Why I Live In the Port of Oakland

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Running

Less than 10 miles from where I sit typing this still-dark morning, El Cerrito slumbers under a stringy web of Chinese elms and sagging power lines. Early, early in those lost mornings, lying in bed, letting the last of the summer breezes swell at the window, I would hear morning rise before its beams gave a pale glow to the luffing curtains. The sewing machine sound of the commuter train; the sticky suck of tires on asphalt; the slap and sigh of newspapers hitting driveways.
.
Before Aurora could reveal among the shadows that spun as headlights swept the walls and ceiling, the stand by my wide bed, the book that sat there, that it was a red book, that it was Proust, I would hear the far off cries of trains pulling through the Port of Oakland and wonder where they had been, where they would go. "Hop on," whispered the memory of a lover whose wanderlust led her to do exactly that, now so many years past. "Hop on," called the ghost of Kerouac and the legions of unknown and unknowable rail riders who could not function in the thin oxygen of normal. But their calls would fade and I would sink again into sleep until dawn when the birds sang me back from the deep interior to begin again, to try again to carve out a place in the stultifying atmosphere of the regular, white, christian world.
.
I did not hop on although I am near enough now that I could. The trains serving the port thunder past my bedroom not more than 100 yards from where I lay my head. Their whistles, once the far off cries of loons on the opposite side of the lake, now demand that I yield my consciousness entirely to them as they shake the ground, heavy wheels scrape the rails, grinding metal against metal, and monstrous whistles breathe out their warnings like whale songs reverberating through a pod of Leviathans but unmitigated by the dampening ocean.
.
Many here find the train noise a nuisance, but it awakens in me the romance of fleeing; the thrill of being gone, gone, gone—the promise that sustained me through the wasteland of childhood. Proust excelled at ecphrasis, making me shy about attempting to describe the voice of these trains as they whine, moan, shout, or blast through my subconscious. It is a music for which one cannot acquire a taste but only recognize a sympathique of heart. Contrary to every other literary tradition, the iconic American character is a loner, usually on the lam often as the result of a wrong choice made at a critical moment. We are not a band of merry men living outside the law in a shady forest, nor are we a brigade of pirates on the surging main, a fraternity of musketeers bound by the shared blood of a cut in, nor a crusade, nor any of many legends of round tables or castles in Spain.
.
The American hero is a black silhouette against the setting sun, walking/riding/driving into the eternal west, casting a long shadow back to the lesser beings left behind. I am about as west as I can get and still I want to run.
.
My incessant need to escape makes the port an almost ideal residence. I am reminded constantly, by the screaming military jets that roar into low airspace, the boats that slide out of the harbor, the buses, the trains, the freeway snarl of the Oakland maze, the BART line just outside my window, that I can go and while these comfort me, my first choice will always be words. Nothing can carry me as far, as swiftly, or with as much delight. As for the others, it’s good to know they are waiting.

