At the bottom of University sat the Marina. Looking east you could see up into the hills, to houses shaped like giant baritone saxophones and fragrant eucalyptus trees imported accidentally from Australia. To the immediate north was the dog track, empty and silent save on race days, when the roar of the crowd could be heard, colored flags whipping in the wind, Goodyear and Fugifilm blimps hovering above. Southbound, one would quickly arrive at the freight docks, where massive tankers and container barges crept up the line of sky-high yellow and orange cranes which towered over my childhood. And westward, if one walked to the extremity of the isthmus, the small private boat harbor could be found, sometimes stirring with old men counting herring, or young rich folk learning to sail. Beyond them lay the Bay, always choppy, never stormy, always cool but never cold, and its islands full of prisons and military bases abandoned after the Cold War, wildlife refuges, and then the City, and then the Sea.

Past rows and rows of warehouses (turned into boutiques and record shops and galleries and Japanese restaurants now), past the eddy with its unused fiberglass jump for water sports, past the Grotto and the railway switch yard ten tracks deep, a long pier reached out into the spindrift, boards rotting and creaking, stained with guano, dotted with tight-skinned fishermen and an occasional hot-dog stand. Us kids promenaded ourselves down the narrow length, smelling the salt and the railway oil, and no matter how many times it had happened before, no matter how animated our walking world had become, reaching the terminus always brought silence and solemnity to the gang. As if the end of such a corridor was so inexplicable, nobody knew how to react, as if the sight of nothing but water stretching out to the City was an opposition less material and more metaphysical with every passing day. It was rare for any of us to enter the City, be it by ferry boat, by bus across the bridges, or by subway train in the tunnels under the Bay. And when someone did make it, their recollections would be mostly of how our side looked from theirs. Of their Marina, of their mysterious piers and container ships.

My father worked on Telegraph, my mother worked on Shattuck, my brother frequented the corners and alleys of High Street, International, and McArthur. Traveling between them, the pull of the Junkyard caught me, and thus began the days of my gang, days of being wild, days of rust and dust and imaginary siege. You couldn’t see the Junkyard from the Interstate, which always seemed strange, as though some spatial distortion made it possible, for the space between asphalt and shore which the kingdom meant to occupy seemed infinitely small from without, but infinitely large from within. Twisting around bunches of poison oak, evading spike-collared dogs with wits and dexterity or else with diplomacies of red, red meat, climbing the berm, apprehending first the sound, then the smell, and at last, the sight.

No one I knew was ever sure if Jenkins couldn’t talk or wouldn’t talk, but either way, he didn’t talk, not once, at least in the fright and wonder of my days at the Junkyard, and so instead of remembering his face I remember his hands, the delicacy of his gesture, the deliberation of his stride, half toddler, half thug. Jenkins was the first to take me in, when I was unallied, a free agent, a Loner we called “the type,” and it was a type reserved for a fierce few, a type well beyond my ability or disposition. I joined up with Jenkins, hauled sand for his fort, dragged the big round rusty magnet through the dirt, searching for that scarce and precious Junkyard resource: nails. The supply of wood was infinitely large, the giant driverless trucks brought it in faster than we could use or dump into the Bay, but nails, especially nails not beyond the point of irreparability, were hard to find. Jenkins’ smile understood this; Jenkins’ hands came out of his pockets with hard candy, with baseball cards, with marbles, with knives.

Then there was Sosa, a Loner; the most famous of those days. He built the zip line. There was the great Tower at the east end of the lot, the tallest structure therein, said to have been built by grown-ups—before the children arrived—supposedly in preparation for a war that never came. From the top deck of our masterpiece of brick and wrought iron, our land-lubberly flagship, was strung a thick cable Sosa pulled from the Bay at night, and it ran nearly the length of the lot, over many a fort and court, over Jenkins’ place, over the handball wall and the burning barrels and the Exchange, all the way to the Mound, a heap of sand covered in old tires at the edge of the foreshore. Control of the Tower, and thus of the zip line, was the most powerful strategic position possible in the Junkyard, as a gang of just a few boys could hold off an army of runts from above, and could exit quickly to the Mound, and then to the Bay with its rowboats and routes of escape. But Sosa was itinerant in his intimacies; whether by chance or design, he never let any one gang cement its grasp on the Tower, and though he never betrayed any interest in the common good, in egalitarianism, his influence alone kept the zip line open to most any kid strong enough to climb the Tower. And for this he was revered by all the runts, though he rarely knew their names.

