Different Kitchens, Different Friends by Alec West

Alec at Green Windows' monthly workshop 3/2017.

​I heard about Green Windows on an aimless walk through downtown Oakland at dusk one Spring.  I remember the sky was pink and I was climbing my way up from rock bottom and pure Hell.  I think I was only a few months sober.  Back then, Green Windows was hosted at the original Rock Paper Scissors Collective art workshop on Telegraph Ave.  I opened my mouth for what seemed like the first time since I was a kid and spoke about what was really important to me.  We sat on unassuming chairs in a paint-splattered room and people listened to me.  I never did AA or any kind of structured help program.  Green Windows was it for me.  Every month I would join a friendly assortment of colorful people, I would write, I would share and I would listen.  In this way, I built myself up from broken, devastated pieces into a positive member of a tangible community for the first time in my life.  
    In Green Windows, you always have the option to pass on sharing a piece of writing.  I have never done this.  I have written pieces of writing that scared me into shaking, pale-skinned jello in these workshops.  Sharing them in a safe, confidential space with warm, loving people who all share their stories in turn has brought me healing that feels divine.  Again, you don’t have to share if you don’t want to, and plenty of people choose not to, but I have made serious progress emotionally and spiritually just by saying what I need to say, even if I’m terrified.  
    After a while of coming to these workshops, you start to see the same people.  You admire their writing and then get to admire them as people.  None of us are big-shot prestigious writers (at least not yet).  Almost everyone is available to talk or share a ride home or a slice of pizza after the workshop.  The community of people I’ve met coming to Green Windows over the years is what keeps me rooted in the Bay Area.  It brings me pride in my home and I feel like I’m releasing stagnant energy and rejuvenating by writing, reading and listening.  
    As long as I live in the Bay Area, I’m going to keep coming to Green Windows workshops.  This community has played no small part in making me the person I am today.  Peggy, her helpers, and all of us do a lot of work to keep the space open to truly anyone who wants to come through these doors and write.  The participants in these workshops feel like a cross-section of Oakland and the greater Bay Area and I haven’t seen this diversity in one space anywhere else.  Green Windows writers have the privilege of coming to awareness of what life is like for people different from us. This work is important for keeping myself humble and keeping myself engaged in the struggle for justice and in building community.  Here, I have the space to dig into myself and find veins of painful, traumatized gold to bring into the light and inspire others.  I am grateful to live in a time and place where this is possible.

Below is a piece of fiction I wrote in a Green Windows workshop. I hope you enjoy it. 

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Different Kitchens, Different Friends

by Alec West 

The refrigerator makes a sound that most people don’t hear. My friend Charles grew up on a boat and said that when he had to live in a house he hated the refrigerator. It was so loud, it kept him up at night. He wasn’t used to it.
    My friend J used to come over and raid my fridge. He showed me how to cook tortillas on the stovetop. Years later, he admitted that he’d had a gun on him in our house. Old friends were trying to kill him, and he had to protect himself.
    My friend Basil also used my kitchen. He is dead now. I remember him standing in my kitchen, having a conversation with my Mom about yogurt-coated granola bars.
    “These are actually sweeping the nation as one of the best new things!” he said. His wide eyes were shifty and unfocused, his blond, box-springed hair was like a brillo pad under a wool cap or a hoodie. We went on that afternoon to get drunk in an alleyway with fresh green grass growing. It was springtime, and we were enjoying being young and the bold, deep flavor of loneliness when you have someone to share it with. Then Basil bought a bottle of vodka from a homeless man with my money, and we blacked out in the bathroom of a drug store.
    This kitchen, on Lake in Piedmont, by Beach Elementary, was the first place I discovered alcohol. I remember coming home in a nice button-down shirt from the freshman dance and finding the liquor cabinet open. 
    Vodka and Gin. I filled up two plastic water bottles full, one red and one blue. My friend Red covered the stairs at the Morcom Rose garden with orange, green, white, and yellow puddles from the paints in his stomach. They were inkblots spilled over a page. Somebody was holding their pen up too long thinking about what to write and splotches ran through. Back then there was less loneliness than hope and excitement. I felt like I could still be part of something here if I tried. Red was my first drinking buddy. 
    Years later, I find myself in my brother Gabre’s kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. He has liquor bottles displayed above the cabinets where he keeps plates and dishes. He was a teetotaller all through high school, and now that he is in college, he is drinking. He felt that he had earned the privilege with his success. My friends and I taught him all about top shelf bourbon and scotch. Now he is a connoisseur and a snob, and at six pm on a weeknight he is shaking the cocktail mixer, fixing a drink. 
    My friend Hombre’s Dad’s kitchen looks out over the whole of San Francisco. You can see the city shimmering with light and heat and fog and silver and gold during the day and shining with purple and orange at night. It was the perfect place to enjoy a blunt with some close friends. My friend Hombre had sixteen pot plants growing on that back deck in high school. At first, his Dad didn’t notice, then he didn’t care. 
      Tall, fragrant bushes, sticky flowers and phosphorescent leaves. Orange hairs, white hairs, purple hairs. Acid and mushrooms and looking at the clouds. Hardcore music. Drum and bass music. Dubstep. A State of Trance. 
    We found a vast, dark basement full of all flavors of people who did drugs in San Francisco, from hardened criminals to kids like us. Hombre wanted to wear sweat pants and a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. We told him to go for it, but he didn’t do it. We were too young for ecstasy, we felt, so we took trucker speed, those pills you buy over the counter at the gas station for like five bucks. That and a lot of marijuana, and we didn’t sit down for six hours. 
    All this is what I remember of my childhood in the East Bay. What were we gonna do? We were making the best out of a teenage situation in suburban California. No, you’re too young to get into the club, but there’s this alleyway and this bag and this homeless guy who agrees to buy you alcohol. I’m not joking when I say that homeless guy became my best friend. His name was J, he was only a few years older than me, and he taught me a lot.

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Alec West is a Bay Area native and has been writing and publishing since he was twelve, when a fierce middle-school teacher taught him that he was worth something.  He has been published in Slingshot Magazine, The Anthology of Poetry By Young Americans, The Moon,   and The Highlander.  His first book, “What Happened When I Stopped Watching TV” will be available in print and e-book in December 2018. Follow Alec on Instagram.