me and my brother and my friend Kenny Allen used to always call Guile from Street Fighter II the Juiceman because we all thought Guile looked like the Juiceman guy


we used to play Base-Wars for the NES everyday after school. Remember Base-Wars? It was a baseball game, but all the baseball players were robots



one time my brother got so mad at the level in Battletoads where you ride the hoverbikes that he threw the controller as hard as he could at the TV screen and the TV screen cracked and we told our mom that Kenny Allen did it and then our Mom wouldn't let Kenny Allen come over to our house for two months after that. Our Mom did not like Kenny Allen.


my brother and Kenny Allen and Josh Harper and me were playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time for the SNES one time when Josh Harper's dad came home drunk and started yelling at Josh's sister because he thought her fiance was beating her and he told her that if she didn't leave her fiance, she was out of the will. Josh's sister was very unattractive.


one time me, my brother and Samu, the Indian boy who lived on the other side of the neighborhood were exploring the woods and there was a big ditch with water in it, and my brother and Samu both jumped over it to the other side and then I tried to jump over it, but I landed right in the ditch water.


another time my brother, Scott Farkus and Teddy Jordasch were at Teddy's house having a sleep-over and I really had to pee but I was too afraid to ask to use the bathroom so I peed in my sleeping bag, but nobody noticed. Teddy's brother Charlie went to Juvie for bringing a bowie knife to school. Their step-mother Sue was abusive to them.



when I was five, my brother and the black boy two houses down, Jason Feldman, were fighting over a Goliath action figure that they found in the woods. Jason's dad got mad because Jason was yelling at my brother while we were sleeping over, telling him the Goliath figure was his because my brother found it in the fort he and Samu had built in the woods. Jason's dad decided that my brother and Jason would compete in a race down the block and back and whoever got to the fire hydrant at the end of the cul de sac first would keep the Goliath action figure. Jason cheated by taking off on two instead of three and he and my brother got in a fight and my dad started yelling at Jason's dad because Jason was beating up my brother. My dad and Jason's dad never talked again until the Feldmans moved out three years later. An old white couple lives in their house now.


one time, me, my brother, Kenny Allen and Teddy Jordasch were in a yelling match with our arch enemy, Joey Weisenhaur. We all hated Joey. He was like the villain of the kids in our neighborhood. My brother and Joey got into a fight, and my brother knocked Joey to the ground and was on top of him, and he raised his fist like he was about to punch Joey and knock his lights out, but then he just shook his head like "no, man....you're not worth it", and got up and walked away. It was the coolest thing that ever happened.


once when me and my brother were staying over at Kenny Allen's house, Kenny Allen put a Jolly Rancher between his legs and got his german shepard Seneca to lick it. We all thought it was funny.
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hey miz. you are a chump.

bloody blisters, what are some of your memories of childhood? Please include full names of all friends, what NES games you played, what kinds of forts you built in the woods, and how many Playboys you and your friends stole from your other friend's dad. It was always one of your friend's dads who had the giant stash of Playboys. It was never your dad. Your dad never bought a Playboy.

did you build a secret society based around the discovery of an issue of Playboy? Did you build a fort in the woods and bury the Playboy in the fort?

Josh Harper's dad was a carpenter, and he built us the most amazing treehouse you ever saw out in the woods behind Josh's house. It was seriously a great treehouse. You could eat off of it. My god, was it a good treehouse.

I did not play video games and my parents refused to pay for cable tv. we could only watch the networks and PBS. I remember at a very young age watching Monty Pythons Flying Circus and Dr. Who. My parents almost divorced when I was in the 5th grade and I remember Genesis was really big, and Bob Seger - those artists remind me of those time. God how I hate them. If I hear Phil Collins voice, I want to crawl under a rock and die.

we used to go digging on a big incline next to a ravine behind the school. We called it Froot Loop Forest. There was a big wooded area next to Froot Loop Forest with some sewer pipes--the big ones you could walk through--we called that Devil's Ditch.

Where is Harry these days? I miss ma beautiful fren. If I had the energy, I would post a sarlaac asshole pic just for him but I just cannot muster it up right now.

me and my brother's friend Kenny Allen was a huge fan of Vanilla Ice when he came out. He always went around with a walkman and a cassette of Vanilla Ice's live album. We all thought that the song "Havin' a Roni" was about having a boner. We thought a Roni was a boner.

There was a high school kid that lived up the street and my middle brother and I used to call him the Peenie Genie. I can remember listening to 45 records on a kiddie turntable - Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, Joey Scarbury's theme from Greatest American Hero and Burl Ives.

when me and my brother lived in our old neighborhood, there were two teenage brothers on the block who we all thought were really cool. We called them Conky and Bonky. I think Bonky got into drugs and ended up in jail for a while. Last I heard, Conky was married with five kids working as an insurance adjuster in Sun City, Arizona.

Oh, and Frankie Smith's Double Dutch Bus:

after watching Return of the Jedi on VHS, my brother had a nightmare where he saw Darth Vader standing in the kitchen, holding out his red light saber. My brother insisted he actually saw Darth Vader and it wasn't a dream, all the way until he was around ten years old. I had bad dreams about Max Headroom.

full names excluded.

i remember riding bikes in the street with a few of the neighborhood kids. this one little asian kid, we will him 'keichikun', was riding his bike, when all the sudden he ran into a parked car. i, being the asshole that i was, started laughing. i turned my head to say to him, as i was still riding my bike, 'keichikun, you are such a fucking retard for hitting a parked car. what kind of dumbass hits a parked car?' as soon as i finished my statement and before i could turn completely around, i too, ran into a parked car. the rest of the neighborhood kids gave me shit for years.

more bike riding...
one of the kids we used to tease, named 'jaymcnutz', tried catching us with a fishing lure while we rode by taunting him.

i superglued this same kid's screen door shut, lock and all. his mother, a bull dyke truck driver, came over with the handle of their door in a coffee can of gasoline. i got yelled at and sent to time out.

i remember being beaten up, held down and beaten up, thrown in bushes, being tricked into drinking pee, having my head slammed against the corner of an entertainment center and bleeding profusely, being choked by neighborhood kids, climbing trees. etc...

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Kenny Allen went through an intense Weird Al Yankovic phase. He knew all the words to all the songs and played them constantly whenever we were at his house.

I had lots of nightmares. In fact, I slept with the lights on sometimes as late as 13 or 14 years old. They were always apocolyptical in nature. One time when I was 8 or 9, I swore I saw a young man crouched down at the windows looking into my parents basement. He put his hand to the window and I did the same. He said his name was David. I turned away in fear and he vanished.

I remember the smell of my parents house and the black leather couch in the family room. They had a bar but instead of bar paraphenalia inside, it was filled with books and old comedy records of my dads - bill cosby, the smothers brothers, etc.

I miss my Dad.

one time when me, my brother, and Kenny Allen were having a sleep-over at Josh Harper's house, Josh snuck his dad's VHS copy of Basic Instinct down to the basement and we started watching it. We fast-forwarded to the part where Sharon Stone shows her pussy and rewound it, then watched it again, then rewound it, watched it again, rewound it, watched it again, rewound it, watched it again, rewound it watched it again, rewound it, watched it again, rewound it, watched it again. I think that was the first time I realized I found women smoking cigarettes sexually arousing. I was watching Sharon Stone smoking her cigarette while everyone else's eyes were glued to her pussy. And then for some reason, there was a quick shot of Newman from Seinfeld right after she opened her legs, and that was kind of weird.

I love that actor that plays newman. i seriously want to lick on his dick and put it in my mouth. and i am a guy. i wonder if he would fuck my head.

of course, another time at Kenny Allen's house, Kenny snuck a VHS copy of Blame it On Rio (which to us was the holy grail of movie nudity at the time), down to the basement while his parents weren't home. It was really cool, until my brother and I looked over and saw Kenny Allen had his uncircumcised dick out (his mom was Jewish), and he was wacking at it. I thought at first it was some kind of novelty store gag gift or something because it was so big, but it was actually Kenny Allen's dick. That was the first time I realized I had a very small uncircumcised dick.

me and my brother would sometimes go over to our friend Marcus Sharendalow's house two blocks down to play air hockey. Marcus wasn't really our friend though. His parents were very religious and so Marcus wasn't allowed to watch Married with Children, The Simpsons, or see anything rated PG or above. But we liked his air hockey table. So we went over there sometimes.

I remember when me, my brother, Kenny Allen, Josh Harper and Teddy Jordasch went to see the first showing of the Street Fight II movie. We were so excited. It sucked.

I remember one time one of our friends got a hold of a Hustler from his dad and we all looked at it and then when the train would go by we would hold it up for the engineers to see.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2012 07:44PM by Alias.

A black guy named Feldman?

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2012 07:42PM by Alias.

Alias Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> my brother and i used to start little fires in the
> woods... not to do any damage.... just to create
> fire.
>
> one time, using gasoline, the little fire got a
> little bigger and despite our frantic attempts to
> douse the fire.... the fire department was called.
>
>
> when we heard the sirens, we ran.....

Harry Tuttle is one fuckin well-dressed man.

My childhood memories? Or my memories as a child in the hood?
Never knew Dad... a neighbor girl died in a drive by...toothless scab covered hookers , brutal drug dealers , scary addicts that might do anything for a fix...being searched by cops just for standing around..trying to get to school without being beat up...once at school hoping not to get stabbed (this was before every homie had a gun).

Let's see growing up in the Village in New York City was tough for a straight boy. The temptation was always out there to get involved in homo sexual activity. Homo boys blasting Culture Club and George Michaels all hours of the night, fashion shows on the way to school, names like "girl lover," "straight boy," "hetero!" and one time I got jumped for my purple socks. At school where it was supposed to be safe even the teachers were involved. Back in the day before "sissies," used to pack vibrators they would carry dildos so ass rapes were a common issue. All around the school and buildings you would see gay graffiti, at least before the museum of modern art took it away. Rainbow flags painted neatly on buildings were a common sight back then. I remember one time my dad got his car polished and waxed for free, he was too confused to be pissed! I remember one time, this still gives me nightmares to this day, I was walking home from school when all of the sudden these pink eco friendly cars pulled up beside me and a man with a new haircut asked me where Phantom of the Opera was playing. Before I could answer I was surrounded by 5 of them. They all started laughing at my half tucked in shirt and my mismatched clothes. One guy came up from behind me and held my arms while his buddy tucked in my shirt. It was so humiliating. Then another one pulled out a dildo and held it up to my mouth and said "the word in the men's room is that you insulted Prince, said 1999 lacked artistic character and originality." Then I heard some platform shoes hit the street and a man wearing a three piece suit stepped out and said "Bruce, Brandon, let him go, he's in my Home Ec class." Later on that man turned out to be the host of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I'll tell you they were hard times, Lady Gaga seems to be bringing unity to the scene so it's calmed down quite a bit but about a year later my dad got upset because he got bit by a pomeranian and plus he got a job transfer, so we moved to Cleveland where it was a lot safer.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2012 07:46PM by Alias.

in the 4th grade, our music teacher made us all sing along to Ace of Bass's "I Saw the Sign". And also Criss-Cross's "I Missed the Bus". She typed up the lyrics and printed them out and everything. It was the gayest thing that ever happened.

also in 4th grade, I was in a school play for christmas. I was a penguin in the part where the penguins come out in the north pole and sing. My paper beak fell off halfway through the song and I had to pick it back up and hold it up to my nose for the rest of the song. Everyone was laughing.

in kindergarten, our teacher brought in an actor from some soap opera to speak to us for some reason. I can't remember which soap opera, but I remember his name was "Hutch", and he was very handsome.


