The first day in 7th Grade at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School I didn't know anyone but Mike, who I had given my paper route to 2 years earlier. We became friends immediately as he was a good hearted person like me. We had both almost died before age 5 (he by Polio and I by whooping Cough) so there was a grown up seriousness and maturity that often comes from almost dying as a child. (Unless one is grow up enough one often doesn't survive these kinds of experiences). So, we both shared the horror of having to grow up very young emotionally. So, though we tended to be adults in teenagers bodies we both knew what was important in life even then.
When I was 13 and he 14 he bought a 1940 Ford Coupe with a flathead 6 engine. It was a really beautiful black thing and I helped him work on the engine. By age 15 he had sold the 40 Ford and bought a 1953 Mercury with an automatic transmission. Mike was a natural mechanic and I helped him rebuild the automatic transmission on the Mercury. One day at his house after school (I was 15 or 16 at the time) either a Life or Look or Post magazine arrived in his mail with the Beatles on the cover. We were both excited because the Beatles music then in 1964 was just becoming the rage in California and across the U.S. Up until then it had mostly been about Elvis from the mid 50s but then it suddenly became about the Beatles and then all the Beatles (clones) from England like Herman and the Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, etc. etc. etc. I found it! It was this one and it came to Mike's house while we were rebuilding his 1953 Mercury's transmission in 1964. It was the 28th of August 1964 so it was summer vacation and I had just returned from my church conclave in Mt. Shasta California.
A year or two later Mike wanted me to listen to the Beatles Album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he had just bought the record album. He was dating his first love then and owned a street racer that he had built up with racing slicks and a special street racing engine. I was also there when she left him and I don't think he ever got over her. She was a very pretty blue eyed blonde that looked really good riding inside his 57 Chevy with Chrome reverse wheels, racing slicks, and tuck and roll interior and the biggest engine he could fit into it for racing on the streets. We were sort of living at that time "American Graffiti" and a Surf movie both at the same time.
Then there was the Littlerock Dam incident where I thought it would be a great idea to climb up the iron ladder up the then face of the dam. However, about 50 to 100 feet up the ladder leaned out for about 10 feet before it returned to a vertical climb. But I wasn't afraid of heights (or most anything) at that time of my life and so I was waiting on top of the dam for Mike to join me. Anyway, Mike almost died there because he froze 50 to 100 feet up where the ladder went out of vertical. I had to finally as 1/2 hour passed and I knew that if I didn't do something my friend was going to fall off the ladder and die. So I climbed down over him and told him to climb down with him right above me so he wouldn't fall off and die.
However, strangely enough for years I thought it was me who froze on the ladder because I was so afraid of Mike dying. We were about 17 or 18 when this crazy thing happened. We did a lot of crazy things like outdoors boys did back then. We had spent one week in Yosemite together when I was 15 when his mother and sister got food poisoning and almost died hiking in Yosemite while an Air Force Corpsman who was a medic took care of Mike's mother and 17 year old sister. All three of them told us to go take a hike because we were 15 year old boys and didn't know anything about food poisoning. This was one of the most amazing outdoor spiritual adventures of both our lives, hiking to Vernal Falls, California Nevada Falls, exploring trails all over the place swimming in the river going through Yosemite, jumping into the river off of the stone bridges with hundreds of other children, teenagers, and 20 somethings. Then at night there were Cedar Firefalls off of Glacier Point which was like watching thousands of shooting stars fly down off of Glacier Point which were really Cedar embers. It was basically like watching a River of Fire pour down from Glacier Point and everyone who could took pictures and movies of it with 8mm cameras. we did this in 1963 while firefalls were still happening in the summers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXsA7E21ErQ&feature=related
This youtube will show you pictures of the firefall that was done from 1872 until 1969 and stopped because of ecological reasons. At about 1:40 in you will see the firefall narrated by Huel Hauser from PBS.
Mike and I had many adventures like riding over to Catalina on the Great White Steamship with our SCUBA Gear because we were both licensed SCUBA DIVERS. We also surfed at places like Malibu and Huntington Beach together and if the surf wasn't big enough for us we would go to Knott's Berry Farm or Disneyland as Disneyland was a great place to go dancing then. I danced with Gladys Knight and the Pips there for instance in 1969 and many other famous rock and roll groups there at that time.
