Project 2 Archives

Lance Is Finished...

(Second of four parts of the 'Life On Roseton' Series..)

It came to me as a Christmas Present. Stingray style, banana seat and a tall sissy bar with a fat slick tire on the back. I could not have been more pleased with anything in the world. As proud as I was of it, it wasn’t a Schwinn Stingray, It was a Royce Union Stingray. I would find myself defending it repeatedly to my peers at the school bike lockers as Royce Union was the knock off brand, and Schwinn was the recognized hot bike. Close, but not close enough for the ‘in crowd’.

I didn’t care what it did for my social status, it just beat the hell out of walking. I could now avoid most of the after school entanglements with the blessed application of leg powered acceleration. In one move, my parents had expanded my universe by another 10 miles in every direction. An hour on foot was equal to about 5 miles. On a bike, it was 15. I could now in theory, make it to the Long Beach Airport on my own. I could in theory almost make it to the beach. My head swelled at the opportunities the bike presented. I daydreamed of riding all the way to San Simeon to visit my grandparents, yet it was a full 150 miles and two entire mountain ranges away. The logic of it didn’t matter, I had discovered the value of personal mobility in maintaining a persons sense of freedom.

I went everywhere and did everything on my bike. Any excuse to mount the bike and go somewhere and I was off in a second. If someone needed a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk, it was my task to go get it. The original paint didn’t last long because of the wear and tear I managed to inflict and I took great pride in the metal flake candy apple green spray paint that I replaced it with after the first year. I would ride through the neighborhood streets; do wheelies and “broadies” and jump ramps for hours on end.

The bike for all its joys it gave nearly killed me on two occasions; once I had taken the turn into our driveway a bit too fast, hit the curb and flipped. There were no helmets in those days and I was convinced that without the tall sissy bar, I would have been dead that very day. Instead I got up dazed, got right back on the bike and rode away.

The second time it nearly killed me, started at Hoov’s Liquors. Hoov’s was in the L-shaped strip mall at the corner of Centralia and Pioneer. It was at the far edge of the walking universe, and was also the closest store to my house, so even though it was technically a liquor store, it as more like a convenience store that also sold hard alcohol to shady characters. Milk, Bread, Cheese, Eggs – all the basics of life could be found in the deli case at Hoov’s. Add to that the fact that they were open 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year and you could always count on Hoov’s to solve the little accidental problems of daily life.

On one mission to Hoov’s to get a half-gallon of milk, I parked my bike outside and walked in. Hoov’s had a smell to it that is the same no matter what liquor store you walk into. It was a smell that partially comes from years of bad cigars, spilled liquor and the owners flop sweat that you don’t really know what it is when you are a kid, but you recognize it when you get older, it’s the smell of failure, shame and broken dreams. It’s a smell that you cannot get out of your clothes and you can never wash off your soul no matter how big the cake of lava soap is that you use. It’s the smell of shame with just a bit of the bitter piquant flavor of defeat. It’s the smell that makes you exhale when you sense it in a room, it’s the smell that would emanate from most episodes of “Cops” if there was such a thing as “smell-o-vision”. It’s a smell that doesn’t just come from the essence of spilled grain alcohol, it comes from the funk of the underarms of the broken souls of thousands of men who walked through the doors of the store, who gambled their mortgage away on a stupid horse race or fathered children only to abandon and neglected them. Liquor stores are the places where the hollow people self medicate their self-inflicted wounds. Unlike physical wounds, pouring alcohol into these wounds helps ensure that they stay infected, sometimes for generations.

I pulled the milk from the deli shelf and I paid the man behind the counter. He stood there behind the counter glassy eyed and preoccupied with other matters far away in time and space, took my quarters and went back to his own retail version of the soldiers thousand yard stare. I must’ve shopped at that store every day for nearly 4 years, he was always there, day in day out. I never once called him by his name or acknowledged him as a person, nor he I. He was not the mysterious “Hoov” and he was not the owner of the store. He was a ”minion”, it was his duty to serve. He was man who seemed trapped at Hoov’s, forced by pitiful circumstance to serve the damned in their desire to fill an unquenchable salvation. Somewhere in the past, a disaster occurred in a man’s life, and the result of the debris of that collision with reality was the ass end of a life spent in purgatory behind the counter at Hoov’s Liquor.

