Chapter 8: Summer Jobs and Vacations

Chapter 8: Summer Jobs and Vacations
(Jobs 2, 3, 4 and 5)

Job #2: Weed Puller

Like I said in the last chapter, the egg farm job may not have strictly been my actual first job. The other contender for that title was Hobbie Automotive, but it shall now be known as job #2. It seemed that they had already been around forever when I started working there, and they've been around for the forty-odd years since then, at least until recently. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the Hobbie name had been replaced by the much more generic “O-Town Auto Center”. That is why I feel safe using their actual name.

I can't remember how I came to this job, but I took it very seriously. The nice man – probably a Mr. Hobbie – who interviewed me asked me questions which indicated that they were looking for someone who was willing to work hard, and I answered all them in the affirmative. I meant what I said, too, even though I hadn't yet had enough experience to really know what hard work was (except for dragging a shit tub). This was my first encounter with the strange phenomena of job interviews. You wouldn't be there if you didn't want the job, so even if down in your heart of hearts you're a bit a slacker, you're not going to tell the keeper of the job that.

I was mainly hired to pull weeds in the landscaping surrounding the property, and to keep the lot clean of trash. Occasionally I was asked to perform other tasks as needed. One day one of the many adults who worked there asked me to move a company pickup truck from one side of the lot to another. This put me on the horns of a dilemma. For one thing, I was only about 14, and was still a long way from having a driver's license. I guess I looked older than I was – which was a compliment, I suppose. I had been trained from infancy that when an adult tells you to do something, you do it. I figured the good people of the car lot must know what they were doing, so I nervously climbed behind the wheel of the truck. I had once “driven” our family station wagon in circles in a parking lot while seated on my dad's lap, so I knew enough to be able to turn it on and get it in gear (thankfully it had an automatic transmission).

I set out very slowly, and I probably never got above a few miles an hour, but this just seemed terrifyingly fast. Even though I was nowhere near any other objects, I panicked and slammed on the brakes with a great deal of noise, leaving some nice black marks on the concrete surface of the lot. I finally got the truck into the designated spot. The experience shook me up enough that I confessed to my employers my total lack of qualifications for that particular chore. They weren't upset, but they certainly never asked me to move any more vehicles.

One afternoon, I was doggedly pulling weeds in the summer sun when I began to realize that work can suck. I'm sure I was just sun-burnt, thirsty and hungry, but above all – hungry. It wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I was diagnosed as having hypoglycemia (chronic low blood sugar), but I'm sure I must have had the condition all my life. Had I known earlier about the importance of healthy snacks, it might have made a significant difference in a lot of areas of my early life, like school and work. It's rather sad to think of a little boy who already had Attention Deficit Disorder (oops, Hyperkinetic Impulse Disorder) compounding his behavior problems because he probably just needed to eat – or worse yet, had eaten the wrong thing – like Shake A Pudd'n [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKV7yd6RWYk]. Is anybody here old enough to remember that stuff? It was the bomb, but what a poor choice for a brown-bag lunch for school! Like the kid in the commercial says, “What a crazy way to make a snack!” No wonder I had troubles.

That fateful day on the car lot, though, I suddenly felt like I couldn't take it anymore. I went into Mr. Hobbie's office with my head hung low. I told him that I knew they wanted somebody who could work hard, but that I guessed I just wasn't that person. I felt genuinely ashamed for betraying the faith they had shown in me. Mr. Hobbie seemed to take it well enough. He probably found my earnestness amusing. We parted amicably, and I slouched my slimy self home. So much for job number 2.

Job #3: Moving a Bookcase

Job number 3 was a temporary gig at a local law office. It was one of the more prestigious law firms in O-Town, located in a beautiful, tall Victorian house in the historic downtown residential neighborhood. It was right across the street from future job number 20, the Congregational Church. It was one of those heritage law firms with the same family name repeated on the sign, like “Kardashian, Kardashian, Sputter, Booboo and Moore” (names changed to protect the lawyers).

My mother was in the local art league with Mrs. Kardashian, the matriach of the family business. They needed someone to disassemble a metal book shelf on the second floor and move it into the attic – which was more like the third story of the old building – and reassemble it. My mom suggested me for the job.

The day I performed this chore was the hottest day of the year, which in the Sacramento Valley is nothing to laugh at. I don't know how accurate the LED time and temperature sign outside the bank on the main drag was, but the entire town seemed to take it as meteorological gospel. That day it was reading 114 degrees. The business portion of the law firm had air-conditioning, but that didn't extend to the attic. It was probably in the upper 120s in that airless space.

I managed to finish the job, but my clothing was absolutely soaked with sweat. I also somehow hurt my finger, and went in search of a bandage. One of the lawyers asked a co-worker if they had any band-aids on the premises, because – as he said – “our boy” had hurt himself. I felt quite honored that he had called me their boy. It made me feel like I belonged, even though it was only a one-day job. So, I'd call job number three a success. If I had been asked to spend another day in that oven of an attic, though, I probably would have balked.

That summer of 1975 was fun because I got to go on a prolonged trip to Alaska with my brother Dick and his friend Al. I won't go into detail, because they are not germane to this memoir. In short, we drove up in Al's VW van, which he had rigged up with a bed in the back. We were up there for a few weeks. I saw a lot of great sights and had some interesting adventures, including being charged by a ferocious marmot. Additionally,  I was out of the California heat for the remainder of the summer.

"I'll get you next time, Rimpy!"

