Accidental Careerist Part 4

...continued from Part 3

I’ll have to give you the condensed version of the Diablo/Blizzard experience. It would take a book to give the story its proper due. So here we go. Two years into the development of Diablo Blizzard decided to buy Condor. We became Blizzard North and Max, Dave, and Erich became millionaires overnight. Diablo was released in the first week of January 1997 and stayed at the top of the software charts for 7 months and ushered in the era of online gaming. PC gaming ruled the industry. At the time Blizzard acquired us they were being acquired by software publisher Davidson. Warcraft 2 had been released in 1996 and was Game of the Year and Diablo followed suit in 1997. The success was continued with the release of Starcraft in 1998 giving Blizzard Game of the Year three years in a row. Blizzard North stayed small, we had only grown to 15 people for the making of Diablo. By 1999 we had grown to 45 people for the making of Diablo 2.

By then things had started to change. In a large part due to Blizzard’s success the gaming industry went through a rapid expansion. Annual revenue started to rival that of Hollywood. Corporations started buying their way into the industry and snapping up the small independent studios and publishers. Soon after the release of Diablo Davidson was bought by CUC, a corporation that made their money on memberships for discounted services and products. CUC soon merged with HFS, a real estate and hotel based corporation and formed the conglomerate known as Cendant. Wall St. was on a roll. Yahoo and Amazon, two new internet companies, were the hot stocks. Google at the time was just one of many search engines trying to find their niche. In April 1998 Cendant became the first corporation to get busted for fraud during the mid to late 90’s meteoric rise of Wall St. To us lowly workers they made stock options seem like gold. Our bonus money for the success of Diablo came in the form of stock options which became worthless once the fraud went public and the SEC started their investigation. I remember the day, it was April 15, 1998. The Cendant execs sold their stocks two weeks before the bust because they knew better. For me and my friends at Blizzard North our stocks became worthless. Cendant’s assets were frozen for a week and by the time they were unfrozen the stock had dropped to well below our option price. I was two years vested and my portfolio was worth $240,000 and almost overnight it became worthless. It was my wake up call to the nature of the corporate beast. The Cendant fraud was soon followed by the Worldcom debacle, which was followed by the Enron travesty.

There were many other high profile stock based frauds. Cooking the books was the business of the day. This was all paralleled by the dot.com boom and bust which I had a front row seat from living and working in the Bay area. Unlike Condor which was started on a small loan and money from parents I witnessed the birth of one dot.com outfit after another hitting the ground running fueled by venture capitalist money. These companies had made no revenue but they had the best offices with the best technology and handed out high paying jobs like cheap beer at a frat party. These companies had lavish perks and threw massive parties. Young people flocked to the Bay area for the high paying jobs, which in turn forced the rent and cost of living up in San Francisco disenfranchising the City I had known. It was like a technological gold rush. Many of my friends in San Francisco who were mostly artists and working class were priced out of the City.

Diablo 2 was released in June of 2000 and it was a monster hit setting a Guiness Book of World Records for game sales. Gaming had gone international and Blizzard was well known around the globe. We were especially huge in Korea due to Starcraft. Right before the release of Diablo 2 Cendant sold its gaming division to Vivendi, a French water utilities company, for $885 million. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the beginning of the end for Blizzard North. We had grown to 65 strong. Most of the people were new and had not worked on Diablo or Diablo 2. Many of the people who came on at the end of Diablo and the beginning of production for Diablo 2 left the company after the Cendant fraud. We were now fully corporatized. We had rules, we had overseerers, and we had several levels of management. We were no longer the small maverick studio that did whatever it took to get the job done. We started working on Diablo 3 with a crew that was not cohesive and leadership that had become more concerned with maintaining their wealthy lifestyles than leading the studio. For two and a half years we were like a rudderless ship. By the summer of 2003 we should have been putting the final touches on Diablo 3 but instead we had nothing to show. We had started on five different versions of game, spending 3-6 months at a time developing ideas that we eventually trashed. Max, Dave, and Erich came in to work one day and announced they were leaving Blizzard North to form a new studio. The scuttlebut was that they approached Vivendi for more money and not only were they turned down they were asked to resign. Blizzard South had been working on World of Warcraft since 2000 and had already sunk tens of millions into the game. Vivendi was trying to sell off Blizzard and was asking $1.5 billion but found no takers. To cut their losses they decided to consolidate Blizzard which meant liquidating Blizzard North. The guys (Max, Dave, and Erich) left to form Flagship Studios and they only took a select few with them. I wasn’t one of them. They had a plan to have a small group of designers and leads to create a game and outsource all the development for the assets. Soon after they left Blizzard, Blizzard North was downsized by a mass layoff. After being told in a private one on one meeting with the management that I was one of the so called important people I was shown the door. I had been with Condor/Blizzard North for 9 years and this is how it would end. I helped build the studio from nothing and helped the guys become millionaires

I had been working for 22 years straight without a break and for the first time in my life I was laid off. The day of the layoff was the same day escrow closed on the home (a one bedroom apartment) I had just purchased in San Francisco. I hooked up with a bunch of ex Blizzard guys who formed a studio called Castaways, the name a direct reference to how we exited Blizzard North. We secured a contract with Electronic Arts to make a Diablo like game based on Greek and Persian mythology. After a year and a half our contract was cancelled. Electronic Arts had a CEO change and went in a new direction and cancelled all of their third party contracts. After about six months of unsuccessfully trying to find a new publisher Castaways was forced to lay off all of its staff in December of 2005.

I didn’t start looking for work right away. I decided to do take some time off from working and do some traveling. I went to Costa Rica and had a fabulous time. A few months after that I went to Peru to hike the Inca Trail to Maccha Pichu and I went to Tulum in Mexico to see the Mayan pyramids. I took a summer job to be the director of the ID Gaming Academy, a three work residential program run out of UC Berkeley where high school kids were given a crash course in game art and game development. It was the perfect job for me since it combined my two careers. It was a challenging job. I worked from 7am to 1am, seven days a week. When that ended I landed an animation job working for Backbone Entertainment in Emeryville.

I had only been at Backbone for two months when I was contacted by my old friend from Blizzard North Michio Okamura. He and another old time Blizzard Northy, Eric Sexton, were forming a new studio. They had secured a deal with a Chinese publisher. I was hired to be the Lead Animator. It was just like the Condor days, we were starting a studio from the ground up except this time the stakes were much higher. Where in the Condor days it maybe cost a few hundred thousand to operate the studio now the annual cost was in the millions. The new studio was called UI Pacific Games and we were making an MMO (massive multiplayer game) based on the Chinese legendary story, the Three Kingdoms. All the core management people were ex-Blizzard North. We hired about 25 people and started production on the game. We also had a studio in Seoul. In March of 2007 we visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul to meet our new publishers in person. All was going according to plan when the Chinese pulled out of the deal abruptly after nine months.

Brad Mason, our CEO, managed to find another publisher for us in less than a month. This time it was with Gravity of Korea. Gravity built its success around the game Ragnarok and wanted to establish itself in the US market. Our new studio was named L5. Gravity had an office in Los Angeles and owned a few licenses based on Hollywood films. This was actually very exciting because at first we thought we were going to be making the companion game for the movie Avatar. For some reason the deal could not be worked out. Gravity had a license for Ice Age so that became our new project. It was a bit of a letdown because that is not what we signed on for plus we would only have an 18 month development window to make and ship the game. We weren’t even sure what kind of game we wanted to make so we spent the first few months negotiating with Gravity what type of game it was going to be and who would be the target market. Once that was settled we started working on the game. I was promoted to Art Lead responsible for all of the art assets. We were on a tight schedule but we were making good progress. We had most of the main characters modeled and animated and we were actually starting to get some momentum. Even the Blue Sky people who made the movie were digging our game. I have been in some whacked out situations in the gaming industry but I wasn’t at all prepared for what was about to happen.

In August 2008 I came into work and was told by Brad that the management team was going to resign from L5 to go work for T3 and Hanbisoft, another Korean company. I was told I could join them or stay at L5. The same offer was made to the entire staff which numbered about 30 people. Apparently there was some concern with Gravity’s commitment to L5. Of course I took the offer, what else was I going to do? So here I was heading into the third company in three years with basically the same people. The irony behind this move is that we were going to be working on a game that had shipped a year earlier that was made by Flagship which was run by our former bosses at Blizzard North.

