Today's Fredometer Reading

Crumbling Thoroughfares

2013-04-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

I have harped on this before, but it is astonishing to me how poorly the street maintenance and sidewalk conditions are kept in the City of Los Angeles. And by this, I don’t mean, within the other smaller incorporated cities such as Burbank, Glendale, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Manhattan Beach and the like, but rather in all of those cities that have those designated names such as Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, McCarthy Circle, North Hollywood where they are actually a part of the City of Los Angeles.

It is clear that the city of LA doesn’t have the funds to keep up with the needed repairs, but how did this occur? I was visiting my mother at Ronald Reagan Hospital not long ago, and I parked in that area of Westwood just west of Gayley, but east of Veteran, and to see the war zone-like condition of the sidewalks was just appalling.

I know the city has more important issues to get over, such as how much of that Christopher Dornan reward money will be paid out. But for a city that is so much in the public eye to shirk it’s responsibility to keep it’s streets and sidewalks safe and passible is I think a bit shameful. And while I realize I could offend a lot of people who do currently live in the City of LA, I would hope that any feelings like that would be turned into trying to push the city council to get on the ball with these types of things.

I showed a house today in Valley Village on a street called Van Noord, which is just west of Coldwater Canyon and in the block north of Moorpark Street, a very nice neighborhood, and as I was waiting for my clients to arrive, I suddenly realized how uneven the concrete was that I was standing on. This is but just one element of why I have chosen to live in smaller incorporated cities in the southland for the past twenty years. Any of these neglected characteristics and services within a city generally indicates deeper flaws in how the city government and resources are run. One generally doesn’t see these problems sitting idly in cities such as Burbank and Manhattan Beach. They are run well, are responsive to calls, and are not overwhelmed by their own sheer size.

It takes a while to realize this I think, especially for newcomers to the city. I always wonder how if I moved to another town such as Sante Fe, Portland, or Austin, how long would it take for me to digest these types of nuances within a particular city. And as for my own insight and understanding of the City of Los Angeles, well, chalk that up to being a native I suppose. I spent the first five years of my life in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.

Gray Skies to Blue

2013-03-25T16:24:00.004-07:00

A native Californian friend of mine who was working in Munich, Germany back in about 1989, and who described the skies there as a perpetual kilometer-think cover of grey clouds, wrote me in a letter at that time with a section that said, "Oh, how I pine for the warmth of the Southern California sun!" It made me laugh to myself, not only because it was a little overly poetic, but also because I was living in an ocean front apartment in the old Sea Castle on the Santa Monica boardwalk just south if the Santa Monica Pier for $480/mo and had access to exactly what he was desiring. After reading his letter, I immediately went out barefoot onto the warm sand and played around on those gymnastic rings by the pier under blue skies!

Pizza Size

2013-01-31T14:33:00.001-08:00

Strange thing, the pizza size issue. A lot of the pizza places don't measure their pizzas the way you'd think they would.

This is what happens often when you decide you would like a pizza.

Ring ring…

                      Pizza Guy
Main Street Pizza. How can I help you?

                          You
Yeah, I’d like to order something to pick up.

                      Pizza Guy
What would you like?

                           You
How ‘bout a large pizza. How much would that be with three toppings?

                      Pizza Guy
Thin crust or thick crust?

                            You
Hand-tossed.

                       Pizza Guy
That would be $18.67.

                             You
How about an extra-large?

                       Pizza Guy
Then it’d be….$20.49

                              You
How big is the large and how big is the extra large?

                        Pizza Guy
The large is eight slices, and the extra large is twelve.

                               You
But how big is it? Not how many slices. How many inches?

                         Pizza Guy
We don’t really go by inches. It’s eight or twelve slices.

                                You
Yeah, but you could slice a pizza up into a million pieces, and it doesn’t mean anything.

                         Pizza Guy
Well, yeah, I now. But we go by slices. I mean, probably about twelve inches or something.

