I know I left my readers hanging at the end of Hard Knocks: Memoir of a Small Moment, but my second book, Hard Love, is due the be released by my publisher, http://www.wipfandstock.com, by the end of spring, beginning of summer. Thank you for your patience!
2
Day Labor
San Clemente is a little beach town about halfway between San Diego and L.A. in Orange County, the Republican epicenter of the state. It is mostly populated by White middle-to-upper-middle-class native Californians and out-of-staters from the Midwest and back East. Although there is a heavy presence of Chicano gang life in Orange County—the largest being F Troop, based in Santa Ana—the homeboys have not yet settled into our new haven. The people are “laid back” and live in rhythm with the tide’s ebb and flow. The professionals, lawyers, doctors, corporate types, all hit the waves before and after work, and the kids model their parents. Camp Pendleton, the Marine Base, is only ten miles south down the freeway. A lot of Jarheads rent near the beach, which is a popular place for recruits to party.
Our new home is just east of the freeway in the low hills, and we arrive to find a change of plans. Teresa’s and Brad’s roommates, Rick and his stripper girlfriend, Suzy, have not yet moved out, and Paula and I find ourselves sleeping on a mattress at the foot of the waterbed in Teresa’s and Brad’s room. We are starting off on the floor. Everything is new and there is so much we don’t know. We have yet to make love.
Rick has bad skin and long, oily red hair. He’s average height and weighs about a buck-and-a-half with that sunken-skin look from sucking the life out of his veins through a needle. He manages the strip club where Suzy dances. Rick has a Great Dane named Brutus, and Teresa reports that she walked by their bedroom one night and saw a picture of hell through a slight opening in the door—bestiality. They move out after a couple of weeks, and we all move out a week or so later. I don’t know how they ended up living in this house together, but Rick is a bad actor apparently capable of attempted murder.
Driving to the work one morning, Teresa has to pull off the freeway because her van starts shaking up a storm once she reaches 65 MPH. The lug bolts had been loosened. Rick was the suspect as he was seen by Frog mulling about the driveway early that morning with a cup of Joe in his hand and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Frog, a bricklayer/mason, works for Brad and waits in the driveway each day before they head out. Problems persist with Rick, primarily over ownership of certain household items. He insists that the refrigerator is his and comes to claim said item while we’re at work. Teresa can hold her own and is able to dissuade him for the moment but not before he makes threats of ill intent. No one threatens my sister without feeling my wrath—a long-established doctrine. That night I call Rick at the strip club and tell him to stay there so I can come and rip the eyes out of his head. He suddenly sees the light through the eyes he wishes to keep and says there’s no need for violence. I agree upon the condition that we never hear from him again. He must have seen something in my eyes because we never hear from him again. I’m still angry much of the time, which makes loving me hard.
During the next couple of months, we move two more times with Teresa and Brad before arriving at our own one-bedroom apartment at 1002 Buena Vista. Situated across the street from the condos on the bluff overlooking the beach, we have our tiny ocean view between them. The stairs leading down to 204, a local surf spot, are seconds from our front door.
After a short stint as a Betty Crocker sample hostess at the local supermarket, Paula starts waitressing at a Howard Johnson’s. I’m working as the laborer of a three-man crew. Brad’s father has a contractor’s license and is able to finesse enough masonry jobs to keep the one-truck outfit going. It’s hard to know how old Frog is because he has that weathered, worn out, heavy-living look. He stands about five-feet-something, weighs about 125 lbs. and has thick, shoulder-length blond hair with a matching Fu Manchu mustache. His skin tone is reddish-brown. They call him Frog because he sort of croaks when he speaks, a result of a lifetime of smoking all kinds of stuff. And he talks a lot, so it sounds like a frog croaking in a pond that follows you around. He’s married to a pretty young brunette named Peaches. She’s 19 years old, about a half-a-foot taller than Frog and a full-bodied woman, probably outweighing him by 50 lbs. They are a startling couple and just had a baby girl named Regan, after Linda Blair’s character in The Exorcist.
