Oakland Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  Elena doesn’t know shit. I like her.

  * * *

  “So, what’s your story?” a guy at the Kingfish asks when I’m about six beers in.

  “Just a girl having a drink,” I say.

  Though “girl” at forty-five is kind of a stretch.

  “Feel my ears,” he says.

  He’s clearly looking for something, rather than someone. We both know what it is.

  “Like stones,” I say, touching them.

  “I used to wrestle. It smashes the cartilage.”

  The Kingfish is close enough to walk home from, which makes up for it not serving hard liquor. Plus, there’s fresh popcorn and a shuffleboard table. The guy and I slide a few pucks down the table, and then we walk to my place, and soon we’re naked on my living room rug and he shows me some wrestling moves.

  My house is a little 1920s bungalow on a quiet street, a few blocks off Telegraph Avenue.

  Usually quiet, anyway. Every so often someone runs through the backyard. Once I opened my back door and two cops were there, looking for a gun someone dropped.

  Mostly older black folks live here. There’s a white lesbian couple that keeps chickens. There’s also an old Polish guy in a wheelchair who owns three houses on the block. One he lives in, and the other two look condemned.

  “What’s your story,” the wrestler says again, when we’re sitting on the front porch afterward.

  Not like he really wants to know.

  I tell him anyway.

  I tell him my parents died a few years ago in a car crash and left me some money, enough for a down payment on this house and something left over.

  I tell him about Nick taking out a whopping loan on our equity line of credit at the bank—I put him on the mortgage as a tenant-in-common—without bothering to mention it. I tell him how I kicked Nick out when I found out, and how much I hate him. I keep saying his name: Nick, Nick, Nick.

  Fucking Nick.

  Right now all the houses on the street are dark and somehow seem smaller, like they shrink a little when the light goes out, and I imagine that everyone else is asleep and not having bad dreams.

  “I guess I should go,” the wrestler says.

  I find the dropped gun the next day, in the potted bamboo on the deck, and I keep it.

  * * *

  Nick and I were together ten years, which means things were both good and bad. When I think about him, I think about us having sex.

  And sometimes him standing at the stove cooking.

  But mostly the sex.

  Everyone you love leaves a hole in you.

  A blast crater.

  Soon there aren’t any more flowers or birds and the rivers dry up.

  The wrestler’s been gone about ten minutes when a car pulls up next door and cuts its lights. I pull back a little, into the shadowed part of the porch where the streetlamp doesn’t reach.

  The back door of the car opens.

  Someone gets pushed out.

  There’s a little chiming sound from the wind chimes.

  There’s a motorcycle backfiring on the freeway two blocks away.

  I’ve never seen a dead person. I’ve seen birds lying stiff under a tree, or next to a window they slammed into. Once I saw a half-eaten deer in the Oakland Hills. I watched my cat be put to sleep. They looked like nothing—a rock, a fence post, a throw rug.

  This looks like shit-for-brains Anton.

  He’s lying on the curb where they pushed him out.

  The car drives off without turning on its lights. It passes the house where the Polish man lives. It passes the house where the old woman sits on her porch all day, her hands folded in her lap. I follow the car until I can’t see it anymore and have to imagine where it goes.

  I head inside, get a bottle from the built-in shelving, and drink without looking to see what’s in it.

  Gin.

  I met Anton a few times in Elena’s kitchen. She was making macaroni and government cheese, ground beef round and Hamburger Helper, chicken thighs. He was just this side of sullen, talking to me but not making eye contact.

  I try to imagine where Anton has gone. If he might see my parents and pass on a message.

  He let Darnique go to school without breakfast most days. Once he slammed her head against a washing machine.

  So fuck drug-dealing movie-making shit-for-brains Anton.

  The message I would give my parents is this: Please come back.

  And this: I know you were both drunk off your asses when you crashed the car.

  I add some Snapple Lemonade to the gin.

  I call Nick.

