Recently while stopped at a red light I pointed out to my wife a man with long white hair, sitting on a recumbent bike, wearing tie-dye, and waiting for the turn arrow so he could pull into the parking lot of Urban Ore, a scrapyard in Berkeley, California that sells household junk for upcycling.
“That might be the most Berkeley guy I’ve ever seen,” I said.
For Berkeley residents like me, it’s something of a local sport to scan our surroundings in search of people who are “really Berkeley.” Defining who is and is not “really Berkeley” is, of course, a highly subjective exercise, one that ultimately says more about the observer than the observed.
At the same time, it’s hard to deny that many people (myself included) have an idea of Berkeley—even one that is cartoonish or draws primarily on events half a century old. Even—or especially—people who have never set foot upon our hallowed grounds. The mythical Berkeley looms large. Ours is a town with an outsized sense of its own importance; a town that celebrates and actively cultivates the outlandish; a town of roughly 120,000 residents whose municipal governing bodies do not hesitate to issue foreign policy directives.
A number of interesting and significant things have in fact happened here, both before the Sixties began and since they ended (assuming they have, in fact, ended). In the 1940s, scientists from the University of California’s Radiation Lab played a crucial role in the development of the atomic bomb, a legacy which spawned the placement of signs at the city limits quixotically declaring Berkeley a “nuclear-free zone.” Thirty years before that, August Vollmer was installed as the city’s first chief of police. Referred to as the father of modern law enforcement, Vollmer implemented innovations such as the motorized vehicle fleet, the lie detector, the requirement that officers obtain a college degree, and the hiring of Black and female officers. (Detractors will point out his embrace of eugenics and racial theories of criminality.) Alice Waters, grande dame of the Gourmet Ghetto, founded the farm-to-table movement and helped define California cuisine. The list of writers and artists with a Berkeley connection is long and varied. If the city regards itself as a wellspring of creative energy, that’s because it frequently is.
Also true: In their relentless iconoclasm, Berkeleyites (or Berkeleyans, or Berzerkers, depending) tend to invite parody. “First they ignore you,” the ethos maintains, “then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Sometimes, perhaps. Other times they laugh at you, then keep on laughing.
I settled here nine years ago—long enough for me to call it home, not long enough to have shed entirely my outsider’s perspective. My wife and I are raising our family three and a half miles from the house she grew up in and where her parents still live. When I pointed out the man on the recumbent bike and nominated him as the most Berkeley guy ever, she just smiled. She told me she belongs to a Facebook group called YMISB, which stands for “Your Mom is So Berkeley.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: folks sharing stories of how stereotypically Berkeley their moms are.
YMISB her landscaping crew is a herd of goats.
YMISB she composts her reading glasses.
So, yes, this place is indeed my home; I’m fond of and invested in it. Yet it continues to surprise me, and occasionally to confound me. Sometimes I can feel like a well-meaning tourist: fumbling the native customs, attempting to wave hello, and instead signaling I wish inglorious death upon you and your offspring.
The insider/outsider tension will be familiar to many writers who by dint of circumstance or temperament find themselves in physical or psychological exile. We are voyeurs to our own lives, at once immersed in, fascinated by, and alienated from our surroundings. Such dislocation primes a certain sensitivity to detail. Moreover, as a non-native, I feel the weight of responsibility—the need to get it right.
But what is the it that I’m trying to get right? What does it mean to write about a place?
Alameda County, which comprises Berkeley and Oakland along with twelve other cities and six unincorporated communities, is home to a million and a half people, spread over eight hundred square miles. Each of those cities and communities display tremendous variation within and between themselves. Comparatively little crime fiction has been set here. Southern California is the traditional epicenter of noir. Northern California noir almost invariably focuses on San Francisco. Insofar as the East Bay makes an appearance, it’s usually an adjunct to “the City.”
Partly for this reason, my father and I chose to make our series protagonist, Clay Edison, an Alameda County coroner. Through him we get to travel from one end of the territory to the other, shining a light on locales otherwise underrepresented in the genre: now Oakland, now El Cerrito, now San Leandro or Fremont or Pleasanton. In his role as a death investigator, Clay interacts with people of all stripes. What unites them are a shared geographic fate—earthquakes and fires do not discriminate—and the common humanity they manifest in grief.
When I write about the East Bay and feel that weight of responsibility, what I’m really feeling is the challenge of constructing an authentic whole out of fundamentally disparate parts. It is the challenge of looking at atoms and picturing the stars. And it is an important struggle, because the unifying quality of art itself arises, precisely and paradoxically, from the differences it articulates between individuals, locations, cultures, and times. The trivial becomes definitional. The Russian dramatist Stanislavsky expressed this best when he said that “generality is the enemy of all art.”
What makes a story universal is its’ specificity. We communicate broadly by restricting ourselves locally. Individual differences are what makes fictional characters and settings worthy of the reader’s attention. And what is true of characters and settings is true of real people and places, for the unfamiliar is a kind of fiction until we begin to encounter it. The strangeness of others sharpens the boundaries of our selves. We are all strange; we are all fallible, and insignificant, and momentous. Individual difference makes this clear by creating contrast, limning the foreground of our quiddities against the background of commonalities.
What marks Berkeley as Berkeley or Oakland as Oakland are what differentiate them in our minds and make them meaningful rather than generic and therefore easily dismissed. What makes me different from you is what makes each of us irreplaceable. This should be obvious, but it isn’t. The speed of communication has a homogenizing effect on how we express ourselves; novel ideas and locutions are taken up, disseminated, and boiled down to cliche in the course of one news cycle. Increasingly we seek convenience and wind up with uniformity. Increasingly we view others foremost through the lens of groups and types, reducing our humanity to the discrete, searchable, indexable—a soul composed of hashtags. The latter worldview in particular has enormous artistic and moral sequelae. I consider it lazy, unimaginative, and bereft of good faith. Just as we cannot or should not look at places as monolithic or static, we cannot or should not treat people as unelected representatives, not if we are to avoid eating each other alive. When we are grasping toward understanding—in art, in life—individual difference gives us something to grab hold of. It is the soil in which sympathy takes root.
My father and I are crime writers. We’re entertainers, not documentarians. Insofar as the Clay novels are about places and people and times, they do not claim to present a definitive portrait. But I do hope that—book to book, through the steady amassing of individual personalities and images—we’re painting a portrait in aggregate. Our East Bay is rendered daub by daub, in tie-dye and Birkenstocks, minister’s robes and mom jeans; in the faces of cops and in the cameras of Copwatch; in frat houses and homeless encampments and neighborhoods suffused with bashful generational wealth; in the flocks of wild turkeys that roam like street gangs, the homicidal geese that chase joggers around Lake Merritt; in taco trucks, fine dining rooms, food pantries; farmer’s markets, Japanese fish vendors, liquor stores, supermarkets where shoppers will scold you if they disapprove of the contents of your cart. It is a polyglot portrait. Freak flags fly. A portrait that inevitably reveals our own biases and interests, because it is the joint product of two individual minds, working to learn the world around them, combing through the dizzying complexity of here and now, forever reaching, never satisfied, never still, every body strange, every day new.
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