A day or two before we were to depart for Alaska, my mom and I drove down to Sacramento. We stayed in the trailer at my dad's then-current job at a trucking yard in West Sacramento (the place of my first residence as an infant) until it was time for me to leave. On the morning of August 1, the day our journey was to begin, I was walking Bonnie, the family dog, around the truck yard. I noticed that Bonnie was acting strangely. She was whimpering and hunching her shoulders and pawing at the ground.

A few moments later my dad came out of the mechanics' shop and said, “Did you feel that?” I asked him “Feel what?”, and he said, “We just had an earthquake!” I couldn't believe it. I hadn't felt a thing, even though I was standing outside, on the very earth that was allegedly quaking.

My mom had been inside the trailer at the moment, and she had felt it shaking. She thought that perhaps I was jumping on the towing tongue of the trailer, and she yelled at me to stop. When the shaking didn't immediately cease, she looked outside and was mystified to find no naughty boy to blame.

It turns out that a 5.7 magnitude quake had occurred in none other than O-Town! There had never been an earthquake there before in recorded history, and I was out of town the day it happened! Here we had left southern California because of earthquakes, and now they were happening in the seemingly safe foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In the months following the quake, I wondered if the relatively new O-Town Dam (1968) and – more importantly – the weight of the water it impounded could have triggered the quake. Resevoir Induced Seismicity is now a more well-known phenomenon, but relatively unheard of in 1975. I felt pretty smart for thinking of it as a teen.

Damage was later estimated to be around 2.5 million dollars. There were no fatalities. I don't think there were even any injuries. The quake was the death blow for my old alma mater, Bird Street School. It didn't collapse, but its already unstable portions were damaged enough that it had to be torn down and replaced by a boring modern one-story building. The old Catholic church across the street from the school had damage to its bell-tower. They didn't remove it, or rebuild it, but instead shortened it. It was never as impressive-looking after that.

On the day of the quake, through phone conversations with friends and neighbors, we were able to determine that our house had received no outwardly visible damage. There was another large temblor in the early afternoon. I did feel that one way down in Sacramento, so I didn't feel too ripped off. Being Friday, it was time for my dad to go up to O-Town. My parents departed to see how the homestead was faring, and my Alaskan adventure began unimpeded.

Job #4: Moving Stuff

Returning to the subject of jobs, number 4 is so vague in my memory that I've had a hard time placing it with great certainty in this chronology. It was at the old Montgomery Ward store in O-Town. I don't recall exactly how I got the job. I do recall applying at MW. It was one of the first times I had to fill out a typical job application form. I was embarrassed because I had nothing to put in the “work history” section. I didn't want to leave it blank, but the one or two things I had done didn't seem sufficient. I spoke of this with Charlie, who later went on to great success as a business man. At the time, though, he confessed to the same problem, which I found comforting.

The MW store was a great relic of a bygone era. It seemed almost too nice for little O-Town. It had a full-service diner inside. Actually, the Woolworth's store across the street had one of those as well. It was a glorious time for retail. The MW store had really nice restrooms, as well. Later, during jobs 55 and 57 (I'll explain later), when I was a para-transit driver, that restroom became my favorite to use during the course of my work day. I could park right outside the door closest to them. They were clean, climate-controlled and (sadly, because the chain was in decline by then) almost always devoid of other humans.

In my teens, I somehow landed a temporary job helping to move some stuff around at the MW store. I had never been “behind the scenes” there before, and I was amazed to find out that not only was there a vast second story storage area, there was (obviously) a freight elevator to transport items up and down. Interesting what you never suspect.

Job #5: Substitute Paperboy

Finally, there is another job that I had originally considered for this list. I initially rejected it, because, for one thing, I couldn't remember actually receiving any monetary compensation for it. Charlie assures me I did, however, and I believe him. Pay or not, it was really more in the nature of a favor for a friend. At prompting from Goodtime Charlie, I've decided to include it now, but I am reluctant to number it, for reasons I just cited. Besides, I like that nice round 80 number. 81 jobs just doesn't have the same ring to it. Let's just call it Job Number 4.5 and leave it at that.

Charlie and his younger brother and sister shared a paper route in their neighborhood. It wasn't a very large route, and they did it on foot rather than on bikes. When their family went on vacations, I would fill in for them. Seems like every kid since time immemorial has had a paper route. Although I never had one of my own, I can proudly claim membership in that honorable club, at least as a substitute.

It was an easy enough job. It had some perks, too. A pretty young woman would deliver the papers to Charlie's house. One time when she was leaning into the trunk to fish out my allotment of papers, I could see down her shirt. This being the '70s, she wasn't wearing a bra, and I got a full view of her breasts. This makes quite an impression on a teenage boy.

The job also had its annoyances, and even dangers. This was mostly in the form of people's dogs. I took a clue from the mail carriers and got a can of Halt! dog repellent, which I carried on my belt. There was one vicious little poodle, whose elderly lady owner never seemed to want to constrain him in any way when it was time for the paper to be delivered. I ended up having to spray that little bastard, in front of the old lady. I warned her I was going to do it, but she didn't do take any action, so I let him have it. And it didn't seem to bother him much! His vile, curly hair was growing down over his eyes, and most of the spray got hung up in that.

Or maybe it's just something about poodles. What's with that breed, anyway? They don't seem to respond to things the way other dogs do. A tactic my dad had taught me when I was younger, when menaced by a dog, was to act like you were picking up a rock, even if there was no rock available. Almost every dog I had ever used that on had responded by turning and running away. The only one that didn't was a fucking poodle! Are they too dumb for self-preservation? No less luminaries than Dennis Haysbert in an All State commercial and the internet claim that poodles are one of the smartest breeds. Maybe they're smart enough to know that unless they actually see you pick up a rock, your threat is an empty one. Hmm.

