Euro Trashy

My Euro Trash neighbors have moved and I am missing them. Gone are my dashing prince of the cosmetics counter and his orange-haired Viking boyfriend. They were lured away by Emeryville which, admittedly, has a lot going for it: the best 3-D theater in The Beast; a humming foodie scene; Grayson’s, home of the best hamburger you will ever eat; the Berkeley Bowl; Rudy’s Can’t Fail; Pixar, Novartis, Bayer; Pete’s; and, in short, all kinds of people doin’ all kinds of stuff.
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Jack London still has: The Chop Bar (home of the second best hamburger you will ever eat); Blue Bottle; Heinhold’s; a gorgeous water front; a great Chinatown just under the freeway; and the most happening summer festivals of the entire Bay Area, so I’m good. Brown Sugar Kitchen sits halfway between Emeryville and the Square so we can both score the BSK for our side. Did you know that Emeryville’s urban nickname is Rotten Town? It’s built on a superfund so huge that it is the bedrock of both Jack London Square and Emeryville. So it’s true, they didn’t move far but the psychic distance is enormous and I am feeling it today.
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I miss seeing Matt (Mathias) taking his little dog for walks in the morning. King is a Pomeranian half-breed the size and texture of an orange coconut. I swear he was sired by a miniature orangutan. His hair is as orange as . . . well, Matt’s. They have exactly the same hair color—part of their inexhaustible charm. Matt will be old enough by the time King shuffles off this mortal coil that, given the ebbing of his hair line, he can skin the dog and put the pelt to good use on the dome; maybe even leave the head on, Davey Crockett style.
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Daniel, or Danielle when she is fully tricked out, is a different kind of miss. Despite being a biological male, Danielle was a great girlfriend to have next door, often stopping by with a new perfume to show me or a little gift from the cosmetics counter—a mask, facial scrub, elbow cream, foot cream, lip cream, eye cream, hand cream, all the many, many creams it takes to keep me from spontaneously combusting during any of the hundreds of static shocks the winter months deliver.
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She also did things that made me insane. She simply had to trump me when I invited them over for dinner. I would work most of the afternoon and evening to make something rather nice, ossobuco, for example, and to lay out a nice table with a great pairing of wine for each course. At the appointed hour, as I would be lighting the candles, Danielle and Matt would arrive with some crazy concoction Danielle had just dreamed up—waffles Rockefeller or a flaming dessert of peaches and whipped cream, and insist that we eat her dish for dinner.
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It surprised me the first time. Maddened me the second. And infuriated me subsequently. She did not see the problem—I am bringing a wonderful surprise, she would claim, special, just for you because I love you. Failing to make my point, I failed to make them another dinner of any more complexity or work than sandwiches knowing they likely would arrive with a ziggurat of tapioca studded with mangoes, the entire thing burning like a gas leak mated to a cigarette.
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But she would also be the one who would unfailingly call to ask how an important meeting had gone. Did I get what I wanted? If yes, she would run over with a bottle of wine. If no, she would give me a foot rub and tell me stories about growing up in Europe under the Communists.
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Her stories made me happy. A well-told story is an experience so precious, a skill so rare, a thing of such beauty. Listen. How devilishly smart they had to be to survive the insanity of Communism and the state controlled markets that routinely meant there was no food, no raw materials, no capital, and no hope. I’m sure it was horrible, but she made it sound like a fun game tricking bureaucrats and bending rules and getting away with murder until you were caught and then murder got away with you.

Love my Neighborhood Bookstore

Late at Night, In the Loft

The absolutely adorable Leprechaun who lives next door stopped by tonight around 11:30 to announce that he was making pies for Thanksgiving Dinner, had the dough all made up, was ready to drop some crust, and did I by any chance have a rolling pin he might borrow. I was really mortified to have to disappoint him, especially in the pre-wee hour. The thought of him going out alone into the cold, dark night terrified me. He is no bigger than a ten year old. I wonder what he sees when he looks up at me. Do I look like that super-sized freak chick from the old B-movies? Wearing a tattered animal-skin sheath and looming over skyscrapers; peering down on the citizens of Gotham no bigger than dolls as they stampede away? I guess I’m in an inquisitive mood because I’m also wondering why did I not have a rolling pin to offer this chap.
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I had a rolling pin many years ago. I once baked frequently but stopped when I left Chicago for California. I can’t say why but my desire to bake just did not make the move with the rest of me. I did, however, bring that rolling pin out with me but now I don’t have it. Perhaps it ran away with any of the spoons I also can’t find. What are the time/space lacunas that steal away the many things in my household that unaccountably just disappear? That are here one day and gone the next: that French bra lost after one wearing to the mysterious vortex that lives in the washing machine; socks that evaporate in the drier; candles; bowls; photographs—my history, now gone.
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My witchy housemate, Katrina, and I were always losing essential items—car keys, CDs we had to play right that minute, matches or a lighter—and be as dumbfounded as right proper idiots about what could have happened because “I just had it the other day.” I’m convinced that some portion of the great, inter-galactic battle between Good and Evil was pushed through Katrina and me during the years we lived together at the Tute. All sorts of witchcraft--magic, green neon space strings of super powers--found us and attracted more voodoo until we were each a public menace and, together, almost burned the house down. Seriously though, it wasn’t really magic all that black; more of a dark gray, like a business suit. Here, I’ll give you an example: Although I have no memory of its genesis, there came a time when we could unfailingly find lost objects by going out to the car.
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Okay, don’t ask me how this works, but let’s say you had just played the Miles Davis CD yesterday and would like to enjoy it again today. But you can’t find the Miles Davis CD despite having put it in that huge stack of CDs without jewel cases within the last 24 hours. The house, regrettably, must be torn apart searching because of the need to show the forces of the vortex that you are not lazy; not just banking that they’ll save your ass every time you can’t find Miles. But still, the CD cannot be found. You retrace your steps. You refuse to believe your life is a Stephen King novel. You resist the intuitive voice that whispers, “Go to the car.” But you want some Miles Davis more than you want your soul at the moment so you go to the car and rummage for a minute or two. Now here’s the part where it gets spooky. The CD is NOT found in the car BUT when you go back in the burning midnight kitchen and go through that stack of loose CDs for the nth time, viola! There it is.
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Whether the car still connected me to the vortex was something I had not tested since moving to the Square about a year ago. You might find that to be hard to believe but, after living in my house for fifteen years and then moving to a loft, everything was hard to find for months; it wasn’t out of the ordinary that I couldn’t locate something. But tonight the rolling pin obviously hit me over the head with its own damned self because this thought immediately struck me: go to the car. I knew at once I had to and so I grabbed my keys and walked slowly, calmly down to the garage and got in my car. I did a desultory flip of the many stacks of CDs I keep there, knowing the real test would be when I got back upstairs. I waited in my car for what seemed like a respectful amount of time. Of course, I ran into several of my neighbors from the building while waiting and felt strongly that I had to lie when they asked, “Hey, watcha doin’?”
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Okay. I get out of the car and again walk slowly; giving props. Back inside the loft, I retrace my steps looking for the rolling pin. The first drawer is pulled back. There is no pin. I resolve to stay open to anything that might happen and open the second drawer. Nothing. I know before I even put my hand on the third drawer that the pin will not be there. It’s really gone. Along with the salad spinner, the Victoria’s Secret bras and panties (leaving only the big white Target underpants and me sweating every day that I might be hit by a car). Gone. They will not come back.
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Uncertain what to make of this loss, I stood in the kitchen, my hand up in my hair, staring blankly into intermediate space. That’s when I saw it. No. Not the rolling pin. The Cunt Rock! The heart of the Tute’s great draw down of cosmic lightning bolts, the CR was found on the beach in San Francisco and brought back to the Tute illegally. It’s against the law to take anything but your trash out of a state park. The decision to take the CR was one of those 50/50 things that so many nerdy superhero novels turn on: will doing this advance my quest or annihilate me? Lucky me, the rock and I got along. Katrina first felt the muscle in the rock and a ritual for harnessing the force was hatched late one scorching summer evening when the sky had no moon and there was not even a whiff of a breeze at the back door. I have to stop here because the rest of this story cannot be spoken of outside the Tute or, now that it is in the corporeal past and its members have scattered to the ordinates of the four winds, spoken of only among ourselves—the Fellows of the Institute. You understand.
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But I can say that I snatched my cell phone off the counter and dialed Katrina who is now holed up in Sonoma, heavy with spawn and about to replicate herself in January. “Hey,” I said, “Do you happen to have the rolling pin? I can’t find it?”
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“No,” she replied. “Did you go out to the car?”

I Think We Have Come to the End

Appropriately, the sentencing of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle followed quickly on the heels of the general election so that West Oaklanders could be bitch slapped twice by a system that does not care about them.
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Forty-four percent of the households in my neighborhood do not have access to a car. There is no decent public transportation; neither do taxis cruise the streets picking up fares. With only 250 registered voters in my precinct, the city will not even open a polling place. The ballot marking procedure changes in every election so that the method learned in one election means nothing to subsequent elections and ballots are easily invalidated in the rare instances when they are cast.
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We do not have a full service grocery store. West Oaklanders buy most of their food at mom-and-pop corner stores and gas stations, meaning they pay the highest possible price for household staples such as milk and eggs. That is like going to the emergency room to get a Kleenex. There is no fresh produce in a gas station. Dining out often means buying fatty, high sodium food from a taco truck.
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We are red lined for gas—paying as much as 50% more for a gallon of gas than drivers in better neighborhoods. Our stores are big box stores. Our dogs are pit bulls. Our rides are bicycles. Our restaurants are trucks. Our parks are center dividers. Our attitude is fuck you.
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Last night, when Mehserle received a two year sentence for killing an unarmed man who was face down on the ground with another officer kneeling on his back, Oakland erupted in violence for the third time this year. America listens to only two voices: money and violence. My neighbors do not have money. When the government, including the justice system, says ‘we don’t give a rats ass about you and to prove it, we will not punish your murderers,” we answer with smashed windows, burned cars, and, last night, stripping officers of their guns and turning the tables. A gun sure looks different when it's pointed at your head.
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But what did you expect? Flowers? A peaceful march where we sang the old time spirituals?

