Bullard Street: Becoming a Legend and My Greatest Bad Idea

I sat in the studio late last night, smoking a Hemingway cigar, sipping Almave, and thinking about the kid I used to be.

Sober now. Older now. Still drawn to nights with a little smoke in the air and a story worth chasing. And when I let my mind drift, it went straight back to Fremont, to a bright fall afternoon, orange city cones, three flies up, and the kind of great bad ideas that could make a boy feel immortal.

By nine years old, I had already learned two things about life in Fremont.

Money mattered.

And boys with bad ideas could turn a quiet street into history before dinner.

My Mama knew the first part better than most. She worked hard, carried our world, and stretched every dollar. She didn’t have Mission San Jose money. She had waitress grit, fast feet, and the kind of determination that keeps kids alive and moving forward.

One morning her sitter fell through. She had to be at work by 5:30, and panic was starting to circle the room. Then Peggy stepped in.

Peggy worked with Mama. Lived close enough to the Mission Pine Café that my Mama could breathe again and get to work. She took my sister Jenny and me in, tucked us onto a big sofa that was plush, and comfortable. We fell asleep quickly.

When I woke up, Peggy fed me, looked at me, and said, “I’ll give you five dollars if you mow my front lawn.”

Five dollars!

At nine years old, that sounded like a corporate acquisition.

Peggy took me outside and introduced me to the mower like she was handing me a trade. She showed me the cord, the oil, the gas, how to hold the machine so it worked for me instead of against me. Then she stepped back and let me work.

I mowed. I raked. I bagged the clippings. I tried to do it right.

When I finished, Peggy smiled like she had known exactly what would happen. Then she changed my life.

“I’ve got friends on this street,” she said. “Want me to call them? I think you could make another thirty, maybe thirty-five dollars.”

Another thirty! Maybe thirty-five!

Within fifteen minutes she had eight houses lined up and offered to cover the gas.

That was it. That was the ignition.

By the end of the day I was grass-stained, sun-hot, proud, and carrying myself like somebody with a future. That lawn turned into a business. Leaves in the fall. Windows cleaned (I learned that from my Granny in Gardnerville). Weeds. Whatever grown people didn’t want to do. I always had money in my pocket. I always had a plan.

Peggy gave my energy direction. Mama kept the world steady. Peggy put a blade in my hand and showed me I could cut my own path forward.

Then there was the other part of life.

Bullard Street.

That was our neighborhood.

Kids everywhere. Football in the street. Mom’s watching out for us. Food moving from one house to another. Working families, loud boys, and enough freedom to get into trouble before the adults could organize against us. We played three flies up like our reputations depended on it, because they did. Somebody always got hit too hard. Somebody always argued. Somebody always swore he caught it clean. That was neighborhood law.

The problem was traffic.

Cars kept interrupting our game, making us stop, step aside, and hand the street back to adults every few minutes. We were sick of it.

Then I remembered my stepdad’s orange construction cones in the garage.

Heavy. Bright. Official. The kind of cones that told streets to obey.

A boy looks at them and sees power.

I looked at my crew and said, “We’re closing the street.”

That’s all it took.

We dragged those cones out of the garage, and set them up with all the confidence of a city department and none of the authority. A few at one end. A few at the other. One line here. One line there. Suddenly Bullard Street belonged to us. 

And the wild part was, it worked.

Cars rolled up and stopped.

Drivers leaned out their windows and asked what was going on. I jogged up like I worked for the city.

“I don’t know what’s going on. They said they should be done sometime today.”

Confidence is most of government anyway.

A surprising number of them looked at me, looked at the cones, looked at the boys standing around like junior public works officials, and decided rerouting their lives was easier than arguing with us. They backed up, turned around, and left.

We were beside ourselves.

For one shining stretch of time, we had done it. We had bent the adult world around a game, and it was beautiful.

Then I met a real adult. It had to happen. She pulled up, took one look at the setup, and didn’t buy a second of it.

“Why is the street closed?” she asked.

I gave her my best line, fast and official.

She stared at me, then stared past me.

“Why would the City of Fremont be using City of Hayward cones?”

That question hit with the force only a dumb mistake can deliver.

Because there they were. Bright as they were obvious. CITY OF HAYWARD.

I learned something important that day. If you’re going to run an unauthorized civic operation, details count.

We let her through.

Then, because boys do not retreat from a bad idea just because it has been pierced by logic, we went right back to playing.

Three flies up. One football. Pride in the air.

Then all of the kids ran away like they were on fire. I knew before I turned.

Murphy.

He and half the Fremont Police Department knew me. He parked, looked at the cones, looked at me, and motioned with one finger for me to come over.

I walked over to talk with him. He looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders and grinned.

Murphy stared at me.

I gave him my logic.

“They keep driving through our game, so…”

He started laughing.

Then, what he said, dropped my stomach straight through the street.

“Let’s go talk to your mom.”

That had not entered my calculations.

I asked if we could leave her out of it.

Murphy smiled the way cops do when they’ve heard that plea a hundred times before and know they’ll hear it a hundred times again.

We started walking toward my home.

I was going to tell him that mama was working. Then she stepped out onto the porch.

That image has stayed.

My Mama on the porch, watching us come toward our home, her face moving from concern to disbelief to Scottish red that meant I was about to find out exactly where laughter ended and law began.

Murphy pointed back toward the street, gave her the outline, then headed back to his unit with the smile of a man leaving a kid to handle whatever came next. I’m pretty sure he liked it. Too much.

Mama called me up.

I tried swagger. It was all I had left. Pride dies hard in boys.

“Mama, I didn’t know we couldn’t do that.”

She looked at me like I had announced plans to purchase Fremont.

“You thought you could shut down city streets and it was okay? Bryan-David, go get the cones. And do not ever do that again.”

I went and got them.

Stacked them back in the garage. Sweat on my hands. Sun on my face. Pride still alive, but dented.

That day I thought the story was about power. A pocket full of cash. Orange cones. Cars backing up. A cop laughing. A boy trying to stand tall in the wreckage of his own great bad idea.

Years later, I know better.

The real story is that long before I had language for it, women were shaping me.

My Mama held the world together.

Peggy showed me how to cut my way through it.

And somewhere between a lawn mower and a stack of city cones, an East Bay kid started learning the difference between power you borrow and power you build.