I always wondered if something was going on between "Hutch" and the teacher.

Alias Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Brown Eye Blind Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > I had lots of nightmares. In fact, I slept with
> > the lights on sometimes as late as 13 or 14
> years
> > old. They were always apocolyptical in nature.
> One
> > time when I was 8 or 9, I swore I saw a young
> man
> > crouched down at the windows looking into my
> > parents basement. He put his hand to the window
> > and I did the same. He said his name was David.
> I
> > turned away in fear and he vanished.
>
>
> I had lots of nightmares, too.
>
> Once, a man sawed my bedroom in half, and I
> watched my sister float away. I woke up screaming,
> and it took my mother quite a while to convince me
> I wasn't standing inside half a room.
>
> A few days ago, while sleeping in my brother's
> house in Vermont, I dreamed that a man ordered my
> brothers and sisters to line up against the wall.
> He had this giant shredder and he was going to
> shred them all.
>
> I was yelling, "Don't line up, you're gonna get
> shredded," but they couldn't hear me. Each of
> them calmly walked to the wall. The man turned on
> the machine and just as he was dropping in one of
> my brothers, I woke up....


you must be jewish

also in kindergarten, when we all sat down for lunch everyday, the teacher would say "1, 2, 3, look at me", and when she said that it meant that we could start eating.

one time, I convinced my little sister that her name was really Santa Claus, and that she was adopted. She ran to my mother crying because she believed me.

one of my earliest memories is seeing my brother touch the grill one time when we were having a cook-out. At least I thought he had touched the grill. I thought I saw him put his thumb right up against the grill, so I went and put my thumb right up against the grill and got burned.

another early memory is when I was in a room playing with the sewing machine and got my finger caught under the needle. It hurt.

the other early memory I can think of is when I was taking a bath and fell and busted my lip against the side of the tub and had to get stitches.

and the last one that comes to mind is when I was riding my bike and crashed and fell against the handlebar, leaving a big bloody red mark in my stomach. The old lady who lived in the house I fell in front of came out and started yelling at me to get off her lawn.

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> also in kindergarten, when we all sat down for
> lunch everyday, the teacher would say "1, 2, 3,
> look at me", and when she said that it meant that
> we could start eating.


Do you think that's why you overeat now?
Like you eat in defiance...Like= How dare you tell me
when i can eat??

is that it?

one last early memory is when my old Mexican grandma came and started hitting me because I couldn't stop crying one time when my mother was sick with shingles and I had to stay over at Mexican grandma's house. Mexican grandma was always mean. Terrible, terrible old woman. My mother was gone for a long time with the shingles.

and another time when I got lost in the department store and couldn't find my mother.

one more thing.....when my mother left me at daycare for the first time and I peed and pooped my pants and the people there refused to help clean me up. I thought she was never coming back.

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> and another time when I got lost in the department
> store and couldn't find my mother.


That's a classic.

2 of my kids got lost in department stores......

But i think they did it on purpose.

another time I had a nightmare that my mother had disappeared and I got up and went to find her, half asleep, and my parents found me hours later sleeping a few blocks down in someone's lawn.

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> another time I had a nightmare that my mother had
> disappeared and I got up and went to find her,
> half asleep, and my parents found me hours later
> sleeping a few blocks down in someone's lawn.


How is your relationship right now with your parents Miz?

when I was very young my mother got depressed and lied on the couch for a long time, like a couple months. I thought she was dying.

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> when I was very young my mother got depressed and
> lied on the couch for a long time, like a couple
> months. I thought she was dying.


That's sad Miz.

I don't believe you.

My mother tried so hard to keep a kosher house and family . My brother and I used to eat bacon at a friend's house and laugh. I feel bad about that now.

jbalo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My mother tried so hard to keep a kosher house and
> family . My brother and I used to eat bacon at a
> friend's house and laugh. I feel bad about that
> now.


PFFT!

Scoff you may! Free bacon is the Jew's biggest dilemma. But seriously, it was always bacon cheeseburgers..a double whammy.

we had a kid in middle school who was very unpopular.....and one day, he got caught somehow whacking off in the restroom. From then on, until high school graduation, he was branded as the kid who got caught whacking off in the restroom. He had it bad.

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> we had a kid in middle school who was very
> unpopular.....and one day, he got caught somehow
> whacking off in the restroom. From then on, until
> high school graduation, he was branded as the kid
> who got caught whacking off in the restroom. He
> had it bad.


Wuz that you Miz?

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> when I was very young my mother got depressed and
> lied on the couch for a long time, like a couple
> months. I thought she was dying.


Do you think your mental illness was passed onto you genetically?

one time me and my brother were being watched by our babysitter, and she turned on the stereo as soon as our parents left and said "here's some music, boys, you can dance to it if you'd like to!" My brother and I just looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was pretty funny to us.

Norwalk is a working class suburb in southeast L.A. County.

Its demography when I was coming of age there in the late seventies and early eighties was nearly equal white and Hispanic.

There were three major Chicano (Mexican-American) gangs operating there, mostly disdaining combat with civilian forces outside of the gang culture and in those days not yet heavily armed.

It almost seems quaint now, their hand to hand combat usually involving nothing more than a knife or any handy heavy object; gallant even when compared with the drive-by shooting of today and its ignoble, exceedingly cruel and wreckless nature.

The veteranos of the old days may have been no better than the psychopaths who lead the gangs today, but the times would reign them in somewhat, doing battle as they did before lax mores would create the feral state of some of today's vatos locos.

My neighborhood just off of Imperial Highway (a major thoroughfare running some thirty miles or so from Yorba Linda east of L.A. through our city and then the tougher quarters of Compton and Watts right into LAX) looked rougher than it was.

Later when I was a serviceman stationed in Camp Pendleton, about midway between L.A. and San Diego, I would delight in showing friends the old neighborhood anytime our travels took us that way; it so resembled the image of a rough L.A. 'hood. It was sadly important to me as a young man to craft some sort of dramatic back story for myself, always a little embarrassed of how truly boring my short life's history was.

What made my neighborhood look such a mess was its cleft by the stalled construction of the 105 freeway, running from just beyond our back fence all the way to the airport ten or fifteen miles away.

A swath of real estate cleared for road construction took out four streets abreast just the other side of our little backyard's brick wall.

My earliest childhood memories are of this neighborhood slowly being drained of its inhabitants, selling their homes to the state and moving away.

The houses weren't demolished; rather they were cut from their foundation's and carted away in the furtive early morning hours.

Sometimes we would stay up late to watch. Few things are as disorienting as the sight of a home, the very symbol of stability, mounted on a trailer and hauled away. My faint, earliest memories are of a complete community of small, well tended homes lining cul-de-sacs of about a dozen homes a piece; by the time I left home years later the scar running through the center of our area would be complete, but construction on the freeway would still have not begun.




We called the vast open area of vacant lots dotted with the occasional abandoned house the "wastelands." Some owners would resist selling to the end, the last of them existing exposed in the middle of the cleared land, lonely frontier outposts of a settlement in retreat.

The wastelands provided the ultimate environment for a youth of drug use and truancy. We laid claim to certain abandoned houses as meeting places, mounting an underground resistance against the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and their ever present helicopter. The helicopter was viewed as some kind of alien spaceship, with all manner of observatory capability. Its infrared capabilities were the stuff of legend. It would come buzzing in, a sinister, giant mechanical insect, with its spotlight sweeping the ground below as it homed in on us, and we would scatter like the mute rabble fleeing the army of gorillas in Planet of the Apes.

For the most part we were harmless. We just wanted to get high, and in the period of my adolescence there were a variety of means available for this. This was before crack; in fact I would escape to the military as the technique of free basing cocaine, which would presage the crack epidemic of the eighties, was becoming widespread.

P.C.P. in the form of Angel Dust would be the first hard drug wave to encroach on our lives, and I found myself smack in the middle of it.

I'm still not sure what P.C.P. is made of; elephant tranquilizer it is said, and somehow this didn't dissuade us from trying it, nor did it discourage some adults from involving us in its packaging and sale.

Angel Dust was P.C.P. soaked mint leaf powder, for smoking. It gave off powerful fumes, vaguely reminiscent of a a fuel, or formaldehyde.

One night we would break up a pound of it, down into the gram units that retailed for ten dollars apiece, at a friend's kitchen table, the fumes getting us all high.

The next day the owner would find his parrot, kept in a cage nearby, laying dead in its cage.

It was also available in liquid form. For a price you could dip a cigarette in a vial of it. For some reason an upscale brand of cigarette, Sherman's, were the preferred type, when soaked they were called "sherm sticks." If you preferred menthol Kools, you might have a "super kool."

It tended to give one a feeling of euphoria and ease strangely coupled with a sense of invincibility that could sometimes go terribly wrong, leading to bizarre psychotic episodes.

A rash of police shootings would accompany the Angel Dust epidemic; "dusters" would try to take on anybody who came close, including armed policemen, often showing a desire to strip naked and attempt physically impossible (and pointless) feats.

One acquaintance of ours would try to climb a telephone pole before the police managed to corral him. No doubt the cops took some liberties with the phenomenon, for a time it seemed to happen weekly; one defense argument offered up in the Rodney King beating case was that the police thought he was a duster, and his behavior was certainly consistent with one. My experiences of the time now give me a skepticism toward the oft leveled charges of institutional police brutality as well as an appreciation of the sometimes untenable situations we place cops in on a daily basis. When I was young, however, they were the enemy.

Who were my allies in this insurgency?

There is a type of humor; bland, base, darkly vulgar, which is common among white males of the criminal subculture.

These are people who are often referred to as white trash.

