Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  Oakland is broken down into sections, man. You have the “haves” and you have the “have-nots.” And you have those little wealthy pockets, and you have the poor. It is kind of systematic that they get the Latinos and blacks out of Oakland. I mean projects like Acorn. They pull those things down. They move people. They rebuild those things for different people. For the working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos, places like Antioch and Stockton are getting more desirable and they are moving out there. The white folks are coming back. They got tired of driving two or three hours to work every day and they are moving back to Oakland, building all this stuff. I mean, housing has gotten ridiculous. Oakland, man, you used to be able to buy (six or seven years ago) a three- or four-bedroom house for $150,000. Now they’ve got like two bedrooms and they’re asking like $300,000.

  But you still have these pockets of ghetto, and a whole lot of young black men, maybe in their twenties, who look at selling drugs as a profession. They go to jail, get out, keep selling drugs, and kill each other—80 percent of the murders are drugs. They’re down there and life is miserable, basically, and they can’t see no way out. And Jerry Brown is the mayor and, you know what I’m talking about, he’s bringing 10,000 new residents downtown. They’re building all this shit downtown and all of a sudden, people can’t afford it. It gets all messed up. You know, haves and have-nots, and the folks that can afford it are the white capital set.

  I live in East Oakland, right up 38th Avenue, and they have, like a Raider block, man. Right across the street, my neighbor Art, he’s a Mexican guy and he used to be a little gangster. But he’s really cool. On Sundays, him and about six friends of his, all dudes, they are standing on the porch. He has twelve steps leading up to the sidewalk, and they come, standing on the porch with black-ass glasses on, Raiders black, from top to bottom, man. They are standing there like gangsters ready to go into the ghetto, and everybody on the block is down with the Raiders. I mean they save year round, like some people might save to go on vacation, to get season tickets. I’m not down with that. I will stand over there with them with my Raiders stuff on, but I’m going back to my house.

  I grew up in North Richmond, and that’s probably one of the poorest communities in California. The average income for a family of four is like $9,000 a year for the mother on welfare and the daddy, whose profession is selling dope. That’s where I was born and that made me leave for Oakland, to the east side, in my early teens. I lived in poverty neighborhoods my entire life, that’s why Oakland is my city, man. When you read my books, you read what these eyes have seen. It’s all make-believe, but I saw similar stuff.

  Renay told us about his day job:

  I am a custodian. Right now it’s for the police station. I never wanted to work there for my whole career, because, you know, the young African American mentality, I didn’t want to be anywhere near the police. [But] I’ve been at the police station for the last five or six years. A lot of [the police] were assholes. Many of them were cool. They were just regular folks. If I was in my twenties (I’m forty-four now) and down in the police station, I’d go to the Academy. When I was in City Hall, I saw the politicians work. They get free tickets to every Warriors home game, and they get free tickets to every A’s home game, and every Raiders home game and, many times, I’d see those tickets in the garbage. When I worked at City Hall, I got a lot of tickets to go to games. When the teams were sorry, the tickets were plentiful. When the team is good, they don’t give them away. But I don’t like people tripping. They think they’re so important, you know, it goes to their heads, man.

  Renay was a lot more enthusiastic as we discussed his writing and the amazing story of how he went from helping his daughter with her writing homework to the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune, appearances on the News Hour, and a book contract:My writing? Well, everybody knows that I started helping my daughter with her school writing. She was in the seventh grade and she wrote about “What I did this summer” [and wrote about a sentence]. And so, I’m like, “Baby, you cannot do that in the seventh grade. You’ve got to write more. Write it all, baby. Get descriptive.” So it was like that. After she left, I kept writing. And before I knew it, I knew I could write a book, and I started telling everybody, but nobody thought I could.

