The Wildnerness Years - One Small Step for the Man's Kind (pt. 1)

From the sevenfivenine (over time the apartment would be dubbed as such and serve as a reference point for those of us who lived, worked and played there as well as the countless number who scored there) to the North Oakland hub was roughly a 10 minute walk give or take, across the street and down an alley, past the fire station that was catty corner to the sevenfivenine, from the alley you walked across a vacant parking lot and behind a set of dive apartments, there was a huge mystery warehouse on the opposite side of the parking lot, a cavernous building that seemed mostly empty except for a large space crammed with video poker machines and even after years of living there we never knew if it was the cops or the crooks who owned all those machines and ran it, guys would drop off and pick up machines and not Fred, Thelma or fucking Daphne knew where they came from or what they did with them, from the parking lot you cruised up the side of the dive apartments and crossed Baum Blvd., Anthony's Lounge, a strip club was on the left along with another of Andy Carnegie's libraries, this one for the blind hence why it may have been so conveniently located next to a strip club, down the alley towards Centre Ave and past what was then the new CVS, bust a right on Centre at Sweet Georgia Brown's, a bar that no white man went in unless expressly invited, past a run down barber shop and the House of Sauce, a chicken and rib joint run by an old black woman with graying hair who radiated voodoo, i was one of the few white guys who actually frequented the place getting ribs or quarter chickens, every order coming with two pieces of white bread to sop up the sauce, sometimes i'd add greens or get the BBQ beans, the voodoo lady's voodoo sauce working magic, from there it was across the busway, a worn dirt path on the right led to six or so row houses on a hidden street that would serve as headquarters for one of the Glimmer Twins, past the check cashing store, the state liquor store, a bodega that sold mainly lottery tickets, a greasy spoon and then an ancient pharmacy, across the street another flop house apartment building and a laundromat... and at that point you could smell the stale booze, see roaches scurrying up and down the sidewalk, a sidewalk decorated with cigarette butts, broken beer bottles, vomit and crushed plastic liquor bottles, Banker's Club and Nikolai Vodka, and of course the buzzing lights of the bars, fluorescent and neon mingling with the hum of humanity...

The North Oakland hub circa the last half decade of the 20th century was a soon to be boarded up and vacant Giant Iggle grocery store, Mitchell's Tavern on the corner of Melwood and Centre, and another half block up near the corner of Centre and Craig another trio of dives, Thirsty's which was a Deadhead bar on the corner, Chief's which was a rock and roll dive/old man alcoholic joint, it was one of the old school Steel Town places and opened at 6am, Pennsyltucky being the proud commonwealth boasting some of the most antiquated liquor laws in the country opening that early gave it special status, the morning crowd was often wilder and more lively than the night crawlers, there was a beer distributor sandwiched between the two and across the street on the other corner was the Luna, named after Pittsburgh's old Luna Park, roughly standing in the same spot as the entrance to the old amusement park, an old painted moon on it's faded marquee... each bar served cheap drinks and was populated by petty criminals, college kids, hard core drunks, the brothers and sisters from the Hill and East Liberty, low level dealers, basically the working poor all lit up and popping quarters in the jukebox and singing and arguing and dancing and crying their lives away... it was a beautiful wreck of humanity and i'd learn more on these streets than the average white kid who grew up in the suburbs should ever learn, but here i was and it was hard to wipe the grin from my mug...

And so here was week one of the rest of your life son, whachyagonnado? On Monday i got up and tied back the dreads, showered and rolled on down to the new gig, there was the formality of the usual paperwork and meeting my boss, a guy who was excited to have another college graduate in the warehouse so he'd have someone to discuss "things" with, of course as i sat there smiling and nodding my head as politely as i could, the muppet in front of me was a pudgy short guy wearing those tiger striped Zubas pants with a matching top, and by tiger striped i don't mean orange and black or what one would call like tiger-like colors, it was more like aqua and purple and black and white, he had the makings of a mini-mullet going and the sides of his head where shaved and the top tips of his tight white man's afro dyed bright blonde, if ever a train wreck i ever did see, that first day just looking at him made me feel as if i'd eaten a massive dose of LSD, he couldn't wait to ingratiate himself to me, explained that he was into wrestling and in his spare time aspired to be a wrassler, like 4th rate WWE shit or something, the kind you find on television very late at night in strange apartments while very drunk and high on a number of substances, already the shit was doing my head in, the beautiful and absurd existence of the grunt lumpen-prole... his name was Ron...

