WHITMAN’S PASSION

Stories Never Told

by Dana F. Skolfield

1

Longing

  Two boys stand in front him in the dirt, faces hidden in afternoon shadows, prob’ly twenty, he thinks.  In the vacant lot next door, leaf clusters defining tall eucalyptus trees watch over him.  He won’t be five until April, but started kindergarten a month ago in February, yet still to find friends.  His two older sisters are prob’ly in their bedroom cutting out paper dolls—no chance they’ll allow him in—girls!  He likes cutting out paper dolls, and once admitting it, they called him a sissy.

  Not much to do alone in the backyard on weekends from school, except gather seed pods falling from the eucalyptus trees, rubbing their lemony smell of sticky gum all over his hands, a lonely pastime; so the sudden appearance of the two boys excites him—stirs again an ill defined longing—a quickening heart beat.  The boys smell of eucalyptus, their yellow cords covered with dust, flaps of white shirts, torn and hanging out.  They must have been playing in the vacant lot next door, and now he wishes he’d gone there instead of sitting here all alone in the dirt.

  As they come toward him, he shivers and hopes they’ll pick him up and hug him.  Maybe they’ll take him to play in the grove, or maybe to some far away place like in the song they sing in kindergarten, leagues of sky, silent lie, blue and free, calling me, where the horizon fair, binds earth and a-er.

  Now they’re whispering to each other, making low, growling sounds and laughing.  Suddenly they turn and run away, leaving him alone, sitting alone in the dirt.

  He lives on Avoca Street in Eagle Rock with his mother and the two older sisters, the three of them from his mother’s first marriage; a baby sister born just a year ago from their mother’s second husband, Mr. Dixon.  Their two-story house sided with brown, unpainted shingles, is the last one at the top of a steep hill.

  Last year when he was four, before entering Rockdale kindergarten, they lived only one block away on Algoma Street in a small brown stucco house, not so high on the hill as the house on Avoca.  One day in October, his mother, Jane, and step-dad (they call him “Mister Dixon”) brought home the new baby sister, naming her Elizabeth Jane, but his mother is afraid people might call her “Lizzie,” so they call her Jane instead.  Dana doesn’t remember ever living with his father—his mother divorced him when he was two because he had an affair with a Swedish girl, Alice Ruth.  He was still married to her.

  In the next few years they were to live in several different neighborhoods in the northeast part of Los Angeles, Eagle Rock and Highland Park—on hillsides, in gullies.  He would retain a fuzzy recollection of  living with Mr. Dixon on Neola Way in Eagle Rock when he was only three—a tree shaded street on low ground beneath the hills, a pretty white house with high latticed fence with a gateway entrance to a rocky driveway.  But his recollections of living on Avoca Street and the two boys from the eucalyptus grove are much sharper, more clear.  He’ll never forget them, and years later believed they were not twenty years old at all, but much younger, maybe nine or ten.

  In the 1980s, he drove out to some of these childhood neighborhoods and on Algoma Street was surprised to find the brown stucco house still standing—amused to see a gently sloping street up to the house from Eagle Rock High School on Yosemite Drive below.  He’d remembered it as a steep hill.  He didn’t remember the high school being there at all.

  However, he remembered Yosemite Drive, walking with his mother after a rain on the way to Rockdale school on the tree-shaded street, splashing his feet below the curb reflecting him in swirling pools of water; remembered too the ride on the Number 5 streetcar, how his mother told him he must go down the iron steps first when they got off.  “Gentlemen always get off first so they can help the lady down the steps,” she said.

  On Algoma Street, when he was four, he wanted to play with a boy older than he was in the house just below them; a quiet boy always frowning and serious, who paid no attention to him at all.  The boy spent most of his time in his garage gluing balsam wood parts into model airplanes.  Dana knows this because once when his  mother wasn’t watching him too closely, he snuck down and lingered long enough outside the garage door to see the boy, mouth clamped shut, intensely gluing balsa wood fragments together, sharp aroma of banana oil filling the air.

  Several years later at Christmas time, his Uncle Jack, his mother’s brother, presented him with a large box, a beautiful airplane pictured on the cover.  Opening it, he finds a kit with only bits and pieces of the plane to be fitted and glued to make the plane.  He didn’t even try to put it together.

  Sometimes, the smell of banana oil filled the air all the way up to their front lawn, and at long last, the boy appeared on his own front lawn, proudly flying the finished airplane, its propeller powered by a rubber band, sending it swirling into the air, soon careening into the grass.  Picking it up, he darts a look at Dana and smiles, causing Dana to tremble all over.  He can’t think why.  But that’s the end of it.  They never play together.

  “Myrt and Marge,” his mother’s favorite radio program, is on in the daytime, so at night he gets to listen to his favorite radio programs while his mother cooks dinner—CHANDU (GONG!)—THE MAGICIAN! and JACK ARMSTRONG, JACK ARM­STRONG, THE AHHHH-L-L-L AMERICAN BOY! while Edith and Alice, his older sisters, are in their bedroom, reading about makeup and glamour tips of the stars in movie magazines, or cutting out paper dolls. 

  Sixty years later when writing these memoirs, he is wonderfully surprised when the story of the paper dolls is picked up by a Spanish friend in Madrid who follows his blog—a very sensitive man, commenting, “describing feelings and perceptions of childhood, you brought back memories because I lived in a small village when I was a child .  .  .  I also remember in Spain we gave the name marquitas to paper dolls, and this was used by children to insult the person they believed was homosexual – I think marquitas is sissy in English.”

 Dana’s mother cooks everything with real butter when she can afford it.  Once in a while she buys Nucco margarine wrapped in cellophane.  She lets him pop the small red dot in the package, mashing it, spreading the color into the margarine—to the color of butter, but it always comes out orangey.  His mother says it’s against the law to sell margarine already mixed.  “I hate artificial things,” she says, “but real butter costs ten cents more than margarine.”

  Nevertheless, real butter rules on Sunday mornings, in scrambled eggs and spread on toast or pancakes.  The bread, usually white, from Wonder Bread’s packages with red and blue balloons, is toasted on a metal rack placed over a gas jet on the stove.  You have to watch it closely because the bread burns quickly and you have to scrape it.  Chi-titi-chita-scraping the toast!—song he heard in a movie—when the morning rolls around, chi-titi-chita-scraping the toast!

  For dinner sometimes his mother makes stuffed green peppers with rice and tomato sauce, and sometimes little round cakes from pink salmon out of a can that cost only nine cents.  The cakes were held together with bread crumbs soaked with eggs, and she tells them to watch out for tiny round bones.  “You can eat them as long as you chew them up first.  Fish bones are good for the brain.”  Edith and Alice—especially Alice—don’t like “little bits of things” in their food, and pick them out.  He doesn’t mind the bones and dutifully chews them up.

  In February at the start of school’s spring semester, almost five now, he’s ready for kindergarten at Rockdale Grammar School and that’s when they move one block away to Algoma to the house next to the eucalyptus grove.  The school has its own eucalyptus trees to play under.  He can recall a blur of scuffed knees, but especially remembers Miss Dobbins, pink cheeked teacher with silvery white hair, asking them to gather seed pods from the trees and bring them into class to help them learn how to count.

