My childhood neighbourhood in North-east Houston, Texas was called Oak Forest. It sat beside some railroad tracks that ran to Katy, Texas and was near White Oak Bayou. The bayou was concrete-lined and served to drain the streets after the torrential rains and hurricanes. In the old days there were a few cows grazing off the bayou in the oaks and pines where I used to play. It was a great place to catch snakes.
It was suburbia to be sure but all suburbs begin as wild land and vestiges remain. I was born to that neighbourhood and after living many other places, I found myself back on the very same turf when I was fourteen that I had left at age three or so. One of our high schools there had a good band that played at the grad ceremonies. They were called Moving Sidewalk and are known today as Z Z Top.
I was going to grade eight and my elder sister was already in high school. My school was called Black Junior High. I shall never forget my first day. I stuck out in a crowd due to my six-month sojourn in Lynn Valley, British Columbia and my five and a half years of living in Louisiana previous to that. The school building wasn't overly impressive or large but the first thing that struck me was the ten-foot high chain-link fence surrounding the property.
The vicinity was inundated with heroin and this was done for our protection. The school also had armed personnel on campus at all times and there was a short time window wherein the gates were open for ingress and egress. At all other times we were locked in. I was on time to get in the gate and proceeded to my preassigned homeroom for roll-call. I found it with little difficulty. I took an available seat around the middle and a little toward the front to compensate my less than perfect vision.
The crowd assembled was at first glance distinguished by the vast range of ages present. Some of the pupils looked my age but many of them looked like they were somebody's parents. The ethnic mix was broader than it appeared to be on the streets outside. This reflected the large catchment area and the legislation in place at the time. It was a wild crowd to put it mildly.
There were mostly males and some were still dressed in fifties fashion sporting studded black leather jackets, Beatles boots and impossible side-burns under pomaded duck-tailed haircuts. Others had pachuco pants as if they had landed from 1930's Havana, L. A. or Miami in a time machine. A very few wore clean old jeans with clean white cotton tee-shirts and I immediately recognized the children of poor people.
After a raucous five minutes, a young teacher walked in and asked us to please stand. He called the roll and requested that we all proceed to sit in alphabetical order as our names were read. We were arranged from front to back and from left to right. I wound up in front of a fellow called Juan Juarez. The purpose of the homeroom was to be merely a method of taking attendance for the day.
Anyone missing and unaccounted for would be sought by the Truancy Officers outside in the world. A paper form was need for every absence including temporary absences from a class within the gates. The homeroom's duration was forty minutes and we were all encouraged to do any unfinished homework during this time.
After this was accomplished one tall black jacket rose from his seat. There were titters, giggles and hoots as he swaggered up to the desk at the front in his tourniquet-legged black jeans. This rock star looked to easily be a few years older than the teacher, who looked to be about twenty-four or so. Jacket sidled up, lifted up the teacher's briefcase and undid the latches while the teacher looked on with constipated anxiety.
Jacket examined the contents with the expression of a dog looking at its reflection in a pond for the first time. Then, he slowly emptied the contents in a grand arc across the desk and the teacher’s head with a Shakespearean flourish. He next cracked it in half over his knee and placed the two halves on the oak desk in a neat stack. The crowd went wild. Jacket turned for a short bow and emboldened by the applause, he reached into his jeans and pulled out a switch-blade.
With a deft click under the nose of the seated teacher, he proceeded to cut the poor young man's tie in half and placed the severed piece into the remains of the briefcase. He twirled around to an encore of applause and sauntered back to his appointed seat. The teacher gathered up his belongings and hurried off. A security officer came not long after and told us that now we would not have the privilege of a homeroom teacher. There would be roll-call though and he personally would conduct it before closing us in until the class was over.
I got to know Juan. He was thirty years old and from Monterrey, Mexico. He was married there and had a wife and two small children. He worked in Houston at night and went to school in the daytime to get his diploma and perfect his English. Friday nights he drove home with the bacon and spent time with his family. He wore clean old jeans and a clean tee-shirt. He was passionate about the Beatles’ songs and I was passionate about learning some Mexican songs.