They usually have done some time in prison; their time outside of an institution is often more reprieve than release, and their return is, usually, inevitable.

There comes with it an accent and inflection that transcend region. Incorporating black slang and rhythm unselfconsciously, filtered through ineradicable residue of deep seated lumpen-proletariat origins, it is the sound of the penitentiary.

This posture is completed by a certain look, as unmistakable and inimitable as the foul effects of poor hygiene and diet which mark someone long homeless. This look is where we get the phrase slack-jawed from, and the phrase is remarkably apt. Someone somewhere must have a theory explaining the tendency of the lower jaw to hang slack from the face of the pathologically delinquent.

The attitude these traits garnish is one of unfocused defiance. This defiance is not political though it resists the rule of law. It is an unconscious recognition of one's lack of morality, one's base nature, one's narcissism. It mocks conventional morality. It is the socialization that takes place outside of the mainstream, in the wretched outback of poverty and ignorance, akin to that of the geographically remote such as hillbillies, though it flourishes in our midst.

There is another, closely related type of humor: mirthless, taunting, disturbingly deprecatory of everything, which is common to the vato, the Chicano gang banger. It is less humor than a brutality of manners, seeking to strangle any and all that is remotely foreign to the narrow conceptions of the barrio. This is the humor of the cholo, and it is little more than a gob of spit in the face of the culture and manners of the gavacho, or Caucasian.

Strangely, you would find these types, the white trash and the vato, mingling with one another on the streets of my old neighborhood, striking up alliances and even friendships as they found common criminal cause.

It wasn't uncommon to find a disheveled white punk with "White Power" tattoos partnered up with a Mexican gang banger in chinos and plain white undershirt.

What they had in common was a more or less complete lack of amenability to society.

Learning was not only undervalued; it was discouraged and denigrated as, depending on one's particular point of view, selling out or as effete.

Physical bravery and audacity were valued above all else with the approving label, crazy, as in, "you don't want to mess with him, he's crazy."

The cholos would claim their superiority in their graffitti taunts with the ubiquitous term mas loco; as in lil' Boxer, Varrio Neighborhood, 13, mas loco. (The lil' abbreviation meant little and was normally given to a junior gang member who took up a name already claimed by a veterano, or simply to a very young or small member. There was a time when I was, jokingly, called lil' Alf because of my small stature, and before that lil' Groucho because of an entirely unfair comparison to Groucho Marx that was the result of my getting an unfashionably short haircut one summer.)



Most of us who would drift into this subculture would eventually find our way out. Some, however, were destined to die in it, and usually at a very young age. These were marked early on, and it was plainly evident that they weren't going to settle down to a quiet life. They would end up incarcerated or dead by violence or drug addiction well before middle age calmed them.



I had a friend growing up who was as decent and honorable as anyone I knew up to that point in my life. He and his father were movie buffs of a sort. It seemed every weekend they went to see something (this was long before the VCR).

His old man was a legendary crank; big, gruff, and scary.

There were stories, unverified but believable: once when the mother of one of his kid's friends made a pretext of coming to the door to borrow a cup of sugar (this sort of thing was still possible in those days) in hopes of striking up a conversation he wordlessly shut the door in her face; he had once fired off a high powered handgun at some cats that were digging around in his garbage, cutting one in half. His love of film was incongruous in light of this image. Every Monday at school I would listen with keen interest and envy as my friend would describe that weekend's film. Fatherless myself, it never occurred to me to envy the relationship he had with his father, but now I realize it was a remarkable bond, one that most of us didn't have with our parents.

There were three sons in the family, my friend being the youngest. I would say they were as different as night and day but I need a third pole. They were night, day, and twilight.

There was a classic middle son who was cowardly and thoroughly unprincipled. He was a would-be con man, always running some kind of second rate scam, and an inveterate thief. As a juvenile delinquent I would spend time hanging around with him later. I suspect he is dead now, as his need to involve himself in every manner of criminal activity combined with a complete lack of physical bravery and toughness did not bode well. There was always an air of the amateur about him. He was aspiring to things he had no business with, but it was obvious that a normal life involving work and family would never be possible for him. It was a depressing inevitability that I recognize now in retrospect.

The oldest son I didn't know well. He was in jail more often than not. The offenses were serious, armed robbery and the like. He was thoroughly criminal. He had survived a stabbing that should have killed him, and lifting his shirt could show you a collection of train track scars that proved it. It happened in a bar fight and apparently his attacker did not so much stab as slash him, deeply. He had been hastily stitched back together and the welt like, cross hatched scars had a Frankenstein look to them.

His older sister, unintelligent and prone to superstition, conjectured that he had been spared because he was to father a child somewhere down the line who would one day achieve something great.

Hilariously, there was no question that there was no direct benefit to humanity in his survival. The last time I saw him he was headed back to prison on a parole violation. Its okay, he said, he would be rejoining his friends.

The youngest and the oldest brother were as different as night and day, and the middle brother was somewhere in the nether region in between, idolizing the oldest and sadly lacking the character of the youngest. Knowing them is one of the reasons I would eventually fall on the nature side of the nature/nurture debate, in spite of a lifetime of being taught the opposite. It remains for me, like so many other experiences in my life, irrefutable evidence, a rude real life rejoinder for the misty sentiment of the blank slate thesis.

Love your children, support them, make them feel worthy and you have done well. But know that nature's torments aren't limited to disaster and disease. Sometimes the vileness she hurls at us comes in the form of a helpless infant. Sometimes that precious child is a foul bud which reveals itself gradually, in stages. The human penchant for cruelty doesn't find a neat, flat level as water in a vessel but pools up in the various recesses of our complex and uneven human nature, sometimes finding a deep pocket in the heart of a deviant.




My parents came to California sometime around 1960 with my then infant eldest brother, and my father's (no doubt presumptuous) certainty that his experience as a military policeman would land a job with the expanding LAPD. That this next part isn't a family secret is evidence, like a nonexistent pulse, that the family that should be jealously guarding it is dead. Regardless; my father failed the psychological evaluation for entrance into the LAPD. Upon hearing this many years after his death (news of which was belatedly received, by years for some of us, as well) his eldest son, who knew him as I didn't, chuckled and said, "maybe there's something to those psychological tests."

We were the people to whom things happened. We created nothing and left no real impression. We surfed the wake of the creative and ambitious across an ocean, tramped behind them across a pristine continent, and settled in to toil in their concerns. We settled in, because we are adapted to nothing so much as rooting ourselves to a spot, any habitable land. The farms had passed into the hands of the capable to be made efficient; the same would happen with the industries, and our modest worth would be halved again. A subsequent decline in our numbers is the only decent result; as for us, we'll be taken care of, made comfortable, granted every liberty, even, who knows, there's always a chance the name could rally somewhere, like in some absurd film wherein a pair of morons give birth to a genius. This is not a lament, not a complaint. We haven't pulled our weight for generations. This is our atrophy.

We thought we were moving toward something, up a gentle incline perhaps (because we love nothing so much as a gentle incline, the gentler the better), but we were fleeing this whole time, because that's what dread and mobility combined are, flight. We were fleeing those who have been gradually displacing us for centuries: the smarter or the harder working, the sturdier stock; that is to say, the worthy.

This line, like many, runs out of momentum at the far edge of the world's last continent. Farther afield and more glorious a place than any of my dim-witted ancestors, or me, their dim-witted progeny, has any right to expect. We ran out of room at the Pacific; unable to keep going and impervious to the occurrence of an idea, we settled into our dull torpor, and we amuse ourselves fading away.




Mario
Mario went insane. I didn’t know the sane Mario; we grew up in the same neighborhood but he was about four years my senior.

I got to know Mario after the sudden onset of serial hallucinations would torment him; after a stay in Norwalk’s Metropolitan State Hospital (an institution for the mentally ill, “metro” in our parlance named not only the place but was convenient shorthand for someone going off the deep end); but before he managed to gain a hearing in civil court where he filed suit against an actress from a legendary seventies television series, seeking damages for his mental anguish suffered as a result of her tormenting him with witchcraft.

Our neighborhood was bounded on the west by the San Gabriel River. The San Gabriel only sometimes resembles a river. In the summer it is less than a creek, a trickle really, running down the center of a massive concrete flood control channel. We used to call it the “riverbed”, and that would have been an accurate description of what that part of the San Gabriel was, a dry riverbed, before they encased it in concrete to better drain off the flood waters that came down from the San Gabriel Mountains on days of heavy rain, emptying into the ocean near Long Beach about ten miles southwest of my home. It seems every winter in Southern California someone is swept away in one of these rain swollen rivers, usually kids who can't resist floating a raft in the swift current.

The riverbed was a solid geographic barrier at which our row of streets dead-ended. Mario lived on the last house remaining on one of these cul-de-sacs. Two houses, vacant and boarded up, shared what was left of his street. On the next street, two lonely homes remained, just behind his. In one of these lived the three brothers I mentioned; across the street from them lived Kenny.



Kenny
Kenny went insane.

Kenny was a year or two older than I, a friend who ran with my group.

Kenny was a big strong, ruddy kid. He had the torso of a beer keg, and a deep but childlike laugh. He was smart, but goofy. When Kenny told a story he always embellished it with vocalized sound effects (his stories invariably included features that required this), so much so that it became a running joke. Kenny could never describe the flight of a ball or the rude meeting of an ass with the ground without providing an attempted re-creation of the sound made or the sound an otherwise silent event should have made. He had a spatial-logic oriented sort of intelligence. He would have made a good engineer given the chance, and he also had a gift for musical instruments, teaching himself to play the guitar when he was young. Kenny was the only guy I ever knew to play the mandolin.

After having run with our clique of stoners for a while he cleaned up, avoiding drugs and alcohol. He became a born-again Christian. At first he managed to keep his good humor intact, even though he had that morbid and naive fascination with the Book of Revelations. But he soon started obsessing over eschatology. It was from him that I first learned the superstition about Reagan's full name; six letters in each, Ronald Wilson Reagan: 666. He became obsessed with this. Soon he was developing theories about how bible prophecy would play out soon in the end of the world.

Periodically I would run into him, sometimes at night near his house in the vacant lots that I cut through to get home. He always seemed to be lurking about the shadows there. He would engage in manic, semi-coherent expostulations that went nowhere; always finding signs that portended the end of the world, all fit into Revelation prophecy.

One of the most chilling memories I have is listening to him as he stood under the shadow of a tree at night, a featureless black silhouette, possessed of that peculiar schizophrenic energy as he foretold the end of the world made obvious by the most intricate pattern of evidence.

