Oasis - Part II

When Uncle Milt, Dad’s oldest living brother, and his wife, Ethyl arrived at Thompsonville, they were, to quote one of Mom’s favorite phrases, “straight out of the Grapes of Wrath.” And she should know. They were confirmed “Alkies,” another common phrase in our extended family gatherings. Alcohol, the snake, was always there, along with tobacco, “another nail in my coffin,” Roy would toss off the phrase like an epic boast out of Beowulf.

Sometimes Truth is not enough.

Dad put Milt and Ethyl and their two suitcases in a vacant apartment. Milt arose, facing a new day:  Cold turkey. As I shoveled the sand into the cement mixer, Milt formed up the dirt floor of the garage for the new “modern” floor. A huge man at more than 6’5”, thin, worn, and strung out from years of drinking, Milt went at the wild bamboo and the floor project with alacrity, an energy spewing like a geyser from the very depths of his Oaky heart.

This “Period Without Alcohol” had epic dimensions for a man who had drifted and drunk and drifted and now 55, without roots, with a suitcase of old shirts, a pair of khakis, and a pair of worn “Sunday” shoes, he faced his demons without a 12-Step Program, without God—without much of an inner life. Ethyl joined him in this valiant war against the snakes in their apartment and in their heads that, truly, were not there. But they were real.

Profound Courage, wrapped in brown paper and string.

I was watching a human drama, which with full perspective I see as truly a wonder. Two family members I long to meet again—and embrace.

One way to fight your demons, whatever they are, is work. Victor Frankl, in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, says we find meaning [logos] in work, in love and in suffering. These two people, right out of Steinbeck’s epic, put all three sources of meaning into play immediately.

Ethyl and Milt took a shift in the store/service station. Ethyl, an impeccable housekeeper, scrubbed the apartment to the real, original layer. They cleaned the station, arranged the “stock,” scoured the walls and, as Pop said, “made us proud.” A year later, when Mom came into an inheritance from relatives in Spain, Dad expanded his hopes:  Four new vacation trailers; and the now used trailers also lined-up, facing busy Highway 78. Capitalism on the go … dreams starting to come true.

Ethyl and Milt, now “clean,” turned attentions to their newly married daughter.

Love works. The suffering lay behind. “A bright new day was dawning,” says the poet.

The early morning Escondido fog settled gently all around us, only to burn off by 10 a.m. The halcyon days in Paradise. For all of us, Escondido, specifically Thompsonville, were an oasis with endless rows of date palms and melons. “Pardes” is a Persian word for Paradise, the place where suicide-obsessed Arabs who blow up themselves and others, long to go.  Paradise, “park or oasis”; a place of repose, a wine glass in one hand, at least 70 virgins undulating to the throb of Arab pipes and drums. Our Town.

Ritual organizes, informs, and shapes our ordinary lives. Dad played golf, but The Gillette Shaving Company added a new dimension to Homo Ludens. Playing Man, along with 14-year-old son and a tall, gentle giant named Sam Powers, gathered each Friday evening at Milt and Ethyl’s for Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. We discovered the choreographed violence of ancient Greece:  Boxing.

There we sat, in a circle of course [it was a ritual, you see, and circles are important in rituals]. Uncle Milt and Aunt Ethyl remained “clean” but never free of a new “habit” for me to observe:  Snuff. 

We read of snuff in the 17th and 18th century among the aristocracy. Like Cocaine, it entered the nose, immediately hitting the mouth blood vessels. An instant “hit.” Better than alcohol, if you have to choose between two different species of snakes. Another of Dad’s brother’s chawed; yes, chew and spit. Unless you’ve seen it in life action, you fail to fully understand Emma Smith’s frustration. "Yes, my house is also a house of order," she said. Amen.

Over the next three years, we must have absorbed 300 boxing matches. Always Americans, we rooted for the underdogs, the guys who probably should have graduated from high school and worked at Rexall Drug or Chewy’s Machine Shoppe.

Rooting often drifted towards racism. Dad remained quiet, hiding nascent and contradictory Oklahoma-bred feelings. I loved certain fighters because I was judging these “books” by their covers. Who could not root for Bobo Olson or Johnny Saxon [died in a mental institution], Vince Martinez, Kid Gavalin [the Cuban ‘bolo’ punching phenom from a "free" Cuba] and the Wild Italian Band:  Joey Giardello and Rocky Marciano.

