Where José Vadi Writes

“I blame my first studio apartment for my habit of writing in kitchens.”

I blame my first studio apartment for my habit of writing in kitchens. It had a closet of a kitchenette, my body spinning in place like a record needle while cooking, washing, and cleaning with a low enough splash to not hit the nearby fuse box. Two years later I started circulating Lake Merritt counter clockwise, from that small downtown studio to similar apartments in East Oakland and then north of the lake in Adams Point, writing towards an MFA at Mills College in larger, more proper kitchens before moving in with my now-wife into the one (and a quarter?) bedroom apartment we’ve shared for six years. We had the option of a bigger fridge or a breakfast nook, and both knew the implication behind a Yes vote for the nook.

I didn’t know I’d end up writing a book here . . . and continuing to sit here, day in and night out, amidst the pandemic. Inter State is full of a lot of movement—road trips, pedestrian jaunts across neighborhoods on foot and every form of public transportation available—and a lot of it was crafted here in a sedentary state. As the pandemic continued to worsen through 2019 into 2020, I realized I might be in this sedentary state for much longer than expected.

The ErgoStand has become this kinda mascot of the space and its multi-use pandemic functionality: job interviews, filming Pop-Up Magazine episodes, and even our video wedding with Alameda County. It wasn’t always here. Previously a stand of books, the cardboard stand quickly turned into a notepad scrawled with late night notes for the book, a scotch-taped California edition quarter for whatever karmic relevance also attached. The original purpose was ergonomics. Early mornings writing in San Francisco coffee shops before work increased my already hunched habit of working with a laptop without some type of elevation. I’m 6’2” and require a tall-backed chair, a wireless keyboard and mouse.

There’s a pantry and coffee maker immediately to my right. When the sun is too bright I open both of the pantry’s doors to block out the shine. There’s usually a stack of whatever books I’m trying to read, with a wider set of skate magazines beneath upholding the stack. There’s this portable desk office organizing thing that holds a bunch of pens, letters, stamps, some nearby bills and pay stubs, whatever handwritten journal I’ve just completed, lens cleaner for my glasses. Above me on the small sill, embroidered Scorpio and California poppy patches. A postcard of the Capitol in Sacramento from my inlaws. A flier for a Fugazi film screening at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland that the pandemic cancelled. A Unity Skateboards postcard featuring Jeff Cheung’s artwork. A ticket for a recent virtual online Sun Ra Arkestra show. A framed portrait of James Baldwin bought off a Lake Merritt vendor. A Vanidades cover featuring Maria Montez and Kent Taylor on cardboard that I bought from The Magazine in the Tenderloin and reminds me of more modern covers from the same publication found in every bathroom in every Mexican home I entered growing up in the San Gabriel Valley. I bought a poster called SIGNS AND ARTIFACTS, a by-neighborhood collage series of real-life signs and exteriors lost to gentrification, produced by the Secret Riso Club for the Printed Matter New York Book Fair (now virtual), and stare at it frequently, daydreaming how to hand draw the signs, their unique details and qualities, and how much I miss walking around San Francisco and Oakland at night before the pandemic.

And a newly acquired, used tube television.

The pandemic and its need for nightly distractions from the apocalypse via entertainment led me to buying a VHS/TV combo on eBay and a bunch of equally old action movies that my wife and I, after temporarily clearing this makeshift office into another room, would turn into a dining room turned 90s living room, period-accurate skate videos included. Here’s my partner screaming along to Parker Posey’s Air raid! scene from Dazed and Confused:

Again—a different way to feel Time’s pass amidst work, finishing the book, and not going outside other than short walks and skate sessions at BART.

Sometimes I’ll put the laptop on the television perpendicularly and use it as a standing desk thing. Whatever works, but the options are there—and that’s the point of all these kitchen spaces. To know a physical space exists where I can always be creative, whenever I want.