One of These Is True, the Other Is a Dream

1. Two work colleagues and I piled into a taxi to head out to lunch. The driver, a recent immigrant from India, was unfamiliar with the restaurant we directed him to and asked us to tell him how to get there. Although we were diligent in guiding him at first, we got lost in conversation and were soon enough lost on the road. Despite picking up and extra person who seemed to know the area, we ended up far from where we intended to be. I could not recall the name of the restaurant but, certain that I knew how to get there, I began telling the driver what road to take, where to turn, etc. Our party grew to a small convoy when another car responded to our appeal for assistance by saying, “Follow me.” One of the people in the cab claimed to be about to faint from low blood sugar and asked could we please stop at any store and pick up something small, like a bag of chips. Our driver pulled into a seedy looking corner store in a tough neighborhood. There was little in the store other than sugar—candy, soda, ice cream—and we declined to buy anything, preferring to soldier on to the restaurant. We got back in the cab and were immediately surrounded by young toughs who began beating on the roof and hood of the cab, taunting us for not spending money in their store. I said, don’t worry, they’re making fun of us for being white. The apparent ring leader heard this and started to laugh; he thrust a 40 through the window of the cab and I took it, drank some and passed it to the others. We spent much of the afternoon surrounded and drinking.

2. After obtaining a medical marijuana Rx and a license to grow, a woman in my building began cultivating plants on the roof and, after a few crop rotations, discovered she had an aptitude for producing incredibly strong ganja. Soon, the grow garden on the roof became a small farm that employs a handful of people at harvest time. Unfortunately, the woman’s profound attraction to abusive men is in direct, if inverse, proportion to her aptitude for producing splendid spliffs. As hindsight is universally recognized to be 20/20, we might reasonably argue that she should have seen trouble coming when her crop could be measured in bushels as opposed to plants. After the most recent harvest, one of her helpers stopped by for a brew. Though the harvest was a home grow for personal use, it was not hard to see it as a cash crop worth big money. Another beer and this chap had dollar signs gleaming in his eyes. My neighbor is spunky and when her visitor challenged her for the pot, she put up a fight. That’s when things got very bad. They fought hard and dirty. The woman was battered quite severely but this was not the first time she'd been attacked by a man she trusted. As she was being pushed against the counter, she had the presence of mind to grab a pair of scissors she’d been using to trim the plants and stabbed her assailant in the nuts. Hard. Later, the police were able to gather DNA evidence from the blood on the floor.

Gift of God

I want to talk about my mother. No, no. Not the anguished confessions of therapy, more of a wake. I want to boil twigs and leaves to make a steaming mug of dirt brown tea, wrap up in a blanket, sit out on the chilly deck, under the dark blue night salted with white stars, and open up the faucet on my stream of consciousness. I want to reach deep into my chest and pull my mother forth—her cigarette in one hand, the gray smoke curling away, a flaming hot cup of coffee in the other; her beat-up Keds gripping the fleck-patterned linoleum in the kitchen. I want her in her forties when she thought she was no longer young and was no longer thin; wearing navy or tan Bermuda shorts topped by a plain, sleeveless, cotton shirt primitively laundered in our old tub washer and gruelingly ironed throughout the endless, flaming-hot summer that was my childhood; purple, blue, and green varicose veins tracing her stark white skin and making her legs look like road maps—the kind we kept in the glove box of our mammoth mint-green Buick.
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Although she was born in Indiana, Dot’s vocabulary and mannerisms suggested the south. Her father built Highway 51 running from the Gulf of Mexico up to the top of Wisconsin. Construction started in New Orleans the year Dorothy was born and ran north as fast as forty men could go working mule teams, digging road bed, and laying asphalt. My grandfather died when the crew reached southern Wisconsin and my grandmother put down roots in what became my hometown.
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Our town straddled the Wisconsin-Illinois border and, toponymistically, if not geographically, offered a demarcation of sorts between north and south. Illinois town names are southern: Centralia, Decatur, Vandalia—names that spoke of long, hot, dusty dry summers, a by-gone era and women named Blanche, as was my grandmother. Wisconsin, the complete opposite, was a land where Indians in loin cloths, stepping silently from the woods, met at the confluence of broad, green rivers to trade for skins with French trappers wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Wisconsin towns follow the beds of its many rivers at evenly spaced intervals—as far as an ox cart could travel in a day—and bear French or Native names: Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac, or Menominee, Winnebago, Potawatami.
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Dot grew up going from town-to-town as her father pushed 51 north. My father claimed that when they first met, he couldn’t understand a word she said but they married. You may argue that the southern appellation is a stretch and I’ll listen but it does account for some of my mother’s foreignness; for example, calling pound cake Johnny cake, cantaloupe was muskmelon, and corn bread corn ‘pone.’ She loved Hoppin' John though she made it only rarely. I make it every New Year's Day, for luck as southern tradition dictates. I never heard Dot use “y’all” except in jest, but the remainder of the Southern lexicon was standard in our house, especially when Dot spoke to her mother but even my father adopted many of the phrases he once ridiculed. Dot preferred biscuits for Sunday breakfast and made them from scratch, pushing the rim of an empty juice can into the sticky dough and then hitting her wrist on the edge of the counter to free the paste-white disc from the barrel of the can.
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I was their second child. Between my alcoholic, army sergeant father and my mother who simply had to have been bipolar, I learned a rich and arresting vocabulary that not only shocked my teachers but to this day causes me grief. “Shit a meat ax.” I actually said that in kindergarten; it may even have been the first day. My father used it constantly. It was his way of expressing that he was unhappy. At four and having little experience with the outside world, I thought nothing of working these expletives into my vocabulary. It was in this same way that I first called my brother an asshole. He had brought the epithet home from the schoolyard and taught it to me. I’d already become a handful, largely because no one was paying any attention to my random acquisition of language and behavior.
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“Shut up or I’ll cram your teeth right down your throat,” was how my mother would settle our increasingly frequent arguments. I heard her bark into the phone, “You can stick that right up your ass and nail a board over it” so many times when she was working something out with my father that I thought it was a standard form of discourse; something of a non-endearment. It was only when I arrived in elementary school and began to meet other children and their families, that I realized how peculiar was mine. My mother had a narrow bandwidth for normal. She couldn’t stay “in the paint" too long, as they say in round ball. She was frightening when depressed; we held our breath thinking the least disturbance would finish her off. When she became manic, she was utterly terrifying.
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Her depressions had a southern gothic shading to them. Dot confided in me, when I was eight years old and she was about to leave us to go on one of her long, internal quests to find Eurydice and bring her back to the living world, that she never wanted children; had even wished, after each of us was born, that we would die so she wouldn’t have to take care of us. My most enduring memories of her, however, are both from her manic phases.
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I was still small—yellow seersucker pajamas, damp and sweat-tangled from a nap, clung about my legs; my baby fine hair was matted to the back of my neck—when she came bursting out the back door waving a frying pan in one hand and an egg and me in the other arm, shouting that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. “I’m gonna show you,” exclaimed my mother’s bright red mouth with an enthusiasm that stretched her smile too thin, startling and worrying me because it felt so wrong. “You stand right here and watch me.”
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I stood as instructed; staring down at the sidewalk where a glob of white grease was melting in the center of a pan struck full force by the sun. My mother crouched low to the ground and pushed her hair out of her eyes, then cracked the egg against the sidewalk. “Never crack an egg on the edge of the pan or the bowl, Claudette; you get a cleaner separation when you strike a flat surface.” She pulled the white oval open to let the clear snot and yellow ball drop slowly from the perfectly broken shell. On landing in the pan, the yolk slid forward as though it had been hit from behind and fell, skidding on its chin. Gradually, under the fierce sun, the clear part of the egg clouded to white and thickened. My mother grabbed me by the arms, swinging me into the sky above her head. Spinning me around faster and faster, she shouted, “See!” jubilant and red faced. “You didn’t believe me, did you? But I was right, god dammit. I was right!” And she laughed loud and wildly, swinging me in wider and higher circles, letting my arms slip through her hands until she was barely holding my small wrists and I grew sick.
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That manic gaiety was what stuck with me. As Dot cycled through her ups and downs, her mouth was the most important visual signal as to who I was dealing with—bright red lips pulled tight across lupine teeth meant trouble. But, and here is where it was so confusing, before getting there—and I mean the rise up the slope of the sine wave to manic—as she rose from depression and became more voluble, my mother was fascinating and I thrilled to be in her company. The best times were when we would start some large project that consumed our attention and bonded us where love could not, as when we tore up the backyard on a whim one day to plant a stand of birch, my mother delivering a discourse in canoe building as she swung a pickax into the dark earth of early spring.
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Even after accounting for the tendency of mourners to say only good things at a funeral, my cousins’ eulogies at Dot’s service stunned me. Who were they talking about? Who would fold her arms around them and pull them up onto her lap? Who always had time to listen and an encouraging word to offer? Who taught them to knit? Who, for the love of god, made sock monkeys for every other child in the universe?
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Just after World War II, when new siblings and cousins were arriving annually, my maternal grandmother marked our births by making for each of us a red, felt Christmas stocking. Each stocking bore a heraldry of sorts. All stockings ended with a Christmas tree at the toe, blazing with beadwork candles and garlands. The boys’ stockings featured a yellow star and white drum over a rocking horse, while the girls’ symbols were uniformly an angel accompanied by a blue bell. One stocking, however, was so completely different, so anomalous from the others it always invited mocking commentary—mine.
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Mine was the only stocking to bear the completely secular image of a blue bird whose spread wings, at their apex, were about to push down hard; almost as though they knew from the start that I was destined to fly away. Shortly after my mother’s funeral, I dreamed of a birch stand where a blue bird sang sweetly to me. I walked toward it and extended my hand but it remained on its branch, singing a dream tune of almost unbearable sweetness. I was awakened by the phone; friends calling to invite me to golf.
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Waiting on the first tee, a western blue bird swooped down from the high sky to land in a nearby tree. The western blue bird is almost extinct. People have lived their entire lives in California and never seen one. Even more amazing, of all the variety of trees lining the tee box—fir, aspen, liquid amber, Japanese maple—the blue bird landed on a birch bough and began to sing. I walked slowly up to it and came within five feet of the branch. We looked directly into each other’s eyes for several seconds before it darted away. It followed me the entire round; from branch to branch, from one hole to the next. And for the next twelve months or more, whenever I played golf, a blue bird would arrive at some tee box and stay with me for a while.
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You may call it what you like. I know that bird was my mother.

