Deep Cuts Part Three: Father Facade

Okay.  Let’s wrap up this depressing history lesson and get on with some truestoopidshit.

I wasn’t really a fully formed asshole until I came back from living with my father for the second time, so this last little bit of history will get us all caught up to that point.  Before then, I was a product of my environment; and afterwards, my environment was a product of me.  I did wrong again and again.  Knowingly.  Willfully.  Joyfully.  Not because of anything that happened in my past, but because I wanted to do wrong.

This post is going to be about losing my last little bit of the innocence, but don’t worry, it’s not that bad.  I really didn’t have a lot of innocence to lose at this point, and to say I “lost” it might be a bit disingenuous.  I’d have sold it for drugs had anyone been willing to pay for it, but instead, I just threw it away.

I started having mental breakdowns around the time we moved from Le Nez and roughly coincident with my decision to start stealing drugs and alcohol from my mother.  I only stole a little at first.  It doesn’t take much to get a twelve-year-old kid high.  When I started having panic attacks, insomnia, and bouts of depression, I never thought to connect these with the chemicals I was ingesting.  Not until just now, writing these words, did I even consider the possibility.

Funny little blind spot, that one, huh?

Anyway, these breakdowns got worse through middle school and high school, and eventually, I learned to incorporate them into my mythology.  I learned to give into the paranoia and enjoy the fear my panic attacks brought.  I learned to chemically amplify the delusions with booze and to enhance my insomnia with meth.  But that was later.  At first, my breakdowns scared the living shit out of me.

My mother took me to a free clinic a few times, and the psychiatric doctor gave me a couple prescriptions that I abused.  I used to go without sleeping for so many days in a row, that I’d actually hallucinate or fall asleep in the middle of sentences.  And this was before I’d ever even tried speed.  I saw other doctors and other therapists, but they all had different theories about what was wrong with me, and no one ever diagnosed me with anything solid.

I met Rudy at around this time, (Rude Dog Blog) and I started doing even harder drugs.  This, of course, led to increased breakdowns, and since I never told anyone that I was stealing my mother’s pot and alcohol, or my grandmother’s pills, no one ever made the connection.  And let’s not forget that I’d been hiding behind a reputation for instability and brutality for quite a while.  Now I had an actual mental condition!  It made for a handy excuse once I started getting suspended for pushing cabinets over onto kids, or stomping on them with my steal toed army boots.  (See Deep Cuts Part Two).

And then I went to middle school.

Within minutes of starting my first day of middle school, I knew I was going to get in a fight.  My instincts told me to establish myself within the pecking order quickly — somewhere near the top would be fine — and thereby avoid future fights.  So I picked a biggish Mexican kid who acted tough, and I called him out.

Yes.  We still did that back in my day.

I said something like, “Meet me after school at the bike racks, pussy.”

He flipped me off and said something in Spanish.  For the rest of the day, I got myself all worked up and prepared to fight.  I told all my friends to come watch.  I told people in my gym class, people I barely knew, to come watch.  I wanted big word-of-mouth buzz, and I got it.  Half the school must have been there, waiting for me and the Mexican.

At the time, I preferred the blitzkrieg fighting style.  I’d wait until my opponent started talking trash, and then, without warning, swing my fists wildly at his face until he started to run.  Once he began his retreat, I’d kick him with my boots, hopefully tripping him and knocking him to the ground where I could kick him some more.

The kid opened his mouth to talk some trash, and I didn’t even let him get a word out before trying to shove my fist down his throat.  Get this out of the way, I was thinking.  Stomp this guy and get some respect.

Only this kid didn’t run when I hit him.  Instead, he tucked his chin, lifted his hands into a boxer’s stance, and punched me back.  A lot.  And hard.

You see, ever since I’d been kicked out of Smithridge for attacking some kids with a hammer, I’d been fighting people who didn’t really want to fight me.  I’d fought guys who’d talked like they wanted to fight, and guys who’d looked like they wanted to fight, and even guys who’d thrown a punch or two, but I’d never fought anyone who’d really just wanted to fight.

And this kid wanted to fight.

He kicked my ass in front of everyone, and the protective coloration of my bad reputation was gone, just like that.  I felt like a turtle pulled from its shell, totally exposed to the environment and unprotected.  Now everyone knew that I was just a small and frightened little kid.

I wish I could say I returned to The Dojo in search of myself, or in search of my heritage, or in search of martial arts even, but that would be untrue.  I went home so I could learn to fight, so I could exact some revenge.

I hadn’t seen my Uncle Herb since moving out of The Dojo, seven years earlier.  I’d been told bad things about how he’d screwed our side of the family, and some members of my family actually considered me a traitor for going back, but I decided to make up my own mind.

Since I’d last set foot in the dojo, Herb had turned it into a martial arts commune and had it legally listed as a church.  No longer did the corner house have a porch or a front door that opened to the street.  High, wicker wrapped fences made the whole place seem like a military compound from feudal Japan, complete with a rock garden, sliding doors, and a little Buddhist shrine.  Classes were free, but most folks paid the suggested $30/month donation.  Herb told me not to worry about paying a donation, but that I should try to do something around the dojo to help out.

My very first class, I discovered that I already knew how to do many of the rolls and falls beginners find so daunting.  I don’t remember ever going to classes when I was a little kid, and I don’t even think they taught kids classes back then, yet I had apparently gone to a few, and my body still remembered some of what it had learned.

So every Tuesday and Thursday I rode the city bus from Trainer Middle School to the dojo.  I did my homework in the communal kitchen, swept the sidewalk out front, and vacuumed the mat and stairs.  I went to a one-hour children’s class, then I’d eat a snack and go to the two-hour adult class.  Afterwards, I’d sometimes eat dinner with Herb, his wife, and maybe a few students.  Then I’d ride the bus back to Sun Valley.  Eventually, I started helping teach children’s classes.

During this time, I excelled in school, didn’t get into fights, and cut my drug use down to almost nothing.  I hit the weights and ran.  I read books on martial arts, philosophy, meditation, military strategy, and magic.  In addition to Jujitsu, I practiced techniques for lucid dreaming, astral projection, and pain tolerance.  Everything seemed magical again.  The dojo has always been like that for me, and remains so even today, despite the defiling it suffered at my hands later.

Once, when I was just hanging around the dojo, I put an acupuncture needle against the back of my forearm, about two inches below my wrist, and slowly worked it back and forth until it stopped hurting.  Out of curiosity, I continued twisting the needle and watched as it painlessly slid further through the meat of my forearm, a full inch and a half, at least.  Eventually, twisting the needle began to hurt again, only this time, it hurt on the underside of my arm.  I looked, and, sure enough, the skin on the bottom of my forearm had begun to tent around the emerging acupuncture needle.  I figured I was pretty committed to the experiment by then, so I backed the needle off just a bit, set my arm down on a paperback book, and returned to drilling.  After a few seconds, I picked up my arm, and the paperback came with it.  I pulled the book off my arm and looked at the acupuncture needle.  The plastic cap of one end stuck out the hairy side of my forearm, while the pointy part stuck out of the soft underside.  When I flexed my hand, the ends of the needle bowed up and down.

“Quit doing that,” my uncles wife said, when she came into the family room and saw what I had done.  “You’re going to break that thing inside your arm.”

“Sorry,” I said.

She squinted at the needle.  “You should go show your uncle.”

So I went upstairs where the actual classes were held, and waited for my uncle to finish teaching black belt class.  When I showed him the needle protruding from both sides of my arm, he seemed very pleased and called some of his students over to see.  I loved making him proud of me and adored the attention.

I enjoyed the celebrity of being “Sensei’s nephew,” and for the most part, I did well in school and life while I attended classes.  So what happened?  Where did I go wrong?  What pulled me away from the dojo?

It was a couple things, actually, but the biggest reasons were definitely jealousy and girls.

