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I’m having a scented bath oil and slow-jam flavored love affair with the city of Oakland, which I’ve taken to calling “Brooklyn By the Bay” because of its rainbow of Sesame Street diversity. I’m ignoring the staggering crime statistics, but I enjoy reading about them and the various lost cats and stolen tires daily on the NextDoor website, written by the citizens of my immediate neighborhood.
I’ve been trying harder to get off my ass more and move around in a mildly athletic manner. The trauma of various upheavals in my life turned me into a bit of a hermetic vegetable. I was a hardbody once; now I am as soft and white as a boiled parsnip. The truth is that I stopped caring about fitness once I realized I’d never have enough money to grow old. ( I never had enough money to have kids, either - even back in my bougie heyday when I had enough money. )
My girlfriend Bridget and I try to walk the three and a half miles around scenic Lake Merritt once a week, in the name of health and community. Lake Merritt is the central hub of humanity nearest me — a gorgeous little lake tucked in the hills with a functional landmark movie theater nearby, and a sidewalk all around its circumference which collects drummers, runners, occasional jazz trios, tents of the otherwise unhoused, African garment stands and men who sit in their Toyota Camrys all day blasting thumpy urban radio.
There are black motorcycle gangs devoted to roaring motocross dirt bikes around Lake Merritt and doing block-long wheelies. The collective roar is deafening; the brazen lawlessness and the way they stand on their seats with one foot is impressive, and fucking crazy. Safety is not at the forefront of the mind of all Oakland drivers. I check my six whenever I am on the 580, because you can see the psychopaths in Toyota Camrys swerving through the traffic behind you at 98 mph, riding kamikaze, without fear of death or license plates. Walking to the gas station in my neighborhood, you can see certain cul-de-sacs where cars come to burn black donuts into the asphalt, creating primitive Spiro-Graph designs of hi-octane vandalism. The Fast and Furious movies weren’t taken as entertainment so much, by the citizens of Oakland, but as a suggestion of daily driving habits, and how you’d be driving too if you weren’t such a pussy.
This is why I love NextDoor: somebody once wrote an entry saying there was a car full of guys in my neighborhood in a white Camry, all wearing ski masks. Where were they going, I wondered, creating such a fashion sensation? Why are Toyota Camrys at the epicenter of Oakland’s criminal activity? I am also alerted to packages being swiped by local “porch pirates” — security cam pictures of the thieves posted on NextDoor, more often than not, show the perpetrators wearing fuzzy slippers or shower shoes. It’s footwear that asks so many questions. Are the perps in disguise? I’m not stealing your catalytic converter, I just got out of the wet sauna.
Killer Joe has a kind of animist, almost Shinto feeling about California. Its hills are alive, and he knows them all by name. He’s trying to instill more communion with nature in me. It’s hard for a girl who spent 25 ½ years in Brooklyn. I have never successfully kept a plant alive for very long, but when I am tripping on mushrooms I become absolutely convinced of the divinity of trees, and the indivisibility of man from nature. Joe dragged me and his friend Yueh Hai to Point Reyes over the weekend for a Bataan Death March of six miles in order to view a herd of massive tule elk bucks, loitering manfully around a water hole.
It was a majestic experience, trudging through the soft sandy dirt up hills and up hills and up hills in thick white fog, which was blowing fast and sideways across the path like an Akira Kurosawa fever dream, causing the entire Pacific Ocean at our immediate left to disappear entirely. Only the sound of waves crashing nearby gave any hint.
All I could keep thinking, watching my feet trudge along the seemingly endless path, breathing the sensational coastal air, and witnessing great mammal beasts, was how lucky I was to live in Northern California, and how I would have enjoyed the experience a whole lot more if I had been on mushrooms.
I have always wanted to visit Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, which is right on the shores of Lake Merritt. Like, ALWAYS. I am annoyed by the fact that this revered old monument to children’s playtime was just a short trip over the bridge from where I grew up, and my parents never took me. What an egregious oversight. I offered to take my nieces and nephews to Fairyland but was haughtily shut down by my sister. “That place is for toddlers,” she snapped.
But there is a toddler inside me yearning to breathe air full of glitter.
So I got Joe and Bridget to take me to the “Fairyland at Night” event for adults. “You’re reparenting me right now,” I told them. They both looked at me and said, “We know.” I jumped up and down at all the wonderful little storybook installations that have been lovingly preserved since 1950. Walt Disney was said to be inspired by Fairyland to make Disneyland. Most of the paintings of elves and fairies are Black, Asian, and Hispanic, to reflect the children of the area. “Trump would BOMB Fairyland,” said Bridget, as we got jiggy on the outdoor dance floor to some excellently thumpy R & B.
My beloved lifelong friend Benny was up north recently, on a trip from LA; we were able to grab a glass of wine together at an old hotel bar with a famous Maxfield Parrish mural. We’ve been the dearest of friends since high school. He was the drummer in our unnamed band. I couldn’t help but remember the way we used to get really stoned, and tear up the hill to his mom’s house in Mill Valley at breakneck speeds in his Volkswagen Golf— taking our lives in our hands, really, because the streets were too narrow for any oncoming car to get out of the way, and there were dozens of blind corners. It’s that sweet Freebird of Youth, I guess, that tells you to drive in a way that death could come instantaneously, at any second, and yet you hit the accelerator anyway, because you can feel the psychic bubble of impossible luck surrounding you, because you’re young and stoned.
The President has threatened to send the National Guard into Oakland. I suppose they’re going to murder or imprison our extensive homeless population. They will find a fizzlingly active community that doesn’t rat on its neighbors, or scare easily. Maybe they’ll address the Toyota Camry problem, but I doubt it. Fairyland is off limits. There will be no occupation of Fairyland. Blood may run from the gingerbread homes, but the glitter will prevail.
MEMOIR CLASSES ARE STARTING AGAIN! 4 SEATS ONLY! 2 ALREADY FULL!
CONTACT ME AT CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM TO ENROLL.
Theme song: Jack Black!