Why I Write #2

I come from a family so challenged that, were we a Ronco Popeil slicer ad in which the amazing contraption faithfully shreds and tears as “Quick!," “Effortless!," and “Guaranteed!” urge the buyer on, the words flashing across our screen would be “Suicide!” “Alcoholism!” “Homosexuality!” I mean only to say that I did not have a good rapport with my mother. It is like running headlong into a minefield to write about our mother/daughter relationship, so suffice it to say we didn’t laugh much. “Suffice it to say.” That is my mother’s voice pulling me into her slipstream where I ride along behind her into the orange western sunset. Safe as a bug in a rug. There. See what I mean?
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“I’m going to rip your arm out of its socket and beat you with the bloody end of it!” “How'd you like a sharp stick in the eye?” “Judas Priest!" Pronounced: JUDE assed preeeeeeest. These were some of my mother’s favorite expressions. She could turn a phrase better than anyone else. Even when I was being beaten and she was screaming abuse at me, I would reflect with pride on how the things I heard my mother say, I never heard anybody else say. I believed she could talk the blue down from the sky and I was intensely in awe of that. Is that when I first wanted to be a writer?
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My mother's name was Dorothy, the inverse of Theodore. Both names mean 'gift of god;' one forward, the other in reverse. I loved listening to my mother. Those mornings before I started school and her friend Clara would come for coffee, I would pretend to play quietly nearby but secretly, I was listening. I wanted to hear the stories, hear her voice change as she confided a secret or again when she told of a betrayal. I learned that she believed the most outrageous things. Pranks too idiotic to be believed by any but the most gullible had become certified urban legends by the time she got hold of them and still she fell for them.
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I once overheard her talking with a woman from her PTA. They were discussing Betty Bonette whose husband was a salesman and traveled quite a bit. Casting a sideways look at me, which I knew to mean she was speaking in code, the PTA woman began telling my mother about Betty's 'lady problem.' My mother said she'd talked to Betty. She swore the source of Betty's problem was yellow toilet paper; dyes used to make toilet paper match your bathroom walls rather than plain white. The way her friend looked at her made me realize my mother was insane. Yellow toilet paper was all Betty had to explain herself to the world. It was good enough to sucker the woman who raised me.
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There was another story about a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who bought a coat made in India. It was the end of the season and the woman put the coat away, placing it in a box and sliding it to the back of her closet. When the chilly season arrived again, the women pulled the box from the dark, warm back of her closet and slipped it on. Immediately, she felt it squirm as though alive. She died when the poisonous vipers just hatched from the eggs that had incubated for months in the lining of the coat devoured the first food they could find. I love that story. My mother actually believed it. She would just swallow anything hook, line, and sinker.
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One of the last times I saw Dot, I had just returned from Italy. I was showing her pictures of Roman catacombs. Even though she tried to be appreciative, I could see that she was growing more upset with each new view of stacked skulls and crossed arm bones. I asked whether it was too macabre. She looked at me without comprehension, as though I were speaking Urdu. What then? "It's just. . . well, how will these people find their bodies on Judgement Day if their bones are all mixed up?" I looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues. "What will they take up into heaven with them?"
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My mother’s voice is always with me, absorbed into the very fabric of my psyche where she broadcasts a show 24/7 on the internal station of the superego that Annie Lamont calls radio K-FUCKED. She died in April, my mother, the month Demeter trades places with her daughter Persephone in hell to renew the world. On the day of mom's funeral, in Wisconsin, the sun shone fiercely against the crystal clear late winter ice. Then it snowed, the wind came up, it rained, washing the snow and ice away, lighting split the sky, and lilac bushes exploded in ecstasy behind garages and along fences everywhere filling the air with an aching desire for another chance at life. The service had nothing of my mother in it; only her ashes, the charred remains. She had already been sucked to the underworld.
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When I write, Dorothy returns from Hades and gets to work subverting the narrator. I have the story arc, but mom has the voice. It’s not like hearing her voice inside my head. What happens is that I begin to see the world the way she saw it and the only way I can capture the images that unwind when I write is to use her language. I sometimes suspect the only reason I write is her voice. To hear it again.
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Aside from the engineering satisfactions of the craft, the major reason I write is that the time I spend working through a story is the time my mother and I have the most civil conversation of our lives despite the fact she has been dead for years. In an imaginary space where I can reinvent her as I need her, we get lost in each other. Lulled by our temparary truce, I operate comfortably in my own skin, feeling safe enough to be like her, to adopt her expressions and manner of speaking while she, like the good witch in a fairy tale, sees and speaks what is in my heart.

Why I Live In the Port of Oakland

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Running

Less than 10 miles from where I sit typing this still-dark morning, El Cerrito slumbers under a stringy web of Chinese elms and sagging power lines. Early, early in those lost mornings, lying in bed, letting the last of the summer breezes swell at the window, I would hear morning rise before its beams gave a pale glow to the luffing curtains. The sewing machine sound of the commuter train; the sticky suck of tires on asphalt; the slap and sigh of newspapers hitting driveways.
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Before Aurora could reveal among the shadows that spun as headlights swept the walls and ceiling, the stand by my wide bed, the book that sat there, that it was a red book, that it was Proust, I would hear the far off cries of trains pulling through the Port of Oakland and wonder where they had been, where they would go. "Hop on," whispered the memory of a lover whose wanderlust led her to do exactly that, now so many years past. "Hop on," called the ghost of Kerouac and the legions of unknown and unknowable rail riders who could not function in the thin oxygen of normal. But their calls would fade and I would sink again into sleep until dawn when the birds sang me back from the deep interior to begin again, to try again to carve out a place in the stultifying atmosphere of the regular, white, christian world.
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I did not hop on although I am near enough now that I could. The trains serving the port thunder past my bedroom not more than 100 yards from where I lay my head. Their whistles, once the far off cries of loons on the opposite side of the lake, now demand that I yield my consciousness entirely to them as they shake the ground, heavy wheels scrape the rails, grinding metal against metal, and monstrous whistles breathe out their warnings like whale songs reverberating through a pod of Leviathans but unmitigated by the dampening ocean.
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Many here find the train noise a nuisance, but it awakens in me the romance of fleeing; the thrill of being gone, gone, gone—the promise that sustained me through the wasteland of childhood. Proust excelled at ecphrasis, making me shy about attempting to describe the voice of these trains as they whine, moan, shout, or blast through my subconscious. It is a music for which one cannot acquire a taste but only recognize a sympathique of heart. Contrary to every other literary tradition, the iconic American character is a loner, usually on the lam often as the result of a wrong choice made at a critical moment. We are not a band of merry men living outside the law in a shady forest, nor are we a brigade of pirates on the surging main, a fraternity of musketeers bound by the shared blood of a cut in, nor a crusade, nor any of many legends of round tables or castles in Spain.
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The American hero is a black silhouette against the setting sun, walking/riding/driving into the eternal west, casting a long shadow back to the lesser beings left behind. I am about as west as I can get and still I want to run.
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My incessant need to escape makes the port an almost ideal residence. I am reminded constantly, by the screaming military jets that roar into low airspace, the boats that slide out of the harbor, the buses, the trains, the freeway snarl of the Oakland maze, the BART line just outside my window, that I can go and while these comfort me, my first choice will always be words. Nothing can carry me as far, as swiftly, or with as much delight. As for the others, it’s good to know they are waiting.