He described a vision he’d had, in the middle of the day among a group of friends, of an angel falling from the sky. Something about it happening in the daytime, among sane people, when he should have been safe from his madness, scared the hell out of me. This was the moment I realized, in my slow fashion, that Kenny was gone.

He would steadily get worse; at some point he began having the hallucination of being raped by an incubus. One day his mother would turn up at the neighbors (the home of the three brothers); beside herself because he had shut himself in the closet the day before and still hadn’t come out.

Unlike Mario, Kenny's insanity was immediately apparent. I would run into him again after an interval of several years; now clearly a man who had spent his entire adult life with a severe mental illness. Still a hulking physical presence, with a full beard long untouched and wild black hair, he looked like Rasputin. His intricate theories had now given way to dull, uninspired nonsense. He had been at it a long time; his manic energies had ebbed. That deep laugh of his had become a nervous affect, punctuating everything he said. For all I know he is still there, in Norwalk.

Kenny’s slide into insanity had taken a matter of months from its first un-foreshadowed stirrings. We had all done heavy drugs, so there was some speculation that his mental illness was related to his use of acid or angel dust, but the fact of the matter was Kenny took in much less poison than the rest of us. Kenny was a naive but thoroughly decent guy; guileless, creative, and unassuming. Kenny deserved better.

I had always harbored an unreasonable suspicion of that place where Kenny, Mario, and the three brothers lived, a cluster of homes standing at the end of a pair of decimated streets like the remnants of a bombed out landscape, abutting a fake river; of these three remaining homes in two of them young men would become hallucinatory schizophrenics and in the other was raised up a true sociopath.



Mario
From what I gathered in my conversations with Mario, his sanity deserted him for good one night in his bedroom.

That was when the famous television actress came to him.

I don’t remember if he thought he'd had sex with her or not; his visions usually entailed her tormenting him by engaging in sex acts with other men, and worse.

Somehow he deduced from this that she was in love with him, and that if only he made contact with her she would acknowledge this and they would live together happily, once she had somehow disposed of her less famous husband, a handsome television actor.

This was before John Hinckley would try to assassinate Ronald Reagan in an attempt to get the attention of Jodie Foster. I imagine that nowadays someone with his particular obsession would be watched more carefully, but Mario was given a government stipend and a court ordered regimen of therapy and medication, after he got out of Metro.

I told you of my shiftless friend, the middle brother (a classic Fredo character). I always knew I could find my friend at Mario’s house on the first and fifteenth of the month when Mario got his government check; in Mario's front yard Dave would be swilling beer bought by freshly scrounged money, and Mario might be holding forth on his certain to be shortly realized wealth as the actress’s husband, once he had made contact and convinced her who he was.

The strange thing about Mario was that he was a relatively intelligent guy; articulate and, well, cool, in the sense that he had style and poise. He believed in his delusions nonchalantly; it never seemed to occur to him that others found him crazy. On more than one occasion I saw him suddenly go into his rap about the actress before someone who had up to that point no reason to doubt his sanity. Oddly, we all humored him, always. I don't recall anyone ever pointing out to Mario that he was crazy. That doesn't mean it didn't happen; it may have. I do know that those of us who hung around him didn't; we indulged him.

He functioned normally for the most part, though he didn't work. He had a car that he used to take us to the beach; he even went out at night sometimes. Once we found ourselves at a home among some white-power types; they had no problem with me but it was only a matter of time before one of them turned on Mario, a Mexican. We somehow managed to talk our way out of there; but I couldn’t help noticing how much more harmless the certifiably insane Mario was compared to these common criminals.

He lived at home with his parents, but they were so much in the background that I can’t recall their faces. In fact, one thing that stands out in my memory of a youth filled with drugs and petty crime and countless hours whiled away in general malice is the near complete absence of adults. We were a sub-culture, a separate society, parasitical to but independent of the honest law abiding world of our parents.

Eventually Mario's parents sold their home and he left the neighborhood.

A little while later a short news article in the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner (now the nostalgia's coming on strong) would tell of the kook who filed suit in Norwalk Superior Court against the television actress, appearing with a stack of books on witchcraft and an impressively researched case, humored briefly before the judge turned him away.



Vernon
The riverbed was bordered by a bike path. It provided a great pedestrian highway, and a way of moving about furtively at night. If you were chased by the police, you would make for the riverbed if at all possible; usually the L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies weren’t willing to give foot chase through the sand, over the chain link fence, down the embankment and then, if necessary, across the shallow water and into Downey, the jursidiction of its own police department. Somehow they knew we weren’t master criminals that might potentially yield a career making bust. The Sheriff’s helicopter ruled the night skies anyway, if they really wanted you.



There were stories of a man walking around the riverbed at night dressed like a vampire. Wearing fake plastic fangs and a Halloween costume cape, friends of mine would tell of coming upon and harassing him; he would flash his fangs and flare his cape. Some of the older kids knew who he was, an oddball who had attended Norwalk High School a few years before; he claimed he was a wizard and even came to school dressed in his outfit (how he survived that is beyond me, maybe he did have magic powers). My older brother knew of him. “That’s Vernon Butts.”



Around 1980 a serial killer, known as the "Freeway Strangler," was abducting teenage boys from the streets of L.A. and Orange Counties, sexually molesting and garroting them before leaving them on the side of the road. His youngest victim was twelve. He would eventually be caught, a truck driver living in Downey. He had three accomplices who helped with various murders. His main accomplice was Vernon Butts, who assisted with six murders and would hang himself in a jail cell before going to trial.

This next part is where it gets weird for me. [Redacted.]








Drugs
I was in the back of a car, loaded on something, I don’t remember what, looking down at my scrawny arms. I was curious that they seemed alien, as if they weren’t my own. I couldn’t feel them. I was sure I couldn’t move them if I tried, though I couldn’t bring myself to try. I could feel the weight of them in my lap; but I couldn’t find them sensately, wracking my brain for their background signal. I took this all in with dull amusement.

Outside my window Interstate Five existed as a red and white blur of motion and smeared electric light as we passed streetlamps of crystalline light blooms suspended on giant concrete stalks. The cars left trails of red, stretched, as if squeezing themselves through a constricting atmosphere. If I could see them as elongated by movement, weren’t they in fact? Were we moving? I couldn’t tell. It seemed the whole world was in motion, swirling around us, its axis. We were heading north to Azusa Canyon.




It was the drugs that defined my youth; they were our currency and culture. There were the base elements: marijuana, alcohol, tobacco; hardly drugs at all. One advanced through the harder stuff, as far as his sense of adventure took him: cocaine, amphetamines, acid; PCP in its various forms: angel dust, cannebinol, sherm; an occasional specialty item like psilocybin mushrooms; free basing and crack would come later. And all the while heroin was lurking in the background, like an old pervert waiting in the shadows for the kids to get just wasted enough to have no inhibitions left.

But I wouldn’t be around for that; I had already made my own circuit through the drug culture and arrived, mostly unscathed, at something like late adolescence with nothing more than a residual affinity for smoking pot.

No great tale of addiction and redemption here. I lived a certain way for a time; I stopped after a while, a rational decision, or more like a series of rational decisions becoming a new way of life, a new strategy. There was no crescendo, no plot point, no realization and triumphant march into the light of day; just eventual exhaustion and a gradual drifting away. It was boredom that drew me in, and it was boredom, as much as anything else, that delivered me from it.

We weren’t looking to escape reality, or the hopelessness of our lives. It wasn’t self destructive behavior; it was merely reckless. We were bored; rebelling against tedium. We went in for the experience. As for me, I remember being very keen on any sort of derangement of perception. “Tripping.” Drugs were the means, novelty was the end.

I first started smoking marijuana when I was about twelve. I soon realized that I could pay for my indulgence by selling joints. Back then you could buy an ounce of cheap Mexican pot for ten dollars, roll as many as forty joints and sell them for fifty cents a piece to your fellow junior high school students; leaving you ten dollars for your next bag, some pocket change for yourself, and whatever was left you smoked. I started saving up, and worked my way up to buying by the pound, selling ounces. I would eventually branch out into other product lines, all on a very small scale. I never got far. The idea that people get rich selling drugs on the street is a myth perpetuated by phony street-tough rappers.

I took pride in my business, such as it was. From the start I was known for carrying a superior product than my main rival at Corvallis Junior High. Rob, a friend of mine, was something of a freeloader, earning the nickname “Radar” because he always seemed to show up whenever there was someone else’s stash to smoke. We competed for the individual joint retail in the eighth grade. He couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, compete with me for quality, rolling smaller joints with more stems and seeds. I cleaned my stash, rolling mine a little fatter; I became expert at rolling a tight, even burning cigarette. Aside from a means of income selling for me was a way of achieving a level of social status, not high but higher than a shy and timid kid would manage otherwise.

In the early days it was a communal experience. Much of the appeal was in the event; in the conspiracy of it and in the ritual of the circle, passing a joint around. Marijuana is the ultimate adolescent high; its appeal has roots in childhood memories of the warm maternal embrace, in its tendency to enhance music and humor, the camaraderie of shared experience. If it’s good stuff and doesn’t promote paranoia, it has the effect of pushing to the margins whatever concerns a user has. For this reason it persists as a popular, less demanding alternative to alcohol for many young to middle aged adults. I certainly don’t promote it; as a parent I engage in the same hypocrisy of many of my generation, living in perpetual dread, lecturing on the evils of all drugs. In reality, I know too many potheads who hold down good jobs, pay their taxes, and support families to feel that its continuing criminalization is anything other than a costly and unnecessary prohibition.

In the first few years it was all innocent enough. The Southern California summers were carpeted with dried out golden brown grass and steaming heat softened asphalt swept repeatedly by an ever present sun; girls were starting to appear, as if emerging from the landscape, wearing cut off shorts and halter tops, their soft scent and smooth skin leaving us helpless, all of it hinting that a bottomless mystery was opening up before us. The days were endless, we lived in flip flops and ragged clothes, baked and bleached by the sun; half wild and semi-socialized. Not a care in the world. We didn’t know we lived in a brief respite anticipating an endless grind. The eighties were right around the corner.



The nights were different.

The nights were sinister.

The nights swept you up in a maelstrom and left you wherever you happened to be when the momentum stopped.

One evening Dave, the wannabe con man who was always seeking alliances and connections, and I found ourselves in a strange apartment.

Two older guys sat at a table covered with a pile of ground mint leaves they were rolling into very thin joints, “pinners.”

The scent of the mint leaves mingled with a heavy chemical odor. This was my introduction to angel dust.

We took to calling the high “gumby” because of the overall numbing effect it had. Phencyclidine (PCP) was originally developed as an anesthetic, but was abandoned because of a high incidence of psychotic reactions. It would later surface as an animal tranquilizer.

