Chapter 3: Rumbles in the Valley

Chapter 3: Rumbles in the Valley

As I hinted at the end of Chapter 2, I started having a lot of troubles at my school. Life on the out-skirts of Los Angeles was a bit rougher than what I had been used to in quiet San Luis Obispo. The early '70s were a turbulent time in America, and LA seemed to be the focus of a lot of angst. The Manson Family trials were going on. The Watts riots were still fresh in the collective memory. There were still tensions between races. On the micro-scale of my suburban grade school, there seemed to be a lot of bullying by roving gangs of meanies, but it wasn't really along racial lines. Any easily-victimized kid was fair game, and I fit the bill nicely.

In one incident I was surrounded by a large group of mostly large kids lead, incongruously, by a really short kid. Comparisons to Napoleon were easy to make. My options were either kiss the asphalt of the playground, or take a beat down. Not being a fighter or a fan of pain, I chose to pucker up. As it was, once I had satisfied their sadistic demands and was allowed to go free, I received a swift kick in the ass as I fled (no doubt tearfully).

One day, soon after the ground-kissing incident, I was walking about near the school with Edward and another friend when we ran into the short kid, alone, without his posse. Being bigger than he, and boasting superior numbers, now it was my turn to be the bully. I ended up giving him a kind of karate chop on the upper lip, which must have hurt like crazy. He ran off – I want to recall that he did so tearfully, but that's probably too good to be true.

This “victory” emboldened me. The three of us managed to round up a couple of other kids who had been victims of Shorty and his gang, and we headed off for his street. I guess the idea was that we were going to mete out some more frontier justice while we seemingly had the upper hand. As we rounded a corner, there was Shorty coming towards us, followed by his entire gang, with perhaps a few fresh recruits. They were marching abreast, and stretched right across the entire width of the street. It was just like a scene from a Wild West movie.

They couldn't have known we were coming, so they must have been heading toward my street to even the score. As it was, my little “gang” was easily outnumbered two to one. We wisely did an about-face and beat feet back to our several homes and swore off the vigilante lifestyle.

Of course, that was not the end of tensions between myself and Shorty and his ilk. I spent every day in fear of being beaten. The principal, teachers and other administrative types tried to reassure me that if any of these ruffians dared to lay a hand on me, they would be suspended. This wasn't very reassuring. I didn't think the threat of suspension was enough of a deterrent. I'd be injured, and they'd get a vacation from school as a consequence.

So, life in southern California was shaping up to be no picnic. In addition to the daily threat of violence, occasionally the dreaded Santa Anna winds would blow, which just seemed to make people edgier. There had been nothing like this in my earlier life on the Central Coast.

Then, at 6:01 on the morning of February 9^th, 1971, mother nature decided to ramp up the misery.

Chapter 2: Unemployable in Pacoima

Chapter 2: Still unemployable

In the last chapter I mentioned that my dad was critical and overbearing. That was a bit of an understatement. I'm not trying to sound like a victim, or trying to blame all my problems on my father. I don't think that I – let alone anyone else – can understand why I've had so many issues with work, and consequently so many short-lived jobs, without exploring my relationship with my dad. That is potentially the most painful aspect to this little project, and the one which has kept me from starting this much sooner (to say nothing of finishing it). Soooo...maybe we'll talk about that a little later.

To continue with the history revue: Right at the start of the '70s, when I was about ten, my dad got a job in southern California. He was working on-site, maintaining the trucks and dirt-hauling trailers that were helping to build a new freeway. I don't know if this was a Madonna contract, or if something had happened to end my dad's employment there. I was pretty in-the-dark about my dad's work situations, as I suppose kids would be. I've never really understood so-called autobiographies or memoirs wherein the author seems to have had an adult's understanding of the events surrounding his or her child self. It makes me wonder if I was an unusually obtuse child or if those writers were embellishing a bit.

So I made a sudden transition from the small-town life of San Luis Obispo to one of the many San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles. It had the bucolic name of Lake View Terrace, but it was hard by Pacoima – a name which seemed to cause a shiver of fear in those who were familiar with the area. I remember it being kind of run-down looking, but not particularly scary. However, it had quite a reputation for crime and gang activity.