Flagship had shipped Hellgate London in late 2007 under much controversy. They made a deal with Hanbisoft late in the game to get much needed funding. They took a sizeable loan from Hanbisoft and put their game up as collateral. The game was released before it was ready and it didn’t meet expectations. They had to liquidate Flagship in summer of 2008 because the loan was called in. Hanbisoft took over the game and the rights to distribute it in Asia. We were brought in to polish the game for its Asian release. Like Gravity, Hanbisoft was making its play to get into the US market. They were riding the success of a game called Audition. Our new studio was named Redbana US. Right after we began with Hanbisoft the global economy tanked. Audition was launched in 2009 in the US and it failed to garner any attention with the Guitar Hero/Rock Band dominated US market. In the spring of 2009 T3, the parent company began to downsize Redbana. Eric Sexton, who started the original studio, myself, and some other management staff were laid off in April 2009. Once again I found myself out of work, getting my ass scorched by corporate politics and decision making.

Seven months later I am still trying to reboot my career but this might be the end. With the economy in the shitter jobs of any kind are almost non existent. Fifteen years I have worked in the gaming industry, starting at the very bottom and reaching the top of the mountain only to find myself on the bottom again, on the outside looking in. My savings are rapidly dwindling and soon I will not have health insurance if I don’t find a job by January. If I go a few more months unemployed I’ll have to sell my apartment and probably move out of San Francisco, the city that has been my home for the last 18 years.

Has my luck run out? If there is a new career out there for me I haven’t had the chance to meet it yet. I have some ideas about some new directions I want to go in but the clock is ticking and these are hardly the best of times. I can’t say I have any regrets. It was a great ride that ended in a wreck but I had some great times and I met a lot of good people. Who knows? Maybe the gaming industry has one last silver bullet left for me. It would be nice to go out on my own working on a game that ships that I can be proud of. I’m down but I am not out. Perhaps if you follow my blog you will get to witness my resurrection.

The future is not yet written.

Accidental Careerist Part 3

…continued from Part 2.

It can sometimes be strange and mystifying the random occurrences that dictate our fate. What leads us down this pathway vs. that? What leads us down the road less taken? For me it has been because I have never had a burning desire too travel down any specific path, I trust the universe to reveal itself to me. Pathways and doorways are always opening up it’s just a question of how aware I am and how much am I willing to risk the unknown. How willing am I to let go where I am to get to someplace new and different? For most of my life not only have I been willing I have relished the moments when the strange and unknown have taken the reigns of my life.

In the fall of 1993 circumstances not directly related to me had a profound change on my life. One of my best friends, Megan Feeney had moved to New York and she met a guy named Ken Williams. They were living together in some hole in the wall apartment with a brick and chimney view in Manhattan. That summer Ken’s parents died in a car crash in Los Angeles where he was originally from. This unfortunate and devastating event called Ken back home to LA so he could settle the estate and put his parents to rest. Megan called me and told me she was heading up to San Francisco while Ken took care of his duties in LA. Ken’s best friends from his childhood in Brentwood, CA., Max and Erich Schaefer, lived in San Francisco and Ken planned on coming up to San Francisco later to be with his buddies while he was in mourning.

Megan arrived in San Francisco in October. She called me and asked me if I wanted to hang out with her and Kenny’s best friend Max who she didn’t know to well just yet. I agreed and suggested we meet at the Up and Down Club. At the time the so-called acid jazz scene was really happening in San Francisco. It was the last true live music scene the City has seen. I was deep into it, going out to the clubs two or three times a week. Alphabet Soup, one of my favorite local bands had a regular gig on Monday nights at the Up and Down Club and that’s why I chose it. I was very happy to see Megan and I was always up for meeting new people. My first impression of Max turned out to be way off the mark. He was 26 years old and a graduate of the University of Colorado. It was the way he dressed that threw me off. This was light years before the dot.com boom and bust. Most young San Franciscans dressed down by choice. Doc Martens, tatoos, piercings, Grateful Dead t-shirts, and American Spirit cigarettes was the standard uniform. Max showed up in a blue blazer, wrinkled and tucked in plaid button down shirt, and Dockers. He had the kind of look that suggested he didn’t go out much and was probably very conservative, possibly even a Republican. Boy was I ever wrong about Max.

Listening to the funky beats of Alphabet Soup Max told me about a new company he and his brother and a friend had just started called Condor. They had a contract to do a fighting game for the Sega 16 bit console based on the DC comics superheroes. They were just starting out. They had no employees and no office space yet they were working on the game. They were looking for an artist to draw superheroes like Superman and Batman for the game. It never crossed my mind to tell Max that I used to draw superheroes but Megan knew and she volunteered the information to Max. Max handed me a napkin and a pen and asked me to draw something. In about two minutes I drew a sketch of Superman. Max liked it a lot and asked me if I would be interested in doing some art work for their game. He was only able to offer me 20 hours a week with no benefits and no guarantee the company would even survive the first year. Although I was flattered by the offer it wasn’t enough for me to leave my job at the YMCA where I had built a career.

Even though I didn’t take the job I did become friends with Max. He lived with his brother Erich in an apartment at the top of Twin Peaks. Max was far from being a conservative. He was a classic ultra liberal San Franciscan who hated dressing up. He didn’t own a tie or suit. He was a sharp minded fellow who loved to talk politics, play video games, and smoke tons of weed. When I would go to hang out with him and Erich I felt right at home. Erich was an interesting guy in his own right. He was an easy going guy with that live and let live philosophy about life. He was the older brother but he didn’t have that older brother attitude. He had a wry sense of humor and we could relate to each other because he was into stuff I was into, like underground comics and weird magazines. He also was a lover of film, not the mainstream stuff, he was into the arcane and off the wall stuff like Eraserhead and the movies coming out of Hong Kong, especially Jackie Chan and John Woo films. They also loved playing video games, specifically Sega NHL hockey. They were experts. I had played video games growing up but lost my taste for it after getting beaten badly by my younger brothers Kenny and Kirk who were video game savants. They could beat anybody at Intellivision. When you can’t beat your younger brothers at something you just give it up because it’s just not cool to lose to your younger brothers at anything. It puts a dent in the older brother aura. I had fun hanging out with Max and Erich. We played video games, watched cool movies, ate burritos, and smoked bong hit after bong hit. They were self proclaimed “slackers” which was a term that was still new at the time. Their main inspiration for starting the video game company is that they didn’t want to work for the Man or work in some tight assed corporate environment. They were anarchist. They weren’t into rules or traditions. That was what defined the young people of San Francisco. Everybody was trying to find their own way to work and live, not for money and upward mobility, but for freedom and peace of mind. It was a City full of young people living on the cheap and by their own rules. Nobody had a nice car, nice clothes, or their own apartment. We all had 3 or 4 roommates. Everybody I knew was doing something creative and that’s the way we preferred it. The dot.com would change all of that and not for the better.

In the March of 1994 I was up for a visit at Max and Erich’s and I saw a stack of drawings of Batman on the kitchen table. They had finally found an artist and he was pretty good. He was a Japanese guy named Michio Okamura. Michio had been in the states since he was 9 but you could still still see the Japanese influence in his drawings because they had an anime look to them. The guys were excited beyond belief because they could finally get the project rolling and get more money from the publisher which meant they could hire more people. A few months later I left the Buchanan YMCA to work at the Hilltop YMCA in Richmond. I was hired to run a community center in the Iron Triangle, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Bay area. I looked forward to the challenge. I had been working with teens in gangs when I left Buchanan and thought I had the chops to do it in Richmond. Unfortunately I ran into the same problems that I left the San Francisco Y for. The Hilltop YMCA was a new branch and was literally on top of a hill. Like most hilltop neighborhoods it was fairly affluent and seemed a million miles from the weed encrusted, broken glass strewn streets of the lowland where the community center was located. I was spending way more time on the top of the hill attending meetings when I should have been at the community center getting to know the staff and the people in the neighborhood.

I had only been on the new job for two weeks when Max called me and again offered me a job. This time he was offering full time hours and 50% benefits. The pay was a few thousand less per year than my job at the Y but Max said I could earn an extra 5-10 thousand a year through royalties. I didn’t think twice. I accepted the offer right away. Something inside me told me this was the thing to do. I gave the YMCA one week notice. They were stunned. I had just started and already I was leaving. I knew I was done with the YMCA. I departed without looking back. I took nothing with me. I left my library of books and manuals on the shelves and left my plaques and certificates on the wall of my office. I walked away from 11 years with the YMCA almost as if it had never been. My outlook was completely forward. I had no idea what this new job would bring but I was ready for it. I had no fear, I had no hesitation, and I had no doubts heading into a new job without really having any idea what exactly it was I would be doing.