Secret Beautiful Park

The Port of Oakland proves there is beauty in the heart of us all but that, in some, it is buried a little deeper. By the age of ten I was keenly aware that, no matter how well I did in school or what I accomplished, the world out there waiting for me would regard me as a pariah at best or a criminal at worst, so the idea of an escape to a secret place where I couldn’t be found was wonderfully appealing—a refuge where I could not be attacked or ridiculed, where the happy endings of children’s stories applied to me. At night I dreamed of finding secret rooms, hidden paths, or a fork in the road that led to a shining world of sweetness.
.
Finding a secret place, I have since learned, is common in everyone’s dreams, not just mine. It seems we all guard a true self that we fear cannot survive in a competitive, hierarchical world. The identities we take on or that fall into our laps as we travel forward from day-to-day—a profession, a standing in some community of choice or necessity—are at their very center protective.
.
Driving through West Oakland, my neighborhood and a patch of superfund that carries one of the grimmest reputations in California if not the U.S., my friend Jean and I take a turn into a no-man’s-land for the same reason the bear went over the mountain. We’d never been there and that was reason enough for us. While risk is sometimes rewarded with a trip to the Emergency Room and the permanent loss of teeth, our gambit has the spectacular result of dropping us into a secret world that is flat out amazing.
.
I live along a finger of the Port of Oakland that runs directly behind my building—a thin strip of twin rail lines and a bank of skyscraping gantry cranes off-loading ships day and night. The bulk of the port, however, is not inside the estuary but farther west where the open water is deeper and the sweep of the shore can accommodate more ships. Neither Jean nor I have ever been inside the Port of Oakland. True, we have no business here but that has never stopped us from doing anything. The real reason we’ve never visited was our erroneous assumption that the port held nothing of interest. A caprice, then, leads us to turn onto the causeway at Adeline and launch ourselves into the fourth largest container port in the United States and the westernmost terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
.
Fans of The Wire who especially enjoyed season two would be right at home in the enormous container lots along the port. Hundreds of people work here. The parking lots of shippers and wholesalers as well as tertiary businesses serving the fleets working the port, are filled with cars. The shipping containers—acres of metal boxes stacked five and six high—stretch on as we follow the road into the city-within-a-city that is the port, marveling at each stunning revelation of industry and ingenuity. The lots at each berth are accessed through check points similar to toll booths. A steady stream of high-seated, diesel-powered semis roll in empty and an equal number heave ho in the opposite direction bearing a container, or box if you follow The Wire, on their newly attached trailers. Being unauthorized, we can’t go in so we drive instead among the loaded and heavy Leviathans converging at Middle Harbor Road and Maritime Street grinding to the freeway a short distance away.
.
Our car sneaks among them like a mouse in a lion’s den; our only hope is not to piss anyone off. This is the territory of stevedores and long-distance truckers, so we are surprised to find, amid the roar of grinding gears, a turn out into what appears to be a garden. We have discovered the mouth of the Oakland Estuary and the place once occupied by the Oakland Naval Supply Depot, now a secret beautiful park. Secret Beautiful Park, built on reclaimed land (2002-2004), is a concession to a stretch of Oakland long neglected and left to memories when the navy decommissioned the depot. The port threw some money down when it took over the naval station and created a park that is hard to access. To seal the deal, it sits amid the poorest air quality the East Bay has to offer, so the park remains relatively unknown. Unmolested by the hordes of children, dogs, softball teams, yoga masters, their skinny white women devotees in designer leggings sipping $5 tea, and taco trucks that routinely populate the tonier Jack London Square, SBP is gorgeous in a quiet, reflective way. It’s a great place to run, walk, and climb up to the observation deck at the western edge and watch the big ships sliding into the harbor against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline and graceful Bay Bridge. It is where lovers might go in more gentle neighborhoods to watch the sun set. Instead, the park is empty; embarrassed, perhaps, that its once rock ‘em, sock ‘em waterfront brio has had its face washed and its hair combed. So here it sits—a palooka in a Sunday suit.
