ALAMEDA JOURNAL Posted on Fri, Jul. 26, 2002 Novelist reimagines growing up in Alameda By Susan Fuller STAFF WRITER Conrad Clay is 10 and his life is falling apart. His friends are moving away, his hard-drinking, violent "Pops" lost his job, Conrad finds out he is colorblind and the family is facing eviction. Conrad is the protagonist in a new novel set in a semi-fictionalized Alameda. The backdrop for this novel about a lonely boy is the closure of the naval base. Andrew Winer loosely based "The Color Midnight Made" on his experiences as a military child who lived in Alameda in the 1970s. Although Winer didn't live here long, he spent lots of time in Navy housing and on Webster Street with friends from the island. The Alameda that Winer knew as a child was multicultural. Conrad is white and his best friend Loop (short for Fruit Loops) is black. "I didn't know the white part of Alameda," Winer said. "The Navy is a leveler when it comes to race. I was fortunate to be there at a time when I didn't experience explicit racism and that has informed the rest of my life." Winer augmented his childhood memories with four years of research trips to the island. "I spent most of my time on the West End, though I always thought of it as north," he said. "In 1996 there was an abandoned feel in the neighborhoods and in the Navy housing west of Webster, out near the water. I had to reimagine myself as a 10-year-old boy, skateboarding around." When Winer was that age he was friends with all the neighborhood shopkeepers. He used that memory to imagine where another lonely boy would hang out. Like Conrad, Winer spent time watching ships unloading, fantasizing about where a ship would take him. Both were fascinated with Oakland's Chinatown. "The research process was intense, taking a lot of notes and doing a lot of daydreaming," he said. "Then it really was a process of allowing myself to distance myself from Alameda." He said he couldn't have written the book while living here. Winer wanted the novel, which landed at No. 13 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list this week, to be timeless and not locked into one place. Many locations in the book -- a 7-Eleven store on "Central Street," Hideout Liquors, Jack London Elementary School, Zeke's Skateshop and a Safeway in the West End are imagined or imported from other places. Likewise, Winer's young characters use a slang that is partly made up to avoid association with a specific era. "I wanted Conrad's language to be very unique," Winer said. "I didn't want people to say 'That's how we spoke in the late '90s.'" For example "squid" is used to mean a young person who is not cool, he said. Back as far as the 19th century, "squid" has been slang for a navy sailor, but Winer changed the meaning. Winer and Silva Book Company are working on arranging a reading at the main library, but no date has been set. Winer received his master of fine arts degree from the University of California at Irvine. He lives in Southern California and is working on a second novel about two generations of artists and how they were affected by the Holocaust.