Nine months ago,  the woman in the mirror put it to me straight: Your money or your life.   I chose my life.  Since leaving my job almost a year ago, I’ve made no money and I haven’t yet thought of a plan to make any.  I know I should worry each month when another round of expenses further depletes my net worth.  But I don’t.  Instead, I concentrate on building meaning into my days.  I am not a calm person so I surprise myself being sanguine about the complete loss of income.  Could there be something new at work it in the worn sum of instinct and experience, quirks and neuroses that is me?

Today offers a perfect example.  I rise at 5 a.m.  Morning sun crawls up the back of the Berkeley hills.  In fifteen more minutes, it will crest that horizon and slide west out over the ocean.  The estuary that is my backyard will glint with chips of hard, white light.  I lie in bed listening to birdsong.   This is new.  When I moved here three years ago, my  loft did not look out on a line of green trees swaying in the morning breeze off the ocean where purple finches make their nests.  Now it does because I had the time to pester PG&E into planting them.  I open the drapes and the razor of light that was slitting the bamboo floor pools there as harmless and yellow as butter in a pan.  I cross the loft to the kitchen, a wonder of design and efficiency plopped down amid open space.   I make coffee and measure out food for a black cat named The Bee.  The signets of my spinsterhood are a stray cat and, I shit you not, a degree in library science. 

Bee’s bowl rings like a gamelan when the kibble hits.  I pour oily, dark French roast into a cup and add milk and sugar.  It is so delicious I smack my stomach and say ‘Ahhhh’ like a right proper idiot.  I will sit at my laptop for much of the morning answering emails, fiddling, and pushing a novel forward to something like completion.  It’s Friday, however, and lunch shines brightly at the back of my mind because Larry con amigos are taking me out.

My neighbor Larry lives just above and behind me along the railroad tracks.  He and his wife moved in maybe a year ago.  Larry is one of those people I've met randomly as an adult and with whom I share not DNA but a huge swath of emotional and nostalgic brain space.  We see the world through a shared lens.  The Italians call it simpatico.  I call it Freak Twin.  Even a partial list of affinities reveals the depth of our connection.  We’re both from the Midwest; we grew up in the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Michigan in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.  Our childhoods were largely unsupervised and thus we developed a keen appreciation for Mischief with a big M.  The very thought of monkey business sets our eyes to twinkling.  We like the same paintings and music—both wildly eclectic in our tastes though we are secret romantics in our view of the world.  The Vietnam War was a landmark for us both—he as a young naval captain running a small recon boat up and down the Vietnamese coast; me in my early teens learning that the world was bigger and meaner than anyone had yet let on. 

Larry and his posse—Alan and Jack—have been meeting for lunch on Fridays since forever.  I am the first woman ever permitted to join them.  It’s an honor I do not take lightly.  These men have eaten in every greasy spoon, dive bar, noodle hut, chop house, diner, and pub in Oakland.  They know every burger, schnitzel, pho, Scotch egg, falafel, pizza, steak-and-eggs, Rueben, tuna melt, and sashimi in a ten mile radius.  They are the Lone Gunmen of the louche lunch.  I am discovering a new side of the city and myself in their conspiratorial company. 

We hit the road keenly alert to trash bars and anything with more than two police cruisers parked in front—the cops know where to eat.  We are almost sucked in to Art’s Crab Shack—the retro design and proclamation, ‘Since 1963’, exerting a powerful gravitational force as we drive by.  But inland heat has pulled a cover of fog over us and we are not just hungry but cold and hungry.  The men delve into a quick and rapturous pow-wow concerning the soup at the Claremont and we slide right past Art’s resolving to return some sunny day.

We bump into a booth—there is no one else in the Claremont Diner, a charming old dump wedged into a sharply angled corner I’ve passed countless times without thinking twice.  It is 11:45 a.m.  The waitress comes by with water and menus that read like tablets handed down to Moses—two columns of temptation inscribed with the orthodoxy of diners: ham and cheese, cheeseburgers, mac-n-cheese, everything that can be done to an egg, malts, shakes, fries, rings, bacon, blu cheese, fried chicken, pie, donuts, coffee, Coffee, COFFEE.  Larry observes that it is International Bottled Beer Day and we resolve to pay our props with a round of Anchor Steam.

As our waitress slaps the cold, beaded bottles on the Formica table top, she recites the day’s specials and is quizzed about the soup.  “Barley,” she answers to the blank stares of my booth mates, “and a cowboy soup of sausages and ravioli.”  The Gunmen look at each other with the alert excitement of children up to no good and call in unison, “Cowboy soup.”  They grin with anticipation and I think how much I like them.

