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I'm From There

Walk Oakland

Jan Stürmann

The Town That Feeds One Writer’s Imagination 

  There’s a house not far from mine whose entryway is guarded by four wooden heads on posts. The gold-painted one might be a Buddha, and the others have the talismanic quality of tikis or Easter Island heads, but the faces are more complex and featured—portraits of brooding intelligence.
    Here’s the catch: Each of these heads is made of hundreds of pieces of carefully layered wood. If you’re on their side of the street or seeing them head-on, you could pass them a thousand times and see only a jumble of wood. Only when you’re across the street and at an oblique angle are the faces discernible.
    That’s Oakland. For every obvious delight the city offers (like the westward view from Warfield Avenue and Prince Street, straight across the lake to the Kaiser Auditorium, and then the Grand Lake Theater sign becomes a great backwards die cut stamped out of the sky as you descend toward Mandana Boulevard), there are a dozen subtler prizes that need to be sneaked up on. You can’t do it by car. You have to walk.
    What this means to me as a writer is approximately everything, because a great city for walkers is an ideal one for writers. I know some people out there have pretty luxe offices, with Aerons, atria, full city roast at the coffee stations and broadloom carpet that you sink into for a week, and good for them. My office has a lake.

    For fiction you want a loose, moving mind, and a loose, moving body’s a start. I’ve learned the art of walking while writing in a reporter’s notebook, the slim kind that tucks into one hand, and not tripping over anything too often.
    I live halfway up a hill. If I go uphill I’m a short bike ride from what looks like the foothills of the Sierra when I open my notebook at a succession of penknife-cuneiformed picnic tables in Redwood Regional Park. If I go downhill, I find myself in city streets whose beauty and oddity, in a more hustling town, would have been rubbed out by big boxes and high rises in those now-quaint boom years. You can’t take this walk in Emeryville, the virgin that jumped into the sales-tax volcano to spare the rest of us.
    Try Franklin Street between 12th and 20th streets, which could have gone all steel and glass but instead is still brick, stucco, awnings and porticoes, jade and tangerine tile, wrought-iron curlicues on fire-escape railings, deco copper crests over doorways and faces from everywhere walking past. There are whole blocks out of a yellowing American storybook about the allure not of the big city but of the livably sized one, where the buildings are three-story sky-duckers with more elegant plaster fluting than will ever again be put on a structure outside a theme park. I’m in Centertown, Hon! It’s swell! Say, that’s my streetcar—call you back!
    Or go residential. Those front-yard gardens where the plants share space with bowling pins, cowboy boots and 1970s toys—does Oakland lead the non-tourist-town world in those? It has an excellent shot. The city charges me business tax. I don’t feel cheated.

    It’s not that writers need to see all this; it’s that their characters do. With that slim reporter’s notebook tucked into your hand, you can practice method-writing: Take yourself out of the equation (“Why be yourself when you can be someone interesting?” –Philip Levine) and let the character react to what he or she sees through your loaned-out eyes.
    A writer wants surprises in the landscape, characters on the corner and above all caffeine, which is why you see so many of us working in those adult study halls, the Peet’s and Tully’s and L’Amyxes, next to decorators showing swatches to clients and people with laptops, CADing wireframe buildings or fixing their movies in Final Cut. At Gaylord’s on Piedmont Avenue, a quartet of iBook owners sit at the tables against one wall, nursing lattes while learning nursing or looking for work on LinkedIn, their Apple logos lined up in a Warholesque multiple.
    My branch offices are library branches, where I can spread my stuff on a table, smell that special elixir of much-handled books plus kids and take a guilty rest in other people’s writing. At Oakland Main, up where I research newspapers on microfilm, there are public-access Internet computers with a one-hour use limit and a waiting list. When their names are called, the users go to their keyboards and write all their e-mail at warp speed, an army of attack typists. If I had their wpm, I’d have written three novels since Wednesday, and I bet some of them are in fact making next year’s literature in those one-hour bursts, like Frank O’Hara writing Lunch Poems in typewriter showrooms.
    If you’re trying to get something going, go. Walk along the swooping bridge MacArthur Boulevard makes over Interstate 580 as it enters Grand Lake, with that river of cars underfoot. When you stop to jot, you feel like the only stationary observer in a flying world, and how writer-like is that? Visit the crazy-heroic old friezes in the Kaiser Auditorium’s niche doorways, in which gods and mortals join in farming, building, learning and other civic virtues. Nowadays the friezes’ titles—“The Delight of Flowers,” “The Consolation of the Arts”—fly like blessing standards over the four-blanket pallets of homeless people who sleep in the doorways. Then go make up something that good. A tall order, but I’ll put my two-pound computer and my 20-pound plot problems in my daypack, head out the door, and try.

    Walker-writer Charlie Haas has a new novel, The Enthusiast, out this month from Harper Perennial. His writing has appeared in Esquire , New West, The Threepenny Review and many other journals. His screenwriting credits include Over the Edge, Gremlins 2 and Matinee. He lives in Oakland with his wife, writer and editor B.K. Moran.