West Oakland

8/2/2011

The boys on the corner by the tiny taqueria have piled their bikes unceremoniously on the concrete, and they stand about and hold their shoulders high and give the passing cars hard looks. But they’re only imitating the men—they do it so well—who loiter outside the auto-shop, resting one foot against the wall.

The cars stop to let a woman cross, but she isn’t looking anyways. She’s got a wool-knit top—you can see her skin through the weave—and she’s cut the bottom short with scissors where her midriff is. She’s tall and fine, she’s sex on legs in torn up jeans, and she has eyes only for the red thunderbird that has stopped across the street. She comes alongside the car and bends down so that her unremarkable face—neither ugly nor pretty—and her remarkable breasts are thrust into the window. She speaks a word. The driver gives a response. And she gets into the car.

The door to the public library has a bullet hole in its glass, and in the lobby a security guard sits at an old metal desk. He is young, and big, and from time to time he shuffles around the lobby floor. The librarians come out and direct him to uphold the pedantics of library law—a firecode violation, a foot on the chair, a giggle in the silent zone. He shuffles among the troublemakers, speaks to them with an air of tired apology, and all the while his eyes are rimmed with red.

Two girls can be heard from across the aisles of library books. They sound like they’re in junior high. There is no breathless excitement to their gossiping, no conspiratal whisper of shame. Just a matter of fact recounting: “… she’s dating a twenty year-old, and they were sleeping together, and she got pregnant from him, and then she got taken to jail cause she was at his place—they both got taken to jail, cause he’s a drug dealer, and the police came to take him while she was there….”

In a backstreet beside the railroad tracks, a man is crossing at a signal light. He limps to favor his left, and he’s wearing a pointy Christmas hat—a festive red beanie with white snowflakes on the sides. In the opposite direction a homeless man is pushing a shopping cart, and he has a Doberman tied to his cart by a string. As the Doberman trots along it arcs out from the cart and into the middle of the street, then back toward the cart, then back toward the street, then back to the cart, and it hangs out its tongue to laugh at the cars that pass.

Across from the public library is a busy city park. At the crest of a knoll in the middle of the park rests an old Victorian house where a summer day camp operates. They have hung fingerpainted signs of butcher paper from the rails, and they billow in the breeze like a paper skirt around the porch. In front of the house girls with braids in their hair are skipping rope and they sing the rhymes that all children know to accompany skipping rope. Some of the littler ones are playing tag by an elm tree, and a large, young woman with a shining forehead watches them from the doorway of the house. Cars have already filled the nearby lot so they begin to park at the library, and solicitous parents herd their children from the cars, across the street and into the waiting park. From somewhere a few blocks away a police siren wails, but no one turns to look—the girls are still skipping rope, the little ones still run about, and the woman in the doorway is smiling at the sunlight as the children squeal in play.