Oakland is many things. The book I'm working on about Miss Marilyn is also, partly, about Oakland as a city of grief, grief which sometimes expresses itself through fury, fury disguised as joy, through violence, through demonstration, revolution, through music and dance. It can all come together at a thing called here a “sideshow,” at which gather youth in the dozens or the hundreds, who swarm and besiege a wide intersection in the dead of night and raise hell with their cars, with music, with weed, these days with guns. Not all sideshows culminate in violence. But last month, at a sideshow on East 12th Street, there was a triple shooting. One of the victims was killed.
There was a time, before social media, when sideshows could seem to spring up organically, at intersections far from me, in Deep East Oakland, along Bancroft, at 82nd, 92nd, along MacArthur at 86th near Castlemont High School. Rather suddenly, under the florescent glare of corner gas station parking lots, would pop up markets for weed, other things. The station’s proprietors would gain a late-night windfall selling Swishers and beer.
Oaklanders in the throes of their adulthood today will remember sideshows as the most exciting event of a weekend or a week or an entire youth spent in Oakland, as edgy, semi-spontaneous gatherings underneath the mixed perfume of marijuana and alcohol and burning rubber, where you could hear what new music people were listening to, see how people were wearing their clothes, learn how they were dancing, buy or smoke or drink, and experience the wild gravitational thrill of a donut, or the death-defying rush of a ghost ride, in which drivers abandon the wheel and climb onto the hood of their still-moving, now-driverless car, and ride. Back in the early Oughts, OPD would appear, but tended to loiter at the perimeter of the action, without interfering in the lawlessness of it all. Today they seek to head-off the sideshows, to prevent them, and the city has installed traffic barriers and circles to discourage such gatherings. But the kids still find places to gather.
If they occur close enough to me -- and recent sideshow crowds do seem to favor an intersection just a quarter mile from my bedroom window -- then from my perch on a hill above East Oakland, tucked comfortably in bed but often sleepless, I can hear the screeching tires as multiple drivers execute donut after donut at two or three in the morning. Driving by there later, I see the circular and semi-circular tire marks on the asphalt, marks which linger, like a bad Celtic tattoo, often until the road is re-paved, once every fifty years or so. And so I drive over them daily and, an older person, a white man, never an attendee, recall to my mind the raging banshee-like squall and squeal I’d heard the night before, a sound that seemed to come from the depths of the souls of young Oaklanders.
And when through my open window I hear the call of a sideshow in my own wee sleepless hours of desperation for attention, of angst and despair, I hear all of Oakland, this place desperate for joy and attention, this city always reminding me of a neglected adolescent, promising, misunderstood, searching for an identity, determined to express itself, living out its youthful scofflaw tendencies, forced to find its fun in self-destructive bad-boy transgressions, finding relief in the thrilling gravitational pull of a donut, in the death-defying adrenaline-pump antics of a ghost ride. I’m trying to get to something here in this diary entry, to an idea, or a set of ideas, like the idea that finding a thrill in risking death is maybe a roundabout way of saying life and living do matter, that something is at stake, at risk, but further I am trying to get to Oakland’s cry of civic sadness, to its furious grief-behavior, to describe the sound of the sideshows, like that rising from some wild Irish wake, as a place where a unique, creative generation’s incipient joy, grief and fury meet, seek release, and call out for attention. And I think it might be there in the noise the sideshows raise to the heavens, in the sound of asphalt resisting rubber careening out across the flatlands on a Sunday morning 3 am, like a transient veneer of joyful despair, or like a thick layer of cold fog.
Some may not like my interpretation, may certainly dispute it. But I just wanted you to hear what I hear.
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