It is a few minutes after 10 p.m. on a Sunday evening in early June, 2010. We are just finishing up a party that began almost inaudibly, with the deflowering of a bottle of cabernet on Friday after work and built steadily until, by Saturday night, in the wee small hours, it had become a howling frenzy characterized by several self-inflicted calls to the police to report ourselves for fear that we might soon actually cross the consequential, and not too distant, line that separates the as-of-yet unindicted from the incarcerated.
I face these periodic uber parties the same way I imagine a pioneer woman out on the lonely 19th century prairie might have stoically endured a wall of locusts or a towering cloud of sky-obliterating dust tearing up the known world at 200 mph. Mobile destruction is the defining characteristic of parties in my building—once a warehouse serving the Port of Oakland and now a residence hall for grown up artists, doctors, lawyers, advertising moguls, professional chefs, and Indian chiefs. At some tipping point I am too far past my sell-by date to notice, the party suddenly, synchronized, breaks from its moorings in the host loft and bursts into the hall to hunt out and settle a new hive where the food is better and the liquor cabinet not so ravaged.
This is not the first time this has happened since I moved to the building nine months previously and I am prepared. Knowing that I must protect my property with any and every resource available to me, I keep the swarm away from my unit by containing the revelers on the roof. First, I give them a bottle of Canton, the ginger infused cognac that we have taken to like bees to the blossom, burying our faces deeply in the cocktail shaker to draw out the last drop of sweet goodness. Quickly, however, before the crowd can grow restless, I up the ante with a barrel of beer followed by a donkey pulling a giant, oaken cask of vin on a rustic cart surrounded by garland-festooned maidens singing of the coming rut.
At this point, I take a potty break that extends to a shower, a full-night’s sleep, and breakfast with a friend. Coming home mid-Saturday afternoon, I can hear the party in my building from two blocks away. When I arrive, I am hailed in the hallway as though a sailor long lost at sea and presumed dead. They cannot believe their luck at seeing me before them. If anything ever called for drinks, this is it.
By now, the building truly has become a hive. Industrious worker bees fly in and out of open doors carrying plates of food, newly cooked, cork screw reinforcement, “the CD I’ve been looking for since dawn,” and buckets of ice. Other drones have been dispatched to perform specific tasks essential to the survival of the hive: get propane, buy toilet paper, cocktail olives and a bucket of chicken. People now are laughing and throwing their arms around complete strangers vowing never to part. I’ve had several of the newly devised cocktail christened hammer blow.
Even the stalwarts start to drop after 33 hours although a few wanderers cluster around a laptop, watching Google Earth of someone’s home town. 1990s Euro Pop and dance blares from the second floor—our version of house music. Someone on the roof is screaming “please” at the top of her lungs but in a manner that is asking for trouble rather than trying to fend it off as evidenced by her devilish laughter when the object of her desire relents. It’s 4 a.m. and a third wind, less gusty than the second but by no means trivial, has swept up those who were previously comatose and vivified them enough to reconnect with the source of their banging heads.
The sun is up splintering off the true believers, myself among them, who attend services at the Laney College flea. We are carrying the bucket of chicken and attracting roaming curs at an alarming rate. Once through the buck-a-head gate and safely among the heaving throngs we sober up enough to strategize our morning. First, we diversify our diet with corn-on-a-stick and fish tacos sold from a big truck. Then, we aim and launch into the souk earnestly searching for the Balenciaga parfum at a price more reasonable than the $100/bottle last seen at Nordstrom. We are immediately distracted by a table of nail polish in colors reminiscent of automotive touch up paint and buy several bottles including a small vile of glitter additive. It is, after all, June—the month of pride.
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A Resident's View of the Port of Oakland, the Warehouse District, and Jack London Square.
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I COVER THE WATERFRONT
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Why I Write
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.
Here at last he finds rest.
—from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.
Here at last he finds rest.
—from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919
About Me
- Claudette
- I am a fiction writer. The words you read here are inspired by but may or may not reflect actual events. Characters are a mixture of real and imagined and nothing is as it seems. Enjoy.
It is our petite Vieux Carré, our sunny Marseille, a catchment holding more than the Port of Oakland it cradles the beloved margins, the narrowest, antipodal feet of the human bell curve on which the mass of every conceivable human securely rests: the artists, vagabonds, authors, entrepreneurs, hucksters, dopers, prostitutes, sailors, dispossessed, drag queens, misbegotten, chefs, brewers, musicians, politicians, the wealthy and destitute; haunted by the ghosts of Tennessee Williams, Edith Piaf, Hart Crane, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
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