Is this the way to Sacramento?

When I said I wanted to go to Sacramento, everyone laughed. “Nobody goes to Sacramento for no reason,” California native B guffawed, suggesting I might have a screw loose. This, I already knew, having had it confirmed by most people I’d ever met. However, I also had what I thought was a pretty compelling motive for wanting to visit the political hub of the third-largest state in the Union.

California, you see, is run by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was manufactured in Austria by Skynet, an artificial intelligence network created by Cyberdyne Systems. He won a competition at the age of 20 to run the entire universe (they even called him Mr. Universe), but when that became a bit taxing, he decided to settle for a big chunk of America’s West Coast, which has great weather and a good supply of citrus fruit. He is living proof that anything, absolutely anything, is possible in the US of A.

Arnold hangs out in Sacramento with lots of political lackeys and a very challenging wife. We know she’s challenging, because Arnold says so on his gubernatorial website: “Challenging both his body and mind, he earned a college degree from the University of Wisconsin and became a U.S. citizen in 1983. Three years later he married broadcast journalist Maria Shriver.” I guess ‘challenging’ is meant as a compliment, because Maria doesn’t seem too upset about it in their official photos.

A little generosity goes a long way...

Arnold also describes himself on his website as a “generous philanthropist”, which, aside from being a tautology, means he allows other people to ski past him and doesn’t hog the slopes, which, of course, as Terminator-in-Chief, he would be entitled to do. Such sportsmanship has its downsides, however, as it can, for example, attract unwanted attention from the kind of people that the American Association of Psychiatric Measurement Standards refers to as ‘complete whackos’.

The inconceivable Global Schwarzenegger Fans Community website, GlobalArnold.com, helpfully keeps a running tally of those sentenced to jail, probation and mandatory psychiatric counselling for bothering the Governator. “In September 2003,” it informs us, “Canadian cat burglar Richard Sathianathan was busted for trespassing on Schwarzenegger's Brentwood estate on numerous occasions and tampering with a car” and for having a completely unpronounceable name.

More recently, people with much more user-friendly names like Jeffrey and Frank had their asses nailed for being not very good Arnold stalkers and getting themselves caught. Law enforcement agents apparently hacked into the supercomputer Arnold was allegedly using to control Jeffrey’s mind and deduced his home address from an email with a very precise map in it.

A very particular market niche

All these arrests, of course, mean only one thing: there is now a gap in the stalking market. As an international woman of mystery, it occurred to me that stalking the governor might be an interesting and not very expensive way to kill a bit of time. Indeed, if I managed to stalk efficiently, I could maybe fit in a bit of Sacramento sightseeing, perhaps even some shopping.

I’m not an obvious stalker candidate. In fact, an ex-boyfriend once told me I’d be the world’s worst stalker, because I’d forget who I was stalking long before my first gin and tonic. In addition, I have the attention span of a gnat, so I don’t concentrate on anything long enough to become obsessed, and stalkers, seemingly, need to obsess. Even worse, I tend to get really bored really quickly. Indeed, my interest in Arnold was already waning. Yawn.

Still, I figured it would still be a mistake to move too quickly. Boredom threshold aside, I needed to perfect my stalking moves to ensure that I wouldn’t end up in a cell with Jeffrey, who didn’t sound at all well. For this purpose, I decided to ask one of my dearest and longest-suffering friends, Maximus (I have changed his name at his request to conceal the fact that he is a Swedish national with a veritable mane of long blonde hair, living in California), if I could practise my stalking on him.

After making a brief phone call to the nearest home for the bewildered, the details of which I didn’t quite catch, he agreed that I could follow him around his kitchen for about 20 minutes so that I could get the hang of it. I offered to wear a disguise so that he wouldn’t recognise me, but he said that wouldn’t be necessary and started looking up anti-psychotic drugs on the internet.

With friends like these...

Okay, so he didn’t quite agree. But I thought that made my dry run all the more authentic. My pseudo-stalk consisted primarily of sitting at Maximus’ kitchen table, drinking a glass of sauvignon blanc, saying “See? I’m stalking you now and you had no idea, right?” while he threw together a very tasty dinner, but I’m still putting it on my stalker CV.

After a different and much less sober conversation with Le Grand Belge, who’s almost French and should therefore know about style, we decided I should probably wear Calvin Klein on my stalking debut, as Mr. Klein was unlikely to be the designer of choice for your run-of-the-mill whacko and should offer me a certain degree of flexibility were I carrying out my stalking in, say, a nice bar or cafe where I might meet a husband and give my friends a rest.

