fourth grade, the new 'regular, normal" school, there was no nightsticks leaning against the teachers desk anymore, just finished three years in a juvenile prison in California, utterly clueless, unstable educationally, socially, and in third or fourth grade? He is11, better put him in fourth...
there was no right grade for me, no one knew what to do about my '"transcripts", I think my old man "lost" them....
I had made a friend, Bill Lang had become my friend, the first clean normal kid I got to know, we wrote stories together about a crew of invented creatures centered in our throats because we could make noises in ours that sounded like frogs croaking.
Well, it turns out it is more like pigs grunting, but we were acing English for them, we had them ruling the world, one of them was an eyeball, foreshadowing my obsession later with Rick Griffin comix..... and the class liked it when we read them out loud to them so we were hamming it up, having fun, I was fitting in somewhere good, I was normal, I let them cut off my pompadour, traded up for a flat top "butch".....
recess you go outside for twenty minutes then line back up and go back in, Bill and I had a corner of the yard where we had built a track for the little Matchbox cars we had, other kids came over and looked at it, we were proud of ourselves, a new experience for me, the call goes that only five minutes are left, pick up, ...
a sixth grader, there were two of them on our yard, safetys, they called them "Safetys", they had fancy little white belts and a badge, in charge of sometimes getting kids to hurry up and line up, one comes over to where Bill and I are getting up and tells us to hurry up, I looked up at him and he then went and took his foot and fucked our track up,... we had built and saved it carefully, everyone knew about it, we even had built a bridge, we had worked on it for three days,.. he took his shoe and toed our cars, I told him to cut the shit and he reflexively moved at me, snarling a little at the littler smart ass dirt kid and I knocked six of his front teeth out and kicked him in the nuts and went and lined up all innocently like, I don't even know what happened, don't look at me... while he rolled around in the dirt, screaming at the thought of all that dental work he needed now, blood pouring out of his face, but I didn't care, he started it, fuck you, right??.
But everyone ratted on me. Unbelievable to me, perfectly normal for kids in fourth grade that hadn't been raised in prison. So, another safety came up to me to straighten me out and I busted him up, too..
Mr. Romero's training kicked right in, all reflex and breath, a little footwork, I hit him in his eyes with my left thumb, hard, he had no defense the poor kid, he had come over to stick up for his partner and this is what he gets, him and his little belt and badge...
UH OH.
They started it, just little kid bully boy idiots, bullshit for bullies, not my thing or scene, but it had not just all gone away, My father had found and saved me. I was in a family now, I was in heaven mostly, until they fucked with me and it wasn't ok.
I didn't get in trouble with the authorities but, the kids that had actually seen me and the other two combatants wouldn't get anywhere near me again, ever.
Even Bill. I had stuck up for US, but little kids don't have tips, their own loyal crews on their recess yards in fourth grade, he wasn't Bobby, who would have died before he ever told on me.
I was out, but I wasn't free, not enough.
My father was pissed off. He said, "How the hell are you going to be able to go to school and not get in trouble? You hurt those boys really really bad, what the fuck happened, why did you hit them that way?"
He noticed something right there, I was ready to fight him, he was giving me shit, I was looking for a way out of it, but he saw it and he was surprised, I didn't even know I was plexed up, but he did.
"They asked for it, They tried to hit me."
something like....
"What?..."Did they?"... "Hit you?".."Did they?"
"He came at me, both of them did. I didn't start a fucking thing. "
and I ran off for six hours and sat under a tree and thought "why not just go home?" I was on parole, I could call the guy in Albuquerque and he'd have to get me out, he told me that on my paperwork which they didn't think I could read. I belonged to the State of California until they said otherwise, even Deloris didn't know that because she couldn't read it, Jack just never read the paperwork, or maybe he did.
I never brought it up. I surrendered. I started trying to do better. I didn't really know what that was though, so I started asking my sister Phyllis stuff, if I timed it just right after she got home from school, she would take her shirt off and lie down on the top bunk in the girls' bedroom and after about a half hour,I would go in and ask her a question, she would rise up to look at me and I would be innocently looking at her still bare breasts, I don't think she ever knew, but I worked it, yes I did, I was a dirty little monkey and I was completely out of control.
Hey now, she is my "step" sister, so there's that...and I was 11,,,what was I gonna do, I just had to see them, I had to...
Another guy who was willing to explain something now and then was a race car guy down the street, Sgt. Summers, he ran a super modified, back then that indicated then a one-seat car on a custom-built chassis with a 327chevy, or a 292 ford and the fabled 500 and something cubic inch Chrysler that was illegal to run and can't be hidden, the 500 plus Cubic Inches of combustion in the chambers were discussed incessantly in the pits,. We were No. 25 on the Speedway Park dirt track out behind the base.
The Unser Brothers home track, Indy Car stars now, but they started at Speedway Park....they were out there just before I moved there, I never got to see them race except on TV...they called the stock cars Jalopys and then the one seat Super Modifieds, on an eighth-of-a-mile dirt oval track, wild shit, great racing, the immensely entertaining flying upside down cars, dancing debris flinging rollover multi-car wrecks all the time, guys are bolted in, they don't come out until they want to if they wreck,when they wreck, a lot of nothing but loud smelly gas and oil mud spraying all over you in the bleachers on the corner and never eat the snack bar food they sell, nothing but fun weekend nights. All summer I could hear them from my bedroom window at night, they would race until midnight or 11 pm, it was out in the middle of nowhere for real, letting loose no pissed-off neighbors complaining to the cops.
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| this kind of super modified, before they wore hats |
Global Warming was on nobody's agenda...
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| used to be granmas luxury sedan |
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