Somewhere in the past, a disappointed mother said to another with a heavy sigh: “ My son? Oh, he works behind the counter at Hoov’s Liquor store in Lakewood…”. The chain of shame that man wore around his neck will have added another link even if he wasn’t close enough to hear the comment between two mothers as the psychic link between all mothers and their sons is permanent and clear no matter the distance in time or space. I am sure it was not the life either of them wanted, but it was the life they got.

The door opened, the bell rang and the sight outside caused my heart fall out of my chest. It was gone. My bike was gone. The space that was filled with my bike was now empty as if I had somehow not taken it to the store at all. It was as if it had never been there. I stood there spinning in all directions looking for any sign of my bike. It wasn’t just my bike that was missing; it was my freedom that they had taken from me.

I walked home looking in the alleys and driveways, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of the bike. It was not to be. When I arrived, I expected the worst from my parents, but thankfully didn’t get it. I spent the evening with my dad, driving around the neighborhood in what to him must’ve seemed surely to be a fruitless search for the now missing bike. He knew what the bike meant to me, and knew that now was not the time to lecture me on how to lock my bike. He also knew he could not get me another bike for some time to come. I knew it too, but neither of us said as much, it didn’t need to be said.

I walked to school the next day and I hated every step. I walked past the bike lockers and waited, hoping I would see the bike and yet, I did not. When they heard the news, my fellow stingray bikers felt my pain. Some speculated that now maybe I could get the Schwinn at last, but retracted the thought when they understood the true nature of my predicament. I was lucky to get the Royce Union, now having lost it, my chances of getting something better were next to nil. Truth be told, I didn’t want the Schwinn, I didn’t want another Royce Union, I wanted that bike. I wanted the Candy Apple Green bike that I knew every part of and had painted myself. I wanted the bike that was a part of me, not some other bike that I had to break in all over again.

By lunch, rumors had begun to surface. The bike had been seen. I discounted it at first, finally accepting my loss. My cousin Patrick, finally confirmed that he had a good source who swore he saw the bike. Patrick was my best friend and my "wingman". I think the loss of my bike affected him as much as it did me.

“Lance Has It”, he whispered to me across his shoulder as I sat behind his desk while Mr. Dutwiler, the social studies teacher looked the other way.

I stared back at him with the gravity of what that meant. Lance… That’s Just Great I thought and said under my breath. It’s not just that my bike has been stolen, but its been stolen by the biggest pain-in-the-ass in Artesia and Lakewood. Red hair, freckle faced, green eyes and teeth, same clothes every day, never wore socks or underwear. A kid, who even older kids avoided as he was just-freakin-trouble. There was no good news wherever Lance was and there was usually nothing but debris where he had been. He stole, He swore, He swindled, abused, wrote graffiti, smoked cigarettes and popped the tires on the teachers cars all before the 5th grade. For Lance, his sniffing glue seemed like only an improvement to his general situation. He was, in a word “Evil”. Everyone avoided him at all costs, including and especially adults. Lance didn’t just pop out of the ground one day, he was created, and the people who created him were far worse than Lance. Lance was the up and coming evil, there was a whole horde of “older Lances”, some in Prison, some out of Prison, but all bad.

The thing about people like Lance isn’t just that there are people like Lance, but the cloud of ‘hangers on’ that tend to bask in their reflected glory. It was the mob that stood behind Lance that always worried me, not Lance by himself. Lance was just one guy, but his mob was big and his influence through his brothers was nothing short of mafia like in its reach. You didn’t just take on Lance, you took on the whole mob, Lance knew it and exploited it whenever he could.