My new official title was game artist. My job was to paint DC superhero characters with pixels. Before I started I had an interview with Dave Brevik who was the third partner. Max and Erich were the art and story guys and Dave was the programmer. I rode my bike from San Francisco to Redwood City for the interview. I had a flat about ¾ of the way there. I called Max and he came and picked me up in his old war torn VW Vanagon. The interview with Dave was short. He didn’t even want to see my artwork, he just wanted to meet me in person and give me the stamp of approval. I wasn’t nervous at all. I had been in so many meetings with people in power suits much older than me it was quite refreshing to be interviewing with my future boss who was 26 years old and wore shorts and a t-shirt. I was 31 at the time. We had a few laughs and talked about comic books and I was officially hired.

I was the 7th employee and the oldest guy working for the company. Dave and Max were 26 and Erich was 27. Michio Okamura, 30, did the paper drawings using a pen and a light box. He didn’t even have a computer. Richard Seis, 24, was the first hire and was the other programmer. Tom Byrne, 26, was a pixel artist. Matt Uelmen at 22 was the baby of the group and fresh out of college. He was our sound and music guy. We basically had a three room office. Matt inhabited one room where like a mad scientist he concocted sound effects for the game. Max, Dave, and Erich shared a small, closet like room adjacent to the large room that contained the rest of us. We had used, large, oaken desks and worked on 486 computers running the DOS operating system which was all command lines. I had never worked on a PC before. At the YMCA I had used Mac Classics and at home I had a Mac Performa. On my first day on the job Max had to show me the basics of running DOS. Michio made full page drawings, each representing a frame of animation. The drawings were scanned and Tom and I would paint them with pixels. We used a program called D-Paint. We had a 16 color palette and basically we just clicked all day painting in muscles and details one pixel at a time. Pick a color, click, zoom in, click, zoom out, click, pick another color, rinse-wash-repeat. At times it could be maddening work. Completing three frames in a day was considered a good day. We worked hard and we played hard. Our philosophy about making games is that you have to love games to make games. We didn’t make games from the viewpoint of artists and programmers we made games from the viewpoint of a gamer. Our goal was simple. Get the game on the shelf. We didn’t worry about how many copies the game sold or critical praise we just wanted to get the game into the hands of the gamers and give them a great gaming experience.

We finished the game and it was released the following November in the fall of 1994. It did ok, it wasn’t a blockbuster but like I said we were just happy to get the game released. We were a miniscule, obscure, no-name studio with seven employees. We were building a studio from the ground up, creating an egalitarian work environment that lacked formality and rules. We reveled in our anything goes attitudes. We had no CEO, no Directors, and no Leads. We were all just programmers or artists, even the owners. We all did the same work at the same level. To survive we needed the maximum effort of each individual. After finishing Justice League Task Force we started shopping around a role playing game designed by Dave called Diablo. We secured a small publishing contract with Blizzard Entertainment, then and up and coming studio that had just released Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans. Blizzard was actually sort of a rival for us. They had worked on the SNES version of Justice League Task Force and we used to get builds of their game and compare it to ours. Of course we always thought our version was better. Diablo drew interest from other larger established publishers like Acclaim but we felt comfortable with Blizzard because they had a similar studio environment to ours. At the time neither Blizzard nor Condor had any idea we were just a few years away from skyrocketing to the top of the gaming industry.

Ok, there is still a substantial amount of this story to be told but out of respect for the one or two people that read this blog I’m going to stop here. The next entry will definitely wrap up the saga of my two careers. If you are still on for the ride thanks for your patience. The finish will be worth it if you like tragedies.

To be continued…

Thanksgiving

I’m riding on BART on the way to the airport. I am very excited because I’m going to Phoenix to celebrate Thanksgiving with my Mom and two of my three brothers. It’s been over a year since I attended a family event . Thanksgiving has always been a special day to me because usually it means spending time with family. My mother is a great cook. If she owned a restaurant I would eat there every day. She always prepares a fantastic Thanksgiving meal. As kids my brothers and I would look forward to Thanksgiving dinner and days of leftovers and cold turkey sandwiches. When I was young I could easily put away three plates of turkey, stuffing, yams, greens, mac cheese, potato salad, and of course pumpkin and sweet potato pie. As a young adult I remember taking home care packages of leftovers prepared by my mother which I would share with roommates and friends who once they tasted my Mom’s cooking were hooked for life. I’ll watch football games and have one healthy plate of food as that is all I can handle (and all I need) these days.

Too often the day goes by without really thinking about the real meaning of Thanksgiving. 400 years ago the immigrants, pilgrims, invaders, take whatever name suits you, landed on the shores of what we now call America. They were part of the many people who spread about the world to help secure the vast British empire. They were British subjects loyal to King James as Americans hadn’t been invented yet. The newcomers struggled to make a go of it. The world was alien. They didn’t know how to farm the land. They didn’t know how to hunt the game. Most of the people were dieing of starvation and disease. The Wampanoag, the indigenous people native to the land, had been watching the newcomers. They were invisible, blending in with the natural flora and fauna. They were not sure what to do. Do they help the struggling visitors or do they run them off of the land that they called home?

They decided the newcomers were not a threat. They brought women and children. Whatever they were here for it was not to wage war, or so it seemed. The Wampanoag took pity on the rapidly perishing newcomers. They came in peace and friendship and brought offerings of bountiful food to the newcomers. The Wampanoag knew they were taking a chance. From the cloak of the forest they silently watched the newcomers arrive on their large ships. What were their intentions? Would more come? Are they peaceful?

These were questions that could not yet be answered. Some of the natives wanted to wipe them out and easily they could have. But their chief Massasoit decided otherwise. He decided to come in peace and bring them food so they would survive. And so it was. They brought them food and the newcomers were saved. The newcomers were grateful and insisted they had come in peace under the protection of King James who was now the ruler of these lands, the King of all the people. The newcomers declared the day to be a holiday, a Thanksgiving. They thanked the natives but mostly they thanked their Christian god for in their eyes He was the one who saved them.

400 years later the newcomers still celebrate Thanksgiving, but not as a people struggling to survive but as the people who, in their minds, are the most powerful nation to ever exist on the planet. And what of the natives? They again have become invisible people but not by choice. For America to be what it is today somebody had to pay a price and they were the ones. They were a people who inhabited every part of the North American continent at one time and now are barely seen, almost extinct. Think about this. What is the closest indigenous population to where you live? What native people once inhabited the land where you now live? For myself I know that the Miwok tribe were the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. I have no idea what is the nearest native community to the City of San Francisco. I should find out. It is something I should know. I know the history of California when it comes to the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Americans, but I don’t know about the natives. I know there is some native blood in my family line of my father’s side. His grandfather was one quarter Choctaw. I know about the Trail of Tears. I know about Wounded Knee. I know about the Mandans and the Lewis and Clark expedition. I know about the half breed rebel Metis. I know about the Aztecs, I know about the Incas. I know about John Horse and the Black Seminoles. I know about Geronimo and Sitting Bull. That is not a lot. I should know more. We should all know more.

This is a day when we should give thanks but it is also a day we should acknowledge the people who made America possible. We should all take some time to learn something we don’t yet know about the native people of our land. We should find out about the lesser known tribes, the ones that inhabited the areas where we now live. Their blood and bones are in the soil. Anywhere you dig deep in the soil you will find what they left behind. Find the latest native community nearest to where you live. If you can, visit them and give thanks. We read and here about their casinos whenever election time comes around. We assume they are doing ok when in fact they are the most impoverished group in the nation. My friend Craig Catimon has lived in the midst of native people for years. He has a son with a Mohawk woman of the Akwesasne tribe. He lives in Massena in upstate NY near the Canadian border not too far from the Akwesasne reservation. From what he tells me there are no jobs, there is no industry, and everybody is poor. He himself works in a cigarette factory. He struggles to make a living just as the native people do. They have problems with alcohol and depression.

