Dreams at the corner of Broadway and 7th

I remember very clearly the first song that ever made me cry.

I must have been about 27 years old, living and working in Oakland, having just recently “finished” at UC Berkeley.

Actually, I never did graduate from Berkeley… I had started with a year’s college credit from high school AP classes, and an unalloyed, exuberant confidence in my own ability to be the absolute best at whatever intellectual pursuit I essayed. I took whatever classes I was interested in – more math than anything else, but a lot of other classes that went along with my journey of self-discovery: philosophy, religion, literature, and so on. They seemed so interesting on the syllabus, but I lost interest in many of them pretty quickly, or found myself struggling to fight the currents of the intellectual game that I wasn’t there to play, so I would pay only minimal attention or none at all. I ended up failing about 13 or 14 classes – mostly by simply failing to attend – a few of which I later made up, but mostly not.

I was also putting myself through school, so I’d take off time to work here and there, and save a little money – precious little, since I was much more interested in buying clothes and doing fun things than in smartly managing my self-guided path to success. So it took a lot of time off from school just to save for a quarter or two back on. And I took off other times just to play – to read Chinese poetry, or to play blackjack for a living.

So even after 7 or 8 years of sporadic study, I had barely enough credits to graduate with my BA in Math, and I still hadn’t met my minimum foreign language requirement, along with some other useless requirement which I’ve forgotten. But I needed money again, and I was able to talk my way into a job I was completely unqualified for, as an HR Systems Analyst (of all useless things) at World Savings, at their shiny silver 20-story headquarters building in downtown Oakland – so I “finished” going to school for the last time, and just decided that I would go on with my career from there.

I was living with my girlfriend, now my wife, in a little apartment just a couple of blocks from World Savings, on Alice Street. It was very much downtown Oakland – a few blocks from Oakland Chinatown (which is beautifully evoked in Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, by Nellie Wong), a few blocks from the adult movie theaters and peep-show bookstores that used to line that part of Broadway, around a couple of corners from dingier and darker streets where drugs were sold day and night, where lonely prostitutes wandered between work and home, where poor kids laughed and ran in the garbage-strewn streets. Our building was a refuge of straight lines, clean floors, and potted plants, hoping to become a nicer place, where poor, educated young white and black and Indian and Asian couples pretended they were not poor. Nice little cafes and restaurants sprung up like weeds along the nearby streets, and the city planners of Oakland did their best to bring big businesses like Kaiser and Union Pacific into the few gleaming office towers, while the drug-dealing and emptiness and poverty and racial anger swarmed like a fast-encroaching jungle all around.

I can’t say I hated my job – I enjoyed some of the challenge, and I learned a lot, and I enjoyed some aspects of “work life”. I liked dressing up for work; I liked being smart and proving I could become good at a job I had no preparation for. But I was lonely. I did not find my co-workers to be potential friends, the way many of my classmates at Berkeley had been with no effort. We shared fewer values and goals, and I wasn’t psychologically prepared for the sad and meaningless struggle of entry level office culture; I was still a brilliant intellectual in my own mind; an important person, not a hamster in a cage. I had to force myself to play the game. I was intimidated by those who seemed to thrive in this milieu, and I doubted myself.

I would usually go off somewhere for lunch, just driving around, exploring aimlessly, eventually stopping somewhere for a bite. A little out of the way café here or there, where I could eat and think and read the paper in private, away from the maddening bustle and meaningless drudgery of the office, with all it’s little daily emergencies and it’s crazy culture of objectives that no one in their right mind could take personally seriously – and which everyone seemed to. Someplace I could flirt with a waitress, or doodle cartoons on my napkins – brilliant little compositions which I would laugh and throw away after an hour, as I sighed and smiled and got ready to go back to face the afternoon.

One day, I was driving on my slow way back, listening to the radio, and Fast Car, by Tracy Chapman came on. I think it had just been released. I had never heard it, or her, before.

You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way

It was so completely unlike any other popular music I was used to hearing. It wasn’t jingly jouncy crap. It made my fingertips tingle, like a kind of electricity that was flowing right through my body. It was like listening in silence, in the dark, to the deepest sorrows of a close friend, baring their soul. Tears were streaming down my face, involuntarily. I had to pull over, on 6th or 7th, a block away from Broadway, and just sit and listen, in amazement.

I was really surprised to be affected this way. It wasn’t about me… it wasn’t about my life. But it was about the life of the people I lived with, that walked the streets of Oakland. I recognized them. I could FEEL that life coming out of my radio; I felt as if I were INSIDE that young black woman’s skin, as if I were riding in the car with her as she held out that hope, as she did what she could to dream, while living in her true world.

You got a fast car
And we go cruising to entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a big house and live in the suburbs

It was such an uncompromising song. One listened, knowing that things would not get better for her; drawn into her hopeless clinging to the prospect of a promotion, of his job, of the big house, but knowing that it was an empty dream; knowing that she would never escape in her fast car, that the bills and the crying baby and the tiredness would go on, that there would be shouting fights on the steps of the dirty, run-down apartment building, the man would leave, that nothing would change.

And it was completely unpretentious, completely unprotected. It was not *about* something else, it wasn’t pretty or pleasant or lovely. It was exposed. Yet it wasn’t raw, or exploitive, or bold. It was simply the true feelings of a young, poor, still hopeful black woman, who held on to some dream of a good life, a life. It was stripped of all pretension, as if she had written it, and then gone back over it and mercilessly struck out every false note, every word that was not straight from the heart. Over and over again, stripping the words bare, excising every hint of self-protection, so that at the end we were listening in to her deepest private feelings, with music seemingly welling up straight from the unconscious, that spoke the language of the soul.

I remember we were driving driving in your car
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

It makes my eyes water just hearing it again, in my mind. I sometimes tell my wife that in my next life, I’ll come back as a black woman, and maybe there’s some secret unknowable affinity there. Probably not.

I loved Tracy Chapman from that moment on. Really loved her; I would help her the way I would help my brothers or sisters if she needed it. That’s the power that art has to remake us. She hasn’t changed; her later music has remained uncompromising and brilliant and true. Some of her songs, like “All That You Have Is Your Soul”, or “Subcity”, or “The Promise” are among my favorite things in the world, and perfectly express (and shape) my own feelings, and make me sigh and smile and cry. But nothing, to me, has the power of “Fast Car” or “Talkin’ About a Revolution” – those first punches; those first words, that to me told a truth that I wanted to hear.