Le Grand Belge also helpfully pointed me towards his very impressive toolkit, which he purchased for a mere $25 and thought might come in handy, should I have to wrestle with an electric fence or some such. Alas, it didn’t contain a grappling hook, so we agreed I should probably steer clear of anything that involved climbing up, down or over anything. Furthermore, it was a bit too large to fit into my handbag. So, I reluctantly had to pass. This led to an in-depth discussion of tactics, strategy and suitable footwear, facilitated by another excellent bottle of pinot noir, after which we concluded that it might be better to pick one particular location and stalk remotely from there.

A little bit about Sacramento, by the by

Ah, but where? Sacramento is about 100 square miles in size with a population of just over 460,000 – roughly equivalent to the number of bricks it took to build the world’s tallest Lego construction in Austria (a happy coincidence, I can only assume) in October last year. The city’s mayor is called Kevin Johnson and he was apparently a rather big NBA basketball star before he got his political calling. Locals call the town’s university Sac State (I’m not kidding), its historical area Old Sac (really) and it has the biggest railroad museum in North America.

The city’s laid out in a grid, with lettered street names going one way and numbered avenues going the other. If you want to find a street between S Street and T Street, it’s a pretty safe bet it’ll be called S Street T Street Alley, because all the in-between streets are named like that. There’s a curvy-street bit that flows around the Odd Fellows Lawn Cemetery and Mausoleum, a crowd-enticing name if ever I heard one, though I suspect most of the visitors are of the more permanent variety.

I reckoned it would make sense to hang out where Sacramento’s famous people hang out, except that they don’t. Or, at least, I wouldn’t recognise them if they did. I managed to unearth the fact that actress Molly Ringwald (who?) was born just outside Sacramento. Brokerage founder Charles R. Schwab comes from there, as does porn star Bunny Luv, rapper Brotha Lynch Hung and Stockholm-syndrome standard bearer Patty Hearst. Okay, so maybe I wouldn’t hang out with all of them.

I also managed to discover that Brian Wilson (yes, he of Beach Boys fame) collaborated with a guy called Gary Usher back in the sixties to write a song about Sacramento, called, impressively, “Sacramento”, which appears to involve a random guy and a random girl getting to know each other intimately on a train and then taking a snap decision to settle down together at “the end of the line, Sacramento”. But as Bill Pollock says on his website, http://billpollock.com/Sacto/songs.php, “this is, of course, patent nonsense. Nothing ends here, they just pass through.” He adds: “This is a clear indication why bounce-back relationships are A Bad Idea” and one of the many things that make this ditty, in his opinion, the worst song ever about Sacramento. Bill has got it goin’ on.

Suffering for my art

So, after much painstaking and somewhat aimless research, I resorted to the Sacramento Bar Guide, which I found on sactosaurus.com. The Press Club on 21st and P sounded like it might have potential, until I noted that that the sactosauri had described it as a “sh*thole” with very clean restroom facilities. The website also usefully suggested a bunch of venues where I might get “trashed” before any potential court hearing. And, it listed a couple of “meat markets”, which I thought I might use as fall-back positions if I had to escape from the FBI, or just became desperate.

But that’s when my cunning plan started to unravel. Turns out, Arnie doesn’t live in Sacramento full time. He lives somewhere nicer. Ronald Reagan (who I believe became famous for starting a chain of restaurants with his friend, Old McDonald) was the last governor to live there full time and that was also back in the sixties (clearly a high point for Sacramento). So I’d have to go there in business hours to be in with any chance of catching a glimpse of him (Arnold, that is, not Ronald, who now spends his time interacting with the residents of Odd Fellows Lawn Cemetery and Mausoleum).

This was problematic. I’d have to get the Caltrain from Sunnyvale to San Francisco, then find a train from San Francisco to Sacramento, by which time I’d have about 20 minutes to stalk the governor, before getting back on a train to catch another train and be home in time for dinner. With a deadline like that, even if I made it to one of the many highly attractive bars on offer, I’d have to remain standing, drink shots and forgo the pleasure of the very clean restroom facilities. Nasty.

Eureka!

At this point, the card-carrying and car-owning members of my Californian crew magically scattered, muttering that they’d rather drive me to Alaska than Sacramento. Someone (and I’m pretty sure I know who it was) suggested I should think about spending the night there. Someone else fainted at the mere thought. And then someone came up with a useful suggestion. “If you’re going to stalk Arnold remotely, couldn’t you do it from here?” B said. There were murmurs of approval all round.

So, a DVD of Terminator 2 (by far the best one) and a bottle of sauvignon blanc it is. And if I drink enough, I’m thinkin’ I may even feel like I’m in Sacramento.

© Poilin Breathnach 2009