Lies And Another Job I Once Had

I was a Teacher's Aid for LA Unified for a couple of years. I wanted to see if I liked it well enough to go back to school and get my teaching credentials. I didn't. But the last year was at a local elementary school here in Westchester and I divided my time between two 5th grade teachers and did playground supervision at morning break and at lunch. The teachers had me very involved. I was doing special tutoring for the dummies in one class and running an art class in the other. The playground was quite large and the "Official" playground supervisor was this very large woman who came out and sat down at the top of the yard by the classrooms. Well, before my advent, there wasn't an adult at the other end of the yard and the large woman (who reminded me a lot of a larger rounder Red Queen from Alice In Wonderland) ('Off with their heads!') never ever walked down the yard, so anything went. I soon discovered that the younger kids were being taken for their money and belongings by the fifth graders. I investigated, kept my eyes open and wanted to understand the whole thing before I decided what to do. The two ring leaders were best friends from one of the classes I worked in. One kid was a straight A student and the other was one of the dummies that could barely read. (He wasn't stupid, but he didn't think he had to read)
Some of my Boy Scouts that were in Middle School and High School with my twins had gone to this elementary school. I questioned them. And apparently, the extortion ring was self-perpetuating and had been going on every year for at least six or seven years. The littler kids grew up to take the place of the ones that left for middle school.
So, one morning when I was supposed to tutor the dummies in reading vocabulary, I wrote 'Extortion' one the board and asked the kids (and one of my ringleaders) what it meant. No one knew so I very carefully explained the ins and out of it to them. How I could go over and put my arm around a kid's shoulder (again, my ringleader) and say 'That's a real cool chain you have on, can I see that?' 'Oh, take it off and let me see it."
Anyway, I explained how some of the teachers and some of the officials at the school had asked us aids to keep a look out because they had understood that there were some things that were not legal that were taking place (and the kids now understood that extortion could be viewed as illegal) and how if it came to light, it might mean that some of the kids might not get to graduate and go on to middle school. (They were all 3-4 months away from the end of their 5th grade year.) At morning break recess, my dummy ringleader was in deep discussion with his buddy. It all stopped that day. I hope I broke the cycle, but I didn't go back the next year. I was done. Teaching wasn't exactly what I wanted. I am good at extortion though.

Lies I've Told

This is a view of Kirkwood Avenue at night, looking from the IU campus toward downtown. This hasn't changed at all from 1970. In 1969, I was attending High School two hours in the morning and working at a nearby restaurant in the afternoon and as a fry cook. I only needed two classes to graduate and they had a work program thing. So I got a job where I worked the lunch hour and prepped the dinner time and I had my evenings off on the weekends for the first time since I was 14. The trouble was that I hated the place. The boss was crabby, the kitchen was open so all the customers watched you every minute, so you couldn't even scratch yourself and it was me all by my lonesome for the whole shift. I made one friend, a dark curly haired waitress who was in Grad School at IU, but she was the only one. So I just quit. It was the first time in my life, I just called them and said, I quit. I'm not coming back. I assumed I could find another job, and I did.
I ran into the waitress an the street around here (above) and she wanted to know what had happened to me. I told her that I had a friend that had been desperate to kick his smack habit and I quit the restaurant to sit with him for a few days while he went cold turkey. She believed me. (Everyone believed me then, I don't know why) She said, why don't you come over for a meeting at this center we're putting together. You might be someone that could help. So I showed up. Her boyfriend was the leader, most of them were psych grad students at IU and had decided to form a crisis center for drug related problems. They had a donated house and were setting up training programs for counselors and the like. And the girl had repeated my story and they wanted my help. I went through the training and begin to work one evening a week manning the desk and talking to people on the phone. It was mostly being sympathetic. Most of the problems were college students on bad trips or some of the screw-loose people that hung around the college. The place was supposed to be non-judgmental about the drug use. Most of the counselors did drugs, just not while on duty. I actually made a connection one night while off duty. Anyway, Michael (I just remembered his name) was full of wisdom. The question he would pose was: "Do you want to help people or do you want to make them feel good?"

