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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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?
.
A crowd rampaged through the Civic Center area smashing windows and cars after the verdict in the Oscar Grant murder trial.
.
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.
.
A sniper in a West Oakland high rise opened fire on police when they made a routine vehicle stop in the neighborhood.
.
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.
.
Police helicopters hovered over the Lake Merritt BART station as officers rushed through the underground chasing down an armed suspect. He was not found.
.
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.
.
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?
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.