  Miss Dobbins, never stern or scolding, plump and always smiling, teaches them the alphabet by turning big white pages with brightly colored images on an easel which stands near large windows, always open in good weather, sun shining through shimmering leaves of poplar trees next to the school building.  The easel  displays large pages with giant letters and pictures of apples, boys and girls, cats and dogs. eagles. . .  They learn to pronounce longer words one syllable at a time: con-sid-er-ate for considerate, co-ah-por-ate for cooperate.  He has learned to read and pronounce long words from his mother and two older sisters starting when he was three.

  Miss Dobbins teaches them a song in two-part harmony, a song he’ll remember always in later years whenever he wants to escape, longing for the free air of  life, sailing the Spanish Main on tall ships.  Miss Dobbins gives him the higher line to sing with the girls because, she says, “you are a boy soprano.”  The sound of the small harmonizing chorus makes him shiver, sometimes sad, the same way he felt when the two boys ran off leaving him alone—words he’ll never, ever forget.

  Leagues of sky, silent lie,
  blue and free, calling me.
  Where the horizon fair
  binds earth and ai – er.
  Cloud ships daily, venture gaily
  on the silent sea.

  He’s much older now, almost ninety! sitting on his porch after a rain, puffy clouds venturing on a silent sea of sky, and he marvels he remembers every word of the song, and its melody. . . leagues of sky, calling me . . . to celebrate life.

  At twelve o’clock bells ring in the hallways calling them to lunch outdoors, where they dig into paper bags and lunch boxes for sandwiches, bananas, apples, sitting at splintery wood picnic tables, except on rainy days when they must eat in the cafeteria.  “Sit up straight!” the teachers admonish, “Slouching interferes with your digestion!”

  Dana’s lunch is packed in a paper bag, sandwich neatly tucked in wax paper, peanut butter and grape jelly spread on soft white Wonder Bread most of the time.  Once a month when his dad’s alimony checks arrive, his mother can afford to layer the sandwich with a thick slice of bologna spread with mayonnaise.  His mother often takes him down­town to cash the checks at the county clerk’s office—fifteen dollars a month for child support, for him and his two older sisters.  Mr.  Dixon is a cook, but he’s not too good at “bringing home the bacon.”  He’s out of work, more often than not.

  He was named after an uncle, Herbert Dana Skolfield, one of his dad’s four younger brothers.  “I wanted you to have an unusual name,” his  mother tells him, “not Bill or Bob, because you were my first boy, and your Uncle Herbert was the only one of the boys who was kind to me after the divorce.”

  His mother wants them to continue seeing their dad, even though it means spending time at their grandparent’s house at 4610 South Gramercy Place in southwest Los Angeles.  They call their grandmother, “Nana.”  Jane calls her “that hellcat who broke up my marriage.”

  After his sister Edith was born in 1921, Jane insisted they move to Highland Park. “I can’t stand living in flat country any longer,” she said.  That was her excuse, but her hope really was to move as far as possible away from her  mother-in-law.  She got her wish.  “When I was going to have Alice, I persuaded your dad to move.  He could find a house only in Lincoln Park, however—near Highland Park.  You couldn’t see the mountains from there.  Highland Park and Eagle Rock had much nicer neighborhoods, but at least Lincoln Park was better than southwest L.A.!”

  Alice was born on the kitchen table in a small house on Lincoln Park Boulevard.  “My father delivered her.  He delivered all you children.”  The baby girl was named Mildred Alice after Nana, Mildred Stroud Skolfield, but after the divorce, and for the rest of her life, Jane and all the children called her Alice.

  Dana was born in the Angelus Hospital in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.  They had moved back to  southwest L.A.  to West 71^st Street.  But after the divorce—Dana would remember nothing about that—Jane took the children back to her beloved hill country, living in rooming houses, until she married Mr. Dixon.

  Jane loved northeast sections of Los Angeles—Eagle Rock and especially Garvanza in Highland Park because of  the hills and trees, and the clear view of the mountains above Pasadena and Sierra Madre—Mount Wilson, Old Baldy covered in snow in heavy rainy seasons.  “Look! there’s snow on Mount Baldy!”

  Jane had fallen in love with Highland Park, “The City of Seven Hills,” from the time she lived with her father on Echo Avenue.  Her mother, May, died when she was only six when the family was living in Redlands, and her rich Aunt Pearl in Palm Springs took care of her and her sisters off and on.  Her brother Jack was old enough to take care of  himself.  When she was sixteen, Aunt Pearl stuck her in a convent on Monte Vista Avenue in Highland Park.  They were not Catholics, although her aunt Pearl did convert before she died.

  Jane pleaded with her father to take her out of the convent to live with him.  “My knees ere sore from all that kneeling!” and so he rescued her at once.  They became close companions, playing tunes together on Doc Forline’s upright piano, cribbage in the evenings.  Jane was to worship her father inordinately all the days of her life.

  In Highland Park, in clear bright weather when low fog wasn’t backed up against the mountains, they could detect a glint of silver atop Mount Wilson, the setting sun striking the dome of the one hundred inch telescope, the world’s largest at the time.  Dana didn’t know the telescope took pictures not only of stars, but galaxies; nor was he told when he was five years old living on Avoca Street that Albert Einstein visited Edwin Hubble there and Hubble convinced Einstein the universe was expanding.  Dana’s universe was much smaller.  Until the age of six he thought Paris France was somewhere in California.

  Alice Ruth Wilson, the Swedish girl Carl married after Jane divorced him, didn’t tell her father Carl had been married before and had three kids and feared her old-world father would show up without warning.  Dad and Alice Ruth lived in a one story white stucco on West 99^th Street near South Figueroa, a block away from Century Boulevard which ran all the way west out to the Los Angeles airport.

  One Saturday afternoon Alice Ruth’s dad did arrive at their doorstep unannounced, and Dana, Edith and Alice were hustled quickly into the closet in the empty back bedroom, trapped there for more than an hour in a small space crammed with stacks of their dad’s Esquire Magazines and some cast-off clothes hanging over them making it even harder to breathe.  The back bedroom was never furnished, not even a bed where they could stay overnight, or if they did, only one at a time, usually one of Dana’s sisters, Edith or Alice, sleeping on the couch in the living room.

  During school vacations and in a few summer months, they would stay at their grandparents house.  Two of his dad’s unmarried brothers lived there, Uncles Stuart and Tom.  The house was (and probably still is) a small, brown frame with three bedrooms, roofed front porch and a good-sized backyard.  All the houses on the street were built differently, mostly three bedroom, one-story with covered front porches.

  Nana and Pop had bought the house in a new development in 1905 with four boys, all of them born in Portland, Maine.  His dad was four at the time.  The developers had planted squat date palms in front of most of the houses, one on each side of the front walks.  Nana didn’t like the palms because their roots snaked out from the trunks choking the grass.  She didn’t much like any species of palm trees, especially the tall ones which looked, she said, like upside down broomsticks.  (No palm trees in Maine, thank you!)  Most trees in California kept their leaves through the winter, and she complained about this as well, and the sycamores which did shed their leaves, but “never get Irish green in the spring, like the elms in the east.”

  The palm tree on one side of the walk had been removed long ago.  Earth around the remaining palm had a mysterious kind of moldy smell which excited Dana—he didn’t know why.  The soil around the house was black and sandy, with silver specks in it.  His dad tells him that’s because millions of years ago the whole of southwest Los Angeles was under the ocean and to prove it, gave him a small crab-like fossil trapped in hardened clay he’d found in the hills near Play del Rey when he was a boy.