“Maybe you should just let it go...” Pat said as he shuffled his feet in the cold open hallway as we went between classes. I stared at him, gritted my teeth as my face went redder by the moment and asked him “Could you?” "How about I ride your bike home and you walk for awhile”. Pat knew what I meant and he knew what I was going to do, he was just trying to keep me from doing it. Pat knew something I didn’t know, by my deciding to get my bike back at any cost, it meant that Pat was automatically involved. It was my Bike, but I was his cousin. There are some things more important to protect than the things we own.

After school, I started off towards Lances “compound” down the street from the front gates of Willow School. Most of us lived in homes and houses, but families like Lances lived in “compounds”. Lakewood had once been a farm town of mostly dairies before it became the newest set of homes added to the greater LA suburban sprawl. In the older section of our part of town the older farmhouses still existed side by side with the newer L-shaped suburban homes. Lance and his family lived in one of the largest and most dilapidated of the older homes. It had not seen a coat of new paint since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean. It had cars on blocks and refrigerators and other debris all about the property and no lawn that could be determined. A broken fence line of barbed wire topped with “Keep out – Private Property” signs could be found at each corner. Streetlights within line of sight of the compound were always shot out, and celebratory gunfire regularly came from that place.

As I started out of the school towards Lances “compound”, my cousin directed the now gathering crowd behind me. It was lost to me in my self-determined tunnel vision, but apparently many people knew that Lance had my bike and had guessed before even I knew what my reaction would be. As I walked the block and a half, stingrays of every type began to report to me as they drove by “ He’s there, He’s got it, we saw it…Whatcha gonna do? Are you going to go get it?’ My rage fueled further by the thought of that skanky bastard sitting on my bicycle seat.

I stood across the street of the compound and looked inside between the oleander bushes and willow trees that obscured the front of the house. There on the old style covered porch, was an old washing machine, a derelict and chewed up sofa, cases of empty beer bottles, Lance, his assorted minions armed with rocks and slingshots, and my bike.

All that stood between me getting my bike back was a pack of Lances armed baboons, a barb-wire fence with a chain link gate and some dogs.

Lance and I didn’t notice at first, but a crowd was gathering. One of Lances minions pointed to the gathering, Lance then turned around and saw me standing there at the gate. He might have had my bike, but I was his target all along. The bike was just a way to get my attention. Now that I had arrived, the rest of his plan could take place.

He walked off the porch steps and onto the dirt at the front his house, stretched his arms out and with a big green toothed grin shouted for all to hear:

“Hey THERE Smartasssssss!!!, You like my new bike!!!?” His mob laughed out loud as he bucked over in laughter at my predicament.

He wasn’t saying it for me, it was for all the other kids, the ones on the porch and the ones gathered on the street. The message was clear, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, and I’m going to prove it to you, (just watch and learn…).

I stared at him, I drilled a hole right through is freckled forehead. Now that the adrenaline had kicked in, if there was a time to back away and get an adult to solve it that was gone now. It was gone the minute I saw my bike on his porch.

“Give it back Lance”, I said to him. It was the dumbest thing I ever said. As if this green toothed greasy headed spawn of Satan would just hand me back my bike on command. What was I thinking?

I was completely unaware of anything else going on around me. Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that each of his minions had begun gathering projectiles to be thrown, grinning at the easy target just standing there in front of them. Lance was also focused, for had he been paying attention, he would have noticed Patrick busily distracting Lances dogs, quietly lowering Lances first line of defense by locking them in a dog run at the side of Lances compound. Patrick knew what was going to happen before I did, even the crowd knew before Lance and I did, even though Lance and I were right in the middle it was as if we were the last ones invited to the dance. Lance might have also noticed that he forgot to lock the gate, something that did not escape my focus.

"Why don’t you just come in here and take it from me then, eh smartasssss?” He hissed and giggled and mocked. I hated being mocked, Lance just knew that no one ever went inside the compound. Lance had dogs, guns, big criminal brothers and absolutely no moral compunction from holding back the use of any of them, Lance had used terror and threats to control his little part of the world for a long time. Lance was used to people backing down when threatened. Parents backed down from Lance, Teachers and Principals backed away from Lance.

