Tape title stories

 The TR3 experiment                                                                     in dreams      Somehow in 1968 with a miraculous acceptance to UCLA in hand I was able to talk my Dad into shelling out $800 to buy me a beat up sports car with mechanical problems to match the cool look it had from the outside. It was a 1960 TR3 and it is so bitchen looking Jay Leno himself says it is one of his favorite cars out of his ninety automobiles. It should have been a chick magnet but the rag top was damaged and hung down in front of the passenger seat. When you got up to driving speed that made a tunnel of gritty wind rush into the face of any rider. Also, the car is built very close to the ground and the noise inside the cab made listening to conversation or music near impossible. It also had a terrib...

 BC discount       We grew up in a system now called white privilege but in fact it was only certain whites with the privilege. BC was a street-wise man who went to the school of hard knocks on North Broadway where kids had no protection from bullies and future criminals. As expected, he was an aggressive and successful kid salesman when he peddled newspapers like the Los Angeles Exmainier or the Evening Herald. As a promotion the newspaper gave out fancy change aprons to top sellers with a battery attached that lit up the name on the front. BC says he kept it less than an hour before some thugs took it away from him and left him on the ground with a pain in his gut. He learned to make friends with "the right people" and that did not always include the most moral folks in the fold. He was not a bully but he knew tough guys who would protect him after he helped them sneak through an unlocked door for a big fight at the Vernon Arena or acquire some bootleg gin or Canad...

 Scotty's Wisdom      Since we were last inside the South Gate institution of Ashton's Market why leave when such insight into the mysteries of the universe are available right there. The thing about Ashton's was that it was like the geographic center of the Gate with the Hogan residence just Billy-steps away and Disa working practically next door at the Bank of America. Across the street was the painful dentist Dr. Schecter who I shamefully stiffed after he repaired a wreck of the teeth in my twenty-something mouth. While old Chuck Ashton founded and oversaw the market it was run by his sons and a ne'r do well mentioned before as "Scotty." This Scotsman was a very good pal of John Barleycorn  and was reduced to peddling a bicycle around town since his drunk driving convictions had stripped him of his liscense and area cops knew him by sight. Normally, if they saw him in an automobile they could assume he was sozzled. However, this inebriate Jock was  popul...

 It's no good to be white anymore!       South Gate's intellectual experience was not like Oxford or Harvard unless you are talking about Oxford, Mississippi and Harvard, Nebraska. When the city began to turn brown there was the expected reaction by lots of plain folk with little experience with the world outside Atlantic, Alamdeda, Firestone and Bullis road. The area once known as Home Gardens was comprised of 100% white folk with some "nice" Mexicans sliding in because they owned businesses or sent their kids to Catholic school. These same residents who could count their Gate roots way back to 1946 seemed to think they came over on the Mayflower and racial slurs were fairly common around Tweedy boulevard. There were three Jewish families, a handful of hispanic homeowners and the real estate was redlined. It wasn't like it was a sundown town officially but it was in spirit. Little did I know that my classmates and good pals like Gomez, Miranda, Lopez and Garcia w...

 An Ill-advised trip to the Conejo      I believe history has proven that decisions made under the innfluence of drugs or alcohol or a combination of both may not be wise. This took place in the 1970's when so many poor drug-addled selections ended in complete disaster. There was the time I talked to a UCSB Co-ed on the phone at my salesman job on a Thursday and drove up there on Saturday morning with a bag of weed, a gallon of cheap red wine, and a water pipe. I called her number when I arrived in "the American Riviera" expecting a hero's welcome and probably a wild weekend of drugs, sex and rock and roll. Instead I got a stuttering faceful of no I have to study with a touch of what kind of weirdo would do something like this. There was also the time when Greg, finding himself getting nowhere with a crush he had on a fellow UCLA student asked her if she was a lesbian. She was not. Hayo! Of course, long miserable returns from Tijuana were the end results of making a...