  Finally Nana had the remaining palm dug up.  Dana was eight, and he took the evil deed personally—There shall be no secret hiding places for young boys!  He cried, and his grandmother said, “You are too morbid.”
  Pop was more kind to him, a gentle man who took him on short trips—more than once to Echo Park Lake near downtown L.A., where they fed the ducks.  Pop didn’t talk much.  He kept mallard ducks in the backyard—male drakes with shining blue and green heads, and more plain looking brown females slurping around in a muddy pool near the back porch.  In August, two fig trees became heavy with ripened fruit—one bearing plump and juicy purple figs, the other, green figs, not so juicy.  The purple ones were the best; covered with cream, they really tasted “scrumptious,” a word he’d learned from his mother.

  All his uncles, “Nana’s boys,” had bred homing pigeons in backyard coops, individual cages separated by chicken wire.  He remembered most of all his Uncle Stuart tapping a coffee can with his manicured fingernails (explaining he had to keep his nails looking good because he sold magazines door-to-door.), looking up into the sky to call in the pigeons circling the coops, training them for much longer flights.  Once Pop sent pigeons all the way to Cincinnati and they every one of them returned home, flying right into the coops!

  Uncle Stuart whistled a lot, a tense and nervous man, tapping rhythms with his fingers on the dining room table; storming around a much too small living room during family arguments in the evening—these were many and loud.  Dana hated them—perhaps because he disagreed with everyone, including Nana, and even his favorite Uncle Tom.  Pop never said a word, sitting quietly in the high-backed chair in front of the grandfather clock, dozing off in the heat of battle, or simply leaving the room to walk around the neighborhood.

  Stuart wrote poetry, printed in small booklets of his own design, covers decorated with drawings of brightly colored butterflies.  No one in the family could understand his poems, but he had a chance to read them to a radio audience when the local CBS station offered him a once-a-week half hour radio show.

  The show was short-lived.  During the 1934 California campaign for governor he began touting his support for Upton Sinclair, a Socialist running against Republican Frank Merriam, ex-Iowan and onetime realtor from Long Beach.  One night, listening to Uncle Stuart’s voice emanating from the large Philco in the living room, they were startled to hear a blast of organ music, a male announcer (no female announcers in those days), proclaiming, “This has not been a paid political broadcast.” and that was the end of Uncle Stuart’s radio career.

  In the two-car garage where he occasionally refinished furniture for customers, Pop kept brown and white hamsters in cages, and plump pink-eyed white rats running in treadmills.  Dana liked the scent of wood chippings in the cages and varnish used in refinishing.  Acrid smell of smoke infiltrated from the backyard from the incinerator when trash was burned.  All the houses had backyard incinerators for burning trash because the city only picked up garbage.

  Nana wouldn’t allow her boys to burn trash on Mondays because without fail, that’s the day she did the family wash in a chugging Maytag on the back porch, complaining smoke from the incinerator would cover her wash with soot when she hung it out to dry.  Nana squeezed out moisture from the laundry through rollers on the Maytag, and warned Dana to watch out because if he got his hands in the rollers, they’d be mangled, telling him the story of a young girl who got her hands crushed in rollers just like these.  Nana had lots of weird and frightening stories to tell—the kind his mother wouldn’t tell in a million years.

  Thursdays, ironing and sewing day, Nana darning socks in the living room sitting in on the overstuffed davenport in the living room, her legs spread.  If she caught Dana glancing at her, she would say, “Keep you eyes up!”  An ironing board with fold-down legs was set up in the dining room.

  The family owned a four-door Franklin, yellowish brown with celluloid windows and black leather flaps snapped over them to keep out the rain.  Pop drove them out to West 99^th Street on visits to their dad, to and from their home to Eagle Rock or Highland Park, wherever they happened to live.  They moved a lot.

  In summertime, Uncle Tom drove Dana and his sisters to Manhattan or Hermosa Beach, tossing them into the breakers.  That’s how they learned to swim—in the ocean, riding the surf.

  Sometimes they’d swim in the bay at Playa del Rey which had no surf at all.  On the way home Tom would put the Franklin’s gear shift in neutral and coast down steep inclines going forty miles an hour.  He said it was against the law to drive in neutral, but he did it anyway.

  A summer night Dana would never forget, driving through nearby neighborhoods, Liemert Park and Inglewood, Pop at the wheel, Nana beside him, Dana sandwiched between Edith and Alice in the backseat, a smell like burning rubber tires filled the air.

  “What’s that smell?” Dana asked.

  Nana said, “Well, it’s not incinerators, I can tell you.  It’s the peat bogs.  They burn underground somewhere and they don’t know how to put them out.  They will go on burning forever.”

  Dana slumped between his sister, goose bumps on his arms, Burning forever?  Another morose story out of his grandmother’s mouth.  The night was cool, the sky overcast feeding his sense of foreboding and hopelessness.  Why the smell of hidden, burning peat bogs and the sure possibility they’d go on burning forever—Nana said so—should make him feel sad and depressed, he couldn’t figure out—it just did, but Nana often made him feel this way, always complaining about something—seldom did she laugh out loud—she hardly ever even smiled.  Dana never got a single hug from her or her boys at 4610.

  Nana didn’t like driving to the beach because it brought them closer to the oil refineries in El Segundo.  She hated the smell.  Sometimes ocean breezes and high fog brought the foul odor of refineries into the neighborhood.  “In Boothbay Harbor wind from the nor’easters brought in the smell of the sea and the fishing boats,” she’d say, “not the smell of oil wells.  Those derricks at Signal Hill down in Long Beach caused the Inglewood quake, you know—from drilling into the earth.  Pop said, “There’s lots of money in oil wells.”

  Nana was terrified of earthquakes, unlike Dana’s mother who told him her father taught her not to be afraid of anything—thunderstorms, or floods, or earthquakes.  “Once you know what causes these things, you won’t be so afraid of them,” she said.  “My father taught me that,” telling the story of once sitting with him in a movie house and the chandeliers started swaying and people all around them ran for the exits, but her father instinctively seemed to know it was a small tremor, and told her to sit still.

  On a Saturday night, soaping him down in the bathtub, Dana mentioned how much Nana hated the smell of oil wells.  His mother, rubbing the wash rag over his back, smiled.  “Don’t pay any attention to your grandmother, she complains about everything.  I love the smell of oil wells.  It reminds me of just before you were born, when I was expecting you, your Uncle Herbert and his girl friend, Elaine, would drive your father and me past the oil refineries in Long Beach on our way back from the Pike.”  The Pike was a big amusement pier in Long Beach with two really scary roller coasters.  “Your father and I loved to ride the Cyclone Racer—we always got the front seat.”  After the first steep free-fall, the two coasters raced each other back to the shed, but nobody really paid any attention which one was the winner.

  He and his sisters spent some Christmas eves at their grandparents, hoping they might see their dad.  Whether he would show up or not, however, was uncertain.  Three of his brothers were there to snipe at each other—Tom and Stuarts, Herbert and wife Elaine who lived in the hills above Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood.  The youngest, George, didn’t live at home, even before he got married.  He worked for Santa Fe Railroad since he was sixteen, and lived sometimes in San Bernardino, and once as far away as Topeka, Kansas.

