Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  The first thing we noticed was the free beer. Then there were free tamales and more free beer. As I sat down to stuff my gaping maw with tamales and wash them down with (have I mentioned it was free?) Dos Equis, my friend Rick tapped me on the shoulder to notify me that Bonnie Raitt was starting a concert behind me. As we walked through the crowd of affectless, coiffed, well-heeled revelers, I began to feel as if I had snuck into a secret society. Whatever you do, I thought, don’t tell anyone that a week and a day before this moment you had seen Bonnie play at a massive antiwar rally in San Francisco and that your friend Alys had bumped into her afterward on the way out of a Vietnamese sandwich shop in the Tenderloin. If that comes out, they’ll learn about the IWW t-shirt you bought or divine that you clapped for a speaker who blamed global capitalism for creating an obscenely huge gap between the affluent West and the dire poverty of the Third World, poverty that was, in turn, one of the conditions that fostered terrorism. Blamed capitalism? That would be it. I’d be finished with my new crew. I kept my peace and drank free beer as fast as I could swallow it, ate gourmet ribs and barbequed chicken, and strolled over to the swimming pool they’d constructed amid the normally desertlike environs of the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot. There was even a fountain and rows of lounges. I felt as if we had wandered into one of the parties in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald where the colossal vitality of Jay Gatsby’s vulgar materialism was at least ennobled by the raw power of his dream. On closer analysis, however, there was none of that there.

  We took pictures of each other around the splashing water and made our way over to the tequila tent where open spigots of the powerful nectar lay unguarded. Open spigots of free tequila at a Raiders game! What kind of nihilist came up with this idea? But all was safe. There were few hard-core Raiders fans to be found in this bourgeois playground, and I felt as if my friends and I would be discovered and escorted out of the party and into some small cell in the bowels of the stadium at any moment. The possibility of a Raiders riot was small indeed among these corporate wieners. We took a couple of shots and ran into some Brazilian guys who “came up for the day” to see the game. They were wearing matching yellow soccer jerseys. It was a miracle of neoliberal corporate globalization. We took pictures of them and had a number of tequila shots. The more tequila I had, the more I began to like my new set. Rick suggested that we switch to beer in order to increase the likelihood that we would remember the game tomorrow. Good idea. Chuck suggested that we have one more round of shots, which we did before grabbing a final free beer and leaving our new friends and the Foo Fighters to rock out at the corporate tailgate.

  Overfed and drunk as skunks, we headed over to the stadium, bloated and confident of victory. Inside we located our seats, and I noticed that of the two huge blow-up football players, the Raider was droopier. Another bad omen. Still, I pressed on in my unwavering faith that Gannon would slice the Bucs’ defense to shreds and we’d be dancing for joy in the streets of the Gaslamp. With about forty minutes left until kickoff we walked around the stadium to say hello to our Raider buddies Jim and his father Hank. Jim was up at a concessions stand so we chatted with Hank for a bit and walked back around past the elaborate ESPN tent set up on the sideline. As we got back to our seats, Santana started up a brief set. Sting and No Doubt would play at halftime. Would there be a football game? Unfortunately so.

  It started well with the Raiders picking off a Brad Johnson pass to put them in scoring position early. Chuck, Rick, and I were ecstatic. This was the start of it—a long raucous festival of Raider dominance. Points would be coming from the defense and the offense, falling off trees. The drive stalled and Janikowski hit a 40-yard field goal at 4:20 of the first quarter. It was all downhill from there, a horrifying free fall into the depths of depression. When Grammatica hit a 24-yard field goal at 7:09 of the first quarter, I thought, at least we stopped them. After his second field goal at 3:44 of the second quarter, I told myself the game might be closer than I had anticipated. Then Alstott’s 2-yard touchdown run at 8:36 had me thinking it would be fun to see the comeback victory. Once Gannon worked the kinks out, we’d really get this show on the road. The offense continued to sputter and the Bucs suddenly looked like a juggernaut. Just before halftime, at 14:30 of the second quarter, McCardell caught a 5-yard touchdown pass from Johnson. Can you say miracle comeback?