For some reason, though, we collectively decided to root for a lad who was studying drama at Michigan State:  Chuck Davey. A southpaw, I don’t think he could actually “punch” his way out of the proverbial wet, paper bag.  He danced, however, and “jabbed,” danced and danced and danced. We hoped against hope that the left hand, held menacingly, was our "Great White Hope’s" Wunderwaffen. When he fought Kid Gavalin, we made it clear. This was a victory for “us,” for the USA. Gavalin’s Bolo punch was a wind-up toy, backed by the thrust-power of, say, the Energizer Bunny. Yet he knocked Chuck out with that punch. Chuck’s glass jaw shattered. For years I gave movie magazines a cursory glance, on the lookout for an Aspiring Young Actor.

Like the line in Raisin in the Sun, “Chuck never showed.” Gone, gone, as the German folksong goes, “gone to graves, everyone. Where are the young men [fighters] gone?”  To broken lives with broken brains and bodies.

This fading [hopefully] chapter of violence in my life is now “Clean.” For years I carried around purely biodegradable information. I thought—until the famous adolescent novel writer Peck visited Ricks College. Stuck with a primo horse’s rear, I invited Scott Samuelson over for help.  After cutting off his tobacco in my house and allowing him to nurse a flask of Jack Daniels while we tried to talk, Peck drifted into something else he “knew everything about.” Wrong. I don’t know where Scott got his knowledge of the boxers, but I knew he had some football lore under his eyelids. Like two street fighters, we mercilessly pummeled Peck until he finally folded against the ropes. Broken, he went outside for a long time and smoked his coffin nail. Scott and I hugged: Schadenfreude. Chuck Davey’s left hand hit home … finally.

Boxing? Never again. It ain’t a sport. Oh yes, confession. I agreed to watch a pay-for-view with friend, Jimmy Barrett. And what did we get? Big Mike Tyson [little voice, though] BITES the other guy’s EAR OFF. See what I mean about boxing as a sport?

The Milt and Ethyl Thompsons moved on and up.  Together with their son-in-law, they bought a trailer sales operation in San Bernardino, living another 10 years “clean” and comfortable.

Mom and Dad had reached out, and a tired five-acres of scattered tin trailers and apartments and an old Rio Grande Service station had saved two lost souls.

Oasis.

Oasis - Part I

Thompsonville was a strange oasis, a mere stopping place for some folks, just “moving through.” Dad awoke one night, for example, to pounding on the door. A dark, “gypsy-looking” lad asked in broken English if he could stay for a couple of days. “We don’t have any spaces right now,” Dad said. “ He went on to say we did have open territory, three areas, out in the “field behind the park … you can at least park for the night and get a shower.”

The next morning presented us with a whole caravan of gypsies! Michael, my youngest brother, is the best source of the gypsy episode, but I know it brought predictable outbursts of laughter for the rest of the folk’s life together. Who else could be so taken in by “he” and “they?" Only Pop, the host par excellence, the hospitable [from which we get the word “hospital” of course] who naturally lived out the word host [which in Sanskrit also means “guest”:  interesting flip flop, one in the same].

Dollie and ET were truly the Good Samaritans, those who simply waited for the wounded and downtrodden. Thompsonville proved more than a mere stopping place; for some it would be their final resting place.

The gypsies? You ask. Vague memories of a short stay. Kind, musical, an invitation into the “Other” for us kids. The young girls, two my age [11th grade] were swarthy, black-haired, dangerous-looking. One even carried a small dagger. The makings of a movie.

Then death came.

One of the boys, a 16-year-old, suddenly died. Nobody in Escondido was interested in paperwork, especially for anyone who was not white. The night THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS played an exhibition in our high school gym, they could NOT stay overnight in Escondido—24 miles from San Diego. In my Eisenhower-conservative bubble, ignorant in my white world, such things failed to ring a bell. It took a few years of reading and living among the Germans [who were certainly not black] to begin expanding that circle I was in. It had to expand—my mind and heart.

My own ignorance was as imprisoning as that retention camp, Manzanar, that lay a mere 10 miles away. I saw brown faces; I knew about Nazis, and I saw Mount Whitney in all her shining glory of 14,000 feet, scratching Heaven that day, but I did not see real human beings, thrown together like mackerel, living in tarpaper barracks, listening patiently to the constant anger of the relentless Mojave sandstorms …

Hell is ignorance.

