A Piece of Plywood and an Apricot Tree

It wasn’t much of a tree house, but the time I spent in it, were some of the happiest hours of my entire childhood.

A found sheet of plywood, some 2x4's and a huge apricot tree in our side yard was all we needed. Kenny Meeks and I made a frame to fit the sheet of plywood and nailed it all together. We took half a day to wrestle it about 12 feet up into the tree. We found the perfect spot, it was level and the plywood was wedged solidly into place.

We could think of nothing better than to sit in the shade of our tree on a hot summer day and just talk away the hours. We escaped the violence and craziness of our family lives up there. We also escaped the glue we sniffed and the varnish and lacquer we huffed. Maybe best of all, we escaped the agony of growing up extremely poor in a middle class neighborhood.  For just a little while we could forget that we were the local area’s “white trash.” Not many kids had the guts to say it to our faces, but we knew what they thought.

We talked about anything and everything up there. We would sit and eat the plumpest and juiciest apricots I've ever seen.  It may have only been a tree that grew between the two shacks we lived in, but in that tree, relaxing in the shade, we could have been anywhere...

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The Jordan H.S. Match Gun Incident

Thanks everyone for the great Christmas messages, posts and comments. I very much appreciate them all. Now it's time to share some more stories from my dysfunctional and crazy childhood. This one was posted shortly after I started my blog and I don't think anybody outside of my family read it and/or commented.  

There is a way to make a “match gun” using a wooden clothes pin and a rubber band. I don’t remember who taught me how to do it, but I experimented until it worked. It had to do with taking the clothespin apart and reassembling it backwards. The rubber band is there to hold one end of the clothes pin together. The match (a wooden kitchen type), lights as it is shot out of the clothespin by one end of the spring. I just found the above picture on the Internet, and it looks pretty close to the ones that we made. Yes, we were evil wicked children...

I don’t remember the exact year, but I think it was 6th grade. It was mid-summer and very hot. Kenny Meeks and I were walking down Myrtle Avenue in North Long Beach, along the backside of Jordan High School where the athletic fields are. We were having an ongoing “war” with our match guns, shooting them at each other. I suppose it could hurt if one hit you in the eye, but we were young and didn’t worry about it at all. I shot one at my friend and it zipped right by his head. We continued on our merry way until we noticed smoke coming from the area we just came from.

We hid our match guns and ran back to where the smoke was. I guess the match that whizzed by my friends head went through the fence and caught some grass on fire.  As we looked through the fence it was very obvious that it hadn't been watered all summer. It was brown and dry and starting to burn. The fence was too tall to climb over and there were no gates on that side of the school. There was only one option remaining and we took it. We ran! The hidden match guns were forgotten. What match guns anyway?

We ended up at our original destination which was the local junior high school to play bombardier in the gym. A few hours later we walked by the high school again on our return trip. A patch of grass about the size of half a football field was burnt. We couldn’t tell if a fire truck had been called to put it out or not, but because there was nobody in the area, we assumed the fire just burnt itself out.


Several years later I attended that high school. Every time I was in that area I thought about the fire and the match guns, and just how little supervision I had as a kid.  Of course with my mother, having little or no supervision was a good thing...

Oops!

Many of you are new (or newish) to my childhood stories, please don't think I'm being too hard on my mom in this blog post. If you go back and read some old entries related to my childhood, you'll soon agree that I'm being pretty darn nice...
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My mom was a terrible cook didn't cook very often. We always looked at that as a good thing.  To the best of my recollection, she only prepared Thanksgiving dinner a couple of times. When she did, a pre-cooked ham was always the main course.

For reasons known only to her, one year she decided to cook a turkey. It was probably because she had recently decided to get married again for the second, no third, oh yeah, for the fourth time.  She was probably trying to impress her latest victim new fiance. I believe I was in ninth grade and my younger brother was in second. The other four or five people were friends of my new, soon to be step dad.

The table was full of all the normal Thanksgiving things.  Nice dishes, formal silverware settings, the whole shebang. I think there was even a center piece. I'd never seen any of this stuff before and wondered if it was all stolen property where it came from.

Everybody was sitting at the table waiting to eat, my brother and I were sitting at one end and were the only ones who could see into the kitchen.  My mom was at the stove transferring the turkey from the roasting pan to the serving platter with a couple of large forks. The turkey started to get away from her and she dropped it. 

The turkey hit the floor with a thud, everyone at the table looked up in surprise. My mom yelled out, "It's okay it fell on a piece of paper!" Only my brother and I could see that there was no paper, or anything else on the floor but our dinner. She picked the turkey up off the floor in a split-second. My brother and I looked at each other and then looked back into the kitchen to see our mom staring at us. She was pointing at us with one index finger while using her other hand to make a "keep your mouth zipped shut" motion with her other hand.  She didn't have to do either of those things. We knew by the fire in her eyes, that if we said anything about there being no paper, we were dead meat in big trouble.

My mom proudly marched into the dining room with the no doubt cat hair and dust laden turkey. All the adults oohed and awed as she set the platter on the table. She was positively beaming as she asked her new fiance to "do the honors," while shooting me and my brother another acid glance.

Before carving, my soon to be step dad, started scooping dressing out of the bird and into a serving bowl. Yes, ladies, gentlemen and dear friends. You know what happened next.  The last scoop was not full of dressing, it was full of the "giblet bag" that my mom failed to remove before cooking the turkey. Peyton looked at mom and said, "you are supposed to ta....." She didn't say a word, but somehow he knew by the by the look in her eyes, not to finish his sentence. She had a smile on her face for everyone else at the table and pure evil in her eyes for him. 

Everybody in my mom's life understood what that glare meant, just as clearly as if she said it out loud.  It meant, "I am crazy, I am more violent than you can imagine and I am capable of hurting you or worse."   Amazingly, he married my mom anyway. It didn't last.  A Las Vegas wedding and a Tijuana divorce...

The only positive thing that came out of the entire affair was related to her dropping the turkey. From that point forward, continuing until today. When somebody drops an item of food on the floor or ground, even if they have no intention of eating it, we always say, "good thing it fell on that piece of paper!"