  I got the determination from when I was a rapper. Rap music came out in’79. By 1982, I had a rap song on a record and I was selling it in City Hall and all over the city of Oakland, with a little bit of airplay. The title of my record was The Job Is a Mother. One of my partners I met watching a Raiders game, and I played that music and I told him, “Man, I could do that shit.” He bet me that I couldn’t, so I became a rapper because of a bet. I did three rap albums. Back in the eighties, in my community, I showed quite a few people how to make a record. A lot of them went on to making a whole lot of money. People are always trying to charge everybody for information. I didn’t. I’m not into that.

  Renay then explained how he runs writing and publishing workshops for free.

  Nobody told me nothing. So why would I charge them? I’ve got my own little style, my own little niche. I’ve met a lot of East Coast writers that do the gangster lit, too, but I think theirs is weaker than mine. [Once my story hit the media] all of a sudden I have all of these offers [from presses that had previously rejected my work] and people putting pressure on me from all different directions, and I was thinking that this must be like it is with them recruiters trying to get kids to play football, or maybe worse because I was talking to four or five agencies. Do I pick the one with the big publisher where I’ll be well known, with my picture all over Black Expressions and Infinity magazines, or do I go with the small little mom-and-pop type publishing house? I had people cuss me out. I was telling them [I was going to go with a small Bay Area publisher] North Atlantic.

  I don’t expect everybody to like what I do. But there is a market for what I do. I sold 40,000 [self-published] books and that shocked some people. I had this little army of people selling books. That same rap mentality, [people sold them] in barbershops, beauty parlors, restaurants, corner stores, any place of business that would sell them. I had them all over. And they were going home and selling books to people in their neighborhood. I think that corporate America don’t want folks to know this information. They don’t want those kind of books out there.

  On the morning of the Raiders’ home opener, the Oakland Tribune featured an article entitled “Wild in Oakland” about the Raiders’ prowess in going 7–1 in home openers since returning to Oakland in 1995. “Home is where the hole is.... We’re talking Black Hole,” the Bill Soliday piece crowed. In the article, Mo Collins discounted the lack of sellouts and said, “I’ll take our 20 to 30,000 against anybody’s 80 to 100,000 any day. Our fans are unique. They follow us around. They go to hostile environments. They don’t care. They’re going to support their team, and that’s all you can ask as a player.” Tim Brown said of the 50,000-plus crowd that the paper anticipated, “Hey man, people need to work, kids need new shoes . . . all that stuff. You don’t worry. Whoever is there, we know we are going to get their best. Knowing you can raise or lower your hands and the crowd is going to do whatever you ask them to do . . . that is what makes it so special.” And it did feel a little special before the kickoff as the crowd in the Black Hole flipped off the Bengals when they came on the field and went nuts as the Raiders were introduced. Still, there were a surprising amount of empty seats in this, the most legendary, fanatical site of Raiders fan zeal. At times, the music was louder than the fans were, and I couldn’t help but notice the guy a couple of rows in front of us who slept through most of the first half. At one point, some dude got up on his seat, turned around and screamed his guts out, “C’mon Raiders fans, they need our help!” “Shut up!” somebody yelled back.3

  The Raiders were outgained by 180 yards, and the feeble Bengals had ball possession over two-thirds of the game. The crowd was frequently cranky with shouts of “C’mon,
you morons!” “Goddamn it, Gannon!” and “Make the tackle, fuckhead!” filling the air. When the team left the field at halftime, there were scattered boos. It was a long way from the magic evening of the AFC championship game after which my ears rang for a day and my voice was left hoarse from shouting for joy. The team just felt off, out of sync, and the crowd kept waiting for the party to start. It wasn’t really until the fourth quarter, with the game tied at 13, that the spark was lit when Phillip Buchanon picked off a John Kitna pass and ran it back 83 yards for a touchdown and the ecstasy flowed as the crowd jumped and danced and swayed to the music. But it was a shallow high as the Raiders squeaked by one of the worst teams in football to win the game 23–20. The cops didn’t even let the Black Hole enjoy the afterglow as they gruffly announced, “Start packing it up! We can’t go home until you go home!” A couple days later, Raiders’ longtime executive assistant Al LoCasale retired, two games into the season. It was another bad omen as the Raiders headed into Denver on shaky legs.4

  Nine

  Raiders Rage

  Most people are confined to lives of monotony. Year in and year out, workers in

  offices, factories, and large and small companies follow the same daily routine.