 Boy Did I get a wrong number      Very sound life lessons in this tale that involves one of the many missteps in romance I took during the desperate years in my 20's and 30's. Once upon a time Maureen was a wonderful host and a kind tutor when she taught at UCLA. She had a nice apartment very near campus I think near Sepulveda boulevard and she invited me to a cocktail party up there as I had depended on her to pass my Italian classes at UCLA and I lived in the old hometown in South Gate where a social life was non-existant. Most of the guests there were somewhat over my head intellectually and also older than my very immature 30-somehing. I was pretty happy with myself, having achieved the very difficult to get post at Central Library. I was on my way and I needed a mate to share my good fortune with and become a family man. At the party there was actually only one woman in my age group and she was tall and attrractive. Her name was Marla Brown. I really did not t...

 the Magical Chicken     OK...so I had to dig through some brain damaged history to write Greg posts sometimes but once in a while one  just pops out of the old free-jazz subconscious. Maybe it is the time of the year or the fact I am soon getting on a plane to travel away from my refuge against the confederacy of dunces soon. Normal people get excited when they are going to travel but I only dread the challenges of  flight times, connections, shuttles, seat numbers and places full of oblivious people who seem to think I am just another dumb boomer. I like cats better than people and am mostly content to sit in my chair just like my good old buddy loved his leather throne. I also tantalize the grim reaper by continuing to drink a drill every single night that leaves me giddy for maybe an hour, followed by a gradual drowsiness. That probably sounds appalling to most people but I never was one of those folks. When I was younger I was thrilled to get on a poorly m...

  First day       My twelve year old heart was pounding despite lying on the bottom of my numb, late-blooming body. My Mom’s Grecian gray 59 Chevy station wagon matched the color of my state of mind as the journey to my new school was nearing the dreaded end. We had hit the driveway, rolling past the convent and the classrooms of Our Lady of Guadalupe were in sight. Tears rolled down my face as my worst nightmare was taking place. It was the culmination of several worried months in the kid-golden Summer of 1959. First there were whispers, then grumbling, threats, crying and finally the irrefutable decision by our tyrannical father to rip out our happy American dream childhood and move to Orange county.   Our blue collar suburb was no longer good enough for this family on the illuminated highway , later called white flight toward the south. It might as well have been Dante’s “vestibule of the futile” for any of we children or my pouting Mother to stop th...

  one hundred dollars for that picture      Somewhere back in time there are a few fine young people, nicely stoned and focused on a sweet Simon and Garfunkel song drifting out of some cheap Pioneer speakers maybe on Marshallfield Lane or Seminole or Saturn street. Old friends, winter companions, the old men Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset The sounds of the city sifting through trees Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends Can you imagine us years from today Sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be 70 Old friends, memory brushes the same years Silently sharing the same fears What made the classic album and beautiful songs even more poignant were the recorded "voices of old people" that preceded the song, speaking about what their lives had become. Greg was probably 18 and I was 23 when we repeated the words "I've little in this world, I would give honestly without regret one hundred dollars for that picture."  It was...

 We don't piece here     We used to berate ourselves and say we were pussy suburban privileged white kids but that was only partially true. It certainly is a better description of my work history than Greg's who sometimes joined the working men in parts yard or factory. The problem with many of us in the Boomer generation was we wanted to be hippies because that was where the fun and chicks were but we also wantd to have some money to pay for fun and take those hippy chicks out for beer and pizza pie. In my case I lasted exactly one day in the glass bottle factory of Owens-Illinois over on Fruitland in Vernon. It was a BC involved hire and I assumed I would be in an office taking orders over the phone but instead I reported at 6;30 am to the factory where I moved cases of empty milk bottles off a box car and onto a conveyor belt at a speed that kept you sweating. The noise was absolutely deafening as the embossing machine was just feet away and each bottle stamped caused...

  One True Friend                         when the ocean was monochrome “If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.” ―  S.E. Hinton      Closing in on a terrible anniversary now and I am still floundering in the void. What makes these days even more dismal is another memory, ten years before when my  spirit was scuttled and sunk to the bottom of a very deep ocean. After ten years I still cannot understand how my mind became so utterly engulfed in anxiety, then depression that became a six month journey through mental health hell. It began with a diagnosis of sleep apnea, then a phobia about CPAP machines, then a complete meltdown of emotional fragility where I could not eat solid food or stand to be alone in my own home. Every day was a torture without anything I could hang onto in the maelstrom that were my thoughts. I lost fifty po...