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Hair Cream versus Tooth Paste

My dad kept his tube of hair cream and comb in a drawer next to the bathroom sink. His tooth brush and tooth paste were in the medicine cabinet over the sink. He was out late most nights and was usually pretty bleary eyed when he got up in the morning. 

One Saturday morning, my brother and I swapped the two tubes, hoping that he wouldn’t notice until it was too late. We sat in the living room waiting for him to get up and go to the bathroom for a long time.  

After what seemed like hours, we heard him come out of his room and go into the bathroom. The first noise we heard was the toilet flushing, the second was the bathroom faucet running, the third noise sounded like some kind of wild animal.

Apparently fate selected the “brush your teeth with hair cream” scenario over “comb your hair with toothpaste,” because the "wild animal" noises turned into some very loud retching. Then the sound of my dad throwing up!

After a few minutes he came out of the bathroom with one tube in each hand. We sat quietly on the couch watching TV, like we didn’t know (or hear) a thing while he stomped into the kitchen and asked my mom about it. She claimed to know nothing and told him that he must have put them away in the wrong places the day before. When he walked by us on his way back to the bathroom, he paused for just a second and stared at us.

We must have looked innocent, because he didn’t say a word.  I think he knew on some level that we did it, but he never asked.

I don't have many happy childhood stories, this is one of them...

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I first posted this when I had only a handful of readers and it received exactly zero comments

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First Day of School

A few of the blogs I follow have had recent posts relating to the first day of school this year for their children.  As many of you are well aware, I don't have many fond memories relating to my own childhood.

The first day of a new school year is no exception.

I was 7 in this photo. It's the only photo of me that exists between the ages of 3 and 11.

On the first day of school at our house, there was no fanfare, no nice new clothes, no hearty breakfast, and no fancy packed lunch with a note inside.

My mom usually sent us on our way with a threat "you better get your ass out of this house! If you're late on the first day, there's gonna be hell to pay when you get home!"  Of course she could only threaten us, if she was actually there to say it.  On more than one occasion, she wasn't. First day of school and mom is missing in action.

So I'd leave the house with my county welfare supplied "lunch ticket" safely tucked into my "new" jeans.  They weren't usually exactly new, but they were new to me. They usually came from the thrift store, or from some generous local family.  Of course these jeans, "had better last all year," so my mom sewed double patches into the inside of the knees. 

I know most kids have a lot of questions and what-ifs before the first day. My "what-ifs" were usually a little bit different than most kids. Mine consisted of things like "what if someone makes fun of my clothes?" "What if someone comments on my "welfare lunch?" "What if someone makes fun of how poor my family is?" "What if someone calls me white trash?"

It wasn't really a matter of "what if," it was a matter of who and when.  My quandary was usually related to whether I would try to kick their ass during school, after school, or wait until I saw them away from school?

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The Bully Part 3 of 3

Next day, same exact story. Except this time when the kid came to our house he had his older brother with him. A lot of people from our apartments were already waitingto see what would happen.  Todays beating was no different than the previous two. I was about mid-way through my punishment when I finally figured out that if I timed it right, I could hit him hard. I’d still get my ass kicked, but at least I’d get a lick in. So that is what I did. I aimed for his mouth, swung as hard as I could, and hit him directly in the throat.

The kid wasn't breathing very well. My mom was screaming at me to kill him. The people from the apartment building were yelling at me to hit him again. I did hit him again, so many times that I was tired from it. His older brother tried to butt in, but my mom grabbed him by his shirt and flung him away. I don’t think my punches were really hurting him very badly, but he was through. My mom told me to stop hitting him.

When the kid could breath again in a fairly normal manner, my mom told us to start fighting again. The kid said he didn’t want to fight anymore. I couldn’t believe how good it had felt to hit him, but I think what I felt most, was hatred towards my mother.

What happened next, was probably more shocking than my mom making me fight this kid three times. While the “former” bully and his brother were walking away, my mom whispered something in my older brother’s ear. When she was done, he ran after them. He bashed into the back of the kid's older brother at full speed, knocking him down. Then he kicked the hell out of him while he was still on the ground.  I assume that was my mom's warning for him to not let his little brother bother me anymore.

I don’t think anybody called the police and I don’t think they came to our house. The parents of the other kids never came to our house either. Another of many examples, where my mom should have been in trouble with the authorities, but wasn’t. I know my mom was scary crazy to her family, but this was the first time I’d seen her effect on others.

I would never say that what my mom did was right. It was horrible. It did teach me one thing though; I never let anybody hit me first again, ever...

The Bully Part 2 of 3

When I got up the next morning my mom told me I wasn't going to school. I was very happy to hear that, because my bottom lip was busted and I knew the guy would come after me again. My good feelings flew out the window, when at about five minutes before two, my mom told me to go outside and wait for the kid. My heart sunk. I couldn’t believe she was really going to make me fight him again.

This time she went outside with me. We waited for the kid to walk by. After a short time we saw him walking up the street towards us. When he saw my mom he crossed the street. She yelled to him to come over to us. I was hoping that he would be afraid to, but the cocky bastard wasn’t. I was hoping that my mom was going to tell him to stay away from me. She didn’t. She told him that I wanted to fight again…

I felt totally helpless! My mom pushed us over to the parking lot in front of the apartment building and told us start fighting. By this time a small crowd had gathered. My mom told me to hit him, but I was afraid to. She again told me to hit him, only this time she screamed it. When I didn’t do it, she told the other kid to hit me. He punched me in the stomach. As I was doubled over trying to catch my breath, my mom told him to hit me again. This time he punched me in the face. I tried to fight back, but this kid was just too big and experienced.  He had no problem beating me up again.

While all this was going on a couple of people told my mom to stop what was happening. She yelled at them to shut the hell up, because she “knew where they lived.” When my mom thought that I’d taken enough punishment, she told the kid to stop and to come back tomorrow after school. I felt lost. I wanted to die.