First off, I was jealous of Uncle Herb’s children, or to be more precise, I wanted to be one of them.  Sometimes, like when I put the acupuncture needle through my arm, he was very proud of me and told everyone how I was his nephew and how I looked like Bumpa (his father).  Most of the time, however, I was just a kid that hung around the dojo.  Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I would never be as important to him as his own children, and even though that is the way it should be, the disillusionment took a bit of the glow off my training.  I told myself I was better than his kids, because I didn’t even need a father, and in doing so created a new myth: Bastard Leon.

Then there were the girls.  I’d messed around a lot by the time I went to middle school, but mostly it was clandestine midnight groping and secret screwing around.  No one wanted to be my girlfriend, and though I’d gone down on girls and gotten blowjobs and done lots of stuff, no one had ever really let me kiss them.  Then I got a nice girlfriend (See Helicopters Over Leon Street), and suddenly all the other girls started noticing me.

Of course, I dumped my nice girlfriend and started dating fast and dangerous girls.  One of those girls broke my heart a bit, and I decided to go live with my father.  The night before I moved to Oregon, I entertained two girls from school.  We drank stolen whiskey and smoked my mother’s crappy weed.  We messed around and traded blowjobs.  They promised to write me while I was in Oregon, but I never heard from either of them again.  I don’t even remember their names, but I remember one of them had extremely long and soft hair that, when I looked closely, seemed to contain every shade of brown, red, and blonde ever invented.

So I moved back to Oregon, to a father I barely remembered, and spent my 8th grade school year there.  The endeavor was doomed from the start.  Since last time I’d lived with my father, he’d become pretty bitter about my mother and her side of the family.  He took the stance that anything any of them said was a lie, and that I had been raised entirely by deceptive and manipulative white trash, and therefore, I must be a liar as well.  For my part, I’d given up on the idea of a father figure when I realized Uncle Herb wasn’t looking for any more kids.  I’d become attached to the persona of Bastard Leon, and actually living with my father made maintaining that myth difficult.  My father and I clashed early and often.

My father’s assumption that my family was dishonest was not without basis.  On Mom’s side of the family, the code of ethics had two distinct parts: the way we treated family, and the way we treated outsiders.  Family was to be defended at all times regardless of right or wrong.  Outsiders were lied to whenever it was convenient.  So I was stuck living with a man who’d become hostile towards my family, albeit with good reason.  Though I considered him an outsider, he was also my father, so I couldn’t live inside my myth of being a hard-case, bastard, ghetto-child while living with him.

Also, with my long hair, cigarettes, attitude, and aggressiveness, I was the ultimate misfit in the little hillbilly middle school.  By the time I left Oregon, at the end of the school year, I’d made some friends and been marginally accepted, however, the situation with my father had gone about as far as it could go without major violence.  I was nearly man-sized by then, and every night I went to sleep after long and detailed fantasies of killing him.

It was in everyone’s best interest that I not stay.  That first time I went to Oregon, when I was in second grade, things could have worked out, but by the time I went to stay with him in eighth grade, things had gotten too far out of hand.  I was proud to be a bastard, and he was a father who’d been misused.  I went back to Reno hating my father, and though we have a cordial relationship now, it took me a long time to forgive him for trying to be my dad.

The Nevada I returned to was not the same state I’d left, however.  A strange transformation had taken place while I’d been stuck in Podunk Fields, Oregon (a.k.a Brownsville, Oregon).  Nevada had discovered NWA.  When I’d left, everyone I knew had been smoking pot, fucking, and listening to glam rock.  When I returned, less than a year later, everyone was snorting speed, fighting, and listening to gangster rap.

The new world order suited me just fine.  Before Oregon I’d been hedonistic, but I returned with a sadistic streak.  I’d already learned to fight at the dojo, half of my family was dealing drugs, and the bad friends I’d left had done nothing but get worse.  Also, I’d accepted my status as bastard, returning from Oregon with the world’s biggest chip on my shoulder.

Fuck fathers.  Fuck my mother’s murdering husbands and junkie boyfriends.  Fuck Uncle Herb for not loving me as much as his own children.  Fuck my real father for trying to fill the hole he’d left in my life when I was two.  Fuck em all, because the bastard was coming home.

Deep Cuts Part Two: Preteen Wasteland

Grandma Gabrielle

In my last Deep Cuts blog, I wrote about the part of my childhood where I felt small and weak and helpless.  It was not a very large part of my life, but it was important, because I learned to hide behind a reputation for brutality and instability during that period.  I learned to create and maintain the myth.  This time, I’m going to write about the part of my life when I lived inside that myth, when I believed it.

So, picking up where we left off last time: I had just garnered a reputation as a pint-sized psychopath after attacking a gang of older kids with a hammer, but my neighborhood still scared the hell out of me, so my sister and I moved to Oregon to live with our father.

My mother and father split up when I was two, shortly before my little sister, Olivia, was born.  I have no memories of my parents being together.  As a mater of fact, I can’t remember a single thing about my father before I went to live with him in second grade, so when my sisters and I packed up and went to Oregon, we were really heading into the unknown.

I don’t have any bad memories from that first time living with my father.  I remember getting teased in school because I wrote some of my letters and numbers backward, but I wasn’t a pariah or anything.  I met a kid named Eli, who became my friend and has remained so to this day.  In the school musical, I got the “Sneezes the Clown” solo, and my stepmother made me a clown outfit complete with a never-ending handkerchief.

My father tried to teach me fatherly lessons.  For example, he bought me a bike for my birthday, but it was a jankety piece of crap that didn’t even work.  For weeks, he guided and assisted me as I sanded rust, oiled sprockets, and made repairs.  He helped me paint the bike with glittery blue paint, and his wife upholstered the banana seat with denim.  I was very proud of that bike, even though I wasn’t allowed to go further than the end of my block while riding it.

I probably should have stayed with my father, but I didn’t.  I went home to my mother and grandmother, to Reno, to Neil Road and all the terrifying crap that came with it.  I didn’t leave Oregon because I hated my father, or because I couldn’t meet his expectations, or because anything was wrong.  I just missed my mom.

My father brought Olivia and me down for a Christmas visit, and we just didn’t go back to Oregon.  This is a serious source of hurt for my father, as I discovered just recently while researching this part of my past.  Sorry about that.  I don’t have any good excuse.  Like I said, I just missed my mom.

And I really must have missed her bad, because Neil Road sucked.  My mother was still living with her friend, Sherrill, and Sherrill’s family, and they still smoked pot like it was a full time job.  We still bounced around from apartment to apartment a few times a year, always on Neil Road, however.  Once we lost our cat, Tiger Man, when we moved.  Later that year, we moved to an apartment a couple blocks from where we’d lost him, and there he was, just waiting to move back in with us.  I guess he missed his mom too.

After splitting up with my father, my mother dated a few dumbshits I didn’t like, married an asshole who turned out to be a pederast and a murderer, and married another guy who beat her from the day after the wedding until the day he died of pneumonia brought on by a cocaine overdose.  Not all of this happened while we lived on Neil Road, but I seem to recall a fair amount of conflict inside our household at around this time.

My best friend was a kid from the apartment building across from ours.  I don’t remember his name, but he was a year younger than me, and he never went to school.  During the weekends, we liked to play on the construction equipment in the lot beside ours, and once we even fired up a tractor when we found the keys inside.  If we played in the construction site before noon, however, a crazy black guy who worked graveyard would sic his Doberman on us.  One day, shortly before I left Neil Road, my friend told me in graphic detail how he’d molested his little sister, but I’d been too young to really understand.

Once, when my friend and his little sister were staying the night, we heard some shouting coming from the hardpack dirt courtyard outside.  Just as Sherrill’s husband, Frank, lifted the curtain to take a peek, a black woman clutching a baby to her chest burst through the front door of our apartment screaming about how her husband was going to kill her.  So my mother, Sherrill, and Frank brought this strange woman and her child into our home, locked the doors, and turned off all the lights.  We huddled in the kitchen as she explained the situation.

