Spotting The Phonies
It’s hard for a guy like me, who comes from a small town where you dressed only like a freak because you were one, to spot the fakes. California, I love you; there is something about the Bay Area that recalls at its best the vision of that more enlightened society which my friends and I dreamed up over the long hot Ohio summer nights when there was nothing better to do, and we, lucky enough to be blessed with backyards and overactive imaginations, would sit in the dark grass and let the mosquitoes bite us in the face because the deep field view of the stars above was better than anything. All us kids in all those yards in all those small towns across America. California, we adore you, you are indeed a land of plenty, but you are also damn flooded with so many fakes. For the last sixteen years I’ve called you home, and I have come to know that we’ve got fake poor, fake poets, fake queers and fake hustlers. The small-town MidWest of the 1980’s where I grew up may have been boring and architecturally uninspired, but we didn’t have any need for the wearing of intifada scarves, or the dyeing of our hair gothic grandma purple, or the wearing of ugly 90’s sweaters ironically. You will counter me with arguments about Duck Dynasty and the cult of rambo camouflage. You will mention Columbine. You will say there were white thugs who wanted so bad to be black thugs. You will confess to me that the guy in your family who looked like a child abuser actually was a child abuser and that’s why you got out as soon as it was humanly possible. But grant me here some leeway to pass, because we are not talking about them, or their racism, or their self-loathing, or their heroin and unemployment. We’d have a heroin problem out here, too, if our economy wasn’t so damn good, believe me.
When was the point that I reached peak exhaustion with “the scene”? It was sometime after 2007, and the crash, my own divorce. Moving back to the city I had left for the East Bay in 2004, I returned in 2011 to find it cold and unfamiliar and full of a gradually increasing majority of tech-driven milquetoasts. Most of the buildings and the shopping centers were still there, and the bars — even if they’d changed hands a few times — still served liquor, but there was something missing in the whiskey sampler takeovers and the modern Mondrian condoplex that replaced the abandoned gas station lot I had, for some reason, just figured would stay that way forever. What was gone would not return. The soul. The community. The glue. Once everyone comes looking for the cool then no one finds it. When I came to the Bay Area in 2001 the first house I found was in Oakland, and it was there that I felt the most comfortable, that I lived with punks, beside drug dealers, with the girl on heroin next door in her dangerously thin chemise leaning out of the window at the top of her entryway steps which was separated from our own by this thin gap of space certainly less than two arms length. She, asking for a cup of sugar which I gave to her, before looking down to see a baby doll’s head and a 10lb weight and a crow with a misshapen foot limping around in the muddied grass and standing water below. An unpoliced nook between two houses on a street popular with homeless street traffic, prostitutes and gang members invites the strangest things. K and I have said to each other that what we want from wherever it is that we move to next is community. That it doesn’t matter if it’s in a city or a village or someplace in between but just that we have a group of people we care about, that we don’t have to drive our car too much, and that it’s easy to feel inspired about exercise. We look outward, trying to divine such a place like a mendicant striding through a dustbowl with a dowsing rod in search of water. Until here, for the first time in seven years, it rains. The drought breaks. My child is born.
I am in the lobby getting our mail because K can’t take the stairs. Her wounds are healing. Our baby, our miracle baby lies sound asleep in her crib. How long has it been since I’ve slept? Our current next door neighbor, a nurse who keeps a scotch terrier and is generally all around the sort of person who you can tell is both exceedingly nice and just a little too square for what you still perceive to be your bohemian standards of freaky friendship enters into the lobby, her excited dog licking my hand.
She asks, Is she here?
Yes, she’s here, I say. Yes I’m so excited. No, I am not sleeping.
She offers to help watch her some night should we want to go out. We chat some more.
What’s her name? she asks, ahead of me on the stairs and climbing.
R, I tell her.
R, she muses.
I’ll think about your offer.
Ok, sure, anytime, I really mean it. Or just come over for a glass of wine even, you and K. She smiles. And bring the baby, she says.
I’ll think about that. Yeah, thanks, I really will.
