Chapter Two

(DRAFT)

Some Personal History - 1960

In Charlotte, North Carolina, black students take seats at a Woolworth's lunch counter to protest the "local custom" of only permitting blacks to be served if they stood: January 15.

Francis Gary Powers, in a U-2 spy plane, is shot down over the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower calls espionage, "a distasteful but vital necessity," because of the Soviet Union's, "fetish of secrecy and concealment." Powers is sentenced to 10 years in prison: May 5.

Best-selling author [CELL 2455 DEATH ROW], and convicted robber and kidnapper, Caryl Chessman, is executed at San Quentin Penitentiary, in California. Worldwide protests, including personal appeals by Aldous Huxley, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Pablo Casals demonstrate that rehabilitation is not the goal of prisons in America.

Enovid is approved by the FDA for use as an oral contraception: May 9.

The United States launches Midas I, our first spy satellite: May 24.

Lunch counters in 15 cities have been integrated: October 17.

Four TV "debates" are held between presidential contenders John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Nobody "wins" but it is agreed that Nixon needs a better makeup job: September 26 to October 17.

Four national chain stores, with 150 outlets in over 100 cities, are integrated. The world as we know it does not end: October 17.

When I think about my likes and dislikes and the reasons I am involved in the things I do, I can usually trace the motivations back to some silly or inconsequential childhood impression. The first time, or the first place, imprints the event from which a belief is made.

Why I like history is a good example.

Too many cowboy movies started me on reading about the Wild West. An interest in horses and cows gave way to a fascination with the people of the west. Particularly the outlaws and the lawmen who chased them. Stories of Wild Bill Hickock shooting it out on the streets of Abilene fired my imagination much more than stories about cowpunchers riding herd on the plaines.

When I got older, I recognized the outlaws for the violent criminals they were. After that it was easy to get interested in the people who were the true heros of the western movement: trappers, traders, farmers, the army, and the Indians they displaced. The outlaws and the lawmen were sideshows in a sideshow.

The reason I always associate the flavor and fragrance of grapes with Negroes is another example.

The summer between second and third grade, my mother volunteered once a week at UCLA in their psychiatric clinic. We would ride the #12 Big Blue Bus from where we now lived, in the Palms section of west L.A., and get deposited right in front of the NPI, Neuro-psychiatric Institute, just inside the campus gate on Westwood and LeConte.

The NPI is a tall office building made of dark granite-colored concrete with glass the color of deep ocean water. The front doors opened into a lobby more reminiscent of an airplane terminal than a hospital, what with the high ceilings and the echos caused by a hub-bub of many busy, and important, voices.

While Mom did whatever it was she did at the NPI, I got to read my books or play in the hospital playroom with my army men and the hospital's Lincoln Logs. Lincoln Logs were miniature interlocking ersatz logs that replaced building blocks and which were eventually replaced by Erector Sets, which have been replaced by Leggos. Such is the evolution of engineering toys.

I knew who Lincoln was so playing with his logs was a form of playing history. After I built a log house, or a fort, I would make up stories and my army men would act them out.

There were lots of nice ladies in the playroom. They were waiting while their children saw the NPI doctors. The ladies always wanted me to play the board games with them. But I liked the logs so that's what we would do. The only concession I made was to sit at a table since the nice ladies didn't like sprawling out on the dusty floor in their dresses.

In the playroom, time flew like an arrow.

The return bus ride took us on Wilshire Boulevard, through the Veteran's Hospital grounds, and past the VA Cemetery. Many years later I would read that Jeremiah Johnson [remember the 1972 movie with Robert Redford? "Some say he's dead. Some say he never will be."] was buried there, on San Juan Hill, section D, two stones from the road. Johnson [a.k.a. John Johnston, a.k.a. "Liver-Eating" Johnson] had been a fur trapper and an army scout, before being made into a successful movie and had died at the VA Hospital on January 21, 1900, one month after checking in.

When I went to find him at the VA cemetery [Jno. Johnston/Co. H/2nd. Colo. Cav.], they told me Johnson had been "removed" to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming on June 5, 1974. Traveling to Kansas from California in 1984, I had swung through Yellowstone to visit a friend and then made a special trip to Cody to see the famous western artwork on display in the museum. Nobody there had said a word about Jeremiah Johnson.

