The Atelier

It is midnight. The largest full moon of the past eighteen years hangs above my building on the Oakland waterfront. Ragged clouds race across its dull white face as it looks down on me from a watery, blue black sky. Silver clouds diffuse random, scattered bursts of lightening. To the west, in the sprawling, snarled terminus of the Southern Pacific rail line, a monstrous freight train is built car-by-car.
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Cargo ships are scattered out on the bay like peanut shells on a bar room floor. I am on the roof of my building—in my pajamas, a beer in one hand and something else in the other, standing under a full, midnight moon in the fourth largest seaport in North America watching the passenger train Coast Starlight pull clack/clack, clack/clack into the deserted Square. A fog horn brays out near Angel Island. A freight train slowly picks up speed; I feel the vibration under my feet. The non-stop radio of my mind is playing Johnny Cash. He sings, “Pig iron, I got pig iron, I got aaall pig iron.”

I have spent this entire day of successive squalls and random emergencies writing and managed to push the novel forward in a way that is more than additive, it is breakthrough. I am feeling mighty. The storm quickens and my hair whips straight out behind me. My slipstream. This is the most alive I ever feel; when I have pushed past something that was defeating me. It is exhilarating to stand triumphant in a howling wind. I am happy.
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The moment I know I am, the predator in my psyche that lives to attack all the innocence in me, to take away any shred of satisfaction or joy, put them in a sack and throw it in the river springs to life. But not tonight because, when I write, I can beat this deceiver back to stand on the roof victorious, under the full moon, and watch the California Zephyr roll out, headed for Denver. I lift my beer to the sleepy passengers as they sail past. Rain is coming. Writing defeats the predator and the energy rages through me into the inky night.
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I finish my beer and turn to go inside, back to my kitchen, back to my laptop, back to my story. A giant crane lifts container cars, one-by-one, off cargo ships.
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Sleuthing Through the Square

One of the great pleasures of living in Jack London is coming upon an amazing loft tucked away in an unlikely corner of the Warehouse District. While newer construction is impressive and the views can be spectacular, the newer space itself is limited and cramped—more a stager’s canvas than where one would want to live day-in and day-out.
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The older buildings are where the magic is—the old brick warehouses, factories, shipping offices, and producers’ co-ops. Each space is uniquely flavored by its history and the designer’s intent to recast these Grande Dames in leading roles where their age is a plus.
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Some people can walk into a store and immediately bee line right to the best deal on the floor. Others can look at a vintage dress and see the new creation hidden among the folds of faded couture. I love the architects and designers that can see in an open factory floor the wonder that is awaiting emergence from the shadows.
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There are not thousands of these lofts here in the Jack London District and there are not hundreds, either. There are a few dozen. And when one comes across one, it is revelatory. I don’t know whether it is the echo of the past that haunts the space or the inspiration of the human mind that has carved beauty from abandoned floors and high ceilings that makes the artist’s loft the wonder that it is.
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The 15’ ceilings and broadly fluted concrete supports bear witness to a day when someone’s hopes and dreams played out within the compass of my home. Fires burned in forges, sweating men swung hot pig iron into place and hammered some new gear or housing for ocean going ships and, in the long ago past, iron horses that carried the riches of California “back East,” as everything in the rest of the United States is summarily called. The scars of hoists run through my bedroom, living room, den. Powder burns blacken the supports—for reasons I can only guess at. Where massive chains and cranks once moved turbines and drivers, pale colored walls now sprout paintings and photographs of my own long life.
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Today, Jean and I found a small, ground floor loft with a cement floor and massive iron-plated fire walls that opened not onto a forge but a sweet outdoor garden; secret garden that I suspect only a few score people have ever laid eyes on. It made us quiet, as though we were being initiated into a parallel reality and that is the heart, I think, of the loft experience: occupying intersected planes of reality and time. As a gay person in a country whose mainstream god purportedly hates fags, I am comfortable living a secret life in a charmed social circle that is unknown and unknowable to the non-initiated. I am comfortable occupying multiple realities and trading realities as the situation demands.
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I have often looked at old photographs; particularly turn of the last century photos of big cities like New York, Chicago, or here where I live now and imagined myself into the picture. Loft living has traces of that—occupying a ghost space where one life has faded and another has risen up to take its place. But that old life echoes and pings and creaks in the night and calls out for its story to be heard.