  Halftime was a miserable blur. All the lifeless spectacle had been exposed as ridiculous decadence. The most noteworthy thing about the crowd was its utter indifference to everything. At one point during the first half, I stood up to cheer on the defense and turned around to a lifeless clump of silver-and-black-clad forty-somethings and yelled, “Come on, corporate Raiders, make some noise!” They seemed neither inspired, nor upset, nor even amused. Someone needed to go check the whole bunch to see if they had a pulse. If it was possible to embody the Platonic Form of affectlessness, they did. It was then that I noticed the tag hanging off one of their hats. The scenario was clearly this: fly in from Aspen or Miami or Manhattan and, once at your exclusive hotel, stroll up to the souvenir stand conveniently located in the opulent lobby and flip a coin. Heads it’s Raiders, tails it’s Buccaneers. As for the contest? Whatever. Do you want to dine at Morton’s downtown or Japengo in La Jolla after the game?

  Sitting through the second half was like enduring a ruthless beating that graduated into a meticulous torture session. If the Raiders’ Swiss cheese defense and impotent offense were not bad enough, the interception returns for touchdowns added a particularly vicious angle to the experience. It was like knowing that you were slowly dying, with only the occasional sledgehammer shot to the gut to look forward to. I will spare you, gentle reader, the precise details. The comeback? It was a cruel hoax performed upon an already traumatized Raider Nation. Death is always more devastating when the dying patient is given a shred of hope to nurse only to have it ripped from his or her desperate, trembling hands. At one point during the apocalypse, Chuck turned to me and said, “After all we’ve been through, they’re not even going to show up. I can’t believe it, Jim. Two thousand bucks for this!” This hit me hard, since the whole thing had been my idea. I was with erstwhile Raiders fan Hunter Thompson who remembered, “The beating came close to utterly destroying my self-esteem. I felt smaller and smaller as the game went on. There was no relief, no mercy, no place to hide from it, and no sane way to explain it.” I’ll leave it at that. As the futile minutes ticked away, we decided it was no use staying to watch ex-Raiders coach Jon Gruden gloat and Chuck and I abandoned ship, leaving Rick to suffer alone. I left my free Super Bowl crap under the seat and gave myself license to stomp on the stupid little radio they gave us. Chuck tossed his against the wall by a garbage can and it shattered helplessly into useless fragments, an apt metaphor for the Raiders and our state of being. I went into the bathroom before we left and the ridicule came at me from all sides. The enemies of Raiders fans, fearing the fearsome thug myth, usually wait until they can pick you off in an isolated and vulnerable place to let you have it. I took it stoically. Outside, some guy was getting in Chuck’s face, so we fled to the trolley station.

  On the way there, we were greeted by some perverse Bible thumper who’d decided it was a good idea to greet angry, retreating Raiders fans with the message that we were all going to Hell. It was good for his health that he was behind a chain-link fence. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was the last person in the world that I wanted to hear from at that moment. In the back of my head, however, I did wonder whether God was punishing me for my hypocrisy in opposing war while shelling out an obscene amount of money to indulge my savage love of gridiron combat. The self-doubt generated by the victory of the Disney pirates over my beloved Raiders brought the whole bloated edifice of the Super Bowl down on my head. I saw myself as a creature driven by vanity and sustained by illusion.

  Then, all at once, the crowd of defeated Raiders fans began to hurtle the absurd security barriers on the way to the trolley, ignoring police or
ders to continue weaving through the pointless maze like rats searching for nonexistent cheese. The cops issued sterner warnings, but nobody listened. It felt liberating until my friend tripped on the last hurtle and fell, gashing his arm badly, just above the elbow. He got up and we jumped on a trolley car and stood sullenly mute all the way home as people stared in horror at the blood dripping from his arm. It was there amid the lonely crowd on the trolley that the voice came back to haunt me, “The sole real status attaching to a mediocre object of this kind is to have been placed, however briefly, at the very center of social life and hailed as the revelation,” the voice mocked. I tried to peer into the darkness outside the trolley window but saw only my own reflection in the glass. The voice went on, “But even this spectacular prestige evaporates into vulgarity as soon as the object is taken home by a consumer—and hence all other consumers too. At this point its essential poverty stands revealed—too late.”4

