Kindred Spirit : Like the Children in His Novel, Jess Mowry Knows All About Life on the Streets

Boys work the parking lot in East Oakland as night falls. They beg Jaguar and Mercedes owners for change to buy a meal. Businessmen walk by on their way to watch the Warriors in the Coliseum.

Only Jess Mowry seems to see the kids. He observes their moves from his sagging 1955 GMC truck as he waits outside a Denny’s restaurant.

“Imagine how much courage it takes to do that hour after hour; approach somebody and do that little humble thing and get refused, or get cursed,” he says to a companion. “Some people spit. And you do that every day. It probably takes more guts than you got. I’ve done it.”

Like these kids, Mowry, 32, grew up on Oakland’s meaner streets. He still lives in a poor neighborhood in West Oakland, but now by choice. His new novel, “Way Past Cool,” is his third book and the first to be issued by a mainstream publisher.

He received a $30,000 advance for the book and has sold the movie option for $75,000. Paperback bidding will start at $150,000, says Sandra Dijkstra, his Del Mar-based literary agent. His publisher--Farrar, Straus & Giroux--mentions interview requests from People magazine and CBS’ “Street Stories,” which Mowry has so far turned down because they want to interview him at his home.

“I don’t give tours of the ghetto,” he says.

Mowry’s fiction, however, portrays the streets he’s lived on and, by his reckoning, could have died on. Mowry’s characters are gangs of children, sometimes armed and dangerous, who glide through life on skateboards, fending off predators circling their ‘hoods. Their parents are gone and their lives are full of the lure of quick cash from selling drugs. They are cornered by poverty, “drive-byed” and provoked by police. Mowry calls them “Little Rascals with Uzis.”

“He’s a new literary voice, a voice that isn’t like any other,” says Jonathan Galassi, editor-in-chief at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who bought “Way Past Cool” immediately after reading it. Galassi, a poet, likens Mowry’s work to that of a modern-day Dickens: “He’s someone who has come up out of a place where no one expected anything to happen, and that’s where real changes come from. He’s someone to be reckoned with.”

“I can’t imagine how it happened, how this 27-, 28-year-old who had been educated through the eighth grade, sat down and started writing these stories,” says Susan Daniel. She and her husband operate John Daniel & Co., Publishers, a small Santa Barbara firm that published Mowry’s second book, a collection of short stories, “Rats in the Trees,” in 1990. “They were very rough, but his sense of the way a story should work, the tension that’s needed, character development, were all pretty sophisticated.”

Mowry “presents a picture that most of the people in this country have no idea exists, and probably don’t want to know exists. My husband thinks (Mowry’s) 12- and 14-year-old kids are dealing with the same problems, questions of good and evil, as Shakespeare’s characters. It makes for classic themes in this very strange environment,” Daniel says.

“I am hearing the same gunfire he’s hearing,” Oakland writer Ishmael Reed says of Mowry. “Everyone’s writing an inner-city book now, doing an inner-city movie, and they are being done by middle-class people who don’t know what they are talking about. He knows these characters he writes about better than anybody.”

Mowry has little record of his beginnings. His father is black and his mother white. He only recently learned that he was born in Mississippi. His father told him his mother left them.

Father and son moved to Oakland during the early ‘60s. Mowry quit school after the eighth grade and hooked up with a young drug dealer. The future writer carried a .45-caliber Army pistol.

As a teen-ager, he met Markita Brown. They have been together for 16 years and have four children, ages 8 to 16.

Mowry has lived on the street, collected scrap in the back of his truck, scavenged for aluminum cans and done mechanical work. And he read.

His father, who operated a scrap-yard crane, was an avid reader and gave him a hunger for words, Mowry says. Growing up, he devoured everything from Dickens to Dostoevsky. John Steinbeck and science fiction writers H. P. Lovecraft and Larry Niven are among his favorites. He read mechanical manuals and comic books. In class, he was always ahead of everyone else in reading.

“Maybe reading had something to do with it,” he says of his turn from crime. “Maybe I knew there was another world out there some place.”

In 1988, Mowry purchased an old Royal typewriter for $10 at a school auction and began to create his characters while perched on the back of his truck. He sold his first short story to the prestigious San Francisco literary magazine Zyzzyva.

