Street Raised Read online

  Speedy looked in Carmel’s eyes. “I’ll be back,” he promised. “Will you be here later?”

  “I have to go online anyway,” she said, gesturing in resignation at her phone psychic gear.

  Carmel poured Fat Bob one more glass of wine while Speedy got dressed in her room.

  “Thanks,” Bob muttered in distracted tones, his eyes never leaving the bedroom door.

  When Speedy came out, he and Carmel flowed together into a hug, Speedy sniffing the woman smell of her hair as she relaxed in the safe harbor of his arms. Then they broke their clinch, and Bob herded Speedy out the door and he was gone.

  Carmel was left alone with her Tarot deck and that increasingly hideous waiting phone.

  Chapter 23

  Fat Bob took the Posey Tube into Town then the Nimitz north and the Grove Shafter inland, exiting at San Pablo. Without explanation he turned left at 31st, taking them into West Oakland through Ghosttown past the American Burial Casket Company and its sister coffin store, side by side on Filbert.

  West Oakland itself had been one of the drug capitals of the East Bay for as long as Speedy could remember, many of the houses being straight up Heroin Hiltons. The Ward brothers had held court as neighborhood kingpins back in the day, in the ‘70s when ‘The Mack’ had been filmed here on location. The Wards had been the gangster royal family of Oakland, organizing the first ‘Player’s Ball’ before big brother Fred got shot in the head by person or persons unknown and their syndicate unraveled.

  Now, of course, crack had come along. Even leaving Little Willy out of his calculations, Speedy was getting a dawning realization of how much those fucking hubba rocks had changed all the rules while he was inside . . .

  Fat Bob took Peralta south past Lone Star Industries, then under the stacked double-decker Cypress Structure: an elevated freeway running diagonally overhead in a no-nonsense straight line, as if the designers had anticipated most (white-bread) drivers’ determination to be rapidly elsewhere. Bob was taking them into the neighborhood called Prescott by the maps, but the Lower Bottoms by everybody else. Built on flat filled marshland, the Bottoms were the last semblance of human residential life in West Oakland before the mechanistic Port, which semi-surrounded it on three sides.

  Fat Bob drove through block after block of remarkably dilapidated old pre-1906-Victorians, then parked just around the corner from the Continental Club.

  Bob said, “You were asking about those cocksuckers that threw Jojo and Lucky in the River.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “That’s right,” Speedy said, beginning to suspect the purpose of this little excursion.

  Fat Bob jerked his chin, flashed his eyes at a house down the block. “There’s their crib.”

  It stood out from the homes surrounding it. Maybe it was the house’s peeling white scale-shingle walls, making it resemble a dragon with terminal eczema. To Speedy the house appeared as if it had swelled up overnight like a mushroom, or a tumor.

  “How much money you think is in there?” Bob asked, scowling at the house as if its mere existence was a personal affront.

  “We have to lay eyeballs on the inside,” Speedy said.

  He stashed his sawed-off under his seat and got out the car. Speedy meandered down the street to the mangy white house, weaving more and more the closer he got til he was wavering on his feet at the base of the porch steps. Slowly, heavily, he climbed the worn wooden stairs, putting a stumbling lack of balance into his movements, acting like he was so drunk he was barely able to stay on his feet.

  “Michelle,” he bawled in a slurred, hoarse voice.

  As he reached the porch, the door flew open to reveal two guards, both holding guns.

  “The hell is this?” the little one asked, looking past Speedy to see if anyone was with him.

  “Michelle,” Speedy mumbled, staring down at the porch floor with his mouth slack. “Want Michelle.”

  “Ain’t no Michelle bitch here, lush.”

  Speedy stole a glance past them at the interior of the house, doing his best not to give them a good look at his face.

  The front room spanned the width of the dwelling, with a single wide archway opening off the room into another house-spanning open area further back; a couple doors opened off to the right, he figured probably to small bedrooms and the bath. A nattily dressed Mexican was sitting at a surprisingly elegant desk with his back to Speedy, in the far room at the back of the house. As the Mexican spun in his chair to look at Speedy, a pile of greenbacks was revealed on the desk – so was a triple-beam scale, and a taped-up plastic-wrapped brick of something-or-other.

