Walking home in the evening, I pass Dark Carnival, the mystery/fantasy bookstore, and The Escapist, the neighborhood comic book store. And feel so lucky to live where I do.
Escape
St. Bernard’s
I went to mass here a few months ago. Despite the fact the mass was in Spanish, and I don’t speak Spanish, it didn’t really matter. If you go to church every Sunday for the first 22 years of your life and say the same prayers every Sunday you will know what people around you are most likely saying, even if you don’t speak the same language. (This is the exact opposite of what happens when you get a pedicure and the women are speaking Vietnamese — a language you have exactly zero knowledge of — and your best guess is always that they’re talking about what a mess you are, which might be the case, but it’s just as likely they’re talking about their kids.)
It felt like a little bubble of my childhood inside that church — the same scent of lily, occasional incense, worn missals and weekly bulletins. The virgin in her alcove. People kneeling and standing in unison. Parish churches are seldom beautiful. They’re sort of the Thomas Kincaid of ecclesiastical art. The saints have sentimental faces, the folk choir is earnest but average, and the crucifix is almost always a weird mix of a deeply uncomfortable body of Christ who has the face of a man who’s maybe a tad bit troubled by a circling mosquito. If that.
There’s a McDonald’s on International Blvd. right behind St. Bernard’s and I went there after church. I had an egg McMuffin, which was pretty awesome. Kind of like donuts in the church hall — your reward for not bitching too much about having to endure an hour inside the church when your dad (the atheist) gets to sit outside in the parking lot and read the Sunday paper.
The Graduate
It was years and years (more than I care to admit) before I realized that this neighborhood bar might be called The Graduate because its owner went into beer instead of plastics. Also it isn’t that far from the Cal campus.
Nebraska Saturday Night
Crickets. Trucks on brick roads. Train whistles from the tracks near the Missouri River. My keyboard. I’m in love with this place. With the sky:
With my studio:
With Nebraska City:
Notes From Nebraska
There are brick roads here in Nebraska City, where I’m at the Kimmel, Harding, Nelson Center, finishing Queen of Mercy. Ditto the sidewalks. Coming from a place where bricks are a disastrous building choice, this made me uneasy for a while. But I’m getting used to it. I’ve also gotten used to: slow — everything is slow. People ring you up slowly, they talk to you slowly, they walk slowly, and they drive slowly enough that you have time to catch a glimpse of a perfect stranger waving to you. Howdy. Welcome to Nebraska City. I don’t think this means the citizens of Nebraska City are thinking slowly, however. My guess is that thorough thinking comes best when you give yourself time to think. That’s what this place does so well. Gives you time to think. And paradoxically, as a result, I’ve written so much about what happens during the twelve days of Christmas that make up the time span of my novel. If the slow thinking and the fast writing keeps up, I might even be finished by the time I head home on October 3. Here’s what I have on one of the walls in my writing studio. The things the book is made up of. 
Flora
Eating: hugely important when you have three teenage boys in your house, which will be the case tomorrow, when Jack finishes his finals and comes home. But what’s kind of cool is that Bay Area teen eating strikes me as maybe a little different from teen eating in other parts of the country. I don’t know this for sure, but our kids seem to be more, well, opinionated about what they eat. They know that apricots eaten in February will suck. They have experienced ice cream that has rosemary in it and have lived to discuss which herbs might have been better paired with chocolate.
Which is why it was so much fun to take William to Flora — a fancy establishment across the street from the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland. First, in his usual confident way, he noted that our waitress appeared to have taken her hair style tips from the Hunger Games (springy and sticking straight out). Then he opined that the menu seemed well distributed among lighter and heavier and interesting and familiar, which seemed like a good idea. He observed that there seemed to be a lot of people my age and not a lot of people his age. I observed that the answer to that was probably located in the prices of the food we were about to consume. And the fact that I have a job and he has an allowance. A pitiful one, as he likes to point out.
