Jiffypop

Every morning when I waken to the sound of a freight train heaving past my bedroom, I smile and think, ‘my little house by the sea.’ Of course it is not the rose-covered cottage at Swansea I may have imagined in a more romantic youth—swans gliding with bowed heads into the gloaming sunset, birds calling their mates to nest and sleep. It is a snarl of train tracks, shipping lanes, and knotted Interstate. But it is a stone’s throw from the back bay and, arguably, the sea.
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Last year I was surprised that I moved here at all. This year, I am surprised by how much I love it. I try to account for this and fail although I have some hints in behaviors that are new; behaviors I would never even have thought of at Rockway, much less considered doing. For confessional example: I love to put on Parisian café music at evening and let the part of me that wanted to be a modern interpretive dancer have the floor. I love to dance. I did not know. As the evening matures, I give in to Frank Sinatra. By the wee hours, it is Miles Davis, Paris, 1957. My conclusion is that I am more emotional here than I have ever in my life been. I am freer for living among the antipodes, my true homies and the people I love the most.
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Then there is the matter of just being so weepingly thrilled to be living in a city again. Growing up gay in the American Midwest, ‘the city’ was to me what ‘North’ was to the slaves—a place where I could escape to a better life and be free. I do not do well in middle class America and I cannot aspire to upper class America so I run to the marginal bottom, where live the most creative people I have ever met. I am home. I am tempted to say that only circus freaks could comprise a more outré community but then I remember that there is a circus school only a few blocks from my loft.
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Before moving to California, I lived and worked my entire adult life in major, urban concentrations of all manner of folk; a freak show to some, a carnival for those like me. Arriving in California, I encountered something I’d never experienced before—suburbs. There is a Richter scale of soul crush for California suburbs and I wasn’t in the worst one but I was barely hanging on as I waited for the equity in my house to release me back to the demimonde of whinos, Bohemians, romantics, artists, and families of hip young fathers with perma-stubble on their square jaws and their unaffectedly lovely, pre-trophy wives. I embrace them all; even the derelicts or especially the derelicts.
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There is Chair Man, a homeless chap in his fifties whose sartorial sense leans toward wife beaters and pajama bottoms. I pass his shopping cart household every day where it is staked out in a public parking lot on the way to the 12th Street BART. He has a gas-powered generator he sets up and, from the electricity it produces, links to the world via the Internet (who knows how but I have seen him Googling away in the purpling dusk of many summer evenings). I call him Chair Man because he is one of the few vagabond people I have seen who carry a chair around. It makes him a stand out.
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I won’t say I know him, but I do speak to him frequently on my way to and from work. I may say something like: “Good evening.” And he will usually answer with advice, my favorite being: “You going to pop Jiffypop, you GOT to know what the fuck you are doing.” Well, true dat.

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.

Thank You!

To the person doing the great stencil work--"Pick Up Your Dog Shit"--in the Jack London District, thank you. I love you for loving the neighborhood.

A New Aquarian on the Way

Sending wishes for the safe birth of a healthy baby to Big Weedie. As for Little Weedie, may she be intelligent and bold, compassionate and inquisitive, adventure-some, creative, filled with curiosity and wonder, may she be loved and loving, kind and attentive, determined, industrious, a dreamer, a doer, a lover, may she be blessed with a life that draws from her the full measure of her talents and soul, may she roam every continent, sail every sea, and set her sights on dreams so vast that some will never be achieved.

Euro Trashy

My Euro Trash neighbors have moved and I am missing them. Gone are my dashing prince of the cosmetics counter and his orange-haired Viking boyfriend. They were lured away by Emeryville which, admittedly, has a lot going for it: the best 3-D theater in The Beast; a humming foodie scene; Grayson’s, home of the best hamburger you will ever eat; the Berkeley Bowl; Rudy’s Can’t Fail; Pixar, Novartis, Bayer; Pete’s; and, in short, all kinds of people doin’ all kinds of stuff.
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Jack London still has: The Chop Bar (home of the second best hamburger you will ever eat); Blue Bottle; Heinhold’s; a gorgeous water front; a great Chinatown just under the freeway; and the most happening summer festivals of the entire Bay Area, so I’m good. Brown Sugar Kitchen sits halfway between Emeryville and the Square so we can both score the BSK for our side. Did you know that Emeryville’s urban nickname is Rotten Town? It’s built on a superfund so huge that it is the bedrock of both Jack London Square and Emeryville. So it’s true, they didn’t move far but the psychic distance is enormous and I am feeling it today.
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I miss seeing Matt (Mathias) taking his little dog for walks in the morning. King is a Pomeranian half-breed the size and texture of an orange coconut. I swear he was sired by a miniature orangutan. His hair is as orange as . . . well, Matt’s. They have exactly the same hair color—part of their inexhaustible charm. Matt will be old enough by the time King shuffles off this mortal coil that, given the ebbing of his hair line, he can skin the dog and put the pelt to good use on the dome; maybe even leave the head on, Davey Crockett style.
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Daniel, or Danielle when she is fully tricked out, is a different kind of miss. Despite being a biological male, Danielle was a great girlfriend to have next door, often stopping by with a new perfume to show me or a little gift from the cosmetics counter—a mask, facial scrub, elbow cream, foot cream, lip cream, eye cream, hand cream, all the many, many creams it takes to keep me from spontaneously combusting during any of the hundreds of static shocks the winter months deliver.
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She also did things that made me insane. She simply had to trump me when I invited them over for dinner. I would work most of the afternoon and evening to make something rather nice, ossobuco, for example, and to lay out a nice table with a great pairing of wine for each course. At the appointed hour, as I would be lighting the candles, Danielle and Matt would arrive with some crazy concoction Danielle had just dreamed up—waffles Rockefeller or a flaming dessert of peaches and whipped cream, and insist that we eat her dish for dinner.
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It surprised me the first time. Maddened me the second. And infuriated me subsequently. She did not see the problem—I am bringing a wonderful surprise, she would claim, special, just for you because I love you. Failing to make my point, I failed to make them another dinner of any more complexity or work than sandwiches knowing they likely would arrive with a ziggurat of tapioca studded with mangoes, the entire thing burning like a gas leak mated to a cigarette.
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But she would also be the one who would unfailingly call to ask how an important meeting had gone. Did I get what I wanted? If yes, she would run over with a bottle of wine. If no, she would give me a foot rub and tell me stories about growing up in Europe under the Communists.
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Her stories made me happy. A well-told story is an experience so precious, a skill so rare, a thing of such beauty. Listen. How devilishly smart they had to be to survive the insanity of Communism and the state controlled markets that routinely meant there was no food, no raw materials, no capital, and no hope. I’m sure it was horrible, but she made it sound like a fun game tricking bureaucrats and bending rules and getting away with murder until you were caught and then murder got away with you.

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