I didn’t back down. A smarter kid might have, but I didn’t. I took two steps forward, opened the chain link gate and just walked in like I knew what I was doing. It was stupid, it was a total frontal attack. It was also the last thing anyone, including and especially Lance ever expected anyone to do. He stood there in utter shock as I entered the compound. Once I crossed the threshold, it was open combat. Bottles, rocks, sticks and screams of “GET HIM!!!” came from all corners of the compound, yet Lance stood there with a look of shock, I had called his bluff, I had simply entered his compound, no one had ever done that before. He was confused and rattled right away at my surprising first step inside; Why was I coming for him? Where were his dogs? Why were the rocks and bottles not stopping me? Didn’t I see his mob? I was oblivious to all targets, except Lance. He ran backwards towards the porch to tried to take cover behind the derelict sofa. I chased him barely touching the steps of the porch as I flew up after him. I wasn’t after my bike anymore, I was after Lance. When I pulled him from behind the sofa and threw him over the porch onto the dirt of the front of his house, he knew it. His mob began to get into the act, the occasional rock and bottle landing on my head and back as my fists and feet were landing with rapid descent on Lance. Patrick, now returned from his task of distracting the dogs now came to my aid. “GET THEM OFF ME, PAT!!!” I shouted at him as the thrown projectiles landed on me. He bounded over the fence with several friends and just the sight of it caused the mob to break their lines. They fled in close pursuit by my cousin and several others looking for their own form of retribution.

I never stopped beating the hell out of Lance, it was just a blur of action. I enjoyed every minute of it. All the years of terror, the hiding, the sneaking around to avoid him. The humiliation we all faced at his hands was over with every smack my fists made to his bleeding face. He whimpered out to the crowd for help and sympathy that never came and never would come, they were his victims, all of us had suffered at his hands, and on that day the bill came due for Lance. The crowd seeing their former menace now covered in blood and urine would never again look at him as the icon to be feared as much as the creature to be pitied. I stopped to catch my breath as he tried to crawl away across the dog turd covered dirt that marked the threshold between street and the porch of Lances compound. I stood up and walked to the porch, picked up my bike by the center brace and walked back to the now supine Lance, as he lay defeated on his own home ground.

I leaned over, and within an inch of his spit and blood covered face came three words out of my bloodied mouth as I pointed at my bike:

“ My Bike Lance..” . It was my bike, but it was really my freedom. I stood, wanting to kick him with rage, but finally seeing him for the sad creature he was, just walked away instead. I opened the gate, walked out of the compound, never to return. He howled loudly as I walked away, almost as if calling me back to finish him off, but it was a just a call for a mother who would never come to salve his wounds.

Lance and his crew having flattened the tire of my bike caused me to lose the ability to ride away in victory, so I just walked with my bike beside me as the adrenaline wore off and the bruises sprang up. My eye began to swell shut and my cuts bled from the rocks, bottles and sticks thrown by the mob. It didn’t matter to me, I had my bike, I had recovered my freedom. The dirt of the yard and my sweat mixed on my lips as they swelled and I began to check to see if I lost any teeth. I didn’t care if I did, I had my bike and in the end that was all that mattered.

“Come on man, let’s get you cleaned up” Pat said breathlessly as he came up from behind me, finally catching up with me after all that had been done. I didn’t realize how bad I had been injured until he said that. We went to Pats house, which was just down the street from my house and he helped me clean the wounds. As we sat at the kitchen of my cousin’s house, Pat filled me in on the rest of the action that had happened. Even though I had been in the middle of it, I was just a small part of a bigger battle. It would grow even bigger by reputation over the next few days as time and distance from the actual events would grow the event into a scene something akin to the Normandy invasion.