  Meanwhile, across town, the Super Bowl farce turned tragic. Greg “Griz” Jones, one of the few real Raiders fans who made it into the game, was blindsided by an SUV as he crossed San Diego Mission Road while leaving the game. The hit-and-run assault sent Jones flying and the impact severely fractured his pelvis and cut open his head. Jones, the bear-sized linchpin of the “66th Mob,” who camp overnight and tailgate on 66th Avenue by the Coliseum in Oakland, is known as an affectionate man who always makes enough extra food to feed the homeless at his tailgates. Witnesses said the accident sounded “like two cars colliding.” At Sharp Memorial Hospital, surgeons had to insert a steel plate in Jones’s pelvis. His recovery required months of painful rehabilitation. He had no health insurance.5

  The Raiders’ AWOL center, it turned out, had a tragic tale as well. Unlike the legendary Super Bowl drinking binge of John Matuszak, the Barret Robbins story was no light-hearted romp. The Raiders’ center missed the game as a result of a bipolar episode. Later he revealed to ESPN that he had started feeling it coming on in the middle of Super Bowl week. “A real scared feeling started to happen, and it got worse,” Robbins would later explain, “I didn’t know what to do. What I did was started drinking. I felt that drinking was going to make it go away.” Rather than the sex and drugs and rock and roll of old, this was no renegade Raiders myth but a real nightmare. Robbins recalled:I left the hotel . . . I don’t know what for . . . I wandered around aimlessly. I could remember seeing people that I knew. I could remember riding around with people that I knew, but I didn’t know why I was there or where I was going or what I was doing. All I know is I was not where I was supposed to be. My brain had shut down. I don’t remember Saturday morning. I remember being somewhere by the ocean and looking for a way home . . . or looking for a ride. I don’t really know what I was looking for.

  Robbins did not sleep all Friday night before the Super Bowl, made the team’s 11:00 p.m. bed check, but was then spotted partying at an after-hours club called E Street Alley in the Gaslamp at 4 a.m. At one point early Saturday night, two Raiders fans spotted Robbins drinking, weeping, and muttering to himself as he sat alone in a booth at Moondoggies in Pacific Beach. “He looked lost,” said one of the fans, who got Robbins a cab and gave the driver $20 to take him back to the Hyatt where the Raiders were staying. Robbins was then kicked out of the team hotel and is said to have spent the night in Tijuana. Eventually, he wound up at a local hospital with alcohol poisoning and was put on suicide watch. As Monte Poole observed, “Robbins spends part of his life in dark corners most of us never see and can’t begin to understand.”6

  Two

  Oakland’s Burning

  I believe there’s really gonna be a riot here in Oakland. . . . I heard it over the radio that the police department was ready for anything, shotguns, blockades—I dreamed that a bunch of youngsters had started a riot and they had set Oakland on fire.

  Luther Smith, calling for a police review board in

  Oakland in Oakland’s Not for Burning, 1968

  We were “representing” the town. Oakland is like this.