The woman said her husband had come home drunk, taken out his gun, and told her he was going to give her and the kids a ten second head start before he released his dog.  So the chick just snatched up both her kids and ran, barefoot, through the apartment complex, banging on doors and screaming.  Somewhere along the way she’d dropped her oldest child.

“Does your husband really have a gun?” Frank asked.

“Lots.”  She nodded while her baby cried.

Frank popped a banana clip into his big black machine gun, took a one-knee firing position, and aimed at the window.  Twice, a gun-toting silhouette crossed in front of the window, and Frank kept his barrel trained on it.  The front door handle jiggled a couple times, and someone kicked the door.

Despite the drugs in the house, Sherrill called the cops.  Apparently, the police dispatcher was not being responsive enough, and Sherrill screamed into the phone, “You’d better hurry up because we’ve got a machine gun aimed at the door, and if he comes in, we’re going to blow him away.”  I think she was trying to say it loud enough that the guy outside would hear it, but the police were not amused.

When the police finally arrived, they had all the adults in our household come outside into the lit up courtyard to be frisked.  As the oldest, I was left in charge inside.  I remember Frank handing me a .22 caliber rifle and telling me to shoot anyone who tried to come in without identifying themselves, however I’m not so sure about the veracity of that memory.  It seems highly unlikely that anyone would give a kid my age a gun, so perhaps I made up this memory, part of my personal mythology.

Anyway, the police caught the woman’s husband in the construction zone beside our apartments.  He had his dog and a hunting rifle in his car with him, and his daughter was tied up but alive in his trunk.  It turns out he was the same guy who used to sic his Doberman on me and my buddy, so the cloud had a silver lining after all.  With him in jail, me and my fucked up little friend could play in the construction site as early as we wanted and no one would try to kill us.

Well, not that guy at least.

My family moved to an apartment complex called, Le Nez around the time I was in fourth grade.  Le Nez had a pool, and it was actually in the Roger Corbett school district, so I wouldn’t be a transfer student anymore.  The name Le Nez is French for “The Nose,” but my whole life I thought it meant “The Nest.”  I still think of it as The Nest, because I always felt safe there.  For instance, we were now the worst family in the complex, which meant I could play outside without fear of getting beaten up.  Also, I’d been going to Roger Corbett long enough to make some friends and get a reputation as a fighter.  Even my sisters remember people saying, “Hey, don’t mess with that girl.  Her brother’s a psycho.”

The biggest reason I felt safe in the nest, however, was my grandmother.  When my mother, my sisters, and I moved to Le Nez, we moved back in with Grandma Gabrielle, whom we had not lived with since we’d lived in the dojo.  No matter what kind of crazy crap might be going on outside our apartment, or even inside the rest of the apartment for that matter, Grandma’s bedroom was always calm and quiet and safe.  She listened to classical and opera, jazz and blues.  She watched PBS and Star Trek.  She cooked “graveyard toast” and Malt-O-Meal on a little burner.  She is the reason I love music, science fiction, and myself.

Le Nez also seems like a nest in my memory due to how crowded we lived.  My grandmother, my aunt and her newborn son, my mother, my two sisters, and I (all seven of us) lived in a three-bedroom apartment.  Grandma got her own room, while Shelly and her baby got another room that they sometimes shared with Shelly’s boyfriend.  That left one room for my mother, my two sisters, and me.  As I recall, we shared that room with a couple of Mom’s boyfriends/husbands as well.  Like I said, it was crowded, but for the most part, I liked it.

I remember sneaking off my balcony on the second floor, and climbing down the support beam to the porch of our downstairs neighbor, a girl named Melissa.  Every Saturday night, we’d sit on a little bench seat fondling each other under the covers while we pretended to watch Saturday Night Live.  Once, her friend came over and all three of us messed around.  It was all innocent bullshit, but I remember thinking I loved Melissa for a very long time.

I used to steal my mother’s alcohol and pot and get messed up with a neighbor kid named Mike.  I saw his sister fifteen years later in an Oregon supermarket, and somehow, she recognized me.  I used to hang out with a kid downstairs named Travis just because I liked to peep his teenage sister while she was showering and changing.  His sister got cancer when she was still in her twenties, and I heard Travis committed suicide.  I was also arrested and taken to juvi for the first time while I lived in Le Nez.  For years afterwards, I told people I’d been arrested for trying to steal a television.  In truth, I had been trying to steal a pack of little plastic toys called MUSCLE men that cost something like a dollar at the time.

Then, sometime around the middle of sixth grade, Mom married a very old black guy named Norman and we moved into a new, double-wide trailer in Sun Valley.  We left Le Nez.  We left Aunt Shelly and her son.  We left Roger Corbett Elementary.  We left Grandma.

Sun Valley was — until very recently when they got a few houses on foundations and put sidewalks on a few of the bigger streets — the world’s largest trailer park.  It was like hillbilly heaven, right outside Reno, and I loved it.  My sisters, my friends, and I used to roam the desert hills all day, catching lizards and bunnies (See Rude Dog Blog), climbing rocks, playing war, and otherwise endangering our lives.  We once lowered Rudy down a mineshaft on a bunch of old plastic rope we found dry-rotting in the sun, and I’m still a little surprised we got him back up alive.  In the Valley, my sister, Olivia, burned down a very large hill of sagebrush.  Don and I tested homemade grenades on abandoned cars.  Rudy almost got killed by a horse he was trying to catch.

I don’t recall disliking Sun Valley Elementary School, but I did get suspended twice in just half a year, so maybe it was worse than I remember.  The first time I got suspended, I’d pushed a metal filing cabinet over onto a kid who’d been whispering mean things to me from the other side of the cabinet.  Since I was new, and the other kid was a notorious troublemaker, I was sent home for a day or two.  The second time I got suspended from Sun Valley, however, they nearly kicked me out.  Some kid was talking trash about my mother, which didn’t really bother me, and he made the mistake of expanding his area of insult to include my grandmother.  So I kicked him in the gut with the steal toed combat boots I’d saved all summer to buy, and when he fell, I kicked him some more.  I’m pretty sure they moved me on to middle school just to get me out of their hair.

And as soon as I went to middle school, things changed again.  My “big bully” routine I’d been hiding behind stopped working, and I found myself in fights with guys who actually wanted to fight back.  I started drinking more, smoking cigarettes, and doing drugs that didn’t agree with me.  Girls took up an ever-increasing percentage of my thoughts, and I would soon loose what little I had left of my virginity.  But all that shit’s for another time.  Next time maybe.

This time, I’m still writing about a fairly innocent version of me — a teenage bully so in love with the space program he skipped school to watch the Challenger space shuttle take a teacher named Christa McAuliffe into space.  The kid I’m writing about got nervous after repeated delays to the launch schedule and rode his bike to school.  When he walked into his classroom, no one noticed he was late.  A small television on a tall stand had been wheeled in front of the blackboard, and on the screen, crazy contrails of smoke twisted away from a ball of fire while the newscaster talked about an “unimaginable tragedy” in a voice thick with tears.  Everyone in the classroom looked stunned, including the teacher.

The kid I’m writing about this time knew immediately what had happened, and though it embarrassed him greatly, he sat at his desk, hid his head in his arms, and sobbed until his shoulders shook.

Later that year, I wrote an essay about it.  My teacher produced the essay during the only parent-teacher meeting I ever remember my mother attending.  I remember my teacher telling my mother: “Leon is obviously very talented.”

No one had ever said anything like that about me before, and I’d certainly never thought it myself.  Still, it took a long time to make myself believe those words, and sometimes, I still can’t make myself believe.

Don Armitage: Happily Ever After

“You wanna play war?”  The kid was skinny and pale, with very light blue eyes.  He wore a camouflage jacket and hat that I thought was very cool.  He was a second grader, just like me.