The main reason, however, that I decided to include this sort-of-job is the significant role which that can of Halt! would play a couple of years later in my life, but you'll just have to wait to hear about that.

I feel sorry for anyone who just goes to work immediately after graduation. I think you need one last chance to be a lazy kid before taking on the adult world. My last summer vacation, the one after graduating high school, but before entering the grown-up work force, was a blast.

My high school had been participating for a number of years in a cultural exchange program. Well, exchange isn't quite the right word in our case – it had always been one-sided. For one month every school year, a group of Japanese students would stay with host families. In my senior year, we hosted a young man named Takuya.

That year it was announced that for the first time a group of us Americans were going to travel to our sister school in Japan. I was surprised when my parents said they were going to pay for me to go, as a sort of graduation present. Spoiled, First World, middle-class brat that I was, I was also a tad disappointed. You see, my siblings had each received a car from my parents upon graduation. While I realized that a trip to Japan was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I couldn't very well drive it around when it was over.

My far east adventures could fill a separate book. I'll just touch upon the basics here. We and groups from other high schools flew into Tokyo, and spent the first week touring that city, as well as Kyoto and other locales. We spent a night in a Buddhist monastery, where we ate terrible food and some of us got hit upon the shoulders with bamboo sticks during meditation practice. You know, to loosen us up.

At the end of the first week, the different groups separated to travel to the cities of their respective host schools. I stayed with Takuya's family in a small town outside Nagoya. Japanese schools don't have a summer vacation, like we do, so most of our days were spent at the school. All in all, it was a rewarding experience, despite the culture shock I sometimes suffered. The extremely high humidity played absolute hell with my already acne-prone skin. Despite my hideous appearance, I fell in love with a Japanese girl. Good times.

On our last night in Japan, we were back in Tokyo prior to catching the plane home. Because I had repeated kindergarten, I was the only 18-year-old in the group, and could legally buy alcohol in Japan. Not that I needed to be legal. There was actually a beer vending machine on one of the floors of the hotel and no one watching. We had been ordered not to drink on pain of being sent home. I figured that on the last night it couldn't make much difference if I did get caught. Long story short, I got terrifically drunk and much mayhem ensued. Something involving lit firecrackers being thrown from a fifth-floor window. My buddy Edmund had managed to get drunk somewhere else, and the next morning he threw up french fries and grape skins all over the floor of our room.

Despite that international incident, and all the other American hi-jinks that had gone on during that trip, the Japanese school still agreed to host another group the following year. Apparently that group was even worse than we had been, because after that they went back to it being a one-way exchange program.

And that is how I spent my last summer vacation. I flew home with a hang-over and the pressure of what to do with the rest of my life. But I had already formulated a plan. Of sorts.

The end.

Chapter 7: Chicken Abuse is Job One

Chapter 7: Chicken Abuse is Job One

Okay. So. Can we somehow get through childhood and into the real meat of this memoir – those 80 jobs? Let's see.

As I moved toward young adulthood, and advanced through the school years, I began hearing more and more lectures from my dad about work. His main thrust was that I should find something and stick with it. I think I heard this so often that it had the opposite effect from what my dad intended. Psychologists would probably call this a reaction formation. It certainly seems to fit the description.

One of my dad's favorite expressions was about certain people who “expected the world to owe them a living.” I'm not sure who these people were he had in mind. His politics seemed pretty liberal, or at least I'm sure he voted Democratic (probably because they supported unions). I can't recall hearing him rant about welfare recipients or other favorite punching bags of conservatives.

Probably his biggest fear was that I would grow up to be one these dreadful people who expected the world to owe them a living. I remember thinking that it would be pretty neat if the world could somehow provide me with a living without any effort on my part. If I had ever dared to voice this thought, I probably would have immediately experienced defenestration at my father's hands.

I'm sure my dad meant well, but his frequent, repetitious lectures about the importance of finding something and “sticking to it” became the bane of my existence. Perhaps he was afraid that my attention deficit would be a handicap for me in the working world, and he may have been right about that.

My dad had an unfortunate habit of tacking a year onto my age when he would be delivering one of his innumerable lectures. I hated it when he did that. I didn't want to think that my own father didn't know my true age. That could be, and being a parent myself for some time now, I can see how it could happen after four kids. In reality, however, he may have just been rounding up in an attempt to impress upon me the passage of years and the increasing importance of accepting the responsibilities to come.

Those diatribes of my dad's may have contributed to my being afraid of the new and unknown. With each milestone passed – grade school to junior high, junior high to senior, high school to “real life” - instead of feeling proud of having accomplished something, my predominant feeling was one of dread for the next phase of existence. I was always certain that I wouldn't be able to handle all the new and increasing responsibilities.

Starting back in about the sixth grade, when someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer, “An author”. I loved to read, and I liked to write, and I showed a talent for it, although those of you reading this are probably thinking I was way off beam. I also used to think I wanted to be a movie director, but that would have involved living in Hollywood. No thank you.

Unfortunately, my dad noticed my talent for writing, and he focused on it as a possible career choice for me. It's a natural desire of parents to hope that their children do better than they, or at least without as much struggle. My dad, in his overbearing manner, basically co-opted my interest in writing. He was always telling me to send my work off to publishers. It's not that he was wrong – after all, that's how a writer gets published. It's just that by now I had grown inwardly rebellious against any of my dad's wishes. You can probably see how this might have contributed to my apparent inability to stay very long with any one job.

High school was chock-full of people whose job it was to be concerned about my future. I'm sure I had to take at least one type of vocational aptitude assessment, but I don't remember what the results were. All I know is that as the day of graduation approached, I experienced more and more anxiety about what I was supposed to do.