To add insult to injury, my mom was once again raging at me for not hitting the kid or putting up a better fight. I didn’t know how to fight! I was shutting down. I no longer cared what happened. She told me I was going to fight this kid every day until I decided not to let him beat me up…

The Bully - Part 1 of 3

I haven't posted anything relating to my childhood lately, so here's another three part bit of insanity!

We were living on Rose Street, in Bellflower. I was going to the second of three schools I attended during first grade. There was this jerk of a bully who lived on our street. He was in 3rd grade and much bigger than me. We had just moved there and this idiot zeroed in on me right away, to be his next target. His bullying mostly happened at school. I tried to avoid him on the way home and in the neighborhood, but wasn't always able to do so.

One day he told me that he was going to "kick my ass" after school. I really didn't want that to happen and as soon as school let out at 2:00, I made a speedy exit before he got out of class. I made it home and felt like I was safe for a day.

After a few minutes there was a knock on the door. My mom answered it and told me that one of my friends wanted to know if I could come out and play. I went to the door and was shocked to see that it was the bully. In the phoniest "friendly" voice I've ever heard, he asked if I wanted to come out and play.

I told him I didn't want to play with him. My mom told me to go outside and play with "my friend." I told her I didn't feel good. She told the guy to wait a minute and closed the door.

She looked down at me and said, "There was nothing wrong with you five minutes ago! You need to go outside!"

"I can't go outside!" I told her.
"Why can't you go outside?" she demanded.
"If I go outside, he's going to beat me up!"
"What?"

I explained what had been happening since we moved there and she got very pissed off...
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Some of you who've been around here for awhile know about my mom. So what I'm about to say won't surprise you at all. For those of you who are new here, "may I present my mother, Letty Tillett..."
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"What the hell do you mean; he's been picking on you?"
"He keeps pushing me around and telling me he's going to beat me up!"
"Get your ass outside!"
"But mom!"
"I'm not telling you again, get your ass outside and fight him!"
"But mom, he's going to beat me up!"
"Only if you let him!"
"He's bigger and older than me!"
"I don't give a shit! Get out there!"
"Don't make me go out there!"
"Are you more afraid of him than you are of me?"
"No."
"Then get your ass outside now!"

She opened the door and pushed me out...

Apparently the kid heard my mom yelling and knew he could do whatever he wanted. And that's exactly what he did. He pretty much beat the hell out of me. After a few minutes of getting pummeled by this kid, my mom came out and told him to get lost. She drug me into the house, gave me the once over, and cleaned the blood off of my nose and lips. She then asked me if I hit him at all. After I told her no, she told me that I was going to fight him again the next day...

Cod Liver Oil

Do you (or did you) have a mother or grandmother who believed that fish oil was a panacea? That taking a regular dose would prevent you from catching almost any disease, either serious or minor? And if you had already caught something, fish oil would make it go away?

My grandma Connie, was one of those people! Every time I went to her house she made me take "cod-liver oil."  I was at her house a lot! I'm not talking about fish oil nicely hidden in a sissy capsule. I'm talking about two tablespoons of vomit inducing "cod liver oil" right out of the bottle.  If there is anything nastier, I've never heard of it, or tasted it.  The smell was not to be believed. 

My grandma would always tell us that in addition to the "miracle" healing properties of the oil, it would keep us "regular."  I could not have made it any clearer to her, that I had no problems in this area! 

Seriously, what was up with this concern about my bowel movements?  And why do some old folks have a "fixation" on this subject? Is that what they talk about amongst themselves? 

If I EVER get to the point of answering a "how ya doing?" inquiry, with something like, "I'm doing pretty good thanks, but I'm just not as regular as I used to be!"  I want to be put someplace. Someplace quiet, with soothing lighting and regular doses of mind numbing medication.

She also said that her mother always made her take it and as a result, she was never sick.  So this was some kind of sick payback? Because she had to, we had to?  In addition, whenever we were at her house and wanted a snack there were two choices; peanuts and prunes!  Let's do the math...

Cod Liver Oil + prunes + peanuts = IHED
IHED = Improvised Human Explosive Device

I'm thinking granny may have had some type of fetish or bizarre interest in the scatological sciences...

Swimming Lessons?

I recently read a blog post relating to the torture of childhood swimming lessons.  Of course, almost every "family" or "childhood" related post I read, reminds of yet another bit of lunacy from my own upbringing.  This one was no different.
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My mom scheduled me to take lessons at a local high school when I was almost seven.  I didn't want to go, but I had no choice. I was relieved when she made me walk there by myself. One thing I didn't need was her screaming at me (or worse) from poolside.  The instructors were clearly high school idiots with summer jobs working for the city. I didn't like them at all.  My "teacher" and I didn't hit it off very well.

He instructed, I ignored.
He pleaded, I turned my head.
He yelled at me, I told him to go to hell.
I then got out of the pool and walked home.  I may have only been six years old, but I had the swearing ability of at least a sixth grader.

My mother wasn't pleased.  She informed me that I would learn how to swim that summer, or else. Some of you already know that my mom rarely threatened, she usually just reacted. When she did threaten, if you didn't comply, god help you.  That applied to anyone in her life, not just us.  My older brother chimed in with a potential life saving, "I'll teach him how to swim!"  Whew! My brother usually only caused me grief. This time it looked like he was actually going to help me.

Several days later my brother and I took the bus to the Nu-Pike Plunge, in downtown Long Beach.

The plunge was a huge pool with fancy concrete fountains in the middle. We changed clothes and walked out to the pool area. It was very loud and crowded. He found a spot to put our towels down and walked to the edge of the pool. He told me to jump in.  I'm no dummy. I checked out the depth markers. We were at the deep end and I knew it was over my head.

"Jump in" he repeated.
"No way, I'm going to the shallow end."
'Mom told me I better teach you how to swim today and I'm going to."
"Not in the deep end, I can't touch the bottom here!"

He grabbed me from behind, put both arms around me, did a couple of twirls, and threw me in.