  Uncle Tom told Dana and his sisters, “George and Herbert are the only two of us boys who escaped from Ma.  She didn’t want any of us to get married.”

  Dana didn’t much like Christmas Eves at Gramercy Place.  His uncles teased each other unmercifully about how cheap their gifts were, and argued about everything they could think of.  Uncle Stuart got all tensed up and shouted things about the “gold standard” and “crooks on Wall Street.”

  Dana kept hoping they’d give him the Lionel electric train he’d seen in a large box on the closet shelf in the front bedroom, but it never happened.  It belonged to Uncle George, they told him.  It stayed right there on the closet shelf; and nobody ever got it down for him or anyone else to play with.

  His uncles were too busy to play with electric trains, Uncle Stuart, other than writing and selling his poetry, mixed perfumes in the dining room and organized his magazine delivery routes; Tom at the other end of the table banging away on a portable typewriter, writing a novel, “A Trip to the Moon,” or doing his Charles Atlas exercises in the living room, or chinning himself on a bar he’d set up in the backyard near the pigeon coops.

  Having a good, muscular body was important to him, and to a lot of other men, like many other men prompted by the magazine ad for The Charles Atlas method showing laughing men at the beach kicking sand in the face of a skinny guy.

  There were plenty of schemes in the 1930s for old folks—“crackpot” schemes, Stuart called them.  First came the “Technocrats” and “Utopians,” followed by “Thirty Dollars Every Thursday,” called “Twenty-five Dollars Every Monday Morning,” proposed by Robert Noble who formed the organization, “California Revolving Pensions.”  With his two brothers, Willis and Lawrence Allen, the plan was promoted through their advertising agency; forming their own pension group, excluding Noble, changing the name of the plan to “Thirty Dollars Every Thursday” for every unemployed person over the age of fifty.

  Nana seemed to like “Thirty Dollars Every Thursday” best.  To heighten its folksy appeal, the plan had been dubbed “Ham ‘n’ Eggs.”  It was defeated as an initiative in the 1938 election, although it received close to a million and a half votes.  The corrupt practices of the Allen brothers exposed shortly before the election may have had something to do with its demise.

  “Youth for work and age for leisure,” the slogan of the Townsend Old Age Pension Plan, was created in 1934 by Dr.  Francis E.  Townsend, a retired Long Beach, California physician, calling for a two hundred dollar monthly pension for each person over the age of sixty—money which must be spent within a month, thus restoring what Dr.  Townsend called “the proper circulation of money.”  (An idea which seems to have been lost in present times—2015.)

  Although millions joined the five thousand Townsend Clubs, not Nana and Pop—they weren’t joiners, never went to meetings, but they certainly hoped the Townsend Plan would succeed.  It did became a powerful force in both state and national politics, but failed to be adopted anywhere in the country.  Perhaps nobody took special notice at the time, but the Townsend Plan’s notoriety helped pass the Social Security Act in 1935.

  Uncle Tom tried everything to get work, never got his novel “A Trip to the Moon” published, or a short story “In Love with Love” rejected by “True Confessions” magazine.  He talked about having sex with girls all the time, but he only had one girlfriend Dana ever knew about—Vera, a troubled feisty, slim girl who’d been brought up in an orphanage in Highland Park—her tale, one more morose story issuing forth from Gramercy Place—one Dana would never remember—a “broken home,” child abuse, something like that.

  Tom took a home course in film cutting but was blocked by the union, he said, from getting a job.  He invented a mechanism which would display a red signal light on the dashboard warning when automobile’s tires were flat, but couldn’t get a patent.  During the longshoremen’s strike in 1934, he stoked coal on a freighter up the coast to Seattle and back again.  When the stokers disembarked at San Pedro, they were attacked and severely beaten by thugs shouting “Scabs! Scabs!”  He set pins in the local bowling alley a few blocks away on Vermont Avenue for a year until Roosevelt’s “Lend Lease” took hold, then got work as a machinist at North American Aviation near the airport.

  No wonder Dana felt such relieve and happiness returning from these vacations to his mother’s home, rushing from the old brown Franklin into her arms, soft, warm refuge as she swooped him up, kissing him, making him cry.  Even as his mother struggled to make ends meet, she always kept an optimistic outlook, and her stories were never morose.  How we welcomed escape from that cold and troubled place at 4610!

  Nobody at Gramercy Place ever encouraged him or his sisters as his mother did.  And worse, his grandmother at every opportunity, would make snide remarks about his mother, to a friend on the phone, or intoning her complaints directly to them.   Alice paid little heed to them; Edith would solemnly shake her head in agreement—Dana seethed.

  Her favored litany was “Your father could come home to dirty dishes in the sink and no dinner on the table.  “No wonder he strayed.  A wife has got to take care of her man.”

  Sometimes unpleasant stories came at them from their teachers, but his mother only laughed them off—or said, “Ridiculous!”  In the third grade at Rockdale, his teacher, Miss Wheatley, warned them about biting their fingernails, telling them the story of a girl who died of unknown causes until they opened up her stomach and found a ball of fingernails inside her—one more thing for him to fret about—but his mother said, “You don’t bite your fingernails, so why should you worry?”

  Jane was a great comfort and didn’t allow unpleasant talk, although sometimes she retreated into nervous outbursts—when his dad failed to send child support checks on time, or when his older sister, Edith, threw a tantrum.  Edith just couldn’t get along with his mother—defying her when asked to wash the dishes or take the trash out to the incinerator or garbage pails.  Edith blamed her mother for the divorce from Carl—sometimes said so right to her face.  Alice was just the opposite —Jane called her “Darlin’ little ‘Lisha girl, Mother’s Little Helper.”

  Music filled their home; hardly any music at all at 4610—no upright piano in the living room, only now and then from the radio when Uncle Stuart wasn’t listening to the news—“Destiny,” the opening theme from Nana’s favorite program, “One Man’s Family”—Oh love is like the sea, the tide comes rushing free—until the Association for Song Writers (ASCAP) got all copyrighted music used as themes banned from the radio.  (The legendary Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeMille who hosted Lux Radio Theatre quit the show over the ASCAP flap.)

  At home his mother played an upright from a large collection of tattered sheet music kept in the piano seat—“Twelfth Street Rag,” “Ramona” – Ramona, we’ll meet beside the waterfall – Villa, pronounced Veel-ya – Vil-ya, Oh Vil-ya, Please Answer My Call, My life without you means nothing at all.  Jane taught herself to play, telling stories of her mother, May, accompanying herself on a piano.  She taught all of them to play.  Dana developed an ability to play by ear.  “You get that from my father,,” she told him.

  There was always music at grammar school—singing with caroling groups at Christmas in school hallways—Dana’s favorite, singing much too loudly, Glo - o – o – o – o – o .  .  .  o – o – o – o – oria – in Excelsis Deo!

  In February 1932 they moved down to “The Gully” section of Highland Park along Arroyo Seco creek (today’s Pasadena Freeway), to a house on Leslie Way.  At Herman Way grammar school, he enters first grade.  What a delightful adventure getting to school each morning, he and his sisters stepping on stones to cross the arroyo in rainy season, climbing a steep wooden stairway—not like living in a big city at all, but in some remote land in the wilderness.

