The Far West

I live at the far west end of the Jack London District. Our building is isolated from residential neighborhoods by formidable barriers—the racing, dirty, fumy freeway, the Port of Oakland, BART, the estuary, San Francisco Bay, and the western terminus of the Southern Pacific Rail Road. Look south and see one of the largest rail yards in North America and the fourth largest container port in North America. Look north to where the shadow of the freeway above us divides us psychologically at ground level. To the west is the silvery Bay Bridge skipping toward San Francisco off Treasure Island (Treasure Island!). And to the east the airport, rail lines, and warehouses of haute industrial Oakland.
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Amtrak keeps a huge yard as our neighbor on Third. Seventh recalls an early day when the factories weren’t quite so huge and this stretch of Oakland was called the Harlem of the west. But much of Seventh is boarded up now and even Esther’s Orbit Room, that landmark club, is empty, its awning falling to tatters, a starburst hole where a rock hit the sign.
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We are like an outpost of civilization here; my building some urban iteration of The Swiss Family Robinson. We are the only residence in the sprawl left behind when the freeway, the Post Office, and BART sewed this formerly vibrant neighborhood into a pocket. We sit like a fort out on the prairie in the mid-1800s when Custer and similar generals waited weeks for supplies and munitions.
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Thus we are alone and turn to each other for companionship and neighborly ways. The trouble is, the people I live with here are exactly the kind of people my mother would not let me play with as a child or go out with as a teen. They drink, smoke, stay up late, scream, drive fast cars, wear short shorts, you name it. We were made for each other and know it.

Summer Heat

I knew this party was going to cook when we found the place by homing in on a half dozen search lights carving circles in the night sky above the Mojave Desert. We were welcomed by members of the L.A. SWAT team who frisked us before we entered the compound. Let me translate that for those of you who don’t speak Palm Springs: out-of-work actors from L.A. in rented costumes with ‘L.A. SWAT’ emblazoned across the shoulders felt every one up before letting us in. You had to be there—it was fun. The drag queen signing people in at the door of this mid-century modern bungalow wrote ‘Fill’ on my friend Phil’s name tag. I began to get my groove on.
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The living room was hot despite retractable glass walls that eliminated the barrier between outside and in. The desert can reach 120 degrees by noon in late June. The night takes forever to cool down. A full movie screen had been put up behind the pool. Its loop showed Edie Sedgwick, young, wearing a striped French boatneck jersey, her innocent eyes darkened with kohl. She is in her twenties, a child woman, tragic, unaware the she would soon be dead. This alternated with Carmen Miranda in a sarong singing seductively about a heat wave in the tropics.
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The backyard was generous by Palm Springs standards. The pool was large enough that a few laps every morning would make you muscled and toned. The lawn at either end held a bar tent and, to the east, café tables and chairs, and, to the west, a samba band and large dance floor set out over the lawn. Just beyond the fence, a compressor pumped cool air into the yard through a hundred yards of 12” tubing. The noise from everything was deafening. The damp heat of sweating bodies was over powering. Jean and I hit the bar and then the dance floor.
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The moon was up and the heat held—over one hundred degrees as grills flared at either end of the pool and the air conditioner attempted to wrangle the fiery air to cool. We were treated to constant stimulation. Our host doubled down every hour or so, kicking the gig up a notch—or two, as when I saw a quick glimpse of glitter and skin through the garage window where Carnivale dancers, imported from Brazil, in full costume of feathered headdress reaching four feet into the stratosphere, waited in flesh-revealing bodices of lace and sequins.
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They formed a dance line that snaked out into the crowd and brought people back to the dance floor with renewed mojo and abandon. We’d sweat out all of our booze and needed more. Our host, wealthy and socially connected to Hollywood and the old guard southern California Republican party is an A-list Palm Springs fag, the first in the Coachella valley to collect Jeff Koons. Drop a name, he was just there for dinner or had coffee with them that very morning. He married his first fortune, his second comes from selling prune juice disguised as a diet plan. He is making a killing.