by Lindsey Danis

It goes block by block is what everyone said about Oakland when I told them I was moving west, and my block, just off Foothill, is six houses thick, tiny two-stories with cement front yards and patches of lawn in the back. Our backyard has overgrown rosemary, blushing roses invading through the fence, and wild pea shoots, tiny and undernourished pods growing, translucent so you can see the baby peas inside. There's a clapboard shack with one tiny window where Fiona goes to smoke her medicinal marijuana. If she doesn't have it she can't sleep at night, she wakes up in pain, and she doesn't like doing things like going to work stoned, riding BART, but what can you do, really?

The Chinese neighbors on the left have two boys who won't stop crying, and the way they watch Fiona go to the shed and back feels like an accusation. Currents blow their words into my house before anyone's awake, so I wake with the Chinese family, have my coffee while they quarrel, sleep away an afternoon. When we leave the house they're quiet, but their eyes whisper insinuations as they follow us out the front gate and down the hill, and I make a point of looking back because there are stories I could tell about them.

In and out of our house, four queers, then three through the hot month, where the heat clings close like a lover, and my skin sweats under skimpy clothes and burns pink. Fiona and Jill shut the windows to block the heat and we sit, too hot to eat or talk or sleep.

Fiona and Jill strap on cocks and fuck men for money, slap men around, and I visit the house in the remote East Bay hills with cookies I made one night, rolling and cutting dough, stamping out round O's, making tiny chocolate sandwiches. Tracking flour all over the kitchen floor, into the gaps between the floorboards, adding heat in the unnecessarily hot night, baking in my tank top with the back door open and a tall boy of beer cracked and slowly warming while I load baking sheets.

To the other side a black family, the mother cooking at odd hours, in and out of the kitchen, doors creaking. I sit in the rocking chair on the back porch, drink my beer, watch her unload the dishwasher in a tee-shirt dress. They're not very loud, and I am thankful.

Inside we have tense conversations about money. What we would do for money. How Fiona and Jill can get new business, where they can get it, while in the washing machine lingerie sets thumps around. They would like to leave the ramshackle house, with its ancient, senile madam who believes sex work is healing, but there is nowhere else to go, and though our neighborhood is wary of cops you can't be certain.

I wake before dawn, shrug intro dirty pants, cloak myself in the night and head for BART. Sometimes before dawn the Hells Angels are out, sometimes it's only me and the truckers barreling toward the Bay, windows down to keep me awake until I get to the shop, where I can brew coffee and watch the sky lighten to bright blue, the pinprick of light from the approaching morning ferry. I'm alone while the world is sleeping; I roll up my sleeves and turn on the ovens.

In and out of bodegas carrying tiny bags, I push through the young Mexican mothers at Mi Ranchito for my plantains, potatoes, limes. The cashier switches to English for me, slowly exaggerating each word. Thank you. Have a nice day. You speak Spanish?

They don't say much as I walk down the street but I feel their eyes on me, la gringa, as I enter the bodega or the liquor store or walk down to the BART, and sometimes I'll look at them, nod, some days I'll just look down, keep walking, understand that they don't want me here. It's a neighborhood of schools, one down the street and three others within walking distance, and I thought at first that would make it safe, but I don't like walking down Foothill when it's late so I stick to the side streets, even though nothing's happened and I wouldn't expect it to, it is not that sort of block, the dangerous kind, it's just that every step is a cultural barrier I'm crossing.

In the hottest stretch of spring it reaches ninety in Oakland, but the heat sticks to our skin. At the corner, the children have forced open a fire hydrant, and a chubby boy holds a board over the flow to direct the water toward the children and adults scampering through in wet shorts and t-shirts. None of us queers have ever been in this sort of urban television fantasy, so we sprint, shrieking, through the arch of water, joining our neighbors on the far corner.

Before the cops come, we plant our feet in the runoff and watch as everyone goes through, from the far side to the near, and for a second stands invisible in the center of the spray. There's been no announcement but suddenly everyone is out from three blocks around. Small children and dogs scamper at the edges, parents lean against fences and watch, and for once everyone is silent in celebration and it's quiet enough to hear the water hiss onto the asphalt and the smack of wet flip flops as someone takes another turn. The mist coats cars, passerby, makes our street seem to shimmer the way the buildings shimmer with the heat and haze when you get high enough up the Oakland hills to see out across the foothills and flatlands, to the city across the bay.

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