  * * *

  My mother used to read me stories. They ended happily, but before that there was usually sadness or difficulty. I never understood why they ended just when the good part was starting.

  Elena tried to kill herself at least once that I know of. She had a baby back in Tennessee. The baby was born crack-addicted, and died.

  I learned this from Darnique.

  I tried to kill myself at least twice. There might have been a third time, or I might have just been drunk and taken more pills than I realized.

  This was always after Nick had sex with someone else.

  I love Nick with all my heart and soul, and he’s a complete asshole.

  He comes right over when I call.

  “I’m scared, Nick,” I say. “What if they come back? What if they know I saw their car? What about Elena? She’s going to come outside with her coffee in the morning, come over here to bum a cigarette, and see her dead son lying there. Should I call the cops?”

  “I’m sorry about the money,” Nick says.

  “You’re such a dick,” I say. Then he kisses me and we go to bed.

  Afterward I lie awake. Nick is snoring a little. I can hear cars on the street.

  I imagine that my heart looks like the moon, the surface all fucked up from space rocks.

  The moon has no atmosphere.

  Red lights swirl around the bedroom.

  * * *

  Elena mourns Anton with a houseful of people and a lot of potato salad and ribs.

  I bring her a grocery bag from the Alameda Food Bank. Tangerines. Chocolate fudge Jell-O. Cans of tuna and vegetables.

  At her church they play tambourines and talk about Jesus’s love.

  There is no God.

  Nick and I bought a grill.

  Which means he’s moved back in.

  “Next time I’ll bring you a barbequed turkey,” I tell Elena.

  “I ain’t had no barbequed turkey ever,” Elena says. “Ain’t you got to defrost it first?”

  “We’re getting a fresh one.”

  “Fresh? Where you get that at?”

  “Andronico’s, in Berkeley.”

  Which means in a galaxy far, far away.

  Darnique comes to live with Elena. They get out the glue and glitter and colored markers. Elena cornrows Darnique’s hair. She makes her Eggo Cinnamon Toast waffles for breakfast.

  Everything works out fine, except in the end it doesn’t.

  Elena will get diabetes. Darnique will be pregnant by fourteen.

  I’m nobody’s fucking fairy godmother.

  * * *

  This is the part where the gun goes off. I was drunk, and mad at Nick again after he’d been back a couple of months.

  It turns out he had another girlfriend.

  Everyone leaves me sooner or later.

  I kind of waved the gun around and screamed at him. Then I aimed it at my head, but I changed my mind and turned it toward him instead.

  Years before, when Elena tried to kill herself, the recoil of the gun jerked her hand away from her temple. The bullet only grazed her neck, leaving a little scar.

  So I knew to hold the gun steady.

  There is no recovery.

  When I was little, my parents used to take me to bars with them.

  Shit works out for other people sometimes, but not for me.

  And not for the other w
omen in here.

  In here we’re all doomed, and we know it.

  My parents’ favorite bar when we lived in San Francisco was the Wishing Well.

  It’s gone now.

  I sat on a stool and drank Shirley Temples.

  In my glass, three bright-as-neon cherries were impaled on a plastic sword.

  I pulled it from the melting ice.

  They were cold, and delicious.

  A MURDER OF SAVIORS

  by Keenan Norris

  Toler Heights

  I remember hearing about the incident in the news, and considering it with all the sentimentality of a seven a.m. BART train crowd, battered black briefcases and visionless stares. I’m a real romantic, you can tell. Perfect for reporting on Oakland’s death spirals—not so much for San Francisco, but this story doesn’t have shit to do with San Francisco.

  The kid was found in the commercial truck bay of the plaza that divides East Oakland from the suburbs just beyond. A gravel ramp runs up from the bay to the upper level of the plaza, where there is a police station. Someone had tracked the victim’s blood up the black ramp, right past the police. Granted, it was a rough section of town, but even by tough-town standards, this seemed impetuous. Not only were the police stationed there, there were also a children’s dance studio, a decent-quality supermarket, and a Wells Fargo bank in the plaza. A murder committed so close to so much innocence and authority was rash, even if it happened in the early morning, before business hours.

