Oakland Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  INTRODUCTION

  Put on the Night

  PART I: NOT A SOFT CITY

  THE BRIDGE TENDER

  by Nick Petrulakis

  Fruitvale Bridge

  THE WISHING WELL

  by Kim Addonizio

  Pill Hill

  A MURDER OF SAVIORS

  by Keenan Norris

  Toler Heights

  DIVINE SINGULARITY

  by Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder

  Piedmont Avenue

  WHITE HORSE

  by Katie Gilmartin

  Bushrod Park

  PART II: WHAT THEY CALL A CLUSTERFUCK

  A TOWN MADE OF HUSTLE

  by Dorothy Lazard

  Downtown

  THE STREETS DON'T LOVE NOBODY

  by Harry Louis Williams II

  Brookfield Village

  BULLETPROOF

  by Carolyn Alexander

  McClymonds

  THE THREE STOOGES

  by Phil Canalin

  Sausal Creek

  CABBIE

  by Judy Juanita

  Eastmont

  TWO TO TANGO

  by Jamie DeWolf

  Oakland Hills

  PART III: A VIEW OF THE LAKE

  SURVIVORS OF HEARTACHE

  by Nayomi Munaweera

  Montclair

  PROPHETS AND SPIES

  by Mahmud Rahman

  Mills College

  BLACK AND BORAX

  by Tom McElravey

  Haddon Hill

  WAITING FOR GORDO

  by Joe Loya

  Hegenberger Road

  THE HANDYMAN

  by Eddie Muller

  Alameda

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  Put on the Night

  EDDIE MULLER: I grew up in San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, so my impression of Oakland—an impression the media fostered—was the badass black brother across the bay. Definitely dangerous. That was my image of Oakland from an early age. The Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, right down to Jack “The Assassin” Tatum and the outlaw Oakland Raiders. Scary, mean, borderline uncivilized. It took awhile to wise up and grasp the political and economic realities behind the image. Now that I’ve lived in the East Bay for almost thirty years, I’ve come to understand and appreciate the hardscrabble, working-class roots of Oakland—and I prefer it to what San Francisco has allowed itself to become.

  Jerry, as a transplanted East Coaster, what were your first impressions of the city?

  Jerry Thompson: Like you, I saw the city as a place soaked in racial and political contradictions. Scary, fabulously underrated, and fabulously criminalized. It’s the mothership of delicious and dangerous bad lighting and double gin martinis.

  My first impressions are of full busloads of soul music–loving, twelve-year-old superstar ghetto celebs, crackin’ on each other while laughing about the day and the years before them. It all blazed fearlessly in front of my nine-year-old East Coast eyes. I was seduced by an ancestral internal drumming that I knew little about but felt deeply—in the folks who looked like me, danced like me, and fought like me on classic soul recordings, dance floors, black movement magazines, and articles shared by Hazel and Larry, my wildly funky parents. It was no accident I was inspired by the collage of blaxploitation posters spread across entire walls in our ghetto-fabulous TV room with its shag carpet. Remember those?

  EM: Yeah, I remember . . . though I had other stuff on my walls. So what you’re saying is that while everybody else was coming to San Francisco wearing flowers in their hair, you had your sights definitely set on Oakland.

  JT: Discovering the wang-dang-doodle jams of the Pointer Sisters shifted my entire focus. Stunning black women were scatting and bebopping all the way into my soul. I think what we’ve put together in Oakland Noir is a volume where this city is a character in every story. He’s a slick brother strutting over a bacon-grease bass line and tambourine duet. She’s a white chick with a bucket of hot muffins heading to farmer and flea markets, to sell crafts and get hooked up with some fine kat with dreadlocks and a criminal record. And it’s in the faces of young fearless muthafuckas pounding keyboards and snapping fingers, lips, Snapchats, and Facebook timelines. It’s the core of not only Black Lives Matter but all lives matter. We are the children of fantasy and of the funk.

  EM: My hometown did not have a Tower of Power. The funk was definitely on the east side of the bay.

  JT: Yes, back then inviting some fucker to a party in the East Bay was like asking them to murder your dog. The rusty blue and gold cranes and flickering shipyard lights were like the hems of red leather skirts or second-hand leather bomber jackets, winking into the startled blue and green eyes of Bay Area transplants who have begun to remove the soul of what was created—forgetting that Oakland, with all its myth, was still a city that held a grudge.

  EM: Oakland was once considered a predominantly African American city, so I find it interesting that the cultural mix happening here now is much deeper than in the once-liberal bastion of San Francisco. That’s been going on for a while, but now the landowners and developers in San Francisco seem to be aggressively marginalizing everyone who’s not a high-paid techie. So Oakland is picking up the slack, whether the old guard likes it or not.

  There’s this restaurant in downtown Oakland called Le Cheval, a Vietnamese place; it’s huge and bustling and has survived numerous attempts to displace it. Every time I eat there I feel like the great American experiment has actually worked. A Vietnamese immigrant family runs the place and the patrons are a cross section of the city: middle-class African Americans, starving artists, Catholic nuns, blinged-out gangbangers, off-duty cops, relocated hipsters, Raider cheerleaders celebrating a birthday. Feed us well and we’ll all get along!