.
Coming out of the park, we lope back toward town coming up on the other side of the Nimitz underpass at 7th & Willow, where Esther’s Orbit Room still stands but is shuttered and lifeless since its eponymous owner Esther Mabry died in May at the age of 90. Quoted in The Oakland Tribune, guitarist and music historian Ronnie Stewart of the Bay Area Blues Society hailed Mabry, saying “The passing of Mabry brings to an end the last physical connection to West Oakland's heyday as the Harlem of the West Coast." Blues legends B.B. King, Etta James, Al Green, the honey-throated Lou Rawls, and the rough and tumble Ike and Tina Turner all played the Orbit Room when this neighborhood was bursting with music and people. Seventh Street was a scene then, home to jazz joints and blues clubs in a lively, predominantly black-owned commercial district before the BART station and the big Post Office distribution center moved in and swept most of these small businesses and Oakland’s thriving blues scene into memory. But this neighborhood is not dead—it is only sleeping. Drive on down 7th and swing south at Mandela Parkway, then quickly curve behind the BART station at Lewis.
.
The oft-stated problem with Oakland,to quote Gertrude Stein, its most famous writer after Jack London, is “there is no ‘there’ there.” That is doubly true of South Peralta, where we now roam. There is no store although the remnants of corner markets can still be seen in the broad, high front windows and angled entrances of larger, two-storied buildings that now stare blankly from their foundations reminding us of what this place was before it was sewn into a pocket by the freeway, port, Post Office, and BART line. There is no gas station, no school, no doctors’ offices or cafes. Nearby, weathered and blistered Victorians are parked jowl-to-jowl with a western style of architecture that might aptly be called pre-ghost town with a dusting of stone buildings that once housed light industry. There are few people other than the brown children who run through dirt lots, kicking up a dusty rooster tail that hangs in the air softening the sunlight after the children have passed from sight. The afternoon sun not so much drills down on the landscape as seems to be settled permanently on top of the streets, giving everything in the landscape the pleasure of high contrast—carving the ordinary street into shimmering geometric angles and curves.
.
Despite skins of ageing, sagging paint, the richly hued green, yellow, red, and blue houses along tree-lined streets are neatly maintained. Most are fronted by riotous gardens of exotic leaf and voluptuous bloom but there are few people and no foot traffic. The cars are older and sun-faded but without rust; they seem to have been parked years ago. This is a working class neighborhood where people are closer to the homestead than the corporate ladder.
.
Yet squarely in the middle of this 10-block enclave sits the massive new state-of-the art studio of Oakland sculptor, Bruce Beasley—the guy who built a worldwide reputation as a designer of art for public spaces out of 35-ton plates of steel. This massive steel-sided building is Beasley’s third studio in the same few blocks. It is not beautiful but handsome, a perception aided by the newly planted and fledgling bougainvilleas along the fence, the clean and orderly courtyard that holds numerous completed works. There is a set of tremendous roll-up doors, closed now but we are given a hint of the vast interior through the glass panels that allow sunlight to stream into Beasley’s work space. This is obviously the studio of a wealthy artist who can afford to build with expensive materials and processes. Yet it occupies its space modestly, invitingly. So Jean and I feel entitled to get out and look. Beasley also has a fenced lot across the street to accommodate his sculpture garden modeled after the great, fin de siècle French gardens in Paris. We are peaking through a wall of bamboo running along the fenced perimeter. It’s not dense enough to keep people from looking in, only to hold them back so that work will not be interrupted.
.
I am thinking of the great Spanish poet, Lorca, a gay patriot who eerily predicted not only his own assassination by fascists during the Spanish Civil War, but that his body would never be found: “They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches . . . but they did not find me . . . They never found me.” Because, I think, they never looked in Secret Beautiful Park where we are safe, where the prim, class-conscious religious right and straight, christian majority are afraid to go.

