Notes from Oaktown II

Did you know that Batman has detailed plans to kill every member of the Justice League?


Up the street from my house there's as truck parked near place named Hippie-crack park. A few days ago I saw a man with a heavy duty hikers back-pack carrying his daughter into the park and for a second fear scratched at the top of my head and I wondered about what the little girl would find behind a bench or under the perpetual piles of autumn leaves, those leaves that seem to find their way into my house, into the liquor store three house down from me, leaves the liquor store clerk's brother is constantly sweeping out onto the sidewalk while he yells at his older sibling in Farsi, leaves that I 'd seen everyday since I had moved to Oakland; perpetual autumn leaves. But when I saw the little girl walking toward the pile of moldering vegetation, in my mind I just saw her little hands gripping busted glass bulbs with speed residue settle at the bottom of them, of crack pipes with teeth jammed in them, discarded condoms, and copies of US Weekly and People; all I could think of was this little girl getting her little hands on theses, destructive, mind numbing things. I turned off my headphones and started to let the father know that his daughter was probably walking into her first case of herpes when I heard someone say, "What you worrying about dere young man?" Even though I had pretty much trained myself to tune out people on MLK I turned around to see who was talking to me.



Did you know Superman started out as a bald villain?

When I looked to the voice I saw skinny, short man with burnt brown skin and ashy white buds of dry skin for elbows. He was wearing boxy strange looking sun glasses, leaning out of his plain white utility truck with a cigarette dangling from his lip, flaking a perpetual stream of ash onto his wife beater. I tensed up when I realized I knew his face. I said "excuse me?" then he said
"I see you looking over at the park. If you had something stashed over there.. well if it's what I think it was I dumped in a garbage can and I ain't telling you where it is.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Your shit boy... the crack." He said.
I explained to him that I was trying to keep the little girl from catching flesh rot from all the crap that the crack-heads left in the park.
Really it wasn't much of a park; just a full asphalt basketball court, benches, and a sign that read MARCUS GARVEY PARK. Then he said.

"Let her daddy worry over her... I cleaned that place out yesterday anyway."
I asked him if he'd found anything interesting. People in my neighborhood, crack-heads homeless folks, broke hipsters, anarchist and hippie drifters are a part of Oakland's ecology. When someone moves or loses their place, any or all of these people swoop into to the place and assist in the decay of the former lodgers presence. Their stuff shows up in the park a lot of times. The man with the truck, whose name was "Freak Frank", who I had seen parked all over my adopted neighborhood, invited me to look inside his truck

Did you know that Batman was an alcoholic?

Now by then I had seen Freak Frank around the neighborhood like fifty time, yelling at crack-heads, being hassled by cops, or maybe leaning out of his window smoking a cigarette, surveying the sidewalk from his trucks window. He lived in the truck. On top of the truck was an igloo dog house and behind that solar panels but the truck was all a sort of grubby looking matte white. When he opened the back of the truck I finally caught a look at what was inside. The walls were covered in crap, brick-a-brack, and miscellanea; broken Power Rangers, tattered a Cal Berkeley T-shirts, a certificate for completion of an electricians program, burnt novels, weird looking things in jars, broken cellphones, shattered VCR's and VHS tapes; nothing I wanted, but what I noticed was that there was not sign of drug paraphernalia; not a pipe or screen or a roach. Frank was stone sober as far as I could tell.
"You cleaned this all out of the park?"
"Boy there ain't just one park out here. Besides I can't stay around one place. Gotta keep moving, they won't let a man stay still."
The name on the certificate was Franks and I'm pretty sure he wasn't a forger so I was guessing that the California seal wasn't fake.

Did you know that Ant-man nearly beat his wife to death?

"Why?" I asked
"Why what boy?" I was really getting tired of this boy shit but I pressed
"Why do you chase of the druggies? Pick up their crap and dump it all?"
"Cause all those motherfuckas want is to use stuff up and mess things up. And white folks already think that's all we do."
He had a point. I kind of understood what he was saying. I mean I scare people without even trying and sometimes it gets on my nerves.
White-guilt+Black rage=Black fear, Fear of Blacks.
But Oakland isn't Gotham or Metropolis or Bludhaven heroes get killed here. Of course Frank was crazy. After I had taken a look at all things I didn't want in the back of his truck, he handed me a pamphlet on solar energy, even though I told him I lived in an apartment. He said it didn't matter and that he would set it up. I told him that was O.K. when I realized there were solar panels of the roof of his truck but no wires or grounders or generators just a lot of shit found in parks and vacant houses around Oakland.