  On his sixth birthday, 1932, April 26, his mother bought him his very fist pair of long pants, yellow corduroys, the same color worn by most boys at school.  Mr. Dixon opened a small hamburger joint near the newly built Los Angeles Coliseum where the summer Olympics were in full swing.  Dana liked going there, distant sounds of roaring crowds cheering in the distance.  Dixon, cook as well  as  counter server, knew all customers by name.  Strangely, this bothered Dana who expected owners of restaurants should keep their distance.  (A therapist would’ve had a field day with that one—but child psychologists were as scarce as Eskimos in his world.)

  Next fall, after cold November rains oppressively dampened gully, Dana gets a severe soar throat turns into diphtheria.  Grandfather Forline is on hand.  He’s rushed to the county hospital downtown, a large, red brick building resembling a prison from a Warner Brothers gangster film, but he’s too laid low to notice.  He’s near death, but doesn’t know it.  He’s saved with a serum for curing diphtheria, discovered only a few years before, in 1929.

  The second week, after of week of being almost totally unconscious, he awakens one morning to hear the sound of his  mother’s high heels clicking on the wooden floor, approaching from down a long corridor and his heart leaps.

  “You would have died without the serum your  grandfather gave you,” she tells him.  “It was only discovered four years ago.  He saved your life.”

  His father never comes to see him; he didn’t expect him.

  February, 1933.  Mr. Dixon can’t find work as a cook, so takes a job in a furniture factory in Huntington Park, a city district south of Los Angeles, much different than Highland Park and its seven hills— no hopping over stones across a magical arroyo to get to school; no dusty smells of sycamore trees or climbing a rickety wooden stairway.  Now— flat country!  Dana has completed first grade

  Friday evening, just after o’clock, March 10, 1933--playtime before dinner, Dana explores trees lining the street, searching in vain for a hideaway; his stepbrother Warren rides a tricycle along the sidewalk, pumping away beside him.  Mysteriously and suddenly Warren plummets into the street, Dana has to grab onto the trunk of a pepper tree to stay on his feet.  The sidewalk id shaking violently, rising and falling like waves on the ocean; Warren on the ground in the path of an approaching Model A Ford swerving down the street, brakes screeching, rumbling sounds from the earth and in the distance, a man’s voice, a long wailing cry like the scream of a siren, er-r-r-r-rth quake! Warren, trembling with the heaving earth pulls himself up in front of the startled driver, dragging his tricycle back to safety.

  The earthquake growled through Huntington Park’s quiet neighborhood not too far from its epicenter off the coast of Long Beach along the Newport Beach fault.  Long Beach suffers the worst of it—over a hundred people killed and serious damage.  Just around the corner of their house on Pacific Boulevard, a woman is killed when the roof of the grocery store fell in.

  Getting back to the house, expecting his mother to be on the front lawn like the neighbors, he finds her instead in the kitchen cleaning up sardines and boiled potatoes now splattered all over the floor.  Mr. Dixon rushes in ordering her to come outside.  “There will be aftershocks,” he says.

  “I’ve got to clean up this mess,” Jane says, continuing to swipe a mop over the floor.  “I think there might be enough potatoes and sardines left on the stove for dinner,” she says.

  Later the same night in Dixon’s Ford  sedan they tour a family outing to see the damage.  Huntington Park High School auditorium is a black crumbling skeleton, silhouetted among bright orange flames.

  When he’s seven, his mother divorces Mr. Dixon because of his “bad temper,” soon after marrying Herschel Robert Taylor.  So now, a second stepfather.  Taylor rents a three bedroom one-story house on the corner at North Avenue 63 in Highland Park—no backyard to  speak of, but the front lawn is ample.  Mr. Taylor had apprenticed as car mechanic when he was a kid in Massachusetts and now lubricates jalopies, fixes flats and pumps gas for Mr. Bates who owns gasoline stations in and around Highland Park and Eagle Rock.  Taylor, it would seem, never can wash off the veins and wedges of black grease on his hands and embedded in his fingernails—mark of  his trade.  A rough, rather crude man, looking a little like Humphrey Bogart in Warner Brothers gangster movies, and speaks with a New England accent like his uncles.  Edith hates him, Alice, neutral.

  After school one day, Dana rushes into the kitchen unannounced and finds his mother sitting on Taylor’s lap.  He’s rubbing her breasts—right in front of him!  His mother doesn’t stir.  Dana gives no words to his feelings, just feels sick inside.  Taylor looks at  him with a leering grin.

  He’s getting fewer hugs and kisses from his mother these days, so retreats into a private world, grim refuge, calling himself Fritz, the name given him by a neighborhood boy, Bob Gustafason who gives him a large straw Mexican hat—I’m a lone cowhand, from the Rio Grande.  Gustafason is a couple of years older than Dana’s eight years.  He will be killed in the war somewhere in the Pacific—Dana never knows where exactly—nor even the branch of armed services Gustafason served in, probably the Navy, or maybe Marines.  Dana and a few other boys in the neighborhood call themselves, “The Fuck Frieda Gang,” Dana setting himself up as their leader, and Gustafason will have no part of it.

  Frieda, ten years old, lives next door, a blonde girl with Shirley Temple curls and a pinched face.  Gustafason scolds Dana, telling him he’s too young and should watch his language, and stop strutting around. 

  At eight years old, Dana considers himself grown up and can do as he pleases; lunchtime at Garvanza grammar school sitting alone on the wooden steps of the old brown building, glowering, lips clenched, cussing out loud, when anyone’s there to hear him—words he’s learned from his dad.

  A couple of months before his ninth birthday he’s advanced to the B-4 taught by Miss Rickerich and his rebellion intensifies.  It doesn’t help that Miss Rickerich is just like Nana, a yellow bun at the back her head—Nana, who smothers him with tales of woe and condemnations, and that his mother’s love seems to be strangely entwined in the arms of his stepfather.

  One morning standing over him, Miss Rickerich complains, “You forgot to reduce the eight,” tracing the mistake with a pale finger, nails clipped square, hands smelling like the Fels Naphtha bleach his mother uses to get rid of “Tattle-Tale Cray.”

  “Well shit!” he says.  Unbending from the small desk, Miss Rickerich, tower of subdued rage, says quietly, “Into the cloakroom, and you will stay after school,” not moving an inch from his desk, so when he gets up, he must skulk around her, marching into exile, teeth grinding, proud to be thrown out, now painfully demonstrated by sitting alone on a bench in the long, unlit cloakroom, sullen beneath ghostly shades of coats and jackets hanging on hooks like the highwaymen he’s seen in illustrated books, their shadowy corpses hanging from jibs at the side of the road, smells of peanut butter-jelly sandwiches and overripe bananas cloying the air.

  After school, Miss Rickerich makes him write a note: Dear Mother, I said shit in class today, warning him to make sure his mother signs the note and returns it.  When his mother reads the note, her eyebrows narrow hiding usually kind blue eyes.  “I guess you’d better go to your room until dinner time.  I’m not going to tell your stepfather about this if you promise to behave.”  So ends the matter.  His mother signs the note and that’s the end of it.  She doesn’t like dwelling on unpleasant things.

  He could never figure out how he survived Miss Rickerich and “Fritz,” but he did and she even passed him to the A4 in the fall—probably glad to get rid of him.  Years later as he was walking up North Avenue 54 on his way to Franklin High School, he passed a small house with a picket fence, and there she was, Miss Rickerich, looking the same, gloved hands tending a stand of gawky hollyhocks—thinking the flower must remind her of her unruly charges.  She glances at him through the stocks, no recognition in her eyes.  If she did and they were to speak, what would he say to her?