Some of my classmates planned on going right away to college. I hated school, and couldn't imagine subjecting myself to more of it. Some people planned on going into the military after high school. That option also seemed reprehensible. I had been yelled at enough already by my dad. I didn't need any more of that noise.

This only left the option of work. But what was I going to do? Some kids already seemed to know what they were going to be doing. I hadn't had much work experience up to that point (except for a couple of summer jobs, which we'll examine soon enough). I hadn't seen anything that looked appealing. I was never much of one for hard physical labor, and I didn't have any skills in more gentle trades, whatever those might be.

Wow. I guess that brings us to the first of the many, many, many jobs I've had. Over the course of a few summer vacations, I had a few different jobs. I have debated long and hard with myself as to which of these first few jobs was actually number one. The two major contenders were the egg ranch and the auto dealership. My gut tells me that the car lot was the actual first one, but my brain tells me that the egg ranch was perhaps the first, because that was the first time I recall being asked for my social security number. It could be that the auto dealership was strictly “under the table”, which would make the egg ranch more of an “official” first job. So, without further ado, I present:

Job #1: Chicken Abuser

Actually, the egg ranch may not have been during summer vacation. Periodically they had to hire some extra hands to help exchange the current chickens – which were all tuckered out from cranking out ova for our delectation – for fresh hens. This chicken exchange only constituted one night's work, and since it was done on an ongoing basis, it's very likely that I did my one stint there during the school year.

The extra hands were usually a bunch of high school kids who wanted to pick up a few bucks. I forget how I got involved. I think my best friend, Good Time Charlie, had worked there before, so I probably came to it through him.

We all congregated in the evening at the chicken ranch, which was located in the foothills above O-Town. We were herded into some sort of office, where we told a man our pertinent information. Most of the kids had been there before, so their information was already on file. When it came to me, the man asked me what my social security number was. I told him I didn't know. The man seemed disgusted, and the other kids laughed. I was embarrassed, but it was the first time in my life anyone had asked me for it. It didn't occur to me to ask them to dial my home, so I could ask my mom. I found out later that she had kept my social security card for years in a fire-proof box. After that incident, I became the bearer of my own card.

As it was, the man just told me to make one up. At his prompting, I rattled off nine random numerals. I'm not sure why they even needed our social security numbers if they were going to treat it so cavalierly. Welcome to the weird world of work.

The job was simple enough, but it required a certain callous disregard for the well-being of lesser animals. It was the kind of job that has probably created more than a few vegans and PETA members. There were long rows of cages in a large shed with open sides. The floors were cement, and troughs were built under the cages to catch the chicken excrement and other detritus. We would open a cage, grab the resident chicken by the legs, and essentially yank her out. We collected four chickens at a time, two in each hand. We would then carry them upside down to one end of the shed, where a semi-truck with small compartments built into the sides of the trailer waited. A scary-looking guy in overalls would take the hens from us while insulting our slowness, and then he'd slam them with one smooth overhand pitch into a compartment and bang the door shut.

The owners of the ranch didn't care about the health and welfare of these old layers, which were probably headed to a slaughterhouse and a future as dog food or something worse. A few hens would sometimes start to flap about crazily while we were carrying them. We were allowed to slam our two handfuls of birds together to quiet such outbursts. Every so often, a hen would get loose and begin running about, usually in the troughs under the cages. Then the scary guy would charge over with a net and snag the poor creature out of there.

When all the old birds had been loaded aboard the truck, another truck pulled in with the fresh hens. Now we could no longer abuse them. Instead, the new hens had to be treated with great care. We would take them one at a time out of the truck, carry them gently to their new home and gingerly put them through the small door. This portion of the job took most of our time there.

Eventually all the hens were in their places, and that was that for my first real job. They probably paid us at the end of the night, but I don't really remember. It's funny to think that maybe I had accidentally given them somebody's real social security number, and that person was mystified to receive a check for a few dollars from some egg farm in northern California. I only worked there that one time. I think it was a bit too brutal for me, or maybe they didn't want the weird kid who didn't know his social security number back.

Well, how about that? We actually got to the first job! In the next chapter, we'll probably discuss summer jobs 2 and 3, as well as what I did on my post-high school summer “vacation” (in the mysterious Orient!), which provided a bit of distraction and delay from having to figure out what I was going to be when (and if) I grew up.

The end.

Chapter 6: Turdlock

Chapter 6: Turdlock

I think I was in the fifth grade when we moved to O-Town. We moved midway through the school year, so I finished that grade at Eastside Elementary School, in a quaint little old building that was probably built by the WPA during the Great Depression. It was “kitty-corner” from the high school I would later attend. Our new house was only a few blocks away, which was mighty convenient.

There is a funny aside about that house. Even though our family consisted of just me and my parents by this time, my mom wanted a three bedroom house. She had really enjoyed having an extra room in LA for her many arts and crafts projects, and wished to continue to have that. My dad went up to O-Town first for work and house searching. He found what he said was a suitable home. It was a funny little cinder block affair on a corner lot, with a small backyard and a couple of grapefruit trees in a side yard. It had a detached garaged and a covered patio, not unlike our short-lived home in LA. When my mom and I arrived, my dad was showing us around our new home. My mom asked, “Where's the third bedroom?” My dad expressed surprise, saying that he could have sworn there was a third bedroom. I thought it was funny at the time that he could make such a silly mistake, but years later I figured out that he must have just decided we only needed two bedrooms, and had told my mom a bald-faced lie, which she had no choice but to accept.

