‘The Color Midnight Made’ – first novel of Alameda native
August, 4, 2002
by Aaron Tassano

Set in the depressed, post-base closure climate of Alameda, “The Color Midnight Made” is the debut novel of former East Bay resident Andrew Winer.

Winer details the life of Conrad Clay, a colorblind boy who only sees people in colors that represent who they truly are.

The book begins: “They say I can’t see colors. They’re lying. I can see colors in people.

“Moms is yellow. Pops is camouflage. Our teacher Mr. Garabedian is tan like a weed. I got a color for everybody. Except me.”

Equal parts Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, Clay is, like those literary heroes, an investigator of life.

But there is a price for his explorations. He must first come to terms with his own identity. “He doesn’t know his own color,” explains Winer. “Which is to say that he doesn’t see himself. He doesn’t know who he is.”

The story unfolds in the 1990’s just after the closing of the Alameda Naval Base. The closure leaves hundreds of families (including Clay’s) without income.

As his father quickly falls into alcoholism and his mother into neurotic bitterness, Clay seeks refuge in the hip-hop and skateboard cultures of his classmates.

Winer, diagnosed with colorblindness as a child, says Clay’s colorblindness is not the only parallel between Clay’s life and his own.

Winer’s mother was a lab technician at the Oakland Naval Hospital. There she met Winer’s stepfather, an eight-year naval petty officer who was later trained as a nuclear medicine technician.

“We had many friends at the Alameda Naval Station and often found ourselves on the Alameda base or in the housing area along its edges,” says Winer.

Winer’s family moved frequently. They lived in several sections of Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito and Hayward. The one constant in Winer’s environment was that he always lived in predominately black or racially mixed neighborhoods.

“I spent a lot of time by myself, interacting with whatever environment I found myself in.,” says Winer, who is white. “And growing up in several African-American communities gave me insights into race and culture struggles I wouldn’t have ordinarily had.”

Another important aspect of the novel—specific to his East Bay upbringing—is the language he employs. Winer believes that, as he was growing up, the language, more than clothes or money, was the key to survival.

“When I was a kid everything was about how you spoke and what you said. It was a way of not getting your butt kicked. We were constantly coming up with new words, riffing off each other almost like jazz,” he says. “Mind you, this is pre hip-hop.”

In the late 1980’s, Winer left the Bay Area to pursue his dreams of becoming an artist in New York City

“The art world kind of died in the early 90’s. It was hard to get shows, and I started suffering from depression,” he says. “I started staying up all night watching films. As a result, I educated myself in how narratives work.”

Winer took his newfound knowledge of narrative and moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. He sold one script, “Honky!”, to New Regency Productions.

Despite his small screenwriting success, Winer was not satisfied.

“I began realizing that writing screenplays is not pure art. If I was writing, I still needed to be an artist,” says Winer. “So I started writing short stories. They were all rejected. But I did get some encouraging notes.”

He applied to the writing program at the University of California at Irvine. He chose the program because one of his favorite writers, Berkeley resident and Pulitzer-prize winner Michael Chabon, had gone there.

Upon entering the program, Winer had two ideas for novels. One was the story of an artist coming of age in New York City. The other was Conrad Clay.

“I came across a quote by Twain that said writing from a child’s point of view is something that shouldn’t be done until one is older,” says Winer. “I wanted to do the more challenging book.”

Winer worked on the book for more than four years, mostly in Los Angeles. He felt being away from the East Bay helped him use Alameda as a geographical terrain he was familiar with, but not immersed in.

“With apologies to the citizens of Alameda, I had to allow myself to invent Conrad’s Alameda,” he says.

Winer still has great affection for the Bay Area. He speaks of it with such reverence, one gets the impression he will someday be back.

“Oakland has traditionally been a working-class community,” he says, “but it’s also been a great place of intellectuality and activism and arts. Those are the things I love about it.”