I was actually ok, I think. I left for a year and started volunteering again when I came back. Most of the original people had graduated and were no longer there. I had become, at 20, an old-timer counselor. In 72 the drugs and the problems had sort of moved on from acid and grass to other stuff and there were a lot of guns around. I was on duty with a real shrink-to-be one night and we spent the entire night with a guy playing with a pistol as he threatened to do himself in. We got him to a shrink at IU in the morning and he finally surrendered the gun. I realized that night that I was way out of my depth. It finally ended when I stopped by one night and a 'client' attacked me physically because he was nutso. He was a little tiny guy. (I'm 6'7") I thought by taking him down I could get him to calm down. So I maneuvered him so his back was to the lawn and then held him down on the grass until he seemed to settle. It started all over twenty minutes later, so I left. It was decided later by the staff that we should have called the police. The whole idea of the house was to have a place where the police didn't come. The original group had worked with the cops when they had set it up. I decided I was really not invested in doing it anymore and didn't know how people could do it as a profession and so walked away.

Anyway, this is what it looks like today. They do battered women and a lot of other programs and have other locations, etc. etc. One of my destroyed murals was a tree with branches and leaves that covered a wall in the first house that was torn down.

More BS (Fondly Recalled)

The drawing is of Sentinel Peak at Camp Whitsett up above Kernville, drawn about 10 years ago, the first summer we went. You are supposed to get up at three in the morning and hike up to the top in time to watch the sun rise. The first year the Scoutmaster and I got there about nine. As I began to get back into shape, I got a little faster. It's a fun summer camp. The first year my kid was so excited that I barely saw him. He ran from thing to thing. Earned 7 merit badges in five days, which I think is still the Troop record. I did spy on him taking the test to get his swimming badge, sure that he was going to drown or fail, but he did neither. I played chess with the waterfront manager every summer I went. We played water polo and did the Cope Course which is climbing around a rope course thirty feet in the air and exiting by a zip line. I started taking one Merit Badge class with my guys each year. We did Wilderness Survival and Canoeing and went horseback riding and I started drawing again after a eight year hiatus. We did our first backpacking trip out of here.

This lake was usually green and brown by the time we arrived in August. The guys threw up every year as we were coming down the mountain on our way home. There was a traditional place to stop by the road so they could heave their breakfast of leftover candy.

Fond Places

There's a place up in the Santa Monica Mountains that is a fond place in my heart. It's a Boy Scout Camp off of Sunset, you have to go north through a residential area and then off on a single lane paved road that changes into gravel and back again. That may have been improved upon because now its been years since I've been up there. It started with Cub Scouts. They had camp-out weekends for the Cub Scouts, but the kid could only come if one of their parents came, so me (Cub Scout Den Leader) and my three Cub Scout part-time wives / mothers/ buddies would take our boys up there and camp. It was all very silly, the boys could not run, the boys could not have hot chocolate at the lodge unless it was the official designated time to have hot chocolate (they might drink it, I was told) and you had to put a deposit down for ping pong balls to use the ping pong tables in the lodge. (I started bringing my own). But the kids got to shoot bows and arrows (though they could not touch the rope fence around the archery range) and shoot off bottle rockets and we all slept in tents and had fires and played frisbee etc etc. The first night Chris and I slept up there in a tent, it was a warm night and I took the weather cover off the tent so we could see the stars before we went to sleep and that night it rained and I had to dry everything out inside the van so we could stay the second night and we were up at four in the morning soaked sneaking hot chocolate at the lodge. I had Leadership training up here when we graduated to Boy Scouts. I had already discovered it was a very cool place to hike after dark. I'd bed everyone down, sneak a nightcap and go for a stroll up into the hills without a light. We didn't really come back until our Order of the Arrow ordeal. I was tapped out with my kid because they needed more OA adults. We spend a day up there, eating very little, not allowed to speak all day, and clearing brush and mowing. I snuck a few words with a Dad that was a Professor of Asian Economic Development at UCLA but spent a good afternoon clearing a meadow up above the lodge. When our work was done, they fed us a big steak dinner and all the boys were going to watch videos and sleep together on the floor of the lodge. I looked around and realized that I did not want to sleep with 100 smelly boys and their fathers/ leaders so I went up to my meadow that I had cleared and slept out with a tent for the first time.
This picture is even later, when the camp was closed because of the great winter rain storms of 2003 or 2004 that washed out the only road into the place. We did a little weekend backpack trip from Will Rogers Park over to Josepho (the name of the camp) and back again to get the younger kids ready for a bigger backpack trip. My kid wasn't here. Probably playing basketball somewhere.