  JT: I would only discover Oakland’s true voice after realizing one day that I had been living here longer than all the years back east put together. I was not a native but I was not a stranger. Being afraid, and pretending not to be, was like stretching myself out. Learning how to stare life in the face as a black man in a city of black men systematically being erased. I’d find myself in conversations with brother and sisters who loved testifying that they were born and raised in Oakland. Born and raised, a native to all first impressions.

  EM: My favorite Oakland moment was when I went with my wife to Maxwell’s, a downtown nightclub—now closed, sadly. It may have been the one time I went out into the night kinda hipster casual, and the brother at the door turned me away, saying I was “underdressed.” Now, I’ll work a suit-and-tie morning, noon, and night—but I got 86’d from this place. Went back a week later, got the once-over, and the doorman announced, “This gentleman is clean and sharp and ready for an evening!” I loved that. I’d found a new home away from home. Forget the color, forget the class—just show up turned-out and ready to party.

  JT: I feel that my mission is to stand up, to create, to connect, and to carry on in some way—the flip side of ripping down the history of all those brothers and sisters and other minorities who found their way to the end of the train tracks in West Oakland.

  EM: I’m really glad there are a couple of midcentury stories in this collection—from Dorothy Lazard and Katie Gilmartin—because as time passes, not many people may remember how Oakland came to be the city it is today—that it was a migration of Southern African Americans who came here during World War II to
work in the shipyards. This changed the racial makeup of the city. In my house, the upstairs had been converted into a separate apartment, with its own kitchen and gas, to provide living quarters for WWII shipyard workers. That happened all over the East Bay, and the vast majority of those migrant workers stayed. Who wouldn’t?

  JT: True. Many did stay—the Pullman porters, civil rights leaders, trailblazers, legendary early black business owners who are still considered by many to be unsung heroes, but by others to be gangsters, pimps, and swindlers. And yet at the same time they are fathers, sons, and brothers raising a living history.

  EM: We agreed, right off the bat, that this book would be most interesting to readers if the lineup of writers loosely reflected the demographics of the city. I know a lot of crime-fiction writers—the Bay Area is a breeding ground for them these days—but it didn’t feel right to have, dare I say, “outsiders” telling stories about Oakland from a distance. Because you’ve worked in bookstores here for many years, you were aware of local voices I would have overlooked.

  JT: This collection reflects the families who moved here, found their voices, created art, built their homes here. It was paramount that we kept close to the pioneers like Ishmael Reed, Amy Tan, Gary Soto, and modern mystery writers like Nichelle Tramble, who set their stories in and around Blues City. I set out to find the writers who were inspired by our history, Oakland’s black, Hispanic, LGBT history, its Black Panther history. I did what any eighties East Coast nerdy writer would do: I called on the ancestrals and they guided me. I asked Dorothy Lazard, Judy Juanita, and Keenan Norris for stories, and they answered that call without hesitation, as did new writers like Mahmud Rahman and Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder.

  Of course, the collection could not be complete without giving some rebels the mic. “Two to Tango” by Jamie DeWolf and “The Wishing Well” by Kim Addonizio put the ride into high gear. Eddie, I think we share a mutual attraction for what lives in the shadows. Would you say that the shadows are teaching us or guiding us?

  EM: That’s an interesting way of looking at it. I don’t think the shadows do either. I think they’re just there, always. It’s up to us whether we learn anything traipsing through them. These days, writers and readers aren’t denying the darker parts of our existence as much as they used to, especially in crime fiction. Some writers just do it for fun, because it’s become the fashionable way to get published. You know, “gritty violence” and all that bullshit. The genuine darkness in noir stories comes from two places—the cruelty of the world’s innate indifference, and the cruelty that people foster within themselves. If you’re not seriously dealing with one, the other, or both, then you’re not really writing noir.

  JT: I see the stories in this collection as manifestations of thousands of unfinished conversations, gang songs, street hustles—lovers and haters creating art from their pain and regret. Oh, you better believe the Black Panthers are in these stories, as are the next wave of hip-hop noir rappers, like Ise Lyfe, Cookie Money, and Thizz Nation, who are slapping big beats behind their pains and passions. Oakland is a city of black power, brown power, people power . . . Let’s roll, people!

  Eddie Muller & Jerry Thompson

  Oakland, California

  January 2017

  PART I

  Not a Soft City

  THE BRIDGE TENDER

  by Nick Petrulakis

  Fruitvale Bridge

  “Are those sirens? Gotta be. What do you think? Fire? Police?” She tilted her head and tried to catch more of the siren symphony below us. Whether or not the sirens were headed to the bridge depended on which side the call came from. If it came from the Alameda side, those sirens were ours; if the call came from the Oakland side, the sirens wouldn’t be headed our way, not yet. Always too much going on in Oakland, never enough in Alameda.

  “You were talking about your boy,” I said, and that made her look back at me.

  Because the sun lay low—and behind—her face was shadowed by her black curls, making it hard to see the eyes that were soft brown, a shade lighter than her skin. But just the mention of her son made her smile. I had to remember that.