Another weird thing about that house, beside the missing bedroom, was the deceased lady in the garage. The old couple my dad had bought the house from hadn't yet finished moving all their stuff, which was stored in the garage. One day we were snooping around their stuff. My dad found a small parcel which had a label stating that it was the final remains of a woman who shared the last name of the former owners. Of course, it was her ashes, but my dad just had to say, “There's a dead woman in this box.” I was horrified. It was a very long time before I summoned up the courage to enter that garage alone, even after the former owners had carted off their relative.

I started sixth grade at Bird Street school. I was about to guess as to that building's age, but luckily I remembered there is this thing called the internet. Now I know that it was built in 1912, and it looked it. It was an imposingly grim two-story monstrosity. My classroom was on the second floor. There were sections of that floor that were off-limits to students, apparently because they weren't exactly structurally sound anymore.

There was nothing too remarkable about any of my grade school years. School and I were never a good fit. I was smart, but I was hyperactive. In fact, as far back as my early years at San Luis Obispo, I had been diagnosed with what was then called “hyperkinetic impulse disorder” (thanks again, Internet buddy). The doctors or psychologists or whatever they were wanted me to take Ritalin. My father, however, adamantly refused. I don't know if his decision was well thought-out or just his usual knee-jerk opposition to drugs of any kind. In retrospect, whatever his intentions were, I think he did me a favor.

In San Luis Obispo, I used to get out of class periodically to attend special classes with other spazzes...er, “hyperkinetic” kids (all boys, of course). I can't recall what exactly went on during those sessions, but I think they were trying to teach us concentration skills or something to help us cope and learn. Those teachers must have had the patience of saints, because the proceedings often devolved into an orgy of giggling and screaming little nerds.

I also had a series of tasks I had to practice at home with my mom. One I recall involved her rolling a tennis ball across the table. My task was to follow the ball with my eyes. My eyeballs, of course, wanted to jump ahead to the far edge of the table in anticipation of the ball's inevitable fall. I really couldn't see the sense of watching it roll boringly along. I wanted a good seat for the real action. I tried to be good and do as I was told, but it wasn't easy. I really can't say whether that or any of the other forgotten exercises I performed helped me, but I hope so, at least for the sake of the memory of those anonymous, well-meaning childhood education specialists.

Despite the efforts of those forgotten heroes, in sixth grade I was still a spaz, a class clown and a frequent disrupter of other children's education. I spent a lot of time sitting in the vast and gloomy hallway outside my classroom, ostensibly to think about my behavior. In reality, I was enjoying a refreshing break from the drudgery of compulsory education. I suspect my teacher was also enjoying a break from me. A win-win, in my book.

As the school year wound towards summer vacation, all of us sixth graders looked ahead to...(cue dramatic stinger)...junior high school with fear and loathing. This is probably common for most school children, but we had heard stories from our peers (who, of course, had older siblings who knew a kid who...you know how it goes) about the torments and savage beatings awaiting us at the hands of cruel, gigantic eighth graders.

I tried to put these thoughts out of my mind as I contemplated my upcoming school holiday. This year was going to be different from my usual carefree summers. Well, it turned out to still be fairly carefree, but I was going to be spending most of it in Turlock, California.

My dad was working on a freeway project down there. He was staying in a large travel trailer he had bought for that purpose (we never went traveling in it, since we already had the good old motor home) on the job site. I guess it was appropriate that my mom and I should come down there for the summer, rather than my dad having to drive home every weekend, as he usually did during the school year. I rather suspect, though, that my dad didn't fancy the idea of the two of us lounging about in air-conditioned comfort while he slaved away to support us. In fact, I know so, because years later my dad actually said to me words very similar to those about my mom when he and I were alone.

So it had been decided that we would journey down to Turlock the very first day of summer vacation. I guess my dad couldn't wait to start the torture. I had already accepted my summer fate, but there was a new development in my life which suddenly made it seem truly tortuous: I had started to notice girls in a big way. Liking certain members of the opposite sex was nothing new to me. Back in first or second grade, I was quite smitten with a dark-haired cutey named Jane. One day, I was told to pass out papers to my classmates. As I came alongside Jane's desk, I guess my impulse disorder got the better of me, for I suddenly bent down and planted a big smacker on the top of her adorable little head. Needless to say, there was a huge uproar in the class. It took me a long time to live that one down.

In sixth grade, however, girls suddenly took on a greater significance. I had a terrible crush on one particular brunette (what is up with that?) classmate named Jeanette (maybe it's the “J” names -guess what Mrs. Rimpington's first name starts with). On the last day of school, Jeanette and her plump cousin came up to me and asked me if I wanted to play tennis with them the next day. I had never played tennis in my life, but here was my crush wanting to spend time with me. I was overjoyed. I readily agreed, then suddenly remembered that on the morrow I would be wending my way to Turlock. I sadly informed them of this, and silently cursed my father. That was a classic example of a “what if” moment that life sometimes hands you.

It was certainly different spending my summer vacation on a dirt lot next to a future freeway, surrounded by trucks and hopper trailers. The trailer was roomy and cool, and our family camper, which was parked next to it, was my bedroom. This was good, because it gave me lots of privacy at night to practice a new hobby I had picked up, one that dove-tailed nicely with my increased interest in females.

We had a tarp stretched between the two recreational vehicles to form a sort of covered patio area. There was no television, and at first I missed it, but I quickly adapted to its absence. I had always enjoyed reading, and my mom and I made regular trips to the local library for new material.

I created a way to earn money by going around the construction site, collecting discarded aluminum cans. I would redeem them for cash, which enabled me to religiously purchase the latest copy of Mad Magazine (and it's weaker competitor  - Cracked - for good measure) as soon as it hit the stands. Back then I thought I would like to be a cartoonist, and I spent a lot of time working on my own shamelessly ripped-off versions of Mad's movie parodies. I also tried to build a balsa wood model airplane, but that never got much further than the wings.