We spent our homeroom time writing hand-written lyric sheets for each other. We had only one other class together and that was math. I wrote English lyrics for him and he wrote Spanish for me. Seven years later I sang a ribald song that Juan had taught me in grade eight. I was getting drunk somewhere in Labourd near the Pyrenees Mountains with a group of Spanish-speaking Basques. We were in an outdoor café a few miles on the French side and the waiter was a Frenchman. He was very nervous and suspicious of the rowdy Basques, fearing they might be Separatists. Given the area we were in it was not an unwarranted fear.
The group of three men had a drinking game underway when I chanced upon them. One player would sing a song at the top of his lungs and if it was deemed a worthy performance by the others, he would be rewarded in one of two ways. If the song was exceptional, the singer would be bought the next beer and if the song was épica, he would have earned the right to dispararle al camarero (shoot the waiter) with a plastic cap-gun. This usually caused the high-strung beverage server to drop a glass or two on the tiles.
I opened with El Rancho Grande and it went over well. I was clapped on the back and given a fresh tankard of ale. When my turn came again, I sang a song about Solomon that is quite too crude to translate here. A song that Juan Juarez had taught me. My rendition reduced the three Basques to tears of breathless joy and they damn near knocked the wind out of me with congratulatory slaps on the back. I was handed the plastic gun and confess now that I did made the waiter jump like a cat trying to catch a grasshopper. I can still sing that song to this day if the situation warrants it.
Back in Houston, that first day of school I eagerly headed for the cafeteria at lunchtime. The Louisiana school system had fed me the best red beans, rice, cornbread and back-fat on the planet for five years and now I was going to be treated to the best chili con carne that a man can get. I hurried into the long line. A kid who reminded me of some of the guys in my old Italian dominated neighbourhood in East Baton Rouge tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey yah, kit. You new, huh?”
“New to this school but I ain't new to this neighbourhood.”
“Lookit, this right hee is a very dangerskoo, huh?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah... Lookit, you ain gettin ouddahere live widdout prodection, huh?”
“No?”
“No. No you ain. Lookit, twenny-fie sinnaday an I kin day care of errythin fa you. Whaddaya say?”
He pulled out his switchblade and began scraping some dirt out from under his somewhat feminine thumbnail.
“No thank you.”
“Itchur funeral, kit. Change you mine, look me up, huh?”
“I'll do that.”
The chili was all I thought it would be and I miss it down to this day. I traded Juan a matchbox full of yerba buena that first week for a ten dollar switchblade. Knives were easily smuggled in. It was like the comb in your back pocket, one was simply not dressed for school without it. They were constantly being lost, stolen and traded. Any trip to Mexico was an opportunity to replenish ones arsenal.
Within a month, Juan and I started to figure out ways of escape. One was internal and one was external. I came up with the former and Juan, the latter. I had discovered a loose ceiling tile in the boy's changing room. One could shinny up the toilet stall, push this tile aside and hoist oneself up into the ceiling structure. Up there a person could travel all over the building. The walls were constructed of concrete blocks and they were made to have a two foot wide void behind in order to accommodate the pipes, wires and ducts.
Once inside the pipe-chase I could waltz around to any classroom and peer through a grate which was installed at the front centre wall just under each blackboard. I could hear every word of the teacher and class and see the entire class as well as the teachers legs from the knees down to the shoes. To prove it to Juan, I navigated one day to the math class we shared and waved a long piece of grass through the grate and tickled the teachers ankle.
The man kept slapping and scratching his legs and muttered something about having the place sprayed for ants. Only Juan knew the true cause. A few times we sat in on other classes together as intramural auditors. Juan later shared his method with me and it was a bit more complicated but gave total freedom for the entire day.
The punishment at this school was of two main types. One was to be whacked with a sturdy wooden cricket-type bat with holes drilled into it to lessen the wind resistance. The other was being made to either run laps on the cinder track in the sweltering humidity or worse, to crab-walk back and forth over the football field. It was covered in Dutch clover and thus home to millions of bees which stung you as you did your penance. On any given day there were always a few guys running laps, crab-walking with the honey gatherers and building their character. Juan and myself included among these elite.