Our days on the crew start with a couple of joints, then picking up supplies: some egg sandwiches for breakfast with black coffee and a 12-pack of Budweiser and ice for the cooler. We meet the cement truck at the site, and I start hauling cement in a wheelbarrow and lugging bricks to stack them near the wall. And so it goes, back and forth, cement and bricks, break for lunch, another joint, deli sandwiches and beer, and back and forth, cement and bricks, until we run out of sun and leave, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I’m not feeling the love for Brad because I’m not seeing, not feeling his love for my sister. He’s a heroin addict abstaining for a time and getting by on weed and beer; and he’s a dog, howling at every good-looking woman we see, like I won’t care because he thinks I’m like him. On one occasion he even makes a comment about Paula’s ass. After a couple of days of this shit, I can’t sit in the front of the truck anymore, so I ride in the back with the supplies and tools. I hear them joking on the way home one day that we’re like every other crew with a Mexican in the back of the truck. Brad nicknames me “Lips” because I have big lips and he thinks he’s funny. And this takes me back to my dark childhood—my dark skin, the taunts of nigger and spic—and anger boils in my gut.
For some family bonding one weekend, we take off for a campground in the Cleveland National Forest where there’s a cliff with a small waterfall. We’re in two vans; Teresa, Brad, Peaches, and Regan in one, and Paula and I are driving with Frog. This is a Chaparral Forest rich with Manzanita plants with blood-red branches, topped by tall pines and sagebrush rolling across the valley floor. It’s full of mountain lions, bobcats, Mexican red rattlers, copperheads, tarantulas, and scorpions. It’s an exciting and sometimes dangerous place. We smoke a lot of weed and drink beer and some Mescal tequila with the mythical worm in the bottle. We hike out a mile or so to the waterfall. There’s a small pool at the bottom with a circumference of about 25 feet. It’s deep enough in the middle, but there’s a ledge of rock about five feet around the edges, which is only a few feet in depth. There’s a spot about 20 feet up the rock where you can jump from, or you can go from the top, a 40-foot drop. The challenge is to launch yourself far enough toward the middle of the pool to avoid smashing onto the shallow sides. It is relatively easy from 20 feet, but 40 feet is crazy enough sober, and psychotic if you’re drunk and stoned. Everyone else jumps from 20. I jump from 40. A dead-center landing in the ice-cold water sobers me up slightly, but I’m buzzing with an adrenaline rush and make another successful jump, another example of God’s mercy in spite of my need for crazy. That night we finish the tequila, and I swallow the worm hoping for a psychedelic experience. It’s just a plain old worm . . . and I’m just plain old wasted.
The next morning we pack up to leave. You pay for the site on the way out. Teresa and Brad are already on the road. We have no money and find out that Frog also has no money and no intention to pay as he drives through the gate, smashing it in two and sideswiping the park ranger who is waving at us to stop. And we’re off, racing down this mountain road with this crazy, hung over beach bum, acting like a desperado. We have no idea where we are or where we’re going.
In no time a highway patrol unit is behind us with lights flashing and sirens wailing. Fortunately, Frog doesn’t think it wise to engage law enforcement in a high-speed chase along a desert highway. They impound the van and transport us to the station. Paula and I are freaking out. We’re in California just three weeks and now sitting in a highway patrol station in we don’t know where. I’m off probation for like a month and we’re with this drunken fool asshole, who has a little man’s complex and doesn’t give a shit. We spend the entire day at the station before the cops determine we were innocent passengers and let us go. We have no money and no way to contact my sister, so we start walking along State Route 70-something, trying to hitch a ride. We’re successful (again I’m in the back of a truck) and get dropped off at a real redneck cowboy bar. We walk in. The talking stops; the jukebox keeps playing country music. The sun set long ago, and the bar is packed with the after-dinner regulars: cowboys wearing their cowboy hats and boots, buying drinks for their cowgirls, wearing their cowgirl hats and boots. I’m wearing a muscle shirt and shorts, and Paula is in her white bikini top and blue jean hot pants. The cowboys stop shooting pool and throwing darts, the country music keeps playing, and all eyes are on us. What a sight. I don’t know, but I imagine they’re thinking I’m a Mexican pimp working my green-eyed blonde who I kidnapped in Ensenada. We just stand there, unsure what to do when Teresa and Brad walk in, and we make a fast exit, get in the van, and take off. They’ve been looking for us all day. They finally backtracked to the campsite and found out what happened. As a last resort, they went to the closest highway patrol station and got the news. This was their last stop before heading home. Mercy, mercy, mercy.
Ray Lopez, evangelist, writer, ordained minister, ministering to the hardcore, one at a time. 