I thought I was going to drown. When I came to the surface (probably no more than three seconds), I was cussing at him with everything I had, right up until the time I went back under. As I'm bobbing up and down, my brother is telling me to swim to the side. I didn't know how to friggin' swim and at that point, I was just trying NOT to sink to the bottom. I finally realized that I wasn't very far from the edge and somehow I struggled my way back.

My brother acted like I had done something great.
I wanted him dead!
He said we should go to the shallow end and practice. He was acting very nice (danger!) and persuaded me (dumb dumb dumb) into letting him "take" me out to the fountain using a life saver stroke. He said it was "cool."  He very smoothly swam us both to there. Then he swam away.

Yelling from the edge of the pool, he told me to swim to the side. I told him that I didn't know how to swim. He told me that it was going to be a long cold night then, because he wasn't going to help me. I started yelling, but nobody except the kids close to us heard anything.  One kid offered to help, but my brother told him to butt out or he'd kick his ass. I hung there for what must have been 30 minutes. Eventually, I somehow half paddled, half drowned my way to the side. I've been swimming ever since. That bastard!

I did learn a valuable lesson from the ordeal...

I made my kids take swimming lessons at such a young an age, that they were very unlikely to remember enough about the torture, to blog about it as adults...


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Black Hawk

If you've been around for a while, you may recall that my sixth year on this earth, was not a very good one. I covered much of that in an earlier post.  My mom made me change schools three times in first grade and my dad walked out of my life. There were several other things that happened that year as well. One of them follows.
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Saturday morning was usually the high point of my week. I loved it for two reasons; cartoons and the fact that my mom usually spent little or no time at home on the weekends. One fateful Saturday morning, while waiting for "Felix the Cat" to come on, my brother Mike and I were looking at comic books.

When it was time for me to watch "Felix", I left my brother to his comics. He was reading his favorite one, it was called "Blackhawk."

 

Blackhawk was a comic book about a group of hero's called "the Blackhawks." These guys spent most of their time fighting nazis, villians, and criminals.  Whenever the Blackhawks attacked whomever it was that needed attacking, they let out a shrieking battle cry of, "Hawkaaaah!"

I'm sitting in the ugly and stained green chair in the living room, enjoying my Felix cartoon, when I hear my brother running out of our bedroom. He's screaming "Hawkaaah" at the top of his lungs, like he's going into battle.

Well, it wasn't much of a friggin battle. He ran up behind me and cranked me right on top of the head, with a croquet mallet. Hospital, x-rays, stitches, and a fractured skull.  Needless to say, my brother and I weren't very close.  We still aren't now...

Mona Lisa Gonzales

Do you remember your first feeling of embarrassment?
I’m not talking about when you were the only kid in your class who forgot to bring a signed paper back to school, or you gave the wrong answer when called upon in class. I’m talking about major embarrassment! Red in the face, want to become invisible, want to die, embarrassment.

I remember...

When I was 5 years old we lived in a little town in Southern California, called Pico Rivera. There was a little girl who lived next door that I really liked (my first crush). She was as cute as could be and very nice. Her name was Mona Lisa Gonzales. Our families became fairly close and hung out together.

One weekend night we were at their house until very late. She and I were playing in her room and we fell asleep on her bed. It was so late that my parents left me there for the night, rather than waking me. I remember having a dream about camping with my grandma. We were fishing in a fast running creek.  The sound of the rushing water made me want to go to the bathroom, so I walked back into the woods a little bit and started to pee.

All of a sudden I woke up!
Nooooooo! To my terror, I was really going!  I quickly felt under me and of course the pee had soaked through my pants and got her bed wet. I wasn’t a bed wetter! I was totally mortified. I truly wanted to disappear into nothingness.

I got out of bed and snuck out of their house. We had an extra key hidden by our front door and I used it to let myself in. I changed clothes and tried to go back to sleep. I couldn’t because I was petrified over what was going to happen. When my mom asked me why I came home, I told her I had a nightmare and came home just before she woke up.

I have to hand it to Mona Lisa’s family; they didn’t say a word to my mom or dad about it. Mona Lisa was still very nice to me, but I was always reminded of what happened whenever I saw her, so I tried to make sure that I didn’t…

My Mom's Polio Foot

If you’ve read any of the stuff about my mom you know that she was a seriously troubled woman. In addition, she had a couple of physical problems. The arch of one of her feet was slightly deformed from childhood polio. It didn’t make her limp, but apparently it hurt her quite a bit. When I was a kid she would make us massage it, usually me. It seemed like I did it for hours at a time. That is probably an exaggeration, but however long it was, it was dysfunctional as hell for her to make me do it at all.

I hated doing it, she knew I hated doing it, and we both knew we hated each other. But there I was, rubbing the damn thing. It didn’t even seem like it helped. She would just sit or lay there and read, eat, or both.

I think it was a control mechanism. That is, I think she used it to demonstrate to me, that she was in charge. I despised doing it, but if I complained about it, I’d catch a beating. This took place while I was in elementary school. If it had been a little later in my childhood, I’d have taken the beating every time. I used to sit there and massage her damn foot and she didn’t even say thank you. When she thought I’d done it long enough, she’d just pull her foot away and wave me off.

If she knew what I was thinking while I was massaging her foot, she might have had a change of heart. Yes, I was thinking about killing her. I was picturing all the different ways I could do it, and going through the process in my mind.

One time she made me ride my bike to a takeout Chinese place at least a mile away, to pick her up some food. Then she ate it in front of me while I massaged her foot. When I was done I had to eat pinto beans with my brothers. When she was done eating, she put her leftovers in the fridge without offering any of it to us. We all knew better than to touch her food. She could be gone for next 3 days and we still wouldn’t touch them.

Back Yard Surgery

Coming from a very chaotic and crazy household, I guess it was natural that most of my friends would have odd home lives as well. Some were better, some might have been worse. The “normal” kids that I got to know might as well have lived on Mars compared to my house. I always thought that was just the way things were…until I learned otherwise. Most of my dealings with “those” kids were pretty normal. Most of my time however was spent with those more like me. If you’ve read anything older you already know that I was pretty much unsupervised until later in middle school (junior high back then).