I fell in love for the first time down at the Marina, with a curly-headed girl from the south named Bathsheba. Her parents were artists in Emeryville. She had blue eyes and would jump into the Bay naked in full view of everyone. Once I followed her back to her place where she introduced me to her dad. He was seven feet tall and had curly black hair down to the middle of his back, which swung as he climbed savagely up and down the crude scaffolding that stood in front of his canvas, twice as tall as him and with a length two times greater again. Bathsheba’s mother was a famous chef at a French restaurant in the Hills, and every day she drove an ailing Galaxie 500 up University, past houses shaped like giant baritone saxophones and fragrant eucalyptus trees imported accidentally from Australia, to her kitchen, where she listened to Murmur and Surfer Rosa and Daydream Nation and Psycho Candy and cooked meat hot and fast. When Bathsheba’s mother was at work and her father was stranded high on his scaffold, Bathsheba took off her clothes and took off mine and put us together in a giant iron bathtub and turned on the water. She was not disgusted by my body, nor was she impressed; she was merely curious, and inspected me slowly, thoroughly, with her tiny fingertips.

There was a kid from Alameda we called Little Ray (there was another kid we called Big Ray, though he wasn’t big at all, not even as big as I was, he was just bigger than Little Ray), and Little Ray was always bringing half-full buckets of exterior high-gloss paint from different directions. He never told us where or how he got them. I think he just didn’t want to jeopardize his glamorous position as the Junkyard’s sole provider of paint. Slowly but surely, the black and brown panels of the various shacks and forts transfigured into a kaleidoscopic maze of blues and greens. In the late afternoon, the children, tired and hungry, began to move inland, looking for whatever food and family was to be had. Jenkins sat on the Mound watching the sun as it dropped behind the City’s skyline, twirling his Raiders hat on the tip of his finger. I never saw Jenkins leave.

When I met Esther beneath the McArthur Maze one day in late summer, I brought her to the Junkyard and it immediately became her home. We all called her S and she was always talking but never making any sense. You would ask her one question, and she would answer another.

“Hey S, what are those lil beads yer like always flippin around?”

“Hap fell off zip line.”

S wanted to go on the zip line but nobody would let her. She climbed halfway up the Tower once and when she fell, a scare such as I had never seen went through the lot. All the kids from all the gangs thought there was something touched about S. She came to be regarded as useless and burdensome in pragmatic daily endeavors, but if questions of serious philosophical import came up, she was returned to as an oracle whose utterances, though abstract and difficult to decipher, were as close to truth as any of us needed to get. Sosa let S sleep on the ground floor of his fort; he had added an attic where he spent most of his time carving wooden figures and spying out the cracks between the boards. I don’t think S ever left after I brought her there. I wonder what she had done before she had so many runts to look after her. I wonder what she was doing when I found her, idling beneath the Maze, where even grown-ups made haste to pass through.

There was usually food in the Junkyard, brought from all corners of town by all types of pockets and hands. Sometimes it was traded; usually it was simply shared freely, and even eaten in unison at the Exchange or on the Mound. When Bathsheba met S, however, the Junkyard began to experience a culinary renaissance. No one knew how she did it, but Bathsheba began producing boxes and bags of leftovers from her mother’s restaurant. The first pick of delicacies was always reserved for S, who was usually only interested in the sweets, but after she had her fill, the feast was open to the public, and though it lasted no more than a minute, it was glorious enough to leave the runts dozing blissfully on the dirt until the cold air began to rush in from the west. I didn’t think about it then, but S’s diet was probably one of the most expensive on the entire waterfront, though many of us wondered, if she could barely see and hear, could she taste?