Three things happen to you when under the influence: you become more or less impervious to pain; you feel physical euphoria that makes you think you’re capable of great athletic feats; and you feel an increased confidence as nervousness and inhibition fade away. It is both a stimulant and a depressant at once, somehow. Legends of “dusters” experiencing violent psychotic episodes were everywhere in the early days of the “epidemic” that would sweep L.A. County in the late seventies. The stories were overblown. I personally never saw anyone have a violent reaction.



I hate to say it, but as I remember it, a PCP high is glorious. I always felt as if I was walking on six inches of air; taller, stronger, lighter. I was supremely confident. Perhaps the best part was that all fear of girls vanished. An awkward kid became Mr. Seduction. This was all an illusion, of course. PCP has a numbing effect, relaxing the facial muscles, giving one a sleepy, drooling look.

Gumby.

It was true that one felt invincible when under the influence. Once a large group of us indulged in one long dust induced night of recreational fighting; we flew through the air attempting leaping kung fu kicks; we wrestled and punched each other laughing like idiots; walking along the riverbed, we pushed one another down the tall concrete bank on one side or the short dirt and gravel hill on the other. I awoke the next morning a mass of bruises, scrapes, and pains.

We started selling it, buying ounces and retailing grams at ten dollars a go. After dust had been on the market for a while some started showing signs of repeated use: slurred speech, vacuous stares, slack jaws. We took to calling them “mummies.”



Geezing
“Tighter.” My brother said, leaning in toward me, through a peculiar sort of bad breath.

I noticed that all the geezers had the same type of sour breath, which seemed to come out of them once they had shot up. Was it possible that the drug was leaching out of the blood vessels in their lungs, that quickly?

“Tighter.” He said again.

With both hands I was choking his upper arm, between what was left of his bicep and a bony shoulder.

I was serving as a tourniquet, restricting the blood flow to the vein he was injecting with heroin, or maybe a cocaine/heroin mixture, a “speedball.” I don’t recall exactly.

My friend Pete and I had stumbled into the gathering, taking place in the garage of my mother’s house in Norwalk. Years before I had converted the garage into my room, lining it with mismatched wood paneling I had stripped out of vacant houses in the wastelands. After I started spending most of my time at a girlfriend’s it would be taken over and trashed by my brother and his companions. When blackened spoons started showing up in the garage I at first didn’t know what it meant. This was new; the opening of the sinister final chapter of the volume that was our pointless, failed adolescence. Those spoons were like the early indications of a terminal illness.

The one thing I never allowed myself to consider was injecting anything. Heroin was offered to me, but there was never any question; I knew I wouldn’t go that far. We had our own local vernacular for intravenous drug use: geezing, junkies were geezers. Pete and I jokingly referred to my brother’s crew of nascent junkies as the “Geezinslaw Brothers”, after a country & western band.

Pete and I stumbled out of the dank, gloomy garage, disoriented and squinting in the harsh light of day. Pete insisted he had somehow acquired a contact high just from being in there. It can’t be true, but Pete isn’t known for getting crazy ideas.

I had withdrawn from it all by that point; whether by dumb luck or intuition, it was just as things were getting ugly. People started overdosing.



Bub
Bub was, in the words of one of his fellow slack-jawed types, the “craziest white boy I ever met.” It was apt.

Growing up in a mixed Latino/white neighborhood one learns early on that Hispanics, generally, possess a higher degree of physical bravery. A few of them appear to be naturally fearless. Bub was the only white kid I remember from the neighborhood to have that kind of courage. He was as noble and brave in his way as he was vulgar, dim, and incurious. He had a sense of honor; he also had distaste for all things intellectual, seeing them as effete. He lived with his mother, a scatter-brained prescription junkie herself. Shortly after I stopped hanging around, he started geezing. He died of an overdose one night, a speedball. He was probably about twenty one years old, leaving behind an infant. He was the first to go. He’s been gone now about as long as he was alive.

Even before it all began there was one incredibly stupid thing that kids were doing: sniffing paint, which was popular with some of the cholos for some reason, most comically it seemed because they already had the paint cans handy for graffitti. You would occasionally see an esse breathing through a balled up sock saturated with paint, sometimes sniffing with one hand and tagging with the other. Glue and paint sniffing might be the single most idiotic example of human behavior, and seems a natural concomitant of graffitti.

Years later in Okinawa my friend Harry and I were sitting on the seawall down the hill from our base in Futenma, polishing off a bottle of something and lying to each other about all we would accomplish when we got out of the service. Some Okinawans showed up; kids, friendly and curious with a little English at their command. We started talking. Another group of Okinawans appeared; more kids, carrying large, clear plastic bags containing some sort of colorless liquid. They were inhaling from the bags, and were obviously very high. Our new friends exchanged words with them, things got heated, and before we knew it we were standing in the middle of what resembled a Hong Kong action film. All about us five foot tall Okinawan adolescents were throwing roundhouse kicks and precision blows. Our kung fu friends vanquished the glue sniffers.

I was a couple of years and half the circumference of the earth removed from the neighborhood.

It was a fitting, belated denouement.

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2012 07:15PM by Alias.

Alias Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> I used to babysit for a "kosher" family.
>
> I panicked when I realized I had given the
> children dairy with meat.
>
> Do I grab the milk off the table?
>
> What if the kids, then, notice my mistake?
>
> Or, do I let it go?
>
> I let it go and rushed dinner along....
>
> This was the same family.... where I was changing
> the baby's diaper, and the baby rolled off the
> table.
>
> I didn't tell the parents.




See "Forum Bullshitters" thread.

Alias Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I panicked when I realized I had given the
> children dairy with meat.

You breastfed the children?

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2012 06:55PM by Alias.

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2012 06:54PM by Alias.

