Oakland Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  In just over ten minutes, the three homeless friends, sitting atop the creek’s crumbling retaining wall in the gloom of early night, had smoked a pretty phat joint and polished off a pint bottle of tequila. They were feeling no pain. This, however, did not stop Maurice from using his BIC to blaze his second joint. The smoking, passing, and sharing resumed at a more leisurely pace.

  “Damn,” Maurice sighed, caressing his mountainous belly with both arms. “I got the damn munchies.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Champ agreed, patting his stomach.

  “No, dudes, hear what I’m sayin’, man,” Maurice said. “I mean I always got the munchies, but this time I really got the munchies.”

  “Mo,” Lawrence said, “just don’t think about it, man . . . hhssssp. We gonna get some food later.”

  “Yeah, right,” Champ said. “From where? You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Hell,” Maurice wailed again, “I’d do anything for a burger and fries.”

  “Don’t say that.” Lawrence glared at his homeys. “Don’t ever say you’d do anything for anything. Ever.”

  There was a moment of silence while they each contemplated this advice. Either that or they were still thinking about hamburgers, fries, and tacos.

  Champ broke the quiet. “So, real question: like what would you homeboys do for a regular place to stay, every day, regular food coming too, man? Like every day?”

  “Shit ain’t gonna happen,” Maurice responded immediately. “So I ain’t answering.”

  “Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Hhssssp . . . Why you asking, Champ, you ain’t asked stuff like that before.”

  Maurice and Lawrence looked at Champ with their puffy eyes, red and bleary from partying, hunger, and feeling so dang tired.

  Champ then explained about Gordon and the school at Laney, the school for homeless kids, dropouts, and fuck-ups. How Champ could get into that school, even have a place to stay, maybe a part-time job. And more than anything: how he could get off the damn street.

  His two stoned street buddies thought he was crazy.

  “Come on, Champ,” Maurice scoffed. “You? Back to school? Think about that, go back to school after all this? Come on, man.”

  “What,” Lawrence added, “you think they gonna hand all that shit over to you for free? Hhssssp! Sure, sonny, come to school and, hey, live here too, and don’t forget your three squares a day—no cost, no payment. Just for you! . . . hhssssp.”

  “Right,” Maurice said. “Sounds like prison to me. Don’t it sound like prison, homeys?”

  “No, it ain’t prison,” Champ replied. “It’s some government program. And why not me? I can do it. I wanna do it. I didn’t even tell ol’ Gordon, but you wanna know what I done? I called that school. I spoke to the head dude! And we met at the school, man. Coach Gelman was cool, man, he told me I could do it!”

  “Uh-oh, here we go again,” Mo shook his head. “Another homo-erecto freak, lookin’ for some Champ-action, yeah? What is it with these old dudes and you, amigo?”

  “Come on, Maurice,” Champ answered, “it ain’t like that, you know. Not at all. Dude, Coach Gelman’s gonna deal with the details, I just gotta show up there Wednesday morning. He told me that.”

  “Wednesday morning? At the college? Hhssssp. You gotta be totally messed up! You’re dreaming, Champ, look at you, dude . . . hhssssp! You’re a mess! You? In college? Yeah, right. And I’m going to the White House next Monday, meeting with the first lady and the prez! Maybe they gonna fix my teeth too . . . hhssssp.”

  “Nah, see, I shoulda known,” Champ said. “I thought you guys were my homeboys, but you ain’t shit. Screw you both! Believe me, man, I’ma take care of my business, ain’t living like this no more. Coach Gelman even gave me his card—with his direct number and the day and time I’m meeting with him.”

  Champ pulled a business card from another do-rag hiding place, holding it up close to his eyes to read it in the evening shadows. “See? Right here: East Campus, room 324. Gelman’s card, dudes. Says here: Tom Gelman, Track Coach and Director, Home Place School of Education, Laney Peralta College. Laugh at me all you want, but that’s where I’m going.”

  With that stalwart declaration, Champion DeLeon Cromarté tapped his tightly closed fist against his heart three times in a solemn promise to himself. He pointed his finger and shook his head contemptuously at the others. Damn ’em, he thought, I’m better than that. I’ma live up to my name—I’ma be the Champion. And he reached for his special joint—Champ’s Champion Joint Smoke, as Maurice had named it. He pulled a matchbook from his pants pocket, and sparked the reefer between his lips with a big, bright flame. Before he inhaled, his thoughts flashed that this flame signified his own big and bright hopes for the future.