“Jeez, what happened to you”? My older cousin Richard said as he came around the corner, seeing his younger bother and his cousin looking like we had fallen out of the back of a dump truck. Richard, Pats older brother in high school, the hipster beach boy surfer dude was only too familiar with Lance and his family as during his time he too had come to blows many times with Lances older brothers, who were now away spending time in some prison somewhere.

“Lance is finished” Pat said with a smile to no one in particular but for everyone to hear. “ He screwed up and stole Franks bike, and he paid a big price for it”. Richard looked on at our wounds and whistled in surprise, and instantly understood the wider implications of our actions. “I better call Uncle Bruce, Lances dad is likely to want to take it out on someone”. Richard would explain the history of Lances family to my Dad and prepare him for my arrival.

As he reached for the phone to call my dad, he looked back at us and said:

“You did good kid!” He gave me the thumbs up sign.
“ Thanks. Tell my dad I’ll be home in a while“, I said back to him with a wave, my eye finally closing from the bruises.

Pat and I shook hands and smiled. Just getting recognition from Richard was a major coup, but getting kudos, well that was unbelievable. I walked home alone that night, my wounded bike at my side and was afraid of nothing along the way. As I crossed the lawn of our house, my Dad met me at the door and said. “ Well, I see you got your bike back!”. He said it dryly, yet with a booming pride to all that could hear. “You’re damn right I did”. I shot back. It was the first time I cussed in front of my Dad. He just laughed and slapped me on the back with a big embrace.

“You did good kid…”. He said quietly as he hugged me.

“You did good kid…”. I heard it twice, in one day no less.

Posted @ December 20, 2004 07:08 PM | Project 2 | Comments (5)

Leaving Roseton Avenue

They dropped it on me on the last day of the Sixth Grade. Expressed with only two words, it was contemplated conspiratorially between my parents without our knowledge. They secretly developed this plan one evening a few weeks earlier at the kitchen table after my sisters and I had gone asleep. While my sisters and I dreamt of the petty politics of the schoolyard, my parents had decided on a course of action that would have consequences in all of our lives for a generation. There was no more thought to discuss this major life event with my sisters and I, than there would be by most people to discuss such a thing with their pets.

“We’re moving”, they said. Two simple words, and that’s all there was to it. It wasn’t a discussion of what the move would net us as a family in terms of its necessity, or what the adult problem was that caused the move to become necessary in the first place. It was just a simple straightforward fact of action, put into two words by my mother with extreme precision. “We’re Moving” she said, and move we did. There was no discussion, debate or contemplation. As kids, we were self-absorbed, we could only see what it meant to us personally, and not the agony that had caused the need to move to occur in the first place. For me, the words “ We’re Moving” were not unfamiliar. With the exception of those four years, my family and I had moved nearly every year, sometimes twice in the same year. I had learned the art of not being too friendly with my classmates or getting too comfortable with the teachers. I had learned the necessity of not unpacking.

My problem was that I had let down my guard. In the comfort of living in the same place for more than one year, I had unpacked. I had made friends, I had ‘made my bones’ in the playground battlefield. I had found a home. I had established myself and within the triangle shaped universe bounded by Centralia, Pioneer and Del Amo Boulevards, I was the kid who liked airplanes way too much, the kid who navigated the San Gabriel River Channel from Lakewood to Seal Beach, the kid who beat the bully Lance Herrigan to a bloody pulp( and enjoyed every minute of it), I was the kid so maniacal, he broke his arm playing soccer (a game played specifically and with purpose, with no hands at all).

And now, with two words and a snap of the fingers, I once again found myself "moving".

I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to the friends I had made in the four years we lived on Roseton Ave. My parents made their announcement to us after we had returned home from school and my Dad had come home from work. I knew that something was up when the living room of our house was filled with empty cardboard boxes. Throughout my life I’ve learned to dread cardboard boxes with the dread that the sight of sandbags gives to former flood victims or the way ER Nurses knowingly dislike Saturday nights, when there is a full Moon. I went to school that morning planning out the monumental leap to the 7th grade with my friends, I ended the day dealing with the heartless logistics of moving my possessions to another town far away that I had only visited once. What would stay, what would go, what was important, what was expendable, it was all the functions in the cold calculus of moving, played out in the bedroom of the place I had mistakenly thought was my home, but was really just another temporary camp. If you have ever moved, you know that no matter how well planned or executed, every move results in a loss. Something you deeply valued always gets left behind or broken. It’s in the calculus of moving, there’s no way to avoid it. You learn to expect it. You do your best to limit it, but it’s a guarantee that it will happen. No matter how well planned, something will be lost, and I’ve also learned that there’s no way to predict what it is you will lose.