  Summertime on North Avenue 63 in 1935 for the Fourth of July, in Inglewood where purchase is legal, Taylor buys a whole bunch of fireworks, “snakes” and sparklers, cherry bombs and packages of firecrackers.  Afternoons a few days before and after the Fourth is like a “Stupendous, Must See!” movie! caps snapping, smell of gun powder just like from the American Revolution he imagines, rat-ta-tat-tat of firecrackers shared with the gang.  They forget all about “Fuck Frieda” its glamour lost, none of them are interested in Frieda anymore and besides she’s off somewhere with her mom and dad for summer vacation.

  Firecrackers and cap pistols dispel his longings only for time.  The gang knows nothing at all about real sex, accusing him of being an ignoramus who really didn’t know how to fuck Frieda.  Like him, they are on the threshold, soon to plunge into adolescent mysteries, never anticipating the climactic changes this will bring.  They know their voices will get deeper; they’ll grow taller.  Dana will not be a “boy soprano” anymore.  He’s long time given up getting any satisfaction from the hard prong which has suddenly appeared and disappeared like a curse since he was four years old—curse only because he can’t get any satisfaction from it—reaching some kind of climax, glorious explosion which somehow would define his desires.

  His Uncle Tom talks a lot about sex, on a summer night in the driveway at 4610 leaning against Pop’s new Plymouth sedan, explaining to him, Edith and Alice how babies are made.  (His father has told him nothing about sex, except as graphically depicted in his dirty jokes.  At  age eleven in the shower room in Catalina, Carl will glance down at his crotch, and stare silently.  Dana will wonder why—wanted to see if he had “arrived” perhaps.  The thought that his dad was checking the size of his penis never occurred to him, until later years.

  Tom tells them about a young girl who wanted to kill herself because she had done things with a boy and thought she was the only girl in the world who ever had.  “Then fortunately someone told her she wasn’t the only girl who wanted to do sexual things with boys when they reach adolescence—even before puberty sometimes—there’s nothing wrong or sinful in that.”  Continuing, Tom maps out how the man puts his penis into the girl to make babies.  Edith exclaims, “I will never let a man stick that thing in me!”  Alice says she’ll have no problems with that.

  At Garvanza Grammar school, after Miss Rickerich passes him onto the A4, his rebellion ends abruptly.  He never bothers to figured out why, just loves going to school again.  Miss Taft, his A4 teacher, is the greatest, much different than Miss Rickerich, younger, tall and lanky like his mother, with curly light brown hair.  She teaches them the art of penmanship—how to write the same beautiful sloping letters she’s chalked on the blackboard.  “Your fingers must be supported by your wrist as if it’s rolling on ball bearings, the hand attached, but swinging freely.  Don’t tighten your fingers around the pen and don’t crouch into the desk.”

  “Why can’t we learn to print first?” Avis Redfield asked.  Avis was a tiny girl with brown curls who more than once sniffed at him as if he were a bug.

  “We are not making posters, Avis.  We are learning good penmanship, so do as I say and relax your fingers.  .  .  That’s it! your wrist rolling as you write as if it’s on ball bearings.”

  Miss Taft conducts spelling bees, the winner allowed to extract a large chunk of  milk chocolate from a huge barrel at the front of the class.  He knows then and there when he’s grown up and has money, he will buy lots and lots of milk chocolate chunks and eat them all day long without stopping.

  During the “Fritz rebellion era” he never smokes cigarettes or drinks alcohol, not because he believes it’s a sin—his mother never, never talks about “sin,” but because cigarettes are hard to come by, and anyway, he can’t see himself as a smoking drunk.  He doesn’t want to be that different from other boys.  He isn’t influenced in the least by a temperance stumper, a rumpled man who comes to Garvanza one afternoon with a slide show mounted on a wagon in the dirt play area; the slides exposing the evils of drink with a close up of a dropsied leg, a finger poking it, making a soft dent in the leg which would remain there, the man warns, forever! lecturing  on the evils of tobacco and booze, singing in a raspy voice: Dare to be good, dare to be true! displaying a smoking machine that spews viscous brown goop into a glass vial.

  Since his mother never talks about sinning, it’s strange that between  divorcing Mr. Dixon and marrying Mr. Taylor, she would gather Dana, Edith, and Alice, and bundle them off on streetcars to Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple on Temple Street, overlooking Echo Park.  You couldn’t miss the temple—a large amber neon cross on the dome beckoning sinners for miles around.

  His mother has allowed them to go to Sunday schools every week, only occasionally would she go with them.  She never talks about religion or what she might or might not believe.  He’s never heard her say, “I believe in God,” or talk  about “Jesus,” but she believes it’s a good idea to  go to  Sunday school where they would be on their own in deciding or not which religious beliefs to follow.  They attended whatever church neighbor children happened to be going to, and because they moved a lot, this meant many different denominations except Catholic or “Holy Rollers.”  Jane never expressed anti-Catholic feelings like his grandmother and his dad’s brothers did (died-in-the wool “Orange Men”), and had a close Catholic lady friend she’d met at the convent.  Dana remembers she smoked a lot.  They played with her two boys sometimes—Pat and Mike, but never at Easter time, because Catholics had a different week off for Easter vacation.

  Once he and Alice decide on their own never to return to a Lutheran Sunday school and their mother fully supports their decision after they tell her why.  When a boy approaching his teens had asked the teacher—a serious, humorless man—if people weren’t Lutherans did that mean they were heretics?  He answered flatly without hesitation, “Yes, they are heretics—anyone who’s not a Lutheran is a heretic.”

  Angeles Temple frightens him—a cavernous, round shaped auditorium with many balconies bearing down on them, the temple packed with people shouting and singing, arms raised toward a large elevated stage.  Silver-haired men in gray suites, mannequin smiles, perfumey white carnations in their lapels, usher them into wooden pews.

  Edith begins crying even before they’re seated.  Alice is quiet, eyes darting about, taking in the scene; his mother, a worried look, forcing a smile.  On stage, flowers everywhere—an overwhelming smell of jasmine.  No sooner are they seated than CLAP OF ROLLING THUNDER! BOLT OF LIGHTNING! lighting up the temple as a huge globe of the world rumbles out from the wings, spinning across the state floor, followed by angels robed in white, chasing a black and red-clad devil off into the wings.

  Audience in startled silence, then sudden bursts of shouts, hallelujahs, claps of thunder.  Sister Aimee has materialized out of mists in a flowing lemony white robe, golden hair shining in follow-spot chasing after the devil.  Holding a large microphone, she exhorts the congregation to dig deep,  “Let’s hear only the rustle of  paper money  and the  clink of  silver dollars.  Come and Be Saved!”

  Dana is surprised by the sound of her voice.  Has she got a cold?  He expected mellow sounds flowing forth from this beautiful angelic, movie star face, not a rasping frog in the throat.

  Edith sobbing now, sunk deep into herself, eyes shut tight, he expects his mother will scold her, telling her to be silent, but instead grabbing Edith’s hand, yanking her up out of the pew, straining to talk above the noise, whispering, “Come along, all of you!” pushing all three of them in front of her, finding an exit which leads to a back stairway, then fire escape, taking them down the narrow iron steps into the street, herding them out onto Temple Street to the nearest streetcar stop.