  Champ squinted his eyes like Maurice had earlier—high like ching chong—as he sustained a long, drawn-out hit, two, maybe three times longer than any Maurice and Lawrence had taken. The other two watched with amazement and desire burning in their dull-lidded eyes as this monster toke demolished that Champion Joint Smoke. It was the MVP award–winning Champion Doobie Puff of all time! And Maurice and Lawrence held their own breath as their friend utilized years of experienced reefer smoking and overall drug abuse to draw that weed directly into his burnt-out lungs, along with whatever special dust had been added. They watched in ignorant appreciation as the doobage, bartered seemingly ages ago for a pair of used winter boots, quickly disappeared: one-quarter gone, one-third, one-half, two-thirds, then slowly—charred—completely away.

  Champ closed his eyes momentarily as the last spark disappeared. The other two saw him relax his shoulders, holding the pungent smoke deep in his lungs for full effect. Suddenly, Champ made a snorting noise with his nose as he felt the hot, thick smoke begin to burn. A wilder snort erupted as a wispy smoke trail escaped a corner of Champ’s lips. He raised a finger to block the smoky exodus, but then his eyes flew open wide as, finally, he could hold his breath no longer. He groaned, letting out raspy, heaving coughs as the remaining smoke rushed from his lungs, flying up into the chilly darkness of the night. The dark pupils of Champ’s eyes raced wickedly back and forth across the scene—from Maurice to Lawrence, from Lawrence to Maurice—as his coughing fit continued, spewing jagged, painful rasps. And at exactly that moment when Champ simultaneously caught both of his street friends’ astonished stares in his own, he fell from the crumbling concrete wall, collapsing to the ground in a heap. Champ thrashed in agony for three counts, his body seizing up in massive, racking convulsions, his breath coming in gagging gasps. And then, in a flash, his body suddenly lay limp and quiet.

  The special dust that Raymond Donahue, the sorriest drug dealer in West Oakland, had added to that Champion Joint Smoke was very poorly manufactured fentanyl, the so-called King of All Opiates. The drug, fifty times more powerful than 100 percent pure heroin, may have been king on the streets, but in the cheap and deadly way it had been produced, distributed, and smoked, it was the Killer of Champions.

  When the chemical in smoke form had seeped into Champ’s lungs and entered his blood system, he’d immediately convulsed and vomited, the puke mixing with his saliva, gushing quickly in reverse down his esophagus, and flooding into his lungs. Champ had begun choking to death instantly. His heart, already vulnerable from years on the street and hundreds of bad choices, couldn’t handle the potency. He had suffered a mammoth spasm, then crashed. No time for reflection, no time for regret.

  “What the—” Maurice whispered, stunned.

  “Holy shit,” Lawrence said, barely audible.

  Their fallen street bud’s body lay on the ground, a few feet away. Maurice and Lawrence slowly got down from their concrete seats, faces masked in dumbfounded, dazed expressions—equal parts weed, booze, and shock. Maurice slowly reached out a toe in a dirty shoe and pushed it into Champ’s shoulder. Nothing.

  “Shit, he’s dead, Lawrence.”

  “Holy shit,” Lawrence repeated.

  Maurice reached to pick up his
backpack without taking his eyes off the body. He threw the pack over his pork butt–sized shoulder. “I’m blowing Dodge before the cops come,” he said. But massive Maurice hesitated, slowly and carefully bending down and pulling off Champ’s dirty knit hat and then his do-rag. “I’m taking this,” Maurice said, either to Lawrence or to no one. And he rambled off, keeping close to the concrete wall, quickly swallowed up by the dark tangle of overgrown bushes and thick weeds. In a moment, he was gone.

  Lawrence stood completely still. Without turning his head, his eyes followed his friend, quickly losing sight of him. Lawrence dropped his gaze to the lifeless body on the dirty cold ground; he realized he had but one choice to make.

  He squatted down beside Champ and touched the dead kid’s left hand, which still clutched that business card. Lawrence pulled it from Champ’s fingers, straightened up, and tucked it in his jacket pocket, all in one motion. With a last furtive glance in the direction Maurice had gone, Lawrence turned and loped off the opposite way, into the darkness, into the cold Oaktown night.