To Market, To Market

I am driving home under the harbor, heading back to Oakland through the Webster tube—a short tunnel that connects Jack London to the 1950s. I emerge in Oakland's Chinatown, where I now must negotiate a left onto 8th. To be successful requires, in equal measures, a game of chicken and a persistent slide to the right at the top of the turn like a pat of butter skidding along a hot griddle; a maneuver dictated by local custom rather than the rules of the road. I am driving through a slice of my neighborhood that is accessible to me only on the surface—I will never penetrate the deeper psychology of Chinatown. It will always be a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, images, and automotive attitude that let me know I may visit, but I am just passing through; always the butter, never the skillet.
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I am heading west to Broadway, about eight blocks. Is this what the world looked like to my grandmother who came to New York from a small Eastern European village during the huge migrations at the turn of the last century? Sidewalks of artfully stacked crates; cornucopias of deep purple eggplant, tawny cantaloupe, the soothing green and white of onions and leeks, dark crimson beetle nuts, alien sea cucumbers, brown eggs, white eggs, black eggs, fresh fish on chipped ice, the full spectrum of what is possible for green, mushrooms that are as dark and old as the earth, bright oranges and bananas hanging from an awning held up by a broom, women hoisting parasols that splash away sunbeams, men offloading dressed chickens and pigs from the backs of trucks—a market from some other time, some other place, replete with noodle bars, chop houses, steam tables, bakeries, and white steam clouding from cooking vents. Forklifts are not permitted and men run back and forth, sprinting loads of onions, racks of clothes, and buckets of oysters through dense traffic.
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With few exceptions, stores here are miniscule compared to the big box stores that dominate the landscape of the American interior. Shops in Chinatown are the size of an auto repair service bay, some even less. Typically, it is the cash register and the cold cases that are inside while the rest of the merchandise is piled on the sidewalk. To make the most of limited floor space in a densely packed neighborhood, merchants here use their stores literally—as storage. Each evening they drag all their wares in from the sidewalk that is their true market and pull shut the scissoring burglar-gate. Every morning they haul it all back out to the light of day.
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Every street is double parked on both sides. I have never seen a meter cop in Chinatown. Drivers stop whenever and wherever they want and people get in or out of cars at any unpredictable moment. With sidewalks narrowed by merchandise to thin strips, bottle necks form and are relieved only when everyone rushes into the street carrying a bright pink plastic bag, twisted at the top and knotted, or pushing a wheeled, wire shopping basket brimming with produce and small, shiny packages topped by a small dog for ballast. Although this neighborhood is best described as pan-Asian, commerce here is heavily Chinese and Vietnamese. Everything is seemingly familiar but nothing is the same.
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The young are separated from the old by bling and sunglasses as much as by age. Fashionable girls wear short shorts and cork-heeled slides; the boys style tight, white tees, khakis, and Vans. Smart phones swing from wrist chains but the flirting and posturing are universal. Daily life in Chinatown is lived on the street, not in the office or at the mall but in the pho bars, bakeries, and produce stalls where friends are met, news exchanged, ungrateful children are chided, and the old shuffle their way to barrels of dried fish. The restaurants are not the haute cuisine of Michelin stars and celebrity chefs (San Francisco). There is no slow food movement, no manifesto about eating local to save the planet (Berkeley). Chinatown restaurants are about a family making a living serving lunch and dinner to other families off a menu that changes seasonally if at all.
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I had to be initiated into this world of a restaurant behind every other door. Coming from a big farm state settled by Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, I grew up eating sausage and hotdogs, salami, headcheese and wursts—foods that are more appetizing when the ingredients are left off the packaging—along with fish pickled in a sharp, tangy cream sauce and crispy sardines fried whole. I should be prepared for a bold menu. Eating here demands some familiarity with a cuisine that cooks with fish oil and includes squid, pig uterus, duck eggs that have been buried in the ground to ferment, stinky tofu, and a menu written in hanzi. More importantly, one should bring an appetite, a spirit of adventure, a willingness to experiment, and the cultural appreciation that one man’s shrimp is another man’s grub worm.
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Now I have “my place” for tender, white salt-and-pepper squid; my place for deep fried spicy tofu, oily and golden, hidden under a mound of dried red chili peppers served in a wooden boat. I have a stable of dim sum places scattered throughout the area. Almost as complex as shopping for wine in California supermarkets where one must discriminate among hundreds of competing labels that stretch across many aisles, I am learning to buy tea in dark, smoky shops where I can only point and sniff like a hunting dog. All of these now receding in my rearview mirror as I make the turn onto Broadway heading toward the waterfront and home—or what I call home today.

Season of the Witch

Exactly one year ago I moved from leafy, suburban El Cerrito to the trash-lined streets of West Oakland where I live in what a friend charmingly calls a cement box and I call a loft. The trajectory from a single house to the shared ownership of a condo is kind of a salmon run—backwards by most standards—but then no one would ever file me under “Ordinary.”
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If forced to use one word to describe the core principle of my personal weltanschauung, it would be: escape. I cannot stay in any one place for too long and I use “place” loosely to mean apartment, relationship, house, geography, frame of mind, or job. The one exception to this rule is: obliterating obsession. When I latch on to something or, rather, when something locks onto me, it is with a kind of rigor that is unbreakable, as though I am under a spell cast by a fairy tale witch. I believe my house years were a form of obsession in exploring the idea of home, something I’d never experienced and was intensely curious about. The enchantment lasted 17 years. Despite the long residency, I was, in other matters, perpetually in flight; more comfortable as a wanderer, more Moses than Henry Darger although I have much sympathy for Mr. Darger and his monstrous, introverted talent.
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At not-quite-sixty, I have lived long enough to profit from some form of life review and can see a well-established pattern of destruction and renewal that has defined my years and provided them context if not meaning. Before Augusten Burroughs, whom I admire very much as an artist, won his private war, he drank because he needed distraction from his emotions. I obsess because I need to rub them raw and then run. Both are attempts at some form of control. And control, or the illusion of safety it brings, is important to those who grew up among alcoholics or other crazy people. So I surprised myself when I left a monochromatic, predictable suburb for the volatile intensity of a highly passionate neighborhood sandwiched between a freeway and the ocean. I was done with substituting living space for home. They are not at all the same.
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For all its many virtues, Jack London has some serious flaws. We have a lot of police action nearby, it’s noisy and dirty. The air quality is noxious and the port is loud 24/7. Even more tiresome from a practical, quotidian standpoint, Jack London has no grocery store. I have learned the easiest way to get food is to take a quick hop under the bay through the Webster tube and pop up in Alameda, an island in the estuary where one is instantly transported back to the Eisenhower/Kennedy years with the exception of a spiffy new Safeway and a Trader Joe’s literally right next door to it. Crawling up the sleepy main drag of the town that time forgot, my new Acura transmogrifies into one of my mother’s enormous old, high-seated, cavernous Plymouth sedans from the 40s. They weren’t even new when we had, first, a mint green Leviathan and, then, a blue and white two-tone; both with steering wheels the size of a hula hoop because it took the strength of Hercules to turn a corner.
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In this state of drifting reverie, I notice, for the first time in scores of grocery runs, a trim little shop set back from the street, its recessed entrance neatly bisected—half in slanting shadow, half in searing white—its slatted blinds drawn tight against the hot, late-August morning. I feel an instant vibration between me and that door which is open, but barely ajar. I have learned to recognize when I am being called and I am helpless to resist so I get out of the car to hop on the magic bus to see where it might take me this time.
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A small, neat sign instructs more than asks me to knock, and I do leaning in to scan the shaded interior of Biche’s, purveyor of rare books and collectible first editions. The room, when my eyes adjust to the low light, is as I imagine would be Mr. Toad’s of Toad Hall: filled in that meticulous way that suggests every item has been thoughtfully selected and placed and, when room had run out, concessions had been made but, while space had grown tight, the perfection of neatness had not been forfeit. The bookshelves lining the walls reach floor to ceiling and are stacked in clean, orderly rows. The center cases are lower, made of richly grained and polished wood that captures and holds the honeyed hues of morning. Instead of the chaotic jumble of every other used bookstore I have been in, there is an immediately discernable principle of order that is so welcoming to my categorizing brain that I am flooded with relief and intense curiosity—a charmed mixture that always makes my heart sing.
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M. Biche is at first nothing more than a detached voice from the center of the room telling me I may enter but, soon as I am fully in the shop, he rises from the concealing embrace of a circle of bookcases to greet me. The first thing one notices about M. Biche is that he hasn’t shaved in two days so that the stubble on his cheeks matches the cropped hair on his balding dome. He is fastidiously dressed in khaki shorts and a pressed Hawaiian shirt neatly tucked behind a brown leather belt with a shiny brass buckle. He’s not at all strange, but I get the distinct feeling he could go there in an instant. I feel comfortable enough to take a risk so I introduce myself with my recently-learned open sesame to the book trade. I extend my hand to him and say, “Hi. I collect.” At once the man and the chamber all around us are transformed as though touched by what Proust would call “the uplifted finger of day” so that everything shines in that exacting light of the transient intersection where truth and unconscious longing made manifest meet and open their welcoming arms to one who has traveled so long without rest.
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I am made as welcome as the angels that visited Abraham and invited to browse as long and deep as I wish through two rooms of precisely arranged books of spectacular quality and presentation. My eyes spin in my head until the plums are all aligned and the jackpot bell rings while plumes of smoke blast from my ears. There is treasure everywhere I look. This is more than a used bookstore. This is a whole new level; a true antiquarian book store where every dust jacket wears mylar and every spine is visible like pretty maids all in a row. Patterned rugs quiet footsteps and give the open, clear aisles a cozy warmth rather than an intimidating veneer of ostentation. I like it here. M. Biche is a discerning rag picker, selecting only the best copies for his store. There are no broken spines nor did I see a chipped jacket and yet the prices are reasonable; certainly higher than at my neighborhood seller where the goal is simply to move product regardless of collectability. M. Biche is in the business of satisfying those of us who are in the thrall of book collecting.
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I am curious about who such people are largely because I appear to be one of them—a late life surprise. The idea of owning a mint condition, first printing of all the Pulitzer Prize winning novels hit me with stunning force only this year. I have been swept into a community of rare and specific delight. It is one of those diversions that take a life and completely recalibrate it, providing new language, new associates, new routes through the stretch of years that remain. M. Biche is a harbinger. I must pay close attention for he is a guide.
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“My first career was as a search and rescue pilot for the Coast Guard,” he tells me as though to explain his low-fat, swimmer’s physique and a sartorial style that hints at a military past. “Now I search out and rescue old books.” It is an occupation, I learn, that is not for the faint hearted. M. Biche explains that when he first delved into collecting, when he was a novice, he says pointedly and looking directly into my eyes, he became consumed but was without focus. He bought everything that he came across; there was no strategy. I shift uncomfortably and glance away to see what might be happening on the street, i.e., nothing. “I burned through a ton of money,” he says instructively, “To the point where it caused harm in my marriage.” He pauses for an instant. Perhaps he has not looked at this aspect of himself since the last time a rookie bounded in from left field. “I mean, we divorced.”
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I may not be a Pulitzer Prize winning author, but I know the start of a terrific story when I hear one and did the only thing I could in that particular situation. I sat down and said, “Then what happened?” The answer, predictably in any initiation to a way of being or a spiritual practice, was that he acquired discipline. He transformed himself from an idiot to a savant. We talked for over an hour. These randomly encountered sellers are my teachers. I learn language, practices, conferences, bad guys, good guys, how to look for and recognize the signs of my tribe. I tell him of a book purchase I am considering and he walks me through the valuation process step-by-step, instructing me, shaping me. I leave having ascended a few steps in the order. I am no longer a white belt. As proof, I am holding a complimentary pass to the rare book dealer show later this month in Sacramento. I am M. Biche’s guest.
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When I shut the door behind me and walk back to my car, I have the pleasurable feeling of having penetrated some membrane, of having stepped through some veil and entered non-ordinary, luminous space; of having temporarily left the mundane world for the numinous. They were there all along. My people. And I need not worry whether I have found them or they have found me. I am home.