Maybe you don’t go this far in your pizza conversations, but I have. If you think about it, it really is meaningless to talk about numbers of slices. I suppose of a soccer mom is trying to feed eleven kids after a game, she might be satisfied by such an answer, and I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over the subject. But one has to wonder how and when the general public became satisfied with a “slices” answer as opposed to an “inches” answers. Most people are obviously are fine with it because the pizza places seldom get the inches question. They always seem a little befuddled when I ask them.

The, “I Really Couldn’t Say at the Time,” Factor

2013-01-16T16:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve noticed something that has probably been going on for a while, but was driven home to me as I was watching a few events that have happened in the news. I’m calling it the, “I Really Couldn’t Say at the Time” factor.

I found myself watching “Dateline,” not long ago with a segment about a woman named, Sarah Jones, who had at one time been a cheerleader for the Cincinnati Bengals. She later became a teacher in a high school, where she met a seventeen year-old student, who she began a sexual relationship with.

The county prosecutor got wind of the sexual relationship and began an investigation that lead to charges of statutory rape and culminated in her conviction. The aspect that really got my attention was that during Dateline’s ongoing interviews of her before the trail, she continually swore that nothing inappropriate ever went on. That was, until she later admitted that she had been having sex with the student. When Dateline asked her, “Why did you so strongly deny that anything had gone on right in front of our cameras?” She said something to the effect of, “Because there was an ongoing case in progress. I just couldn’t say I had done it when I was pleading, ‘not guilty.’”

And then we have Lance Armstrong. Did you see him on CNN shows such as Piers Morgan towards the end of 2012, vehemently (CNN.com’s word) denying any nefarious doping activities? He seemed to have gone on a number of television shows, under the guise of promoting his cancer organization’s work, to deny any doping of blood transfusion experiences. And now he’s admitted it to Oprah.

Now, I know this seems obvious; that when someone is in trouble, their attorney is often going to tell them not to admit that they have done wrongly in many cases. But when someone chooses to do open interviews with the media and so adamantly declares that they are innocent, well, you’d think that this kind of behavior is reserved for those who are truly innocent. You would think it’s the guy who was put in jail and really wasn’t responsible for a crime who would try to get his word out to the media as a sort of hail-Mary to get some attention brought to his situation.

And inversely, one would think that the person who really did commit a crime, and has been advised by their attorneys to claim, ‘not guilty,’ would keep a bit of a low profile. But this may be a growing trend. To flat out lie to whatever-million people on television. It’s so disappointing that Lance Armstrong and others would take it that far and would deny for that long, just to see if they could get away with it.

Stereophonic Sound

2013-01-06T17:52:00.002-08:00

Since we went through the Holidays recently, I was thinking about when I was younger and we would have Christmas and Hanukkah in our house and about the gifts that would be sitting there around the tree.

And what were the most impacting gifts for me? Hmmm. I think they were the gifts that afforded me some kind of new freedom. The first one that comes to mind was when I was about fourteen and there was a yellow Raleigh ten-speed bike waiting for me in the morning. It was exactly what I had wanted at that age, and it looked so huge and adult.

Imagine back then too, that there were no helmets required for riders of my age. How did my parents shore up for themselves both the fun of giving me a present like that, which overjoyed me, with the worry that it could be so dangerous if used improperly, not to mention all of the mindless drivers around the city.

But I suppose that is all part of parenting.

I thought on it further. What other present made such a change in my life, and then I remembered. When I was about thirteen, my parents bought a stereo-receiver and speakers for me. It too was something I had wanted, but I couldn’t have imagined the change it would make.

When I set it up in my bedroom and turned it onto either KMET or KLOS, the two big rock music stations in L.A. at the time, suddenly the room was filled with high fidelity sound. The space was transformed from a dull area of objects and posters to a warm nest bustling with music, D.J’s and advertisements. A new world had opened up in my room.