The Alfets of Aphrodisiomania Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Norwalk is a working class suburb in southeast
> L.A. County.
>
> Its demography when I was coming of age there in
> the late seventies and early eighties was nearly
> equal white and Hispanic.
>
> There were three major Chicano (Mexican-American)
> gangs operating there, mostly disdaining combat
> with civilian forces outside of the gang culture
> and in those days not yet heavily armed.
>
> It almost seems quaint now, their hand to hand
> combat usually involving nothing more than a knife
> or any handy heavy object; gallant even when
> compared with the drive-by shooting of today and
> its ignoble, exceedingly cruel and wreckless
> nature.
>
> The veteranos of the old days may have been no
> better than the psychopaths who lead the gangs
> today, but the times would reign them in somewhat,
> doing battle as they did before lax mores would
> create the feral state of some of today's vatos
> locos.
>
> My neighborhood just off of Imperial Highway (a
> major thoroughfare running some thirty miles or so
> from Yorba Linda east of L.A. through our city and
> then the tougher quarters of Compton and Watts
> right into LAX) looked rougher than it was.
>
> Later when I was a serviceman stationed in Camp
> Pendleton, about midway between L.A. and San
> Diego, I would delight in showing friends the old
> neighborhood anytime our travels took us that way;
> it so resembled the image of a rough L.A. 'hood.
> It was sadly important to me as a young man to
> craft some sort of dramatic back story for myself,
> always a little embarrassed of how truly boring my
> short life's history was.
>
> What made my neighborhood look such a mess was its
> cleft by the stalled construction of the 105
> freeway, running from just beyond our back fence
> all the way to the airport ten or fifteen miles
> away.
>
> A swath of real estate cleared for road
> construction took out four streets abreast just
> the other side of our little backyard's brick
> wall.
>
> My earliest childhood memories are of this
> neighborhood slowly being drained of its
> inhabitants, selling their homes to the state and
> moving away.
>
> The houses weren't demolished; rather they were
> cut from their foundation's and carted away in the
> furtive early morning hours.
>
> Sometimes we would stay up late to watch. Few
> things are as disorienting as the sight of a home,
> the very symbol of stability, mounted on a trailer
> and hauled away. My faint, earliest memories are
> of a complete community of small, well tended
> homes lining cul-de-sacs of about a dozen homes a
> piece; by the time I left home years later the
> scar running through the center of our area would
> be complete, but construction on the freeway would
> still have not begun.
>
>
>
>
> We called the vast open area of vacant lots dotted
> with the occasional abandoned house the
> "wastelands." Some owners would resist selling to
> the end, the last of them existing exposed in the
> middle of the cleared land, lonely frontier
> outposts of a settlement in retreat.
>
> The wastelands provided the ultimate environment
> for a youth of drug use and truancy. We laid claim
> to certain abandoned houses as meeting places,
> mounting an underground resistance against the
> L.A. County Sheriff's Department and their ever
> present helicopter. The helicopter was viewed as
> some kind of alien spaceship, with all manner of
> observatory capability. Its infrared capabilities
> were the stuff of legend. It would come buzzing
> in, a sinister, giant mechanical insect, with its
> spotlight sweeping the ground below as it homed in
> on us, and we would scatter like the mute rabble
> fleeing the army of gorillas in Planet of the
> Apes.
>
> For the most part we were harmless. We just wanted
> to get high, and in the period of my adolescence
> there were a variety of means available for this.
> This was before crack; in fact I would escape to
> the military as the technique of free basing
> cocaine, which would presage the crack epidemic of
> the eighties, was becoming widespread.
>
> P.C.P. in the form of Angel Dust would be the
> first hard drug wave to encroach on our lives, and
> I found myself smack in the middle of it.
>
> I'm still not sure what P.C.P. is made of;
> elephant tranquilizer it is said, and somehow this
> didn't dissuade us from trying it, nor did it
> discourage some adults from involving us in its
> packaging and sale.
>
> Angel Dust was P.C.P. soaked mint leaf powder, for
> smoking. It gave off powerful fumes, vaguely
> reminiscent of a a fuel, or formaldehyde.
>
> One night we would break up a pound of it, down
> into the gram units that retailed for ten dollars
> apiece, at a friend's kitchen table, the fumes
> getting us all high.
>
> The next day the owner would find his parrot, kept
> in a cage nearby, laying dead in its cage.
>
> It was also available in liquid form. For a price
> you could dip a cigarette in a vial of it. For
> some reason an upscale brand of cigarette,
> Sherman's, were the preferred type, when soaked
> they were called "sherm sticks." If you preferred
> menthol Kools, you might have a "super kool."
>
> It tended to give one a feeling of euphoria and
> ease strangely coupled with a sense of
> invincibility that could sometimes go terribly
> wrong, leading to bizarre psychotic episodes.
>
> A rash of police shootings would accompany the
> Angel Dust epidemic; "dusters" would try to take
> on anybody who came close, including armed
> policemen, often showing a desire to strip naked
> and attempt physically impossible (and pointless)
> feats.
>
> One acquaintance of ours would try to climb a
> telephone pole before the police managed to corral
> him. No doubt the cops took some liberties with
> the phenomenon, for a time it seemed to happen
> weekly; one defense argument offered up in the
> Rodney King beating case was that the police
> thought he was a duster, and his behavior was
> certainly consistent with one. My experiences of
> the time now give me a skepticism toward the oft
> leveled charges of institutional police brutality
> as well as an appreciation of the sometimes
> untenable situations we place cops in on a daily
> basis. When I was young, however, they were the
> enemy.
>
> Who were my allies in this insurgency?
>
> There is a type of humor; bland, base, darkly
> vulgar, which is common among white males of the
> criminal subculture.
>
> These are people who are often referred to as
> white trash.
>
> They usually have done some time in prison; their
> time outside of an institution is often more
> reprieve than release, and their return is,
> usually, inevitable.
>
> There comes with it an accent and inflection that
> transcend region. Incorporating black slang and
> rhythm unselfconsciously, filtered through
> ineradicable residue of deep seated
> lumpen-proletariat origins, it is the sound of the
> penitentiary.
>
> This posture is completed by a certain look, as
> unmistakable and inimitable as the foul effects of
> poor hygiene and diet which mark someone long
> homeless. This look is where we get the phrase
> slack-jawed from, and the phrase is remarkably
> apt. Someone somewhere must have a theory
> explaining the tendency of the lower jaw to hang
> slack from the face of the pathologically
> delinquent.
>
> The attitude these traits garnish is one of
> unfocused defiance. This defiance is not political
> though it resists the rule of law. It is an
> unconscious recognition of one's lack of morality,
> one's base nature, one's narcissism. It mocks
> conventional morality. It is the socialization
> that takes place outside of the mainstream, in the
> wretched outback of poverty and ignorance, akin to
> that of the geographically remote such as
> hillbillies, though it flourishes in our midst.
>
> There is another, closely related type of humor:
> mirthless, taunting, disturbingly deprecatory of
> everything, which is common to the vato, the
> Chicano gang banger. It is less humor than a
> brutality of manners, seeking to strangle any and
> all that is remotely foreign to the narrow
> conceptions of the barrio. This is the humor of
> the cholo, and it is little more than a gob of
> spit in the face of the culture and manners of the
> gavacho, or Caucasian.
>
> Strangely, you would find these types, the white
> trash and the vato, mingling with one another on
> the streets of my old neighborhood, striking up
> alliances and even friendships as they found
> common criminal cause.
>
> It wasn't uncommon to find a disheveled white punk
> with "White Power" tattoos partnered up with a
> Mexican gang banger in chinos and plain white
> undershirt.
>
> What they had in common was a more or less
> complete lack of amenability to society.
>
> Learning was not only undervalued; it was
> discouraged and denigrated as, depending on one's
> particular point of view, selling out or as
> effete.
>
> Physical bravery and audacity were valued above
> all else with the approving label, crazy, as in,
> "you don't want to mess with him, he's crazy."
>
> The cholos would claim their superiority in their
> graffitti taunts with the ubiquitous term mas
> loco; as in lil' Boxer, Varrio Neighborhood, 13,
> mas loco. (The lil' abbreviation meant little and
> was normally given to a junior gang member who
> took up a name already claimed by a veterano, or
> simply to a very young or small member. There was
> a time when I was, jokingly, called lil' Alf
> because of my small stature, and before that lil'
> Groucho because of an entirely unfair comparison
> to Groucho Marx that was the result of my getting
> an unfashionably short haircut one summer.)
>
>
>
> Most of us who would drift into this subculture
> would eventually find our way out. Some, however,
> were destined to die in it, and usually at a very
> young age. These were marked early on, and it was
> plainly evident that they weren't going to settle
> down to a quiet life. They would end up
> incarcerated or dead by violence or drug addiction
> well before middle age calmed them.
>
>
>
> I had a friend growing up who was as decent and
> honorable as anyone I knew up to that point in my
> life. He and his father were movie buffs of a
> sort. It seemed every weekend they went to see
> something (this was long before the VCR).
>
> His old man was a legendary crank; big, gruff, and
> scary.
>
> There were stories, unverified but believable:
> once when the mother of one of his kid's friends
> made a pretext of coming to the door to borrow a
> cup of sugar (this sort of thing was still
> possible in those days) in hopes of striking up a
> conversation he wordlessly shut the door in her
> face; he had once fired off a high powered handgun
> at some cats that were digging around in his
> garbage, cutting one in half. His love of film was
> incongruous in light of this image. Every Monday
> at school I would listen with keen interest and
> envy as my friend would describe that weekend's
> film. Fatherless myself, it never occurred to me
> to envy the relationship he had with his father,
> but now I realize it was a remarkable bond, one
> that most of us didn't have with our parents.
>
> There were three sons in the family, my friend
> being the youngest. I would say they were as
> different as night and day but I need a third
> pole. They were night, day, and twilight.
>
> There was a classic middle son who was cowardly
> and thoroughly unprincipled. He was a would-be con
> man, always running some kind of second rate scam,
> and an inveterate thief. As a juvenile delinquent
> I would spend time hanging around with him later.
> I suspect he is dead now, as his need to involve
> himself in every manner of criminal activity
> combined with a complete lack of physical bravery
> and toughness did not bode well. There was always
> an air of the amateur about him. He was aspiring
> to things he had no business with, but it was
> obvious that a normal life involving work and
> family would never be possible for him. It was a
> depressing inevitability that I recognize now in
> retrospect.
>
> The oldest son I didn't know well. He was in jail
> more often than not. The offenses were serious,
> armed robbery and the like. He was thoroughly
> criminal. He had survived a stabbing that should
> have killed him, and lifting his shirt could show
> you a collection of train track scars that proved
> it. It happened in a bar fight and apparently his
> attacker did not so much stab as slash him,
> deeply. He had been hastily stitched back together
> and the welt like, cross hatched scars had a
> Frankenstein look to them.
>
> His older sister, unintelligent and prone to
> superstition, conjectured that he had been spared
> because he was to father a child somewhere down
> the line who would one day achieve something
> great.
>
> Hilariously, there was no question that there was
> no direct benefit to humanity in his survival. The
> last time I saw him he was headed back to prison
> on a parole violation. Its okay, he said, he would
> be rejoining his friends.
>
> The youngest and the oldest brother were as
> different as night and day, and the middle brother
> was somewhere in the nether region in between,
> idolizing the oldest and sadly lacking the
> character of the youngest. Knowing them is one of
> the reasons I would eventually fall on the nature
> side of the nature/nurture debate, in spite of a
> lifetime of being taught the opposite. It remains
> for me, like so many other experiences in my life,
> irrefutable evidence, a rude real life rejoinder
> for the misty sentiment of the blank slate
> thesis.
>
> Love your children, support them, make them feel
> worthy and you have done well. But know that
> nature's torments aren't limited to disaster and
> disease. Sometimes the vileness she hurls at us
> comes in the form of a helpless infant. Sometimes
> that precious child is a foul bud which reveals
> itself gradually, in stages. The human penchant
> for cruelty doesn't find a neat, flat level as
> water in a vessel but pools up in the various
> recesses of our complex and uneven human nature,