In the age of the internet many Americans have traced their family lines to claim any heritage they have as indigenous people. We have taken just about everything from them now we even want to own their identity for this heritage movement has nothing at all to do with restoring the indigenous people and honoring the many treaties we have broken with them. It has everything to do with people searching for some meaningful culture in a land of materialism and consumption. We will feast today and go shopping tomorrow on Black Friday and for the next month it will all be about shopping up to the day we celebrate the birth of a Hebrew man born in the Middle East who had a philosophy of peace, love and sharing, a man who appears on to us in churches across the country nailed to a cross, a man who was Jewish and Middle Eastern but made to look like a white Anglo Saxon everywhere his image exists. It is not the truth but like so many falsehoods we accept it as true because it fit’s the image they would have us believe is the truth. We don’t question it and will even go as far to violently defend the falsehood. Try to make Him African or Asian and see what happens.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Accidental Careerist Part 2

...continued

When last we met I was unfolding most of my early childhood and adolescence trying to lay the groundwork on how I came to choose a career in my adulthood. Let’s get right to it shall we.

In my quest to show the world I had a brain I decided I wanted to go to college, not on a sports scholarship but on the strength of my academic record. I was recruited to play basketball by all the local junior colleges and a few small colleges. Interesting enough one of the schools that showed the most interest was Occidental College in Los Angeles. Had I gone there I would have just missed our current President Oback Barama by one semester. Had I gone to the school when he was there we would have surely become friends since there were very few blacks at Oxy and he was a basketball fanatic. According to the book From Promise to Power by David Mendell, when Oback was at Oxy he was in search of his black identity and made an extra effort to become friends with the entire black student body (not that there where a whole lot of them). Well that will be left to a life in an alternate universe. I almost ended up going to Lewis and Clark University in Portland. The small school approach was not one of selling me an NBA dream, it was about connections. I could attend one of these small, prestigious schools and meet lots of people who could be beneficial to my future in terms of business and career.

The truth of the matter is I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself after high school. Career counseling at St. Francis was a joke. It wasn’t all that important because most of the students career counseling came from their parents and it was all about following in the footsteps. When it came to college my parents really couldn’t help me. Having both grown up in the segregated south they never attended college. My father wanted me to play basketball at a local JC and get a scholarship to a major Division 1 school. I had an older brother who was in college but it he wasn’t in a position to help. College for him was an escape and that’s what he did. He started out local but eventually landed at LSU where he joined the Omega Phi Psi fraternity. He’s Omega branded and still bleeds purple and gold to this day. Despite going to a college prep school I was completely clueless about college. I applied to Arizona State, Marquette, USC, and UCLA. How I chose the schools is a mystery to me even to this day. I really only wanted to go to UCLA. A lot of my friends were applying there and the UC system had a good reputation and it seemed affordable compared to the private schools. USC was out of the question. The cost was something I could not relate to since I knew I would be paying my own way to go to college. I ended up being accepted at all the schools and of course I chose UCLA.

My freshman and only year at UCLA was a success in many ways but a disaster academically. I declared Art as my major having no idea what the Art Dept at UCLA was like. The campus and classes were massive. I had classes in auditoriums that had more people in them than the entire student body at St. Francis. I lived in an off campus apartment, this being my first time living away from home. One of my rooommates played the electric guitar as a hobby. He had a Fender Stratocaster and he taught me about Les Paul, guitars, and the great and soon to be great guitar players like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Michael Schenker, Yngwie Malmsteen, Angus Young, and Joe Satriani. Up to then I only knew Jimi Hendrix because everybody knows Jimi, Andy Summers because the Police was my favorite band and Eddie Van Halen because he was from Pasadena. I worked a part time job as an intramural referee and came to really dislike fraternities but I ended up becoming good friends with some frat guys from a fraternity called Acacia. They were outsiders in the fraternity system lacking greek letters and a frathouse. The fraternity was christian based and the guys were what was considered “geeks” and that’s what I liked about them. I never joined the frat but they treated my like one of their own.

Half way through my freshman year I started getting recruiting calls from Redlands University. Because of my sub par academic performance I knew I wasn’t going back to UCLA. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself so I agreed to attend the University of Redlands and reboot my basketball career. My father still wanted me to attend a JC and get a scholarship. One week before I was to begin classes at Redlands I gave in to my father’s wishes and enrolled at Pasadena City College to play basketball. I played basketball for PCC. We made it to the state finals and lost to Merced in triple overtime. We had a great year but my heart wasn’t in it so that summer in 1983 I quit the team and basically wandered the streets for the whole summer. It was the lowest point of my life. I lost touch with my friends and was struggling with thoughts of suicide. I just didn’t feel like my life had any meaning. Music saved my life. It was the heyday of KROQ and I would spend hours alone listening to music by U2, Talking Heads, English Beat, XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, Style Council, OMD, New Order, The Specials, and many other mostly British bands. In America I couldn’t relate but I could to these bands from Thatcher’s England. What I was feeling was in their music. I knew I wasn’t alone out there. There were a lot of people across the pond feeling just like me.

My younger brother Kenny was working for the YMCA as a day camp counselor and he invited me to attend their end of the summer staff party. At first I was hesitant. My impression of the YMCA was the people who worked there were a bunch of square Christians who didn’t party. Kenny didn’t party much but he did seem to enjoy his job quite a bit. I wasn’t hanging out with my friends because I was depressing to be around so I decided to go out of sheer boredom. I was totally wrong about this YMCA staff. When I arrived at the party the music was blasting and people were having a great time dancing and playing drinking games. In the backroom there was a group of people smoking joints and taking bong hits. This is where I met my brother’s boss, a red haired woman with freckles named CJ. We hit it off right away. I ended up having a real good time at the party and ran into a guy name Craig Catimon who had played Pop Warner football with my older brother Keith. Craig and I later would become best friends and partners in crime. For the first time in a while I felt good hanging out with people. I liked this group of people. It wasn’t college and it wasn’t sports, it was just regular people. The next week I received a call from CJ. She asked me I was interested in being a group leader for the After School Program at the YMCA. She thought I had the right kind of personality to work with kids. I decided to take the job. I was enrolled in classes at Pasadena City College and thought it would be the perfect part time job to have while I was going to school.

My only experience working with kids had been babysitting which I had done extensively since the age of 12. I was a natural working with the kids at the YMCA. I absolutely loved it. It was challenging and fun and I threw everything I had into the job. I looked forward to coming to work everyday. It was just a part time job so I was just enjoying it for what it was. I wasn’t making plans on doing it for more than one school year but summer came around and I applied for a job as a day camp counselor. That was even more fun because we had the kids all day and we went on adventures to the local parks, to the beaches, and hiking in the local mountains. The following school year CJ asked me if I wanted to be a Site Director in charge of one of the school sites. There were others who had been there much longer than I had but she felt I would be good at running things and providing leadership for the staff. I was a successful Site Director which was almost a full time job. I ended up having all kinds of jobs within the YMCA which was one of the things I liked about it as an organization. I held a ridiculous number of jobs in my 11 years at the Y:

After School Counselor

After School Van Driver

After School Site Director

After School Program Director

Day Camp Counselor

Day Camp Site Director

Day Camp Director

Youth Sports Referee

Youth Soccer Coach

Youth Basketball Coach

Resident Camp Maintenance Engineer (janitor/trash burner)

Resident Camp Cabin Leader

Resident Camp Ropes Course Instructor

Resident Camp Assistant Director

Resident Camp Branch Director

Summer Youth Employment Coordinator

Youth Director

Program Director

Senior Program Director

By the time I reached Senior Program Director I had seen it all when it comes to the YMCA. I could probably write a book about my experience. The YMCA is really big on training. They have a national training program that covers everything from life guarding at pools to raising millions of dollars for capital campaigns. Because the trainings were national I got to meet people from all over, from Boise to St. Paul to Orlando to Denver to New York. The best part about the whole thing was meeting all the kids. I met and got to know thousands of kids from preschoolers to high schoolers. I saw kids grow from fresh faced five year olds to take-themselves-way-to-serious teenagers. I was fortunate as I had the privilege to teach these kids about life as an authority figure and a trusted friend, it is a unique position to have in the life of a child. I did so many outrageously fun things with kids sometimes it was hard to even call it a job.

Working with kids put me in direct contact with the people who are the real heart and soul of this country and that is working parents. When you work with parents a partnership is born. You get a certain amount of respect from people who know you value their child’s welfare just as much as they do. You get to see parents at their worst (right after a really bad day at work) and at their best (showing up with big smiles and the their child for Pot Lucks, Talent Shows, and Haunted Houses). It was a good balance for my own personal life which leaned more toward the hedonistic and bohemian.