While traveling over to Catalina to SCUBA dive we met 5 other guys doing the same thing. We decided to pool our resources and rent a speed boat together to go north to Emerald Cove which was the best diving Spot on the Eastern side of the Island back then. It turned out really great and a great day of Scuba diving was had by all. Another time Mike and I went to the Sunset Strip and went to a place called "The 5th Estate" which was a beatnik hangout. MIke played chess with people while strange movies played on the wall. I felt sort of out of place in my surf garb with Levi jeans with a white t-shirt and a Pendelton shirt but I felt safe there at that place. There was a kindness and helpfulness of those kinds of people that I never forgot. It was as if then in 1963 when I was 15 that Beatniks and the Free Speech movement out of UC Berkeley and Surfers all got together and their philosophies kind of all morphed into the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco in 1967. But Mike and I were pretty straight arrows and mostly street racers and surfers at that time. By 1966 MIke and I both had graduated High School. I had gone to school with Mike in public school for 3 years in Woodrow Wilson Junior High until the end of my junior year in High School. But because I had dated starting at age 16 first a 21 year old girlfriend for about 1 year and then by 17 I was dating an 18 year old girl who was a freshman at LA State in Los Angeles I was pretty fed up with high school by the end of my junior year. So I told my parents I was going to drop out of High School because I was bored with it. They convinced me to go to a private church school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This sounded like fun for me so I went to the snows of Santa Fe, New Mexico which really changed my life a lot. When I returned the following summer both Mike and I had graduated High School. He seemed changed a lot and was worrying a lot about getting drafted into the army and having to go to Viet Nam. So his plan was to get his Jet engine Certification at Glendale College so at the very least he wouldn't have to be on the front lines in the infantry. I was in a very different situation because I had had Childhood epilepsy until I was 15 so this made me a 4F in classification so I was very very unlikely to be called up by the draft unless our country was directly attacked by a foreign nation. This never happened so I was never called up.
But Mike went through with his plan to get his jet engine certification and joined the Air Force as a Jet engine specialist on Jet Fighters and was eventually sent to Thailand to a U.S Air Base there and worked on Air Force Fighters sent in to bomb Viet Nam. When he went into the Air Force his mother moved (I found out 20 years later) to Santa Barbara which I did not know. Also, late in 1969 I moved to San Diego because my parents had moved there and things were not going well for me alone in Los Angeles County. I eventually went back to college at Palomar College and married and had a son by age 26. However, neither Mike or I knew where the other had moved to so we didn't reconnect as friends until the 1990s over 20 years later. When I saw Mike again I realized his life hadn't gone as well or as relatively easily as mine. His life starting with Viet Nam and Thailand had started to become much more difficult for him. So, even though I had been married three times, he had never been able to replace his friendship with me. He was a lot quieter and shyer person than I and this had been difficult for him. Though he was married when I met him I realized his wife had had serious psychological issues since she had been institutionalized in her teens. Though I saw the relationship worked I knew if he wasn't making it work it couldn't work. So when he got a form of senile dementia or Alzheimer's in the early 2000s I watched his relationship with his wife become more and more dangerous to both of them. I felt helpless to do anything so it was worse than awful for me because I couldn't really help or save them in a useful way. Then he asked me to help him separate from his wife because she had knocked him unconscious with a silverware drawer that she broke over his head. So I tried but because he wasn't all there he couldn't follow through with this for more than 2 days. Since he wasn't non compos mentis (declared incompetent yet) there was nothing I could do but wait for his wife to kill him eventually. I told him, "Mike, if you go back to your wife I won't ever see you again as long as you are living with her. You understand that don't you?" So, I kept my word and only spoke with him on the phone which his wife encouraged as long as he knew who I was. Then last summer she left him naked on the floor of their home and left. A week to 2 weeks later a neighbor thought something was wrong and called the police. He was put into the custody of the state of California until his sister found out what had happened and sought legal custody of her brother. A month ago she called me to tell him he was in Bakersfield in a facility near her but could only say "Yes", "No" and "I love you" now.
So, today after hearing how he is now in a wheelchair and fading out of normal existence relatively fast I am left with a friend slowly fading out of existence. And I also feel a sinking feeling as I am left alone with my memories of my friend. If I go see him will he even know who I am anymore? I don't know. I feel and obligation to go but will that even help him or me in the long run, the short run. Remember, I just lost my mother in 2008 after 9 years of dementia and watching her slowly become stranger and stranger people until she didn't know me anymore in 2006. So, what is useful for us both? For now, I don't know the answer to that question.
No comments:
Post a Comment