> sometimes finding a deep pocket in the heart of a
> deviant.
>
>
>
>
> My parents came to California sometime around 1960
> with my then infant eldest brother, and my
> father's (no doubt presumptuous) certainty that
> his experience as a military policeman would land
> a job with the expanding LAPD. That this next part
> isn't a family secret is evidence, like a
> nonexistent pulse, that the family that should be
> jealously guarding it is dead. Regardless; my
> father failed the psychological evaluation for
> entrance into the LAPD. Upon hearing this many
> years after his death (news of which was belatedly
> received, by years for some of us, as well) his
> eldest son, who knew him as I didn't, chuckled and
> said, "maybe there's something to those
> psychological tests."
>
> We were the people to whom things happened. We
> created nothing and left no real impression. We
> surfed the wake of the creative and ambitious
> across an ocean, tramped behind them across a
> pristine continent, and settled in to toil in
> their concerns. We settled in, because we are
> adapted to nothing so much as rooting ourselves to
> a spot, any habitable land. The farms had passed
> into the hands of the capable to be made
> efficient; the same would happen with the
> industries, and our modest worth would be halved
> again. A subsequent decline in our numbers is the
> only decent result; as for us, we'll be taken care
> of, made comfortable, granted every liberty, even,
> who knows, there's always a chance the name could
> rally somewhere, like in some absurd film wherein
> a pair of morons give birth to a genius. This is
> not a lament, not a complaint. We haven't pulled
> our weight for generations. This is our atrophy.
>
> We thought we were moving toward something, up a
> gentle incline perhaps (because we love nothing so
> much as a gentle incline, the gentler the better),
> but we were fleeing this whole time, because
> that's what dread and mobility combined are,
> flight. We were fleeing those who have been
> gradually displacing us for centuries: the smarter
> or the harder working, the sturdier stock; that is
> to say, the worthy.
>
> This line, like many, runs out of momentum at the
> far edge of the world's last continent. Farther
> afield and more glorious a place than any of my
> dim-witted ancestors, or me, their dim-witted
> progeny, has any right to expect. We ran out of
> room at the Pacific; unable to keep going and
> impervious to the occurrence of an idea, we
> settled into our dull torpor, and we amuse
> ourselves fading away.
>
>
>
>
> Mario
> Mario went insane. I didn’t know the sane Mario;
> we grew up in the same neighborhood but he was
> about four years my senior.
>
> I got to know Mario after the sudden onset of
> serial hallucinations would torment him; after a
> stay in Norwalk’s Metropolitan State Hospital
> (an institution for the mentally ill, “metro”
> in our parlance named not only the place but was
> convenient shorthand for someone going off the
> deep end); but before he managed to gain a hearing
> in civil court where he filed suit against an
> actress from a legendary seventies television
> series, seeking damages for his mental anguish
> suffered as a result of her tormenting him with
> witchcraft.
>
> Our neighborhood was bounded on the west by the
> San Gabriel River. The San Gabriel only sometimes
> resembles a river. In the summer it is less than a
> creek, a trickle really, running down the center
> of a massive concrete flood control channel. We
> used to call it the “riverbed”, and that would
> have been an accurate description of what that
> part of the San Gabriel was, a dry riverbed,
> before they encased it in concrete to better drain
> off the flood waters that came down from the San
> Gabriel Mountains on days of heavy rain, emptying
> into the ocean near Long Beach about ten miles
> southwest of my home. It seems every winter in
> Southern California someone is swept away in one
> of these rain swollen rivers, usually kids who
> can't resist floating a raft in the swift
> current.
>
> The riverbed was a solid geographic barrier at
> which our row of streets dead-ended. Mario lived
> on the last house remaining on one of these
> cul-de-sacs. Two houses, vacant and boarded up,
> shared what was left of his street. On the next
> street, two lonely homes remained, just behind
> his. In one of these lived the three brothers I
> mentioned; across the street from them lived
> Kenny.
>
>
>
> Kenny
> Kenny went insane.
>
> Kenny was a year or two older than I, a friend who
> ran with my group.
>
> Kenny was a big strong, ruddy kid. He had the
> torso of a beer keg, and a deep but childlike
> laugh. He was smart, but goofy. When Kenny told a
> story he always embellished it with vocalized
> sound effects (his stories invariably included
> features that required this), so much so that it
> became a running joke. Kenny could never describe
> the flight of a ball or the rude meeting of an ass
> with the ground without providing an attempted
> re-creation of the sound made or the sound an
> otherwise silent event should have made. He had a
> spatial-logic oriented sort of intelligence. He
> would have made a good engineer given the chance,
> and he also had a gift for musical instruments,
> teaching himself to play the guitar when he was
> young. Kenny was the only guy I ever knew to play
> the mandolin.
>
> After having run with our clique of stoners for a
> while he cleaned up, avoiding drugs and alcohol.
> He became a born-again Christian. At first he
> managed to keep his good humor intact, even though
> he had that morbid and naive fascination with the
> Book of Revelations. But he soon started obsessing
> over eschatology. It was from him that I first
> learned the superstition about Reagan's full name;
> six letters in each, Ronald Wilson Reagan: 666. He
> became obsessed with this. Soon he was developing
> theories about how bible prophecy would play out
> soon in the end of the world.
>
> Periodically I would run into him, sometimes at
> night near his house in the vacant lots that I cut
> through to get home. He always seemed to be
> lurking about the shadows there. He would engage
> in manic, semi-coherent expostulations that went
> nowhere; always finding signs that portended the
> end of the world, all fit into Revelation
> prophecy.
>
> One of the most chilling memories I have is
> listening to him as he stood under the shadow of a
> tree at night, a featureless black silhouette,
> possessed of that peculiar schizophrenic energy as
> he foretold the end of the world made obvious by
> the most intricate pattern of evidence.
>
> He described a vision he’d had, in the middle of
> the day among a group of friends, of an angel
> falling from the sky. Something about it happening
> in the daytime, among sane people, when he should
> have been safe from his madness, scared the hell
> out of me. This was the moment I realized, in my
> slow fashion, that Kenny was gone.
>
> He would steadily get worse; at some point he
> began having the hallucination of being raped by
> an incubus. One day his mother would turn up at
> the neighbors (the home of the three brothers);
> beside herself because he had shut himself in the
> closet the day before and still hadn’t come
> out.
>
> Unlike Mario, Kenny's insanity was immediately
> apparent. I would run into him again after an
> interval of several years; now clearly a man who
> had spent his entire adult life with a severe
> mental illness. Still a hulking physical presence,
> with a full beard long untouched and wild black
> hair, he looked like Rasputin. His intricate
> theories had now given way to dull, uninspired
> nonsense. He had been at it a long time; his manic
> energies had ebbed. That deep laugh of his had
> become a nervous affect, punctuating everything he
> said. For all I know he is still there, in
> Norwalk.
>
> Kenny’s slide into insanity had taken a matter
> of months from its first un-foreshadowed
> stirrings. We had all done heavy drugs, so there
> was some speculation that his mental illness was
> related to his use of acid or angel dust, but the
> fact of the matter was Kenny took in much less
> poison than the rest of us. Kenny was a naive but
> thoroughly decent guy; guileless, creative, and
> unassuming. Kenny deserved better.
>
> I had always harbored an unreasonable suspicion of
> that place where Kenny, Mario, and the three
> brothers lived, a cluster of homes standing at the
> end of a pair of decimated streets like the
> remnants of a bombed out landscape, abutting a
> fake river; of these three remaining homes in two
> of them young men would become hallucinatory
> schizophrenics and in the other was raised up a
> true sociopath.
>
>
>
> Mario
> From what I gathered in my conversations with
> Mario, his sanity deserted him for good one night
> in his bedroom.
>
> That was when the famous television actress came
> to him.
>
> I don’t remember if he thought he'd had sex with
> her or not; his visions usually entailed her
> tormenting him by engaging in sex acts with other
> men, and worse.
>
> Somehow he deduced from this that she was in love
> with him, and that if only he made contact with
> her she would acknowledge this and they would live
> together happily, once she had somehow disposed of
> her less famous husband, a handsome television
> actor.
>
> This was before John Hinckley would try to
> assassinate Ronald Reagan in an attempt to get the
> attention of Jodie Foster. I imagine that nowadays
> someone with his particular obsession would be
> watched more carefully, but Mario was given a
> government stipend and a court ordered regimen of
> therapy and medication, after he got out of
> Metro.
>
> I told you of my shiftless friend, the middle
> brother (a classic Fredo character). I always knew
> I could find my friend at Mario’s house on the
> first and fifteenth of the month when Mario got
> his government check; in Mario's front yard Dave
> would be swilling beer bought by freshly scrounged
> money, and Mario might be holding forth on his
> certain to be shortly realized wealth as the
> actress’s husband, once he had made contact and
> convinced her who he was.
>
> The strange thing about Mario was that he was a
> relatively intelligent guy; articulate and, well,
> cool, in the sense that he had style and poise. He
> believed in his delusions nonchalantly; it never
> seemed to occur to him that others found him
> crazy. On more than one occasion I saw him
> suddenly go into his rap about the actress before
> someone who had up to that point no reason to
> doubt his sanity. Oddly, we all humored him,
> always. I don't recall anyone ever pointing out to
> Mario that he was crazy. That doesn't mean it
> didn't happen; it may have. I do know that those
> of us who hung around him didn't; we indulged
> him.
>
> He functioned normally for the most part, though
> he didn't work. He had a car that he used to take
> us to the beach; he even went out at night
> sometimes. Once we found ourselves at a home among
> some white-power types; they had no problem with
> me but it was only a matter of time before one of
> them turned on Mario, a Mexican. We somehow
> managed to talk our way out of there; but I
> couldn’t help noticing how much more harmless
> the certifiably insane Mario was compared to these
> common criminals.
>
> He lived at home with his parents, but they were
> so much in the background that I can’t recall
> their faces. In fact, one thing that stands out in
> my memory of a youth filled with drugs and petty
> crime and countless hours whiled away in general
> malice is the near complete absence of adults. We
> were a sub-culture, a separate society,
> parasitical to but independent of the honest law
> abiding world of our parents.
>
> Eventually Mario's parents sold their home and he
> left the neighborhood.
>
> A little while later a short news article in the
> now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner (now the
> nostalgia's coming on strong) would tell of the
> kook who filed suit in Norwalk Superior Court
> against the television actress, appearing with a
> stack of books on witchcraft and an impressively
> researched case, humored briefly before the judge
> turned him away.
>
>
>
> Vernon
> The riverbed was bordered by a bike path. It
> provided a great pedestrian highway, and a way of
> moving about furtively at night. If you were
> chased by the police, you would make for the
> riverbed if at all possible; usually the L.A.
> County Sheriff’s deputies weren’t willing to
> give foot chase through the sand, over the chain
> link fence, down the embankment and then, if
> necessary, across the shallow water and into
> Downey, the jursidiction of its own police
> department. Somehow they knew we weren’t master
> criminals that might potentially yield a career
> making bust. The Sheriff’s helicopter ruled the
> night skies anyway, if they really wanted you.
>
>
>
> There were stories of a man walking around the
> riverbed at night dressed like a vampire. Wearing
> fake plastic fangs and a Halloween costume cape,
> friends of mine would tell of coming upon and
> harassing him; he would flash his fangs and flare
> his cape. Some of the older kids knew who he was,
> an oddball who had attended Norwalk High School a
> few years before; he claimed he was a wizard and
> even came to school dressed in his outfit (how he
> survived that is beyond me, maybe he did have
> magic powers). My older brother knew of him.
> “That’s Vernon Butts.”
>
>
>
> Around 1980 a serial killer, known as the "Freeway
> Strangler," was abducting teenage boys from the
> streets of L.A. and Orange Counties, sexually
> molesting and garroting them before leaving them
> on the side of the road. His youngest victim was
> twelve. He would eventually be caught, a truck
> driver living in Downey. He had three accomplices
> who helped with various murders. His main
> accomplice was Vernon Butts, who assisted with six
> murders and would hang himself in a jail cell
> before going to trial.
>
> This next part is where it gets weird for me.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Drugs
