Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  DK: James Baldwin?

  JS: I was going to say Frank Ocean—[laughter]—but sure. There are specific challenges for each minority—black and gay aren’t the same, obviously—but the common link if you’re the only one of your kind is that it’s tough to get taken seriously by the majority. People hear you complain and say, “If you don’t like it here, then leave.” If you don’t complain, you start feeling complicit. I just had to learn to ignore everyone, even myself, wait it out, and save my energy for a more worthwhile [inaudible]. Turned out to be a good place for me to grow up, actually, because good politicians aren’t only adept at being frustrated, but also at knowing what to do with that frustration.

  DK: I’m afraid to ask about your off-the-record response.

  JS: Off the record? It’s where I’m from, but it’s not what I’m about. I’ve been able to move, the fuck, on. [Laughter.]

  THE PLAZA

  Some notes on the city at Sixteenth and Mission: In the corner are the steps leading down to the BART platforms, to the trains, all trains this way, this way all trains. Between you and those steps lives a micro-city; women selling homemade tamales; women nursing babies; pigeons loitering near the bus stops. There are the homeless and cheery—the jokesters, the peddlers, the I NEED MONEY FOR WEED sign-holding, missing-tooth-grinning, dog-owning variety; and there are the homeless and despondent—asleep, you hope, bundled up on the concrete in eighty-four-degree, windblown weather, nearly indistinguishable from the trash bags tethered to their ankles with yellow, flapping drawstrings. Their pockets are full of fifteen-cent, shoeprint-stomped BART cards they’ve peeled from the ground in their travels through the macro-city, travels that must occur in the night, though you can’t imagine them getting up off the checkered floor. Note the checkered floor. Black-and-white diamonds on the plaza, and you think: Makes sense. Chess is a game, checkers is a game, but chess and checkers have nothing on this. This—surviving a place—is the game. The hiss-stop, gunshot blare of a bus shakes everyone but the permanent inhabitants of the micro-city, and a heat wave from the bus’s exhaust turns the whole scene into a watery mirage you can’t wait to get close enough to dispel. You arrive at the steps and turn the corner, careful not to touch the handrail, and a black man in a battered three-piece suit is selling flowers on the stairwell. Just in the seven seconds it takes to cross the plaza to the steps, you’ve grown so used to ignoring these people that you’ve already made it to the bottom of the steps before realizing the person you’ve been walking with is still at the top, backlit by the day above him, fishing through his navy blue suede jacket for cash as the man in the suit bundles together the stems of four or five flowers with twine. The stench of urine—faintly at the back of your throat since arriving in the Mission—is faint no more. The stairwell, ground zero for the smell, is no place to linger. Your train is coming—you can hear it and feel the molecules in the air come to life, a savior—and you call out to the person at the top of the stairs: Our train is coming. The two of you jump on just before the sliding doors close, and take the two green, carpeted seats beneath the royal blue RESERVED FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES sticker. No one will call you out on sitting here, but a small-town kid like you cares about rules. You practice your response just in case: As soon as someone needs this seat, I’ll be happy to move. In your mind, the response comes off as less forthcoming and more self-righteous, so you practice until you achieve the desired tone. Beside you, the subject of your assignment—the future president—cradles a newspaper-wrapped cluster of yellow-and-orange violets and acacias, water seeping through last week’s top stories. You live in this world, it occurs to you. You’ve lived in the Bay Area for years, but you never felt comfortable calling it home. For the moment, you’ve been considering yourself a visitor on assignment, and you’ve enjoyed the label, the justification for being here, but there is no such thing as a visitor, and you know it. Maybe there is only one city, micro or macro, and you happen to be a citizen. A woman approaches. Your heart jumps.