  SISTER AIMEE KIDNAPPED!!! screams the headline.  He will learn years later, Aimiee was an itinerant evangelist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1918, gathered a large following and built the Angelus Temple, creating the nation’s first religious radio station.  In 1926, the year Dana was born, at the height of her popularity, she vanished and her grieving congregation held a lavish memorial service.  Then, in a miraculous return from the dead, she reappeared at Union Station and climbed into a large black Packard limousine after telling a faceless battery of flashbulbs and microphones that she’d been kidnapped.  Her return prompted a spectacular homecoming.  Thousands of people lined Temple Street all the way from downtown to Echo Park, an airplane above showering rose petals in her path.

  Reporters later uncovered evidence that Sister Aimee’s kidnapping was a hoax, her absence explained by time spent in Carmel in the north, enjoying what they called an “illicit vacation” with her radio station’s engineer.  The police declined to press charges for fraud and hoax, her congregation remained steadfast—followers even increasing, requiring more and more “Four Square Gospel” churches throughout the southland as Sister Aimee continued her good works, feeding the poor, and ministering the sinful.

  Following Miss Taft, spring semester with Mr. C. C. Clark who teaches fifth grade.  The initials C.C. allow them an excuse to call him “Sissy Clark,” not helpful that he wears glasses and waves his arms around when he talks, often including  his wife in stories, making sure they know he’s a married man, as in instructing his wife (and them, although no one in the class is old enough to drive), warning her never to drive with her elbow on the ledge of the open window because it will make her left shoulder grow higher than her right.

  After fifth grade, in February, 1937, Mr. Taylor moves them to a large, two story white frame house on Marmion Way near North Avenue 50, so Dana and Alice switch to Aldama Grammar School (Alice’s last semester in grammar school—she will go to Luther Burbank Junior High in the fall.)

  Aldama is up the hill on Avenue 50, a grove of eucalyptus trees—what else?—beyond a chain link fence, hovering over a sloping ravine bordering the dirt playground beyond a chain link fence.  The greatest thing about the new neighborhood is that the Santa Fe Railroad tracks are just across the street, running behind a house eastward to Pasadena—all the way to Chicago! so his newly acquired neighborhood gang tells him.  The gang is smaller than the one on Avenue 63.  Bob Crimea who lives across from them, is leader, because he’s the oldest—sixteen.

  The gang includes two other boys—Tommy Buchanan and Johnnie Sullivan.  Tommy is a shorty whose dark inquisitive eyes peer from beneath a big jumble of black cowlicks shooting out from his head.  He’s in B6 class with Dana.  Johnnie, blond pale face, kind of a softie, is only nine years old, so is picked on.  More than once, Johnnie follows Dana down to the gully to capture tiny black tadpole-pollywogs in jelly glasses, a lot different kind of “gully” than the one on Leslie Way when he was six—no running brooks here, only small, still pools beneath thick stands of sycamore trees.

  The gang wrestles high from the street on Bob’s front lawn, plays kick-the-can at night on Joy street around the corner under dim street lights and buzzing gnats, walks barefoot in the summer high above the gully along the Santa Fe Railroad tracks collecting empty beer cans and cardboard milk bottle caps, the smell of creosote and burnt summer grass stinging their nostrils.

  Whenever he has a nickel to spend, Bob Crimea shouts at him—and only him—“Let’s go guzzle a big bottle of Pepsi!” enticing him to Mr. Green’s grocery store on North Avenue 50 and Monte Vista where it seems his mother always has an outstanding bill to pay.

  Tommy lives a couple of blocks away in a ramshackle home beneath Mount Washington at the end of the curve where Monte Vista turns into Marmion Way, running down past the Southwest Museum which houses mostly American Indian relics.  Mount Washington isn’t really a mountain, just a hill.  There Dana and Tommy create a hideaway, a club house, secured in the holly bushes and scrubby California oak trees.

  Evenings at the corner of North Avenue 50 and Figueroa, the other side of the railroad tracks, they sell the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express, a newspaper with a green front page, buying big nickel Hershey Bars with the few pennies they make.

  One night best forgotten (but he’ll remember it) on their way home from selling papers, swallowing chunks of Hershey’s chocolate, Dana’s longings get the better of him and out nowhere he impulsively grabs at Tommy’s crotch.  They have never fooled around like this before, in the club house on Mount Washington or anywhere else, Tommy not resisting at first, returning the favor, reaching between Dana’s legs, taking hold of something as hard as an iron pipe and instantly recoiling,  scared to death.  “What’s that!” he says, jerking his hand away.  “This is no fun, I’m going home.”  Bewildered, Dana watches him run off around the corner of Joy Street, puzzled and unsatisfied—unsatisfied as to what?

  On Saturday night, May 15, 1937 (Dana, now eleven), the new, improved Super Chief 2 is to make its “Maiden Run” from Los Angeles to Chicago.  There had been previous runs of the all-sleeper streamliner, but this one’s advertised as the first new and improved “Train of the Stars.”  Leaving Los Angeles Union Station at 7:30 p.m., it’s expected to cross North Avenue 50 around eight o’clock.  Everybody in the neighborhood gathers, anticipating their first sight of a genuine streamline train, so different than the chugging locomotives, or the black, evil smelling service train, called the “Santa Fe Skunk.”  They hope to catch a glimpse of he new streamline wonder, with movie stars waving at them from the windows as it whizzes by.

  The gang, Dana and his sisters, are privileged to watch the “Stupendous, Must-See” event from Bob Crimea’s lawn.  A lump in his throat as wig-wags at the crossing start clanging, clink-clink-clink, gates lowering; always exciting even before this night—the high signal pole above the tracks blinking from green to red announcing an approaching train up from Marmion Way.  Proud, insistent blast of air horn, Super Chief 2 rumbling out of the trees, brightly lit windows flashing as it passes—much too fast to make out movie star faces, but slow enough to behold the blur of it’s sleek silver sides, red striping, singing its song on the rails as it passes—clunkety-clunk, clunkety-clunk, clunkety-clunk.

  Before they can breathe again, it’s gone, Super Chief 2’s red tail lights marking the train as it glides eastward, leaving in its wake a breeze filled with the smell of creosote and diesel fuel; soon to cross the Arroyo Seco on the North Avenue 64 bridge on its way to the Pasadena station.  Going all the way across the country—all the way to Chicago!  How he longs to go with them.

  Bob Crimea summons the gang, “Let’s play kick-the-can!”  Dana doesn’t hear him, lost in lingering thoughts, he’s inside Super Chief 2 taking him to places he’s never been.

  Aldama Grammar School—plenty of sunshine here, in B and A sixth grade classrooms next door to each other, rows of windows along the left wall looking out on the dirt playground and eucalyptus trees; desks crowded together, each with its own inkwell and pencil tray.  Miss Judson, B6 teacher, pudgy little woman, salt-and-pepper bangs, bulging eyes behind black horn-rimmed glasses, clearing her throat now and then, whipping out a white tissue, delicately collecting spittle into it, tossed in a wastebasket a yard away from her desk.  She never misses.

