Where I Came From - 03 Pasadena and Skid Row

My guardian talked my 'uncle' G G to take me in. I had to commute from Pasadena to Inglewood. My English teacher accused me of plagiarism (The White Man's Sin). I had to complete a comprehensive review and receive an 'A' on it or spend a fifth year in high school. The next three days (weekend and one school day), I stayed up, using coffee, cigarettes, and menthol lotion on my eyelids. I read and reviewed 'The Lady of the Lake.' I got my 'A'.

G G lived in an all black neighborhood. My cousins introduced to flight (Cessna out of Ontario) Big Boy Hamburgers, girls with bowling alleys in their basements, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Joan Baez, and Doc. Doc was a retired railroad Pullman. His lot was sliced into a triangle by the railroad right-of-way. If I had been old enough to vote I would have voted for Nixon.

Mother had foreseen me being a failure. She had secured a promise from H, the husband of my second godmother, to hire me before she had died. At 16 I had worked at Bullocks Wilshire, Good Humor Santa Ana and Scott's Hamburgers Morningside Park at 17, and Los Angeles Times at 18.

Now, I had a man's job. I recently Googled the neighborhood. Giant, but faint, letters spelled it out--SKID ROW. Skid Row Fish and Oyster was operated by H and sons. A salesman had a woman in every courtyard. A young trucker drove up from the Sea of Cortes with fresh shrimp and scallops. Shrimp were fed to a mechanized product line attended to by about thirty Mexican women and girls. Rudolf the Russian designed, built, and maintained the line. The girls deveined, cleaned, breaded, and packaged the product with brand names of customers. The packaged product was rolled across the street on hand carts to the freezers. Nacho, Chuey, and I packed the product for  shipping, stacked the boxes on pallets, and stored the pallets in the freezer. Occasionally, we we took long poles, with machetes attached, into the freezer. We gently hacked at the ice accumulated on the overhead freon pipes. We hacked for about five minutes. Then we stood in the sunlight and warmed up to prevent frostbite. When the distributer truck came, they parked in the middle of the street while helped the driver load.
In the morning, I parked in a small lot, surrounded by brick buildings. For lunch, we walked a block west to the deli for sandwiches, past black women wantonly spreading their brown eye and thick thigh and chattering promises of fulfillment.

Where I Came From - 02 Los Angeles Strangers

From age 13 on, I pretty much raised myself, living in foster homes.

Dr. CW's family taught me to like Charles Lindberg, read Playboy, eat beef tongue, smoke cigarettes, and attend Morningside Park Evangelical and Reformed Church.

Most of my friends belonged to the church. At church I learned to love blacks, gays, and whales--but not war. Pastor K even allowed as how the miracles may not have been physical miracles. The church found me my next home.

I only stayed at the Er home about ten days--long enough to hear Harry Bellafonte sing about bananas, receive oral sex from the grandfather, and motivate my guardian to find me new emergency housing.

The damage had been done. For the next four or five years, regardless of which family I lived with, when I was home alone I would act out--running from room to room, screaming. "Why me, God? Why me? Eventually, I learned to control my rage. Nevertheless, I have become obsessed with child molesters.   I am an opportunist. So, when I moved to Mexico and found myself in a bed of child molesters, I decided to exploit them. I write about the drug world only tangentially. Drug cartels are organized and mean. I don't want my head to bob in the bay like a beach ball. Besides, I have never been attracted to illegal drugs. However, my whole wellbeing has been devastated by one old man. So, I am writing a novel about them and humoring them by trying to tell both sides. I have, for all intents and purposes, concluded my research. Molesters are masters of evasive conversation and researching child abuse on the internet could land me in prison.

Anyway, my new home was with the D and S W family. D was the best read door-to-door salesman I ever met. He was Methodist. He sold me on Watchtower, Thurber, Kerouak, Ginzberg, Gandhi, Steinbeck, Auntie Mame, working out, running track, and much more.

Nevertheless, I fell in with some questionable people. We shoplifted to pay for dates, stole camera equipment, and drank beer. An alcoholic tried to claim I had raped her in a walk-in theater. A friend stripped his sister in her bedroom. Next year, she invited me to the Sade Hopkins dance. I hung out at the beach. It was a magical place--edge of the continent--next stop Tahiti. I learned to mat surf  and body surf. Normally, I hitched rides. Then, I began hot-wiring S W's car with Juicy Fruit wrappers. Once, we took turns driving Craig Carnival's father's car to our homes from school. The Los Angeles police took us down to Rampart Station. Craig's father did not want to press charges against his son, so they let us go. Weekends, I visited Hermosa Beach--The Insomniac and Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse.

My next home was the Dean S family. J S had been one of the bad boys I had hung with. We slept on the pullout couch. We drove to Wallach's Music City, downtown Los Angeles. I listened to Thelonious Monk jazz. J W tried  to walk through the turnstile with a half dozen country albums without paying. We sat in the cop car. J W told the cop that he was a born again Christian and that his father was a preacher and a dean at B A University. The cop let us go. I bought an English Enfield 303 so we could go hunting down near Mexico. I shot a mockingbird. We listened to Marty Robbins sing 'El Paso,' for the first time, on the car radio. J S stole my newspaper route money. He stole the car of a school mate's father. He did not like the kid so he ran the car into a light post. Dean said I had corrupted his son. He sent his son back to North Carolina to a religious school--hypocrites!

My guardian bought me 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.

Where I Came From - 01 Los Angeles Family

I am an aging, white, male--mostly English, German, Scotch and Spanish.

I lived my first two years across Cahuenga Pass from the Hollywood Bowl.
Father worked for Warner Bros. He brought me home a dog that was half wolf. He chain smoked, tarred roofs, sand-blasted,and spray-painted with lead. He died in 1948--before McCarthyism.
I was diagnosed as asthmatic at two. Years later, digging through the hall closet, I found Father's stuff: a banjo, a mandolin, his air raid warden's hat, a gas mask, two ammo boxes, and an old engraved revolver that took paper cartridges.
Mother liked Ike. She left the Episcopal church to become Presbyterian. She taught me to read Donald Duck Comics and how to work my times tables. I pulled the wings off butterflies and played with fire. After I told her that I wanted to play sax; she paid for piano, violin, and accordion lessons. I played in the first violin section of the 101 piece Virgil Junior High Little Symphony, under conductor Raymond Wurfl. She wanted me to become a Marine, but died in 1954--I was a Tenderfoot Boy Scout.
I saw my first UFO in Fish Canyon while my fellow scouts slept. It subscribed a helix path, extremely high up, till it ran out of sun. I concede this one may have been a weather balloon caught in a large vortex.                    
My family had been bigots.

Punta Banda Home Invasions and Robberies

"the investigation into the 9 armed robberies from the buffadora to manadero is
compleat,,,thats right they figured out who the masked, machine gun
carrying,robbers were....they were federal police,,,,the investigaters asked if
i would continue my case..i said no..they said they need to write down a
reason...i told them I WANT TO LIVE AND ENJOY MY RETIREMENT,,i love living in
mexico,but i never forget this is mexico"

from Punta Banda Bulletin Board