The Finger Tip Club

From the front porch and back garden of my house in El Cerrito, I had a rifle shot view of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. Now, standing on the roof of my building amidst the cranes and rail lines of the Port of Oakland, my view is of the graceful Bay Bridge, dipping and rising and dipping again like a bird in flight toward San Francisco.
.
The new summer smiles down on all of this, allowing us to wear our skimpy clothes if we are young or straw hats if we are not. I am on the roof surveying that non-stop ramble that is Jack London Square, the Warehouse District, the Port of Oakland, and West Oakland. For those at ground level, that’s more or less a rectangle at the back of San Francisco Bay outlined in cement lanes, steel tracks, and every known form of transportation: 880 on the north cuts us off from escape downtown should any shit hit the fan; the estuary and railroad yards to the south where cargo ships from China arrive day and night to ensure that we have enough hair dryers and microwaves. Oakland is a huge port, stretching east to encompass Oakland International Airport, once the size of a Dairy Queen and now poaching business from San Francisco and San Jose. Finally, we are contained on the west side by Mandela Parkway, our main drag out of here through West Oakland and its superfunds, train tracks, the old Army base, and, rising from this miasma, the economic miracle that is Emeryville.
.
I am living my first summer in my new home here among the artists, chefs, musicians, surgeons, drag queens, cop and train conductor, suits, and growers that make up my building. I sip wine and gaze out to the windy bay, my hair whipping about my head, and think: I am happy. It is the people, yes; the architectural wonder that is my loft, yes; the many recreations within a short walk in any direction, yes; but it is also very much of the season. The Square and summer are good to each other and, like Paris and lovers, make an attractive pair. The roof, particularly, is again in season.
.
It is our communal backyard and we gather up here weekends to have a family dinner around a long table bearing plates, dishes, towers of food and bottles of booze and to talk of the things that mean something to us. I am contentedly sitting between the two sexiest men in the building, the Square, Oakland, the United States and Europe. They are so equally adorable even their names cannot distinguish them, both are Michael. Michael is talking of food and cooking, describing one of the meterosexual dishes he has brought to dinner and complaining he once cut himself so badly making it he almost lost a finger tip. He thrusts his digit toward us revealing a thin, craggy white line circumventing the end of his finger. We gasp. I am keenly interested although one finger means nothing.
.
“Does it still hurt?” asks Michael, as he pushes his own finger displaying a matching gutter in the same finger, same hand, toward Michael’s . We gasp. A second self-inflicted knife slice that damaged a nerve. I cannot believe my Ugly Duckling luck at finding this tribe.
.
“Legio Irus Actica," I whisper adding my finger to the compass of collective injury. We gasp. We share the same ruined finger tip that twitches randomly with pain from a long ago injury. Kismet. We hug.

The Role of A Lifetime

When she accepted her Tony for portraying the young Big Edie and, after Intermission, middle-aged Little Edie in the runaway Broadway smash Grey Gardens, Christine Ebersole thanked Hollywood for the “role of a lifetime.” But wait, you say, Tony? Broadway? Hollywood? How does Hollywood figure into this?

Using a math all too familiar to women “of a certain age,” Ebersole calculated that her fall from female lead as she aged in Hollywood was in direct, if inverse, proportion to her rise on the stage where acting chops are valued over boob jobs and other heavy lifting. Had she stayed in Hollywood, Ebersole reasoned, she would never have played any Edie. Instead, she played both to such thunderous critical acclaim that fags the world over can recite every line and vamp every gesture Ebersole used to bring both women back to life long enough for us to be enchanted with them and look back to Camelot through a dark lens. Ebersole’s career, in the Hollywood toilet, rose to stratospheric stardom in New York.

In my own version of this very same math, my interpretation of E=mc2 goes like this: Escape El Cerrito = metro-condo, return 2 fun. After 15 years of waiting for accrued equity to launch me to something other than a daily gauntlet of homophobic idiocy, I sold my house in whitechristianland and returned to the city where I am most comfortable among the misfits, outlaws, and genuinely creative. Now that I’m here in the other city by the bay, my life has begun to parallel another grand dame of the boards, Olympia Dukakis or, rather, her most widely seen role, Anna Madrigal.

At 59, I am not the oldest woman in my building of renegades. There is a woman in her mid-sixties. She is corporate counsel for a certain motorcycle gang that calls Oakland home, to the degree that bunch can be said to have counsel of any kind. (She keeps her Hog parked in the garage stall directly below my second floor bedroom and the rumble every morning as she kicks that pig to life is my ersatz alarm clock). Rather, I am the aging hippie lady who opens her door to one and all, comforting the recently dumped, cooking for the abandoned stray, and rolling a joint to make it all better, dear. Okay, this is not 28 Barbary Lane. It is, in fact, better.

To be fair to El Cerrito, my transformation to Ms. Madrigal can definitely be traced to the home of The Gauchos. I even had my own Mary Ann Singleton, the young straight chick who wandered into Gomorrah and was lost in a sea of man and other troubles. The difference being that my straight chick (let’s call her Katrina as she destroyed almost everything she touched) invented Gomorrah. Otherwise, the man troubles necessitated the same herbal smoky contemplations of what went wrong and what to do about it. But a joint in the late-night kitchen of a sleepy suburb is not a life style whereas a loft in an old iron works factory in the Port of Oakland is . . . or could be if managed properly. Enter Ms. Madrigal II.

