Dark passages
If stereotypes are to be believed, Oakland — San Francisco’s hot mess of a sibling across the bay — ought to be a shoo-in for an anthology about noir. After all, the city has shocking crime rates, gritty shipyards, a bleak skyline and a long history of social unrest, from the zoot suit riots to the Black Panthers to the modernday Occupy movement. Even its traitorous football team seems to have gone off the rails — again. One might be inclined to ask Akashic Books, which has done 80 “noir” titles in its series so far, what took them so long to get around to Oakland? California, after all, is the birthplace of noir, and while Los Angeles keeps churning out the plastic elite, and San Francisco is being gentrified right out of its skin, Oakland has kept its hardboiled soul intact. Hell, it’s been composting racial tension, poverty and political corruption for so long that it could fertilize the noir genre for the next few decades.
Wonderfully, in Akashic’s “Oakland Noir,” the stereotypes about the city suffer the fate of your average noir character — they die brutally. Kudos to the editors, Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, for getting Oakland right. All those outsize statistics don’t reveal a real city, but this collection of local voices — both established and new — brings it thrumming to life. Thompson admits that Oakland is “fabulously criminalized,” and Muller describes the standard San Francisco impression of Oakland as the “badass black brother across the bay.” But in selecting stories, they strove to encompass the city’s phenomenally diverse demography and to shed some light on its overlooked past.
The collection is divided into three parts. The first, “Not a Soft City,” drives its point home with a pair of beautiful pieces about the inevitability of loss. From there, the views of Oakland grow magnificently more deranged. Charter schools swooping in like “a murder of crows” to exploit children for public money. A woman turns sociopathic over real estate for a yoga school. It sets a grim, witty tone, and by the time you reach part two, “What They Call a Clusterf—,” you’re ready for more unforgiving fare. Here, a woman plays prostitute and learns the dangers the hard way, and three orphans smoking weed are so lovingly described that you’ll yearn for that easy companionship — until you realize that it can be traded for a hat. Don’t be fooled by the precious third section, “A View of the Lake.” Some characters may have fancier digs, but they’re just as demented as their compatriots — witness a sweet double murder in Montclair and the kind of bondage at Mills College that ends relationships.
Oakland started being that brother across the bay during the Great Migration, when African Americans left the Jim Crow South circa World War II. Dorothy Lazard’s “A Town Made of Hustle” takes us to that postwar bust, to a friendship between a black journalist and a Japanese internmentcamp survivor. It was a time when black men who had worked hard through the war were demoded to “slinging hash to the vets who were handed their good-paying jobs.” Katie Gilmartin’s “White Horse” tells of another oppression: two lesbians who are hunted down during the McCarthy-era Pervert Inquiries. (Oakland’s White Horse Inn lays claim to being the oldest operating queer bar in America.) Flash forward three generations, and Oakland is the most ethnically diverse city in America. Here we have an elderly Vietnamese landlady who needs to kill a gardenshredding raccoon, an Iranian computer expert grappling with a radical-minded girlfriend, a Sri Lankan woman trying to get over her divorce in the worst possible way, and a pair of quick-witted Mexican mobsters under government surveillance.
Muller writes in the introduction that gritty violence is “fashionable” but also “bull—.” The real darkness of noir comes from cruelty — either inside the human heart, or in “the world’s innate indifference.” Indeed, the stories that really leave a mark make their points subtly, allowing apathy to saturate the mood. Judy Juanita’s excellent “Cabbie” offers interlocking monologues — things a cabbie might tell various passengers — about the life and death of Lovelle Mixon. The story’s dark heart is in its grim acceptance of inequality. And Muller’s “The Handyman” follows one man’s desperate search for security in an increasingly hard-to-afford city, revealing that one indifference in the world that at least 99 percent of us can relate to.
Best of all, Oakland is full of art and funk and grit. It’s Thompson’s “slick brother strutting over a bacon-grease bass line” and that “white chick with a bucket of hot muffins heading to the farmer’s market.” Readers who know the city will relish its sense of place, and those who only know the stereotypes will be in for a pleasing eye-opener.
Zoë Ferraris is the author of the novels “Finding Nouf,” “City of Veils” and “Kingdom of Strangers.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com