My buddy that took the picture, Dan Olson, (that's his son Jack next to me) has his name on a plaque in the lodge here. He was a Eagle Scout with a Malibu Troop back before ole Jack was born and a OA'r too.

Odd Places

At sixteen, my mother and sister and I went to visit the Grandparents in Drexel, Missouri (which deserves its own description at some point). The trip there was hours on the road with me in the backseat with a copy of "All The King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren

 

It has all became intermeshed in my brain, the open summer corn fields of Illinois and Missouri, the heat and dust of August with the Midwest humidity and the business shirts with their sweat spots under the arms of stumping in Louisiana and the tobacco fields and the white crackers and the poor sharecroppers and my Uncle's farm that couldn't support his family so he doubled as an electrician in this little town of about 400 souls fifty miles due south of Kansas City. I finished it on my Grandmothers front porch swing. Don't think I could reread it without feeling the sticky vinyl seat and my head stiffly propped up by the arm rest on the door. Maybe this car ride was why I went to New Orleans? 

It Was Greener Than This

After my first divorce at 18, I went back home to Indiana (good title for a song) and worked in restaurants and volunteered again at a drug crisis house that had been set up by some psych grad students at IU. Still mean to write about it someday. I was not at all qualified to do anything but I could be sympathetic and it was mostly listening to druggies and their problems and helping with their bad drug trips. When I came back a group had started a halfway house for junkies from Indianapolis who had been in state prison, but were let out to participate in a methadone treatment plan. They all lived together in a supervised house in Bloomington. I got to be friends with most of them and a few volunteered as counselors at the Drug Crisis House. There was a girl that was interested in me that was part of this group, but I can't remember her name. We all went up to some kind of program in Indianapolis in two cars and ate dinner together and were put up at a house up there. The next day we came back, but on the way we stopped at one of the junkie's friends who had moved out to the middle of nowhere as a retreat thing. The girl and I wandered off and sat on a hill that looked on something like this and for a brief half hour I died and went to heaven right there. We talked a little about what love meant. I was sure I wanted to give myself away to someone- that was love for me then. I can still see the green hills rolling on for a lifetime.

The painter is Paul Turner Sargent- died in the 40s
http://www.antiquescientifica.com/Paul%20Turner%20Sargent1.htm

Fishing at Christmas Time In Montana

His last year hadn’t been great. He had been active and energetic his whole life
and it had become difficult to just walk out of the house. The summer here had
come and gone in a blaze of forest fires—some of the largest in the country. Your
ride up took you through mile-long stretches of blackened timber. Even the early
snow couldn’t make the bare and broken trees look better. And he hadn’t been
able to help. You’d rather conjure him up in front of the market in his Santa
Claus suit, teasing and poking the kids. Or better still, beside you out on that frozen
lake while his buddies cut the holes in the ice for the fishing lines, elbowing
you to pour an extra dollop of whiskey into your coffee. They had caught a ton of
trout that day and just got drunker as the coffee ran out but the whiskey didn’t.
By afternoon, the light had faded to a soft glow and a light silent snowfall began
and continued endlessly until their whole group seemed frozen in time. You had
never known how snowflakes could fall and surround your soul like that. How
you would like to go back and do one of those days over. But it was all said and
done for him And you weren’t sure if you were supposed to feel bad or not.
-From my novel "It Knows You By No Other Name" available from Amazon

I'd been before and since, but that day with Al and his nephews up near Libby was the best. Maybe it was the whiskey. That trip was fine. We went snowmobiling, dancing on Saturday night at Elks Lodge, and generally saw the sights. I got pictures.