The elephant in the room

The spittin' image of old Sam …

I am bewhiskered. Temporarily hirsute.

I know: The shock! Sit down.

You who know me personally believed facial hair impossible. You who've seen me, knowing that, go into shock and fall to the floor when no chairs are provided.
 
My dad embraced the barbate zeitgeist of every age he lived. Could I make a movie of the snapshot-choked scrapbooks, you'd see his sideburns fall and rise and fall again, his mustache widen and take wing, his jawline shine, then grow dark, then gray, then bare again before settling into a steady grizzle.

All because he could.

Such a gift skipped a generation, and I've been fine with that. At best, my hair sprouted into a barren archipelago on my face. Maybe it was a secret treasure map, like the tattoo on the mysterious child in Waterworld. But we'll never know.

S. Brannan, the very picture of fun!
My hat covers the fact I can't match his hair.

Or will we?

Because I just had to go and be Sam Brannan on the Old Sacramento Underground Tours.

Unlike Michael Kearney, the Irish clerk/shirker/seanchaí/Everyman I portray, Brannan was real — the brutish visionary who sparked the California Gold Rush.

(I started feeling sorry for Brannan because few people on tour, I discovered, had ever heard of the guy. His story is so peculiar, he makes J.R. Ewing look like a Cub Scout. But his story — bringing San Francisco and Sacramento into being, and becoming the state's first millionaire while stepping on all the little people —  is going untold.)

As such, Brannan left behind all manner of parlor portraits, all of which showed his muttonchops trimmed "in the imperial style," including a mouche (though, really, soul patch is a vast improvement).

At first I faked the facial hair, assuming my own deficiencies. From a novelty shop in Old Sacramento I bought a theater beard, a small bottle of spirit gum and another of gum remover. The beard matched my peppery hair and didn't cost too much, so I was buoyant.

After an hour or so of splitting the beard, then cutting and fitting and cutting and fitting and cutting and fitting some more, I fashioned two muttonchops with plenty left over for soul patches of different sizes. Who knows? Some days Sam might feel kickier than other days.

Michael Sean Aloysius Finbarr Kearney, at your service.
A fake bloke made a bit less so.

As a new character, Brannan vexed me, requiring new facts and a new fake dialect. He was born in Saco, Maine, and spent his teen years in Ohio, and I make him sound a bit like Hal Holbrook as the stage manager in Our Town. 

(Fast aside: I managed to make a man on tour from Scarborough, Maine, believe I was a fellow Mainer. So there!)

The fake beard didn't help. Just the thought of gluing and placing it just right made me sweat, and required at least 30 more minutes than Michael Kearney did to get in costume.

Properly and oh, so carefully applied, the fake beard managed to look like … a fake beard.

Fake beards are perfect if you are:

1.  On a stage, 55 feet from the nearest theater patron;
2.  20 feet away from a makeup artist who will paste you back together;
3.  In the company of people who don't believe your beard is real, any more than they believe you are the person you're playing on the stage, but accept the prop and the conceit that we're all "pretending."

Fake beards are far from perfect if you're hoping visitors, standing a hot breath from you, will believe your bristles are authentic, even as temperatures approaching 100 work to part you from your fakery, revealing buffoonery.

Swimmer Shawn sez "Owie!"

It was in front of high schoolers in close quarters, my beard — which I could feel at every moment — curling away from my jaws like the wings of pigeons, that I decided to stop faking it.

Also the daily baths in professional-grade acetone (yes, I bought a bigger bottle of remover) to wash away the crusted boogery spirit gum had reduced the beard to mesh and a few bristles. It looked like I had glued patches of a possum-tested screen door to my face.

Maybe — just maybe! — I could grow my own!

After three weeks of not shaving, I carved around the barely longer whiskers in the shape of muttonchops. I finally learned to stop shaving under my lip so the soul patch would grow.

It's taken three months, but now I have long whiskers that drape white and gray (with one odd patch of black) over my jawline. After a careful shave around their shape, ironically, the mutton chops carry out the look of a fake beard, bristles jutting sharply out of my face.

But I don't feel them, except for the moments when I twirl them in my fingers and stare at the ceiling, faking pensiveness. Familiar people unfamiliar with my new face often look at me funny, and this time it's for the weird beard.

The beard is not growing any fuller. New follicles are not springing out between the whiskers I already have. It is a spare forest of bare aspen trees separated by a hill of chin. What meager volume derives from the length of the whiskers, looking for somewhere to go and banging into one another.

My wife hates the look (though instead she says she wishes I'd just trim the hairs), which means it won't last long. Maybe after the tour season winds down after Halloween, it'll go.

The good news is that the whiskers work well for Michael Kearney too. 

In fact, it's the cheapest manifestation of a mid-life crisis I can imagine.

Actual un-retouched,
un-Photoshop™®ped
Kodachrome©®

(Fast aside: The Mulcahy family, real Irish people from County Cork who brought Dave to swim with me last month in Lake Natoma, made gentle fun of my Irish accent when I explained the mutton chops are not my usual mien. In my defense, I have made Americans who have been to the town I say I'm from — Kilfenora in County Clare — believe I really came from there. And almost made them believe I'm 185 years old.)

The bad news is two-fold. For one, I must shave more often, and more carefully, two conditions to which I am unaccustomed.