Damn.

Around the same time as discovering the news about Jeremiah Johnson, I learned that John Muir, the peripatetic champion conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, had died in Los Angeles in 1914. Christmas Eve was the day.

After lives spent in the mountains, it seemed quite an insult for these two to die in L.A.

Of course, I was thinking that turn-of-the-century Los Angeles resembled the Los Angeles of today.

Wrong!

It would be difficult to comprehend what Los Angeles was like when Johnson and Muir were there. The city so overwhelms you today with its size, crush of people, traffic, smog, and other problems. There are some truly beautiful spots in L.A. but it's impossible to ever fully enjoy them because when you get there, everyone else is there too.

From 1861 to 1864, William Brewer was employed by the State of California to do a geological survey of the state, with an eye to cataloging areas suitable for mining. He also commented on the decline of California Condors, collected botanical specimens, surveyed and mapped the headwaters of California's major rivers and streams, calculated the height of significant mountains, and commanded the expedition which first recognized Mt. Whitney as being the highest peak in the country.

Eventually a Professor of Botany at Yale, Brewer also kept meticulous records and, weekly, wrote long, poetic letters back east to his brother. The letters rhapsodized about California's beauty, the peculiar habits of its residents, and the deplorable exploitation of the region's natural resources. His letters were collected and edited by the eminent Sierra Nevada historian, Francis Farquhar, and published in a book called, UP AND DOWN CALIFORNIA.

Brewer had this to say about Los Angeles in the 1860s. "Los Angeles is a city of some 3500 or 4000 inhabitants. As we stand on a hill over the town, which lies at our feet, one of the loveliest views I ever saw is spread out. Over the level plain to the southwest lies the Pacific, blue in the distance; to the north are the mountains of the Sierra Santa Monica; to the south, beneath us, lies the picturesque town with its flat roofs, the fertile plain and vineyards stretching away to a great distance; to the east, in the distance, are some mountains without name, their sides abrupt and broken, while still above them stand the snow covered peaks of San Bernardino. The effect of the pepper, fig, olive, and palm trees in the foreground, with the snow in the distance, is very unusual."

Brewer goes on to describe the town of Los Angeles, a little hamlet in a large plain surrounded by cattle ranches and farms. Being an easterner, he never quite got over the dryness of California and on many occasions his letters say that, "The only thing wanting here is water, water, water, to turn the area into a paradise."

L.A. didn't change much over the decades to the century's turn and into the first half of the last 100 years of the closing millennium. It remained a sleepy backwater town until the explosion in aircraft manufacturing following World War II. After that there was no turning back; there would be no more sleeping.

In his classic 1930s mystery novel about greed and corruption in Los Angeles, THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler wrote this about the oil fields in the neighborhood just west of the VA Hospital. "It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. I followed the ruts along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained, motionless walking-beam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over a branch. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight."

Chandler's detective asks the young woman, Carmen Sternwood, that he is with if she likes this place. "It's beautiful," she says.

That's Los Angeles for you. People always find beauty in its ugliness and never feel the obligation to feel ashamed of their feelings. Maybe that's why they are so quick to ignore the ugly and unwanted.

If nothing else, Angelenos are forward-looking.

I have a friend, Joaquin Murrieta, who was born in Santa Monica. Santa Monica is a small beach town, west of west Los Angeles, south of UCLA, and north of the Venice neighborhood with the horseshoe front lawn. Joaquin still lives in the house where he was born in the early 1920s. His family originally came to the New World from Spain before California became part of the United States.

Joaquin's street is residential, with nice, compact single family houses that have been, mostly, built since the 1950s. The early owners came with the first wave of economic prosperity and worked at Douglas Aircraft, General Electric, and the other high tech industries.

Before all the other houses were built, Joaquin says he remembers standing on the front porch of his house and looking across bean fields to the three story wards at the VA Hospital. In the 1970s, some of those wards would be converted to office space or research labs when the new VA Hospital opened on the south side of Wilshire. They built it right next to the cemetery so everybody would have a nice view of the lawn.

In the late 1970s the VA moved all the psychiatric cases out of the new hospital and placed them in a few refurbished ward buildings on the north boundary, once again crossing Wilshire to do it. Either there were too many psyched out kids for the beds they had available, or the rising population of World War I vets needing medical care squeezed them out.

