Keisha felt disoriented. This was the first school district in the nation to voluntarily desegregate? This was a school named after the great black abolitionist?
Keisha looked closer. No. Not all white. That girl by the window with the blue hair was Asian. That boy on the far end might be Latino. And that girl looking up at her, with the sandy hair and the missing tooth, was definitely mixed with black. But every single kid in the class would pass the paper-bag test.
“You must be Marchand,” the teacher said warmly to her son. She was a slender young woman with a messy blond bun on her head. Miss Keller.
Keisha watched her son walk shyly forward into the class.
“Give Mommy a hug goodbye?” Miss Keller prompted.
Numbly, Keisha hugged her son and stepped out into the hallway, wondering what she had forged her way into.
Righteous Kill
by Owen Hill
Gilman District
The Gilman District, newly named by realtors, was mostly industrial a few years ago. You’d go there for Urban Ore if you needed a broke-down couch to replace your more-broke-down couch. There was a body shop and a good Mexican restaurant, perhaps too good because it brought in too many urban pioneers on the hunt for good manchamanteles. From famous red mole to the Gilman District. There goes the neighborhood.
I had been coming to West Berkeley since the aughts, yes, for the mole, but also for the books. SPD for the poetry, and Jeff Maser’s place for used, rare modern firsts, just to browse and occasionally to sell something. I do a little book scouting, although not full time like in the old days. It just doesn’t pay, and I get a little freelance work as, believe it, an unlicensed detective, something I sort of backed into that now pays the bill at Berkeley Bowl and for the rent-controlled studio southside.
I finished my enchiladas and the imported Coke, then went by SPD to get Marvin some Kevin Killian and for Dino The Collages of Helen Adam, because he wouldn’t have heard of her but he would appreciate the way beauty recognizes itself, and he would love the captions, “remember how I warned you when you’re praying too late.” I don’t usually show up bearing gifts but Marvin had said, “It’s kind of a party,” and I knew Dino would be there, Dino Centro. O Dino Centro.
Walked a little farther, down to 10th Street where Marvin had bought that house, cheap, when nobody really lived down there. The neighborhood wasn’t especially dangerous, but dark, away from stuff, desolate as a staircase. Barely six figures at the time Marvin bought the house, just back from Central America. The money came from “somewhere” but “wasn’t much.” Marvin, the most Marxist of my Marxist friends, moving within and without radical subsets, dropping hints like, “I was in Athens and this crazy guy I know planted a bomb in a police station. I almost didn’t get through customs!” Marvin, homeowner. Lovable guy. Best friend.
I knocked, door open, walked in the house that smelled a little like a cat box. Furniture that recalled places where you lived in your college years. It was a nice house nonetheless, forties vintage, what they call Arts and Crafts though I think that’s a wider definition now than it was. Urban Ore and Ikea furnished, nice walls though, because for some reason Marvin liked to paint. This time the walls were very light with a bluish tint. I once asked Marvin what color it was and he answered, inexplicably, vanilla hots.
The “party” was mostly on the couch, blue Naugahyde, or, in the case of Dino, on the floor up against a matching ottoman. They were in black, awash in blue walls and furniture, except Dino, as usual, in seersucker. It was always seersucker or white linen, any season, with a gray sweater under the jacket in cold weather. It wasn’t cold so it was a blue oxford button down. Just Dino, Marvin, and Patti O’Hara. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years.
My first impression, after that couple of years, was that she had been working out. Muscles bulging from a black wifebeater. “Still boxing, Patti?” and she went into her stance because she did, in fact, do some boxing. So, my best friend and the two people in the world I would most like to sleep with. Okay, a party, I guess.
Marvin hadn’t yet read the Killian and so was suitably impressed. Dino: “I am astounded, dear Clay,” and then a wet kiss. Life is good sometimes.
Dino went into the kitchen and came out with a shaker. Negronis, my favorite drink, not really Marvin’s though. He favors bourbon-based cocktails. I wondered about the occasion. Was I the guest of honor? Decided to let that one go. Why argue with Boodles and Campari, and why interrupt Dino Centro midshake?
Cheese Board snacks and smart talk. Conversation turned to the high cost of living, everybody leaving Berkeley. Where do we go? Bay Area out, East Coast also too expensive, flyover states opioid and Trump-soaked. Emigrate? Marvin suggested Montevideo but not yet. Too many friends still here, and there were “battles to be won and lost.”
This from Marvin, soldier for the revolution even when there isn’t one.
And then, third drinks in hand, talk about the neighborhood, those cheap-rent war stories. You could get a whole house for a few hundred! I paid a hundred bucks, down the street, for a walk-in closet in a house full of commies! True civilization starts with cheap rent and ends with gentrification. I wasn’t aware that the CEO of TalkLike had moved into the neighborhood. This set off a negroni-infused discussion of “the pig down the street” at high volume.
“You have to see this place! From warehouse to palace! An oppressor work space in Berkeley. Fuck Berkeley.” From Patti O’Hara, leaning a little too close to my ear.
Marvin suggested that we all “go for a stumble” and have a look at the CEo’s “bunker.” We helped each other off the couch, Dino’s scent mingling with Patti’s in the warm late afternoon. We walked past SPD and in a sort of circular way toward Gilman. The gourmet burgers, the free-trade coffee, the vegan joint, the Whole Foods. Chunky guys with beards, buried in their devices.
It was looming, almost as big as the Whole Foods down the street. Truly bunker-like although too tall, maybe three stories. Military-style brushed chrome, brick facade, blackout windows. There was still a loading-dock entrance in keeping with the industrial chic. A place to house the Tesla, perhaps. Workers used to sweat in places like this. Now they’re luxury homes. Where are the sweaty workers? I wondered what it was like inside, curious, but also a little queasy, that way the hoi polloi view the aristocracy. And the poor love it / and think it’s crazy. We looked up at the thing like apes before a monolith, then walked silently back to Marvin’s place.
Plopped on the couch between Dino and Patti, the mingling scents a little stronger, feeling sleepy but a little excited. Marvin in the kitchen making coffee, humming, then, “Well, we could blow it up,” followed by, “You can’t blow up all of capitalism,” from Dino, who has a smidgen of the capitalist left in him.
Dino almost asleep on my shoulder, oxford shirt unbuttoned, Patti lying head in my lap, legs over the couch arm. Dino, “A little graffiti wouldn’t hurt,” then Marvin, booming from the other room, “A bullet in the head would send a better message,” and Patti, “Well, we all have guns.”
Coffee, kisses goodbye, and I returned southside, back to the Chandler Apartments, at the corner of Telegraph and Dwight. Fed the cats, worked at some poetry. A perfect Sunday.