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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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."
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
“Blue Sky?” asks my . . . my what? My pharmacist? My dealer? He thinks for a moment and then says, “We don’t have that anymore.”
.
I can’t stop myself from asking for Snow Cap. “Um,” he says, “No.”
.
“Why not?” I ask. “They were bona fide house favorites.”
.
“True dat,” he says in total sympathy. "But it always has a new name. The po. . .” he catches himself. “The medicine, I mean.”
.
“Do you always buy from the same growers?” I persist in trying to smoke my brand.
.
“No, we grow it ourselves.”
.
“So,” I lean toward him conspiratorially. “You could plant some Blue Sky if you wanted to.”
.
“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.”
.
“Are you telling me there is no Blue Sky or Snow Cap?”
.
“Yes, ma’am.”
.
“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?”
.
“Well, Purple Ruckus is the house favorite,” he says firmly and glancing at the new customers lining up behind me.
.
“Why?”
.
“Because it’s better,” he says in the same voice adults use on children.
.
I buy two bags and secretly call them Snow Cap.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
“Blue Sky?” asks my . . . my what? My pharmacist? My dealer? He thinks for a moment and then says, “We don’t have that anymore.”
.
I can’t stop myself from asking for Snow Cap. “Um,” he says, “No.”
.
“Why not?” I ask. “They were bona fide house favorites.”
.
“True dat,” he says in total sympathy. "But it always has a new name. The po. . .” he catches himself. “The medicine, I mean.”
.
“Do you always buy from the same growers?” I persist in trying to smoke my brand.
.
“No, we grow it ourselves.”
.
“So,” I lean toward him conspiratorially. “You could plant some Blue Sky if you wanted to.”
.
“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.”
.
“Are you telling me there is no Blue Sky or Snow Cap?”
.
“Yes, ma’am.”
.
“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?”
.
“Well, Purple Ruckus is the house favorite,” he says firmly and glancing at the new customers lining up behind me.
.
“Why?”
.
“Because it’s better,” he says in the same voice adults use on children.
.
I buy two bags and secretly call them Snow Cap.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
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.
.
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?
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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."
.
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.
.
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?
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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."
.
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.
Monday, July 5, 2010
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
Friday, July 2, 2010
The Finger Tip Club
From the front porch and back garden of my house in El Cerrito, I had a rifle shot view of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. Now, standing on the roof of my building amidst the cranes and rail lines of the Port of Oakland, my view is of the graceful Bay Bridge, dipping and rising and dipping again like a bird in flight toward San Francisco.
.
The new summer smiles down on all of this, allowing us to wear our skimpy clothes if we are young or straw hats if we are not. I am on the roof surveying that non-stop ramble that is Jack London Square, the Warehouse District, the Port of Oakland, and West Oakland. For those at ground level, that’s more or less a rectangle at the back of San Francisco Bay outlined in cement lanes, steel tracks, and every known form of transportation: 880 on the north cuts us off from escape downtown should any shit hit the fan; the estuary and railroad yards to the south where cargo ships from China arrive day and night to ensure that we have enough hair dryers and microwaves. Oakland is a huge port, stretching east to encompass Oakland International Airport, once the size of a Dairy Queen and now poaching business from San Francisco and San Jose. Finally, we are contained on the west side by Mandela Parkway, our main drag out of here through West Oakland and its superfunds, train tracks, the old Army base, and, rising from this miasma, the economic miracle that is Emeryville.
.
I am living my first summer in my new home here among the artists, chefs, musicians, surgeons, drag queens, cop and train conductor, suits, and growers that make up my building. I sip wine and gaze out to the windy bay, my hair whipping about my head, and think: I am happy. It is the people, yes; the architectural wonder that is my loft, yes; the many recreations within a short walk in any direction, yes; but it is also very much of the season. The Square and summer are good to each other and, like Paris and lovers, make an attractive pair. The roof, particularly, is again in season.
.
It is our communal backyard and we gather up here weekends to have a family dinner around a long table bearing plates, dishes, towers of food and bottles of booze and to talk of the things that mean something to us. I am contentedly sitting between the two sexiest men in the building, the Square, Oakland, the United States and Europe. They are so equally adorable even their names cannot distinguish them, both are Michael. Michael is talking of food and cooking, describing one of the meterosexual dishes he has brought to dinner and complaining he once cut himself so badly making it he almost lost a finger tip. He thrusts his digit toward us revealing a thin, craggy white line circumventing the end of his finger. We gasp. I am keenly interested although one finger means nothing.
.
“Does it still hurt?” asks Michael, as he pushes his own finger displaying a matching gutter in the same finger, same hand, toward Michael’s . We gasp. A second self-inflicted knife slice that damaged a nerve. I cannot believe my Ugly Duckling luck at finding this tribe.
.
“Legio Irus Actica," I whisper adding my finger to the compass of collective injury. We gasp. We share the same ruined finger tip that twitches randomly with pain from a long ago injury. Kismet. We hug.
.
The new summer smiles down on all of this, allowing us to wear our skimpy clothes if we are young or straw hats if we are not. I am on the roof surveying that non-stop ramble that is Jack London Square, the Warehouse District, the Port of Oakland, and West Oakland. For those at ground level, that’s more or less a rectangle at the back of San Francisco Bay outlined in cement lanes, steel tracks, and every known form of transportation: 880 on the north cuts us off from escape downtown should any shit hit the fan; the estuary and railroad yards to the south where cargo ships from China arrive day and night to ensure that we have enough hair dryers and microwaves. Oakland is a huge port, stretching east to encompass Oakland International Airport, once the size of a Dairy Queen and now poaching business from San Francisco and San Jose. Finally, we are contained on the west side by Mandela Parkway, our main drag out of here through West Oakland and its superfunds, train tracks, the old Army base, and, rising from this miasma, the economic miracle that is Emeryville.
.
I am living my first summer in my new home here among the artists, chefs, musicians, surgeons, drag queens, cop and train conductor, suits, and growers that make up my building. I sip wine and gaze out to the windy bay, my hair whipping about my head, and think: I am happy. It is the people, yes; the architectural wonder that is my loft, yes; the many recreations within a short walk in any direction, yes; but it is also very much of the season. The Square and summer are good to each other and, like Paris and lovers, make an attractive pair. The roof, particularly, is again in season.
.
It is our communal backyard and we gather up here weekends to have a family dinner around a long table bearing plates, dishes, towers of food and bottles of booze and to talk of the things that mean something to us. I am contentedly sitting between the two sexiest men in the building, the Square, Oakland, the United States and Europe. They are so equally adorable even their names cannot distinguish them, both are Michael. Michael is talking of food and cooking, describing one of the meterosexual dishes he has brought to dinner and complaining he once cut himself so badly making it he almost lost a finger tip. He thrusts his digit toward us revealing a thin, craggy white line circumventing the end of his finger. We gasp. I am keenly interested although one finger means nothing.
.
“Does it still hurt?” asks Michael, as he pushes his own finger displaying a matching gutter in the same finger, same hand, toward Michael’s . We gasp. A second self-inflicted knife slice that damaged a nerve. I cannot believe my Ugly Duckling luck at finding this tribe.
.
“Legio Irus Actica," I whisper adding my finger to the compass of collective injury. We gasp. We share the same ruined finger tip that twitches randomly with pain from a long ago injury. Kismet. We hug.
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