I remember having a similar experience later after I bought my first car, a dark blue 1973 Chevrolet Camaro with a chrome shark grill. I had saved just enough to purchase the smooth looking ride, but didn’t have money left over for a radio. And gas at seventy-five cents per gallon was SOOO expensive! Oh, how I wish…

But after maybe about two months, I saved enough working at Hughes Market as a box boy to finally install a stereo into the car. And again, there it was. That amazing flourishing of sound in that space that had been until then so dead with the drone of a shifting transmission.

I take it for granted now. Having music fill whatever space I am in when I so desire. But it was such a great change at the time.

What It's Not

2012-11-12T10:16:00.001-08:00

-This is not a poem about when you break an Oreo cookie in half, and part of it is still stuck on the white and you have to pull it off with your teeth.
-This is not a poem about how a shoelace starts to tatter at its most anchored points.
-This is not a poem about the cold and wet the underside of a rock is, nor the feeling that there might be something that could bite or sting you living creepily underneath.
-This is not a poem about why your seatbelt occasionally doesn’t recoil to fit your body’s contour, and so you have to tug on it to get its attention.
-This is not a poem as to why the word “its” without a comma is actually the possessive form of the word.
-This is not a poem about why every time you finally sit down at the end of the day to have dinner, the phone rings.
-This is not a poem about how you end up manually going to the same website often, yet you fail to simply bookmark it for yourself.
-This is not a poem about already being in the shower and realizing that you didn’t bring the new bottle of shampoo with you.
-This is not a poem about cleverly marking your place in a book, and then spending three minutes looking for your marker when you reopen the book.
-This is not a poem about what kind of crazy maze of sewer systems exists under the streets that you drive every day.
-This is not a poem about walking past a place you used to work early in your career, and it’s now a completely unrecognizable entity such as a condo.
-This is not a poem about how 92% of the items stuck to your refrigerator door are notes and numbers, which are irrelevant.
-This is not a poem about the difficulty of getting the correct mixture of milk to cereal.
-This is not a poem about how there are about three pieces of clothing you own which are the most comfortable to wear casually.
-This is not a poem about how each elevator should have their call buttons distributed at a radius far enough away from the doors so that you can press them on your way and not have to wait standing there.
-This is not a poem about how you have realized that two or three times earlier in your life you thought of an idea that someone else has since made millions on.
-This is not a poem about how when you are flying back home from a trip and are approaching your home city, you think to yourself, “Wow, I live most of my life in this tiny little section of the Earth.”
-This is not a poem about really knowing the number of miles you can probably get out of when your car’s gasoline indicator is hovering over the empty line.
-This is not a poem about the variations and clusterings of common boys’ and girls’ birth names tracked over decades.
-This is not a poem about how high over sea level you actually are at any point when you are inland, and if there were a cliff right next to you showing your actual height over the ocean’s surface, it would freak you out.
-This is not a poem about life and the universe as we still aren’t able to comprehend.

For, this is not a poem at all. It is about nothing and the undefinable. That which goes on forever with no boundaries, but at the same time, doesn't exist.

Lactal Inebriation

2012-08-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

As an eleven year-old, I tended to get obsessed with music now and then. During the time when the Abba song, "Fernando," was popular, I used to sit at the desk in my room at about nine o'clock at night, playing a plastic little bronze mechanical poker toy thing I had, and I’d keep vigil with my AM desk radio on waiting for Fernando to be played. Something particularly about this song fed my melancholy thirst. I think it was wintertime and the nights were long, and I was wistful about everything in my life right then.

Part of the tradition for that short period was sitting in my white robe and having a gallon of milk parked there in front of me on the desk; the whole plastic carton. I would chug and chug it until finally I would have to put my head down on the desk due to an expanded stomach. It was akin to getting stone drunk, but on milk.

Fernando would eventually come on the radio during my malaise, which I would end up hearing through a partially milk-induced sleep, head still cemented to my desk.

What exactly was going on there, I just have no idea.

Lower Passages

2012-08-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

Just a few months ago, like a fog that clears and reveals a place and a time, I suddenly recalled that as a child, I used to use to explore a set of underground easements and tunnels from a passage in my old house.