There was no “investigation” of the strange death of an unknown “black” gypsy boy. But there was a feast and music and tears and all of Thompsonville, surrounding a pig, roasted in the deep sterile soil of our “field” in back. Jimmy Fugate, a mindless, chain-smoking, high school dropout was asked to “stand in” and “be” the son now lost. “I ain’t gonna have nothing to do with gypsies or whatever they call themselves, ‘Romans,’” he said. Romans.

There was dancing. Slow afoot and nervous about the mane of flying hair and the dagger, I stayed on the sidelines and quietly ate my roasted pork. That night the gypsies moved on—in the “middle” of the night, Mom said, “all at once and not a dime of rent.” Pop, who smoked a pipe occasionally, removed the Meerschaum—smoke floating across our kitchen. “One of life’s ‘Little experiences,’ Honey,” he said, looking back at the Herald Express.

Now as my mind meanders to 55 years ago, I see my journey more clearly. It appears I was a slow-grower, a late-budding California Boy.  The lessons of what Pop called, “the human condition” were deposited layer after layer, like steady snowfall on a glacier, season after season. In fact, we were all growing and changing. Christ and his Church was not our theme song, but the constant background music of our home, in spite of the motley world we lived in, the turbulence of bad nerves and the frenetic effort to make an honest living. We never ate a single meal together. Someone had to “watch the store.” Without that stabilizing communion-like family meal, we were fractured, but we communicated. We were free to, as a Faulkner character says, to “talk our hearts out till they reached some kind of truth.”

The “truth” about a lot of things. Diversity and Tolerance coming, slowly but surely …

Each night Dad would “count the day’s accounts.” Double-entry bookkeeping. Gene, my brother, was spokesman, a very slight hopeful tremor in his voice: “How did we do today, Dad?” Always gentle and keenly aware of a collective moment of bated breath, he felt the burden of inaudible anxiety. “We did $40 in the store,” he would say. I glanced over at the new General Electric television, the reception several thousand pixels added, crowding out more of the snow. With finality and the natural Italian-family-like melodrama that was the atmospheric condition in our home, I stood. “I will never go into business,” I said. “I want a real job, with a paycheck, a mortgage, and some predictability.”

Dad smiled, patient as always. “Well, son, you do what you can do. And this is what your mother and I do.” Such courage. Such belief in a socio-economic system that allowed a man his dream—no, only a small portion of his dream.  Like Willie Loman, this “Salesman” would never find the dream, but in the words of TJ Tolmam, speaking of such struggles:  “He kept on moving.” Yes,  "we survived," Mom would say, years later, slumped in her nursing home wheel chair. “What a blessing the Lord gave us. But I hated so much of it. But many of those people are still on my prayer and letter list.”


Next time I’ll explain again how Thompsonville was an oasis—a Brave New World for Uncle Milt and Aunt Ethyl, now penniless, drying out from a duet of bingeing, that had finally taken them to the garage, where on the shelf sat the last resort:  Wood alcohol.

Violence in Thompsonville - Part II

I end with the infamous attempted robbery of our little country market.  A wave of other kinds of violence washes over me as I write.  Too much pain, though.  An uncle who continued his alcoholic insult to his brilliant brain.  A beautiful girl who killed herself out of alcoholic despair; physical abuse.  Now we children have even come to piece together the puzzle of Thompsonville’s  violence.  Close quarters; little opportunity for modesty; long, hot summer nights; the relentless Santa Annas; the dead-end hopelessness for many.  Abuse—of another kind—dark, destructive, too painful to contemplate.

But people need a place to be.  My folks reached out with patience and tenderness.  Every alcoholic, every “busted” and going down, downer was still a human being—and a lesson.  They were our books and our parents, two well-read high school graduates, pointed out the lessons.  “See, Mike, how sad it is, when Marge asks every single day if the ‘mail has run,’ when we know she has never received a letter in all her years here.”  And then Marge buys a six-pack of beer at 10 in the morning and heads back to her lonely trailer.  And the Santa Anna winds.  Empathy.  Human suffering.

While in junior college, serving a stake mission, I was away more, but acutely aware of the real university of my life:  Family and Thompsonville.  Nothing prepared me, however, for the possibility of killing someone.

The event is simple.  Sundays, ET runs the store alone. I return from church, walk in the door and see a man with a gun.  “Run, son!”  I run to a telephone pole; I look back in time to see Dad leaping over the counter, locked in a death grip with a man a head taller.  A bullet goes through the window, a second well above the pole.  I hesitate, but in an instant, the man jumps in his car, under the steady barrage of Coke bottles, several exploding on the hood, then the departing trunk.  Mom and I converge, expecting the worst.  Dad, face taut and white with fear and anger, calls the police.  Robber apprehended 15 minutes later at the end of Highway 78.