Sorry about the long lead in…
Sometime in sixth grade, several of the other neighborhood idiots and I ended up with bb guns. We used to do a lot of target shooting with them. Of course the targets were usually other people, almost always each other. We lived in North Long Beach, an old neighborhood with alleys and many short cuts from street to street. We had some pretty good running bb gun battles. Yup, bb’s hurt like hell if they hit your bare skin. We had many of these wars, and nobody ever lost an eye or got seriously hurt until…

Now wouldn’t you know that the one kid who did get hurt was the one who wasn’t supposed to have a bb gun in the first place? In fact he wasn’t even supposed to be playing with us. His parents were very mean to him (in a physical way), and if they found out he was playing with bb guns, he would have hell to pay. And then his parents would deal with all of ours, and we’d each have our own personal hell to pay.

So we are having our normal stupid fun and somebody shot him from close range right below his left earlobe. I’m not saying it was me who did the shooting, but it was a long time ago and I don’t remember clearly.

The bb not only broke the skin…it penetrated the skin and dropped down at least an inch into that hollow spot below his ear on the side of his neck. Go ahead feel there…

He’s freaking out because he knows what is going to happen to him when he gets home. He’s going to have to go to the doctor to have it removed, and then probably have to go back to the doctor after his dad is done with him. We came up with about a hundred different scenarios that he could tell his parents and maybe not get killed. He said none of them would have worked. So there appeared to be only one option that made sense. Surgery…

He wasn’t thrilled at all about the idea. But we convinced him that a regular band aid on the side of his neck was explainable. A bb lodged in his neck wasn’t.

Of course there were no adults home at my house so we went there to try and get the bb out. If it had just stuck in his skin it was no problem; just dig the darn thing out and be done with it. There were five of us trying to decide how to get this done. We tried to push the bb back up towards the entry point but it wouldn’t go high enough. He’s not happy at all. He’s sweating and he’s afraid because he has to go home soon. So some genius in the group figures out that if we push the bb up as high as it will go, make the entry hole bigger with a razor blade, we can “reach” in and grab it with my mom’s tweezers. Well the kid is simply shitting bricks now. We tell him that his neck is so sore by now that he won’t even feel it. He reluctantly agrees to move forward. His first scream came when someone “enlarged” the hole with the razor. First step complete, only two to go! Push up the bb and then insert the tweezers. So we are pushing the bb up and he’s not a happy camper cause he’s in a lot of pain. The first scream wasn’t nearly as loud as the one that came after the tweezers were inserted. No, “inserted” is much too delicate of a word to describe what happened. We had to hold him down and force them in… Three people are holding him down, one person is pushing up on the bb, and the other one is trying to find the bb with the tweezers. I think at one point he kind of passed out.

After what seemed like an hour, but was actually only a minute or two the bb was found and removed. Now of course, he had a big gaping hole in the side of his neck. I’m sure he should have had stitches. Hell, what he really needed was a tetanus shot! Nobody even thought about washing our hands, the razor blade, or the tweezers.

So he went home without a band aid, but with a solid story! He was riding his bike on the side walk and got too close to the edge and he crashed against a chain link fence and one of the pointy things on top stuck him under his ear.

When all was said and done I’m not sure that the damage and pain we inflicted on him was any better than what his dad would have done if he just went home with a bb in his neck. It was a scary incident, but one of those great things that we all joked about for a couple of years whenever we saw each other.

My kids were never allowed to have bb guns...

Back Yard Cave

My grandmother owned a small apartment building on Curtis Street in Bellflower. I think there were 6 units. My mom and my older brother and I lived in one of them (for free probably). Although we didn’t live there for very long, I have some fond and not so fond memories associated with it. Even as a first grader, I pretty much had free rein over where I went and what I did. Things seemed to be semi-sane here, I think that’s because my grandmother was pretty close by, and she probably wouldn’t stand for a lot of what my mom did. I don’t really know though…

The fond memories mostly involved caps and firecrackers. The resulting experiments and explosions were fun. I also enjoyed being around my grandmother.

The not so memorable item, had to do with our across the street neighbors. I think there were 3 or 4 boys living there. They had a long term project… Their goal was to dig a gigantic cave under their back yard. They had apparently started a long time before we moved in. We got to know them and they invited my older brother and me to “come and see something neat” in their backyard. There was a swing set there but nothing else of note. They took us to the other side of the yard and moved some boxes and a tarp out of the way, what we saw was amazing! It was a big hole. It was dug at an angle and you couldn't see all the way in. I didn’t really want to follow them into it, but I was glad I did. For maybe a minute...

There was a big cave under there. It was bigger than the metal swing set sitting on top of it. There were big wooden poles going from floor to ceiling. On top of the poles was plywood. Even then I’m thinking I should get out of here. There had to be at least 10 feet of dirt on top of the plywood. I didn’t like it.  When we got back home, my brother told me to never go in that cave again. (Okay, he did give me some good advice on that one).

You had to hand it to them; they spent a tremendous amount of time digging that hole. They were always in there; it must have been safe because their dad was helping. So I ignored my brother's advice and went into it often.

One day my mom told us that we were moving. I didn’t like that a bit, but off we went. We moved into a shack in another part of Bellflower. Looking back at it, the time spent living in that apartment seemed like heaven, compared to what was coming. After we moved into the new place all hell broke loose. My mom was absolutely out of control. An earlier entry “First Grade” outlines some of the stuff that happened there (more to come).

Several years later I heard that the “cave” had collapsed with a couple of the kids in it. They were killed…

All of that area was bulldozed a long time ago to make room for a freeway. I wish it hadn't, because it bulldozed away a "nice" part of my life also...

Flunking 8th Grade

Junior high school was not such a good time for me either. My older brother was in the Navy and my youngest brother was put up for adoption. So it was just me, my other younger brother Tim, and my mom. Sitting here right now I have no memory what-so-ever of Tim during that time frame. That seems so weird to me, I know we weren’t close; nobody in my family was, but still…

Based on my mom’s insistence I was already working part-time jobs and had my daily paper route. I’d also been ditching school on and off since fourth grade. How do you get away with ditching in fourth grade, you ask?  I'll tell you...