  Nobody knew what to make of it, least of all the local media and police. The press gave the boy’s name—Shaun Sobrante—his age—sixteen—and his surprisingly strong grade-point average—3.3. The local gumshoes, going light on the investigative aspect of their work, redundantly noted the manner of his murder and the fact that there was no known culprit, nor motive, nor any witnesses. This was a prediction and justification of what came next: nothing.

  The police offered only the unhelpful fact that Shaun was apparently unaffiliated with street gangs and had a marijuana possession charge on his record. The intent-to-distribute case was still pending at the time he was murdered. I recall wishing that I was a police investigator, or a paid reporter on the crime beat, so I could put in some real work on the case. That’s assuming there was still such a thing as a “crime beat” when it came to local news. It sure didn’t seem like it.

  Where Shaun’s murder barely registered with the media or the law, it resonated deeply along the blocks surrounding the plaza—his community. Shaun’s elaborate graffiti visage went up on the wall of a handball court at the nearby middle school. His funeral brought out several hundred mourners. A basketball tournament was staged at the courts on Seminary Avenue, to mark his passing and the deaths of the many other young people who’d lost their lives to East Oakland violence. Underground rap music blared his name in deafening tribute down the boulevards.

  And an Oakland-born businessman with friends in high places came home and founded a school in his honor: Sobrante Preparatory Academy.

  * * *

  The charter schools had swooped in like a black murder of crows over Oakland, resectioning the city’s schools and recalibrating its civics. No Child Left Behind money was flowing to a few select men and women handpicked to recode the curriculum. It was only later, after Principal Hill at Sobrante Prep excited my investigative streak, that I learned of this trend, but I might as well set the stage with it now so that what happened, the whole mystery at the heart of things, will come clear to you faster than it did to me.

  There was James Chavo of the Native American Middle School; Lexington Fowler at Inspired Tech Academy; Mrs. Majesty Blanche Boudreaux at Leaders Born High School. There were others too, believe me. The time was ripe for saviors: our president was a great born-again Christian and the City of Dope, that Too $hort had told us couldn’t be saved by John the Pope, was being born again too. No, it was no longer the drug-plagued eighties, or the bullet-riddled nineties. It was a new century and saviors were everywhere in Oakland. The town was being chartered out.

  By the time of the Sobrante murder, the schools were already receiving quite a bit of press for their ties to the Republican Party and their exceptional test scores. Chavo at the Native American school in the Laurel District was said to be a miracle worker—his students’ Annual Yearly Progress scores had reached 860 for two years in a row, an elite level rarely accomplished by any but the most privileged private schools. Chavo was also said to be a born-again of particular fervor and Bible-beating prowess. Fowler’s Inspired Tech Academy was, like the Native American school, situated in one of East Oakland’s diverse, borderline neighborhoods, where the announcement of an AYP above 800 was often followed by word that a police informant had been executed in an alleyway, or that SWAT was busting in someone’s door down the street. The kind of neighborhood that could go either way at any moment. Fowler, for his part, had been among Bush 41’s Thousand Points of Light back in ’90 or ’91, and he had not lost favor with the paradise-inclined mind of 43, the son.

  Everything about the charters was story-worthy. Yet there was an undercurrent in every article that went uninterrogated. Each piece would mention, in passing, the schools’ high teacher turnover and militant reliance on nineteenth-century schoolhouse discipline. Chavo, it was reported, angrily ended a pep rally in mid-hoorah because some boys were sagging their pants in violation of his dress code. Fowler, meanwhile, took it upon himself to patrol the halls of Inspired Tech and volubly chastise girls if they were cuddled up with the lower-performing boys. Mrs. Majesty Blanche Boudreaux, the Tribune reported, actually went to the trouble of keeping a public tally of students whose grade-point averages statistically qualified them for acceptance to four-year colleges and universities, implying that the rest were wastrels and losers. Cash Hill bought ad space in the Tribune where he proclaimed his school would be “the lynching that Thug Life and all the other culture cancers have coming.”

