Homecoming

Eric Miles Williamson

Last month I went back to Oakland, my hometown, the town I was raised in, and my father before me, and his father before him. I hadn't been back for over 20 years, since my father died. I've been trying to escape that town ever since I can remember.

The reason I went back was to receive the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for my most recent book of fiction. PEN is an international writers organization, and Oakland is a local branch. Norman Mailer won the award once, and the New York Times called it "the blue collar PEN," probably not in a flattering contex. I'm proud of it, though, winning the "blue collar PEN." It's the greatest honor of my life, other than writing for the IWW. I've got my laborer's card, Local 304, Oakland, California, in my pocket as I write this. All my novels are set in the Bay Area, and my characters are the workers I grew up with and toiled with and bled with and drank with, the men and women who reared me.

When I got off the plane and into the arc-welded ozone air where I could smoke a cigarette, the first person I saw was a shirtless man with hippie hair and an Oakland Raiders logo tatooed beneath his chest fur. I made my way to the Alamo car rental booth ($9.00 a day—it's Oakland, after all), and behind the counter was a large black woman in a purple dress, fake pearl necklace and fingernails long as chisels and painted red. She asked for my license and my credit card, which I gave her, and to which she laid scrutiny. My driver's license is Texas, by the way, has been since 1986, my first tour down here.

I was dressed in my usual duds: a heavy flannel shirt, open; a white wife-beater undershirt, torn Levi's, beaten-up cowboy boots, my 30 year-old black Stetson fedora.

She gave me the up-down with her quick eyes. "You from here," she said, and she cut me a look.

"What?" I said. "What's the deal? What gives me away."

"It's in your blood," she said. She didn't laugh. She looked at me hard, a chastisement, an accusation, a look that condemned me for abandoning my home.

I walked toward my rental car in shame.

My first Oakland stop was Dick's Restaurant (featured, for some reason, in a Radiohead video). It's a diner on the railroad tracks in the industrial/warehouse blear of San Leandro, on the Oakland border. Both my younger brother and my father had their wedding receptions at Dick's. There I met Ken Franklin, with whom I grew up. Neither of us had known who our fathers were, as is the fashion in Oakland. He's now a lawyer, and I'm a professor. Jim Blewer, another childhood friend who now stocks vegetables at Safeway, also met up with me there, and we walked into the unmarked bar, the door a secret to all but regulars.

"Hey, it's Eric, the skinny Williamson boy!" yelled J.R., the bartender. People raised their drinks in toast. It had been 20 years since I'd been in Dick's, but there at the bar sat the men I pumped gas for in my youth. Now they were old, but I am too, so what the fuck. An oldster sat at the end of the bar rigged up to an oxygen tank and smoking, his wife at his side. At the other end of the bar a 94 year-old man slammed boilermakers. J.R. brought me a Scotch and a beer without my asking for it, my two-fister of choice for 30 years now. A train passed and the ice in our glasses rattled and nobody talked until the whistle dopplered away into the petrochemical dark. Dogs howled. At the end of the night I helped the 94 year-old man off his barstool and into his wheelchair so he could sleep away the ache and the lonliness of having outlived most of his family and friends, everyone but the people at Dick's.

On the way to my hotel, I stopped at Taggart's Liquors on Dolittle, the road that runs from Alameda, through Oakland, and ends in San Leandro. It's a road built on landfill, on the garbage dumps that ring the San Francisco Bay. Taggart's is where we used to buy our booze when we were teenagers, Taggart himself taking our cash and telling us to shove the pint bottles down our pants before we left the store so the cops wouldn't bust him or us. Now it was manned by a Chinese guy, but the same ice-bin of malt liquors—Old English, Mickey's, Schlitz, High Gravity, Colt—sat in front of the register. I bought a few Schlitz tallboys and a pack of Newports. I bought a pint of Gilbey's gin and tucked it into my pants in nostalgia.

I was home.

At the hotel I drank and smoked on the balcony, cameras and razor-wire protecting me from the fogged Oakland night. I began reading a short story collection, Before the End, After the Beginning, just published by Dagoberto Gilb. He works for the University of Houston, Victoria, a small satellite branch of the main university which services mostly working class students.

It's a perfect place for him. Gilb spent over a decade as a carpenter. He hails from a working class background. He wrote at least three very good books, The Magic of Blood (a collection of stories), Gritos (a collection of essays), and The Flowers (a novel). He was the kind of writer the workingman needs to read and hold up as a role model.

He was also a very good professor. The same year Gilb published The Flowers, his former student at Texas State University, M. Glenn Taylor, published The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, which became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and went on to international acclaim. There is no higher honor for a college professor than when his students outperform him, show themselves to be better than their mentors as Taylor clearly showed himself to be. It means the professor is doing his job. Taylor's The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart is a standout novel, better than not only Gilb's The Flowers, but superior to most novels of the decade 2000-2009. No doubt Dagoberto Gilb is proud of his former student.

