A while back, I drove down to Oakland to talk to some wonderful people from the Epilepsy League of the East Bay, who were getting together to promote an annual charity event that raises much-needed funds for the thousands of Californians who suffer from that terrible disease. As I turned off the freeway and motored towards downtown Oakland, I wasn’t a bit surprised to find that the directions I had been given weren’t doing me much good. In fact, within five minutes of exiting the freeway, I was completely lost. Now most people absolutely hate to get lost, especially in large cities, but I learned long ago to just relax and look at it as kind of an adventure that you wouldn’t otherwise be having.
I’m afraid I have this long history of getting lost. Once, when I was walking point in Vietnam, I got a whole platoon lost in a bunch of triple-canopy jungle and some of the guys were sure we had marched all the way to Cambodia and back before I finally figured out where we were. So being lost in Oakland didn’t seem like all that much of a big deal, except for all the funny looks I was starting to get.
Suddenly it dawned on me that I was in a completely black neighborhood and judging from some of the hard and puzzled expressions on the faces of most of the people standing around on the street corners I was passing, no one was exactly thrilled with my little visit.
I turned off a street named Telegraph and then onto one with a number – 34th. By the time I had reached the end of that block, it was obvious to me that I needed to stop and ask someone for directions. So, I pulled up in front of an elderly gentleman seated on the front stoop of an old rundown two-story Victorian house. I got out of my truck and strolled up to the old man. He had a golf club in one hand and was turning the dial of a beat-up radio with the other.
“Excuse me,” I said as he looked at me as if I had just landed from another planet, “but could you please tell me how to find downtown Oakland?”
He smiled and motioned for me to take a seat next to him on the stoop. “What’s your name, son?” he asked me.
“Daryl,” I said, sitting down next to him.
He stuck out an ancient hand and patted me on the shoulder. “I’m Louis,” he said, “and what brings you around these parts?” Just as I began to open up my mouth, he suddenly waved for me to hold onto my answer as he apparently had come across the radio station he had been trying to locate. “You know,” he added, “it ain’t too often that a white boy like you pops up in this neighborhood.”
“I’m lost,” I explained.
“Oh, really?” he said, grinning from ear-to-ear and trying hard not to laugh. “Now, is that right? I don’t think I would have ever guessed that in a million years.”
I returned his warm smile and he looked out towards the street and complimented me on how shiny and clean my pickup truck looked. “That’s a new one, isn’t it?” he said, pointing a bony finger at my truck.
“It’s actually almost a year old,” I answered.
“You know,” explained Louis sadly, “I never owned a car in my whole life. I mostly used the bus. Too late now. I got cataracts in both my eyes and couldn’t drive if I wanted to. I’m 76-years old, you know.”
As the minutes started to add up into an hour, it became obvious that Louis wasn’t in any particular hurry to pass out driving directions, but he was incredibly knowledgeable on just about every other subject under the sun and seemed to genuinely enjoy the fact that he had a captive audience. I learned, among numerous other things, that Louis was a retired preacher, a decorated veteran of World War II, and that he could have probably been the lightweight champion of the world if he had only had a decent manager. He also told me how proud he was to finally own his own house and that he was worried that his property value was going to start going down if the cops didn’t stop finding dead bodies in the little park right across the street.
“What people need around here is jobs,” explained Louis with passion. “Do you realize that almost no one in this whole neighborhood has a real job? There just aren’t any. All these poor young kids just really need a job. They’re not all bad, you know. In my day, at least there was work.”
“Louis,” I finally said, “I’m really late for an appointment in downtown Oakland. You got any idea how I can get there?”
“Well,” he said with a mischievous smile that showed off the fact that through the years Louis had lost most of his teeth, “I ain’t much on explaining how to get from one place to another. But I could probably get you there, you know, if I was to ride along with you in that fancy new pick-up truck of yours. Maybe we could even get ourselves a bite to eat?”
I took a long look over at the park across the street where they kept finding all those dead bodies and said, “Louis, you got yourself a deal!”