In Juan's brilliantly conceived and possibly Steve McQueen inspired plan, you simply sneaked into the changing room between classes, donned your P. E. kit and put your jeans in a bag. At the right moment, you burst out onto the track from the changing room and commenced “doing laps.” During lap one you deposited the bag over the high fence, where the cinder track came closest to it. A few more laps limbered you up and gave you a chance to check for security, teachers or the two coaches.
If any were present, they saw nothing more than a couple of knuckleheads doing their punishment laps. When the moment was ripe, you applied the momentum of running to a leap halfway up that chain-link and then hauled-ass over the top. The hard part was getting into your jeans and avoiding the roaming Truancy Officers and HPD on your journey home. I spent most of my “spare time” at the railroad tracks and a trestle near my street.
Another friend of mine and I were training ourselves to ride the rails. It was step by step process that required much research and practical applications. Step one was getting used to walking on the ballast and then running on that same surface without stumbling. The trestle over the bayou had to be negotiated without vertigo in the dark as well as the light. We had to learn the signal of the lights in order to know what was coming through when and how fast it was travelling on any given sector.
I did the book learning and shared this with my pal. He coached me on the physical drills. Next we had to get acclimatized to huge chunks of steel whizzing by at close range. We would stand nearer and nearer to passing freights until we were completely used to the noise, vibrations, air currents and fumes. At the end of our training we could stand within inches of a passing iron horse and calmly tap the ladders with our hands as they went by in a blur.
The next stage was mounting and dismounting the ladders while running alongside. The wrong grip swings you out and the correct grip swings you into the ladder. Before I moved again to Canada we had progressed to running and jumping the cat-walks on top of the moving boxcars. We used to go on Saturday mornings to the switching yards and make coffee and stew over creosote fires. We befriended an engineer and were gifted with hiding inside the switch engines for a few miles if the coffee and stew was good enough for the old man's palate.
During these exercises I was T-Bone Slim and my partner was Mike Swaine (Swaine with an E). The engineer taught us a lot more about trains. The only girls we would hang around with at that time were girls who also liked trains and we always found a few. We never spoke about it but Swaine and I knew that all this training was leading up to a great escape someday.
My day came first. It was a Sunday and I had had enough of everything and everyone. I took a rucksack and my ten speed bike and rode to the tracks. I waited for the whistle I knew would come and threw my bike into an open boxcar and then joined it. The train kept fairly slow until it got past the grade crossings and started out of town. I listened to the diesels and knew that they would pulse up to about seventy miles an hour soon.
I processed scenarios of obtaining new ID, enrolling myself in school, getting a job, obtaining lodgings and such practicalities. At the last possible moment, I flung my Raleigh out of the boxcar into some tall grass and then followed it. I realized as I rode home that I was just too damn practical for my own good. It wasn't time yet. It was getting close though.
On another Sunday I was sitting on the rails near the street crossing not far from the trestle. In front of me was the back wall of a strip-mall. The buildings were constructed of hollow block concrete painted with thick white enamel paint and there were some garbage bins and a few rusty cars for decoration. I was practising rolling Bull Durham tobacco and smoking it without coughing too much.
I saw a guy dressed all in white come around from the front of the buildings. The only thing he had on that wasn't white were his boots. He looked like a baker or a cook except that he carried a ten pound long-handled sledge hammer. As I watched, he began to swing into the back wall. Against he pearly walls all you could see was his black hair, his dusty boots and the hammer.
In about ten minutes he had a man-sized hole drifted into the blocks. He disappeared inside and emerged about two minutes later with a big white sack and headed straight for me. He sat down on the rail beside me and suggested that we move a bit closer to the trestle under cover of the oaks. We did. I let him roll a Bull Durham.
He showed me his loot. Cigarettes and prescription drugs. He was a Chicano and about twenty years old. He was between stints in the Texas Prison System at that time and he gave me the best lecture I have heard to date about not stealing and the horrors of going to jail. He specifically emphasized the ghastly quality of the coffee, while praising the chili con carne. I told him it was the same at my school and he laughed. After a smoke he went over the trestle and I went home.