Most days, when my dad got off work, we would drive a short distance to one of the many cement-lined irrigation ditches in the area for a swim. On weekends my mom would go, too. I also got to go to a real pool in town frequently.

All in all, it wasn't a bad existence. My sister Buff and her husband Roy, and his two sons, Doug and Corey – who were about my age - came down one time to visit us. The two boys couldn't comprehend how I could possibly survive without television. By then, I had stopped even thinking about it, and I found their shock and awe both amusing and flattering.

My mom and I made occasional trips up to O-Town to check on the house and what not. At the beginning of summer, some pumpkin vines were just beginning to sprout in the backyard. I don't remember if we had planted them, or if they were volunteers. I guess the next door neighbors were keeping the yard watered. On each infrequent trip home, we would find that the vines had taken over more of the backyard, and then finally the whole patio. By the end of the summer, we had quite an impressive crop of jolly orange orbs.

But getting back to life on the truck lot. As I said, I was able to keep myself fairly well entertained. The only really bad part of my life there was the people poop I had to deal with. Being a truck yard, it was of course lacking in some of the usual amenities one might find at a place where people park travel trailers. We of course had electricity, and fresh water coming into the trailer, but no place for our waste water to go, except into the holding tank for such filth, and from there into a galvanized wash tub (the kind that cute kids wash a large family dog in) under the trailer.

Using a back hoe, my dad had dug a burn pit for the truck yard's and our trash. It was one of my chores to periodically pull a handle under the trailer's bathroom, which emptied the holding tank into the tub. I then had to drug the foul-smelling tub several yards to the edge of the pit and dump it in. The liquid would soak into the ground, and I guess the solids would kind of dry out until the weekly burning. Yeah, I know  - gross. If anyone involved in the trucking company knew what we were doing, they must not have cared. It's just a good thing no local health official caught on.

The worst part of the shit tub (after the smell of my and my parent's fermented shit and piss) was its weight. I don't know how many gallons it held, but it was fucking heavy. It smelled so bad that I couldn't get close enough to it to grab it by one of its little handles. Besides, it was usually so full that some shit-water always slopped over the sides, precluding direct contact. I had some kind of length of iron with a flat piece of metal welded onto the end that I could hook over the edge of the tub to drag it. I think my dad made that up specially to aid me with my chore. Why he couldn't have just purchased a length of RV septic hose that would have reached the burn pit, or made some sort of wheeled conveyence for the  cart, I didn't wonder until years later. I think it was all just part of some lesson he was trying to teach me, or else he was just getting a sadistic kick out of watching me struggle with a shit bucket that probably weighed more than I did.

There was a one-time incident in Turlock which also made me wonder if my parents always had my best interests at heart. My dad was trying to set up a canopy over his work area for shade, similar to our tarp patio over our miniature hillbilly trailer park. He had managed to get a parachute from somewhere, and he had welded together several tall poles out of pipes attached to truck tire rims. He was planning to suspend the tarp between the poles and anchor it to the ground with ropes and stakes, kind of like a circus tent. He was working on this project after hours, so he only had my mom and I for help. Helping my dad with any kind of project was never pleasant, because it usually involved getting yelled at.

My mom and I were tasked with pulling back on the ropes to keep tension on the structure, while my dad did the same on his side, whilst also trying to manage all the other intricacies of the project. This was definitely something he should have been doing with other big, strong men who understood how things work, and not with a nervous middle-aged woman and boy.

One of the poles started to fall right at me. In the interest of self-preservation, I let go of my rope and jumped out of the way. Of course, this caused the pole I was supporting to topple. My dad was furious, and demanded to know why I had abandoned my post (heh heh). I tried to explain, but he wouldn't have it. My mom whispered to me, “Oh, it wouldn't have hurt that much.”

I was flabbergasted. I thought my mom always had my back. However, she had recently begun talking to me about how she was afraid that I was fast approaching an age - like my brothers before me had done - when I would start fighting with my dad. She told me of the terrible rows my dad and brothers had gotten into, and how she didn't think she could stand to live through another period like that. I didn't want to upset my mother, so I think I made a partly-conscious decision right then and there to be passive with my dad. Being passive was already in my nature, but my mom's distress made it seem of vital importance.

The day of the tent pole incident, I wasn't yet old enough to consider fighting with my dad over such a ridiculous point, although I suppose it would have been better for me had I stood up for myself a little more. After that evening, though, I realized that my mom actually seemed willing to disregard my welfare in exchange for some sort of peace in her relationship with her husband.

I think this was one of the first times I realized that my parents were just humans, and pretty flawed ones at that. I haven't had any jobs that were quite as nasty as dragging that shit bucket (with the possible exception of job # 76 – Osmosis), but it gave me an unpleasant foretaste of what life in the workaday world might be like.

The End

Chapter 5: Go North, Young Man

Chapter 5: Go North, Young Man

There were a few other crappy things that happened during our stay in the San Fernando Valley, as if the earth trying to kill us weren't enough. I don't want to spend too long on this autobiographical stuff. This book is supposed to be about jobs, right? Lots of jobs. Yes, but I don't think I can give you a good idea of why I've had so many jobs without giving you some idea of who I am. We're coming up to the final phase of my childhood. As I transitioned to a being young adult, the sort of things I learned from my parents – especially from my father – had a profound effect upon my attitudes toward work. Like R. Duke and the ether, we'll get into that rotten stuff soon enough. But first, let's try to finish up with the SoCal sojourn.