Just like everybody else, I’d bring home papers to get my mom’s signature, before returning them to school. My mom wouldn’t sign them, or she’d lose them, or just throw them away.  So to stay out of trouble at school, I'd sign them.  Also, if I missed a day of school she would make me write the note and then she’d sign it. I got tired of  that also, so I started signing them myself.  I’m sure I’ve already said that my mom was not home a great deal of the time. It hit me that I could create a note and sign it with her signature when I wasn’t really sick, just as easy as I could when I was. And then it started. During elementary I usually did go to school and only ditched every so often.

During seventh grade I ditched quite a bit, but still managed to go to school enough to stay off the radar.  The next grade was another story altogether. I usually went on scheduled test days and when my mom happened to be home, but I ditched a lot more than I went. Through the various school years my report cards reflected my high number of absences, but no matter because my mom never saw them! I usually did well grade wise because school was always extremely easy for me. I loved to read and what I knew about most subjects went well beyond what they were teaching us anyway.

One bright and sunny day towards the end of 8th grade, I’m sitting in one of my classes day dreaming and not paying much attention to what was going on. My teacher approaches me and sends me to the office. No big deal, I’d been in trouble plenty of times. The ladies in the office knew me well and when I walked in they sent me to the conference room.

When I got to the room, there were several people in there already. One of them was my mom! Oh crap! The principal was there, my counselor and my home room teacher were there, and a couple of people I’d never seen before, were there. I’m told to sit down. I can feel my mom’s glare burning tissue on the inside of the back of my skull. She’s got that look that only a person in my family would recognize. It’s not quite her crazy look, but close to it. I knew the meaning quite clearly. It was the “you wait until I get your f'ing ass home” look. My mother can “function” in public when she’s like this, but she’s at the edge. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she jumped over the table to get at me. Looking back, I wish she would have. It might have told those other people things that I wouldn’t dare complain about to them.

The principal said “let’s get started. Patrick, do you mind if I call you Pat?”
Interesting, because every other time I’d seen him he just referred to me as Mr. Tillett. I just shrugged my shoulders. “Makes no difference to me” I said, sounding only slightly sarcastic.

As he pointed to the two strangers he said “these two gentlemen are the school district psychiatrist and medical director.”  I still didn't know what the heck is going on, but it wasn't sounding good.
The principal swept his hands over a couple of piles of paper sitting in front of him and tells me that they reflect everything I’ve done while in junior high. He puts his hand on one pile and says “here I have your attendance records and the written and signed excuses relating to each of your absences.”

I know I’m in deep shit now. He proceeds to go over each and every day I didn’t come to school. He then holds up the written and signed notes from my mom that relate to them.
“Mrs. Tillett, did you write this note??
“No!”
“Mrs. Tillett, is that your signature on the bottom of the note?”
“No!”
“Patrick, did you write these notes?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sign your mother’s signature on these notes?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t like school” I replied. I knew better than to implicate my mom in this. I wanted to say I signed them because she was seldom around.
“Why don’t you like school?” he asked me.
“I have to walk a long way and it’s not worth it because it’s boring.”
He looks at my mom and asks her if she was aware that I had missed so much school. She of course had no idea. He then asks me to go back to the office for a few minutes, while they talk.

After about an hour the phone rings and one of the ladies tells me they want me to go back to the meeting. I went back in and sat down. The principal tells me that I’m going to have some meetings with the district psychiatrist and some other people. He goes on to tell me that they’ve already scheduled the meetings and I’m expected to be there. He looked directly at my mom when he said that. I wanted to laugh at that, because I knew full well that if I went, she’d have nothing to do with it. He also told me that they requested of my mom, that she and I not talk about the absences, or any of what was discussed in the meeting while we were at home. The meetings were scheduled for the following week. He then asked me if I had any questions. I told him I didn’t, but I would have liked to find out where I slipped up with my “notes.”

It’s the following Monday morning and I’m at the school district offices downtown. Of course my mom had nothing to do with me being there. I had to use my own money and take the bus. During the meetings the psychiatrist asked me a million questions about myself, school, my mom, my home life, and a bunch of other things that made no sense at all. I answered every question truthfully. That is, I answered every question truthfully that wasn’t about my mom or my home life. No way in the world I’m going to tell him a thing about what went on in our house. That would be like signing my own death warrant. “Everything is good at home. Just like every other family,” I lied. I could hear my mom’s words ringing in my ears, “what happens in our family is nobody else’s fucking business!” I always took that as the threat it was intended to be and abided by it. Her reminder the night before “helped” me remember…

I also met with a couple of other people at the school district that first day. They told me I wasn’t to go to school for the rest of the week, but to report there instead. They gave me a “permission slip” that I could show to any truant officer or policeman who might stop me and wonder why I wasn’t in school. Then they gave me several written and oral tests. A lot of it made no sense to me. I figured they were trying to find out if I was crazy. Some of the tests were very similar to the standardized tests we took in class every year.  One of them told me he had interviewed all of my teachers, asking them various questions about me. He said that some of my teachers said I had a bad habit of correcting them in class. He followed that statement by asking me if I thought I was smarter than my teachers. He actually smiled when I replied "not all of them."

When Friday finally came, they tell me to report back downtown just one more time on the following Monday.

It’s Monday morning and after the psychiatrist talks to me for a short time, he says we have to go to a “follow-up” meeting upstairs. We go to a conference room much nicer than the one at my school. Sitting in the room is the same cast of characters as the original meeting at my school. The principal opens the meeting and he’s mostly talking to my mom. He says that after taking an exhaustive battery of psychiatric tests and the 8th grade competency exam, that I’m already well beyond the 8th grade level scholastically. Further, I had tested in the 99th percentile nationally on the standardized tests in every subject but English. He also said that because I was already bigger than most 8th graders, they were going to offer me a “social promotion” to the ninth grade. Unless I wanted to, I didn’t have to finish out the 8th grade school year. You know I didn’t…

I thought the overall results were fantastic. I had already missed over half of 8th grade already. And now I could legally miss the rest of it. Even my mom didn’t seem angry about anything. On the bus ride home she very calmly and pleasantly told me that she "wished I’d never been born."