They used to sing, Bathsheba and S; sliding down the zip line, you could hear their voices echoing out of a fort, or approaching the Mound. There were lots of animals in those songs, and giant machines, cranes, and elephants, obvious elements of Bathsheba’s world. Everyone knew where Bathsheba came from, knew the giant canvases that stretched over her as she slept, but S was a mystery until the end, and the songs were a rare glimpse into her past and present. Her images were bizarre, not the normal trappings of childhood experience or imagination. There were little towns in big valleys steeped in fruit trees and shimmering fast-moving aqueducts. Most of us had never even heard of an aqueduct before, and the runts began taking turns questioning their elders outside the Junkyard to obtain the meaning of her vocabulary, until one day, along with a gallon of Greek Isle metal paint, Little Ray pulled his Radio Flyer wagon up, half full of ancient, decomposing books, among which was a thoroughly usable dictionary. For the first time, my virtues were thrust into the spotlight. Hardly anyone could read. Somehow it was understood that Jenkins could, but as he never spoke, a lot of good it did the rest of us. Sosa read and had read to us aloud from the Tower before, but only in situations of dire and immediate necessity, and by the time S and Bathsheba were singing their duets by the waterside, Sosa rarely left his attic. Bathsheba could read but a short span of attention rarely allowed her to look up a specific word. She would start off with fingers licked wet in the direction of her goal, but it would only take the length of a few breaths to see her slide happily into a new interest, distracted by the black-and-white photographs and crude drawings that speckled the pages. So I became the lot’s most trusted wielder of the dictionary, though my reading and understanding far surpassed my skills of oration, and likewise the authenticity of my pronunciation. Most of the words we looked up I had never heard besides from S, and often we could not find them because we could not figure out how they were spelled. To this day I wonder if a great many of them weren’t made-up words, words with meanings by and for S alone.

The unspoken rule of the Junkyard was, of course, no adults. No one could reveal its location or the nature of its activities to the authorities. There had been violations, but nothing ever came of them. The bums who lived on and around the pier were aware of us, but they had their own habitat, and I think they regarded us as allies. But when Big Ray’s fort collapsed with Little Ray inside, it was quickly decided that we had no choice but to ask the outside for help. We couldn’t get him out. We could hear him crying.

The men from the Grotto were speechless at the sight of the Junkyard. They got Little Ray out and took him away. The lot was quiet. Nobody said it but we all knew things were going to change; things were going to end. A week later we would all be gone. The Tower would be torn down; only the Mound retained its original form. S was taken away somewhere; maybe back to that valley town, or else to a white-walled reformatory. Bathsheba cried for a few nights and then began to prepare for school, began to sink deeper into the worlds of wonder her father had discovered in paint, began to learn the culinary gifts her mother was so eager to impart to her. She never took her clothes off for me again. In fact, not a month ago, as I was drinking cola in the kitchen, watching the kicks and yips of my dreaming dog, a letter came, from which I learned she was married in Santa Cruz to a beautiful man in the financial industry. She was a singer, not famous, but not without her own growing following in bars and clubs up and down the Central Coast. Sometimes Bathsheba returns to me in my dreams, almost full-grown, in a romper and white-and-black checkered Vans, and she takes off her clothes and mine and puts us in a bath, but this time her touch is not the objective exploration it had been in the Junkyard days; it is charged with some force beyond my comprehension, and her eyes and her curly hair are all around me, and in the morning she is gone, and all that’s left is my dog dreaming on the floor.

I went back once, twisting around bunches of poison oak, climbing the berm, and apprehending a figure seated on the Mound, facing the Bay. I milled around in the dust for a minute and approached the subject, uncertain as to whether it was right to disrupt the revelry. It was Jenkins. We sat there a while, and eventually, as the wind picked up, he looked at me. A boat sailed by and slowly, secretly, disappeared into the spindrift.

Story by Joshua Willey
Photography by Walker Esner