You can move your things from place to place, but you can’t take what you put into a place with you. In the four years we were there on Roseton Ave, My dad and I had put up wallpaper, replaced plumbing, a front lawn and a rock walkway along the side of the house to the backyard. All hours of labor spent on someone else’s house as we were renters but it all made the house more livable for us. Today, there’s someone in a house in Lakewood California with a rock walkway that knows nothing of the summer that my father and I labored to turn what had been a siding of mud and dirt into something more serviceable. To them, it’s always been there and always will be. It was not until we made it so. One summer, my dad and I filled a truck with rock and concrete and converted what was dark slime and mud into a liveable patio. Please enjoy the fruits of our past labor current renters, that’s what we’d hope you’d do with it...

The rock walkway would not be coming with us, nor the wallpaper or paint or plumbing. It would stay with the house. The house was not ours, it was rented, as would be all the houses I lived in until I bought my own at the age of 30. All of our possessions would have to fit in the ‘68 Chevy truck that was my father’s main possession and the core of his persona. For a solid week, we fit and refit, changed and stacked and redirected the goods and possessions we had acquired in the time we had been at the house on Roseton Avenue. All of it under the close inspection of my father, the master mover and knot artist of his time. In my Fathers universe, you were simply not a man unless you could master knots and ropes and all other men were automatically suspect as to their abilities. All the boxes my sisters and I packed were inspected for its proper loading and placement on the truck. In spite of all the disruption of placing everything we owned into cardboard boxes taken from the back of grocery stores and then deciding what should go and what should stay, there was no fighting or arguing. My father’s word was law. There was no debate or discussion. He was fair and understanding when he could be but in the end the mission would be accomplished above all things. There was no room for sentiment in the bed of a Chevy, in the end, everything except the family itself was expendable and we knew it. On two previous occasions we had moved in the middle night to avoid the landlord and had quite literally, lost everything. We were put out and bothered that things were as such, but we knew that it could be much worse. This was bad, but it was not the worst. The worst would come later, only we didn’t know it at the time...

After seven days, we were packed, and it was done. We sat in the driveway, My Mom and my sisters in the Lincoln and I sat in my designated spot to the right of my father in the front seat of the truck. We sat and watched as my father stood in front of us,alone, on the long driveway as he looked back at the shell of a house that was just the week before, our home. We sat and watched, as he stood alone in the long driveway with his back to us. He stood there in his black boots, straight-legged Levis and simple white t-shirt. His white Budweiser fedora style hat in one hand, slowly smoking a last Benson and Hedges silently stroking his red-blonde goatee as he looked at what after all was said, had been his home as well. I always wondered what he saw when he looked back at the little house on Roseton, standing there in the open carport, his family and everything he owned in the world packed into one truck and a car just a few feet behind him. Three girls, one boy, a wife and a stack of cardboard boxes placed on the bed of his truck; the truck, made in Detroit, bought used and kept running by a man born just down the road in San Pedro who was now using it to move to body and soul to Sacramento. For just a moment there on that driveway, he must’ve been the loneliest man in the world with no one to carry the weight of it all but he himself. For far too long I thought him eager to leave, and blamed him for it. It’s only as of late that I’ve begun to understand the desperation he must’ve felt on that day. He never let on the pain it must’ve caused him. He just did his job and made sure we did ours.