And of course I wanted to play war.  I wanted to play anything with anyone, because I was the new kid.  I’d been at Roger Corbett Elementary School for what felt like a very long time, and no one had even talked to me.  Not surprising, really.  I wore hand-me-down clothes two generations out of style and two sizes too small, shoes that had developed holes in the toes large enough that I could take off my socks without removing them, and my too long hair in a nerdy bowl cut.  And to top it all off, I was a bit of a hyperactive spaz.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Sure.”

For the next ten minutes Don and I ran around the sandy schoolyard, pretending to shoot each other and defending our playground equipment headquarters from imaginary attackers.

“Sean and some guys want to beat you up,” he told me when the end-of-recess bell rang.  “They told me to make friends with you and get you to go out by the football field during lunch recess.”

“Why’re you telling me?” I asked.

“Because I like you now.”

So, during lunch, Don and I avoided the football field.  We stayed near our headquarters and played war.  Eventually, a gang of second and third graders cornered us there, beneath the play structure.  They shouted, and pushed us, and pumped themselves up for a little ten-on-one fun.  Don had obviously been their full time whipping boy before I’d transferred into the school, and they were used to picking on him with impunity.  I, on the other hand, had just been kicked out of a much tougher school for hitting a bully in the face with a ball peen hammer.

I’m not going to tell that story here, but it was a pivotal moment in my life.  I learned I didn’t have to win a fight to get respect; that I just had to hurt the other guy bad enough to make them never want to fight me again.  I learned the value of a violent reputation.  I learned that, in schoolyard brawls, the aggressor almost always wins.  I learned a lot of things, wrong things mostly, that took me a long time to unlearn.

But back then, in second grade, with a pack of spoiled and soft Roger Corbett kids surrounding me, I knew exactly what to do.  I screamed and let loose berserker-style: wild punches, flying kicks, throwing sand, and pulling hair.  At some point, Don became inspired by all the violence, and he dove headlong into the battle.  Watching him finally open up on his bullies was like watching a dam burst, or a religious epiphany.  It was like watching myself when I’d finally brought that hammer to school.

Obviously, we were bullied birds of a fucked feather.  Only now there were two of us, and we were giving it all back, with interest.

We still got beat up.  After all, we were severely outnumbered and didn’t know how to fight.  But the ass-kicking these guys gave me didn’t even qualify as a friendly wrestling match when compared to the beatings I was used to getting.  Don only got a few little cuts and bruises.  And we gave them more than we took, so I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Second grade.  Don and I have been friends ever since.

Don’s parents had lots of guns, cool cars, and a nice house.  They took me shooting out in the desert, and let me sleep over a few times.  During Hot August Nights, the annual classic car roundup held in Reno, they took me cruising in their beautifully restored Model T Ford, and I got to see what it felt like to be a part of the cool crowd.

I transferred in and out of Roger Corbett three times, and every time I returned, Don was always there, waiting for me.  When I finally got expelled in sixth grade for pulling a knife on a kid, Don vowed to steal the Careflight helicopter from the hospital and break me out of juvenile hall.  Even after I left Roger Corbett Elementary for good, we stayed in touch.

Then, in the summer of 88, Mr. Armitage, Don’t dad, got real sick.  Don spent most of his time out at my mom’s trailer in Sun Valley because Mrs. Armitage didn’t want him to see his father getting weaker.  Don and I played D&D, hiked in the mountains, and dodged the gang of Vatoes who lived down the street from me.  (See Helicopters over Leon Street.)

For the next two years, Mr. Armitage fought the acute amilodosis that eventually took his life.  He was a strong, proud, hard-working man that I didn’t get to know half as well as I’d have liked.  Don, during those two years, spent a lot of time hanging out in my world of drugs and fighting, and it had a corrupting influence on him.

After Mr. Armitage’s funeral, I started hanging around the Armitage household a lot more, and eventually, I just moved in with Don and his mother.  This was a very happy time for me, but I have to concede that it was probably a mistake for Mrs. A to let me move in.  The problem was not necessarily that I was a bad influence on Don, or visa-versa, but that together we were fairly volatile.  Together, we did bad things we would never have done on our own.

Sometimes, when Mrs. A took us to church, Don and I would sit in the very back pew and have long detailed talks about what it would be like to murder someone.  I actually liked going to church though.  When I was fifteen or sixteen, I met a nice girl there and dated her off and on for a few years.  I introduced her to meth and gangs, and she ran away from home to be with me, but we eventually split up.  By the time I saw her again, when I was twenty, she had a serious crank habit.  She was selling dope and sleeping with her dealer.  I’m probably responsible for that.

Don and I also liked to take his 1975 Firebird out for midnight drives.  We’d troll around looking for things to steal, cars to race, or people to fight.  If we couldn’t find any other trouble, we’d head out to the dark streets beside the airport, turn off the headlights, and drive as fast as we dared, screaming with the windows open.

While I lived with Don, we both went to Wooster High.  We spent most of our lunches in the parking lot of the Sac-and-Save across the street, drinking from a stolen, one-gallon, plastic bottle of Brother’s Choice Whiskey and picking fights.  Now that we were in high school, however, our psychotic reputations were considered cool, and we were no longer alone.  We were part of a crew of kids, mostly black and Hispanic, who all lived in the Neil Road area.  We weren’t exactly a gang, but we were close enough for most cops and school officials.

Don and I finally got kicked out of Wooster for “inciting a riot.”  The details are still a bit foggy in my memory, but this is the way I remember it:

The day before the riot, a friend named Danny approached Don and me while we drank whisky in the Sac-and-Save parking lot.  Danny said his girlfriend had just been given a bunch of gory abortion pictures by “that abortion car freak,” and that she was now hysterical.  The abortion car freak was a guy who drove around in a long brown sedan with a bunch of anti-abortion signs and religious quotes on it, handing out tracts and pamphlets that could easily be classified as psychological terrorism.  I hated the fucker on principle, and the idea of doing him some harm appealed to the antihero in me, so we set out to find him.

Before we found the abortion car freak, however, we found a guy who’d been putting the moves on Don’s girlfriend.  We’ll call him Tony F for the purposes of this blog.  He hung out with the long haired biker gang wannabees.  Anyway, when we saw Tony F, Lamont jumped out of the car, chased him down, and knocked him cold with one punch.  We drove off laughing, dropped Lamont at school, and continued our search.

We found the abortion car freak not ten minutes later, stopped at a stoplight in his shit-brown hate-mobile.  I can’t remember everyone who was with us, but we all rushed the freak’s car, and tried to yank him out.  He rolled up his windows and locked his doors before we could get hold of him, so we kicked in his door panels, tore the signs off his car, and broke his window.  He finally ran the red light and escaped.  I went back to school, and Don skipped out so he could hide his car at home.  That night, the assault was in the evening news, as well as a description of the car and attackers.  I’m pretty sure Mrs. Armitage knew Don and I were responsible, and I’m also pretty sure she was at least a little proud.

So Don and I left his car at home the next day and caught a ride to school with some neighborhood friends.  At lunch, I jumped in the back of a mini truck with about a dozen other guys, and we all went looking for fights, as per usual.  Don, however, stayed on campus with his girlfriend.  We didn’t find any fights that lunch, and when we rolled back onto campus five minutes before lunch ended, we were spoiling for something ugly to go down.

That’s when Danny ran up to the overloaded mini truck shouting.  “Tony F and his dirthead buddies just ratpacked Don!  They jumped him like ten to one.”

Shit went downhill fast.  Me and a dozen other Neil Road thugs ran through campus in a pack, looking for anyone who might have been affiliated with Tony F.  We found Don, and he joined the pack.  Innocent people we passed got hit just because they had long hair or leather jackets.  When we found one of the guys who’d actually been responsible for jumping Don, a friend of ours picked him up and slammed him on the concrete ala professional wrestling, putting him in a coma.  Another guy got hit with one of those big metal trash barrels and went to the hospital as well.  Lots of people got hurt.