“Dad,” if I had come in, we could have . . . .” Looking at me, he said, “yes, easily, the two of us.  Then I would have killed him.  That’s why you did the right thing.”  The lesson?  Obedience.  No death.  A lifetime of gratitude for our family and especially for Dad.  “It was the principle,” he said, “not the 60 dollars. No man is allowed to steal from another.  If things like that happen, we have no civilization.”

Violence in Thompsonville - Part I

The early 50s remain among the most exciting for me. Dollie turned her back on the high desert oasis and the background music of the daily sirocco.  We headed south, to Escondido, a Cadillac paradise of rolling hills, filling up with orange and avocado groves.

The Korean War, one of those “dirty little wars” that we never declare.  In fact, it was never called anything more than a “police action,” pitting inexhaustible numbers of suicidal Chinese soldiers and North Koreans, who, under Stalin’s sinister nod, invaded Soul, South Korea.

My brother Gene and I were nurtured on the war.  My essential war vocabulary [such critical knowledge] came out of a ritual reading of the Los Angeles Times each morning over burned eggs and toast.  Gene and I mastered the MIG 15 vs. F-86 “kill” ratios.  We cut out the daily scorecard in the corner of page 1.  Dad and the dictionary defined such important new words as “atrocity,” while Gene and I absorbed a whole panoply of weaponry:  T-34 tank, bazooka, M-1 rifle, the old and unreliable “Tommy Gun,” along with a now arcane geography:  Chosen Reservoir, Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, Pork Chop Hill, etc.  

One of my most emotional moments came when I open the Times, astounded, overjoyed to see an artist’s illustration of a plane that would change the police action in the air war:  The Super-Saber, the F-100.  Surely our kill ratios [which the paper said ranged as high as 15 [us] to 1 of  “them,“ [who, we later learned, were Russian and North Korean pilots] would climb. Gene “flew” around the house, fly swatter in hand, killing MIGs.  His kill ratio was 445 to 0.  Democracy was safe.

Meanwhile our new business endeavor proved to be a kind of economic Mulligan’s soup:  6 apartments [mostly Marine wives from nearby Camp Pendleton], a noisy tin service station [Rio Grande gas at 17 cents a gallon], our house/shack, propane, and an old-fashioned trailer park.  Those were the days when a trailer was 10-35 feet long, 8 feet wide, without a bathroom/shower.  We provided a laundry room, and what we blithely called the “utility” room.

With 20 trailers and the apartments always full, we founded a new village:  Thompsonville.  Dad stocked the random shelves with groceries, lowered the gas an astounding pit bullish 1 cent, eager for a “gas war” with the boys down the road.

This rich cross-section of people of every walk of life became our university, observed insightfully and generously by my parents.  Mom proved to be a “good little business gal,” as Dad complimented her.  The wind, mid-summer whipped us about—yes, the dreaded Santa Annas.  But every day the sea breeze from Del Mar, a mere 17 miles away, wafted over our little community. The reprieve that eased Dollie’s nerves, and kept us “outside,” where she wanted us to be as long as possible, out of the house, “under-foot,” as she put it.

Our first encounter with “violence” was occasional fistfights with the “trailer park” kids, as we called them. Dad, like a boxing referee, stayed between us and the “paying customers.”  A few years later, Gene would make history by taking six of a swarthy group of “Junior Marines” across the street to a ground water-fed pool about 4 feet deep.  “We’ll trow you in,” they threatened in some kind of eastern accent.  Gene, now lifting weights and playing endless rounds of “Conflict,” a board game, “begged” them to try.  They had one wooden gun and a vintage WW2 helmet among them, but he was “steamed” for an encounter.  Fortunately, he didn’t have to “kill” all six and there was no drowning.

Gene’s on-going antics soon turned inward.  Carol, our sister, always fighting for a place at the trough with three brothers, now rode a fast Western Flyer.  As she rode away, having called Gene a challenging name,” he self-narrated the “kill.”  With broom in hand, he muttered, “I just may be able, . . . just might.”  The broom sailed into the front spokes.  She tumbled head over handlebars, recovering by the end of the day with what the cowboy movies defined as “flesh wounds.”  Sad.  And she never got revenge.