We moved a mile or so away to an apartment complex. It was owned by the Consulado de Costa Rica and was managed by my mother. There were three hundred units, three swimming pools and three laundromats. There was also a nightclub on premises. The building complex was named after the owner’s daughter, Princesa. I entertained the Consulate's three sons when they were in town for their annual school holidays and they were planning to have me visit San José one Summer.
My father came into the living room one Saturday soon after we moved into the new place. My elder sister and I were laying on the floor watching TV.
“You and you. Itchy and Scratchy, get your asses off the floor, out the fuckin' door and don't come home until you both have jobs.”
We knew he meant it and went out immediately. I remember being shocked at the time and somewhat concerned. When I look back now, I cannot imagine why. My sister and I had been employed since as long as I could remember. Our typical Saturdays were spent detailing cars, keeping lawns, gardens, washing down algae covered patios, grooming chow-chows and spit polishing twenty pairs of dress shoes. Our beds were made up military style and our barracks were kept ship-shape. All work was inspected and redone if deemed unworthy.
We both were employed by our father at his workplace as well. I worked cleaning three Lindal Cedar display houses and whatever outdoor work needed doing at the site. My sister worked inside doing clerical chores. It was there that I learned to mop, vacuum, clean windows, scrub toilets, sinks and to polish furniture. I got fifty cents an hour and my sister received seventy-five.
I was stacking some old lumber outside in the tall St. Augustine grass and sauna-like heat one weekend. My sister was stuffing envelopes and licking stamps inside. I was tasked with moving some two by fours from one location to another. When I got down to the last few boards, a fat copperhead snake I had startled by removing its cover, struck and landed its poisonous fangs onto the board right between my hands. The snake got a whiplash, slithered away and I got a donkey-load of ice-fire adrenaline.
I stormed into the cool air-conditioning, across the shag carpet and up to my father.
“Why in the precious hell,” I ranted, pointing at my sister at her desk, “am I out in the goddamned sun dodging snakes for fifty stinking cents and she's in the air-conditioning at a desk and getting seventy-five to lick stamps?”
My father calmly looked up from the retired couple he was pitching and calmly said, “You're fired. Go wait in the car.”
Even with those experiences behind me, I remember having much angst that day when we “had to get jobs.” We both started off in the direction of a nearby mall and soon split up. I was fourteen and my sister was sixteen. I went through the mall store by store and approached anyone who looked official enough to ask for employment. I exhausted the entire mall and found myself disconsolate on the pavement outside. It was getting dark and all I could see was some tire shops, car lots and a few restaurants down the street.
I went from place to place like a sad bumble-bee barely able to fly. It became truly dark and I became hungry for my supper and equally desperate. There was a small restaurant left on the street that I had been canvassing. I decided to really try to be convincing. The place was called El Patio.
I went in the door and was greeted by a tall soft-spoken black man. I told him my predicament with much emotion.
“We don't really have anything for you.”
“Mister, I can't go home without a job. My father doesn't joke.”
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Hmnn.”
He went over to a booth and leaned in to the ear of a man sitting there. A big Mexican guy in a fancy suit. There were three pretty young senoritas sitting with him. The man was about my father's age. The gals were much younger. They all looked at me and smiled like angels.
The black man came back and said, “I'm Peter. That man owns this place. He said you can start tonight as a busboy. Do you have any black pants?”
“Yes, Sir!”
“Good. Wear some black pants, a white shirt and some black shoes and come back here at seven o clock.”
“Yes, Sir. Thank you a lot!”
I ran home and scoured the neighbourhood for the clothing items which I did not actually possess. My sister was back and had scored a job at a drugstore in the mall. I returned to El Patio at seven and was trained by Peter. I worked there for a long time. The food was excellent and free. I was so happy, I whistled all the time. They even had a guitar player to serenade the diners. All of the staff save Peter, me and the bartender were illegal aliens. They called me Palomito. It meant 'little dove' and was chosen on account of my constant whistling. I was also the early warning for the Immigration Officer raids. I would give a special whistle and we would all disappear down the back alley until the coast was clear.
I finished up at night after good folks were long asleep. On the way home I would pass by the propped open back door of a strip club and watch the dance of the seven veils until being chased away by their own kitchen staff. My next stops were the three laundromats in my apartment complex. I went through all the washing machines and using an Allen key, removed all the agitators to scoop the change that had fallen out of peoples clothes. It took a while but it was a good warm-down from work and also very lucrative.