For about the first 6 years I didn’t consider the YMCA a career but by the time I made Program Director I decided it was what I wanted to do. I went to management trainings and certification trainings to mold myself from clock-punching-jack-of-all-trades to salaried, pensioned, credentialed professional. I went from small suburban branch to large metropolitan association. By the time I reached Senior Director I was just one step away from Executive Branch Director, it was the next and perhaps final stop on this particular trajectory. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be an Executive Director. It was far removed from working directly with program staff and parents. It was a suit and tie job that required attending lots of Rotary Club type lunches and securing large donations and grants from local businesses and corporations. I was a guy who rode a bicycle and a sported a mohawk. I just wasn’t there yet. More than that I had plenty of years to watch all the politics involved at the management level. The Y is a large non-profit but its bureaucracy is just like any other. As an organization the YMCA became more and more focused on the health club business. All the new branches were primarily health clubs with state of the art equipment and facilities. The primary business was no longer serving the community, the business became selling memberships and selling memberships was driven by marketing. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to build facilities and start programs that would serve the community, primarily youth and their working parents. If that was your agenda you didn’t have much say and you were on the lower end of the pay scale. Executive Directors at branches with large health and fitness memberships made a pretty good salary and had tons of perks like housing and vehicle allowances while small community based Executives struggled to balance budgets and get funding for their programs putting in more hours for less pay.

I started to become disillusioned with my foreseeable future with the YMCA. It would have been a secure future. I had a good reputation and knew lots of directors around the country. I could work anywhere in the country, even abroad as the YMCA is an international organization. But I wasn’t feeling it. I was just 30 years old and still had young man’s view of the world. In my mind there was still some romantic adventure out there for me. I wasn’t ready for the life of a non profit administrator. I still had a touch of the wild in me. I felt I was still firmly planted in the field of anti-establishment. Becoming an Executive Director would have been like killing off a vital part of myself.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I could go from the YMCA. I had ideas about opening a school/camp using progressive methods like experiential learning. I was starting to warm up to that idea when my life took another unsuspected 90 degree turn. Out of the blue, or rather out of the low lights and hip hop beat of a San Francisco jazz club, I found a new career, or it found me, I’m still not sure how to call it. I’ll save that thought for the next blog, part three. Once again thanks for tuning in. Same bat time, same bat channel.

To be continued…

Accidental Careerist

I’m not one of those people who went searching for a career in life. I’ve had two careers and they both happened because of a chance meetings. They were more like accidents than opportunities. I don’t know if it is possible in today’s world to be an Accidental Careerist.


Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s I wasn’t a very ambitious kid. My first love in life was drawing. Some of my earliest memories are being in kindergarten drawing elaborate scenes of Spiderman webbing his way across skyscrapers fighting bad guys like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. If I wasn’t drawing Spiderman I was drawing scenes of war mostly involving tanks and jet fighters blowing up palm treed jungles. What I didn’t know then but can clearly see now my early life was heavily influenced by television as the psychedelic Spiderman cartoon was my favorite tv show and I must have been catching glimpses of the Vietnam War on the evening news, I don’t know how else to explain my obsession with drawing military hardware and burning jungles at such an early age.


In grade school my drawings became influenced by R. Crumb though at the time I had no idea who he was but I liked his art because drawing the “Keep on Trucking” guy became my trademark. I probably liked the Crumb stuff because it was forbidden for someone of my age. I can remember stopping into the Altadena Record store to look at the Crumb posters with the Keep on Trrucking guy and the buxom women. In the R. Crumb style I began drawing guys with huge afros, bell bottoms, and handguns, no doubt influenced by films like Shaft and Cotton Comes to Harlem. I was big into drawing motorcycles and choppers probably because of the film Easy Rider and the long forgotten tv show Then Came Bronson. Mad magazine was also a heavy influence for me. Mort Drucker and Sergio Aragones were the first artists I knew by name. Most of my drawings were in my spiral notebooks I used for school and the front and back of my PeeChee folders so nobody other than my friends saw my drawings. I never showed stuff to my parents, teachers, or other adults. In my mind they weren’t interested in my drawing skills, they were more concerned with my grades, completing household chores, and being good at sports.


As I approached junior high school I began to exclusively to draw Marvel comics superheroes. My younger brother Kenny started collecting comic books. Being the cheapskate that I was I didn’t collect too many comics, I just read the ones Kenny and his friend Marc bought. The Hulk and the Avengers were my favorites. I was always drawing the Hulk, Thor, and Conan the Barbarian, trying to emulate the style of legendary Marvel artist John Buscema. I was really good at reproducing comic book pages and even created my own comic book called Atomic Man that I made with typing paper and a stapler. Issue number one was an epic battle between Atomic Man and the Hulk. Up to this point in life the only thing I had dreamed of becoming when I grew up was a football player in the NFL. Now I was starting to dream of becoming a comic book artist. The only problem was that I knew nothing about how comic books were made and I didn’t know any adults who worked as a professional artist. My parents, their friends. and my many aunts and uncles were mostly blue collar workers working in factories or like my mother, a professional working for a large company like Pacific Bell. My mother started out with Pacific Bell as an operator but by the time I was in grade school she had moved up to an office job. I don’t know what she did but whatever it was it required her to dress professionally because she always went to work looking sharp in dresses and heels or the occasional smart looking pants suit. My father worked for Lockheed and I didn’t know what he did but I knew it was blue collar work because of the way he dressed and the tool box he carried in his van and truck. When I was in high school my father made it to the engineering level because he started dressing nicer and his wrenches and screwdrivers were replaced by a calculator, slide ruler, and a Commodore Vic-20 computer.


During my high school years I outgrew comic books and soon discovered Heavy Metal magazine. The incredible artwork and the mature stories and naked women made Marvel comics seem like child’s play. The artwork was beautifully done, less like comic book pulp and more like the fine art of Da Vinci and Michealangelo. In addition the stories were more inline with what I liked on a literary scale. Even though I loved comics and pop culture for drawing it was a different story when it came to reading. For written material I preferred science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. Comic books were soap operas with simple good guy vs. bad guy story lines but Heavy Metal had stories of incredible fantasy worlds, metaphysics, philosophy, existentialism, cyberpunk, and sex. Since most of the artists were Europeans there was also an air of mystery about the artists. Moebius quickly became my new favorite artist but I also loved the artwork of Bilal, Phillip Druillet, Milo Manara, Liberatore, Richard Corben, and Frank Frazetta. The art was so good it was intimidating. I’d give my left arm to make art like Moebius but I didn’t have that kind of confidence in my ability. In my mind I had to be as good as these guys to make it as an artist and I wasn’t so I put becoming an artist out of my mind. I was really naïve about doing art. For my whole life I drew everything free hand. I would sit down with some paper and just start drawing. It was only much later in life when I was working as an artist did I realize that it was par for the course for artists to use references such as photographs, anatomy books, sculptures, live models, and tracing to create illustrations and drawings. In my limited view I thought that was cheating. I worked in a vacuum. I didn’t even consider myself an artist, I was just somebody who enjoyed drawing as a hobby.


As I mentioned before the only thing I dreamt about becoming as a kid was an NFL football player. Baseball was my first sport. My Dad coached Little League and I have many fond memories of spending Saturday’s at Loma Alta Park playing in games and consuming snow cones and hot dogs afterwards. Football though was my true love. Me and my brothers and neighborhood friends were obsessed with football. We all played Pop Warner football for the Pasadena Bulldogs and spent countless hours playing pick up games in the street or at the local parks and schools. When we weren’t playing real football outdoors we played electric football indoors. I don’t know of any other kids on the planet that went to the lengths we did in playing electric football. Our local toy store and hobby shop Henry’s sold electric football teams. We’d save our money and buy our favorite teams and we would have tournaments all day Sunday while watching real NFL football. We would usually meet at someone’s house and bring at least one extra football field so we could have multiple games going on at once. We bought model paint to modify our players so they looked like the real thing. We’d paint on wrist bands, elbow pads, high white socks and white shoes. We used small strips of foam to add neck braces behind player’s helmets. We stripped the paper off the wiring used to tie loaves of bread and made face masks. We made sure all of our players had the correct jersey numbers. We cut the letters off the decal number sheets to put names on the backs of player’s jerseys. It was a game of one-upmanship to see who could make their team look most like the real thing. I even made a locker room out of a shoe box for my teams. We also were rabid collectors of football cards. Me and my three brothers had shoe boxes full of football cards. We knew all the players in the NFL because we had their cards. We didn’t buy them for collecting, we bought them for the love of football. Little did we know that these cards would be worth major bucks to collectors as the years went on. Most of our cards ended up in the garbage, thrown out as we left adolescence for adulthood.