  Why weren’t these signs of unstable leadership investigated? I can’t say. What I do know now, but only suspected back then, is that local newspapers were experiencing the wrath of the Internet, and budgets were being slashed like a machete dropping cane. Investigative reporting was going the way of my own broken dream of being the next Woodward, Pilger, and Wells, all wrapped into one. News anchors and popular editorialists might demand high salaries, but the actual nature of their work was inexpensive. By contrast, the costs for actual investigative work could spiral stratospherically. What if the story went deeper and involved more players than originally expected? What if the saga ran longer than anyone suspected it would? A news agency couldn’t just pull out midinvestigation and act like the story had run its course. It was an all-or-nothing deal—and the media increasingly opted for nothing.

  I had always imagined myself haunting the halls of the state capitol, doggedly delivering on the intentionally obscured issues of political glad-handing and corruption. Maybe if I made it out of local news, I’d one day work for CNN or CBS, and find myself holed up with Congolese rebels or unembedded in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the very least I’d end up on the Big Pharma beat, stalking CEOs from boardrooms to brunch dates with doctors on the make. But by the time I was out of college, that deeply researched reporting on local politics and events was dead. If it had to do with a war in the Middle East—fuck the Congo, Uganda, or Sri Lanka—there was always money and a few warm bodies to throw at it. But what went on in Sacramento day to day, let alone Oakland, might as well have been happening on another planet.

  I was still trying my hand at freelance reporting back then, although a year clear of school I was just as broke and unpublished as I’d been on my graduation day. Oh, the pride of my parents, you can only imagine. I picked up a part-time job at a Mexican supermarket on East 14th near the Allen Temple Baptist Church, and I worked parking lot security for the church on Wednesdays and Sundays. My savings had run dangerously low before the part-time jobs and I had been forced to move into a three-bedroom duplex
off 85th Avenue where I was the only tenant. This was way before gentrification so I could afford it. Nobody but a naïve college kid wanted that rattrap, which was right above a homeless encampment that doubled as an open-air drug den. Looming over the many elderly, addled homeless was a billboard advertising pet rescue and adoption: Save Fido. Rescue Kitty. Happy, smiley, white Disney cartoon people nuzzled their anthropomorphic pets right on top of rickshaw shopping carts, broken black people, syringes, and vials. The landlady was more than happy to get my six hundred dollars in rent every month. Half the faucets didn’t work, the electrical outlets were all ungrounded so powering up my PC was taking my life in my hands, and there was no heating or air-conditioning in the whole place. The building was as dangerous, really, as anything outside its walls. But I wasn’t ready to give up on myself as a journalist. I had no desire to admit defeat and fall back on my parents in suburban Sacramento, so I holed up in the hood and held tight. I drank a lot, and read books about washouts on the outskirts of Hollywood throwing their ideas down the toilet along with their liquor vomit.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure if I was embarking on an article about a hero leading a great educational effort in an East Oakland ghetto, running a preparatory academy literally founded upon a murder scene and dedicated to the victim—or if what I was after was something more sinister. But I had to tell the story everyone else was slighting, even if my only means of publication was a blog that no one but its author ever read.

  I started schooling myself on the inner workings of Sobrante. Eventually, I wanted to talk to the principal himself, but first I needed to know more about his operation from people around the fringes. I couldn’t interview students who were minors without complications arising, so I settled for janitorial staff, clerical workers, and former employees who were already making their presence known on Glassdoor.com.

  “A Trump-like figure,” one post read, “a mannerless Wall Street lout.” It was the language of a teacher or HR staffer from the hills, maybe even from Marin, who was trying to compute the existence of a man so connected and yet so uncouth.

  “The educational equivalent of a prosperity preacher,” another post read.