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.