Bone on Bone

My father is overweight. When I express my concern; he always says the same thing: "Julie, I'm going to be around to piss on your grave."

I'm down in the East Bay, visiting a colleague who is hosting this year's contingent of Japanese students from the maritime university in Kobe.  It's the first time in at least five years that I've been back to Oakland, and I am not prepared...was not prepared for the waves of feeling, the memory of several formative segments of my life, all of them connected to writing and anxiety, of late adolescence vs. the cliffs of fortune.   Listening to Neil Young sing "The Old Laughing Lady," past dawn on the way to an $8.00/hr. job.  College was over, and the younger kids were still laughing it up on the rooftops on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, which might as well have been in another country.  God, it was sad.  I got fired for the first time.  I threw my dog's crap over a chain link fence, into a ravine behind my apartment, where it hit a sleeping homeless person.  A middle-aged woman who owned a communal house warned me that I couldn't keep alcohol in my room, as her teenaged daughter would break in and steal it.  I slept with a Beretta, under instruction from my father that I shouldn't use it unless I meant to kill.   One night I got high by myself and almost immediately lost my hold on context:  I felt as if I were in the city's throat, on my way to becoming indistinguishable from it.  Is this what private school does to you, or does this just suck?

Coming here was the first step in getting out.  Somehow I knew this, though there was no future in almost anything I was doing.  This was where I made my first furtive, ragged-fingered plans.

Today I sat across the street from a house owned by a close friend from long ago.  It had partially burned in a basement fire when he bought it in 2001, but he painted over the smoke stains and replaced the charred struts and joists, gave up halfway and built a new house behind the old one.  Then started anew on the old house, I see today, and now it's a rental...still semi-finished, ramshackle, but probably bringing in good money.  Still hanging on.   I admire that.

And what has shaped me to the point where I find myself returning to this place, 25 years later, like a tourist, or a Russian doll?   Fate and its almost imperceptible curve?  Luck?  Humor?  I recognize this grit, this feral city, as part of me.

I'm still hanging on, too!