National Night Out in West Oakland

Under the relentlessly streaming axis of the I-980 and HWY 24 freeways in an industrial wasteland marked by abandoned cars, hobo camps, and a CalTrans staging lot where Castro intersects with 7th is a small triangular plot of land that is maybe a thousand square feet. The tip of the wedge points west to San Francisco. Its broad base rests against West Oakland, a neighborhood that enjoys an international reputation for senseless murders and random violence. The sidewalks are impassable—overgrown with weeds and strewn with windblown trash. Discarded veins of electrical tubing stripped of copper by thieves who sell it on the black market knot the mess together.
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On the evening of August 2, 2011—National Night Out—my neighbors and I met there to cook hotdogs, drink beers and listen to exquisite live music supplied by local bands. Those who brought their own instruments joined in as their muse dictated. About a year ago, Garden Hortica transformed this vacant, filthy lot into a multi-use urban garden and community gathering space with astonishing success.
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NNO, National Night Out, is the night Americans are encouraged to meet their neighbors and build community by talking and eating with each other, I could think of no better place to be. Young people not that far from their college graduation day, eternal hippies, and children mingled with people like me who have left the ‘old country’ of youth and latched onto a scene that reminds them of early passions for art, music, spontaneity, and the hip crowds that tune in to these things and the long-time residents who could never afford to leave their dilapidated or public housing no matter what was going on around them.
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Often, on evenings when the moon is a bright fingernail in the pale blue western sky and the back bay shines with the last of the mid-summer night’s dreamy sunlight, magic blesses my neighborhood with Shakespearian charm. Young families with children whose feet struck straight out from the chairs they sat in, ate weenies and chips or the better fare of the big, red tandoori truck that came and stayed. People opened wine and then left the bottles on the community table for others to enjoy. Some of the older women came out of their projects apartments bearing platters of cupcakes.
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We all enjoyed the small but elegant stage where a blues band comprised of a Chinese American on lead guitar, a Latino on ukulele, an African American on trumpet, and a Vietnamese guy on base belted out the American songbook to brilliant effect. Impromptu drummers sat close to the stage and pounded out irresistible rhythms as evening settled on our lot and the moon rose with the scent of chicken cooking in the tandoori oven.
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I love my True Grit neighborhood. Contrary to what the media has conditioned you to believe about West Oakland, this is a small neighborhood populated by those who care passionately about its past, present, and future. Let New York have its Highline. This is a place with a history and a soul. And one-year-old Garden Hortica, the Little Engine That Did, beat out more than two hundred other exhibitors at the 2011 San Francisco Flower and Garden Show to win the award for outstanding visual presentation.
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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.

Spring

The air was sweet today. It was so amazing and wonderful. We live wedged between the maze where two major Interstate highways intersect, the BART lines, the Port of Oakland, and the Southern Pacific and Union Railroads. A robust schedule of flights out of Oakland International zooms overhead. Amtrak rattles along.
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But today the air was sweet enough that we could smell Spring riding on the breeze blowing into the loft. The trees are in bloom and their scent mingles with the deep hemp, raggedy raw smell of field grass and weeds, mostly thistles, grown knee high already in abandoned lots. It smells like brewing only greener, brighter. It is one of the many things I love about living in the city.

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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