The principle, vice principle, and school security guards found our little wolf pack just as we found the rest of Tony F’s friends in the courtyard.  By then, however, shit was already out of control.  People were fighting all over the place, and I didn’t even know half of them.  These weren’t our friends or Tony F’s friends.  These were just kids caught up in the mob mentality of the moment.  I was grabbed in a bearhug by security, and I didn’t actually get to participate in the impromptu mosh pit we’d created.

Cops appeared from out of nowhere, and Don and I were handcuffed and taken away.  I would like to point out that during this whole mini-riot, I honestly did not hit anyone, or even threaten to hit anyone.  I’m pretty sure Don didn’t hit anyone either.  But the school authorities knew we were at the heart of the problem, emotionally if not physically, so they kicked us out of school.  It might have been the first time for Don, but it was just the latest in a long list of suspensions and expulsions for me.

Mrs. Armitage had finally had enough.  She asked me to leave, and I returned to my mother’s house for a few months, until I joined the Army.  I love Mrs. Armitage like a mother, and I don’t blame her for putting me out.  Had she done it earlier, maybe Don wouldn’t have done some of the stupid things he’d done.  But I kinda think Don was gonna loose it eventually anyway, with or without me.  He had a lot of guns, a volatile temper, and a cruel streak that put mine to shame.  If he hadn’t learned to nut-up and fight his bullies in second grade, he might have taken a few of those guns to school and fragged the whole student body by the time he got to high school.  Or maybe he’d be the next president of The United States of America; what the fuck do I know?

I do know that in the years since high school, when Don and I have had much less contact, he has continued to fuck up.  Here are some examples:

When I was about twenty, I went to Don’s house and found a dozen guys watching a home video of Don beating the shit out of a nearly naked guy who’d been tied to the living room recliner.  (Note: the guy I’m talking about was, and still is, one of Don’s friends, so I guess this doesn’t technically count as torture.)

Once, Mrs. Armitage called and asked me to try to talk some sense into him because he’d shot the bookshelf off the wall.

On June 23, 2003, Don got brought up on charges of “armed robbery with a deadly weapon,” and was given four years of probation.

A year later, he got hooked on heroin.

In August of 2005, he violated his probation and was sent to prison, where he spent the last 4 to 4.5 years.

He’s doing much better now.  He doesn’t spike heroin or break the law.  He just rides and restores motorcycles, works and lifts weights.  I might be responsible for some of his downfall, but I know I’m not responsible for any of his recovery.  He’s walked that road all by himself, and I hope he continues to do so.  After all the bad news coming from back home — Rudy back in prison, Tom on the run, old friends lost to dope and depression and death — it’s nice to say “happily ever after” once in a while.

You hear that Don?  My bullied brother?  We’re all growed up now, and you are my storybook ending.

Don’t fuck it up.

Tom Fried: Too Weird to Live, and Too Rare to Die

When I was seventeen, a couple friends and I got jobs installing flooring tile in a California school.  Despite the crystal meth powered twenty-hour workdays, we always needed more help, so I shanghaied guys from the old neighborhood and made them sleep at my apartment when we were not working.  Despite the obscenely large paychecks we took home, most of the shanghai-ees escaped within a week or two, the one exception being a guy named Tom Fried.

Tom was short, loud, and funny.  He worked like a dog, and our household diet of coffee, crank, and beer seemed to agree with his metabolism.  When the work ran out, Tom just didn’t go home.  He and I decided we didn’t like twenty-hour workdays, and that we actually didn’t much like working at all.  So we quit doing dope and started selling it.

For five or six months, we were the most mythical of all make-believe creatures: dope dealers who didn’t do dope.  We had rules our customers had to abide by, hours of operation, and a code of ethics that didn’t allow us to sell to kids or pregnant women.  We didn’t take food stamps or stolen things.  By the standards of our neighborhood, we were ghetto saints.

We were not, however, above selling to old friends, family members, or handicapped people.  Other than my own mother, my best customer was a wheelchair bound woman with a condition that made her shake like a highly caffeinated Chihuahua, and every weekend I’d bring her enough dope to overdose a small elephant.  Tom’s best customer was his uncle’s friend Randy.  Randy lived only a few blocks away from our apartment and bought dope every other day at least.  He was only about four feet tell and whenever Tom and I got drunk, which was every single night at around six o’clock, we’d start in with the Randy impressions — acting like speedfreak dwarfs trying to cop a little extra dope for free.

Eventually, of course, we ended up doing the dope we were selling, and shit spiraled out of control.  We started going out on the weekends, looking for fights.  Then we started fighting three or four times a week, always too anesthetized with booze to feel pain and too high on speed to think about consequences.  We called it “tripping the ultraviolent,” in tribute to our favorite movie of the time, _A Clockwork Orange_.  When we deliberately tried to overdose ourselves on dope or booze, we called that “riding the outer limits,” though I have no idea where we’d picked up that particular saying.

At some point, someone in our circle of psychotic friends got the idea to rob drug dealers.  This was much later on, when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two.  Tom and I were living with a bunch of friends in a little trailer park off Fourth Street, where the hookers too ugly or strung out or diseased to work out at the Bunny Ranch tried to eek out a living.  One of our roommates was a Polish wanna-be-skinhead, named John, who had about as much brains as you’d expect from a Polish guy who wanted to be a skinhead.  The three of us were not exactly criminal masterminds.

The first guys we tried to rob were a bunch of bikers staying in a hotel in downtown Reno.  I can’t even remember how we found out about them, but they were sufficiently far enough removed from our circle of friends that we did not fear repercussions.  At the time, none of us had guns.  We decided to do the robbery with just knives.

We knocked on the hotel room door and covered the peephole.  When they opened the door with the safety chain still attached, Tom and I kicked the door in.  There were three guys in the hotel room: one in the process of coming out of the bathroom, one sitting at a desk doing lines of meth, and one who jumped up on the bed and started begging as soon as we entered.

I grabbed the guy sitting at the table by the back of his jacket, threw him to the ground, and held him there with a knee in his back.  John yelled at the guy on the bed to “Get down.”  Tom grabbed the guy coming out of the bathroom and held a knife to his throat.

“Where’s the dope?” Tom asked.

“It’s not here yet,” the guy said all high-pitched and hysterical.  “They just went to get it a little while ago.”

At this point, Tom and I realized that John still had not gotten control of the man standing on the bed.  John kept yelling at him, but the guy just kept yelling back at John.  When I actually listened to what the guy on the bed was saying, I felt a big stab of guilt.

“Please don’t hurt my baby,” he said.  “Please don’t hurt my daughter.”

“Shut up!” I yelled, because beneath the sound of John and Tom yelling at the guy to get down off the bed and the guy crying about his daughter, I heard something else: a little kid, crying.

The blankets were all bunched up beside the man’s feet, and I saw something moving beneath those blankets.  The movement was synched to the sound of the kid crying.

I pointed my knife at the guy on the bed.  “Get down and cover your daughter,” I told him.  “You hold your baby and keep her safe.”

Talking about his child must have flipped some sort of switch in his head, because he stopped yelling and did as I told him.  We tied everyone up, searched the place, and found a couple teeners in the desk drawer.  We’d been expecting about twenty times as much dope.

“Fuck it,” Tom said.  “Let’s bounce.”

Just as we opened the front door to leave, two big bikers and a skinny biker bitch tried walking in.  Tom shouldered past them, and John ran.  I was still in the room when the skinny chick started screaming, “We’re being robbed.”

As soon as I heard her yelling, a shoved past the guys at the door and ran for the stairs.  I tried to jump down half a flight of cement steps, but one of the guys chasing me shoved me as I jumped.  I ended up crashing into the wall at the bottom of the stairs, and the rough stucco texture grated the skin off my arm.  I felt someone grab the back of my jacket, so I spun and slashed and felt the knife catch.  The grip on my back went away and I jump-ran down the rest of the stairs.

Out on the sidewalk, I saw Tom racing back towards me.  He and John hadn’t even noticed I was gone until they started piling into the car.

