Welcome to OaklandEric Miles WilliamsonRaw Dog Screaming Press |
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Reviewed by Brian Allen Carr
Four things I know about Eric Miles Williamson:
1. His favorite drink is malt liquor.
2. He drives a car he bought for $100.
3. There’s almost no furniture in his house. Just stacks of books and desks.
4. He doesn’t write. He swings fists of fiction.
Williamson’s prose is fortified with male bravado. His language spits in the face of academia’s politics. Literally raised in a gas station, the Oakland native’s words seem penned with motor oil. The Atlantic called his last outing Oakland, Jack London and Me one of “the least politically correct texts of our time.” And this, his latest, Welcome to Oakland, goes a step further, grinds more gears.
In this sequel to his 1999 debut East Bay Grease Williamson drops lines that could pink Henry Miller’s cheeks, dismantling the sensitive milieu by deconstructing every manner of gender and creed. Singing the laments of “darkest Oakland dark,” Williamson swills out the stuff that sets enemies of negative stereotypes dizzy with rage. Mexicans carry stilettos, ex-wives have “black accents white girls sometimes get when they like fucking black dudes,” and male Berkley students are called plainly “faggots.” Still, the heart of Williamson’s intention here is not to weave webs of hatred across targeted factions of society, but to show that all humans are warty:
I told Agnes that even though she’d rather be a nigger, most of the time if I had my druthers I’d of wished I was Mexican, someone from a wonderful and ancient culture, someone who knew who his goddamn parents were and who his grandparents were and who knew his cousins by name. American white people can rarely trace their family tree back past their grandparents, and if for some reason they can, they probably got it wrong, because only the women know for sure who the fathers are, and the bitches they don’t tell.
In Welcome to Oakland, T-Bird Murphy (the returning narrator from Williamson's Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award finalist East Bay Grease), is holed up in a shack in Missouri writing about his demise. Often he pauses freely to address the audience, examining his own attitudes without ever apologizing:
Hell, I’d like to piss a fucking lot of people off. At least I’d be making the assholes feel something. People might not like you, The Author. Shit. My heart is all broken up about this. Honest.
In sweeping sentences that channel Faulkner, Williamson once again tethers music to humanity. T-Bird the trumpet-playing blue-collar hoodlum wrestles with the juxtaposition—to spring from shit, but to aspire to the condition of beauty—this is, according to Williamson, the crux of existence as well as the horror of humanity. Williamson is capable of slipping from the discourse of drudgery to the lyric of the sublime:
I put down my horn, set it in the grass, and the horses started circling around me, walking, slow at first, about a dozen horses ringed around me and walking in a circle. Just like that. Then they walked faster and they walked faster and soon they were trotting and then running and then they were a blaze, a gray and white and black and pinto wash of streaks and spots, their manes feathered back in wind. And I ran. I ran with them.
This is a sprawling initiation, but not a bildungsroman. Here the age has already been achieved, and it's only truth that lingers beyond the narrator’s grasp, beyond his filthy-mouthed meditation on humanity's true endeavor: to make the best of it. Elsewhere, Williamson shows us a junkyard watchman making garbage art, a possible personification of this philosophy:
Night Jones welded. He welded anything made of metal—old kitchen sinks, car parts, shorn girders, refrigerators, the legs of cheap kitchen tables, bent up and green brass lamp. He was making some kind of weird sculpture, a whacked out tower that didn’t look like anything, really, but a bunch of junk welded together and curving into a sky.
Or perhaps not, as Williamson’s own art curves closer toward clarity. His narrator learns about himself from his surroundings, but rarely likes the lessons, leading to what is perhaps the novel's truest revelation: If you can learn only from your surroundings, and your surroundings are shit, then you cannot be expected to overcome.
Throughout, Williamson shows us the filth of reality, taking a microscope's view of working class life, but not in the pastoral sense, and not by singing the praises of blue collar sustainability, weaving yarns about the everyman’s resiliency. He is focusing on our basest mannerisms, our dirty bits, the bits that like to cum and curse, that get blistered by prejudices inherent in our surroundings, where society self segregates and fear of the unknown is our last unifying factor.
And then there is the shame. Shame is the poetry of Williamson’s Oakland, and it comes across in his dirty lines, in his prose depicting endless imperfections. Those who’d rather ignore this reality might get sour at T-Bird’s less than righteous outcome, might make faces at every racial slur, every sexist sentiment, every new instance of debauchery. To these people, I offer only Willamson's own words, filtered through T-Bird's distinct narrative voice: “You want perfect? Read someone else’s fucking book.”