  "Teach your children well" Teach your children well Their father's hell did slowly go by Feed them on your dreams The one they pick's the one you'll know by Don't you ever ask them why If they told you, you would cry So just look at them and sigh And kno w they love you" "Teach Your Children"- Crosby, Still and Nash      First it was a phone call on this day, then a text message asking Greg if his children had honored him on this sacred Father's day? His answer ranged from hell no! to "I hope not" that reflected his belief  that the day was a phony, made-up sham to justify florists selling lots of arrangements for Mother's Day which he also ignored and disparaged. I know he loved his red-headed offspring and enjoyed spending time with them more than any necktie or wicked slippers could demonstrate. Poor Lissy endured the rigors of childbirth twice and never got as much as a molasses chip for her motherhood, except for the oth...

  but not of them      The value of a liberal education was evident in our dear friend who  illuminated  the most unlikely subjects by describing them in terms drawn from great literature. This episode involved sitting in the bleachers at Dodger stadium, the left-field bleachers where we sat for a buck and a half in the resurgent 1974 season. After being in the doldrums for too many Summers the team had acquired Jimmy Wynn "The Toy Cannon" and a jerk wih a screwball named Mike Marshall who pitched in an unheard ot 106 games that season. We also had two strong starting pitchers in Don "Sonny Boy" Sutton and Andy Messerschmidt along with the new star of Steve "another asshole" Garvey who knocked in runs. It was a time of dominance by the Cinncinnatti Reds Big Red Machine but this year we overachieved and won 102 games and the National League pennant. So, the point is that going out to the stadium was fun again and we went to quite a few games, sitting in lef...

 the Summer of 42      While Greg had a fine career as an Architect and worked his entire life without any bum periods I feel he may have missed his true calling. The man had an uncanny ability to recall and recite lines of dialogue from stage, film and TV scenes that strummed his heart-strings. I mean he could mesmerize our group when he was moved to repeat the  introduction to "the Fall of the House of Usher," or scenes from "Double Solitaire" with a deep emotional expression. I could ask him to answer a line from the underrated film adaptation of Moby Dick by saying "Was it not Moby Dick that took off your leg?" His face would redden like he was expressing angst and he would moan "Aye...twas Moby Dick!" We have heard before about his tavern recitation that caused his cousin Evan to be booted from the Sunshine Meat, Fish and liquor Company and suffer a lifetime ban but these performances were rare. Dutch courage might help but his monologues w...

 An Early Hibernian Obsession                                       the McCabe daughters with Mom Nora      Growing up hetero was not always easy despite an entire society set up to make the journey one of lollipops and rainbows. Most of us started to notice girls around 5th grade and by 6th grade we were overmatched. I recall the Halloween scene at St. Helen's where the cutest girl in school dressed as a princess, wore lipstick and struck about a dozen boys smitten to the levels where we would do anything just to stare into her blue eyes. It will be another story about my obsession and failed attempt to win the heart of Jean Lowe but this blog is about Greg and he suffered the same malady that the rest of us young fellers were gripped by throughout our tween years. Greg matured earlier than I did but unfortunately was schooled by very poor role models who feared the rejec...

 the Roulette Wheel      It does seem ironic that Greg and I discussed death a lot, even in our salad days when we were just playing with the concept of mortality. We got a little more serious in 1992 when we saw our father's close their mortal accounts. Then the thunderbolt of Ed Carroll's untimely death in 2007 really gave us pause and increased our imagining of what this would be like to just cease being. Greg used to say it was simply "the cessation of sensation" but behind that sentence are gallons of tears, wails of despair and countless hours of paralyzing sorrow. We move forward in life holding onto one another and when that grip loosens the challenge to continue can be terrible. Over all the years there was one concept we shared however and that was the great roulette wheel of life. This was no "wheel of fortune" where we might win an outboard motor boat but the possibility of greeting the new day with a forboding impairment. It might be a troubled...

  hawaiian sellout      There is a quote by the great Dodger hero Roy Campanella that says "you need to have a lot of little boy in you to play baseball for a living." You could say that about a great number of activities in our adult lives from laughing at farts to being fascinated by balls moving about a TV screen. However, there was nothing as basic to the men and women, boys and girls in these posts as spirited games of "hawaiian sellout" The term comes from a hilarious Firesign Theater sketch where contestants play a game called hawaiian sell out that ends with the greediest player getting a prize of a big bag of shit. Since we often quoted silly Firesign sentences that everybody but nobody truly understood we plucked the nonsense title out of our subconscious to describe a game we began playing out of sheer boredom in the old crash pad on Midvale. All hawaiian sellout entails is any kind of wadded up piece of paper, cloth or soft nerf ball that is bat...