By the time I reached high school my fantasies of being an NFL football player began to fade. With each new level of playing the stakes became ridiculously higher. Up to high school I played football strictly for fun but once in high school football became ultra serious and practice was like boot camp and the team was like a military outfit. I played football for St. Francis High School in La Canada which at the time was known as a football school with a grand tradition of winning and uniforms that resembled the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. At St. Francis you were a nobody if you didn’t play football. I knew I wasn’t going to be an NFL player. I didn’t have the religious devotion to the sport that was required to reach that level. The game was no longer fun to me. After my freshman year I quit playing football much to the dismay of my father and the coaching staff. They were counting on me being a key figure on the team for four years and possibly going on to play college ball. I was a pretty good football player. I was a two way starter at defensive end and wide receiver but my heart wasn’t in it. I switched to basketball and track, two sports that received little respect at St. Francis. I was good enough at basketball to be considered college and NBA material. We made the playoffs my senior year after years of being a perennial loser and in track and field I set the league record in the triple jump and medaled in the CIF southern section finals.


By the time I was 17 my views of myself and life started to change drastically. In my community growing up being good at sports brought more respect than anything else. If you were good at sports you were known, people spoke of you, girls liked you, other guys thought you were cool. If you were good at something besides sports it was like nobody even cared. You could be a straight A student and you could still be a nobody. It was the same thing at St. Francis. Honor students were just students while athletes walked the school grounds like they were the gods of Olympus. As a black athlete at a white school all that was expected of me was being good at sports. In the minds of much of the student body that’s what I was there for, to help bring the school more football glory. I rebelled against this notion. I wanted to show that I was more than just an athlete. I wanted respect for my intelligence more than my athletic prowess. Little did I know had a rebel spirit in me. I began to rebel against expectations others had of me, including my parents. I declared myself an atheist to the priests at school. They wanted to counsel me like I was a troubled youth but I was having none of that. I was kicked off the basketball team for not seeing eye to eye with my coach and speaking my mind. I was no longer part of the “in” crowd at school so I started hanging out with the marginalized students. I began to question sports as my future and my ticket to a college education.


I didn’t realize I would be writing this much for the set up part of this particular blog entry. This was supposed to be a writing about how I got started in my careers and I haven’t mentioned anything about that yet. I’m going to end this entry here. I’ve laid down the foundation and I’ll get to the meat of the subject in the next entry. Stay tuned!


… to be continued

Drive By

Fortunately for me my brushes with the law have been few and far between. All my encounters with the police have been traffic related. Many times it was just a case of DWB but on a few occasions I have been stopped for legitimate purposes like expired registration tags, which in my younger days was the rule not the exception.


In my impoverished young adulthood vehicle insurance and registration were at times beyond my paltry budget so I took my chances and boy did I take chances. It wasn’t like I was driving some middle of the road, financed, upstanding citizen, blend into the void, kind of car… I drove a 1965 Rambler American. It was in good shape but it was a beater. It was a ska mobile that I bought off my most excellent friend Dan Parada who had decorated it with photos of the cast of the Big Chill on the inside passenger door, and with the words “Elvis died fat” printed on the dashboard under the radio. It was a four door that made for easy piling in and piling out of with the crew while wandering the streets of Los Angeles.


I must confess that I had many a reckless night in the City of Angels negotiating the freeways and mega boulevards for mile after mile from Pasadena to Hollywood, to Westwood, to Santa Monica, to Long Beach, Newport Beach, and back, even surviving the dreaded S-curve near the end of the Pasadena Frwy just before Ave. 64. The curve doesn’t have a name and people don’t speak of it but anyone who has driven that stretch knows the curve. Built in the 30’s and the oldest freeway in California the 110 Pasadena/Harbor Frwy had curves put in to make the drive “not boring” for the snail paced Ford Model T’s. making the drive from Pasadena to Los Angeles. Well “not boring” today is now “hair raising”. I was in the Rambler with my friend Dan P, on our way to Westwood to see “The Road Warrior” of all movies and we saw a VW go airborne and do multiple flips in the air right in front of us. The woman driving the Vee Dub didn’t hit anybody she just caught her wheel on the inside curb on the S-turn and up she went. I watched the car flip twice in the air, I thought it was going to land on us. She hit the ground, rolled once more and landed on her feet. We stopped about two feet short of her. Miraculously she was unhurt. Although physically she was ok, mentally she was scathed. She and the car were a wreck.


Thanks be to gods unknown I was never involved in an accident while driving a car… a bicycle yes, but never in a car. Part of my job working for the YMCA was transporting children in vans and busses which required me to have a Class B commercial driver’s license and certification from the California Highway Patrol so I had good driving skills. I may have been an irresponsible driver at times but I was always a safe driver. Before moving to San Francisco the only moving violations I had was a speeding ticket I acquired in law abiding South Pasadena for going 40 in a 35 mph zone. On the DWB stops I never had to ride in the paddy wagon because my name always came up clean on the computer search as well it should as I am a good citizen. That all changed when I moved to San Francisco.


My first month two months living in the Bay area were spent living in Oakland although I worked in San Francisco. My boss let me use the YMCA van to get to work and back until I relocated to the City. He didn’t like leaving the van in a the YMCA lot because it was a target for vandalism. I was so busy working the new job that for the first two months I didn’t go out and since I had no friends I hadn’t gone out to any bars in San Francisco or Oakland. My first night out at a bar in San Francisco would prove to be unforgettable.


My first night out at a bar was on Halloween night, 1991. Me and the youth staff at the YMCA had just finished doing the annual Haunted House fundraiser which was a smashing success. I was invited by one of the staff to go celebrate. We went to a bar called the Covered Wagon located on Folsom street in the South of Market area of SF. I was tired from a 16 hour day at work and I had not eaten but I was in a festive mood because I had just pulled off my first major event at my new job so a little celebrating was in order. Over the course of three hours I had 4 pints of ale. When I left the bar I didn’t feel drunk but I was feeling very tired. I hopped in the van to make the drive home not thinking twice about my condition. I made it across the Bay Bridge and was just about to get off the 580 freeway at MacArthur when I saw the red and blue flashing lights in the rearview. I wasn’t speeding or swerving so I was wondering what I was being pulled over for. The CHP officer said he pulled me over because I was straddling the line. He asked if I had been drinking. I said I had a few beers. They made me do the drunk tests, you know, stand on one leg, follow the finger, touch the nose, etc, etc. I thought I did well but the officers had other ideas because the next thing I know they tell me they’re taking me in for possible Driving Under the Influence. They were a couple of polite chaps so I went with them without argument, debate, or struggle.


Being handcuffed and put into a police car was a new experience for me. I had only been in a police car once in my life before this and that was in Rosarito Beach when me and my buddy Wes were pulled over one midnight in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. They told us we were speeding but we knew that was bogus, they just wanted to search us for bribe material. The Mexican cops put me in the back of the squad car without cuffing me. I knew the situation wasn’t that serious because they didn’t cuff me and in the backseat there was basket full of freshly done laundry. These guys weren't hardcore shakedown artists they were just bored and looking for a score. They searched the VW van and found a roach in a box of Marlboro reds. The maddening part about this was that neither Wes nor I smoked cigarettes and neither of us had brought any herbage for this trip because we couldn’t find any. The Marlboro reds had been left in the van by another friend weeks ago and the herb was homegrown which in LA is practically an insult. That roach ended up costing us $50 each. They wanted more but Wes beat them down on the price thanks to his well honed negotiation skills that he had developed haggling with Mexican vendors and store owners over the years. Here I was in the US of A where haggling for a DUI was out of the question. They drove me to the Oakland city jail where I was booked and put into the community cell. I never spent much time imagining what the inside of a jail looks like. We have all seen jails in movies and television shows but when does that ever measure up to reality? Courtrooms are always so beautiful and dramatically lit in the movies but every court room I have been in has been drab, rundown, and uniformly lit by harsh fluorescent lights which is the typical look for cvic offices and buildings that deal with the masses. The Oakland jail feels subterranean because there are no windows and everything is bland off discolored white brick, painted grey metal, and 1960’s green tiled floor. They gave me the Breathalyzer test and I came in at .09. Just my luck California had just lowered the drunk standard from 0.1 to .08. A year earlier I would have been legal but now I was considered legally drunk. I was photographed, fingerprinted, and put in a cell with about a dozen other men, all black and latino.