I realize that, as a lesbian, I know very little about men; very little at least about their unguarded emotional inner lives.  These three men have let me see a private moment of friendship.  I have been let into the Bat Cave.  I wiggle with satisfaction and order the barley.  My first surprise is that the soup is indeed remarkable.  I should’ve trusted them to know what’s what.  There follows nuanced discussion about the source of the subtle but unmistakable zing in the cowboy soup.  Pepper?  Chipotle?  Red sauce?  With each conjecture another spoonful is lofted and lips are smacked in analytical rumination.  It is a mystery.

On the drive home the Gunmen call out dive bars and holes-in-the-wall as we pass if they merit, by dint of  endurance or decay, a visit on some future Friday.  I keep quiet, letting the men reveal themselves to me.  I concur with every suggestion noting only that I am especially in favor of a trial run if the word ‘bucket’ appears on the menu as a serving size.  When ‘spotting’ like this there is no adult in the car despite an average age of 60+.  Seen in stop motion through the eyes of memory, we are four kids in Red Ball Jets, seersucker shorts and sand-dusted tee shirts out on a lark, happy to be together casing a neighborhood.

It is now the blue part of the night.  The trees outside my big, factory window have lost their green and everything is drained of color.  Black night will come soon.  I am home writing in my kitchen.  I stop to close the window against the foggy chill.  Above me, the couple who live at the inner corner of my L-shaped building have lit their balcony with candles and thrown a white cloth over their café table which is simply decorated with a vase of white roses, the pink edges flickering in the candle light.  As I watch, first one and then the other appears, each is carrying a plate and has a wine glass hooked in his thumb.  The men laugh, making the dog do tricks for scraps.  I smile up at them and wave before closing the drapes and returning to my computer.  The Bee is pestering me to stop writing and turn on the TV so we can snuggle up on the couch.  In the wee hours I give in and we wrap up in a blanket to watch ancient episodes of The X-Files, grinning and purring like right proper idiots.

Pissing In the Ocean

Some of you may remember my first blog wherein I chronicled the misadventures of The Rockway Institute and my decade-long obsession with golf. The Tute is no more and the golf bug has flitted on to natter in the ear of a new victim leaving my psyche a green field for new neuroses many of which have started to sprout.  Though I can never adhere to a theme for long—or person, or job, or POV—were I to start a third blog I would definitely write of the travails of having to work a toilet at sea level.  God! What a gripe.  Gravity is essential to a good flush and here at the edge of the San Francisco Bay we got nuthin’.

I’ve often remarked that when I bought my loft I gave insufficient (read: none) consideration to my charming lateral lisp and find myself having to pronounce my address, composed entirely of words beginning in S, endlessly to the amusement of every jackath who needs to know where I live.

I can live with the lisp.  The toilet is another matter.  On arrival here, I quickly acclimated to the sight of my neighbor pissing behind the building along the railroad tracks each morning.  He and his dog out for their morning stroll marking their territory.  I thought him rude at first. Then I got to know and like him and adjusted my opinion to eccentric.  Now I realize he is simply practical. 

I’m considering getting a dog.

Skin Deep in West Oakland

‘You live in a cement box,’  my guest said, flustered by her lack of sufficient wit to otherwise describe my home. She was the first to visit since I bought and moved into  an old iron works factory , now lofts, inside the Port of Oakland. There is no denying it—it's a cement box in a foundry just around the corner from an EPA Superfund site. For the double down, it’s not just Oakland, it’s West Oakland.  West Oakland, for those who have been living abroad for the last decade, has a national reputation. Giving it the most positive spin I can, when it comes to murder rates West Oakland has consistently out-performed every other major metropolitan area of any size. Two years ago, when I told people I was selling my house in a safe but dreary East Bay neighborhood to live in West Oakland, they all had the same reaction. First, they would ask if I was kidding and, when they realized I wasn’t, would take a big step back as though proximity to such madness might result in contagion.
 

Now, to be clear, I don’t take the murder rate lightly. Or the toxic top soil. Nor, for that matter, abysmally bad air quality due to the Port of Oakland in whose rough lap I tenderly sit. I am aware of the people living in their cars, always in the shadow of shipping containers stacked six high and I know about the abandoned buildings across the street.  I am not at all surprised by the people who say ‘no’ to this outpost of civilization.  Very few of them, however, are still my friends—if they don’t get this neighborhood, they don’t get me.