  Speedy wavered on his feet, preparing to make a drunken exit now that he’d gotten a mental snapshot of the drug house’s layout. Another much bigger man, a Latino dressed cowboy style carrying a clinking bag of ‘groceries,’ trudged inexorably up the porch steps from the sidewalk to join the two door guards. He inspected Speedy.

  “You from around here?” the big Mexican asked him, his kindly voice sepulchrally deep, yet strangely melodic. “Not too many white boys in this neighborhood.”

  “Fuckin’ bitch stole my money,” Speedy said to the floor, not making eye contact, keeping his body and mind meek and stupid as he prepared to stumble down the porch steps past this Latino hulk and away.

  But the big Mexican stepped in front of Speedy, blocking Speedy’s path. The big Mexican looked up and down the block. Then he turned back to Speedy and slapped the palm of his big brown hand against the side of Speedy’s head, hard. Speedy didn’t resist the blow, letting himself slam onto his side on the porch.

  Speedy acted like it hurt worse than it did, he even wept crocodile tears as he moaned, “Michelle, where’s Michelle?”

  The Mexican’s lips pressed together, unsuccessfully hiding a smile of pleasure as he turned to the two guards. “Get him away from here,” he rumbled.

  “Sure thing Oso,” the smaller guard said.

  Oso quietly said, “Use my name in public one more time, puto.”

  The small puto cringed as Oso disappeared inside. Then the two guards started kicking Speedy, methodically, each getting out of the way to give the other his turn, each kick heaving Speedy’s pseudo-drunken body a little closer to the top of the stairs.

  For the big guard it was just business, he didn’t put anymore into getting Speedy off the porch than he had to: he was more hooking his toes under Speedy and rolling him than anything else.

  The little guard, however, was paying Speedy back for Oso’s humiliating words, taking out his chagrin by really laying the boot to Speedy every time he threw a kick.

  Speedy covered up as best as he could the whole time; he gave them a little show, yelping a bit to satisfy their cruelty so they wouldn’t think any more on the matter. But when he rolled off the top of the steps and bounced down the steps to the sidewalk, he didn’t have to act very hard to make it seem he was hurting.

  He rose to his hands and knees on the cement, feeling a little creaky. He heard the two guards laughing behind him as they went back inside.

  Still on all fours, Speedy looked across the street and saw a little black boy standing there holding his mom’s hand. Mother and son were both staring at him.

  Speedy gave the boy a little smile as if to say: ‘See, it’s not so bad.’

  The boy’s mother jerked her son’s hand hard enough that his feet left the ground and he sailed horizontal in the air for a second before touching down again. He looked at Speedy the whole time he flew behind his mom, and he kept looking back at Speedy as she hurried them away from there, intent on minding her business.

  Speedy got to his feet and continued his drunk routine all the way back to Bob’s car. It wasn’t difficult to keep up the act; he was sore enough from rolling down those steps that his limping hobble came semi-naturally.

  “So how’s it look in there?” Fat Bob asked as Speedy gingerly climbed into the car and retook possession of his stashed sawed-off.

  “It’s a cakewa
lk, one big field of fire inside – all I need is big enough iron. But I don’t like that Oso guy,” Speedy said, looking back at the house. “I don’t like him at all.”

  “Who?” Bob asked.

  “Never mind,” Speedy said. “Let’s get Willy. I want him in on this.

  Chapter 24

  “You know brother,” Fat Bob rasped. “Meaning no disrespect, but I could never figure out why we keep carrying Willy. All right, he knows fucking everything, and he’s okay at scheming. But he’s weakness.”

  Speedy looked at him. “I never told you what went down the night him and me left home, did I?”

  Bob shook his head, not taking his eyes off the road but obviously interested in knowing.