> I was in the back of a car, loaded on something, I
> don’t remember what, looking down at my scrawny
> arms. I was curious that they seemed alien, as if
> they weren’t my own. I couldn’t feel them. I
> was sure I couldn’t move them if I tried, though
> I couldn’t bring myself to try. I could feel the
> weight of them in my lap; but I couldn’t find
> them sensately, wracking my brain for their
> background signal. I took this all in with dull
> amusement.
>
> Outside my window Interstate Five existed as a red
> and white blur of motion and smeared electric
> light as we passed streetlamps of crystalline
> light blooms suspended on giant concrete stalks.
> The cars left trails of red, stretched, as if
> squeezing themselves through a constricting
> atmosphere. If I could see them as elongated by
> movement, weren’t they in fact? Were we moving?
> I couldn’t tell. It seemed the whole world was
> in motion, swirling around us, its axis. We were
> heading north to Azusa Canyon.
>
>
>
>
> It was the drugs that defined my youth; they were
> our currency and culture. There were the base
> elements: marijuana, alcohol, tobacco; hardly
> drugs at all. One advanced through the harder
> stuff, as far as his sense of adventure took him:
> cocaine, amphetamines, acid; PCP in its various
> forms: angel dust, cannebinol, sherm; an
> occasional specialty item like psilocybin
> mushrooms; free basing and crack would come later.
> And all the while heroin was lurking in the
> background, like an old pervert waiting in the
> shadows for the kids to get just wasted enough to
> have no inhibitions left.
>
> But I wouldn’t be around for that; I had already
> made my own circuit through the drug culture and
> arrived, mostly unscathed, at something like late
> adolescence with nothing more than a residual
> affinity for smoking pot.
>
> No great tale of addiction and redemption here. I
> lived a certain way for a time; I stopped after a
> while, a rational decision, or more like a series
> of rational decisions becoming a new way of life,
> a new strategy. There was no crescendo, no plot
> point, no realization and triumphant march into
> the light of day; just eventual exhaustion and a
> gradual drifting away. It was boredom that drew me
> in, and it was boredom, as much as anything else,
> that delivered me from it.
>
> We weren’t looking to escape reality, or the
> hopelessness of our lives. It wasn’t self
> destructive behavior; it was merely reckless. We
> were bored; rebelling against tedium. We went in
> for the experience. As for me, I remember being
> very keen on any sort of derangement of
> perception. “Tripping.” Drugs were the means,
> novelty was the end.
>
> I first started smoking marijuana when I was about
> twelve. I soon realized that I could pay for my
> indulgence by selling joints. Back then you could
> buy an ounce of cheap Mexican pot for ten dollars,
> roll as many as forty joints and sell them for
> fifty cents a piece to your fellow junior high
> school students; leaving you ten dollars for your
> next bag, some pocket change for yourself, and
> whatever was left you smoked. I started saving up,
> and worked my way up to buying by the pound,
> selling ounces. I would eventually branch out into
> other product lines, all on a very small scale. I
> never got far. The idea that people get rich
> selling drugs on the street is a myth perpetuated
> by phony street-tough rappers.
>
> I took pride in my business, such as it was. From
> the start I was known for carrying a superior
> product than my main rival at Corvallis Junior
> High. Rob, a friend of mine, was something of a
> freeloader, earning the nickname “Radar”
> because he always seemed to show up whenever there
> was someone else’s stash to smoke. We competed
> for the individual joint retail in the eighth
> grade. He couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t,
> compete with me for quality, rolling smaller
> joints with more stems and seeds. I cleaned my
> stash, rolling mine a little fatter; I became
> expert at rolling a tight, even burning cigarette.
> Aside from a means of income selling for me was a
> way of achieving a level of social status, not
> high but higher than a shy and timid kid would
> manage otherwise.
>
> In the early days it was a communal experience.
> Much of the appeal was in the event; in the
> conspiracy of it and in the ritual of the circle,
> passing a joint around. Marijuana is the ultimate
> adolescent high; its appeal has roots in childhood
> memories of the warm maternal embrace, in its
> tendency to enhance music and humor, the
> camaraderie of shared experience. If it’s good
> stuff and doesn’t promote paranoia, it has the
> effect of pushing to the margins whatever concerns
> a user has. For this reason it persists as a
> popular, less demanding alternative to alcohol for
> many young to middle aged adults. I certainly
> don’t promote it; as a parent I engage in the
> same hypocrisy of many of my generation, living in
> perpetual dread, lecturing on the evils of all
> drugs. In reality, I know too many potheads who
> hold down good jobs, pay their taxes, and support
> families to feel that its continuing
> criminalization is anything other than a costly
> and unnecessary prohibition.
>
> In the first few years it was all innocent enough.
> The Southern California summers were carpeted with
> dried out golden brown grass and steaming heat
> softened asphalt swept repeatedly by an ever
> present sun; girls were starting to appear, as if
> emerging from the landscape, wearing cut off
> shorts and halter tops, their soft scent and
> smooth skin leaving us helpless, all of it hinting
> that a bottomless mystery was opening up before
> us. The days were endless, we lived in flip flops
> and ragged clothes, baked and bleached by the sun;
> half wild and semi-socialized. Not a care in the
> world. We didn’t know we lived in a brief
> respite anticipating an endless grind. The
> eighties were right around the corner.
>
>
>
> The nights were different.
>
> The nights were sinister.
>
> The nights swept you up in a maelstrom and left
> you wherever you happened to be when the momentum
> stopped.
>
> One evening Dave, the wannabe con man who was
> always seeking alliances and connections, and I
> found ourselves in a strange apartment.
>
> Two older guys sat at a table covered with a pile
> of ground mint leaves they were rolling into very
> thin joints, “pinners.”
>
> The scent of the mint leaves mingled with a heavy
> chemical odor. This was my introduction to angel
> dust.
>
> We took to calling the high “gumby” because of
> the overall numbing effect it had. Phencyclidine
> (PCP) was originally developed as an anesthetic,
> but was abandoned because of a high incidence of
> psychotic reactions. It would later surface as an
> animal tranquilizer.
>
> Three things happen to you when under the
> influence: you become more or less impervious to
> pain; you feel physical euphoria that makes you
> think you’re capable of great athletic feats;
> and you feel an increased confidence as
> nervousness and inhibition fade away. It is both a
> stimulant and a depressant at once, somehow.
> Legends of “dusters” experiencing violent
> psychotic episodes were everywhere in the early
> days of the “epidemic” that would sweep L.A.
> County in the late seventies. The stories were
> overblown. I personally never saw anyone have a
> violent reaction.
>
>
>
> I hate to say it, but as I remember it, a PCP high
> is glorious. I always felt as if I was walking on
> six inches of air; taller, stronger, lighter. I
> was supremely confident. Perhaps the best part was
> that all fear of girls vanished. An awkward kid
> became Mr. Seduction. This was all an illusion, of
> course. PCP has a numbing effect, relaxing the
> facial muscles, giving one a sleepy, drooling
> look.
>
> Gumby.
>
> It was true that one felt invincible when under
> the influence. Once a large group of us indulged
> in one long dust induced night of recreational
> fighting; we flew through the air attempting
> leaping kung fu kicks; we wrestled and punched
> each other laughing like idiots; walking along the
> riverbed, we pushed one another down the tall
> concrete bank on one side or the short dirt and
> gravel hill on the other. I awoke the next morning
> a mass of bruises, scrapes, and pains.
>
> We started selling it, buying ounces and retailing
> grams at ten dollars a go. After dust had been on
> the market for a while some started showing signs
> of repeated use: slurred speech, vacuous stares,
> slack jaws. We took to calling them “mummies.”
>
>
>
>
> Geezing
> “Tighter.” My brother said, leaning in toward
> me, through a peculiar sort of bad breath.
>
> I noticed that all the geezers had the same type
> of sour breath, which seemed to come out of them
> once they had shot up. Was it possible that the
> drug was leaching out of the blood vessels in
> their lungs, that quickly?
>
> “Tighter.” He said again.
>
> With both hands I was choking his upper arm,
> between what was left of his bicep and a bony
> shoulder.
>
> I was serving as a tourniquet, restricting the
> blood flow to the vein he was injecting with
> heroin, or maybe a cocaine/heroin mixture, a
> “speedball.” I don’t recall exactly.
>
> My friend Pete and I had stumbled into the
> gathering, taking place in the garage of my
> mother’s house in Norwalk. Years before I had
> converted the garage into my room, lining it with
> mismatched wood paneling I had stripped out of
> vacant houses in the wastelands. After I started
> spending most of my time at a girlfriend’s it
> would be taken over and trashed by my brother and
> his companions. When blackened spoons started
> showing up in the garage I at first didn’t know
> what it meant. This was new; the opening of the
> sinister final chapter of the volume that was our
> pointless, failed adolescence. Those spoons were
> like the early indications of a terminal illness.
>
> The one thing I never allowed myself to consider
> was injecting anything. Heroin was offered to me,
> but there was never any question; I knew I
> wouldn’t go that far. We had our own local
> vernacular for intravenous drug use: geezing,
> junkies were geezers. Pete and I jokingly referred
> to my brother’s crew of nascent junkies as the
> “Geezinslaw Brothers”, after a country &
> western band.
>
> Pete and I stumbled out of the dank, gloomy
> garage, disoriented and squinting in the harsh
> light of day. Pete insisted he had somehow
> acquired a contact high just from being in there.
> It can’t be true, but Pete isn’t known for
> getting crazy ideas.
>
> I had withdrawn from it all by that point; whether
> by dumb luck or intuition, it was just as things
> were getting ugly. People started overdosing.
>
>
>
> Bub
> Bub was, in the words of one of his fellow
> slack-jawed types, the “craziest white boy I
> ever met.” It was apt.
>
> Growing up in a mixed Latino/white neighborhood
> one learns early on that Hispanics, generally,
> possess a higher degree of physical bravery. A few
> of them appear to be naturally fearless. Bub was
> the only white kid I remember from the
> neighborhood to have that kind of courage. He was
> as noble and brave in his way as he was vulgar,
> dim, and incurious. He had a sense of honor; he
> also had distaste for all things intellectual,
> seeing them as effete. He lived with his mother, a
> scatter-brained prescription junkie herself.
> Shortly after I stopped hanging around, he started
> geezing. He died of an overdose one night, a
> speedball. He was probably about twenty one years
> old, leaving behind an infant. He was the first to
> go. He’s been gone now about as long as he was
> alive.
>
> Even before it all began there was one incredibly
> stupid thing that kids were doing: sniffing paint,
> which was popular with some of the cholos for some
> reason, most comically it seemed because they
> already had the paint cans handy for graffitti.
> You would occasionally see an esse breathing
> through a balled up sock saturated with paint,
> sometimes sniffing with one hand and tagging with
> the other. Glue and paint sniffing might be the
> single most idiotic example of human behavior, and
> seems a natural concomitant of graffitti.
>
> Years later in Okinawa my friend Harry and I were
> sitting on the seawall down the hill from our base
> in Futenma, polishing off a bottle of something
> and lying to each other about all we would
> accomplish when we got out of the service. Some
> Okinawans showed up; kids, friendly and curious
> with a little English at their command. We started
> talking. Another group of Okinawans appeared; more
> kids, carrying large, clear plastic bags
> containing some sort of colorless liquid. They
> were inhaling from the bags, and were obviously
> very high. Our new friends exchanged words with
> them, things got heated, and before we knew it we
> were standing in the middle of what resembled a
> Hong Kong action film. All about us five foot tall
> Okinawan adolescents were throwing roundhouse
> kicks and precision blows. Our kung fu friends
> vanquished the glue sniffers.
>
> I was a couple of years and half the circumference
> of the earth removed from the neighborhood.
>
> It was a fitting, belated denouement.
Attachments:

He's Delusional Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Mr. Misery Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > when I was very young my mother got depressed
> and
> > lied on the couch for a long time, like a
> couple
> > months. I thought she was dying.
>
>
> Do you think your mental illness was passed onto
> you genetically?


Bingo!

Mr. Misery Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> one last early memory is when my old Mexican
> grandma came and started hitting me because I
> couldn't stop crying one time when my mother was
> sick with shingles and I had to stay over at
> Mexican grandma's house. Mexican grandma was
> always mean. Terrible, terrible old woman. My
> mother was gone for a long time with the shingles.


At least grandma is dead now

I doubt his family knows the full extent of how much he trashed them all here.