Some other time her acid remarks might have hurt me, but at that moment I was already thinking about what I would have to do to take the 9th grade competency test, so I could skip that year also...

First Revenge

I had just turned five and I think I was already acting up (or out).  I’m not sure if this "incident" was in response (revenge) to the "geese" under my bed, or for the harness practice. 

My grandmother drove a new 1955 Chevrolet, so I think it was late 1954. I remember watching very closely, what she did while driving.  I also remember knowing exactly what I was doing, when I took her keys out of her purse, climbed in her car, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, put the transmission into neutral, and released the emergency brake.

The driveway was on a mild slant and the car rolled onto Walnut Street. Fortunately, it didn’t hit anything except the curb on the other side of the street.  My mother and grandmother came running out of the house. Then there was a lot of screaming, threatening, and pounding on the windows from my mom.  It didn’t matter what she did, I wasn’t going to unlock that door for anything. I’d spend the night in there if I had to. 
My grandmother’s only reaction was a little smile.

Walnut street, although it was in the middle of a neighborhood, was fairly busy.  It didn't take long for traffic to start backing up in both directions.  I'm sure this added to the intensity of my mom's wild, manic freakout.

After a little while, a tow truck showed up and the driver used a tool to unlock the door. I have no memory of the repercussions for what I had done, but I’m pretty sure it was so severe that I’ve blocked it out. We moved shortly after that to the Carmelitos housing projects in North Long Beach. Maybe I wasn’t acting out at all; maybe I was already in revenge mode against my mom. 

Years later my grandmother told me that she had an extra set of keys in the house, but was enjoying my mother’s freak-out so much, that she didn’t want it to end.  She told me that she thought I needed to win one.  My grandma Connie was a bit quirky herself, but mostly in a good way.

.

Death's Headache

Take a second and think about where your head was at while in 5th and 6th grade. Your kids also, if you have any. Playing in little league or soccer maybe? Cub scouts or Brownies? Practicing their clarinet or violin? Going to church? Maybe just going to school, playing, having sleepovers, and enjoying life?

I'm sorry to say it, and I'm certainly not proud of it, but I was getting high... At first glance it may seem that I was probably just another bad kid. You know, fell in with the wrong crowd or something like along those lines. I wish that was the case…

I wasn’t doing it to “be cool” or because of “peer pressure,” I was doing it to escape. Obviously, I couldn’t label it at the time, but I was clearly “self medicating,” at an early age. Back then you didn’t need to be 18 to buy glue, spray paint, lacquer, or pretty much anything kids “huff” today.

Do you know that at one time, cough syrup contained codeine? And that you could buy it right off the shelf? To be honest I didn’t buy much of it, I usually stole it. And it wasn’t just me! I had friends (if you want to call them that) who did it also. Isn’t it strange how humans have instinctual onboard radar, that seeks out others like themselves?

I didn't sniff glue because it made me feel high. It did it because it made me feel dead… It was how I coped with the insanity that was my life. I didn’t have to feel what was really going on around me. I paid a price for it though. I used to get the most terrible headaches. Death’s headaches... But that didn’t stop me because it still felt better than my reality.

They say that “sniffing” or “huffing” clearly damages and kills brain cells, I’m sure it’s true. Add to that the alcohol, weed, hash, Thai stick, speed, whites, reds, rainbows, stumblers, horse, opium, angel dust, coke, mescaline, peyote, PCP, LSD, and only God knows what else I used over the next 15 years, and I’m surprised I’m able to sit here and type this, many years after the fact.  Please don't take what I just said out of context. Consider what you've read about me in the past and I'm sure you'll understand that it wasn't really about having "fun,"  it was about escaping and not having "real" feelings.

If you don't recognize a lot of the words in the last paragraph, pat yourself on the back. That's a good thing.

People say you have to really keep your eyes on your kids at all times, because it is so unsafe "out there" today, and because there are so many perverts and weirdos out there now. When I hear those things, I always think that the people saying it are very fortunate that they had a “safe” and “protected” childhood. I’m here to tell you that it’s no different now than it was then.

The only thing that's changed, is that there are more people now and everything is made public on the news, or in newspapers. Back then people kept things quiet. Many things happened, but they stayed within the family. Secrets…

The seedy underbelly of life has always existed. Some of us saw it  and some of us didn’t. If you weren’t exposed to it, thank your lucky stars, gather your kids around you, and make sure they aren’t exposed either.

The rifle, the rabbits, the 55 Chevrolet, and me

I'm 7 (or just turned 8) years old here

I had my own rifle since I was 6

I shot rabbits, squirrels, and pretty much anything else that moved. I didn't just shoot them for the fun of it. I learned early on how to dress out small animals, and could do it pretty quickly.

I don't know what you've already read coming into this one, or what I've said in past posts about it. But my mom was special and I don't mean that in a good way. My grandma Connie would take my brother(s) and I out to her place in BFE.  Although the area is pretty much all houses now, when we went there it was desolate, there was nothing.  Connie pretty much let us loose to do what we wanted. There were very few people, and even less buildings within several square miles.

There was a lot of ravines, dry creek beds, hills, groves of tress, and tons of rabbits and snakes. My grandma had no trouble giving me my own rifle at 6 and letting me explore. Of course there was some safety training, and the picture above shows my step grandfather Don Kraft giving me some instruction. The only advice Connie gave me and my older brother was to watch out for rattle snakes. Don't mess with them because they can kill you. She also told us that the powder from their rattles will make you blind, if you get it in your eye. Well me and my brother Mike didn't buy this for a minute. And within a day or two she had taken a picture of us holding up a rattle snake a lot longer than we were tall. I was six at the time, and had no rifle, so we killed it with rocks. It was the first one, but it wasn't the last.