The young soldiers, non-statistical casualties of the Vietnam War, used to wander through the unkempt gardens and lawns. They were zonked on thorazine and other mind-calming drugs so they weren't a problem to anyone.

The VA must have been nice in the days before west L.A. was built up. With a view towards providing patients with a calming and quiet environment the grounds were huge. Today, no hospital would keep so much land undeveloped but in those days it must have been more acceptable to provide open space than to fill every square inch with brick and mortar. Land was flat and easy to build on and land was cheap.

As Joaquin recalls it, the three-story wards could be seen for miles. They were yellow-sided with red tile roofs and laid out in rings and arcs on expansive lawns with scattered copses of eucalyptus trees - a favorite of 19^th century California arborists. Concrete walkways spread out like the anastomosing strands of spider webs.

Wilshire, as it cuts through the VA and divides the new hospital from the old, is more freeway than street. Like all such prototypes, the prototypical Wilshire Boulevard was a narrow dirt track. Today it is six lanes wide, with turning lanes, and off-ramps. The posted speed is 45 mph but through the one mile of traffic light bereft VA property, speeds approach 70 mph. During my childhood it was four lanes and 35 mph.

The Big Blue Bus leaves UCLA at Westwood and LeConte, moves south and turns right onto Wilshire, heading west to Barrington before turning south. On the way, it pulls off Wilshire on a long declining off-ramp, and picks up a load of people from the VA. They put the bus stop under the roadbed and the bridge thunders and shakes from the traffic.

All sorts of people got on the bus because the #12 connected with other routes in Santa Monica. There were lots of nurses and doctors, easily identified by their white uniforms; hospital administrative workers by their suits; hospital maintenance workers by their blue jumpers; and the patients.

This is where I first learned that only old and sick people go to the hospital. All the patients looked old. And sick.

Everybody was old because I wasn't even eight.

Have you seen that famous portrait photograph of Babe Ruth? He is in his Yankees uniform, sitting on a bench, holding a bat.

The first time I saw that portrait I remember thinking that Babe Ruth looked awfully old. It made sense to me that baseball players were washed up by the time they reached forty. When I see that portrait now, I'm amazed at how young Ruth looks. Ruth has a cute, pudgy face and he stares dispassionately out at the camera. The pinstripes on his shirt and pants make them look like pajamas.

Here's another example of how the impression of other people's age changes with our own.

During our NPI summer, when Mom and I rode the #12, I would sometimes leave the playroom and wander outside to walk up and down the street in front of the hospital. There were tall eucalypts along the street and they had shreddy bark. If you've ever noticed the fruits from the trees then you've seen that they are dried capsules and that look like tiny tops. I used to collect them into big piles; windrows of eucalyptus fruits.

The summer school college students would rush past me, dodging my piles, talking about weighty matters. Occasionally one would stop to admire my work and, once in a while, talk to me.

A beautiful woman, dressed in blue and white, stopped one day. Her brown hair was tied back in a pony tail and she smelled like flowers. She kneeled down to talk to me so I wouldn't have to look up. Think about it next time you talk to a child. What would it be like for you to talk to someone and have to look up so far that their face was three or four vertical feet away from you?

Little kids get to know adults by their feet and knees. Slightly older children learn who a person is by the shape of their necks or chins.

I don't remember what we talked about. But the beautiful woman in blue and white seemed so old to me. Not really old so much as mature. She filled her clothes, everything was in place from her hair down to her shoes. She didn't have the frantic or harried disheveled mannerisms I associated with my parents and their friends. Ever notice how parents are always playing a private game of "Catch Up?" In the words of a popular deodorant commercial of the day, the student in blue and white was, "Cool, Calm, and Collected."

When I started college I thought we were all terribly cool and mature and "together" and I shared the common teenager impression that I knew everything. Four years later I remember thinking how young all the freshmen appeared to me and how totally and completely un-together they were.

All that had changed was me.

So there I sat on the #12, watching a large knot of old and sick patients getting on. They shuffled up the steps in no particular hurry. Mom craned her head to locate me and I waved to her.