And then something brought him up short, which I suppose has to do with the fact that he is fourteen. It was this:
Mom, he said, with some awe. The drinks menu is longer than the food menu. Happy to know that there are still some discoveries for our Bay Area kids to look forward to.
Crime Wave
There’s something about seeing a gun pressed against the temple of the guy who regularly rings up your purchases at Eddie’s Liquors in Rockridge that really focuses your attention. So much so that it can even break into your deep reverie about how a liquor store could have such an impressively diverse chip and dip section, which is what I happened to be thinking when I saw that gun.
The robbery at Eddie’s Liquors took place in the chaotic aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. At the time, it seemed only sensible to stock up on junk food at Eddie’s, the thinking there being that at least we’d have Doritos if there were aftershocks.
In any event, when I saw that gun, my first thought was Holy Shit. He’s going to spray the potato chip section with bullets, just like they do in the movies. That’s because if you’re like me and you take all your crime prevention tips from the movies, you would know that the people who crouch down by the bean dip during a robbery usually end up dead. So what I did was walk out the front door while the guy was cleaning out the cash register, his attention totally focused on the cash. And then I ran the three doors down to our house on College Avenue and called 911.
And you know what? They never answered. I guess they had other fish to fry that week.
But it got taken care of. The clerk told me a couple of months later that the same guy held up another liquor store and the owner pulled out a shotgun from behind the counter and killed him.
Eddie’s was just the start of what turned out to be a bad year for crime in Oakland, or at least my encounters with it. That same year, somebody broke into our house while we were sleeping upstairs — he must have been very skinny, because he came in a window that was so small it would barely admit a child. We had a roommate who was from Beirut, and he heard the noise downstairs, grabbed his baseball bat and went down to confront the guy. I think our roommate took all his crime prevention tips from a place far tougher than even Oakland. The guy escaped with a couple of bananas and a broken clock radio.
A few months after the Eddie’s incident and the one involving the broken clock radio, we were in line at Safeway when three kids held up the cashier one lane over. That time, we decided to exit by the meat department, informed by nothing other than a vague sense that nobody gets killed in the meat department because everything in there is already dead.
Then the crime wave ended. But for years afterwards, I couldn’t go into stores at night without feeling very uneasy. You will be pleased to hear, however, that I did not give into that uneasiness. Instead I sucked it up and regularly went inside Eddie’s, refusing to allow the crime wave to stand between me and that wondrous potato chip and bean dip section that was the envy of the East Bay.
Hipsters vs. Twittsters
I had no idea Pandora’s headquarters were in Oakland. Kaiser, yes. Clorox, yes. But a tech company? Well, it’s a little hard to argue that it’s not there, especially if you happen to look up and see that sign. It’s in a building that was trashed by the ’89 earthquake, vacant for a couple of decades, and then finally somebody actually built something on the site. Go Pandora! Really — it’s nice to see signs of life over there. When I worked a couple of blocks from there, I ate a lot of lunches at the Greek restaurant across the street from that building — the Athenian Deli — and I’m thrilled that maybe they’re getting more lunch customers than random people like me. Unless Pandora does that obnoxious tech thing where nobody leaves the building for lunch because they can get all the grass fed beef they want right there. Otherwise, it looks like Oakland is getting some tech people (aka Twittsters, which is such a good name it would be a shame to limit it to Twitter employees, so I’m not going to.)
Which brings me to the Hipster-Twittster War of 2014. This is actually happening in San Francisco, but the collision between these two groups is a general Bay Area phenomenon. Apparently Google provides bus pickups and drop offs for employees who live in the city. The busses, which are actually cute little vans, stop at Muni stops. And that pisses off people who ride Muni, which is neither cute nor little. Which is kind of the idea of public transportation. So there have been protests at the bus stops in the Mission. What’s funny is that the protesters are basically about the same age (twenties and thirties); and same class (middle to upper middle) as the protest-ees. They all probably went to the same colleges. (The drivers who have to deal with this stuff aren’t part of this same privileged group, by the way.) Their differences basically come down to: turntable vs. iPod; artisanal shoemaker vs. Zappos; cute busses vs. Muni; and downwardly mobile vs. upwardly mobile.