We Don't Waste Words In the Square

Always In Season

In the soft sunlight of a fading afternoon yesterday, a woman lay in the middle of Broadway at 10th in downtown Oakland. I had just come up from the 12th Street BART and passed her as I was walking home from a tough work week of few successes and several notable dead ends. She was immobilized on stretcher, her neck in a brace and her arms strapped down at her sides, but she could still scream. The shattered glass and crushed hood of her vehicle testified to the force of impact when she slammed into the tree on the median strip. Several EMTs were working on someone who remained inside the van—throwing instruments and wrappers to the ground as they burned through the effort to save a life.
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With help on the scene and the siren of an ambulance growing ever closer, there was nothing for me to do except be in the way so I walked on, turning toward Washington at the Marriott Convention Center. But I could not out-walk her screaming. It echoed from the sides of buildings and chased at my heels; not the screaming of someone who was injured, though she clearly was, but the banshee wailing of someone who had lost something precious and whose soul had been torn. It was the kind of screaming for which there is no comfort other than the erosion of experience over time. I think she screamed for whoever was left inside that van. I still can’t get it out of my head; not just her screaming, but everything I have seen or experienced since moving here 11 months ago.
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Oakland is a violent city. It routinely makes the Top Ten list of most dangerous cities in America—we currently occupy the #5 slot. A friend who is an attorney and a seasoned litigator lost an argument with his college-aged daughter, who he did not want moving to Jerusalem for fear that harm would come to her, when she said flatly, “Dad, we already live in Oakland.” True dat. My friends did not have a uniformly positive reaction when I announced I was relocating to Jack London Square on the fringe of West Oakland. One chap, among the coolest of the hip, was sufficiently alarmed to gasp—and this from a man who routinely throws himself into maverick waves in the open ocean and will take any drug handed to him by complete strangers at Burning Man. Thank you for your concern. It is not entirely misplaced.
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Here’s a quick quiz to test your knowledge of my Oakland neighborhood:
Over what time period did the following events take place—one year, one month, one week, 48-hours?
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A crowd rampaged through the Civic Center area smashing windows and cars after the verdict in the Oscar Grant murder trial.
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A vigilante wearing body armor was driving a van packed with weapons and ammunition through the section of 880 that seals my neighborhood from downtown when he opened fire on police taking out a dozen or more bystander vehicles. Approximately 150 rounds were fired during the 12-minute shoot out on the freeway.
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A sniper in a West Oakland high rise opened fire on police when they made a routine vehicle stop in the neighborhood.
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Punks at 19th and Broadway shot and killed a man for the $17 he was carrying in his wallet. The man, a Chinese immigrant, was in town for a job interview. He is survived by his wife and three children who are now adrift in a country they do not understand.
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Police helicopters hovered over the Lake Merritt BART station as officers rushed through the underground chasing down an armed suspect. He was not found.
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Ok. Answer time. If you guessed one month, you are right. BUT, take away the night of looting and window smashing from the Grant trial and the answer shifts to 48-hours. Welcome to Oakland.
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Why does Oakland not demand better of its people? Why do we settle for this behavior? Do we show no reaction because we are shell-shocked or are we simply afraid to challenge this deplorable standard lest we attract unwanted attention from the dark forces that appear to have us surrounded?
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In answer to the question I suspect is floating through your head about now, I stay because this is random violence not aimed at me unlike the christian violence I must routinely deflect as a gay person. I was in San Francisco when Proposition 8 was over-ruled in a federal court of first instance. Shortly after 1 p.m., media vans and gay rights advocates began to gather in Harvey Milk Square at the top of Castro at Market Street in anticipation of a ruling in our favor. As the news came in that we’d won, the crowd quickly rose, leavened by the sweet justice of a victory for basic civil rights. By 5 p.m., we took to the streets and marched down Market toward City Hall.
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For the first time in my adult life, I held an American flag. We are not citizens in the U.S. We are not protected by the full sweep of the Constitution or state and municipal laws. It has been open season on us all our lives and the degree of violence leveled at gay people in the U.S. is beyond the comprehension of those who have not experienced it directly. I had never before seen an LGBT crowd wave anything but the Gay Pride flag—the standard of our psychic territory. Seeing my tribe, my dispossessed family of choice amid a sea of American flags was over-powering and I could not stop the tears.
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The Rev. Al Sharpton, responding to a reporter's question about his support for "gay marriage," answered: "Unless you are prepared to say they are not human beings, you have to let these folks have the right to marry." Seven million Californians, whipped into a hate-filled frenzy by the odious catholic and mormon churches, were quite prepared to deny my humanity and voted me to less-then-second class citizen under Prop 8. Carrying my fragile, little flag, I chanted and danced down the street, happy they had been proven wrong; that basic human rights cannot be submitted to a vote. But I was watching, from the corner of my eye, the crowds that lined the avenue—watching for the barrel of a gun and the anger-contorted face of a white christian who wanted to take me out.
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Thanks, but I’ll stay here in West Oakland amid the dopers and dealers, the snipers and thieves. It is just random violence. They are not looking for me.

The Dawning (and Fading) of Aquarius

The day begins not with coffee and oranges in a sunny chair but with pirate radio beamed in from spectacular Radio Caroline bobbing on the surging main of the North Sea. I am dancing through the loft to She Came In Through the Bathroom Window while eggs fry in the pan and The Beatles reprise a time in my life when I did not have a pan, plate, or cup. Those days are long gone but that 19 year-old renegade girl is alive in more than memory. She looks at my almost sixty-year old arms and face in the mirror and wonders how I let this terrible betrayal happen to her. Katrina, my ersatz devil daughter and the spiritual twin of my teenaged self, writes from the steaming jungle of Indiana to say she has defied the odds makers who say she is more likely, at 40, to be killed by terrorists than to find a mate and have a child. She is pregnant with a new, defiant girl who will make her screaming debut sometime in January. Another Aquarian. Amen.
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That child has some shoes to fill. She had better, on her mother’s side, be prepared to pilot a leaky skiff solo down the Irrawaddy from Mandalay to Rangoon, to climb the Himalayas, rebuild orphanages on the tsunami struck coast of Sri Lanka, have hundreds of lovers, and drink them all under the table. Her parents are artists. Of course, she must be her own incarnation of the divine whether that means she will be a monk, an astronaut, or an accountant named Rainy-Dae.
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Hey you, out there getting old, can you hear me? Don’t give in without a fight. The work of youth is rebellion while conservation is the task of the old. I don’t know that I’m up to the job as my resume is quite thin in that area. It is literally do-or-die time for me and my g-g-generation Who hoped we would die before we got old. We will grow old AND die. Ha ha, mean old Time laughs from the echoing tunnel, here is your big lesson as you transit from middle aged to old: there is a difference between knowing and believing. Did I really think that by never choosing, never marrying, never partnering, never having children of my own, never committing to anything that time would stand still while I skipped around from place-to-place, identity-to-identity, job-to-job? Iggy Pop, sixty-three and shirtless, sings I’m A Wild One and I dance. I’m a real Wilde child. I’m quite aware of what I’m going through—ch-ch-changes.
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Only awareness exists—all else is illusion. Approaching a time of “lasts,” I eagerly anticpate the “first” of a child that might just carry a meme from me—an intuitive, sensitive rager who can host a salon of adventurers, write impassioned novels no one will publish, read Proust and Woolf on the subway, or be sought after as an astute critical editor who can salvage almost any manuscript except her own from the ashes of burning excess. Little angel, dance.
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And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Secret Beautiful Park