Just So's You'll Know

It is a few minutes after 10 p.m. on a Sunday evening in early June, 2010. We are just finishing up a party that began almost inaudibly, with the deflowering of a bottle of cabernet on Friday after work and built steadily until, by Saturday night, in the wee small hours, it had become a howling frenzy characterized by several self-inflicted calls to the police to report ourselves for fear that we might soon actually cross the consequential, and not too distant, line that separates the as-of-yet unindicted from the incarcerated.

I face these periodic uber parties the same way I imagine a pioneer woman out on the lonely 19th century prairie might have stoically endured a wall of locusts or a towering cloud of sky-obliterating dust tearing up the known world at 200 mph. Mobile destruction is the defining characteristic of parties in my building—once a warehouse serving the Port of Oakland and now a residence hall for grown up artists, doctors, lawyers, advertising moguls, professional chefs, and Indian chiefs. At some tipping point I am too far past my sell-by date to notice, the party suddenly, synchronized, breaks from its moorings in the host loft and bursts into the hall to hunt out and settle a new hive where the food is better and the liquor cabinet not so ravaged.

This is not the first time this has happened since I moved to the building nine months previously and I am prepared. Knowing that I must protect my property with any and every resource available to me, I keep the swarm away from my unit by containing the revelers on the roof. First, I give them a bottle of Canton, the ginger infused cognac that we have taken to like bees to the blossom, burying our faces deeply in the cocktail shaker to draw out the last drop of sweet goodness. Quickly, however, before the crowd can grow restless, I up the ante with a barrel of beer followed by a donkey pulling a giant, oaken cask of vin on a rustic cart surrounded by garland-festooned maidens singing of the coming rut.

At this point, I take a potty break that extends to a shower, a full-night’s sleep, and breakfast with a friend. Coming home mid-Saturday afternoon, I can hear the party in my building from two blocks away. When I arrive, I am hailed in the hallway as though a sailor long lost at sea and presumed dead. They cannot believe their luck at seeing me before them. If anything ever called for drinks, this is it.

By now, the building truly has become a hive. Industrious worker bees fly in and out of open doors carrying plates of food, newly cooked, cork screw reinforcement, “the CD I’ve been looking for since dawn,” and buckets of ice. Other drones have been dispatched to perform specific tasks essential to the survival of the hive: get propane, buy toilet paper, cocktail olives and a bucket of chicken. People now are laughing and throwing their arms around complete strangers vowing never to part. I’ve had several of the newly devised cocktail christened hammer blow.

Even the stalwarts start to drop after 33 hours although a few wanderers cluster around a laptop, watching Google Earth of someone’s home town. 1990s Euro Pop and dance blares from the second floor—our version of house music. Someone on the roof is screaming “please” at the top of her lungs but in a manner that is asking for trouble rather than trying to fend it off as evidenced by her devilish laughter when the object of her desire relents. It’s 4 a.m. and a third wind, less gusty than the second but by no means trivial, has swept up those who were previously comatose and vivified them enough to reconnect with the source of their banging heads.

The sun is up splintering off the true believers, myself among them, who attend services at the Laney College flea. We are carrying the bucket of chicken and attracting roaming curs at an alarming rate. Once through the buck-a-head gate and safely among the heaving throngs we sober up enough to strategize our morning. First, we diversify our diet with corn-on-a-stick and fish tacos sold from a big truck. Then, we aim and launch into the souk earnestly searching for the Balenciaga parfum at a price more reasonable than the $100/bottle last seen at Nordstrom. We are immediately distracted by a table of nail polish in colors reminiscent of automotive touch up paint and buy several bottles including a small vile of glitter additive. It is, after all, June—the month of pride.