Town Without Pity

WELCOME TO OAKLAND

By Eric Miles Williamson

Raw Dog Screaming. 232 pp. Paperback, $15.95

Most readers will veer away from Eric Miles Williamson's "Welcome to Oakland" the way they would from a street gang descending on their car with tire irons and handguns. The sane, even moderately moneyed property owner will make a U-turn and peel out for the safety of the hills, which in Oakland aren't merely symbolic but a literal expression of socioeconomic reality. Here, human misery (like sewage) runs downhill, and the Oakland of T-Bird Murphy, Williamson's indomitable narrator, is decidedly down. What's more, T-Bird likes it that way, and celebrates the lowly in a tour de force of street narrative, served straight up.

Readers first met Murphy as the narrator of Williamson's autobiographical "East Bay Grease" (1999), which offered a frank account of a hellish youth. Beaten, burned (literally) and abandoned by his mother, T-Bird fell to the care of Pop, who turned out not to be his father at all but who provided a hard-nosed education in street survival. The T-Bird of "East Bay Grease" survived as much as anything through his music, playing trumpet for a Mexican jazz band.

"Welcome to Oakland" moves both forward and back, delving into certain matters left unstated in the earlier work. This includes the horrific death of T-Bird's brother, who was dragged behind a car by a Mexican gang as payback for Pop Murphy's burning their house down (killing six), which in turn was payback for the Mexicans cutting off another brother's ear. The current version of T-Bird is 10 years older and, if anything, more emotionally racked than his younger self. In "Welcome to Oakland" we find a man whose innocence has boiled away, leaving behind rage, disgust and a deep desire to extract meaning from his life. He has finally had to leave Oakland and is now holed up in Missouri, apparently to write this book.

The novel swirls through a series of half-plots, portraits and anecdotes of Murphy's various bar buddies, interspersing diatribes on race, class and literary fiction, among other things. Williamson rails against almost everybody, including readers and critics who live in a fantasy world of justice and resolution. Between its episodic structure -- brilliantly echoing the rhythms of jazz, by the way -- and the blunt-force trauma of the narrator's attitudes, what emerges is no easy read. T-Bird navigates a sea of violent revenge with a cargo of rot-gut booze. He declines from "the best second-rate trumpet player in Northern California" to a dump-truck driver who sleeps in the cab, parked on a mountain of garbage as the eerie blue glow of methane flares on the "garbage shore" of San Francisco Bay.

For T-Bird, living by your word and creating something hopeful -- mainly children and art -- are the sole means of redemption. He finds beauty in the foul-smelling streets of East Oakland, in the camaraderie of working (and drinking) men, whose hands bear the callused crevices of hard labor. He revels in the Oakland dumps where he sleeps amid the vast sculptures of Jones the dump master, who salvages and welds junk into art. And that's the essence of Williamson's take on life: making beauty from the ugly underbelly. It's not a new theme, of course, but in "Welcome to Oakland" Williamson gives a contemporary turn on a literary genre pioneered by Hugo, Dostoyevsky and Céline, and in the American canon by Kerouac, Burroughs and Bukowski. As T-Bird puts it, with an ironic echo of "The Great Gatsby": "One fine morning I'll wake up and look out over the wasteland of pickled and shredded souls and my vision will transform the bile of the world into nectar. And I will not be alone."

Some readers will be inclined to fling "Welcome to Oakland" into the nearest grease pit. This would probably come as no surprise to the author, but ignoring Williamson would be a mistake. For those who can stomach this mad sprint through the Oakland of T-Bird Murphy, there emerges a powerful portrait of a man both extolling and exorcising the demons of life among the working poor. We should listen well, and not judge that voice by the standards of polite discourse, but simply hear it and feel it as the mournful echo of a lone -- and lonely -- trumpet.

Masiel is a novelist and Oakland native now living elsewhere in Northern California.