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.