My pay at the Patio was fifty cents an hour like the pay from my father and when ever I needed, I simply approached the owner and his ladies at their regular booth and stated my hours to date. There was no paperwork due to my being under-age. The man would peel some bills off a big wad he carried in his trouser pocket and sometimes I got a tip. I kept my money in a Quaker Oats can and cashed the laundry coins in regularly to add to my stash.
I was saving up for a Yamaha motorcycle. I never counted the money except once when my grandmother was over visiting. In time I got another job at a Foodland grocery store bagging groceries and carrying them to cars. I mopped and stocked shelves and arranged the produce. The food was also free and there were tips. All my compañeros at this job were Chicanos. We all eventually carried blades and none of us would hurt a fly unless the fly started it.
One day the owner of the apartment complex, his wife, sons and precious daughter came over to our place for the little girl's birthday dinner. It was at that party that he offered to have me spend my summer vacation in his country as his guest. I was thrilled and wanted to impress them all with my command of present tense Mexican Spanish garnered from Juan Juarez, the workers at El Patio, Foodland and a local Houston TV show called Cita Con Carlos.
When the dinner was over and we were being served the birthday cake, I decided to make my move. I was a bit nervous and also very excited in anticipation of my tropical summer only months away. I turned to the beautiful little Princesa and asked in perfect Spanish if she liked her poop. The error was due to my not knowing the term for “cake” and trying to improvise by hispanizing the pronunciation of the English word.
Princesa turned deep red and looked as if she would cry while her three elder brothers spewed mouthfuls of cake across our table. The girl's mother gasped and put her hands on the sides of her head with her mouth ajar. The Consulate's deep rolling laugh was the only thing that kept me from melting into the upholstery. I recovered quickly due to his display of la nobleza obliga and I began at once to apologize in Spanish to all those assembled.
Wanting to set the poor child at ease I looked at the little Princesa and apologized again directly to her, but made the same type of error caused by a combination of being determined to show my willingness to attempt conversation in a foreign language and my very limited vocabulary.
Thus, I said in a gravely humiliated voice, “Lo siento mucho y estoy muy, muy embarazada.”
This proved to be flawless Spanish for, “I am very sorry and very, very pregnant.”
Princesa looked down at her plate and withdrew into her chair. Now both her father and mother spewed cake. When the Consulado recovered from a heinous bout of wracking belly laughs, wiped his tears and squeezed his wife's hand; he made me swear to come visit them soon at their home in Costa Rica. My fate however, was to contract mononucleosis the very last day of school and thus become bed-ridden for that entire Summer. There is a perfect balance in the universe and she is fluent in all tongues.
One day my father came into my room and asked me how much I had saved up in my oatmeal can. I took out the cash and counted out six hundred 1970s US dollars. He told me that we were moving to Canada again and that he needed to borrow it for our travel expenses. He asked me what I was saving it for. I told him a Yellow Yamaha 90 CC motorcycle. He said he'd buy me one after we got settled up North.
At the Motor Vehicle License Office in North Vancouver, I handed them my Texas Drivers License and gave them my new address. Expecting to be handed an interim paper license, shudders went through me as I watched a lady pop my license into a shredder. She told me that the legal age in British Columbia was different than in Texas and that I would just have to wait. I thought of a few Spanish words I had learned at El Patio but refrained from pronouncing them.
My lump sum was never recovered from my father. I got ten or twenty dollars sporadically over a few months, then nothing. I attempted to recoup the balance by chipping tiny bits off of a big block of Black Afghani hash I’d found hidden inside a cedar box I had made him for Father’s Day. Even today from the vantage of being a dozen years older than my father was when he died, I often recall a line from Shakespeare that he was fond of quoting while I was growing up.
“Never a borrower or lender be, for both ofttimes dull the edge of husbandry.”
I have two sons and the eldest is now older than I was when he was born. I raised them with the realization that children don't learn from what their parent's say but rather from what they do.
Muchas gracias, Papi y recuerdas tu, "You are a prisoner of everything you own."
fin