OK, back to the subject at hand. There wasn't much to do at GM's house in BFE. As bad as it was at home, I don't think I could have stood living out there full time (BFE does have a name, it is Wildomar). Anyway, I'd get there on Friday night, and first thing Saturday morning it was me and my rifle going exploring. I was a very good shot and bagged many rabbits. We either ate them ourselves, or gave them to the "cats" to eat. They had several cats that were semi-wild living in a shed behind their house. They were Manx I believe, and they would eat all the rabbits I gave them.

One day my step GD said we should go out hunting at night. This sounded very interesting but I didn't understand how we would be able to see. "After dinner when it's good and dark, we will go and I'll show you how."  After dinner (rabbit no doubt) we climb in the car and went. The car is the subject of another story later. It was used by me in one of my best acts of revenge towards my mother.

Back to the story...we drive away from the house on some dirt roads and it is dark. Without the headlights you couldn't see anything. Don stops the car and tells me to get out. I do and he doesn't! He tells me to get on the hood with my rifle. Now I had no idea what "spot light" hunting was (nor did I know that is was illegal) but apparently I was about to find out. He told me that he was going to drive very slowly down the road and he would only use his spot light to see, but mostly he would drive with the lights out. A little bit scary, but not too bad. We drive for a little while and we go around a curve and the spotlight catches six rabbits in the middle of the dirt road.

He stops the car but he keeps the light shined directly on them. They don't budge, they are looking directly at us, or at the light, and they don't move a muscle. I look back at Don and he makes a gesture to me like he is aiming a rifle. I get it, he wants me to shoot them. No problem. I shot the first one, and it drops. They other five still don't budge, cripes. I picked them all off, one by one. Three of them are dead. Three of them are on the ground kicking and squealing. Did you know that rabbits can squeal? Believe me, they can. It makes you want to shoot them again in a hurry so they will stop. I was just about to do that, to put them out of their misery by shooting them in the head, like I always do.

Don grabs the barrel of my rifle, wrenches it out of my hands, and spins me around. I didn't hear him get out of the car, and he scared the crap out of me. He bent over and got right in my face and said "don't you ever waste a second bullet on an animal." Okay, so now what the hell do I do? I'm 7 years old, I'm in the middle of nowhere with a man who is hell bent on teaching me some type of object lesson.  And there are 3 rabbits kicking and screaming in front of me.

I want them to die.

So I look for a rock, he asks me what I'm doing. I tell him and he says NO.

I need them to die.

"How do I kill them? I asked." I knew what he was going to say even before I asked him the question. I asked him anyway, but I didn't want him to answer, I dreaded what the answer might be, I KNEW what the answer was going to be. "Use your hands he screamed at me." I don't know why he was mad. Maybe the squealing rabbits were getting on his nerves.

I prayed for them to die...

"Use your hands" he said.
"What?"
"Use your hands and break their goddamned necks."

I told him I didn't know how!

He knocked me out of the way, grabbed one of the rabbits by it's rear legs, and made a chopping motion to the back of it's neck. He didn't do it though. He threw it back on the ground and told me to kill them. Every ounce of me wanted to run away from that place. But I knew it wasn't going to happen. I knew I was going to kill those rabbits with my hands. So I picked the first one up by the rear legs, it was hanging upside down and kicking and bucking and trying to get away. Don is screaming at me to do it. So I did...or at least I tried.

My first attempt hit the rabbit in the side of the head and did nothing except hurt him further. It must have taken me ten tries to finally hit it hard enough to break its neck. It was pretty much a repeat performance with the next two rabbits. When it was over, I was covered with sweat and rabbit blood...

At that moment I didn't know who I hated more, my step grand dad or those rabbits for not dying. He made me load them into the trunk of the car and we took them home. I had to dress them all out that night. Don said he was very proud of me and that I would make a good hunter in time.

I wanted to shoot that bastard. I pictured myself shooting him. And if he didn't die with the first bullet, I'd make sure to "waste" another bullet on him, or another, or as many as it took. I never shot another animal in my life. I didn't eat many either.

Go Out And Play (a new meaning)

Here is where the really weird stuff started happening in my life. There may have been other things earlier, but this is one of my first memories of it.  Looking back at it now, maybe it's when my mother actually started going crazy.

While my dad was off in the Navy, we lived with my grandmother in North Long Beach. My grandmother worked, but my mom was usually home during the day. She wasn't what you would call a "doting" mother. Her children were more of a nuisance, than a pleasure to her. When my mom said go out and play, that is what I did. I was only 4 years old at the time and although outside was fun, I'd eventually need to pee, get a drink, or whatever. I would go back into the house to take care of those things, or at least I'd try to. My mom started locking the screen door and would get very upset at my knocking and yelling.

She solved the problem by putting a harness on me. I think it was the same kind you’d put on a dog. She’d tie one end of a rope to the back of the harness and the other end to a post on my grandmother’s front porch. I didn't like it, but she wasn't the type to put up with complaining. Her last words to me before going into the house were, "if you want a drink, use the hose" and "don't you dare knock on that door."

As I began to socialize a bit with other kids, I learned that for most of them a violation of a "now don't you dare" threat, usually only resulted in a different threat like "I really mean it" or "you are going to go your room." In my family a violation of the "don't you dare" warning, ALWAYS resulted in lightning quick physical punishment from my mom. Usually a slap or punch, to the face or head.

Okay, I got it... the rope would allow me to reach the curb, but not to step into the street. Everything was going along just fine, until the huge amount of hose water I was drinking, caused another problem. I really had to pee. What to do?  The absolute last resort would be to go in my pants. That was a discretion worthy of some really heavy punishment. The kind of punishment that you'd trade for a punch or slap to the head any day. I finally figured it out. The rope went to the curb, so that is where I went. And that is also where I "went." I don't remember how long it lasted, but one day, one of the neighbors came out to talk to me while I was "tied up." The practice stopped pretty soon after that.

The really sick thing is that my grandmother had a perfectly good fenced in back yard.  I even heard my mom and her arguing about it. My mom said she wanted me in front, where she could "keep an eye" on me.
I still don't get it! And of course my mom would never discuss her actions.