Not long after the success of Dagoberto Gilb's student M. Glenn Taylor, Gilb had a stroke.

It's truly an awful thing that Gilb had a stroke. It's even worse that his considerable talent now seems to have abandoned him. Before the End, After the Beginning (the title sounds like a Lifetime Channel movie) is a sad, nearly tragic display of how much having a stroke can affect a person's mind.

The collection begins with a plea for pity, a story titled, "Please, Thank You." It's written entirely in lower-case, since the victim of the story, a Mexican-American who has (like Gilb) suffered a stroke, writes his story with only one hand. On the opening page he laments,

if I try to say something, they start asking the same questions. what is your name? [note that he can make a question mark but not a capital letter] what is the date? where were you born? like that, or sometimes, como te llamas? que es la facha de hoy? like im from mexico and just crossed, not american like them. im from here! ill bet my familys been here longer than yours!

Curious that other than the lack of apostrophe marks and capitalization there's not a typo in the story—as if the story were copy-edited but left semi-flawed so we readers could all weep together about the narrator's lamentable condition. Also, computers, like cell phones, automatically capitalize isolated "I"s and the first word following an endmark. In the story nothing happens except that Gilb vents and begs us for pity.

Oh, but there are more white people in the book. Plenty of them. Drug dealers and addicts, perverts who want the narrator to screw their wives, lowly cowards, backstabbers, racist republican hypocrite construction foremen, white women who sate their lusts on the Mexican Mandingo who makes several appearances in different guises (equipped, we're told, with a prodigious Mexican member). The prose style is uniformly as careless and poorly thought as the work we find in the lead story, and the whining and stereotyping (replete with nasty white cops who like to hassle Mexicans) pervasive. Even the last so-called story—our hero, dying, journeys to Mexico to see the homeland—has no plot, no redeeming use of language, no social import.

Writers have a social responsibility. Historically they have been looked to for guidance in the public sphere. The fiction of novelists and short story writers tells the truth of history more than any textbook written by the winners of the wars. When fiction writers lie to us and to themselves, they tell a truth, but it's an ugly one. It's the truth that bigotry, narcissicism, myopia, spite, and mindless rage are enduring facts as universal as dignity, honor, compassion, love, and the pride that results from selfless endurance and courage. Gilb no longer seems to understand that our goal is not to slit each others' throats in rage, but to band together, to unite, to not only throw off our chains but to wrap those chains around the necks of those who would divide and conquer us.

My last night in Oakland I walked from my hotel along Hegenberger, which was under construction, a train line being built to the airport. Homeless people huddled in corners under makeshift shelters of construction debris. At the convenience store an old black man wearing layers of shirts and jackets stood outside shivering.

"You okay?" I said.

"No," he said. "Man won't let me in the store to buy some food." His hands, buffed slick from toil, shone like weathered chrome.

"What you need? You need a beer?"

"No. I need food and a soda," he said. "Food and a soda."

I walked to the bullet-proof glass and the attendant talked to me through the slit in the window. "What do you want," he said.

"Beer and food," I said. "And a soda."

He buzzed the door and let me in. He had a foreign accent. "You're not from Oakland," I said.

"Algeria."

I started talking to him in French. I said, "You of all people should know that just because someone's black and not white doesn't make him a thief. How they treat you folks in Paris?"

"I have never been to Paris," he said.

"You're in Oakland now. You're the foreigner, not him."

"I cannot tell here in America," he said. "I cannot tell who is a thief."

"That's not your job," I said. "It's your job to sell the man a sandwich."

Outside I gave the man his sandwich and his soda. "Know why he let me in and not you?" I said.

"Cause you white," he said.

"The fuckers," I said. "Want a beer?"

"Just soda," he said.

A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot and drove past us slow. I looked at him and nodded. He drove on.

"If I hadn't been here would that cop have run you off?" I said.

"Damn straight."

"You from here?" I said.

"Born and raised," he said. "Can't you tell?"

"Me too."

"I know," he said. "Ain't no white man not from Oakland buy me a sandwich and a soda."

When the cops, when the convenience store clerks, when the factory workers and cabbies and teachers realize that the great issue in working class America is not race, but class, only then will we have a better nation. Dagoberto Gilb used to know this. His books, The Magic of Blood, Gritos, and The Flowers are fine, socially responsible works. In his new collection, Before the End, After the Beginning, however, he seems to have forgotten that the true enemies are those who would bludgeon workers with our differences.

I had to catch my plane. I shook hands with my new friend. He got a look of serious. He said, "We all in this together. Oakland isn't a town, it's a race."

—An oberservation Dagoberto Gilb might consider next time he writes a book.

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