  “Well, I’m not going to tell you now neither,” Speedy said with a smile. “Suffice to say he believed in me once when I didn’t no more. I’ll never turn my back on him.”

  Back in Alameda, they parked in front of T.J. and Sergio’s house.

  “You didn’t take care of him while I was inside, Bob,” Speedy said. “That ain’t right, and you fucked me over harsh there.”

  “I’ll make it up to you, brother,” Fat Bob promised. “You got owe-sies.”

  They opened the door just in time to see the kitten Miya had named Pearl sail across the doorway in pursuit of something small and fast. As they walked in, Pearl was trotting back in the direction she’d come from with a crumpled cigarette pack dangling out the side of her mouth. This rough tough kitty favored them with a psychotic feline axe-murderer glare as she passed, and then she dropped the crumpled pack in front of Little Willy, who was sitting on the floor in lotus position with his legs crossed.

  Pearl looked up at Willy adoringly, as if Willy was the one who’d hitchhiked down the length of Northern California with her instead of Speedy. Speedy was actually surprised at just how much it irked, to see Pearl favoring Little Willy over him – she was just a fur ball after all. ‘Cats – the other white meat,’ he thought with a self deprecating smirk.

  “Check this you guys,” Willy said, smiling down at the kitten whose affections he seemed to have appropriated.

  He started tapping the crumpled cigarette pack on the floor, staring at Pearl. Pearl tensed, slunk back with her head lower than her hindquarters, and waited all expectant halfway across the room. Without warning Little Willy whipped the crumpled pack right at her. Pearl dodged a fraction of an inch so it just missed her, then back-flipped in the air and chased it as it whizzed by. She had it within three bounding steps, and trotted it back to Willy for another go-round.

  Speedy squatted to pet her, a caress she had the good grace to endure without taking her eyes off the seeming current center of her kitty universe: Little Willy.

  “How’s it hanging brother?” Speedy asked.

  “I guess I’ll make it.” Willy was still wan but appeared much better.

  He rose to embrace his big brother and inclined his head a little towards Bob. Bob returned the greeting with a nod just as minimal.

  “We’re scoping out a possible gig right now,” Speedy said. “We’d like to see what you think of it.”

  “We?” Willy asked Fat Bob.

  “Yeah,” Bob acknowledged grudgingly. “We. We need someone to drive, not help us hold a gun.” He wasn’t about to admit that he appreciated Little Willy’s smarts being part of the planning phase.

  “Let’s take a gander at it,” Willy said.

  Bob took them back to West Oakland, approaching the Mexicans’ house from the south this time. He took the 8th Street exit off the Cypress, driving past the West Oakland BART Station, past where Esther’s Orbit Room and the brutalist Postal Distribution Center sat uneasily cheek by jowl across the street from each other.

  He stayed a good ways from the Mexican’s house this time, in case anyone had spotted the car from before. Bob parked next to the Southern Pacific/Amtrak Station at 16th and Wood, facing the car inland and east in the general direction of the target house.

  It was almost dusk, and the sun was on the verge of setting. To their left – to the north – the MacArthur Maze's I-880 connector ramps were visible, arcing across the muck of the shore toward the Bay Bridge. A Port gate opened in the fence up that way, and as the men watched a string of loaded railroad cars was rolling out through it.

  Behind the Valiant – past razor wire and guard posts, past the slanting warehouses of the Naval Supply Depot and the Oakland Army Base – lay soggy glistening wetlands and then the Bay.

  Spanning the vista to their front and their right was the devastated landscape of the Bottoms – a raggedy grill of deserted houses, vacant lots and dead blocks, with spaghetti-squiggles of railroad tracks leading nowhere embedded in the streets. It looked like a neutron bomb had gone off here, doing minimal damage to property but ‘sanitizing’ most of the humans away.

  But this wasteland was also interspersed with widely separated little pockets of life: churches, light industrials, mom-n-pops, and houses as jealously maintained as any in the suburbs.

  “We go in and out fast, like always, but it’ll be a lot noisier than usual,” Speedy said, not even tempting fate by aiming his face in the direction of the drug house, instead looking around the area as if the neighborhood itself were one of his opponents.

