Novel tells story of boy living in 1990s Alameda

By Kristin Bender , STAFF WRITER

Friday, December 13, 2002 - ALAMEDA -- When Andrew Winer set out to write a coming-of-age tale set on the mean streets of Alameda, he returned to the Island haunts that shaped his childhood, and wandered around the shipyards and abandoned Navy base that ultimately became the heart of his new book.

Winer, 36, is the author of "The Color Midnight Made," a novel loosely based on his childhood and set in semifictionalized Alameda during the Clinton impeachment saga.

As a boy growing up in the 1970s, Winer didn't live in Alameda, but he spent a lot of time there because his stepfather was stationed at the former base, and both his stepfather and his mother hung out in the bars and restaurants on Webster Street.

"The Navy then was filled with these wild characters, really a Dickensian-type crew," he said in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles. "My experiences with the AlamedaNaval Air Station was eccentric men coming back from Vietnam, bikers with choppers, people dying to get out of the Navy, a lot of drinking and drugs."

During the four-year writing process, Winer returned to Alameda frequently and hung out in the West End.

He watched students suck Slurpees in front of the 7-Eleven, smelled the grease at area fast food restaurants and fingered the vinyl at the record store on Webster Street.

He wandered the base, studied the weathered, abandoned buildings, and traipsed around former military housing. Winer sat in the bars and studied the seedy characters who drank the day away. In essence, he relived much of his military-influenced childhood under the watchful eye of a single mother in a blue-collar neighborhood.

The story unfolds in 1990s Alameda as the closing of the base leaves thousands, especially many African Americans, without jobs.

The story is told from the eyes of Conrad Clay, a 10-year-old white boy attending a primarily African-American elementary school. The boy has just been diagnosed with colorblindness. But as the story unfolds and the community deals with poverty and racial division, Conrad realizes it's the world -- not his sight -- that has become uncertain, Winer said.

While Conrad seeks solace in hip-hop culture, skateboarding and his black friend, Loop, his hard-drinking father's violent tendencies worsen with unemployment. And his mother, the kind of neurotic woman who pops pills because she's allergic to the cigarettes she smokes, slides deeper into neurosis.

In a review, Publishers Weekly says the characters and plot lines range "from the mundane (a bully, some adolescent sexual fumblings) to the bizarre (a pair of gay pro wrestlers and Conrad's plan to kill his father with a pipe bomb)."

"But Winer's take on boyhood, with its attendant spasms of bravado and insecurity, always ring true," the review says.

"The Color Midnight Made," released in the summer, made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list shortly after.

Winer, who saw positive reviews while in Alameda for a reading earlier this year, said he plans to return when the paperback is released, possibly next summer.

"I liked (the book) better than I thought I would when I started it. ... The time he talks about in Alameda sounded like it is going to be very depressing, but I didn't find it depressing," said Lynda Williams, Alameda's senior librarian.

Winer worked on the book while earning his master's degree in fine arts at the University of California, Irvine, when he took frequent trips to Alameda.

"I would walk up and down Webster, go into bars and restaurants, liquor stores and hang out in the KFC," he said. "As much as I could, I tried to look like a local."

His research ended with constant feedback in the university's Graduate Writers' Workshop, a group that accepts six new members each year and has more than 330 writers vying for acceptance. Authors Michael Chabon, Richard Ford and Alice Sebold are workshop graduates.

Michelle Latiolais is associate professor of English at the university and came to know Winer in the program.

"He's an incredibly compassionate writer and has the ability to imagine himself into amazing complex psychological situation and the ability to write sympathetically about every character," she said.