  Once a week on Friday, Miss Judson casts her eyes over the class, squinting at them as time approaches for “Behavior Appraisal.”  A good or bad mark checked after names neatly printed in dark blue on a large white sheet of paper tacked on the wall behind her; students asked to report questionable behavior—legalized tattling.  Only once does he fail to get a good mark after his name.  Avis Redfield sitting behind him, dogging him all the way from Miss Taft’s A4 class at Garvanza, raises her hand.  A nod from Miss Judson, “Yes, Avis?”

  “He talks to himself all the time,” says Avis, to which Miss Judson barks her standard reply, “Where there’s smoke, there must be fire!”  Quick cough into white tissue, deftly tossed, writing a bad mark against his name.  Tattle-tale Avis.

  And now one day in mid-semester, Frank Hagaman appears two rows behind him, head bent over his desk, concentrating, scratching numbers on foolscap paper, puzzling fractions.  He can’t be more than twelve but seems older; short-sleeve shirt exposing bare arms fleshed out like a mature man’s, fully developed muscles, sun bronzed.  Maybe he spent last summer at the Olympic size public swimming pool near the library, but Dana’s never seen him there.  Frank’s clothes tell a story—he’s poor—knee patches on brown corduroy pants; so how could he get tanned from surfing—he certainly couldn’t afford a surf board, and getting to the beaches, not easy, maybe some forty miles away from Highland Park.

  “Walking home?” he asks, catching up to Frank coming out of class, a bright February day outside.  Frank nods, “You going down the hill?”

  “Where’d you get your tan?” Dana asks, “got mine at Hermosa beach, tan’s usually gone by this time of year.”

  “I work outdoors with my dad,” Frank says.

  He even walks like a grownup, eyes down, ignoring pepper trees, sun shimmering through their willow-green leaves and red pepper corns.

  “I turn off here,” Frank says.  “Where do you live?”

  “On Marmion way, across from the Santa Fe railroad tracks.”

  Frank crosses the street, disappearing as he reaches a curve in the road running up to the top of the hill above Avenue 50, vanishing behind eucalyptus trees.  Dana wants to go with him, find out where he lives, guzzle Pepsis out of giant bottles with him as he does with Bob Crimea.  It will never happen.  Why should Frank Hagaman want to spend time with me? but oh how he longs for it.

  He’ll never find out where Frank lives—who his parents are or where they’re from, yet hoping against hope maybe he can become part of Frank’s mysterious world somehow.

  A few weeks later the principal will choose them, because they are both good boys, to wash off graffiti of dirty words someone not so good has scrawled on the concrete wall across the street from the school—shit and fuck you, words they would never speak out loud.  This is the only real “adventure” he is to have with Frank Hagaman.

  “What are you staring at?” David Spradley is grabbing his shoulder.  No problem talking to David Spradley, tall, gangly, as pale as Frank Hagaman is bronze; although Dana will never get close to David—his parents are strict and won’t allow him to lie half-naked at the public swimming pool or on the beach, or go to movies.  Later in high school, David will invite him to pray with him and his family, kneeling in front of chairs, heads in hands loudly proclaiming themselves sinners and beseeching God and Jesus for forgiveness.  When his mother finds out, she forbids him ever to go to David’s house again.

  Forty years later, when Dana is living in West Hollywood, David will call him several times on the phone, rambling on about his unhappy school days and his parents’ restrictions.  Dana wonders if he regrets something more—a desire for a more intimate friendship with him, never realized when they were boys, but David is married and still active as “born again” Christian, as was Dana’s oldest sister who’d given him Dana’s phone number.  They will never meet in person.

  “I saw you talking to the new guy,” David says.  “Did he tell you anything about himself?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Alone in bed that night, Dana has a dream he’ll never forget, not throughout the long years of his life.  Frank Hagaman taking him by the hand; with Johnnie, Tommy, Bob Crimea, whispering conspirators, stepping off the curb at Figueroa Street and Avenue 50, snuggling into a boat no bigger than a dinghy, sliding into murky waters, Figueroa transformed into a vast ocean—together with Frank Hagaman and the gang, sailing forever around the world.

  At the time he’d never read Walt Whitman’s poetry, and wouldn’t for years to come—had never read “We Two Boys Together Clinging.”  It  would’ve described the dream perfectly.

  We two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving, up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making, power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching, arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving, no law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening .  .  .  air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or sea-beach dancing .  .  .

  To connect with the poem in later years was a remarkable thing—to link himself once again with the dream, a passion at the heart of so many of his longings—the love of comrades—Whitman’s passion.

  In the A6, Miss Holcombe’s class, no “daily good-marks” chart on the wall, is a big improvement.  Maybe when Miss Holcombe was young, she dreamt of acting on the stage, or writing poems; a not so tall, thin woman whose bones must have been forged from iron—spinster teacher who seems to have materialized from a domain peopled by wizards and trolls; nascent moustache on upper lip; in the normal course of the day, eyes, dark and intensive, but never threatening.  No left-over Miss Rickerich nightmares here!

  If Miss Holcombe’s youthful dreams had been side-tracked, not a trace of bitterness is written on her austere countenance, or ever finds expression.  She doesn’t laugh much, but sometimes a faint smile betrays her dedication.  Every week they must memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class.  No subject is forbidden.  Tommy Buchanan recites with unruly black hair foreshadowing the story he’s about to recite, his changing voice cracking with enthusiasm:

  There was an old lady and what do you think?
  She lived on nothing but vittles and drink.
  Vittles and drink were chiefly her diet.
  And still this old lady just couldn’t keep quiet.

  The old lady falls asleep on her way home from market.  A peddler, all round and stout, cuts off her clothes all round about.  When she awakens, she cries, Lordy good mercy, can this be I? If it is I as I hope it be,

I have a little dog at home and he’ll know me.
If it is I, he’ll wag his tail,
If it ain’t I, he’ll bark and wail.

Home started the old lady in the dark,
Up jumps the little dog and begins to bark.
The dog begins to bark, and she begins to cry,
Says “Lordy good mercy, can this be I?”

  Miss Holcombe offers no comment, only a smile.

  Surprising everyone, Frank Hagaman stands solidly in front of the class reciting John Masefield’s Sea Fever in quiet monotone:

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by .  .  .
I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

  Just last summer Bob Crimea has triggered a longing in him impossible to define, we two boys together clinging, down to the sea . . .  hot July afternoon, wrestling with the gang on Bob’s lawn, Bob cries out, “Let’s pants Johnnie!”  He’s overcome with a surging, glowing wrench in his groin lurching him into dark places, leading nowhere; knees melting as Johnnie’s pants are yanked off to below his knees.

  Later that night, alone in bed, Bob’s voice calls out to him, “Let’s pants Johnnie!”  Longing, desire,  wanting—what?  To belong, part of, we two boys together forever clinging.

  He’s five years old again, two boys from the eucalyptus grove stand in front of him, reaching out—play with us, touch us, hold us.  It’s  time, the moment you’ve been waiting for is here.

  Jubilant eruptions rip him forever from his childhood.

  End of August, buying clothes for school.  With his mother at the Downtown Broadway—there it is, the shirt he must have, a light blue cotton short-sleeve shirt, draw strings at the neck—Bob Crimea’s shirt!

  “Mother,” he says, hoping she won’t see him trembling, “I want this one.”

NEXT  from Stories Never Told – 2. “Yet Still a Child”