Pieces of Home
It has been seven years since I have spent any meaningful time in my hometown. Pinole, California, population 18,390. They call it a city but it’s more accurately a town, divided into two parts: Old Town, west of the freeway near San Pablo Bay, and The Valley, to the east, where I grew up.
“Visiting Pinole feels like stepping into 2005,” a friend once told me. Perhaps he was referring to the brutal grey strip malls and sparse chain restaurants, amidst suburban housing. Everything is nestled between rolling hills, yellow with tall grass for most of the year.
“Want to smoke?” my co-worker R asks me in December, 2022. I just started working at a chain coffee shop to fill the days and to make a little bit of money. I finished my shift and was sitting outside, reading a book. “Sure,” I say.
In 2014, I remember going to that same coffee shop and striking up a conversation with a stranger who convinced me to quit my job that day to take a Greyhound bus to Texas.
R’s car is parked behind the cafe, facing the freeway off ramp. He lights up a joint as thick as a double-A battery and passes it to me, turns on the stereo and bobs his head, mumbling to the beat. “You freestyle?” I ask.
When I attended Pinole Valley High School, every Friday at lunch, student government would wheel out large sub-woofers onto the quad and play hip hop. My friends and I would huddle next to the speakers, stand in a circle, and make up rap lyrics on the spot, taking turns, nodding our heads and yelling whenever one of us said something impressive.
It became an obsession, something we practiced at, something we performed at school rallies, something we took trips to Oakland for, to attend rap battles and open mics. The backs of all my school notebooks were filled with lyrics.
“There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, ‘yes,’ in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.” - Saul Williams, poet.
Rap music, for me, was a participatory activity. It meant bobbing your head, feeling the words that the person next to you was spitting, responding, improvising, and releasing your subconscious. I find it hard to share my favorite rap music with people who have never participated in it like this.
R and I are nodding our heads, passing the joint between us. I am watching cars exit the freeway through the windshield, the speakers rattle the doors.
One thing I missed the most about my hometown was the loudness of my friends. In the places I’ve lived outside of Pinole, I’ve found that the people I met were quieter, more polite. I remember attending a talent show in college, and shouting with enthusiasm for one of the performers (as I always had at every talent show I had been to), and having everyone in the audience turn to shoot me a dirty look and hush me.
For Christmas in Pinole, my cafe co-workers hosted a holiday party potluck after we closed shop. We ate food and exchanged white elephant gifts, and I was refreshed by the shouting, the yelling, the playful name calling and musical teasing of one another. I barely knew these people but it felt undeniably like home.
I remember having Thanksgiving on the East Coast with my white family and feeling stuffy and alienated, as we quietly passed the gravy around the table and talked about football. All I had known before were day-long potlucks with lumpia, panict, sushi, ham, turkey, fried rice, mashed potatoes, adobo. There was no formal sit down, but instead milling about from room to room to find pockets of family doing their own thing. One year my uncle DJ’d, and a family friend belly danced for us in full costume (such a funny and awkward memory to be a child and thinking that this is what family holidays were always like).
I remember attending Christmas at a girlfriend’s house in Texas and being unable to talk to anyone. When I tried being myself, crass and devious as I always have been at holidays with my family, I was greeted only with blank stares.
This week was my last week working at the chain coffee shop in Pinole. R quickly arranged a going-away kickback. He cooked a pot of chili and we grabbed drinks and mixers at Walgreens, before driving through the hills to his place, blasting rap music loud enough to distort the bass lines.
My co-workers (my friends!) arrived, kicking off their Crocs to take shots of whiskey with us (Whiskey! Why had I spent so much time with people who hated the taste?). We rolled blunts and smoked out the living room until we were in a circle again, nodding to the music thudding from R’s gaming rig, rapping, freestyling, shouting and reacting to each other’s words.
At the end of the night, I waited for my ride outside with a co-worker, A, in the stairwell. “That was really fun,” she said, “it makes me sad that we didn’t do this more often.”
“Me too,” I said. “But I guess it made this night more special.”
She nodded. “Yeah. It was perfect.”
I leave Pinole in one week for the next chapter of my life. As a teenager, I used to hate Pinole. I thought it was boring and that there was nothing to do. In some ways this is very true, but the people and the subculture is what I now realize to be my real home. I will miss the East Bay terribly, but I am so grateful that the parts I loved about it are still intact.
It is so funny to me that in the five months I’ve been here, my fondest memories are at the chain coffee shop between customers, between shifts, learning dance moves and making up songs. I cannot help but feel a wealth of spiritual energy bubbling up from the ground beneath the cafe. Sometimes when no one is looking I will kneel down and place my palm on the ground to feel its pulse.
When I think of home, I will always think about being lost in a fog of smoke in R’s car, windows shaking, and spitting bars between shifts.