  “You’d like him,” she said. Then the wind got strong and she had to finger some of those curls away from her face. She’d started crying again so she took a deep breath and then released it, slow. “Close your eyes,” she said, yelling because of the wind.

  I did, shut out the deepening sun, and everything got louder. The wind against my ears, the traffic from the bridge below us. But not the sirens, they’d grown faint—so they hadn’t been for us.

  “You close your eyes strange,” she said.

  I cupped a hand behind my ear.

  “Salty people,” yelling again. “You make your eyes all squinchy when you close them. Rest of us? We just close our eyes when we close our eyes.”

  I smiled, but then a gust shot up from over the water, shot up from way down, buffeted hard against me, and I rocked back, scared again, because when you’re sixty-five feet in the air—legs dangling from the side of a railroad bridge, and your eyes are closed, and you feel an unexpected blast of wind against your chest—you fucking rock back and clench your hands even harder against the rail, digging grit into your palms, slicing your skin with flaked paint, and you involuntarily breathe in and hold it, and then realize that only two seconds have passed since you smiled.

  I wanted to check my fingers, see if I’d cut them, but I’d have to open my eyes and loosen my grip to do that.

  Exhale.

  “No peeking,” she said, still loud. “Now, make a picture of my boy inside your head. First, think about chubby cheeks. But chubby cheeks with attitude, am I right? Now amp up the cute. Definitely amp up the attitude.” The wind quieted. “I used to have cheeks like that.”

  I pictured her reaching up, almost touching her face with her delicate hands, then stopping.

  “It was time for the talk,” she said. “You know? The Talk. Everyone thought he was too young.”

  Dead air.

  With my eyes shut I was left to wonder what she was doing in the sudden still of the day. Smoothing her dress? Strumming the nylon rope with her left hand?

  “They don’t know how curious he is. My boy kept asking questions, real crazy ones. ’Specially after he got Hammer.”

  I missed what she said next because of the wind. It rushed at me again and I opened my eyes. It was bright, and she was lovely in the bright light—lovely in her yellow dress, her red sneakers.

  Lovely and close. But not close enough.

  I squinted from the light and tried not to gawk at her. Or the view—one of the best things about working bridges. The Coliseum in front of us with the hills after; San Francisco behind us with its bay. Its own bridges, its own views.

  She stopped talking, seemed to judge the distance between us. Had it changed? Had I moved closer? No, not yet. So she started in on the rope again, tapped it with a fingernail painted as red as her shoes.

  “Everybody said getting a kitten was stupid. That I was stupid. For getting my boy a cat. And a black cat? Bad luck, am I right? But my boy said that was dumb. Thinking black brought bad.”

  She smiled again and started crying. Visions of her boy kept her doing that. Cry, smile, cry.

  “A female kitten, right? But he called her Hammer. MC would’ve made it a boy’s name, but just Hammer? He didn’t see a problem with that.”

  The wind stilled again and a toddler’s shriek cut up through the hush. We peered down at a mom—dressed as Cinderella ready for the ball—pushing a faded green stroller along the bridge below, then I looked at the water churning under that bridge, swirling, the surface of the estuary curling out like breath, the waves an exhalation, angry immediately under us but the whorls calming the farther they spread.

  “What’s that mom see when she looks up?” she said, and let go of the rope, pointing down, the slanting light catching a flash of shiny red from her nails.

  “She’s not looking at us,” I
said as we heard another shriek, “she’s got that baby to worry about. And even if she did look up, Cinderella wouldn’t notice us, not with those clouds.”

  If she could let go of her rope, I could let go of the rail, so I did, hitched one thumb over my shoulder at those beautiful clouds, did it fast and then grabbed the rail again. The grit under my palm familiar now, comforting.

  “You want me to look at some pretty clouds?” She shook her head. “Not me, I’m past all that.”

  “Okay,” I said, “okay.” And I held the rail tight. As long as I clutched the rail I was safe, I wouldn’t fall. “Cinderella, she’d see this rail bridge we’re sitting on, suspended by those tall, Erector Set towers.” I nodded at one, then the other. “That tower in Oakland, that one in Alameda, separated by six hundred feet of water.”

  “This Erector Set ain’t pretty, but she sure works hard.” She palmed away more tears. “Story of my life right there.”

  “This bridge is important—she connects us to California. Don’t diminish her.”

  She wasn’t listening. “What does that mom see right now?”

  Right after she said mom, she touched her belly. A short, soft movement.

  “If she looked up, which she didn’t, by the way, no one is looking up, no one sees us. But if she did, she’d think she was seeing one bridge when of course it’s two. Ours, right here, the rail bridge, looking like an oversize, elongated H,” I pressed harder on the girder we sat on, “with this huge section of track that just moves as one piece up and down, and when it goes down it connects the rails on the Oakland side to the tracks on the Alameda side.”

  Another cry from below but I couldn’t see Cinderella. Strollering back into Oakland, she was blocked from my view by the north tower.

  “Then there’s the bridge for cars below us. The Miller-Sweeney—my Miller-Sweeney—a workhorse drawbridge. But we all combine them since we’re neighbors, and make one span out of two, and call it the Fruitvale Bridge.”