“Run, run, run, run,” I panted as I passed him.

We piled into the car and peeled out, just as we heard a bunch of motorcycle engines starting up in the hotel parking lot.  I checked the knife in my hand and found blood, but the stucco wall had turned my arm to hamburger, so maybe the blood was mine.  Just in case, however, we cleaned the knife and ditched it.

I have actually fictionalized this event in a short story called “Concrete Promised Land,” but the characters in that story actually have morals and brains.  We, on the other hand, were the kind of daytime talk show dimwits who took knives to gun fights.  As a matter of fact, I saw John many years later on an episode of Jerry Springer.

Even after I moved away to Oregon, Tom and I got into trouble together.  He’s one of the only people to ever come visit me after I left Reno.  Once, when he came up for a visit, we drove around shooting the lights out of warehouses.  Another time we used ten gallons of gas to set a building on fire right in the middle of downtown (town name redacted).  At one point, after he’d started to settle down a bit, Tom moved his whole family to Oregon, and both our families spent weekends camping at the lake and wakeboarding on his boat.

In just a few years we went from arson and drive-bys to family camping trips and PTA meetings.  How?  Well, Tom’s got a good heart, but he also has no idea how to self-manage.  When he lived with me, he followed my plan.  When his father got out of prison for setting someone on fire, Tom followed his father’s plan.  When Tom got married, he followed his wife’s plan, and it looked like he was going to finally settle down.

Then the economy went belly up, and Tom lost his job.  Four years ago, he had a wife and a family, a job, a five-bedroom house, a camper trailer, dirtbikes, new cars, and a boat.  Now he has no job, no wife, no place to live, and his only possession is his Harley, which is in danger of being repossessed.

It looks like all his friends have turned their backs on him, some with good reason, others just because he’s currently in a position of weakness.  Right now he’s visiting me, sleeping on my couch, trying to get his head on straight.  Unfortunately, I got sick the day he showed up, and he got bored waiting for me to get healthy again.  He went out to a bar, and four hours later called me from jail: DUI and possession of a controlled substance.  I’m not sure why they let him out of jail, but they did.

Which is good, because his son, Dominic, needed him here in Oregon.  Dominic has been living with his maternal uncle for the past seven months but, for reasons that will not be discussed on this blog, the arrangement was not working.  So Tom brought Dominic here, and for the past week or so they’ve stayed with me and my family.  We go skating nearly every day, and at night we practice gymnastics or dance moves or stretch in the living room.  Yesterday, despite every muscle in his body aching from all the exercise, and despite sharing a frigid garage with my son, Dominic said he wishes he could live here.

I wish we could let him, but he and his father are leaving tomorrow, riding out of town on a motorcycle despite the rain.  Tom says he plans on coming back for his court date, but his future seems pretty fluid right now.  Four years ago, Tom and I, and all our friends, were grown-ups.  We had jobs and houses and futures.  Now Rudy is in prison, Tom is wanted in three different states, and everyone I know has lost everything they so recently learned to work for.

It seems like we are all trying to find ourselves nowadays.  So maybe Tom is a good mascot for these fucked times, a high speed drifter-freak on a flat black Harley, running from his past and towards some ill-defined sense of self.  Or maybe, like the rest of us, he’s just human flotsam, broken by relentless waves of change and tossed up on a cold shore by an ocean that never even noticed him.  Either way, I love him, and I hope he finds himself before the authorities do.

I feel like this is incomplete.  I feel like I should have written about the time Tom killed himself by wrecking his first motorcycle just minutes after getting his motorcycle license, or about the time he accidentally drove his Geo Metro under an eighteen wheeler, or about the time he had his pinky finger torn off.  But I’m out of words for this installment, so I’ll just leave you with a picture of Tom and a Hunter S. Thompson quote.

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

–Hunter S. Thompson

The Rude Dog Blog

I met Rudy when I was fourteen, either right before I moved to my father’s house in Oregon, or shortly after I moved back.  I can’t remember when exactly, but I do remember how.

I was in Jeff’s yard, with a bunch of the neighborhood kids, and we were all boxing with a single pair of cheap boxing gloves.  Since we only had one set of gloves, each contestant only got one.  The champion took the left glove, and the challenger got the right.

An Indian looking kid wandered down and watched us for a while.  He laughed at us and asked if we all lived around here.  We asked him if he wanted to play, but he shook his head.  At some point he picked up a cat and began to stroke it while we boxed.

I remember I was boxing a kid named Chad.  Chad was dating a girl named Jeanette (Neddy) at the time, and I liked her, so I’d been feeling pretty good about beating him left handed and all.  Then, suddenly a cat landed on my back and clawed the hell out of me.

When I turned around, the Indian kid was laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.  He’d obviously thrown the cat on me.  I tore off the glove and got in his face.  Rather than back down like I’d expected, (after all I was the left handed boxing champ of the afternoon) he jumped up from where he’d been crouching and shoved me in the chest.  We puffed up and said some tough words, but we didn’t fight.

The next day — or later that week or month I’m not sure — I found him hanging around with my friends.  We all hiked in the hills and explored caves and played war games.  The US was having trouble with Libya at the time and the movie Red Dawn was still a pretty big deal, so we thought of ourselves as survivalists and potential freedom fighters in the coming war.  At some point we found some baby rabbits and, working together, we caught a few of them, took them to my house, and put them in a little shelter we made on my bed.  I called my mother at work and told her to look on my bed when she got home because I had an Easter surprise for her.

That’s when Rudy told us he’d stolen some pot from his older brother-in-law, Lance.  The younger, not so stupid, kids in our neighborhood begged off and went home.  Rudy, Jeff, and I climbed a tree somewhere in the neighborhood, and smoked the joint.  I still think it was laced with something, but maybe I just had a really bad reaction to the pot.  Either way, I started freaking out and seeing things, and so did Jeff.  Rudy played it cool at first, but after a while, even he started to get worried.  We all went to our separate homes to sleep it off.

By this time, my head was spinning, I was seeing tracers when I moved too fast, and the whole world seemed like a dream.  I kept having panic attacks, (which I’d been having on a lesser scale for a few years) and I thought my heart was going to burst.  I climbed into my bed and yanked the covers over my head.

Startled baby rabbits shot in every direction.  I emptied an underwear drawer, crawled around the room collecting the rabbits, and stuffed them in the drawer.  Back in bed, I cried while my head invented ever more awful hallucinations.  My heavy metal blacklight posters leered.  My little sisters poked their heads into my bedroom to check on me once or twice, and I shouted at them to leave.  It was a wonder I ever tried drugs again, but no one has ever accused me of being a quitter, especially when it came to drugs.

Several hours later, my mother returned from work and peeked into my room.  “Leon, honey, are you in here?”

“Mom,” I said from beneath my covers, “I’m sorry, but I can’t talk.  I’m really high right now.  I think maybe someone slipped me some acid or something.”

“So this is my Easter surprise?”  She didn’t sound as mad as I’d expected.  “My son laying in bed too stoned to talk?”

“No.”  I peeked out from beneath the covers.  “We got you a bunch of baby bunnies, but they were flying all around the room, so I put them with my underwear.”

She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me, patted me on the head, and asked if I needed anything.  She could be very understanding and nurturing in her own way.  I think of the crap I put her through growing up, (and trust me, being zonked on laced weed and jabbering about baby rabbits in my underwear was the least of it) and I’m amazed she didn’t just abandon me in the desert when I was too young to find my way home.

Digression:

My mother was barely fifteen when she had me.  She and my father said they made me in the back of a van in the Sparks High School parking lot.  They’d both been cashing in on the tail end of the hippie movement.  My father actually believed in alternate energy, overthrowing the power structure, rethinking society, and high-minded shit like that.  I’m pretty sure my mother just liked the idea of sex and drugs, though she had taken the nickname “Freedom,” so I guess that’s something.