We drove down Roseton Ave. for the last time, over the bump in the road, past the homes of friends we would never see again, past the places we had celebrated Christmas, Halloween parties and Cub Scout Den meetings, where we had played endless games of “army”. Past Willow Elementary and all I had survived there. At the end of the street was the Junior High that I would never attend. That school and the loss of it would haunt me as the ghost of a life that “might have been” but would never be. We turned left and were on to the freeway, and I would not return to Lakewood for another 10 years, by that time it would be to all still in Lakewood as if I had never been there at all.

Our destination was 500 miles to the north. Sacramento, a place I knew nothing about and had only visited once before. My mother’s grandfather had died there the year before and my mother had decided it was important for us to be near her grandmother. My grandfather had moved there because the fishing in the lakes and rivers was apparently very good. I had never fished and could not have cared less about the prospects of fishing. Here I was, watching my whole life growing smaller in the rear view mirror, because a man I hardly knew had admired the fishing in a far off lake and decided to move there, and then had the bad timing to die after he arrived there, leaving his widow lonely for the company of family, yet unwilling to leave her husband behind in the grave, causing his granddaughter to want to move there to solve "the problem". If he had died when they lived in Gardena just a few years earlier, we would still be in the house on Roseton Ave. Timing, as they say about most things in life, is everything. A man’s simple decision to improve his fishing prospects had the unintended consequence of disrupting my entire life. It wasn't planned that way, it just happened, again, like most things in life.

It was not how I had planned to spend my summer in 1972, but there it was. I went to school one day, and the world was changed for me before I came home. For weeks before they had announced it, they had been plotting the move. It wasnt just the move itself but the deception, although innocent and honest, that bothered me deeply. It would be years before I would trust my parents again. You see, in every move, you lose a little something. In this move, I lost the ability to trust my parents. Until this move, despite everything, I had managed to keep the faith, but after this move I could no longer see the logic or the sense of it. The loss I faced from this move lives on with me even today.

It’s been 30 years since that move. Today, I still have two things to remind me of that time, a propeller from a WWII Drone aircraft and a deep resentment towards two people who were really just making the best of a bad situation. While I’m not going to give up the prop for anything, it might be time for the sixth grade boy inside of me to find a way to let the folks off the hook for their acts from three decades ago.

Posted @ December 19, 2004 07:26 PM | Project 2 | Comments (4)

Backstory - Project 2

At the end of the last century, I was working at Hughes Electronics in El Segundo California. El Segundo is a post war LA suburb that you can see out of your aircraft as you sit on the south side of LAX. It’s marked by a few high-rise office buildings an oil refinery and a sewage treatment plant. That being said, it’s actually not a bad place, it has a nice beach, it’s near many things that are interesting to see and its kind of quiet and down homey for an LA suburb. For me, working in El Segundo was a way to get in touch with part of my past, as I was born in Torrance, my father in San Pedro. My uncle worked at North American in both El Segundo and the Downey plant during the 60’s and for most of the first 20 years of my mother’s life, she was never more than a mile from Rosecrans Ave.

I felt very much at home while I was there.

Since I was traveling on company money, I had a choice between staying at a hotel nearby or returning home each day. Returning home to Northern California wasn’t as odd as it seems, It actually was faster than my driving commute to the bay area. I would leave my house at 5:30 and arrive at the Hughes office at 7:45, having slept for the hour and 10 minute flight. Obviously, this was pre-9/11 as today it would take you that long just to clear security today. At the end of the day, I would reverse the process. Leave the office at 5:15 and be home at 7:30. Round trip flights for each were actually cheaper for the customer by about 100 dollars than staying over night. I didn’t mind the added luxury of having the little bit of time enough to have dinner at home, visit with the kids and sleep in my own bed everyday. Most of my consulting gigs have been in far off places like Pigsnuckle Arkansas or Boogerglop Yugoslavia, so being able to work as a consultant in the same time zone and be home every day was pretty cool.

Now, this is fine, but if you do it long enough it starts to take a toll, so I switched off and on with the traditional stay at a hotel and the ultra cool “fly home every day” plan. When I stayed in El Segundo, I found myself with lots of extra time on my hands. I’m also a bit of an insomniac, so I had a lot of time to fill. I also had a rental car, so what did I do? I drove around.

