THE MEETING
A decade later, I planned to meet Joshua Stilt at a Mission District café in San Francisco, but saw him almost an hour early, standing at the yellow edge of the Rockridge BART platform in Oakland. The weather — warm and overcast — lent a cinematic, quiet texture to the whole scene, as if we were waiting for a steam engine and not a commuter train. For a moment I considered avoiding him until our planned meeting. Checking the overhead electronic platform scrolls, however, I saw that our train had been delayed due to a post-Occupy, largely impromptu protest a station ahead. Fearing Joshua Stilt might catch me avoiding him in that time, I went over to introduce myself.
He was donning those large white plastic headphones everyone our age seemed to be wearing in transit, and I had to reach out and touch him on the shoulder to get his attention. When he slid the headphones down around his neck, I said, “I’m Daley Kushner, the guy who’s writing about you.”
He’d grown up to become a stylish, handsome young man. He’d sprouted a good eight inches not including his early-’90s-style flattop fade (an additional two inches), complete with lines shaved into the sides of his head that reminded me, for whatever reason, of the wingtips on classic American cars. He wore large-framed black glasses and, despite the warm weather, a slim-fitting suede blazer that, only when the clouds passed temporarily, proved to be navy blue. We talked about the chance of rain and the clearer skies we could already make out across the bay until our train arrived, at which point, we found two empty seats and began to talk more comfortably.
“I won’t turn this on,” I said, showing him my digital recorder, “until we get to the café. Too much noise on these rails.”
“Very strange to see another AV kid outside the desert,” he said. “I guess you and I are special.”
“Ha,” I said — actually saying the word. I wondered (a) if he remembered me from high school (probably not) and (b) if I — far less stylish as an acne-scarred, uncombed, short-but-lanky white dude in a polo shirt — had made a good first impression. I resisted the urge to ask, and told him that once the recorder came on, the conversation would be about the ways he — and only he — was special. “Trust me,” I said. “My editor has no interest in getting to know me better.”
“You’ll seep through anyway,” Joshua said, not unkindly. His music was still on, and I could make out the snare hits through the headphones around his neck. “As soon as you choose what to say or write,” he said, “you start seeping through. And it only gets messier the more you say.”
THE ASSIGNMENT
My class — Antelope Valley High, 2005—was the first to graduate not as Rebels, but as Desert Tortoises. Joshua’s was the next. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Philosophy at Stanford, he became, at the age of twenty-three, the seventh-youngest city council member in Oakland’s history. Now, at twenty-five, he was mulling his first mayoral run. It was too early in the campaign for him to be followed around by reporters, but his name had been floated as a possible candidate, and early polls were lending credence to some — if not all — of his confidence. My assignment was to:
1. Conduct, over lunch in San Francisco (where he’d scheduled a cross-Bay photo-op), an interview with Stilt.
2. Return to Stilt’s Oakland apartment for a prearranged photo-shoot with his friend, a photographer named Jenna King.
3. Attend, in the evening, a “green jobs” event at which Stilt was scheduled to speak.
4. Write the spotlight, tentatively titled, “The President of the Future Presidents Club.”
The publication for which I was writing — a Los Angeles — based, century-old magazine turned website — wasn’t the first to speculate on Joshua Stilt’s bright future in politics, but it was the first to acquire an exclusive feature with him (citing his L.A. County birthplace). Stilt and I had never been friends, but I’d been thinking a lot lately about what motivates a person from our hometown to leave, and whether there was some essential difference between people like us and those who chose to stay. In fact, that’s how I’d pitched the article in the first place — from the point of view of someone who went to high school with Joshua Stilt — but my editor advised me to keep the focus on the subject at hand. “Do whatever you need to do,” she added at the end of our conversation, “as long as you don’t turn this into a story about you.”
And so I’d kept certain facts of my life — some more important than others — from Joshua Stilt. I hadn’t told him, for instance, that for the previous two weeks I’d had a dull but constant headache, the result of getting so little sleep. I’d been living with my partner, Lloyd, for nearly a year in San Francisco, but a recent series of disagreements (he wanted to meet my mother) had me sleeping on the stiff corduroy couch of a friend on the south side of Berkeley.
I’d stayed up the night before searching the internet for old interview clips with Joshua Stilt regarding the Hitler-mustache controversy. Some of the footage showed panning shots of the high school during lunch, and when I started looking for myself among the crowd — going so far as to pause the video — I knew it was time to shut off the laptop and try, again, to sleep.
THE TRANSCRIPT, 1/3
JS: You can probably tell your readers more about the Antelope Valley than I can, Daley. I’d rather talk about Oakland.
DK: We’ll get there, but I’d like your thoughts on growing up in the AV. Like, how did growing up there affect your worldview, et cetera.
JS: On the record or off? [Laughter.]
DK: Whichever, just let me know which is which.
JS: Okay. On the record: The AV’s an interesting place. Edge of the Mojave Desert, so, hot and isolated. Not a lot to do. I ended up spending a lot of time in my own head. I thought the Joshua trees were named after me, for example, and then I thought I was named after them. [Sounds from the espresso machine.] I couldn’t face the fact that we had absolutely nothing to do with one another, other than accidentally being in the same place. Mostly I thought about leaving, and what I was going to do after I left. I wanted to live in a place where I wasn’t the only one trying to change things, you know? When you’re basically the only one of your kind in a town, whether it’s an activist, or if it’s the only black kid in class, or the only gay kid, or both, like—
DK: James Baldwin?
JS: I was going to say Frank Ocean — [laughter] — but sure. There are specific challenges for each minority — black and gay aren’t the same, obviously — but the common link if you’re the only one of your kind is that it’s tough to get taken seriously by the majority. People hear you complain and say, “If you don’t like it here, then leave.” If you don’t complain, you start feeling complicit. I just had to learn to ignore everyone, even myself, wait it out, and save my energy for a more worthwhile [inaudible]. Turned out to be a good place for me to grow up, actually, because good politicians aren’t only adept at being frustrated, but also at knowing what to do with that frustration.