The Gene-led onslaughts continued.  Legend has the “death machine” as a true trebuchet.   Recent research proves the “attack” on little Jimmy Lail’s trailer was led by Gene and Michael, our younger brother, now grown up enough to play “Conflict” and throw water balloons. They did not machine-launch, but Mohawk-style infiltrated Lil’ Jimmy’s 3x3 yard and blasted his trailer and him head-on.  Banzai.

In a panic, Lil’ Jimmy [5 feet tall, a dishwasher at Chico’s] banged on our door.  It was 8 o’clock—nearly midnight by my parent’s pre-geriatric biorhythms. “Someone’s having a ball, ET, throwin’ water balloons at my trailer.  And they hit me on the shoulder [possible wound-velocity, here] while I was sneakin’ over here.”

And there was other violence---serious violence.  Fist fights between Marines over the same wife; three “natural” deaths, a lot of beer-inspired threats over the miniature yards and fences.  An ET-enforced clean-up of the Conover’s yard, which involved two pickups and a dozen verbal threats from both daughter and father.  As we loaded, Dad hummed, “Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon,” a primo melody on the Friday night “Hit Parade” television show with Snookey Lanson.

When “Little Joe”[everybody got a name; my mother was usually the name-giver. Always bestowing a kind of motherly tenderness] had not appeared for three days, Mom worried.  He lived on two Hostess fried pies a day, and then walked the railroad tracks across the street with his dog.  Gone till dark, we figured he was following the tracks down to “Dago” [San Diego  in cool talk].  Dad broke through Joe’s screen and fell directly onto the bed.  Little Joe was dead.  The coroner looked in the door.  “We have a ripe one.  Bring a tank.”  The moment that hot summer afternoon never left me.

Others died:  “Captain” Clegg, a slow death, without family or money.  Mom nursed him the two days and nights to death’s door.  He passed, pith helmet in place.

Or “Captain Bair,” described dramatically and entirely hypothetically by Dollie as an “old captain from an old ship.”  While his wife lay dying inside of cancer, he put Cal, his stepson in a pup tent in the yard.  Nights he drove while Cal moved “smudge pots” around the city streets in repair.  The violence culminated with the Captain’s systematic whipping of smudgy-faced Cal with a garden hose, in front of all of us children.  When we told Dollie, she waited till mid-day, while the one-armed captain lay in a beer induced afternoon “coma.”

She called his sister in Maine, bought a 25 dollar Grey Hound ticket, made him three lunches and clandestinely drove young Cal to the bus depot.  Escape.  Justice.

The next day, we watched what Mom called a “conniption fit” as the now broken and slaveless captain ranted and raved. “Can you blame a man for going hostile, Dollie?!” he screamed.

Silence.

Dort Palifox, a fragile-looking Philipino, could open beer bottles with his teeth.  He died suddenly in his diminutive living room [or killed himself] when his 300 lb. wife, Dorothy, “up and left,” as we said.  He looked even smaller dead.

Because of ET’s generosity, the charges [“put it on my tab”] sometimes got out of hand.  It was amazing how irresponsible, misdirected people, living on a minimal salary could lose control.  That frustration surfaced—occasionally.  A “long, tall drink of water,” as Mom described Eddie French,  a six foot giant, who seemed to live on beer and Town Talk white bread, refused Dad’s quiet request for payment of a burgeoning stack of charges.  Suddenly hostile, Town Talk challenged Dad. “You little…you feel safe behind that counter telling me when to pay what I’m never gonna pay.”  Dad sprang up like Michael’s Christmas Jack-in-the-box.  “Let’s go over to the tracks, big guy, that’s neutral territory.”  They walked across Highway 78, Dad a foot shorter, but Mom noticed what I was not there to see:  The always-ready channel locks in Dad’s back pocket.  I told you he was never without pliers.  Channel locks are grown-up pliers, heavy on the end.

When they squared off, Town Talk suddenly walked away.  “What would have happened, Pop?”  “Son, I had my handy pliers; he woulda been gummin’ his food the rest of his life.” Playing Man could be Fighting Man.  A violent man lay buried deep in Dad.  

He  became a Mormon “not because I think I can do what the church expects,” he said, in his honest, kind, existential way, “but because I knew my children and Dollie could live it.  Mormonism will save my children from the alcoholism that has and is killing 9 of my brothers, sisters and my dad.”

Integrity.  A goodness we never felt good enough to challenge.