“I’m getting published by these magazines with guys like college professors,” Mowry says. “There’d be the list in the back, ‘So and so is a professor teaching creative writing,’ and there’s Jess Mowry, ‘Graduated eighth grade.’ I’m wondering what people think.”

Mowry slips into the booth at Denny’s. That day in Oakland marked the end of a 24-hour violence spree that left seven dead, shocking even in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the nation.

Mayor Elihu Harris called for a “violence suppression” program: setting up youth curfews, police checkpoints and barricades; dispatching more cops to patrol the streets. Mowry disagrees.

“It all comes back to treating symptoms, not the disease,” he says. “I’ve already got a half-dozen examples of this. Cops bust into an apartment, keep a whole family, even little kids, on the floor for two hours while they tear the place apart and find out it was the wrong apartment in the wrong building--and not even apologize. They pass new laws every day and they get less justice.

“The so-called civilized social fabric of our society is breaking down,” Mowry says. “I don’t have any solutions. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Like I say in the book, who says we (black people) are going to be able to run the zoo any better? We’re just human, too.”

Mowry says he fears most kids he writes about will never get a chance to read his books. “Who the hell can afford a $20 book? I never bought a $20 book in my life. What’s happened to me would be like taking meat food products that are supposed to go to government surplus giveaway and some rich people get hold of it and make pate snacks for cocktail hour.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m supposed to be explaining the inner-city culture to white people,” Mowry says.

But Mowry doesn’t care what white people think. He cares about black kids.

“They are the future. But people turn their heads and look the other way. They prefer to think of these kids as animals, damaged, no hope for them. I’m trying to show these kids as human beings trying to fight a tank with BB guns. . . . You write about what you know. You draw from what you see. You can’t make up something worse than the truth.”

Rejected by mainstream society, these youngsters create their own. They have their own code of honor and vocabulary. They struggle to do homework and stay alive. Mowry draws from pop culture--TV, music, movies--with a poetic style.

He makes up stories for neighborhood children he knows, some of them gang members, and dispenses advice. “Most of the kids who come around me, they’re about 8 to 13. Most of the characters in my book are about 12, 13, 14--right up until about the time the kids around here are convinced the world hates their guts. They still believe there might be hope for something.”

“Way Past Cool” will be published in at least six countries. So far, Mowry has refused to do promotional tours. He says his agents, whom he calls “pimps,” don’t speak for him or speak his language.

“He’s a special writer with special needs,” is all Dijkstra will say of clashes over such things as Mowry’s refusal to promote his book in London.

Mowry turned down a six-figure Disney deal to write a screenplay based on “Way Past Cool,” but he accepted $75,000 from Disney to option his book for the screen.

“I would have been happy to write them a screenplay,” he says. “What I said was, ‘I take two months to try to write this screenplay. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to pay me.’ They said, ‘You can’t do that. You’d sell it to someone else.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ They just wouldn’t even hear that. I had one of those Hollywood agents tell me, ‘Oh, you’re playing the honesty angle.’

“They sent me a 30-page contract. They talk world rights. They talk about universe rights. It’s like, if space aliens come down and want to rent videos, they got it covered.

“It’s a jungle out there. It’s been like Buckwheat invited to Christmas at the Reagans.”

Mowry is working on a new novel in a 1959 Greyhound bus, which is parked near his apartment and serves as his office, writing in the early morning hours, and trying to maintain his low-key life.

He has little interest in material possessions and says he has used some of his new income to help families and children he knows.

Despite the fact that his 8-year-old son was recently shot in the shoulder on his way home from school, Mowry is reluctant to move from his neighborhood.

“If somebody handed you a ticket out of hell, you’d be happy. My kids deserve better, but that means leaving the other kids behind,” he says. “If we move, I suppose we could take a couple of ones who don’t have folks, or their folks don’t want them. (But) I can’t very well load up the bus with five, six, seven, eight kids who don’t belong to me.

“I’d rather feed one person for a month than give 30 people one meal,” he says. “I can’t, like the foster home people do, take in one for a while and then turn him loose. As far as kids slipping away, sure, I see it. . . . Maybe they’ll do what I did. Hopefully, they won’t kill somebody before they do.

“Do I see hope for Oakland? I see hope for people. Things aren’t going to change until people change. The lady (from a local high school) was talking to me about coming to the schools. What am I going to tell them? ‘You got hearts, you little suckers. Learn to use them.’ ”