  CABBIE

  by Judy Juanita

  Eastmont

  March 21, 2009

  The last day in the life of Lovelle Mixon turned out to be a big holiday in Oakland—the Day of Reparations. Too bad no one knew. Everyone could have prepared, the way they do for Columbus Day or Halloween. Macy’s could have sent circulars with 50 percent off. Even the coolie-hatted immigrants recognize holidays as an inappropriate time to dredge for bottles in the recycle bins. Too much clamor for the homeowners in the hills (not so deferential to us in the flatlands). Weekdays they make noise, Sundays they let people sleep. Mystically, they know which holidays to trample on. I call it the commotion-sensibility quotient. For instance, Thanksgiving—they know everyone’s too tooted up to be bothered by container-hustlers.

  Some newspaper called Mixon a cowboy, but he wasn’t. Drug cowboys run weed from Arizona and New Mexico up through California. Lovelle Mixon was a gun runner. Dope dealer is an occupation. Gun runner is a different occupation, but he didn’t make it as a dope dealer. He went to UC, the University of Crime, and found there were openings at several levels. Lovelle came out of jail with the ability to make new connections. They told him, Why you wasting time dealing weed and coke instead of products that move faster and are more profitable? Like guns, illegal weapons, flesh. The new criminal doesn’t have to deal dope. And he’s not going to get into gambling, fraud, or cybertheft because he’s not trained for it.

  I intend to put Lovelle Mixon in my book, the before-and-after-I-started-cabbing book. Of course, it doesn’t exist outside of the parameters of my thick skull, packed with these streets. But what a spot it holds there.

  New Year’s Eve, 2008

  My baby brother Terence was broadsided by a hit-and-run as he rounded 66th Avenue and Foothill. Crazy fool didn’t even stop, just clipped his Toyota and kept going. Terence’s son, my nephew, barely two, was sitting in the backseat, strapped in his car seat. Terence said, “I wouldn’t give a damn except that drunk motherfucker in his Humpty Dumpty–looking Benz coulda killed my kid.” When State Farm said they wouldn’t pay a dime unless he could identify the driver, Terence was so pissed he started a block-by-block search on his off days. Everyone else was carrying on over Oscar Grant getting shot by the BART cop on New Year’s Day, except Terence, who was fuming over his car.

  It took a few weeks. Right after a Martin Luther King Day celebration, he spotted it on 74th Avenue. Terence said he sat there, angrier by the minute, waiting for the driver to come out. The car, a green Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG, was dented on the right passenger side. Some of the Toyota’s maroon paint was on the dent like blush on a woman’s cheek. Twenty minutes go by. Terence had to get to work at Kaiser. Nobody came out so he took down the license plate number. As he drove to the corner, he saw through the rearview a burly man come out, get in the car, and pull away. It was the hit-and-run driver. He wanted to confront him, but now he had the license number. He drove back and got the house number too. I know that house, a notorious drug den. I’ve picked up fares there. No bueno—bad actors in and out of that place. I told Terence, “Don’t give your info to the insurance people.”

  But Terence is hardheaded. He yelled at me, “Man, I’m not paying for what some hopped-up junkie did to my car!”

  “Listen, lil’ bro: you mad, you sad, you all that. But if the police or insurance give him your particulars, his crew will come by your house and do a drive-by. And they ain’t gon’ be mad or sad, just taking care of biz. No emotion. Just boom, boom, boom, blow you and whoever’s in your house away. Forget it. End of discussion.”

  My bro stewed for two months, like a pressure cooker about to blow if the jiggle-top gets popped too soon. He was intent on driving back by that house on 74th Avenue, where he saw the Benz. The day he chose to go there was the Day of Reparations.

  March 21, 2009

  It was after three p.m. Terence goes to 74th Avenue and runs into a hundred cops, a crazy scene. He told me there was nothing he could do but stand outside his car and watch. I can’t believe he didn’t hear on the radio about Mixon and the first two cops he shot. But that’s Terence—he goes to work listening to jazz, mows his lawn listening to jazz, watches his kids play listening to jazz—he’s the most predictable guy in Oakland.

