Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Brush Hour
West Oakland is a tough neighborhood in anybody’s book. All I really know of it is what I see through the windows of the train when I ride through on my way to more felicitous destinations. The elevated BART tracks offer a panoramic outlook. What I see from them is a sprawling zone of industrial facilities, vacant lots and rail yards and block upon block of old frame houses that each seem to be sinking independently into reminiscences of better bygone days. I’ve zipped through countless times; the trackside landmarks are familiar to me without my ever having set foot near them - the BBQ shack, the blues club, the “Free Iran” graffiti, the old laundry on old lines cats-cradled across trussed-up old backyards. It’s an area I know I don’t know in any meaningful way, but still my last trip through showed me something I really didn’t expect.
The train pulled into the station - two landings framing two sets of tracks under two utilitarian steel canopies. The color scheme is raw concrete; the sound scheme is muted grumbling over implacable machinery. However, against that ambient noise, drowned out by the personal music source that keeps me company on my peregrinations, I still could clearly hear with my eyes the suit waiting for a westbound train on the landing opposite me.
I glanced up as my train stopped, curious as ever who was boarding, leaving, staying, waiting. Usually it’s the urban subset - people of color, moms and youths, old folk with mobility issues, thugs with ‘tudes. This day, though, my eye was immediately attracted by one man who didn’t fit the typical West Oakland mold.
His skin was the medium pink of a deskbound professional; his body was well-nourished and substantial. His red necktie set off his charcoal grey suit and his white shirt gleamed in with antiseptic incandescence. Had I encountered him walking among the glass canyons where I work, I wouldn’t have even noticed him; here among the badlands and brownfields he sure stood out. But that wasn’t even it. The suit and the air of professional complacency were unusual here, to be sure. But what anybody would have noticed anywhere was the drumming.
He sat on the simple slab of the all-weather bench awaiting his city-bound train, holding between his knees a drumhead, and in each hand, a steel percussion brush. His head was bowed, less in concentration than in devotion, and his torso swayed slightly as he worked a rhythm that multiple layers of bafflement hid from me. His brushes stroked smoothly, whisking out a pattern to float over the city with steady serenity. He never looked up or around while we were waiting across from him. As my train beeped and closed its doors and resumed its journey out to places more familiar to me, he just grinned and upped the tempo.