Dad left when I was two, shortly after getting my mother pregnant with my little sister, Olivia.  He moved to Oregon with another woman, who was already pregnant with my other sister, Taneea.  I have no memories of my parents being together.

My mom had a lot of asshole boyfriends and husbands between my father and Norman, the old black guy we were living with out in Sun Valley.  My youngest sister’s father is a pederast and killer currently serving time in prison for–you guessed it–killing his wife and raping her kid.  Kenneth was a big black body builder who beat the crap out of my mom and eventually died due to pneumonia brought on by a cocaine overdose.  Other guys didn’t last as long, so I don’t remember them as well.  Norman wasn’t so bad.  He took my mother and her three out-of-control kids into his house.  He gave us a home, the first one I ever remember having.  I repaid him by trashing the place and stealing from him.

End of digression.

Rudy and I were always semi-confrontational, but we always stuck up for each other too, kind of the way I picture real brothers would behave.  He picked on me constantly, and I always took the bait.  Wrestling matches only ended when blood got spilled.  We nearly came to blows about once a month.  We actually came to blows three times.  (I’ll probably get to those stories later.) But, if someone else ever tried to hurt me . . .  (See Helicopters Over Leon Street.)

At one point, Jeff’s mother adopted Rudy, or she assumed custody or something.  Anyway, at the time of our fight with the Vatoes, he lived with Jeff, Jeff’s mother, and Jeff’s older sister.  I remember being really jealous of the whole situation.  I felt like Jeff stole my older brother.  Then Rudy and I got into that fight on Leon Street, and things changed.

For one, the Vatoes wanted to kill us, and that was a bond all unto itself.  But we also went to jail together for the first time.  We called the cops on ourselves concerning the fight on Leon Street.  We figured we didn’t have much to worry about.  The Vatoes were a known gang.  During the fight, they’d outnumbered us four or five to one.  Anything we’d done, we’d done in self-defense.

Here’s a note to any would be confessors: if you admit to the police that you hit someone, even in self-defense, plan on spending the night in jail.  Especially if people got stabbed during the fight.

The detective we’d talked to on the phone asked us to come down to Parr Boulevard, the brand new police facility outside Sun Valley, in order to “make a statement.”  My mother came with me.  A guy named Detective Cody took my statement, and then informed my mother that I’d be going to jail for assault.  When he left the room, I told my mom to warn Rudy.

Rudy showed up about fifteen minutes after they put me in a locked holding cell, and my mother warned him.  I guess he actually tried to run, but the idea of a fifteen-year-old kid escaping from a state of the art jail is pretty ridiculous.  Within a few minutes of showing up, he joined me in the cell.

We went to Juvie together.  I was released to my mother, and Jeff’s mom let Rudy stay locked up for a few days, in order to teach him a lesson.  (As if either of us could be taught anything at that point in our lives.)  We got court dates, but we never ended up going to court.  Maybe we went to the first date.  I can’t remember.  Anyway, the whole thing just . . . evaporated.

Here’s what I think happened:  Lorraine, my girlfriend at the time, got attacked by the Vatoes a few weeks after the fight.  They pulled a knife on her and cut her sweater, leaving a little scratch on her belly.  Since the cut was so small, the detective she’d been talking to advised her to say that the Vatoes had only showed her the knife when she wrote out her official statement.  Lorraine’s mother and stepfather found out about the coercion concerning the wordage on the statement, and raised a little hell.  The detective who had suggested she lie on the statement was Detective Cody.

I’m pretty sure this is when Detective Cody started to hate me.  Regardless, he hounded me at several points later on in my life.

In the meantime, however, Rudy and I had gotten into more trouble.  In order to protect ourselves from the gangbanger reprisals we figured were sure to come, we stole a bunch of guns from one of our neighbors.  The story on that will be the subject of an upcoming blog, once I get permission to use the neighbors name.  When we realized the trail of evidence pointed squarely at us, Rudy and I packed up and ran away.

We ended up living with my uncle, at a martial arts dojo and commune.  (Lots of blogs on that later, once I figure out how not to get myself killed or disowned for writing about it.)  Uncle Herb took over custody of both of us, but we didn’t slow our crime spree.  We continued on with the same friends, doing the same bad shit, only now we lived in a much cooler house, complete with hot tub, cold tub, massage room, sauna, weight room, rock garden, and training room.

Rudy got along better with my uncles wife than I did, so when I ran away from the dojo, Rudy stayed behind.  He eventually left the dojo.  I eventually returned.  He returned again.  I left again.  He ended up living with my mother for a while.  At one point we both lived with her.  Rudy called me from prison, the first time he went, and asked if I’d be at the birth of his son.  I didn’t want to be at anyone’s birth, so I told him I’d joined the Army, and enlisted the next day in order to make my lie true.  After my short stint with the US Army, we both went to jail together again.  This time as adult guests of Parr Boulevard, the same place we’d made our statements concerning the fight on Leon Street four or five years earlier.

Aahh the memories.

Again and again throughout our lives our paths crossed and re-crossed, until about fifteen years ago, when I moved to Oregon, and Rudy went to prison for the second or third time.  We’ve written letters, but not many.  I attended his wedding when he got married to my cousin.  Otherwise, however, our paths have finally stopped intersecting.

He’s in prison again now.  Parole violation.  He says he’s learned his lesson, and I really hope he’s changed — for himself, for his sons, for me, and for my cousin who is still married to him.  A whole lifetime of history to the contrary, however, makes hope seem a little futile.  I love him, and I still consider him my brother, but at some point, I guess you just have to cut your losses.

I’m at that loss-cutting point in my life now.  Last chance, Brother.  Take it, please.

Anyway, I’ve already used too many words this week.  Sorry for the info dump.  To make up for it, I’ll post a couple pics of Rudy below, one from prison, and another from his wedding.  Next time, I promise TrueStoopidStories instead of historical ramblings.

For now, however, this is all I have.  Take it or leave it.  Love it or hate it.  Not a story.  Just a life.  True, stupid, and mine.

Helicopters Over Leon Street

I moved to Oregon to live with my father when I was fourteen, and I lived with him for about nine months.  Before then, I’d messed around with a lot of girls–blowjobs and handjobs and stuff like that–but I’d only had two real girlfriends: Jeanette (Neddy) and Loraine.

Neddy was a nice girl who lived a few trailers down from the trailer where I lived with my mother, two little sisters, and my mother’s fifty year old, black husband.  Neddy’s little brother had Down’s syndrome, and she was very protective of him.  Her mom gave me free haircuts.  Her dad sometimes paid me to help him with landscaping projects.  Unlike all the girls I’d messed around with before, Neddy claimed me as her boyfriend and let me kiss her.

Loraine was a bad girl who lived in a trailer with a drunk mother and an abusive shitkicking stepfather.  She said my mom was a nigger lover.  She and her best friend, Leigh, smoked cigarettes and pot.  They drank and talked about all the boys they’d fucked in the past.  Loraine let me do a lot more than just kiss her.  She also kinda broke my heart, which was–in part at least–why I moved to Oregon to live with my father.

Can you guess which girl I looked up as soon as I’d moved back from Oregon?

Within days of moving back into my mother’s trailer, Loraine and I were screwing like rabbits.  Between her trailer and mine, however, there was another trailer, full of Mexican gangbangers who called themselves the Surenos, or Sur 13.  My friends and I called them The Vatoes, when we weren’t calling them worse.

Loraine called them spicks.  Rudy (one of my best friends who later became my foster brother) hated them, in part because they were Mexican and he hated his Mexican father.  Jeff (Rudy’s foster brother at the time) said they were always starting fights.  I avoided the trailer as much as possible en route to Loraine’s house, but I’d never had problems with the Vatoes until one day when three of them showed up in my neighborhood looking for Neddy.

I don’t remember their names, but I remember one of them was about my age, and the other two were younger.  They talked about how they were gonna fuck Neddy.  They got pretty explicit about it and really pissed me off.  Pretty soon, we were standing toe to toe and puffing our chests, not really wanting to fight, but not wanting to back down either.