I've already mentioned the troubles I was having trying to adjust to a school in a large metropolitan area. One of the other significant bad things that happened down there was that my mother and I were involved in a pretty bad auto accident. Some old man with hearing aids in both ears just blew through a red light and t-boned us on my mom's side of the car. I was okay, but my mom was rather badly injured. I rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital. The hospital wasn't far from our house, and we went right up our street. I remember seeing Edward and his mom out in their front yard, looking curiously as we went by. I waved, but they couldn't see who was inside the vehicle.

My mom's injuries required surgery. I feel bad for not being able to remember this stuff better, but I was still just a kid. She came home after a bit, but her health rapidly declined. She had to go back into the hospital. It was discovered that some kind of surgical tool had been left inside her. Needless to say, she had to have another surgery to remove it.

All in all, she was out of commission for quite a while. My sister came down from Sacramento to help us out. It was nice to have her around, but it was rather a sad time.

Another unfortunate event that comes to mind was at one point I had some kind of flu that kept me out of school for a few days. One day, my parents needed to run out to the store. I was too sick to go with them, but I was old enough to stay home alone for a little while, especially since I was just going to be lying in bed. Right after they went out the front door to the car, which was parked down on the street (rather than in the garage on the alley), I thought of something I wanted to tell them. I threw back my covers and attempted to jump to dash to the door, but I found my legs would not work, and I fell to the floor.

Maybe it was some kind of symptom of this particular flu virus that caused partial paralysis, or maybe I was just weak. Either way, it was quite terrifying to me to not be able to walk. Whatever I had wanted to tell my parents was supplanted by the desire to report this alarming development. I dragged myself to the front door, and got it open just in time to see the car pull away. That was a very desperate sensation. All I could do was crawl back to my bed and await their return, wondering if I was ever going to be able to walk again.

Of course, I did walk again, but the weakness in my legs lingered for a few days. I found it easier to locomote about the house on my hands and knees. My dad apparently found this offensive, because one day he ordered me to stop crawling around like a baby. I managed to claw my way up the wall to a standing position, and then I made my way back to my room, hugging the walls like a drunken man. Thanks, dad.

As I said before, the earthquake was the deciding factor in my parent's decision to move. Before I was born, my family had lived in a little Sacramento Valley town called O-town. My maternal grandparents had lived in the nearby mountain retirement town of Mountain Town (not their real names) until my grandfather, of whom I have very few memories, passed away. When my grandmother became too old to live by herself, she lived with us for awhile at our home in San Luis Obispo. My sister had moved out by this time, so grandma Fay was in Buff's former room.

Eventually she was placed in a convalescent home in nearby Arroyo Grande. She remained there even after we moved south. I think the official story was that her needs had become more than my mom could handle, but I think the real reason was that my dad resented having her around the house.

I think Fay passed away while we were living in southern Californa, so chalk up another mark on that area's scoreboard of shittiness.

My parents remembered O-Town as being a nice little community, just the right kind of place for a boy who was used to smaller towns. So eventually I bid goodbye to yet another best friend, and we headed for northern California.

All those negative experiences I had in SoCal have given me a life-long detestation of that area, something maybe it doesn't deserve. Before we lived there, we often traveled there on family vacations. My paternal grandparents lived there, as well as many of my dad's siblings. It was also the home of such fun destinations as Disney Land and Universal Studios. I remember fondly getting to ride the original Angels Flight before it was demolished.

On one of those trips, my parents and I were admiring a fountain in the hilly area of downtown Los Angeles near the aforementioned Angels Flight. A man standing on another street above shouted to get the attention of anyone near the fountain. He and another man had a large camera-like apparatus on a tripod. He explained that the picture they were going to take involved some kind of special process, and he needed everyone within the camera's view to stand perfectly still until he gave the all clear.

We did as we were told, and when they were done, he thanked us and said, “You're going to be on a postcard!” I found this quite exciting. Amazingly, we later came across that postcard. The image of the fountain was the lenticular kind that looks like the image is moving when you move the card about. That's why the people had to hold still while the fountain got to spray to its heart content. The people in the image look like little blobs, but off to one side, you can see two adult-sized blobs and one child-sized blob. We knew that those blobs were us. I wonder if that card is still out there somewhere.

I've been back to the Los Angeles area several times since them, but only one of them was willingly. Other than a visit to a Beverly Hills friend I met at summer camp a few years later, most of my trips to that blighted region were for work reasons. I still shudder when I see images of the area. I guess the best thing I can say about Southern California is that it was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there (again).

Pretty soon, we were in O-Town. It was still small, but as I soon find out, it no longer seemed to be the “nice little town” my parents remembered. I was surprised one day shortly after we got there when we went to the famous old Chinese Temple, built and used by the laborers who had toiled on the railroads and in the mining industry of the Gold Rush era.

Upon seeing the quaint little temple, I remembered that we had previously visited O-Town on one of our vacations in our camper. I recalled that O-Town had seemed like a perpetually rainy place ( a lot of our vacations were during winter, when work in the construction industry was slow), but the temple had stuck in my mind. It made me feel a little more at home in our new town knowing that I had a brief, prior history with it.

So now we're in O-Town, the scene of the final phase of my childhood and the start of my so-called grown-up years. However, that's a tale best left for another chapter.

The End.

Chapter 4: Shake, Rattle and Roll

Chapter 4: Shake, Rattle and Roll 

Because I couldn't remember what day of the week it had been, I had to consult Google to determine that February 9, 1971 was a Tuesday. At 6:00 A.M. I was probably an hour away from having to get up to get ready for school. My mother was still in bed, as well, while my father was eating breakfast in preparation for going to work on the construction of a section of Interstate 5, where it climbed the southern slopes of the Tehachapi mountains.