  THE CONSTITUENT

  A white woman in her fifties, wearing a purple sweatsuit and an enormous camouflaged backpack, asked Joshua, in a voice chipped away at for decades by the fiberglass in her filters, if she could have his seat. She pointed to the disability sticker, and, although she seemed perfectly capable of standing and showed no signs of physical impairment whatever, Joshua stood and said, “Of course.” This forced me—though I knew I’d be giving up my seat to a piece of luggage—to follow suit. Once Joshua and I grabbed ahold of the rail above our heads, the woman, by way of thanking us, shimmied out of the straps of her backpack, molting from the thing like a cicada from its exoskeleton, shouldered it onto the seat next to hers, and coughed out the following: “If all fags was nice as the two of you.”

  I felt a shame so immediate and physical that I had to grip with both hands the bag of leftovers from the café so as not to slap her. But there was something comforting, too, to be thought of as part of a duo for the first time since Lloyd asked me to leave. All this, combined with my lack of sleep, prompted me to do what I’d avoided most of my life. I spoke up.

  “First of all,” I said, “only one of us is gay. And even if we both were, what would happen?”

  “What would happen if you two was gay?” she wanted to know.

  “No,” I said, reminding her impatiently: “You said, if all fags were as nice as us … and then you stopped. Well? Go on. Finish the sentence.”

  The woman stared up at me and scrunched her face in that curious way my mother always did when she’d forgotten why she came into the room. Joshua put his hand on the small of my back, and it took me a moment to realize this wasn’t the touch of a lover, but the touch of a wrestler tagging in.

  The train had reached the tunnel beneath the bay, and the sheer volume of the electricity and the steel and the aluminum put our conversation on pause.

  By the time we emerged from the tunnel and reached the quiet, outdoor stop at West Oakland, bracing from the sun coming greenly through the tinted BART windows, I’d moved on from the incident with the woman and prepared a question for Joshua regarding the evening’s event promoting job creation in the clean energy market. I was surprised, then, to see Joshua kneel on the train’s green carpet, face the woman in the purple sweatsuit with hardly two feet between their noses, and ask, in a calm and beguilingly respectful tone, if the woman happened to be a resident of Oakland’s third district.

  “Currently I live off Telegraph and Twenty-third,” she said. “I don’t know what the hell district that is.”

  “That’s it,” Joshua said, letting his legs slide under him, now that the doors had closed and the train was about to move again. What his smile couldn’t do, I didn’t know. His smile seemed capable of the vital but inglorious work of removing simple obstacles from otherwise happy days—it could jump-start a car, probably, or unclog a toilet. With this smile he introduced himself as the woman’s representative.

  The woman coughed a laugh. “You’re a child.”

  “The seventh-youngest city council member ever,” I offered.

  “What’s your name?” Joshua asked.

  “Shelly.”

  “Nice to meet you, Shelly. You have a job?”

  “I’m between things,” said Shelly. Suddenly her tone changed, which I attributed solely to Joshua Stilt’s charisma. Her skepticism had been replaced by a revelatory joy, as if she’d trained for this conversation her entire life and now had to try desperately not to vocalize or repeat the phrase, “This is not a test.”

  “I’m a certified bus driver,” she said, “but for the furloughs. And we went on strike and nothing never came from it. And in the meantime, all the banks get free money, and there was protesters living on the streets a year ago, making the news every day, but they went and shut them up, too. My son Elijah—he’s sixteen—he gets a citation, but the banks, they get away scot-free.…”

  And the conversation went on in this way back and forth for a few minutes,
with Joshua expressing his sympathies and his plans, and Shelly expressing her doubts. When her stop arrived, Joshua thanked her for the talk and promised to bring up her concerns at the next city council meeting. He invited her to that night’s green jobs event. She heaved her backpack over each shoulder, stood framed in the doorway, and said, “You seem like a good enough young man, but there’s a lot, a lot, a lot of angry people in this city, people you can’t just sit down on the train with and talk civilized to. Know that.”

  Later, on our walk to his apartment, I could hear Joshua muttering to himself: “Shelly Retivat, bus furlough, Twenty-third and Telegraph.”

  “You memorize all your constituents?” I asked.

  He looked back at me. “Only the angry ones,” he said. “So, yeah. All of them.”