  They catch the same bus or train; they drive along the same route.... They

  endure hours of boredom, often doing a job which offers them little or no sat-

  isfaction. They come home to face the predictable problems of family life or the

  loneliness of a flat in some dreary location. What greater contrast could there

  be with a life of piracy. The pirates escaped from the laws and regulations that

  govern most of us. They were rebels against authority, free spirits who made up

  their own rules.

  David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag

  As David Cordingly points out in his study of piracy, the romance of the pirate persists despite the fact that “most men and women who were attacked by pirates found it a terrifying and deeply shocking experience.” Indeed pirates were “tough and brutal young men armed with knives and cutlasses” who “deliberately knocked down or slashed anyone who showed resistance,” the result of which was that “often the attack ended with some of the victims lying dead on the deck or with their bleeding bodies being thrown over the side to the sharks.” Thus, it is not surprising that the Raiders’ image appeals to a lot of people with a chip on their shoulder. Perhaps this more than anything else is what unites Al Davis with his fans even as his corporate piracy frequently succeeds at their expense. Raiders fans have attitude, whether it be their renegade capitalist owner, his lumpenproletarian fan base, or just the average smart-ass Raiders fan who enjoys watching rival teams lose and hates losing to them more than anything else. When the Raiders lose, give them a wide berth.1

  The news going into the Raiders’ devastating Monday night pummeling in Denver was that Sebastian Janikowski, the team’s renegade Polish field-goal kicker, had been arrested for a bar fight in Walnut Creek, adding to his list of off-field indiscretions and helping to build his Raiders rebel legend. In Raider Nation, a stay in jail is no shame when compared with missing a big field goal. In this case, the field goals wouldn’t matter as I sat with my Raiders fan buddy Brad in the Rock Bottom Brewery in downtown San Diego and watched the Silver and Black endure a royal beating at the hands of the hated Denver Broncos. I had gone to the Rock Bottom because it was the 2003 season home to the San Diego Raiders fan club, but the crowd was grim-faced soon after the helmeted skull banner of the “Original Raiders Fan Club, San Diego” was hung over the railing of the upstairs balcony. I got a quick interview with a kid in rockabilly gear and a retro Raiders cap who told me he liked the Raiders, “’Cause everyone in San Diego hates them,” but I didn’t have the heart to pester the rest of this grumpy bunch. Brad left after a burger, two beers, and 24 unanswered Bronco points by halftime.

  I stayed to the bitter end and watched a guy in a Garner jersey walk by glaring, a guy in a Gannon jersey snap at a waitress, and another guy yell “cheap old bastard” at the TV when Al Davis came on. It was getting ugly. Somebody yelled “punk ass bitch!” as a Raider missed a tackle and the pride-and-poise boys sank even further behind. “Why are the Raiders fans still here?” I overheard one of the busboys wonder to a co-worker. “I wish they’d go sink into a Black Hole.” The manager was going over a “customer complaint” with one of the waiters, who said, “These guys get up in my face and get all macho with me.” At one point, after it was 31–0, Gannon jogged over to the sideline and started screaming at the coaches, getting in their faces to the cheers of some of the Raiders fans in the bar. The wheels were falling off, and anybody with any sense could see that the 2003 Raiders were not on track to go back to the Super Bowl.

  Raiders rally, downtown Oakland

  I interviewed a waitress named Beth who had worked a lot of Raiders games. “These guys are really loud and a bit touchy-feely. The guy at the third table slapped me on the ass because his friend bet him to do it,” she said, glancing behind her. “No tip is worth that. ‘Gannon’ over there by the bar was really rude to me, and then he walks up to me and says, ‘I’m sorry, honey, it’s the Raiders, not you.’” She looked at my Raiders hat and said, “Some of them are really nice . . . and some of them are really weird.” I thanked her for her time and started walking the long mile home to my flat. Seeing a lone depressed Raiders fan after a brutal loss inspired a number of courageous Chargers fans sitting in chi-chi bar patios to flip me off. This was followed by a “fuck your Raiders” from a drunk in a three-piece suit. I walked on into the heart of the mean American night.