On this particular day the bus had been empty, except for mom and me, when we left UCLA. An empty bus gave me permission, like water, to spread out and sit anywhere I wanted. Normally, if there was anyone else on the bus, I had to share a seat with my mother. That meant sitting quietly when I'd much rather run around the bus and explore.

When we got on, Mom gave me a grape-flavored "Charm" to keep my mouth busy in the event I had an uncontrollable urge to shout out something. Charms were hard, square, candies individually wrapped in waxed paper. They came 12 to a pack. I loved sucking on them. They were wonderfully "grapey" in flavor and fragrance. There was a dimple on either side of the square and I would run my tongue, evenly, over each side until I'd worn a hole completely through. That could take 15 minutes if I was methodical.

But the best part about grape Charms was that they turned your whole mouth purple.

The bus moved slowly away from the curb. Passengers who hadn't already decided on a seat now swung into the first available slot. A large Negro man plopped down into the seat next me. Air shot out of the cushion so fast it sounded like a fart. This caused the man to laugh out loud. He brayed like a mule.

"Wasn't me!" he said.

I turned my head, keeping my expression stoney, and examined my neighbor. The first thing I noticed was his smell. He smelled like dirty laundry left in the dirty clothes hamper [we called it the dirty clothes "hamburger" in my house].

The second thing I noticed was the sweat running off his face. That was because the man was dressed for a snowstorm, not for Los Angeles in the summer. In case you don't know, L.A. is hot in August. The only snow was in his hair and in the short hairs on his face.

The third thing I noticed was that the Negro was examining me. When our eyes met, for a moment it was like looking into a mirror.

He broke the illusion by smiling, exposing yellow and crooked teeth in purple and bleeding gums. His breath was bad; really bad. That was the last thing I noticed about him.

Trying to be polite, and not wrinkle my nose at him, made it all the more obvious that I thought he smelled. I covered my face with my hand, pinching my nose, and hoped to filter out the worst of it. The makeshift gas mask made my breathing as loud as a real one.

The Negro must have thought my efforts funny because he laughed. Again the bray. Again the teeth and gums.

The bus lurched, faltered, and then whipped around to the left. Barrington Avenue.

The Negro patted his knees and hummed. And farted. For real this time.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. When kids fart in a classroom, everybody busts up. When adults fart in public, you kind of can't believe it. Even if it smells bad. The Negro was a mix of both. I laughed. I couldn't help it.

He looked at me the way a dog looks at you when its trying to figure something out. His head cocked, first to one side and then the next and his eyes watered. Or maybe they were watery to begin with. Maybe it was the wine and beer, because by this time I had placed the odor of his breath. Like the stale beer or wine left in a glass overnight.

"Purple," he said, nudging me lightly with his elbow.

"Purple?"

He pointed to my mouth and said it again: "Purple."

Aware of a presence, the Negro and I looked up. My mother's eyes stared down. In her face was something akin to curiosity and disgust.

To her everlasting credit, Mom played it cool. She didn't say anything, probably didn't know what to say, but kept staring down at the two of us.

The Negro man had to lean back in his seat and lift his chin into the sky in order to meet my mother's gaze. He smiled. Teeth. Gums. Breath. A teary eye.

"Purple!" he said for a fourth time. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pint bottle, holding it out to my mother. Like you automatically accept a paper flyer handed to you on a street corner, Mom took the bottle. Her face froze when she realized what she had done. Her mouth opened, shut, opened.

The bus hit a bump and, temporarily off-balance, Mom grabbed for the metal bar at the back of the seat and she dropped the bottle. It landed in the man's lap but he didn't notice. He was digging for something else in the same pocket that had held the wine. Finally he found it; a package of Charms.

The Negro held the package up so Mom could see what it was. He offered her one but he was only being polite.

Mom shook her head.

He motioned with his head to me and raised his eyebrows.

Mom nodded her head slowly. So slowly it barely moved.

The Negro dropped his head and turned towards me with the candy. "Purple?" he asked.

I reached for the candy, took it gladly into my hand, peeled the waxed paper away and lifted the purple square to my mouth.

"What do you say to the nice man?" my mother's voice commanded.

Shyly I mouthed the words, "Thank you," and placed the candy in my mouth. Purple. It was the best Charm I ever ate."