  Little Willy hadn’t uttered a word the whole drive, Speedy assuming he was just absorbing everything like a meat computer programming itself. But when Speedy looked at him for some sort of response, Willy’s sad preoccupied look prompted Speedy to impatiently ask, “What?”

  Willy appeared startled: he had indeed been jolted from one of his reveries. Looking around this neighborhood, he’d seen a sort of time-lapse mental movie, fast forwarding through this area’s history:

  He saw the transcontinental railroad sprinting in from the east and stopping here at its terminus, the bridgehead to the Transbay Ferry before the Bay Bridge was built. He saw blacks settling and building here, men wearing Pullman Company Sleeping Car Porter uniforms and their families, boards seemingly nailing themselves together as block after block of Victorian houses erected within seconds.

  Fast forwarding further along the timeline, Willy looked at the Southern Pacific 16th Street Station next to where they were parked, and saw thousands of southern blacks seething out its doors during ‘The Great Migration’ of WW2, come here in search of wartime factory and shipyard jobs, and to escape the daily spirit-eroding ordeal of racism in the Jim Crow South.

  Suddenly, a blight enters into the time lapse movie, a darkness palls over West Oakland in the course of an instant. First the double-decker Cypress Freeway slams down into place parallel to its namesake Cypress Street, destroying a wide swath of homes and businesses – the Freeway looms horizontal across and above the low West Oakland skyline, dominating it. The Cypress connects the Bay Bridge with the Nimitz for San Francisco commuters, who immediately drive back and forth across it overhead like buzzing bees – but it effectively chops the neighborhood in half, amputating West Oakland from Downtown, Lake Merritt, Chinatown, and Jack London Square.

  Then block after block crumble in instantaneous demolition, and hundreds of families flee like ants escaping a magnifying glass as two more ‘whammies’ come quickly. Like Godzilla stomping his feet, Oakland Post Office Distribution Center plops right on top of what had been the headquarters of the first black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters on 5th and Wood. Acres along once-thriving 7th are erased to make room for the West Oakland BART Station and the east end of the Trans-Bay Tube.

  In Willy’s mental movie, the people try to fight that modern miracle the Freeway, just as Berkeley had done so successfully. But the West Oaklanders aren’t white professionals and academics safely ensconced behind their money up in the Hills – they’re blue collar blacks living in the Flats, without the necessary resources to practice Berkeley’s brand of NIMBY-ism.

  Instead, as was always West Oakland’s way, they practice direct action. Willy sees Huey Newton and Bobby Seale foundi
ng the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense here in ’66, sees them strategizing in their headquarters at 11th & Peralta. Rallies and speeches at DeFremery Park, free breakfasts to school children at Saint Augustine’s Church, facing up to cracker Oakland cops with guns – the Panthers did their loudest and their best to stand up and make the Man take notice. You had to respect them, trying to stand up for their people like that. Though of course, when crack came around it was all for nothing . . .

  But that was then this was now, Little Willy thought, noting Speedy’s growing frustration and coming back to the present. He ignored the ghosts of Eldridge and Huey haunting this place; he put aside his own self loathing for being part of the blight, pretended that their shades weren’t staring at him in disappointed sadness and accusatory anger. Instead Willy focused on the only thing about this neighborhood Speedy and Fat Bob cared about: the pay day.

  “The Bottoms are cut off from everything inland by the Cypress,” Little Willy pointed out shyly, still unsure just how welcome his input would be despite the assurances given him. “The Oakland Army Base and the Naval Supply Center are on the Bay side – there’s no way we could make off in that direction.”

  “The Man will throw up a surface street cordon in hopes we’re neighborhood punks,” Speedy said with a nod, relieved that Willy was recruited into the process and back on board. “He’ll isolate the area right off, with rollers at all the major intersections in the Bottoms. Any units they use for local roadblocks are units we don’t have to worry about chasing us, but we still got to be on the other side of the Cypress by the time they respond.”