It sounds strange, I know.

At the age of eight, my parents and I moved into a large old house in a semi-suburban, semi-rural area of northeastern California, which was built where there had been gold-rush industry many years earlier. One could see while driving around the town that there were skeletons of rusted mining apparatus and earth-sifting equipment built into the hillsides and sprinkled throughout the small city. We lived there for about three years.

My parents weren’t around much, and I was raised as an only child. They worked a lot and then spent most of their free time socializing with friends of theirs. This was a town where there wasn’t a whole lot for a kid to do other than to explore around and make his or her own playground out of whatever was available in this wooded and hilly area. Our old house was built on slab, rather than on foundation, and one of the features of the large home was that in one of the dens, the most remote of the two, was a set of what appeared to be built-in book cases on either side of a mason fireplace. They were innocent looking enough, just holding old accounting and finance reference books.

However, the bookcase to the left of the fireplace was actually a door built with a long, vertical hinge on one side, which could be swung open smoothly to reveal a somewhat roomy wet-bar. This was comprised of a sink, mirrors, and shelves of cleaned glasses of all sorts, full wine racks and other assorted drinks. The space was large enough to fit three adults cozily, who could sit down in tall barstool chairs with high wooden backs and cast off another day’s work with a good liqueur and a smoke.

What I discovered sometime soon after moving in there was that one of the lower wall panels, and a piece of an adjacent floor panel in the back of the wet-bar, lifted up and out. I remember showing this to my father once, who passed it off as part of an aging house and as a section that was possibly needed at some time in the past to access plumbing for the bar. The next time that my parents were gone, I lifted the pieces out, and with a flashlight, I lit up the hole and found that there was a shallow passage under the level of the house slab that was wide enough for an eight-year old boy to squeeze into.

I don’t think I entered during that first viewing, but rather ruminated on whether it was worth further exploration. The concept of a vacuous nothingness just tens of feet from my bedroom arrested my thoughts for probably two or three nights laying in bed. But sometime during that same week when I had the house to myself, I went back.

Opening up the wood panels and shining the flashlight in again, I summoned up the nerve to squeeze into the hole in our bar floor and wall and then crawl down into to the cool and musty space. I crouched silently for a minute, whipping the beam of my light in either direction. What I found was that the space was not wide or long at all. I was sitting in what was more like a cement box. But to one side of this cube on the floor was a slat. I peered over and saw that I could slide myself lengthways over the ledge to yet another level below, the floor and walls of which were all dirt.

Now I was in some sort of actual underground passage that looked like it had been hand-carved into a natural rift in under the ground to make it wide enough for a person to fit through. There were two directions to go, but one looked more inviting than the other, being that it headed at more of a downhill slope. The other direction had a tight corner to it and then a bottleneck, but proceeded on after that. But I wasn’t sure if I could fit through it.

I headed down the easier side, mostly crawling with my elbows an occasionally goose-stepping. I almost always wore Toughskins blue jeans, which were jeans, made for kids who played hard in the mid 1970’s. They had pre-ironed on knee patches that could withstand a lot of friction and scuffling about. There was no doubt that I would get dirty down there, and I knew it, but I could explain this all away to my parents should they later catch me laden with mud and grime that I had just been playing in the nearby hills. They wouldn’t know the difference.

I crawled for what I figure now to be about hundred-fifty feet through this slightly descending tunnel, when I came to a turn to the left, and then it dropped off like a shelf to an open earthen cavern. Below the drop off was a wooden ladder fastened into the earth that was about twenty feet down. After testing the ladder to see if it was secure, I attached a string that was part of the end of the flashlight to my belt loop and let it hang down to illuminate my way down the ladder.

The light swung with each movement I made casting ghoulish shadows onto the side of the cavern walls, magnified and complicated by the flashlight’s swaying back and forth near the rungs of the wooden ladder. It was cold down there. A curious eight-year old is either scared or not scared. Further thought into what and why all of this was didn’t enter much into my young mind. I wasn’t scared. It was there for me to explore, and that’s all that mattered.