He led me down a large flight of steps to the warehouse... the building i would be working in was once an old Ford Motor Car factory from 1914-1932, underneath years of city grit and grime you could see the old ornate architecture, it was situated near train tracks and the story is that back when it was hopping they would use a crane to lift the cars onto the waiting trains and ship them all over the country, the stairwell was stifling in the late  summer and by the time i had reached the bottom of the steps i could feel the sweat dripping down my back, like most places of it's ilk it was shitty-hot and sticky in the summer and cold and crappy in the winter, a fine cloud of black dust rising up every time something fell to the floor, a more poetic type would have made some shining metaphor about the fine, black dust being like the souls of the lumpen-prole gone before but i'm not that poetic and i knew it was nothing more than dirt and diesel exhaust and an old building crumbling slowly over time, it's cement floor worn smooth like marble from years of use, the space itself was filled with flimsy metal shelves piled and stocked with useless crap, shit trinkets from China bought for pennies a gross and sold for .69 cents a piece, pallets of plates and napkins in a myriad of colors... pinatas, tablecloths, decorations for birthdays and anniversaries, graduations and divorces, all shit designed to be used once and fed to the landfill so that next party you were right back here buying more shit, it was the locally owned party haus and would stay that way until the national chains did it in, and on this day, the day marking my 25th year upright, it was my new place of employment...

I was introduced to the rest of the crew, there was T. Rex, a local glam rocker who was between bands and knee deep and sinking into a smack habit, there was Milo, a quiet guy a few years younger than myself but he'd end up being one my favorite people i'd ever work with, at the time he was the senior grunt having been there all of a year and change, there was a tattoo down his forearm and his musical tastes ran to some indie/punk bands that ran parallel and sometimes intersecting to mine, still it was a reference point from which a conversation started, then there was Augie, the owner's dad, an old Jewish guy and an absolute fucking gem, he worked a couple of days a week and was boss when Ron was on vacation, these were my new co-workers and looking around i couldn't say it wouldn't be an interesting crew, maybe not the nut cases and wastoids of the Chemical Crew but it was still early and the fry boys were still fresh in the mind, that was damn near a brotherhood and one could have easily swapped out the suits in the opening of Reservoir Dogs and cranked up Little Green Bag while a bunch of sweaty, grease-covered drunks and drug fiends came rolling out of work and toward the bar...

I'd spend the next few days starting to learn the in's and out's of my new gig, it wasn't quantum physics and like most manual labor jobs there were just enough tedious procedures to memorize and annoy, the kind of shit you had to think about until you got it and then you went about it in a state of semi-consciousness, Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday went by smooth and then my first Thursday night back in the North Oakland Hub rolled around...

And i got smashed... proper fucking smashed...

There are few things more enjoyable in life than a mid-September night, the waning days of summer when a coolness seeps into the heat and humidity of the nights, that first Thursday back and the sun dipping blood-orange over the Hill and i was gonna have it, walking up the street towards the Hub with the Engineer, the sky bruising from blue to black and the stars shining down on my own little barrio, the smoke of Mitchell's changing colors in the blue and red neon as it floated towards the ceiling, quarter beers and double shots, up the street to Chief's to laugh and cut up, junkies to the left of me queens to the right, then the scent of perfume trailing the from the packs of co-eds all heading to the Luna, following the nose and talking shit to pretty girls who wanted nothing to do with this dread-locked lumpen prole beast spouting off indie bands and avant-garde authors, drinking vodka and 7-up, drunk enough for three men... but oh those pretty things, trekking into the shit side of Oakland for the cheap drinks of Ladies Night, the teeth so white when they smiled, the curve of their breast in those fashionable blouses, the clean sheets they slept on, the expensive cars of their fathers, it was like an overload after having been locked up in Podunk and then working like a dog at the shore, i was back in North Oakland, months removed from the world of academia and i was drunk, on booze and lust and on the crickets and the streets... and as i stumbled home that gorgeous night, the clock grinning towards 3am, having lost the Engineer a couple hours ago, i smiled my way through the last call drunks and thugs and college kids and towards my new home, stopping once to throw up, laughing about it and then heading off towards a blanket on the floor and the swiftly approaching sound of the coming alarm clock...