Rudy and Jeff appeared out of nowhere to even the odds, and the Vatoes left our neighborhood, shouting about how they were going to kill our families and burn our trailers down.  I was worried, but the only repercussions I actually suffered in the following weeks were some hard looks and a couple thrown rocks as a rode my bike past their trailer en route to Lorain’s bedroom.

Then, one day near the end of summer, this blonde guy I barely knew from school showed up in our neighborhood with an ax handle wrapped with rope.  He was friendly, and he shared his flask of booze.  He and Rudy and I hiked in the mountains and caught lizards.  We smoked some pot I stole from my mom.  He told us how the Vatoes had been messing with him a lot lately, which explained the rope-wrapped ax handle.  The rope would provide grip, he explained, even if the stick got all covered in blood.  Sometime after dark, we sobered up, and the kid asked Rudy and me to walk him home.

I stole a couple knives from my mother’s husband, gave one to Rudy, and we set out on our way.

“We should cut down to Carol Street and see what Loraine and Leigh are up to,” I said.

“Fuck that,” Rudy said.  “We’re gonna walk right past that taco trailer.  I wanna see those spicks throw some rocks at us tonight.”

The blonde kid–I think his name was Steve, but I don’t really remember–wanted to avoid the Vatoes trailer, and he said as much.  Rudy teased him about his rope wrapped ax handle and how he was too much of a pussy to use it.  I didn’t want to be considered a pussy, (what fourteen year old boy does) so I teased him too.  When we got to Leon street–yes this all happened on a street bearing my fist name–we turned onto the darkened dirt road, and marched past the Vatoe’s trailer.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened.  Sometimes I remember Rudy shouting something as we passed the trailer.  Sometimes I remember someone shouting at us from their porch.  Who shouted what and when?  Fuck if I know, but before we knew what was happening, we were surrounded by a group of Mexican gangbangers all jabbering threats and Spanish.

“Drop the bat,” they yelled, and I realized they were yelling at Steve.  “Drop the bat, bitch.”

Four Vatoes backed Rudy and I into the dry drainage ditch beside the dirt road, while the rest–seamed like at least a dozen–grabbed Steve’s custom ax handle and tried to pull it from his hand.  Someone kicked me in the chest and I fell on my ass in the ditch.  Rudy rushed one guy, and the other three jumped into the ditch with me.

I remember being too scared to fight back at first.  We were outnumbered and on their home turf.  They were loud and threatening and really seemed to be enjoying this.  I got punched in the head a few times, and instinct finally took over.  I punched and kicked wildly from where I half-sat on the lip of the ditch.

I heard the guy Rudy was fighting shout something about “Stab me puto.”  I learned later on that the guy’s name was Angel, or something like that.  Between the kicks and punches I saw Rudy and Angel swinging each other around in a big circle on the dirt road.  They had hold of each other’s hair with one hand, and I thought they were punching each other with their other hands.  Rudy’s punches looked weird though, kind of awkward and slow.

The guys fighting me stopped hitting me long enough to see what was wrong with their friend.  I should have run.  I watched instead.  Rudy wasn’t punching Angel; he was stabbing him, in the head.  I could tell because the knife got stuck in Angel’s skull, and Rudy had to work it back and forth a bit to get it out.  Angel fell, and most of the rest of the gang swarmed.

Rudy ran.  I should have run, but the guy who’d been punching me had turned away, and I used the opportunity to sucker punch him in the side of the head.  I hit him two or three times before he staggered out of the ditch and used the advantage of higher ground to kick at my head and stomp on my hands whenever I tried to climb out of the ditch.

Then, suddenly, the ditch was full of Vatoes, and my world went all ugly and painful.  One grabbed my hair.  (I wore it long back then.)  One grabbed my right wrist, and the rest set about kicking and stomping the holy hell out of me.

For several years afterwards, I kept the T-shirt I’d been wearing that night, the brand names of at least four different shoes had been clearly stamped in my own blood.  They bruised me from head to toe.  They cracked and separated my ribs.  They fattened my lips, and put two or three big lumps on my head.  The white of one of my eyes turned entirely red and stayed like that for weeks.

The entire time, I had a big ass knife tucked into the waistband of my jeans.  I wish I could say self-restraint kept me from pulling it out and going all Norman Bates on them, but I was just too scared to cross that line.  I’d been in lots of fights at that point in my life, but I’d never stabbed anyone.

They stopped kicking me long enough for Angel to question me.  He was bleeding from his head, but none of it was on his face.  It all leaked down behind his left ear and soaked his shirt.  Maybe some of those footprints on my shirt were in Angel’s blood, now that I think about it.

“Where does your friend live?” he asked.

“I don’t even know that guy.”

He slapped me with the hand he’d been holding to his head wound, and so much blood splashed it felt like getting hit in the face with a water balloon.

He kept asking me where Rudy lived.  I kept saying I didn’t know.  He kept hitting me.  Finally, I decided to give him the address of a different guy I knew, an older guy who’s parents were bikers and who had a buttload of guns.

Angel said something to the others, and a few of them rushed off towards their trailer.  “We’re gonna go for a ride, and you’re gonna show me his house.”

I figured if I got in the car, they’d kill me.  I’d have pulled my knife then, if I’d have been able, but they had both of my arms pined.  I remember the knife handle poked out of my waistband, in plain sight the whole time, and I kept hoping they didn’t notice it and use it on me.

Before the others could return with the car, the Vatoes started yelling at Steve again.  I’d forgotten all about him, and apparently, so had they.  Now that they were in control, however, they resumed trying to take the ax handle from him.  A couple of the guys in the ditch with me jumped out and tried to help their friends disarm him.

I yanked a hand free, pulled the knife, and hacked blindly.  I felt the knife catch twice, and I was suddenly alone in the ditch.

I ran.  Later on I felt a little bad about leaving Steve, but I consoled myself with the thought that he’d stood there with an ax handle, doing nothing, while Rudy and I got our asses kicked.

Nowadays, Leon Street is completely paved, but back then, part of it was still rutted and potholed dirt, which was fortunate for me, because as soon as I’d climbed from the ditch and started running, I saw headlights bouncing behind me.  I cut into someone’s front yard, then jumped a fence and ran around back.  I jumped fences and hotfooted it through at least a dozen different properties.  I dumped the knife in someone’s trashcan, stuffing it as far down as it would go.  I eventually came out on Carol Street, where Loraine lived.  I kept to the shadows, hiding in the ditches that lined the road whenever I saw headlights, and finally made it to Lorain’s house and knocked on the door.

Leigh answered the door and choke-screamed when she saw my face.  She went all stupid and actually collapsed right there in the open doorway.  A strange, detached part of my brain felt an odd kind of pride at that.  Now I was the bad boy, and she was in over her head.  Loraine didn’t react as badly.  She ushered me in and asked me “what the fuck happened,” while we cleaned off some of the blood, most of which was probably Angels.

Rudy showed up ten minutes later with a friend who had a car.  He and I rode home in the trunk and walked into my mother’s trailer just in time to catch the news.  A gang stabbing on Leon Street.  The emergency medical helicopter had been dispatched and someone was being transported to Washoe Medical Center, where–ironically enough–my grandmother did the paperwork to check them in.

I should probably tell you about how Rudy and I got arrested for this, (the first time we went to jail together but nowhere near the last) and how my enmity with one Detective Cody started at this point, and how I never really knew if I’d stabbed anyone until later when I met an ex-Vatoe who claimed I’d cut an illegal immigrant member of their gang, but I’m out of words for this week.

Maybe next time.  Then again, maybe not.  I’ve got a lot of TrueStoopidShit to report, and I know people will have enough trouble believing what I’ve already written.  So this is it for now.  I hope you enjoyed the first major fender bender in the car crash that was my life.  Join me next time and I’ll tell you some more TrueStoopidShit.