Two — and I've yet to figure out the mechanics of it — the bristles wear abrasions on my chest as I swim. I'm either doing something right or very very wrong. When the rest of my body somehow manages to feel fluid on a swim, it's a bummer when my chest stings from a new worn spot.

Make that three-fold — so far, no discernible treasure map.  

Twin sons of different mothers

These two muck about in my head lately, knocking over the furniture.

Maybe it's their Irish natures, though sewn through with Irish myself I'd hate to cast aspersions.

Maybe it's because they crave attention or like to get their way.

If it wasn't for all the commotion up there, I'd swear they're the same person.

Actually, I think they are.

Spooky resemblance, don't you think? In look and deed.

The guy on the left is Sam Brannan, hero and villain of my tour of Sacramento's Underground.

On the right is his sesquicentennially separated twin, San Francisco Giants "closer" Brian Wilson. He's the pitcher who's supposed to preserve a win for the Giants in the final innings of each game — except he's been out all season having his pitching arm rebuilt. Every day, fans feel his absence, as the Giants make do with an array of relief pitchers known as closer by committee. His absence is less of a nuisance as the Giants near clinching the National League West title, so Wilson has taken to inhabiting the dugout, leading the cheers for his team, his billowing black beard filling empty space.

Each has been the toast of San Francisco in his day.

Sam Brannan is a wonder to me, mostly because few people on tour have ever heard of him. The exceptions are fourth graders who have been paying attention to their California history lessons; alumni of Sam Brannan Middle School in Sacramento; and occasional visitors to Calistoga, the resort town Brannan created in the Napa Valley. That's OK, because I get to tell people his strange story.

Yet almost everyone on tour — even a family from rural Illinois last week — will have heard of John Sutter, who built a fort near what became Sacramento, and dreamed of empire.

Sutter built his life by charming creditors and running away from debt he inevitably amassed. Fleeing debt and family in Switzerland, he lit out for the western United States, living on credit and learning about forts and frontier hospitality as he went.

In 1839, Sutter essentially bamboozled the Mexican governor of the California territory into believing he was a great Swiss military hero, and was granted 68 square miles of land at the Sacramento and American and Feather (Plumas) rivers to watch out for Mexican interests in these far northern reaches. From his fort he rescued weary travelers from the Sierra, including survivors of the Donner Party, and carved out an agricultural base, and did his part to decimate the Indian population.

His plan to create a vast Swiss colony, though, literally fell apart at the discovery of gold. Onrushing gold seekers destroyed his fort and consumed his crops, and Sutter fled again, seeking but not getting redress from Congress.

While Sutter had no idea what to do with the news, Sam Brannan seized on it, exhorting the world to come looking for gold and then selling the onrushing hordes the equipment they'd need.

Brannan had come to the West Coast with his own dream of empire — for the Mormon church. An elder in the church, Brannan had sailed from New York with more than 200 Mormons at the same time Brigham Young was leading most of the Mormons out of Illinois to what became Salt Lake City, Utah. When Brannan failed to convince Young to keep moving west, it was the last straw in Brannan's fitful relationship with the church. They agreed to a mutual divorce, and Brannan returned to California still dreaming of empire — a land bonanza.

Gold gave Brannan the means to lure people west, and he became California's first millionaire on their lust. He continued to gather fabulous wealth by finagling land, selling at high prices, lathering, rinsing and repeating. He owned a fourth of the new city of Sacramento, a fifth of San Francisco, and at one point had invested more in the Central Pacific Railroad than any of the Big Four (Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford). He subdivided a vast ranch he bought in Los Angeles, effectively beginning the urbanization of Southern California.

With a small armed force, Brannan even tried to take Hawaii from King Kamehameha III in exchange for a pension for the floundering monarch, but the king's police chief sent the raiders packing.

A brawler, Brannan is said to have presided over the first marriage in the state of California — and organized the first hanging in San Francisco. He gave generously to San Francisco schools, but tore down squatters' homes in Sacramento, and ordered enemies shot. Let's say he was flawed.

Brannan's speculative empire fell apart in an expensive divorce and a massive grant of Mexican land he had neither the means nor the wits (he was a drunk) to maneuver. Brannan is forgotten, save for a Yuba City park, a state park in the delta, a San Francisco Street and the aforementioned middle school. Yet Sutter's name tattoos so much of northern California, a puzzling imprimatur of grace and stature — Sutter Home Winery, Sutter Neuroscience Center, for example.

Two colossal figures who fell apart suddenly and ignobly. Two alcoholic philanderers. Yet one lives on in sanitized, romanticized memory and the other recedes. I wonder why.

Bearded Brian Wilson builds his legacy as I write. He's more of a persona, and the real person is probably hidden deep. As his beard grew and became unnaturally black during the Giants' 2010 home stretch to the World Series, Wilson rose in off-kilter flamboyance, and he reveled in it, becoming one of the most popular players on the team, a roaring lion of eccentricity.

The beard and close-set eyes, like Brannan's, make him intimidating. Giants fans and ordinary citizens know to "Fear the Beard."

Wilson's beard grows larger, and tattoos have crept the length of his left arm during his free time.

The Giants should clinch the Western division this weekend, and will have done so without Wilson on the mound. He will have to reassert his presence on the team next season.

So I have to wonder: Is Wilson Brannan's karmic cousin, or does he just bear a strange resemblance?