  THE TRANSCRIPT, 2/3

  DK: Tell me about the incident with the Confederate mascot.

  JS: I’d rather talk about my plans for the City of Oakland. Can we—?

  DK: Really quick, I want to get your take on what some people see as the reason you’re in politics in the first place.

  JS: Well, that’s not entirely true. I was always the kid who participated. I ran cross-country in elementary school, did every geography and spelling bee in middle school, and did the whole pep rally, spirit thing in high school. It wasn’t until I got to Stanford that the urge to engage just sort of arrived in the form of politics. But, sure. We can talk about the mascot, briefly. Being the mascot was a mistake—I’m reminded every day by black voters who’ve seen those pictures of me. But I was a kid—and a lonely one, at that. I was fourteen, fifteen, and my main focus was just getting through my time in the AV. I was my mother’s son back then more than I am now, and I wanted to be as undisruptive as possible. Even though I knew what the Civil War was all about, obviously, I’d internalized the idea that the Confederate flag had become a postracial symbol of independence, nothing more. Remember, there weren’t many black kids in our high school, and the others didn’t seem to want anything to do with me because I was on the pep squad with all these white kids, and [sounds of the espresso machine]. So, I understand why Hollywood stars and progressive talking heads were furious on my behalf—a Confederate mascot in California in the twenty-first century simply shocked people who don’t know how un-California most of California is—and I appreciated their concern. But the truth is: I was the one who had to keep going to that high school once the mascot was changed. And most of the students and teachers and parents—many of whom had gone to Antelope Valley High themselves—hated me for messing up a tradition they’d come to love. The parents were the worst. They saw it as the triumph of political correctness, or else feared the mascot-change represented some larger change they weren’t ready for. I don’t know. A lot of racists can coexist with black folks just fine as long as you don’t ask them to change anything. The way they saw it, you’ve got how many hundreds and hundreds of students, and you have to change the mascot on account of hurting a few black kids’ feelings? I had a mother leave a message on my home answering machine, politely informing me that if I wanted to be more comfortable, Compton was only an hour away. I got threatening letters from self-proclaimed skinheads and Nazis. I looked around and couldn’t spot any of the people who’d had my back before the mascot changed—not a single movie star, director, talking head, or politician. They’d all gone back to their lives of making money, and I was left to defend this political stand I’d never had any intention of taking in the first place.

  DK: So, the media attention during that time shaped your career, inadvertently, in a productive way?

  JS: Let’s just say I learned how to pick a fight—I’ll never pick one I don’t intend to fight forever. And now, that fight is for Oakland, so can we talk about that?

  THE SHOOT

  When we arrived at Joshua’s apartment, the photographer was already there, dragging a reclining chair from one side of the room to the other.

  “You’re going to sit here,” she told Joshua, “and you get to choose six books to stack on this radiator next to you. Not five, not seven. Six.”

  Jenna King was an old friend of Joshua’s from his days in the Black Student Union at Stanford. Some of the curls in her short hair were painted blue, and a yellow ring hung from her right nostril. When I asked if she’d been given a spare key to Joshua’s apartment, she said, “Man, Josh has a spare key to my apartment.” I figured out the two of them lived there together. Nina Simone’s Black Gold was spinning on an actual record player while Jenna set up the lights and probes. To get out of the way, I stayed in the kitchenette overlooking the living room and—“Is it cool if I…?”—brewed some coffee. Jenna King and Joshua Stilt danced lightly near the bookshelves, deciding which six books to include in the photograph.

  “I love Nina,” I said.

  “Who’s Nina?” Jenna asked.

  “Nina Simone,” I said, pointing to the record player.

  “Oh, okay. Just wanted to make sure you called her by her first name like you knew her.” She laughed, and Joshua laughed, too.

  At one point while Joshua browsed the spines along his shelves, Jenna came over to pour herself a cup of coffee. Without saying anything, she reached around me to grab the pot. I moved and said, “Sorry. I know my one job here is to stay out of the way, and I’ve failed.” I was hoping she’d laugh, but when it became clear she wasn’t going to, I started toward Joshua to see which books he’d selected to be photographed with.

