Later I came up with the character of Yolanda White—the motorcycle-riding "hoochie mama" who scandalized the neighborhood. And that finally led me to the character of my hero, Mack Street, the baby who was found by the drainpipe at the hairpin turn of Cloverdale. My first stab at writing it appeared as the short story "Keeper of Lost Dreams."[**]

[**] "Keeper of Lost Dreams," published in Flights: Visions of Extreme Fantasy, edited by Al Sarrantonio (Roc, June 2004).

Finally I found the character of Byron Williams and the way that Mack Street was born into the world, and finally this novel—which I now was calling by its present title—began to take shape. It was still painful going, and so many years had passed since my first expedition to Baldwin Hills with my cousin Mark that I had to go back and refresh my memory of the place. Aaron Johnston, one of my partners in my film company and a wonderful writer himself, came armed with a digital camera, and those were the pictures I consulted during the writing of the book.

I knew the physical place, but not the people. I don't know a single soul who ever lived in Baldwin Hills. So for those readers who do, I can tell you right now that nobody in this book is based on anybody who lives there. If you think you recognize a real person in this book, it only shows that guys who make stuff up for a living sometimes hit close to reality entirely by accident.

Then, with the book about half written, I went back to Baldwin Hills and was horrified to discover that in the process of construction of a new house just below the hairpin turn, someone had stripped all the grass and greenery from the basin surrounding the drainpipe. Instead of looking like an idyllic meadow straight out of Shepherd's Calendar, it looked like Mordor.

Disaster! Even though it wouldn't matter to most of the readers of the book, I wanted people to be able to drive up Cloverdale and see the scene that I described!

But the solution was obvious: I would have an event in the book that explained why the basin looked burned over.

The final key to the novel did not come, however, until I was floundering about in mid-book, and it dawned on me who Yo Yo and Bag Man really were. I had once designed and built the set for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I realized that if Yo Yo were Titania and Bag Man were Puck, the story would take on a whole new layer of meaning.

I went back and revised and rewrote, and now the middle of the book came together. All that remained was the realization that Word Williams, instead of forgetting the birth of Mack Street, should remember it and be Oberon's tool in the mortal world. Finally, all the elements were in place and I could finish the book.

What Roland Bernard Brown asked me for, I finally was able to deliver—thanks to his help, before, during, and after the writing of the book. In fact, it turned out to be overkill, since the characters of Ceese and Word took on so much life for me that one could argue that Magic Street is a novel with three black male heroes.

Besides driving and hiking around Baldwin Hills and Hahn Park with me, Aaron and Mark helped in other ways. It's because of the boundless hospitality of Mark and Margaret Park that I have had the chance to know and love Los Angeles as I do; that magical place where Avenue of the Stars flies over Olympic is on my regular running path when I stay with them, sometimes for weeks on end, working on projects in the city. And significant portions of this book were written on the table in the spare room they let me inhabit.

Aaron Johnston obtained for me the official maps of Baldwin Hills that I used as a resource. And he worked like a crazy man to produce Posing as People (besides writing one of the one-act plays within it), so that I could direct the plays and still have time to write on Magic Street during those hot August days in the summer of 2004.

I was helped by my normal crew of pre-readers—Kathy H. Kidd, Erin Absher, and, as always, my wife, Kristine, who also had to suffer through every idea I came up with for the story over a period of five years. Kristine also performed financial miracles, keeping everything afloat while I was six months later than I thought I'd be in completing this novel.

My assistant, Kathleen Bellamy, and my resident webwright, Scott Allen, make things run smoothly and help me in uncountable ways, though to Scott's relief I didn't write a single page of this book in the car beside him, as I had done with the novel before. Not that there was no car-writing this time—but it was Kristine doing the driving on the way to and from a speaking gig in Fredericksburg, Virginia. As she drove I wrote two chapters... and the speech.

I'm grateful for the patience and the sense of urgency provided by my editor, the saintly Betsy Mitchell, and my agent, the long-suffering Barbara Bova.

And thanks to Queen Latifah for putting Yolanda White on a motorcycle.