 For their every one of their no’s, here is a yes:

·         I awoke one morning to find the street blocked off so that a crane, working with a helicopter, could load a 15-ton metal sculpture onto a flatbed taking it to an installation in New York. People watched all day as the piece was slowly dragged from the sculptor’s studio (big as an airline hanger) and hoisted onto a pallet, strapped and bound like Prometheus, and then loaded and secured. Small cart vendors showed up around noon selling hot dogs, sandwiches, soda. It became a party. 

·         One of the first entrepreneurs to stir each morning is the local brew meister pedaling his bike up 3^rd Street making deliveries to local restaurants and bars. The bike is custom built to have a low platform settled between the pedals and the front wheel—a mini flatbed—that can hold a half dozen beer kegs. His long beard blows back over his shoulder as he makes his rounds.

·         The days all three local coffee roasters fire the beans.  The scent of hot, moist steam rising from vats of boiling malt having some sort of misty, twiney amoeba sex with the nose-singing flare of burning coffee makes me smile.

·         The restaurant causing the most excitement this season is El Taco Bike—a mobile taco stand specializing in carne asada with salsa verde. The bike is charming as all hell and I want it. If you grew up in an era when boys delivered to doorsteps newspapers thrown from the front of their bikes you’ll have no trouble envisioning the small, aluminum steam table attached like a newspaper basket to the front of El Taco Bike. Pulled pork on one side of the divided compartment and sauce on the other. Move to the back of the bike for condiments—extra hot sauce, more salt, diced chilies—and napkins arranged on a café table no bigger than a pizza stone welded to the back seat where a child’s seat would go. The wee-est, little trash canister sits under the table.

·         On summer nights the Oakland Opera sets up in an old, converted warehouse just around the corner from me on 3^rd across from the hardware store and hydroponic outlet for people who grow their own pot. On show nights, an enterprising young man operates a martini cart on the sidewalk. He is usually joined by a hotdog vendor also working the pre-show crowd and us casual diners/drinkers who happen by.

·         Love beer and you’re in heaven here. The stretch of 3^rd between Linden Street, home to Linden Street Brewery and Merchant’s Saloon in the Produce District attracts an international crowd of beer connoisseurs out to taste some of the most innovative flavorings made today. Head east to catch International Beer just west of B’way on 3^rd where bikers catch the late afternoon sun on their leather and chains. Jog south to Jack London Square and stop in at Heinhold’s Last Chance Salon, a bar The New York Times has dubbed one of the ten best in the world. Built during the gold rush days, it was where a young Jack London bent his elbow with grizzled sailors from all over the world and learned how to tell a story. It is no bigger than a single car garage and everything in it is uniformly the same color—table, floor, walls, chairs, lamps, décor. It is like stepping into an old sepia-print photograph; a different world.

·         The newly dredged Oakland Estuary allows the Port of Oakland to take more and larger cargo traffic away from San Francisco and other, West Coaster seaports. On any day, tug boats push and nudge and herd cargo ships bigger than the high school I went to into berths where stevedores high in the sky guide three story cranes over their holds to empty them out and reload in a day. They work through the night and I have grown accustomed to the light and noise.

·         The hottest venue in this part of town is a triangle-shaped wedge under the 24 where it crosses I-880. A local man started a garden there, eventually adding a stage and café tables. The whole thing is maybe 2,000 square feet and holds only a few dozen people lucky enough to get a seat when local bands play for free because they want to.  This isn’t a government subsidized community enrichment program.  It is neighborhood people getting together on summer nights and grilling hotdogs and holding their babies on their laps, and watching the moon come up. It naturally attracts artists and people and dogs and food trucks. Girls in summer dresses dance in the late light, their shadows stretch long and thin; their sandals crunch on the gravel as the girls twist and turn and laugh and call to their boyfriends.

·         Jack London Square is the Paris of California. All the street art I could ever hope to find is here. A school of taggers working from here up to Fruitvale is producing the most dynamic and beautifully rendered paintings; gorgeous and beautifully crafted, these paintings are masterful.  Artists live and work here alongside trades people and stevedores, truck drivers, musicians, bakers, meat cutters, produce markets, painters, photographers, dancers, writers, and a strange boy who stands silently in the Square weaving his hands around each other like soaring birds in swarming flight—it is hypnotic and beautiful and utterly useless except to delight.