The Port of Oakland proves there is beauty in the heart of us all but that, in some, it is buried a little deeper. By the age of ten I was keenly aware that, no matter how well I did in school or what I accomplished, the world out there waiting for me would regard me as a pariah at best or a criminal at worst, so the idea of an escape to a secret place where I couldn’t be found was wonderfully appealing—a refuge where I could not be attacked or ridiculed, where the happy endings of children’s stories applied to me. At night I dreamed of finding secret rooms, hidden paths, or a fork in the road that led to a shining world of sweetness.
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Finding a secret place, I have since learned, is common in everyone’s dreams, not just mine. It seems we all guard a true self that we fear cannot survive in a competitive, hierarchical world. The identities we take on or that fall into our laps as we travel forward from day-to-day—a profession, a standing in some community of choice or necessity—are at their very center protective.
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Driving through West Oakland, my neighborhood and a patch of superfund that carries one of the grimmest reputations in California if not the U.S., my friend Jean and I take a turn into a no-man’s-land for the same reason the bear went over the mountain. We’d never been there and that was reason enough for us. While risk is sometimes rewarded with a trip to the Emergency Room and the permanent loss of teeth, our gambit has the spectacular result of dropping us into a secret world that is flat out amazing.
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I live along a finger of the Port of Oakland that runs directly behind my building—a thin strip of twin rail lines and a bank of skyscraping gantry cranes off-loading ships day and night. The bulk of the port, however, is not inside the estuary but farther west where the open water is deeper and the sweep of the shore can accommodate more ships. Neither Jean nor I have ever been inside the Port of Oakland. True, we have no business here but that has never stopped us from doing anything. The real reason we’ve never visited was our erroneous assumption that the port held nothing of interest. A caprice, then, leads us to turn onto the causeway at Adeline and launch ourselves into the fourth largest container port in the United States and the westernmost terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
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Fans of The Wire who especially enjoyed season two would be right at home in the enormous container lots along the port. Hundreds of people work here. The parking lots of shippers and wholesalers as well as tertiary businesses serving the fleets working the port, are filled with cars. The shipping containers—acres of metal boxes stacked five and six high—stretch on as we follow the road into the city-within-a-city that is the port, marveling at each stunning revelation of industry and ingenuity. The lots at each berth are accessed through check points similar to toll booths. A steady stream of high-seated, diesel-powered semis roll in empty and an equal number heave ho in the opposite direction bearing a container, or box if you follow The Wire, on their newly attached trailers. Being unauthorized, we can’t go in so we drive instead among the loaded and heavy Leviathans converging at Middle Harbor Road and Maritime Street grinding to the freeway a short distance away.
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Our car sneaks among them like a mouse in a lion’s den; our only hope is not to piss anyone off. This is the territory of stevedores and long-distance truckers, so we are surprised to find, amid the roar of grinding gears, a turn out into what appears to be a garden. We have discovered the mouth of the Oakland Estuary and the place once occupied by the Oakland Naval Supply Depot, now a secret beautiful park. Secret Beautiful Park, built on reclaimed land (2002-2004), is a concession to a stretch of Oakland long neglected and left to memories when the navy decommissioned the depot. The port threw some money down when it took over the naval station and created a park that is hard to access. To seal the deal, it sits amid the poorest air quality the East Bay has to offer, so the park remains relatively unknown. Unmolested by the hordes of children, dogs, softball teams, yoga masters, their skinny white women devotees in designer leggings sipping $5 tea, and taco trucks that routinely populate the tonier Jack London Square, SBP is gorgeous in a quiet, reflective way. It’s a great place to run, walk, and climb up to the observation deck at the western edge and watch the big ships sliding into the harbor against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline and graceful Bay Bridge. It is where lovers might go in more gentle neighborhoods to watch the sun set. Instead, the park is empty; embarrassed, perhaps, that its once rock ‘em, sock ‘em waterfront brio has had its face washed and its hair combed. So here it sits—a palooka in a Sunday suit.
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Coming out of the park, we lope back toward town coming up on the other side of the Nimitz underpass at 7th & Willow, where Esther’s Orbit Room still stands but is shuttered and lifeless since its eponymous owner Esther Mabry died in May at the age of 90. Quoted in The Oakland Tribune, guitarist and music historian Ronnie Stewart of the Bay Area Blues Society hailed Mabry, saying “The passing of Mabry brings to an end the last physical connection to West Oakland's heyday as the Harlem of the West Coast." Blues legends B.B. King, Etta James, Al Green, the honey-throated Lou Rawls, and the rough and tumble Ike and Tina Turner all played the Orbit Room when this neighborhood was bursting with music and people. Seventh Street was a scene then, home to jazz joints and blues clubs in a lively, predominantly black-owned commercial district before the BART station and the big Post Office distribution center moved in and swept most of these small businesses and Oakland’s thriving blues scene into memory. But this neighborhood is not dead—it is only sleeping. Drive on down 7th and swing south at Mandela Parkway, then quickly curve behind the BART station at Lewis.
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The oft-stated problem with Oakland,to quote Gertrude Stein, its most famous writer after Jack London, is “there is no ‘there’ there.” That is doubly true of South Peralta, where we now roam. There is no store although the remnants of corner markets can still be seen in the broad, high front windows and angled entrances of larger, two-storied buildings that now stare blankly from their foundations reminding us of what this place was before it was sewn into a pocket by the freeway, port, Post Office, and BART line. There is no gas station, no school, no doctors’ offices or cafes. Nearby, weathered and blistered Victorians are parked jowl-to-jowl with a western style of architecture that might aptly be called pre-ghost town with a dusting of stone buildings that once housed light industry. There are few people other than the brown children who run through dirt lots, kicking up a dusty rooster tail that hangs in the air softening the sunlight after the children have passed from sight. The afternoon sun not so much drills down on the landscape as seems to be settled permanently on top of the streets, giving everything in the landscape the pleasure of high contrast—carving the ordinary street into shimmering geometric angles and curves.
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Despite skins of ageing, sagging paint, the richly hued green, yellow, red, and blue houses along tree-lined streets are neatly maintained. Most are fronted by riotous gardens of exotic leaf and voluptuous bloom but there are few people and no foot traffic. The cars are older and sun-faded but without rust; they seem to have been parked years ago. This is a working class neighborhood where people are closer to the homestead than the corporate ladder.
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Yet squarely in the middle of this 10-block enclave sits the massive new state-of-the art studio of Oakland sculptor, Bruce Beasley—the guy who built a worldwide reputation as a designer of art for public spaces out of 35-ton plates of steel. This massive steel-sided building is Beasley’s third studio in the same few blocks. It is not beautiful but handsome, a perception aided by the newly planted and fledgling bougainvilleas along the fence, the clean and orderly courtyard that holds numerous completed works. There is a set of tremendous roll-up doors, closed now but we are given a hint of the vast interior through the glass panels that allow sunlight to stream into Beasley’s work space. This is obviously the studio of a wealthy artist who can afford to build with expensive materials and processes. Yet it occupies its space modestly, invitingly. So Jean and I feel entitled to get out and look. Beasley also has a fenced lot across the street to accommodate his sculpture garden modeled after the great, fin de siècle French gardens in Paris. We are peaking through a wall of bamboo running along the fenced perimeter. It’s not dense enough to keep people from looking in, only to hold them back so that work will not be interrupted.
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I am thinking of the great Spanish poet, Lorca, a gay patriot who eerily predicted not only his own assassination by fascists during the Spanish Civil War, but that his body would never be found: “They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches . . . but they did not find me . . . They never found me.” Because, I think, they never looked in Secret Beautiful Park where we are safe, where the prim, class-conscious religious right and straight, christian majority are afraid to go.

A Worm Hole Grows In Oaklyn

Approached from the prickly perspective of hard science, there is no observational evidence for worm holes—those alleged shortcuts through the time/space continuum that can suck you up in one corner of the cosmos and spit you out in an altogether different galaxy, light years from where you started. Worm holes, like cosmic string or compassionate conservatism, are hypothetical. There is no proof they exist.
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Thus, what I am about to tell you qualifies me for the Nobel Prize in Physics for I have discovered one such corridor in Old Oakland. The only math I know is how to use a calculator and some of the function buttons on Excel. Still, I offer as irrefutable proof this one fact: One day in the early spring, when I was exploring my new neighborhood, a shop so small I’d overlooked it many times beckoned to me and I opened the door. Wondrously, a universe fell out. I was quickly enveloped and now, tunneled deeply into an expanding, parallel reality, there is no turning back.
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I am not the only occupant of five-dimensional space. While others find their entrée elsewhere, for me it began on July 11, 1960 with the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird--a book many would argue is THE iconic “great American novel.” With an initial run of only 5,000 copies, the book that would win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction started modestly. Now, 50 years later, few copies of the first edition, first printing--what collectors would call a "first, first" or "true first"--remain. What makes this story unique to me and illustrates so happily the existence of worm holes, is that I now own one of the 5,000. The story further illustrates the quiet beauty of my raucous, littered, and fragile inner city neighborhood.
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Fairy tales and myths have demonstrated for millennia that children are often born to families that are not their people but these children are, at a decisive moment, all called home if they recognize and heed the summons. One day, seeing a rack of paperbacks on a sidewalk near my building, I stopped to look and found myself in front of a little, used-book shop I’d not noticed previously. Stepping through the tall, thin doors, I fell all Alice-in-Wonderland through the rabbit hole. Like Oakland, the shop was worn down and gritty. It smelled of candles and old tea. As I examined the shelves, I could almost hear the murmurings of the many prisoners, vagabonds, desperados, lying cheats, private dicks and their jezebel dames, sailors, cops, robbers, explorers, and drunken fuck ups pressed between the boards of ravaged and discarded books.
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Amid this debris, sat Harper Lee’s paean to small town life in the American south on the brink of the modern era. It had come all this way. Through the long corridor of half a century we had been traveling toward each other; making our way blindly but always meant to be. Holding the first edition of a classic American novel is exhilarating. Published at the dawn of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the book expressed our longing for justice and eulogized our hope that we could arrive on the other side of hatred without violence. In later years, as each of the men and women who led us through that terrible reckoning died, I would imagine Atticus Finch, alone and defeated, walking out of the Maycomb courtroom and hear the black maid telling Scout, "Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing."
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Connecting to that day of publication, viscerally connecting not to the recollection but to the physical experience of a defining moment in our collective consciousness makes time fluid and easily navigable. It was exciting in the same way that a direct experience of the numinous is and, having tasted it once, I wanted it again.
I began returning to the book store regularly. I learned of other stores—crazy little hole-in-the-wall shops. Berkeley, California is the Ogallala Aquifer of used book stores—one needn’t scratch very deeply before they come bubbling to the surface; dark, filthy caverns of treasure staffed usually by one shabby and flea-bitten old, bald hippie who nevertheless pulls the clown fringe that is left on the sides of his head tightly back into a two-foot long pony tail. Do not make me talk about the finger nails. The blue jeans are appallingly grimy. Of course, they wear a vest and flower-patterned shirt.
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I wear my most disposable clothes to shop these stores—not one good item, even the shoes. I should but do not wear a mask. One shop in particular is a health hazard and probably a fire code violation. The aisles are made impossibly narrow by overflow spilling from the double row stacks onto the floor. There can be no sure principle of arrangement amid such chaos and so I must scan each shelf twice—the books on the front edge of the shelf and the second row behind them—in about twenty book stacks that reach from the floor to well above my head. I drop to my knees to work the lower shelves and then crawl along the hideous kinky carpet on my hands and knees to examine the over flow while a couple of Berkeley’s many leftover hippies who may actually have read To Kill A Mockingbird in its first edition, haggle over the selling price of a large collection of psychedelic literature from the town’s heyday.
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These men are of the surreal brotherhood of collectors—living in a parallel universe on the far side of the worm hole. They remind me of what my mother used to call Carney Folk, meaning marginally respectable people perpetually on the hustle. This entire community—buyers, sellers, the pickers who drive around the west in dust-covered rattletrap cars going from estate sale to estate sale, the lunatic fringe who one day show up with a carload of books some of which are worth serious money—live in a world of their own making. They occupy time differently—opening their stores whenever they feel like it, endlessly making phone calls, faxing, or stopping by because they do not know how to use a computer. But they are all idiot savants of rare books.
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They know the market intimately. They can identify a first edition going back decades, before ISBN numbers and publisher statements made validation as simple as logging on to the Internet. Best of all, they are generous. Any one of them will talk to you about their work and the tricks of the trade. They are happy to share what they know and have taught me to identify publishers marks on the verso of a title page; what enhances value (a signed title page, a dedication copy) and what diminishes it (no dust jacket, foxing); and how to read catalog abbreviations in auction listings. My appetite for what they know is endless and, because time stands still in this world, they are willing to talk forever.