I surmised by the body language I was the only newcomer there. The cell was all hard surfaces with one metal bench, one dirty metal toilet, and one dirty pay phone. The phone was in constant use but nobody went near the toilet. Men were stretched out on the floor catching some z’s or or sitting against walls nodding off. I wouldn’t say that they were comfortable but they seemed used to the conditions. I was the only one standing up looking around checking everything and everybody out. Nobody in the cell was talking. All seemed quite content to pretend that the others didn’t exist. It was relatively quiet. I could hear the officers joking around with each other like people do on any job and I could hear them processing the perps. About every 10 minutes or so one of the inmates in another cell would start belting out the song “Somewhere” with a voice that eerily sounded like the lead singer from Blood, Sweat, and Tears. The Oakland jail was the last place I would expect to hear someone singing a song from West Side Story but since I’m a huge fan of that musical I found the singing rather comforting plus it's difficult to feel like you are in a hard place when some gravelly voice down the hallway starts belting out, "There's a place for us! Somewhere a place for us...!" The irony, which escaped cops and inmate alike, put everything into proper perspective for me. For this night the Oakland jail was my place of existence and a place for me to make up for past transgressions and pay my dues.


I chose to forgo making a phone call and trying to post bail because I was too embarrassed. I figured I messed up and needed to take my punishment like a man which meant staying the whole night in jail. After they let me out I would go retrieve the van and go to work and try to act like nothing happened. In my mind I was set to deal with whatever fallout that would come from my debacle. That actually put my mind at ease so I stood there in the cell just taking in the jail experience. More men were brought in over the course of the night. Sensing I was not a regular a few of the guys struck up conversations with me. I don’t know if I would call them conversations, they were more like confessions. It was like all of a sudden I was the cell priest or psychiatrist. Guys were telling me stories of remorse and how they ended up in jail…again. One guy I remember in particular because I really felt bad for him. He had been in jail for three or four years for armed robbery and all he wanted to do was get straight and see his kid who had just been born right before he went into the slammer. He was back in on parole violation. He said he had only been out a few days when he borrowed his brother’s car to go see some old friends. He was spotted and pulled over. He gave consent to check the car and the police found some crack cocaine underneath the driver’s seat. He said it wasn’t his but if you are a black man with a record there is no way the cops will give you the benefit of the doubt so here he was back in jail. I believed him. He had no reason to lie to me and he seemed really busted up about not being able to see his son. Most of the guys I talked to were back in for parole violations. The most common violation was hanging out with friends who were also known felons. These aren’t the smartest guys in the world to begin with but the way the system is utilized by law enforcement these guys will be in and out of jail most of their lives. I felt sympathy for them. I don’t know how they were on the street but in the cell they were polite and cordial. There was no fighting, dirty looks, or signifying. They were just quietly biding their time until release. Nobody was coming for them they just had to do their time.


I was released at about 7am. I retrieved my belongings and it felt good to be free once I hit the streets of downtown Oakland. I hailed a cab, picked up the van and drove home. I cleaned myself up and went to work. I told my boss what happened. I didn’t know what to expect. I felt bad because I let him down. He recruited me to come to work in San Francisco and I had impressed his superiors so this was definitely going to be a blow to my image. It seemed my worries were unfounded because he supported me 100%. I wasn’t proud of getting the DUI so I didn’t tell anybody, not even my parents. I just made a vow to do everything that would be required of me for the DUI, like paying the $1500 fine and attending the 6 weeks of DUI classes. For me it was a lesson learned. I wasn’t mad at the world or even myself. I made a mistake, plain and simple. The best thing for me to do was deal with the consequences without pity or apology.


About two weeks after the incident I finally received mail from the City of Oakland. I figured it was my court date notice. When I opened the envelop and read the letter I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The DUI charge had been dropped with no explanation. No further action on my part was needed. I didn’t have to go to court, I didn’t have to pay any fines, and I didn‘t have to attend any classes. Sometimes in life you get lucky and this was one of those times. Even though I was not a religious man I thanked the Lord for my fortune. I’d had plenty of misfortune in my life up to that point so I guess in the end it all balances out. In life sometimes you are up like a hang glider riding the thermal winds as free as a bird and other times you are down in the dumps with no way out. Sometimes it is by your own hand and sometimes it's just how the world turns.


Even though the charges were dropped my license was suspended for a year. I could only drive to and from and during the course of employment. That was not a problem for me since I only drove to and from work. I had been riding my bike as my main mode of transportation for five years so driving was something I only did for work. A few weeks later I moved to San Francisco where I have lived in various sections of the Western Addition for the last 18 years. San Francisco is the perfect place to live if you prefer to ride a bike over driving a car. It is the one thing that has kept me here for all these years. The City is so small geographically all you need is two feet and a pair of working legs. You don’t even need a bike. If you have too much to drink you can just walk home. It’s my preferred way to travel after leaving a bar or party. You never know what you will see or who you will meet and best of all I don’t have to worry about getting stopped by the cops for DUI or DWB. That’s something a brutha can live with.

Heal Ourselves

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo-obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974)

Recently I watched the documentary film 21 Up South Africa: Mandela’s Children, which is based in theme and format on the famous Up series documentaries by Michael Apted. The basic premise is to take a group of seven year olds from different socioeconomic backgrounds and interview them every seven years to see how their lives were progressing. Apted’s Up series started in 1964 and the last film released in the series was 49 Up which came out in 2005. Mandela’s Children started in 1992 not to long after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The film opens with an interview with Willem who is an Afrikaner. At age seven he’s being interviewed on the family farm just north of Johannesburg. The interviewer is asking him about his school which for the first time will be integrated with black children.


“There will be blacks there until the first break, after the break there’ll be none.” says Willem.


“Why?” asks the interviewer.


“They’re not allowed in our school.” replies William


“Why?”


“We don’t like them. They’re not allowed in our school. They’re not white.”


While Willem is giving his answers he’s smiling and not at all nervous or hesitant with his answers. He’s completely comfortable with what he is saying. At the tender age of seven his indoctrination into racial bias is already well under way. To be fair to Willem I have to also touch on what he said about his answers when he was 14. He said he was stupid and was just expressing the views of the world he lived in. He said the blacks that came to his school were good people and he did not expect that. At age 21 he is shown playing for the rugby team for Johannesburg University and he is seen embracing his teammates black and white.


The next child to be interviewed is Thembilise who at age seven is living with her grandmother in a shanty town in Soweto that has seen its share of violence and killing. The interviewer is asking her what she wants to be when she grows up.


“I’ll be a policeman so that I can shoot you.”


“Why?” asks the interviewer.


“Black people are ugly and whites are beautiful.”


Just like Willem she does not hesitate and answers the question with a smile on her face. Like Willem at age seven she is being indoctrinated in racial bias but the twist here is that it is self directed. At times in the interview Thembilise refers to black people as “they” or “them” as if she sees herself as not being black but something other. At age 14, like Willem she says she was just expressing what she had seen as a young girl. At age seven she talked about black people killing each other. It is unfortunate that a child at age seven has this kind of knowledge. Willem looks like he was able to outgrow his racist views he held as a seven year old and not have to carry that baggage around because it was not about him. Kids believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy but eventually they come to know the truth and they move on. Thembilise on the other hand has branded herself with a self hatred that will probably affect her views of herself and the world she lives in for the rest of her life.