I’m trying hard to think of another conflict that involves people who’re almost identical in their origin but who diverge in the flavor of their beliefs and the neighborhoods they live in Oh! That would be basically 3/4 of all wars ever fought. Sunni v. Shia. Tutsi vs. Hutu. Serbians vs. Croatians. The only thing the Twittsters have in common with the hipsters is that they all like to eat humanely raised meat, good cheese and Acme bread (and see all the other stuff discussed above.) That’s why they all live in the Bay Area.
On Evil
This discussion of evil starts with Nurse Ratched, moves on to that Oakland institution, the once ubiquitous and now all but defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery and ends with Flannery O’Connor. The line connecting them is actually straighter than you’d think.
This weekend, William and I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Pacific Film Archive. William’s question: “Was Nurse Ratched completely evil, or just mostly evil?” Completely, we agreed. Now Cuckoo’s Nest is a great movie. And yet I found one thing hard going: the stereotype of the woman who’s purely evil. Nurse Ratched is an unmitigated, castrating bitch. She emasculates the patients, drives a young man to suicide when she threatens to tell his mother his sexual secrets, and finally manages to lop off the part of his brain that comprises Jack Nicholson’s soul.
Pure evil does not belong at the center of a movie or a book — and Nurse Ratched, evil as she is (and objectionable as she may be as a character), isn’t at the center of that movie. She’s what all purely evil characters are: an immovable obstacle, purely what she is. You don’t negotiate with her or change her. That’s why the antagonist in a book should never be purely evil — that kind of static character sucks the life out of a narrative.
But the purely evil character does have a place in a narrative. He’s the disaster your characters have to deal with. He’s like a hurricane or an earthquake. He happens, the way all shit happens. And the other characters have to deal.
Which brings me to Your Black Muslim Bakery and its founder, Yusuf Bey, a purely evil man who does something that is the basis for a disaster that some of the characters in my book can’t move beyond, and finally have to do something about. It’s the story of the sexual abuse of a child, a foster child living with Yusuf Bey, a girl who goes on to have three of his children, all daughters. She gets out, but he comes around when the daughters are the age she was, and she finally goes for help, even though he’s a powerful man and threatens to kill her and her children. The story of Yusuf Bey many other chapters: the intimidation and torture of opponents, the execution of a journalist. Eventually, the enterprise is shut down. And yet, the evil still happened.
Flannery O’Connor makes a wise observation about how we want our stories to skirt around evil, to short circuit it, to try to get off easy without paying the price of having to look right at it. And she says something absolutely true : there is no redemption — in a narrative or in a life — that comes without a price.
“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
— (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)
Yard of Eden
Here in the east bay, most of us have yards rather than gardens. A yard is where stuff grows without caring whether you like it or not — and you let it. A garden is where plants can’t get away with that attitude.
The miracle of it is that this neglect has been rewarded, which is not what you’d expect if you expected life to be fair. I mean really, how is it possible that my sloth has resulted in fragrant star jasmine that climbs into the electric purple bougainvillea that climbs up the side of my house? And why have I been the recipient of a sprawling Meyer lemon hedge that produces more fruit than I have any right to expect since I haven’t ever pruned, watered or even thought much about the lemon’s needs? Ditto the princess plant, and the magnolia tree. If I’d raised my kids like this, they’d be in jail right now. Or I would be.
The only thing that doesn’t work that well in the yard is the wisteria. Why? Because someone gardened it. They pruned it way back, and the wisteria’s apparently been so upset about the intrusion into its autonomy that it’s refused to bloom for five years. This year, it might be feeling like there’s no risk of it ever happening again. Which would be a good guess. Because it won’t.
Lillian Hamrick 