  “Why couldn’t you get an Oakland writer to do this,” Jenna asked Joshua. “I don’t know. Maybe a black writer, even.”

  “We go back,” Joshua said. “He’s from my hometown.”

  “Oh, good,” Jenna said. “So his article that’s supposed to be about you and the City of Oakland is actually going to be about him and Nazi Valley.” She looked at me. “You seem uncomfortable.”

  I was. My discomfort was the result, I think, of simultaneously wanting (a) to engage in the discourse on race and the unavoidable white frame of my article, and (b) to pretend that because I had acknowledged said frame, I’d earned the right to ignore it altogether. The fact was, Jenna was right: I was finding myself less interested in Joshua’s political career, and increasingly drawn to the ways in which our histories had collided, the odd angles at which they’d spun out after the collision.

  “You know we need all kinds of folks behind us,” Joshua said.

  “Folks,” Jenna laughed.

  “The truth is,” I said, “I’m not putting anything about myself in the story. My editor won’t let it happen, and I’m boring anyway.”

  She studied the tiny alligator on my polo shirt, the pleats in my skinny-legged khakis. “You don’t say.” Then: “Why do you need to be here—Daley, right? I mean, here here. In this room. Do you want to be in the picture, too?”

  “I’m doing a day-in-the-life kind of thing—”

  “Jenna,” Joshua said. “Come take my picture.”

  “Look,” she said. “I’m not mad. But hear me out. I’m from Oakland. I think you’d be a great mayor, Josh, because you’re my friend, and you’re brilliant, and I know you’ve got your heart in the right place. But you should’ve got a local writer to do this story! Dude, he’s from your hometown. I get that. But if you want this kid around your campaign, maybe you should go run for mayor out there.” She let out a harsh laugh and turned her attention to me. “Shit, you guys should go run together in the city. It’s a long, vibrant tradition in San Francisco for white people to take credit for everything good Oakland’s ever done.”

  For a minute no one said anything. Joshua flipped open one of the books he’d chosen and leafed through it. “Jenna’s not entirely right,” he said into the pages, “but I would appreciate it, Daley, if you stopped asking me about the mascot thing, or the Antelope Valley in general.” He looked up from the book, first at Jenna and then at me. “Let’s focus on Oakland, and we should all be good to go. Yes?”

  Jenna took another mug from th
e cupboard, filled it with coffee, and handed it to me. “That mascot shit means a lot of things to a lot of people,” she said, “so I understand why you’re interested in it. But for me, the mascot means someone else told him their version of his own story, and he bought it. He dressed up in their version of his story. You know? The difference between having the power to tell your own story and allowing other people that power is the difference between scuba diving and having your head held under water. Put that in your notes.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “And don’t use me as some vehicle for a different point of view. If I show up in your piece, remember that I’m a whole thing. That most of my time is spent with my camera weighing me down, looking for an interesting shot. That I care enough to pay attention and love this man over here, who isn’t just a representative, you know, and neither am I.”

  THE EVENT

  A stage had been set up in a park at the western edge of Lake Merritt, and the three of us made our way through the swelling crowd and dozens of organizers’ booths to a man who pinned a microphone on the lapel of Joshua’s suede jacket. Jenna, camera at her eye, stayed busy recording every detail. I remembered this was my job, too, to record, so I began to pay more attention.

  Joshua couldn’t take five steps without an attendee at the event approaching him to shake his hand. I took note of his remarkable ability to remember names, faces, occupations, and situations specific to each voter. At one point, he asked an older black woman in a wheelchair how her granddaughter was adjusting to college life at Mills, and even this woman seemed stunned by Stilt’s memory. I looked to Jenna, who didn’t miss shooting a single embrace, to see if she was as impressed as everyone else seemed to be, but she only pulled her camera down from her face long enough to check the lighting in the previous photograph.