  Greg Johnson, seventeen-year-old Raider rioter, 2003

  In the wake of the Raiders’ 2003 Super Bowl loss, a section of East 14th Street/ International Boulevard from 35th to 94th Avenues turned into what one police observer called “a war zone.” “Oakland Police No Match for Street Mayhem,” “Roving Mobs Surprised Police,” “Disappointed Fans Vent Anger in Streets,” screamed the headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune. Whether the disturbances constituted a “riot,” “mini-riot,” or a mere outbreak of “Mob violence” was a matter of debate among observers, but the hours-long battle between 400 police officers and as many as two thousand mostly young Raiders fans was an indisputably startling event and yet another piece of bad news for Oakland, East Oakland in particular. In the late seventies, John Krich, in Bump City: Winners and Losers in Oakland, called the city a “modern ghost town” but still reveled in the life of “‘funky East Fourteenth,’ the world’s second-longest gut, where six-pack and pick-up rule the strip” and one can see “the races uniting over a fat joint and the Raiders.” By 1995, Gary Rivlin in Drive By saw less poetry and more pain as he relayed “the lures and dangers of East Fourteenth . . . one of the two main arteries running the length of East Oakland, a river of addicts, prostitutes, and down-and-outers drifting by the good people of the community.” Jim Zamora, a current Oakland resident and San Francisco Chronicle reporter who covered the riots, describes East 14th (which turns into International Boulevard as it makes its way out of downtown, passes Lake Merritt, heads into Fruitvale and continues on by Elmhurst to San Leandro) as “the spine of Raider Nation.” Zamora notes of East Oakland that “it’s ethnically diverse, low-income, with a lot of crime and drugs. It’s the home of many immigrants. This particular area [of the riots] is the home of the Hells Angels and was also Black Panther turf. East 14th is the oldest drag in Oakland. A lot of factories were on that street. The GM plant and other industries. It’s the blue-collar heart of the city.”1

  Much has been done to break the blue-collar heart of Oakland. The working-class flatlands of West, East, and North Oakland have traditionally been cut off from the affluent hills by race and economics. As Beth Bagwell notes in Oakland: The Story of a City, posh areas in the hills were built, by both covert and overt means, as racially “restricted” areas: “Everyone knew what it meant when a district was ‘restricted’; even if the racial restrictions were not spelled out in the brochures, they were in the fine print of the purchasing contract.” Some well-heeled areas such as Rockridge openly advertised their exclusionary practices: as one 1911 pamphlet proclaimed, “It is probably unnecessary even to mention that no one of African or Mongolian descent will ever be allowed to own a lot in Rockridge or even rent any house that may be built there.” While not restricted by race, economics kept blue-collar whites out of the hills as well. Still, as long as there was work in the sometimes booming industries tied to the railways, docks, shipyards, canneries, and auto factories, Oakland’s multi-ethnic working class was able to carve out a piece of the American dream. The shipyard and wartime industry boom that came with World War II brought a large number of mostly southern black and white migrants, increasing the city’s population and creating new tensions. Old timers were leery of the new influx of workers and, as historian Marilynn Johnson notes, federal housing policies “introduced new forms of federally sanctioned racial segregation that would influence postwar neighborhood development.” These policies increased the urban density along the bay flatlands and later building loan programs planted the seeds for white flight to the suburbs. During the war, however, tensions between migrants and “native” Oaklanders did not lead to a white exodus from the city’s flatlands. Instead, while Oakland’s conservative political establishment sought, unsuccessfully, to drive out the new migrant workers, a multi-ethnic working-class city thrived amid the conflict.2

  The spine of Raider Nation

  After the war, Oakland began to lose shipyard and other blue
-collar jobs it would never adequately replace. West Oakland, the heart of the city’s black community, dubbed “the Harlem of the West” for its rich cultural life, continued to attract migrants even as economic conditions deteriorated. A brutal combination of factors led to West Oakland’s decline. Some of the most damaging developments were the government’s refusal to build adequate new housing, the destruction of old housing stock by urban renewal projects, and the construction of the Cypress and Grove-Shafter freeways. Another intrusion was the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. These thoroughfares sliced through the middle of a decaying West Oakland, and the Loma Prieta earthquake traumatized the city’s poorest neighborhood even more, driving residents to the northern and eastern flatlands, with East Oakland receiving the lion’s share of those fleeing the west side of the city. All the while, East Oakland itself was bleeding solid blue-collar jobs.3 As Rivlin points out:General Motors, Ford, Caterpillar, Mack, International Harvester—all shut down plants that had been operating in and around East Oakland for decades. The General Motors plant, in Oakland since 1916, laid off nearly 3,000 workers when it closed its plant at Seventy-third and Macarthur Boulevard in the early 1960s; a second GM plant, in nearby Fremont, laid off another 5,900 workers in 1981 and 1982. The Ford factory still stands at the edge of East Oakland, but now it is home to a bingo parlor and an indoor flea market. In its heyday Ford employed 5,000 workers.