Late at Night, In the Loft

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

I Think We Have Come to the End

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