Whil'st Summer Lasts and I live Here (Cymbeline, IV, 2)

I will celebrate my first year of living in Jack London Square in September, making this summer the last season to experience for the first time as an Oaklander. But summer does not come. Summer cannot find me here in my new home. It has stopped raining. The days have grown longer, true. Temperatures have risen and continue to climb. But it is not summer. Now that it is the middle of July and the season is growing old, like me, I have to wonder if summer will come at all. I mean the feeling of summer; being aware of every day as a summer’s day—just the thought of it is so luxurious—the incredible light pouring over your hot, animal skin. That is what is not happening.
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If I have been robbed of summer, there are two prime suspects—becoming old and moving to a new home after 15 years of living in the same house. I have only within the last few weeks absorbed the emotional truth that the door to my youth has closed permanently behind me. I am in a new place: old. Though I can look back and still see those earlier years, they are like trees along the roadside, shrinking first to miniature as the distance between us grows and then they fall away entirely. I don’t know what lies ahead but one thing that is sure is that it will be different and I doubt that I’m as prepared as I tell myself I am. So it is possible that feelings of loss and the approach of a terrible uncertainty sap my attention away from the light, evening breeze through the leafy maples and the close, fat moon at night. I find the feeling impossible to describe. Not devastating or depressing but elegiac in a way so piercingly beautiful that I am not enough of an artist to be able to tell you what I feel. Perhaps I am too self-absorbed for summer to make itself known to me.
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Or, perhaps it is that for the first time in 17 years, I do not have a garden. As anyone who has worked the same patch of dirt continuously for more than a decade can tell you, a garden so deeply known becomes an internalized world moving in time with the universe. I saw my garden as the face of a living sundial—it told me unfailingly when winter had departed and then when spring had collapsed into the arms of summer. I tend nothing here except my spirit, as did Whitman, but I can still feel the old pull of languid afternoons in the slanting light of late August as the shadows crept toward us where we lay panting in the damp and twisted sheets.

Oaksterdam

Oakland prides itself on having one sure-fire booming economic sector—medical marijuana. Unlike the dot bomb false economy of Bagdad by the Bay in the late 1990s, medical marijuana in Oakland has become large enough for the California State Legislature to eye it with dollar signs in its greedy eyes and propose a sales tax. These days, with the state flat broke and flailing, new tax revenue is always spoken of as the next gold rush—a mythical event as anticipated as and very much in the same mold as the second coming of you-know-who; a longed for return to a happier time in the distant past.
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Growth predictions for pot are pointed straight at the sky. Unlike the flimsy cyber shopping portals that San Francisco bet on at the end of the last century, Oakland has in ganja a little chugger that meets all the standard tests for sustainability. First, it has a value chain that increases the worth of the product at each step of manufacture—from planting, to growing, to harvesting, packaging, distributing and retailing. Next comes the paraphernalia—pipes, papers, bongs—and, get this, line extensions into edible oils, brownies, caramels, and cookies. Now, add in to that mix a tertiary sector involving medical referrals, prescriptions, renewals, licensing and record keeping, dispensaries. Suddenly, you have a lot of people going to work.
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The one business in Jack London that is expanding exponentially is the hydroponic grow shop on 3rd Street where growers pick up their supplies. It now has enough forklifts moving 100 lb. soil bags and tanks around to post a credible nuisance challenge to the Produce Market. Most importantly, the city is home to an enormous population of those in possession of a prescription for Mary Jane. Oakland, by no coincidence, is home to Cannabis University (called Cannabis U by locals), a school that teaches every aspect of the business: cultivating, propagating, growing, amending soil, light boxes, and “head” crop versus “body.” This urban university requires an entire five or six story office building downtown that was once occupied by doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, CPAs, and the like—the kinds of soft service jobs that vanish over night when the economy weakens. But Cannabis U is thriving and adding classes every semester dealing with something or other. I couldn’t follow what my charming and chatty bench mate was saying as I waited at a local dispensary to refill my spliff Rx. I had been sampling the brownie form of the current house favorite: Purple Ruckus.
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The dispensary I’m in takes naming each harvest quite seriously; as seriously as the registering of thoroughbred horses or the appellation and year of vintage in Napa. The problem with this is that no harvest is ever given the same name twice. It’s confusing to be confronted with a constantly fluctuating inventory. If you liked Snow Cap last time you shopped, too bad. You will never find Snow Cap again. My default has always been to ask for the house favorite; a crowd sourced selection methodology. But today, for reasons that must be related to my childhood of deprivation, I want Blue Sky—a favorite from a few months ago.
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“Blue Sky?” asks my . . . my what? My pharmacist? My dealer? He thinks for a moment and then says, “We don’t have that anymore.”
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I can’t stop myself from asking for Snow Cap. “Um,” he says, “No.”
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“Why not?” I ask. “They were bona fide house favorites.”
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“True dat,” he says in total sympathy. "But it always has a new name. The po. . .” he catches himself. “The medicine, I mean.”
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“Do you always buy from the same growers?” I persist in trying to smoke my brand.
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“No, we grow it ourselves.”
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“So,” I lean toward him conspiratorially. “You could plant some Blue Sky if you wanted to.”
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“It doesn’t work like that,” he says, patient and helpful; he must be an instructor at Cannabis U because he goes into full pedagogic mode to tell me, “The medicine is really a commodity. It is cloned from the same plants so it basically stays the same.”
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“Are you telling me there is no Blue Sky or Snow Cap?”
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“Yes, ma’am.”
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“So,” I struggle to gather my thoughts, looking at the sample book he has placed in front of me. “It’s just a name? There’s no secret sauce? It’s just marketing?”
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“Well, Purple Ruckus is the house favorite,” he says firmly and glancing at the new customers lining up behind me.
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“Why?”
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“Because it’s better,” he says in the same voice adults use on children.
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I buy two bags and secretly call them Snow Cap.

I’ve Got to Stop Eating Chinese

In a week characterized by a string of peculiar but significant firsts, I once again find myself in the kind of Chinatown hole-in-the-wall noodle bar that can easily be mistaken for an abandoned shoe repair shop. Once again my friends and I are the only white people among the twenty or so tables. It is Saturday night in Oakland and business is back to usual after the Mehserle verdict mischief Thursday when darkness had fallen and the reasonable people had all gone home. Even more tiresomely repetitious, Mehserle represents the second time in the ten months I’ve lived in Oakland that I have had to cross a line of police in full riot gear to get home. I want to love Oakland but I don’t trust her. Like that crazy, Play Misty for Me nut job we’ve all dated, Oakland is always fucking up, then crying and promising to be better next time.
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Then I think maybe I’ve gone soft from my long stay in the suburbs. I run a quick mental review of the last two weeks: So I came upon an angry man in a court parking lot where he was brandishing a silver hand gun and cursing some unseen antagonist? What if the businesses along Washington were boarding up their windows in case of rioting? Yes, Jack London Square has served as a staging area for simulated riots for weeks so the OPD can be prepared to protect and serve when Mehserle hit the fan—so?
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A week ago, in anticipation of public rioting should Mehserle be acquitted, I signed up for Oakland Emergency Center alerts and, after answering a few simple questions (email address and mobile phone number) was assured of real time, breaking news bulletins as the trial went to jury. So at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, July 8th, I was surprised when my admin slid a note in front of me as I was in my office talking on the phone, my silent and dull mobile dutifully beside me and ready to spring into action. Her note said: “verdict in Mehserle trial.” I have an hour commute home and, not knowing what was happening at Broadway and 12th (my BART stop and ground zero for agitators who had promised shattered storefronts and burning cars if Mehserle walked), grabbed my things and headed home to Oakland.
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As the train pulled into the Fruitvale stop where Oscar Grant was shot dead by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009, the platform appeared normal but I could see workers boarding windows in shops on the business side of the station. TV trucks were sending antennae skyward and positioning the talent against the backdrop of the BART logo. My stop was next.
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Coming to street level at Lake Merritt I was surprised and somewhat disoriented by, first, the sound of three or four helicopters hovering above downtown and the district. Then I noticed the long lines of cars and trucks strung along every street leading to the freeway. I had never seen that much traffic in the district. I was at Oak and 5th with the entire district to cross to get home. I chose the route because it would keep me out of harm’s way if 12th & B’way was the gathering storm as it seemed to be. From Oak to B’way, young people were heading to city center; first at a trickle and then a stream. The cars, closed, locked and moving forward in either a slow roll or short bursts of small moves, were more worrisome in appearance than the smiling and laughing youths as they called their friends telling them to meet up on Broadway, between 12th and 14th. It was a double exodus of opposing values streaming past one another—a wrong move, an angry response and it would be a long, hot night.
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Once home, I watched the evening unfold from the roof of my building, a location chosen for drama rather than view. I couldn’t see past the freeway. Streaming video on my laptop, however, connected me simultaneously to LA, the location of the trial, and city center some 14 blocks away. Mayor Dellums, pale and looking tired, spoke from Oakland Emergency Center about who he’d been in touch with and who was sending additional personnel to the scene. Behind Dellums stood a short, thick woman wearing a man’s dark suit, white business shirt, no tie. Her straight, shining dark hair was cropped closely on the sides and back, then combed straight back from her forehead like Valentino except for that stubborn boyish lock that fell forward as she cocked her head to listen and nod from time-to-time, her hands folded demurely in front of her. Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland City Councilmember at Large, dyke transvestite, and not incidentally, candidate for mayor, had positioned herself to be within camera range.
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When the Mayor was finished, Kaplan spoke a few words of reassurance to the viewers and then, with the mayor hunkered down at Emergency Center to see what the evening would bring, Kaplan headed for 14th and B’way where she stayed most of the night: on the ground, in the scene, in front of the cameras, talking to the crowd, talking to the media, talking to rioters when the night finally met its destiny.
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I cannot overstate my amazement as the last few moments of the day fade into history. For the first time in our nation’s history, a white police officer had been convicted of killing a black man. On this same day, a federal district court judge in Boston struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman. And there was Kaplan—a short, squat tranny holding Oakland together; keeping it real. It was 11:45 p.m. and I felt safe. Suddenly, my cell phone sounded the digital burble that tells me I have a text message. It was from Oakland Emergency Center where Ron Dellums was last seen four hours ago. The text read: "Mehserle verdict reached 4:20 p.m."
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And now here we are, two nights later, having our supper in Chinatown. Our food is Szechwan and spicy: exploding chicken, mouth burning tofu, fire bomb beef. ESL descriptions of menu items crack me up. We are drinking beer to quench the fire on our lips, laughing and talking about the adventures the day has brought us. I have gained ten pounds since moving here largely because I cannot stop eating in Chinatown where everything is fried and delicious. I love Oakland.