In my travels, I found the furniture factory on Figueroa that my dad worked at when I was a kid. I found an apartment in Compton that my family lived in after an abortive attempt to move to Nevada. I visited downtown LA to see some of the scenes of movies like “The Omega Man” and “Heat”. In one of my after work trips, I saw a building in downtown called “Clifton’s Cafeteria”. It looked like it had been there since the beginning of time. A week later while reading a book about weird things in LA, I came across the story of Clifford Clinton. Clifford Clinton was the owner of Clifton’s Cafeteria, a chain restaurant that started in the 1930’s. What I found most interesting is that this man created a restaurant chain in the midst of the depression that was based on the simple statement of “Dine Free Unless Delighted”. Soup lines, 20% unemployed and this guy decides to open a restaurant that actually dares you to not pay. What was amazing to me was that it apparently worked, because here I was 60 years later looking at the same company, with the same concept still in place.

At the time I thought to myself “ What balls this guy must’ve had”.

It turned out I didn’t know the half of it. At a time when LA politics was unbelievably dirty and the police force was in fact an armed gang, Clifford Clinton decides that he’s had enough with the corrupt mayor and starts a campaign to have him recalled. He starts and organization of fellow businessmen, engages the support of some in the media, even though the Mayor and the D.A. call him “public enemy #1”. The LAPD went so far as to bomb his house to stop him.

How did he do? He won! He took on LA City Hall, the LAPD and the LA Times and he won. Mayor Frank Shaw was the first big city mayor to be recalled by special election in a very long time and the entire LAPD was revamped after several of its leading officers were indicted and imprisoned because the corruption that Clifford “Dine Free Unless Delighted” Clinton uncovered and helped put a stop to.

I thought it made a pretty good story. There’s a lot to it. An honest family man risks his life to do his civic duty against a corrupt political machine and comes up a winner. He doesn’t become a celebrity or try to cash in on the fame; he just goes about his life. The story of Clifford Clinton is the story of “duty over self “and I think it’s a good story to tell.

When I was 12, I asked my dad a question about “doing the right thing”, I asked him, “ Should you always do the right thing “?
He looked straight at me with a laser like glare in his eyes and answered, “Yes”.
I pushed back and said, “Even if its hard"?
He grabbed me by the shoulders and held me about 6 inches from his face and said,"Especially if it’s hard, Frank. That’s when it counts the most."

When I was 12, my scale of “what hard was” was very different from what it is now that I’m 43. At the time he said what he said, I thought it was just parental gobbledy-gook, but now the older I get, the more I realize how right the old man was.

So it’s around the story of Clifford Clinton and the downfall of LA Mayor Frank Shaw that I’ve decided to try my hand at writing. Im not a historian and I want the flexibility to tell the story from my own perspective, so I will be telling a fictionalized version of the story. Since I’m also a part of the open source journalism world and I’m a blogger, I’ve decided to document what its like for me to do this. So, periodically I will post in this category what I’ve learned in writing this story, not just about the story itself, but the process of writing and what I’ve learned from the process.

Right now, I’m boning up on my knowledge of the Depression era with the book “The Great Depression”. I’ve also got an order in for Kevin Starrs The Dream Endures: California enters the 1940s.” I typically read 3 to 4 books a week, so I should be through with both of these this week. I’ve also decided that the story will be easier to write once I’ve got the characters themselves, So I’ve begun the process of creating backstory for each of the main characters in the story. The real life example gives me a pretty good template to start with as far as the main players, but I’m surprised at how much I have to fill in to make the story work. I’ve also created the story arc outline and I’ve created the first few chapters. My best estimate is that it should be in first draft status by the end of the year.

What’s the coolest thing I’ve dug up in my research this week? Telephone exchange names.

More to follow…

Posted @ November 16, 2004 11:10 PM | Project 2 | Comments (8)