On moving day, I remember having to drive through miles and miles of what looked like endless city just to get to our new home. Our new house seemed quite fancy and modern compared to our modest home in San Luis Obispo. It had a gas fireplace in the living room, and sliding doors onto the covered patio, which had a brick barbecue. It had a detached garage which opened onto a paved alley behind the house. The back yard was fairly small compared to what I'd had in SLO. My new school was only about a block away, and was easily accessible via that amazing alleyway. The street ran fairly level, but the houses were built on a slope, which got higher as you went from the school toward our house. Our house had a fairly long concrete staircase to the street, which seemed like the height of glamour to me.

I soon replaced poor Billy M in the best friend department with a neighbor and classmate. I wish I could remember his name, so I'll just call him Edward (some memoir, eh?). It was a new kind of experience for me because Edward was black. There had not been a lot of black people in San Luis Obispo, so I didn't have much opportunity to get to know any. My parents must have done something right without my even being aware of it, because race didn't seem to be an issue in our friendship.

Edward's brother however, who was only about a year apart from Edward (whether older or younger I also can't remember), did not like me, but I'm sure it wasn't because I was white. I think he may have been jealous of my friendship with his sibling, or he may have just been a jerk.

One time when I was leaving their house, Edward's brother (whom I shall call Jerkface) said he wanted to show me something. He led me to the edge of their yard, overlooking the slope to the street. Without warning, he shoved me from behind, and I tumbled pell-mell down the hill. Fortunately, their yard – being closer to the school than mine – had a fairly low gradient. As it was I ended up with a sprained wrist, and had to wear a bandage thing with an aluminum brace inside for a couple of weeks. Jerkface never seemed to get any consequences from that. That a peer would want to willfully hurt me was kind of a new thing to me, so maybe I didn't give it enough due. I guess our parents chalked it up to boys being rowdy, but I kept my distance from Jerkface after that.

That was just the beginning of the troubles that I began having with some of the residents of my new neighborhood, particularly at school. More on that next time.

P.S.: According to Wikipedia, one of Pacoima's notable residents was Danny Trejo: 

A product of his environment?

Maybe a young Machete was one of the scary-looking individuals I sometimes saw when we passed through that community. How cool would that have been?

Chapter 1: The Pre-Work Years

Chapter 1: The Pre-Work Years

I was born at Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Sacramento, California in 1959, at or near the tail end (depending on who is doing the counting) of the great Baby Boom, that unsightly bulge in the United States population demographic. My parents actually lived at the time in Broderick, a suburb of an exclave known as West Sacramento, which was so thoroughly disowned by its parent city that it wasn't even allowed in Sacramento County. West Sac had to be satisfied with eking out an existence as an industrial wasteland in eastern Yolo County, staring wistfully across the Sacramento River at its more famous capitol city name sake.

My father was a mechanic, and in those first few years of my life, before I could form any memories, we moved about quite a bit. He mainly worked on large equipment, so he had to follow the work to various construction projects. The story goes that we even lived for a while in a boarding house somewhere near San Luis Obispo  in California's central coast area. Once my dad got a job with Madonna Construction Company in SLO (where the then-new and soon-to-be famous Madonna Inn still stands), our lives became more stable.

This water wheel urinal at the Madonna Inn used to scare the pee out of me. Pretty useful, when you think about it.

I remember seeing a picture of me sitting on a tricycle in the driveway of a house in SLO, but I have no memory of that house. To the best of my knowledge, my earliest memory must have occurred shortly after we moved into the house which I think of as my childhood home. I was playing outside when I met a neighbor boy from a few doors down named Billy M. We roamed about between his house and mine, which was something that you could do pretty safely back in the early '60s, especially in a quiet suburb of a small college town.. It must have been raining, because I remember we were both wearing coats. We found an attractive puddle (I almost said "on the ground" until I realized how painfully obvious that would be). Billy said, "Jump in that", which I immediately did. Like the ending of "Casablanca", it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, which lasted until I moved away around the age of ten.

My childhood was pretty ordinary and unremarkable. Unless theirs was terrible, it seems like most people describe their childhoods as "perfectly happy". Mine wasn't "perfectly happy" -- my dad was pretty overbearing and critical -- but it was far from bad. We were very comfortable. I was the youngest of the family, by a good 10 years. In addition to me and my parents, in the home were also my sister Buff and my brother Jack. "Buff" was a garbling of "Elizabeth", courtesy of a young Jack, who was just "Jack", not a nickname for "John". Our oldest half-brother Dick (short for "Richard", thank you very much) was already living away from home.

But this blog-book-thing is about my relationship with work, so let us not dwell in the distant past, when I wasn't expected to "get a job". We're not quite done with childhood yet, but you shall have to content yourself with this for now.