  By the time Terence got there, the cops were frantic, all over MacArthur Boulevard. Terence said it looked like nobody was in charge. The cops started going house to house until they knew Mixon was at 2755 74th Avenue—right in the part of Oakland that is under relentless siege by the po-po. Then they zeroed in, like bees to the queen. That black boy was queen for a day. Otherwise known as a clusterfuck. Terence said it was almost like a party and the people in the streets behind the barricades were talking shit, taking bets on when the po-po would go in like stormtroopers. There’s no such thing as a standoff in Oakland. We don’t have that kind of patience on either side. Either the po-po are gonna let it fly, or the target will. This ain’t a TV show like Law & Order—this is town biz. Terence said the cops were angry, confused, and frustrated, running back and forth. But the street was not even nervous, not hot or bothered.

  Terence had been so worked up over his car. But all that went away, he said. Everybody there—police, onlookers, all of East Oakland—turned like a kaleidoscope. He felt like he’d taken LSD, and Terence doesn’t do drugs, not even Novocain at the dentist. But there he was in the middle of hell, with his poker face and the ghosts of Emmet Till, Nat Turner, and Huey Newton all looming larger than billboards. He found himself cheering for the brother, for Lovelle Mixon, for Oaktown, for the convict, for the guy who had murdered a cop, and by the end of the day would take out a total of four.

  March 21, 2009, 1:08 p.m.

  The first cop that Mixon shot knew him, and knew he was a gun runner. It was a routine traffic stop, but it’s unlikely the cops knew his level of desperation. Every cop generally knows, on a first-name basis, the criminals on his beat, and the head criminal knows who’s short on the money. They’re in it together, this one pays that one, that one pays this one. That’s why there are so many street deaths in prison, acts of retribution. I think Mixon was buying time. He wanted to bag up money and weapons, go to LA, and disappear. A great many people in the inner cities have no ID, no SSN—they’re nonentities. You think you fingerprinted everybody, but you can’t fingerprint the entire population. He probably knew that some of his schemes would lead him back to jail, where he was already a marked man. So that brings up—how did they know precisely where he was and who they had stopped? One of his known refuges was his sister’s apartment, where the second battle took place.

  Incarceration was not the major problem for Mixon. He was trying to avoid retribution. For an African or Latino man from the hood, incarceration is not the worst thing that can happen. You find friends, associates, and mentors in the prison system. It’s just another neighborhood when you’re sent to jail, leave one hood and move on to the next. Thr
ee squares and a rack on the inside, three squares on the outside. He didn’t kill the first two cops because he was afraid to go to jail, he had decided to affect his own retribution. Understanding the end was near, he did not want to depart this world alone. He knew those cops had been sent by his superiors; he was just a pawn in the game now, traded off for something else. How many pimps are killed so that someone can acquire their hos? In the arms trade, how many runners are killed so that someone can acquire their guns?

  In the Warsaw ghetto, how many Jewish husbands were turned in so the snitches could take their wives? It’s an old story, been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. Squeal on somebody so you can get their land. Mixon’s death was part of an old script, not such an individual thing as people thought. The things that didn’t add up, though, are Who did he know? and When did he know them?

  March 21, 2009

  For people whose Saturdays start at four a.m., like mine, that Saturday was a day like any other in Oaktown. Weekend commuters tunneled north and south beneath the stretch of earth called Richmond–El Cerrito–Albany-Berkeley-Oakland–San Leandro–Hayward-Fremont before going into the long, submerged BART tunnel in San Francisco Bay. At intervals, the snake pops up and offers a tour through the backside of Oakland and its lower bowel, East Oakland, from which those looking east can glimpse the Mediterranean hillside that runs for eighty miles. Tourists making their way to the airports pass under downtown Oakland, speaking in German, French, or Japanese about the wine country, the mud baths, and the crooked street in San Francisco which they navigated in rental cars, with pedals on the left instead of the right. But if they see East Oakland, it’s because of Ron Dellums—or in spite of Ron Dellums. As a young Berkeley councilman, Dellums argued for putting BART underground so the residents of his lovely town wouldn’t have to see the snake crawling through it. So here’s some cabbie wisdom for you: past, present, and future all exist in the same moment. Berkeley got BART underground, every other place got it aboveground, and my man Ron ended up the mayor of Oakland. Folks like to knock the boss, I don’t care if they’re white, black, or Mexican. That Dellums, he’s asleep at the wheel. Folks, Jerry Brown had already sold off downtown Oakland. He said he would get it built up like Rio de Janeiro, tall buildings downtown, flatlands the same. Nothing left for Dellums to do. End of discussion.