Lizette is thinking about the past
This writing contains mention of:
- Drugs
- The Oakland Ghostship Fire
Lizette is walking. She thinks about how she’s noticed more people on the sidewalks in the neighborhood lately. At night, when she takes a walk, she can sometimes see into the apartments lining the street, and the light inside is warm and yellow, and people are sitting around their tables and talking or sharing a bottle of wine. It feels like Christmas.
She turns into the corner grocery store.
“Hey! You can’t bring your bag in here!”
Lizette starts in the entrance. “Oh — oh right.”
She steps back outside and tucks her canvas bag into her backpack. She thinks about how she had just gotten into the habit of bringing at least one canvas bag folded up in the bottom of her purse everywhere she went.
In the market, she idly wanders the aisles. She doesn’t need to get groceries, but she needed to get out of the house. The shelves are very close together, and when Lizette has to sidle past someone, she makes sure to utter profuse apologies. Other times, when there is someone bent over picking out a can of soup, Lizette just goes down a different aisle — maybe there’s something she wants there anyway.
She somehow spends sixty dollars even though she had intended to get just a snack. She slides her debit card through the opening in the Plexi glass. The cashier is young and there’s a hole in the tip of her Latex glove on her index finger. Lizette hesitates before punching in her pin number.
At home there is no more weed, and Lizette’s tolerance is now so high it doesn’t do anything for her anyway. Still, she tries to suck a hit out of the crumbs in her ashtray.
It is about six-thirty in the early evening, and it had actually been a gorgeous day. Lizette thinks about how this also feels like the summer Michael Jackson died. A quiet cultural grief fell over everyone, because even though Michael Jackson was problematic, Lizette thinks, he was also responsible for some groundbreaking and hella appealing music. The cognitive dissonance settles heavily on Lizette, and for a moment, she lets the weight press her into the couch.
Because she is thinking of that summer in 2009, she starts thinking about how at the time she was — holy shit! — twenty-four years old! And Lizette thinks about how she and her friends would go to this super illegal dance club called the Hear Gallery, and it was crowded and dangerous, and how there was only one bathroom and a very long line because people were doing coke in there.
There is so much to be sad about when Lizette starts bringing up these particular memories.
In that club, they used to dance so close together, and it was so hot in there because of it. Only the cool kids knew about the Hear Gallery, and there was a party photographer whose lens you desperately wanted pointed at you. And even if you didn’t get your picture taken, it was still fun because the music was so good, and so were the outfits.
As a kid, for Lizette, the Hear Gallery had felt exclusive and subversive.
Lizette thinks, “Will kids ever get to experience that again?”
She also thinks about the Ghostship Fire in Oakland a few years ago. She realizes that when she used to go to the Hear Gallery, she was literally playing with fire. They used to smoke inside, and that probably wouldn’t have caused a blaze, but Lizette shudders to think of the desperate pandemonium that would have erupted in that small space if there had been a fire. For starters, there was only a narrow staircase to the door. Secondly, they were all drunk and coked out.
They had all been flirting with disaster — and because they had been young — they had no idea.
“And yet,” Lizette thinks, “It was such a foundational part of my life. There were so many times when I felt absolutely euphoric in those spaces — and not just because of the drugs. Those spaces made me who I am. I don’t think I would have done it any differently.”
Lizette thinks about the people who perished in the Ghostship Fire. She hadn’t known any of them, but she has friends who did. Something about it had felt so particularly anguishing, and Lizette can’t put her finger on what.
The thing that makes her most sad, though, is that she used to go to the Hear Gallery with her best friends — and she is no longer friends with those people. Lizette misses them so much sometimes — especially one of them. Stupid shit had gone down, and Lizette is mature enough to realize that they were kinda right to part with her — she was kinda an emotional tyrant back then. She accepts the consequences.
Sometimes she puts Justice on and feels very very nostalgic.
She wonders about the future, and how, if by luck, she lives that long … What it will be like to recount these very strange times, when everyone stayed home, and lots of people died, and everything fell apart. She thinks about the incredible privilege she has to still be working from home, to live in a more inaccessible — by design — part of the city, which, for better or for worse, means there is plenty of space and plenty of resources.
It is a very, very complicated thought, and heavy.
In the future, when she thinks about this, she will say with profound humility, “I was one of the lucky ones.”
“I was one of the lucky ones.”