My bed was the bottom section of a sturdy old oak “bunk” bed, which seemed to have been around forever. It was certainly the only bed I could remember having up to that point (and indeed for the rest of my childhood). At our old house in San Luis Obispo it was a double-decker because I shared a room with my brother Jack. When Jack was off fighting in Vietnam, we still kept both halves together, even though they could be separated. It was great fun to have such a bed all to myself. Then my parents revealed a trick the bed could do. By some sort of mysterious manipulation, the top half could be lowered so that it covered the lower half, which – being on casters – could then be rolled out from under the top part. That seemed like the most awesome thing in the world to me. With the bottom bunk pulled out, I could lounge about on the top part, and then just roll off the edge onto a second bed inches below. Luxury!

By the time we moved to Lake View Terrace (funny that my first two towns both had three-part names), Jack was back from Vietnam and living on his own. I started out in a room all my own, so there was no need for the upper half of the bed, which I suppose got stored away in the rafters of the capacious garage.

But getting back to that fateful morning. My slumber was destroyed by a dreadful noise and violent shaking. I sat bolt upright. My bed was dancing and sliding across the tile floor on its little metal casters. The far wall was taken up by a large closet with double sliding doors. I watched in stupefaction as the doors slid open, seemingly in welcome to my gamboling bed, which wasted no time in inserting itself as far as it could into the closet.

I had no prior knowledge of what an earthquake could feel like. Perhaps from repeated viewings of “The Wizard of Oz”, my first thought was that we must be experiencing a tornado. Indeed, my dad later said that I was yelling that word repeatedly. According to Wikipedia, the quake lasted only about 12 seconds, and that sounds about right in retrospect. Just enough time for a boy to ride his bed across his room and into a closet. At the time, though, it seemed to last forever. I scrambled out of my runaway bed and ran to my bedroom door. I was met there by my dad, and we went down the hall to check on my mom.

My parents were originally from southern California, and had both been through this sort of thing before. However, my mom's previous experience with the famous Long Beach earthquake of 1933 apparently didn't harden her to them. She seemed at least as freaked out as I was. I was lying on the bed with her, looking for some comfort. I remember her saying, “Oh, boy. I'll bet there are a lot of deadies after that one.” This thought struck terror in my heart. I was afraid to look outside for fear of seeing corpses lying about in the streets. As it was, 65 people died in that morning's quake, about half of 1933's total.

Our house hadn't received much damage. Most was in the form of things thrown off of shelves and out of cupboards. My dad told us that he had been sitting at the dining room table when the lamp over it began swinging back and forth, which he thought was odd. Even odder was when a special dish cupboard in the dining room, which contained my mom's best china, suddenly opened its doors and disgorged its contents onto the floor, smashing them all to atoms. Upon hearing this, my mom shouted, “Why didn't you try to catch them?”, and I think she was serious.

We checked every room. There was an extra bedroom which my mom had converted to a studio for her various arts and crafts projects. Every thing that had lined its wall was piled knee deep on the floor. Upon every new sight of mayhem, my mom kept moaning, “Gone! All gone!”. This did nothing to soothe my rattled nerves. I couldn't understand what she was talking about. Sure, it was a mess, and some things were broken, but it was all still there. I was imaging some sort of portal must have opened up and swallowed some items I wasn't aware of.

Once my parents (or rather, my dad) had quelled my fears about seeing“deadies”, we ventured outside to survey the aftermath. The backyards along our street were separated by six foot high cinder-block walls. Apparently reinforcing rods weren't a required item in such walls in those days, because every wall on the street, starting with the one on the eastern side of our yard, had fallen over. It was very odd to be able look down the row all the way to end of our block. I waved to my friend Edward's parents, who were also out in their backyards in their bathrobes.

I don't know what sort of geological phenomenon was at work on our block, but it seemed like the further west you went up the street, the less damage there was to the houses, so we were very lucky. Perhaps it had something to do with being further up the slope in that direction. As it was, most of the damage was in the form of the aforementioned yard walls and some toppled chimneys. Our chimney was on the north side of our house, whereas all our neighbors had theirs on the east end of their homes.

Our chimney only had some cracks in the mortar, but was structurally sound. Most of the houses further down the hill had lost their chimneys, including Edward's home. One chimney had snapped off rather cleanly and was lying like a bridge between its former house and its neighbor's roof.

Needless to say, school and work were out of the question that day. I don't recall that my school had received any major damage (dammit!), but it was a different story for my dad's work. The section of freeway he was currently helping to construct was particularly hard hit:

It was lucky he hadn't been there yet.

I got dressed and went back outside. I was sitting on the low retaining wall at the bottom of our front yard when a particularly strong after-shock rumbled through. It wasn't a shaking; it felt just like a wave lifting a dock upon which one is sitting. It was quite a revelation that the ground – seemingly so solid – could behave exactly like a liquid.

For the rest of the day, we stayed home and kept up as best we could with what was going on around the San Fernando Valley. News reports were sporadic, since most radio and television stations had been knocked off the air by the quake. There was a bit of a scare because the quake had come close to completely destroying the Van Norman Dam, a few miles from our house. Many thousands of people were evacuated as a precaution, but our community wasn't in the path of the possible deluge.

I remember feeling fairly in touch with what was happening around me, but as the long day was winding down, I came over feeling all funny. I was cold and clammy and shaky. It seems I was suffering from shock. My parents put me to bed and I passed into blissful slumber.

The quake was probably the straw that broke the camel's back and caused my parents to decide to get out of southern California. There were some other crappy things that happened while we were down there, which I will briefly recount in the next chapter.