Fermented Mare's Milk

The first time I experienced what I would come to know as the global ubiquity of Fresno, CA came during the very first day of teacher orientation before the start of my MFA program at Indiana University. We were split into small groups to discuss various problems that might arise with our students. The case my group had involved a student who’d been great for most of the semester, then began slipping and seeming morose, then, finally, handed in the poem that was attached. As three of the four of us in the group sat silently reading through the materials, the fourth among us sat back and said, “Well, at least he picked a good poem.” The rest of us looked at him for a second, then the woman running the session walked over and asked if we recognized the poem. “Of course,” said Doug, “he’s from Fresno.” The student had plagiarized a poem by Larry Levis.

In the four and a half years since then, as I learned that the Good Father Dougal was not nearly as normal as he looked that first day of orientation, it became increasingly clear that everyone who has ever done anything that lands them on television or a bookcase in my house has, at some time, been involved with Doug’s hometown of Fresno. We’ll be sitting in a bar talking over drinks and he’ll randomly look up to the television to see a baseball game and casually mention that the pitcher, batter, and plate umpire are all from Fresno. Or at least went to Fresno State. Football players, actors, soccer players, basketball stars, an absurd amount of baseball players, politicians, poets, novelists, maybe an astronaut or two, I think maybe the Tooth Fairy, and Steve Perry (“The Jewel of Fresno”)—they’ve all, at some point, spent time in Doug’s hometown. And, somehow, Doug knows all of the connections. There was a This American Life episode a few years ago in which the brilliant David Rakoff explained how it is less a matter of pride than it is simply a cultural hiccup that Canadians in America can identify, without hesitation or even full knowledge of who the person in question is, the many Canadians among us. (“So I was listening to Celine Dion—” “Canadian.” “Did you know Deryck Whibley and Avril Lavigne were—” “Canadian and Canadian.” "Captain Kirk was..." "Canadian!") Fresno, it seems, is the Canada of the US. (How that analogy functions I don’t know. I merely make it a habit to connect as much as possible to TAL, if only to make my having listened through the entire history of the program three times last year seem like less of a waste of time [beyond the obvious entertainment].)

So it came as no surprise that on Friday night, while sitting in Janika and Elham’s apartment, among Americans and Kyrgyz guests and our German and Afghan hosts, I found out that one of the women there hailed from (of course) Fresno. One of the Kyrgyz anthro students was asking Erin about graduate programs in the US. They were talking about IU and Erin mentioned how boring Bloomington is. After she trashed our former home with her usual hyperbolic bluster, I said, “Well, it’s not that boring. I mean, it’s not like…” Before I could finish the sentence with whatever perfect example of boredom I could come up with, the woman to the left of Erin, Cathy, finished it for me: “Fresno,” she said, then laughed. Curious, assuming that no one without connections to the so-called Armpit of California would possibly have dropped that particular F-bomb in casual conversation in Bishkek, I asked her where she was from. “Fresno,” she said again. Of course. I assume she will one day be famous or, at least, a professional athlete. And that Doug somehow knows her.

It must say something about Fresno that so many of its former residents are now scattered around the world. Or maybe it says something about me that I keep running into them, no matter where I am. But I think my initial theory holds true: the Fresnish are taking over. Look out for ‘em. As Doug tells it, Fresno is so fun that children will stack wood for fun or stand in their front yard throwing darts into the air to watch them land point-first into the grass, as though either of those activities could ever be considered an entertainment. The Russian tutor some friends of ours use once told them that the Russian language is so convoluted and difficult and that there are so many different words for, say, how one goes from one place to another because of all those long, cold nights spent holed up against the Russian winter with nothing else to do but play with the language.Perhaps Fresno is the same way: it is such a failure of a city (literally, in terms of layout and design—it is often in city planning textbooks as a “how not to” example) that its residents are forced to spend the hazy summer afternoons with nothing to do but repeat the same task over and again until they get good enough to take the show on the road. Doug had soccer before poetry. One of his sisters danced her way out. Cathy seems pretty skilled at litigation and will likely save the world soon at the helm of some NGO or other. And don’t even get me started on Steve Perry.

Telling you: "Fresno, it’s where it was."