How many black children over the generations have been infected by self hatred? How do the feelings of self hatred manifest itself in the world we live in? What can be done for black children so that they develop a healthy view of who they are? These are difficult questions with no easy answers and it is something that we in the black community don’t want to talk about most of the time but it is something we need to address because everything starts with the children. For black people around the world self hatred is not endemic. We aren’t born with it. It develops in places like South Africa and the United States where there is a significant number of black people but the dominant culture and ruling class that is not black. It happens in places where there has been a historical campaign to paint black people as inferior and unworthy. Yes we have made progress. We have a black president, there are black CEO’s, there are visibly wealthy black people in entertainment and sports, there are black scholars, black doctors, black scientists, black writers, and black entrepreneurs but these people represent the best of our best. On the other end of the spectrum there is a completely different story going on. The number of black people in prison far exceeds the number of black people in college. The poorest sections of all of our major cities are black. We have a high rate of fatherless homes. We have a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse. Black students drop out of school at an alarming rate. Our biggest contribution to society in recent times has been rap music and saggy pants. Worst of all we black people kill, rob, and rape other black people which to me is the most significant indicator of how deep our self hatred goes. In the United States the gulf between the have and have nots grows ever wider but in the black community that gulf is even more profound. We can point to our successes and say we are making progress but how do we account for our disproportionate representation in the prison system, unemployment, welfare programs, and school drop out rates? It is bad enough the damage inflicted upon us by the status quo but the damage we inflict on ourselves is even worse.


We will always have our critics. In the mainstream media from the daily news to films and tv shows we are either saints or sinners, mostly sinners. We have bought into it much to our own detriment. We were not always like this. In the 20 years after slavery there were over 800 published black newspapers. Universities were erected to quench the black thirst for education. We gave birth to institutions like the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute to be the vanguard of black progress. We fought valiantly in American wars to prove our worth as Americans. When shut out by segregation we created our own music (jazz), baseball league, and ballet companies. We had visionary leaders like Marcus Garvey who challenged us to be better not by word but by action. We knew who the enemy was and it was not us.


In modern times we have met the enemy and he is us. My parents raised me without much rhetoric. They didn’t denigrate white people or the greater society. They didn’t speak negatively of black people or any people for that matter. Mostly they stressed that I needed to be prepared for the reality of the world I live in and that success in life was based on hard work and to take everybody I meet at face value. This was shown more by example than by words. They never said it was going to be easy but they also never told me that anything could hold me back. This was my basic defense against what was happening in the world beyond my home and neighborhood. On the walls of our home there were only two prints that represented people, one of Martin Luther King and the other Angela Davis. Me and the ‘rents never had a sit down to discuss the two legends but their presence on the wall stood for something and my brothers and I were allowed to absorb it on our own terms. Without being overt or didactic my parents instilled in me a love of self and pride for being black. I was fortunate to grow up in the “black is beautiful” era. I can remember a gathering of cousins back in the early 70’s and being led by our Uncle Jim in chanting “black power!” with fists raised in the air like John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics. As a child I was not aware of the significance but the seeds were planted.


Growing up black there are many things you come to know not by being taught directly but by absorbing it from the society we live in. My immediate community may be saying that black is beautiful but the message from the greater society was that white was the standard that I had to live up to. The closer to white you were the better. Even as a child I was aware that lighter skin and straighter hair were valued over darker skin and kinky hair. As a child Michael Jackson represented the epitome of beauty with his glowing smile and perfect afro. But as he became older he traded in his afro for a more processed, wet look. This was the trend that was happening across black America, the afro was giving way to the mullet like shag and the Jheri curl. Black being beautiful was in question. I struggled with it myself. As I hit puberty I began to believe that I was ugly, at least to the opposite sex. My skin was too dark, my lips were to big, and my hair was too kinky.


In my early 20’s I began working with school aged children and really began to see how self esteem was crucial to a child’s development. Children are strong but they are also very fragile and sensitive. Even though we are born with a unique personality and innate skills, as children we can only know the world from the communities we live in and the adults who are responsible for raising us. Like Willem and Thembilise children are a reflection of what they have been taught either from direct experience or absorbing from the environment they live in. They mimic what they see and hear around them but because of their limited ability to comprehend they are unable to distinguish truth from dogma, propaganda, and manipulation. Much of the time it is not the actual knowledge or information that makes a difference for a child it’s the source of the knowledge or information. Children come to recognize authority figures in their life, the people that set their boundaries and approve or disapprove of their actions and behavior. These are their true role models, not celebrities and athletes.


While it is possible for a child to overcome negative and dysfunctional environments it is more likely that they will develop and incorporate the dysfunction because it is what dominates the environment. As a child matures influences multiply and at some point they come to understand that there is a prevailing standard for behavior and ways of being and if they aren’t up to that standard they can become conflicted. If there is no way for them to deal with the confliction it becomes internalized. It becomes the subtext for their actions in the real world which as they mature becomes more dominated by the status quo.


Is it possible to change dysfunctional children without severely altering dysfunctional communities? The prevailing wisdom seems to believe that by changing the conditions of the community you can change the people. There has been much focus on welfare and social programs aimed at uplifting and changing communities but have they been effective or are they just tools of politics? When I was a Senior Program Director for the YMCA I ran the Summer Youth Employment Training Program for San Francisco for two summers in a row. The process for winning the grant was very political and the main motivation for going after the grant was not to help young people get jobs but to help secure our bottom line and to make our resumes more attractive. The program, like many social programs, was more concerned about the bureaucracy than the actual participants. It was always a numbers game. We had to reach specific goals in recruiting and placement and as long as we did that we were successful in the eye of our auditors and would most likely receive the funding again the next year. If it looks good on paper everyone involved on the management level can use it to promote themselves from the Mayor to the non-profit CEO. The reality is that a good number of kids failed at retaining their jobs because nothing about the program dealt with the participants as individuals. They were given jobs and expected to succeed and when they failed they were just placed in another job or they dropped out the program. Instead of giving the kids jobs we would have served them better by acting as mentors and coaches providing them counseling to assist them with improving their self esteem and personal habits and letting them find the jobs themselves with our support.


In my last year working for the YMCA I started a midnite basketball league. It wasn’t really a league, I just opened the gym on Saturday night and let the local gang affiliated teens come in and play basketball. I did this in response to some of the local parents and adults asking us at the YMCA if there was anything we could do to keep the youth from loitering on weekend nights and causing trouble. I started the program with no funding or public relations work. We just put the word out to the local teens that the gym would be available to them. They showed up with their street personas acting hard and aloof and treating me like I didn’t exist. Basically the only rule I laid down to them was to respect the facilities. No drugs, no weapons, no fighting, and properly dispose of candy bar wrappers and soft drink cans. Once in the gym they were on their own. I stayed at the front desk monitoring the door and left them to their own devices. Once the kids were off the street I noticed it didn’t take long for them to drop their street personas. I would peek in on them and they would be laughing it up playing ball and having a good time. The gym was a place they could let their guard down but as soon as they left they reverted back to the street. I could see the transformation of each youth as he passed through the gateway from the YMCA lobby to the outside world. The smiles disappeared and the bounce in their steps gave way to a swagger, a message to the world of “don’t fuck with me.”


For weeks they never said a word to me but at some point they began to trust me. They started to say “hi” to me when they entered the building and soon they asked me if I wanted to play. That’s when I knew I was making progress, or rather they were making progress. Around the neighborhood I started to receive acknowledgement from the local gangsters. The word was out that I was “ok”. This is where many social programs fail. Time is not taken to build trust, it’s not in the budget. I didn’t pass judgment on these kids nor did I heap on them undeserved praise, I just stood by them for the possibility of change. I supported them silently. I let them come to me. Unfortunately just as I gained their trust I left the YMCA for reasons I won’t go into right now and that was the end of Saturday night basketball. I don’t know what became of those kids or if my minimalist approach had any lasting effect but I am glad I did it. I learned a valuable lesson about working with people. It’s the human element that makes the difference. It doesn’t matter what your reputation is, what legacies you have, or how much money you make, in order to successfully work with young people you have to show your humanity.


As much as I love Bill Cosby, when he called out the black community to do better by itself I didn’t agree with his methods. He took the route of the bully pulpit. He took a big brush and painted many people with it without knowing who these people were. It was judgment without humanity, without connection. Whether his words were right or wrong was immaterial, it was the perception that mattered. He was a have that was berating the have nots. In the end Cosby’s words didn’t affect the people he was aiming at, they rejected the messenger, but it was a boon for the media who made it into a controversy.


I can’t do proper justice to the subject of collective self hatred in a blog. Books and dissertations can and should be written on the subject but what I can do is shine a light on it and acknowledge its power and existence. We have the power to do something about it. As I said before it starts with the children because that is where the damage begins that lasts for a lifetime. As author Andrew Vachss states, children are “another chance to get it right”.