Food Hose to a Parallel Universe

Yesterday, some friends and I went out for dim sum—ordinarily a non-event hardly worth reporting. Millions of people routinely enjoy dim sum on Sunday mornings in the Bay Area. What catapulted our trip beyond the ordinary was that we went to Alameda; not San Francisco and not Oakland both of which have vigorous, lively Chinatowns larger than the entire commercial district of the little spot on the prairie where I grew up white as rice on a wedding day I never had. Alameda is not known as a culinary center of any kind unless you are willing to include donut shops and Kwik Marts in that category. Not only was the place absolutely ringing with multi-generational Chinese families--90 year-old grandmothers all the way to newborns were crowded around spinning lazy Susans--but there was a line to get into the parking lot and a line at the door to endure. From this waiting vantage it was obvious we were the only white people in a vast interior dedicated to eating long and hard. To be fair, that could be because all the white people of Alameda were at the Fourth of July parade streaming that very minute through the heart of this small town. I was with immigrants from Poland and our only patriotic concern was what we would wear to and eat at the rooftop fireworks party later because we are all queer and refuse to wave the flag until we have equal protection under the law and the full rights of citizenship. In other words, we long ago stopped paying attention to Yankee Doodle and instead are concentrating on Yangzi Noodle.
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This place has the serving of food honed to a production line that would startle Henry Ford. We were still settling in our chairs when the first of a convoy of carts rolled up to offer the latest from the kitchen—crab stuffed peppers, shrimp rolled in bacon and deep fried with a dipping sauce of mayonnaise (mayonnaise!), sticky rice cooked in mango leaves, fried tofu, shrimp dumplings, mushroom dumplings, bean curd dumplings, pork ribs coated in a screaming red sauce, noodles in a slippery and peppery sauce heavy on the garlic, broccoli leaves sautéed in oil, pork buns, and shrimp balls wrapped in noodles then deep fried. We took it ALL. There were four of us and we quickly found our table was too small for the burden of our appetites. The woman who was our server gave us the once over and radioed instructions of some kind back to HQ.
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There are perhaps 12 cart women on the floor, each wearing a headset connecting them to the kitchen. They radio in what is selling and what is not so they have real time food production keeping the fare hot and fresh and irresistible. We are eating like people rescued from a boat adrift for days on the open sea, speaking only when the next cart rolls up with new plates and steam baskets. Eventually, we simply point with dripping chopsticks and grunt affirmatively as the cart woman reloads our table. I love dim sum even though it ruins me for days afterward as food I do not customarily eat (fried, salty, fat) makes its laborious way through my suffering alimentary canal.
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We all use both hands to push back from the table when we are done. Apparently, we are not alone in this custom as the tables are all bolted to the floor and good thing, too, as it is impossible to rise unassisted after this experience. In the harsh glare of the parking lot, we adjust our sunglasses and wonder if Farine’s is open on the holiday as we would now like to buy cake. We get in the car and count ourselves lucky that the tires hold. In a rare moment of judiciousness, we decide to skip Farine’s and go home to nap before the big party. Ubi sunt? And all that.
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Later, wrapped in a bath sheet, I pace between my walk-in closet and sleigh bed laying out ensembles for the evening—planning for a Phoenician roof top experience requires at least three outfits because you will go through that many seasons in a six-hour period on a roof top facing the Pacific Ocean. I decide to go for surprise with my opening gambit and select a white linen A-line sleeveless shift. For accent, pearl earrings and necklace plus an ivory and nickel bracelet inset with a green stone matched by a silver ring and similarly green stone. I pull my hair up into a French twist, apply pink lipstick and spray Obsession over the entire construct. What has come over me? A pair of high black slides and I am out the door.
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No one has seen me like this since high school and the reaction is immediate and loud when I hit the roof. The collective gasp almost suffocates the nascent flame under the BBQ. Men are throwing their arms around me, kissing me; women are nodding their appreciation and remarking how good I look in white. My neighbor, a drink in each hand, pulls me aside to offer one of the G&Ts and tell me he and his girlfriend are about done. He asks when he can come over. Dude, I tell him, you are barking up the wrong tree and you know it. He persists. I use what I consider to be a definitive squelcher line: I am 59 years old and queer. All couples have problems, he coos, sliding his arm around my waist.
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My 15 minutes of fame are eclipsed by Danielle arriving in high summer drag. She is carrying a pitcher of her party starter: a blender concoction of several pints of strawberries, peach juice, rum and Canton, a highly successful mash up of ginger infused cognac from the Pearl River Delta of China's southern Guangdong province. It is now so popular BevMo has it on continual back order. I have the only bottle in the building. "I hope you don’t mind?" Danielle asks, jingling the key to my loft that I gave her so she could store huge bowls of her cucumber and cabbage salads in my otherwise empty refrigerator. I might mind but I love this nouvelle drink sometimes called a Phoenician and other times Hammer Blow. I down two immediately while it is still sunny and hot. The fog is piling up behind the hills of San Francisco and soon enough my little white dress will be history.
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You know you are among queens when a simple change of clothes elicits screams of “Outfit #2!” the minute you walk off the elevator. I have reappeared wearing designer jeans, a black turtleneck, and a porkpie hat. Where is this sartorial instinct rooted? I am again welcomed for my style as most people are now wrapped in blankets or fleece which is a problem because the serious eating of ribs slathered in sauce has begun. Our party has grown in my brief absence to include the brewer who owns Linden Street Brewery, one of our neighborhood establishments. Nick is often seen making morning deliveries on a special bicycle he has tricked out with a platform running parallel to the ground between the seat and front wheel. He can load about two dozen large growlers on this and is often seen at sunrise clanking through the Square like an ersatz milkman making his deliveries.
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Our newest Phoenicians, and my next door neighbors, have come up bringing with them a strange sort of fairy folk typical to the redwood glens of northern California. They wear tie dyed, flowing robes, crowns of stars and moons (in the hands of lesser beings these crowns would be used for holiday table decorations), and big crystal rings. They have walking sticks and speak of animate nature as might have Merlin had he gotten it together enough to make this party. Go figure. These queens prance around in a silver Jaguar when out and play Barbara Streisand albums all day and night when at home. Neither is bigger than a ten year-old despite being grown men. I like them. They are sweet and friendly. After I have had several more of Danielle’s fabulous red drink I wonder if maybe they are leprechauns and the fairy people have captured and enslaved them.
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Their white magic has, inevitably, drawn a black magic to balance the universe and I am suddenly drawn aside by a very short, dark haired ancient woman wearing smeared red lipstick and a long black coat a la Matrix. Her age is inestimable but she is old, old, old. She inquires what it is I do as though she is inquiring whether I know the secret code to her inner circle. I give my most benign reply: I raise money for medical research. That usually causes people to drift into some vague cooing and gets me quickly off the hook for deeper conversation with strangers when I am loaded as I am now. I knew it, she says earnestly grabbing my hand and looking deeply into my eyes—or as deeply as she can from her vantage a foot below my nose. She has my hand. I am trapped and off we go into a very long conversation concerning her amazing discovery (by way of Canada, I didn’t really understand this part) of the cure for cancer! How, I ask stupidly. Herbs. But not just any herbs and not just delivered in any dose by any fool. I must train in her method to be effective. I notice that one of her fat short male minions is standing on either side of me, not saying a word but pinning me to the conversation. I can, of course, leave at any time but I strive to be polite and am about ready to concede she is indeed a genius when Danielle, at six feet six (the five inch stiletto heels giving her a commanding boost although they do ruin the moisture seal on the roof) abruptly appears and takes my hand away from the woman, asking: Is this bitch bothering you? Flaming daggers of steel pass between the eyes of Danielle and the evil one but Danielle is the stronger force. The three slink away to some other corner. Danielle, I notice for the first time, has green eyes—the sign of a witch. Or so I was told by Katrina, my former house mate who also had green eyes and broke every goddamed thing she touched.
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Geez, maybe it was something in the several blunts that were passed around but I am relieved to be returned safely to the table that is, by now, a heap of plates and gnawed on ribs, pies, and cake. My companion at the table remarks that she has eaten some of everything here and is thrilled to report that no one copped out by making potato salad. This is apparently enough of an achievement for her to rate my building four stars. Who the fuck are these people and how did they get in? It doesn’t really matter. By 10 p.m. I am staggering around the roof bumping into chairs and knocking things off the table—not because I am drunk but because I am eating pie and shortcake covered with whipped cream and three kinds of berries. I am on a sugar high among a crowd of people similarly inflicted and we cannot seem to direct our legs under the avalanche of food we had steadily poured down our throats all day long. Music is now blaring from every room in the building and we dance looking like a promotional film for Lourdes— flinging our arms toward the sky while our legs shoot out in all directions like bird dogs revealing hidden pheasants in the bull rushes. Every few seconds, someone bolts up out of a chair, screams halleluiah, and dashes to the desert table. It is time to sign out from the land of the free, the home of the brave.