  Panthers and Pirates

  Among the wage earners, sailors were by far the most militant. They included men of all colors and a few women who went to sea disguised as men. They displayed a legendary contempt for wielders of arbitrary authority, from constables to kings. Several thousand of them became pirates, whose declared purpose was to “plunder the rich.”

  Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty,

  From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

  The next week in Oakland Kelly and I met Michele Clark at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company, which was rapidly becoming our home away from home. Michele is a pretty, dark-haired, and down-to-earth director of a nonprofit in East Oakland, and was referred to us by one of our Raiders e-mail contacts, Bobby Davis. She is decidedly not a Raiders fan, which is why we were curious about her. Having worked for nonprofits in Oakland for seventeen years, she had a critical view of the Raiders organization and the impact support for the team—both governmental and fan—have had on the city. Michele, who lives in the hills above Lake Merritt, currently directs the Youth Employment Partnership center, which is located on East 14th Street, right in the heart of Oakland’s Raider Nation:We are in the ground zero of the area that the riots were in, so I’m very familiar with the neighborhood. It’s extremely diverse culturally there. I think [Oakland] is the most diverse city in the country, and that neighborhood is the most culturally intense area in Oakland. My building happened to be part of the riot. We lost fifteen ten-foot-by-six-foot windows, $15,000 worth of damage. There was no insurance on them because you can’t get insurance for the plate glass in buildings in that neighborhood. It was interesting to think: “Would it have been any different if [the Raiders] had won [the Super Bowl]?”

  It was quiet at first. I think the police called us around 3:30 a.m. because they couldn’t assure us that the neighborhood would be all right. They called me back to meet them at 5:00, and they told me that [people] had smashed all the windows but still it wasn’t calm enough at that point to get in.

  I was raised in Baltimore and the Al Davis deal [with the city of Oakland] and the Colts deal [the Colts owner moved the team to Indianapolis literally in the middle of the night] have a lot of similarities. But the end of the stories are very different, as I watched people I knew who were raised as Colts fans negotiate the trail and get anothe
r football team. They kind of changed football culture there, where with the Raiders they were here and then they left, but not really, and then they came back, which was pretty shocking to me at the time, but, as my friends pointed out, not that shocking. So the whole Raiders thing seems somewhat alienating to me.

  Michele’s background and relationship with Oakland is compelling. Having moved to the city with her former husband so he could go to graduate school, she “loved Oakland so much I never went back. I just had no desire to go anywhere else.” We couldn’t help but think about the movement of the white working class out of the city. Michele, interestingly, did the opposite.

  Because she’d had experience working in nonprofits, she was appointed by the county Board of Supervisors to bail out the Oakland food bank, which was in the heart of West Oakland.

  The Panthers, five years prior, had been highjacking trucks off the freeway to open their own food bank. It was that intense. I had no idea what I was getting into. And it was pretty interesting and that’s how I learned Oakland. I went in the churches, and food was distributed through the pantries and the community agencies. Once I got to know it, I loved it. I know Oakland has a pretty notorious reputation. But to me that is a very compelling argument as to why it needs to have funding, support, change, and all of those kinds of things.

  Currently, I run a large job-training program for high-risk teens and young adults. It was founded by a bunch of high school teachers who were tired of their kids going backward every summer, so they all got together and formed the Youth Employment Partnership. It’s comprehensive because it has a lot of different parts to it. For example, we’ve built houses with high school dropouts; we work with the community college system; we have GED programs for some of our clients; and much more—we have about eleven different programs. Eventually, we’ll be offering a charter school to children who have been dropped out of high school for more than two years, not pulling from the high school system. I’m a die-hard public school supporter.