The bottom of the ladder reached a thin dirt ledge that was met with a sloping slab of concrete leading down away from the ladder. The concrete was the width of the whole cavern on the side that I was on, and it ended at the dirt walls about thirty feet on each side of where I was. So the only direction I could go was down the concrete. It was at about a 45 degree angle, and course in texture, which made for an easy surface to squat my way down, and I knew, a not very difficult way to get back up. I was all legs in those says from being a boy who continuously ran and climbed in the hills.

I untied my flashlight from my belt loop and shined it along the whole cavern, up, down, and each corner where the earthen walls met. Even I at that age could tell that wasn’t just a coincidental meeting of natural openings underground. This was large enough that it was definitely human excavated.

There were three or four tunnels that led out of this cavern. From one of them, I could hear something like the sound of machinery coming from that direction. I walked slowly into that tunnel opening, which quickly opened into a room that had burnt out old-style light bulbs recessed into the top of the earthen ceiling.

To the right of the room was a large metal cabinet; one that might house electrical or generator equipment. The cabinet hummed with a steady mechanical sound, and occasionally seemed to change gears, as if it was running equipment that was either lifting, like an elevator, or was changing due to torque requirements. I stood there and just looked at it, expecting it to stop, or to somehow give an answer about its purpose. But it did nothing different. It simply kept at its work uninterruptedly.

As an adult, considering how far I crawled and climbed, I’d have to say that at this point I was about fifty, to sixty feet below ground level. And yet, to me, this was neat, wondrous, and convenient. It did not seem completely strange and perplexing, as it should have. It would become an ordinary, yet private part of my life, and that may be why I had forgotten about it for so many years after we moved away.

To the opposite side of the machinery, going left in this tunnel was yet another room. It was connected by another opening and was recessed by only a few feet from the room with the machinery. I could see cement foundations of things that had once been affixed to the floor of this room among the earthen floor. What came to my mind back then were things like lathes, cutters and such. The cement foundations were no wider than four or five-foot wide squares, and they seemed to have steel stumps, which has been sheered off at the surface of the cement indicating that, more than likely, machinery with legs had once been attached to these cement foundations.

Thinking about it now, I realize that I never found any signs of other people recently in these areas. I didn’t look for this fact as a child, but remembering how these tunnels and rooms looked, there were no abandoned sleeping bags, trash or evidence of partying, as one might find in easily accessible abandons sites. So, I have to think that it was completely unknown to most people. I suppose the exception would have been for whoever maintained the machinery in the previous room. That is, if it was maintained at all, and not some forgotten system that had never been turned off.

There was only one time that I thought I heard someone in these passages. It was one of my solo visit, and it had been when I had taken one of many other tunnels that I found along the way, most of which seemed to loop around in a way that I could not understand an could lose my bearings in. I never got to the bottom of whether someone else was actually down there or not during that visit. But it spooked me badly, and I believe that most often after that, I brought a friend along with me.

From this recessed room, I found a vertical tunnel that lead down, as a manhole would, to yet another lower level. This hole had a steel encased at the top with metal rungs that protruded out from one side. After testing these rungs, which proved to be secure, I climbed down the hole and found that it turned into a horizontal tunnel after about fifteen feet, and then lengthened high enough for me to walk through without crouching at all.

From my vantage point, I could hear the faint sounds of water, like a small, babbling brook underground. It seemed to come from an adjacent tunnel in this section that appeared too small for me to fit through, and which in my three years worth of visits, I was never able to locate the source of. But the sound of what I liked to think was a brook brought a calmness to my wanderings down there. It made me feel as if I was not that far from normal things.

I walked for several minutes. It was the longest section up to this point. I’m sure now that I walked between an eighth and a quarter of a mile; probably about a thousand feet. The tunnel made small variations in direction, but was mostly straight, and very dark, but lit thanks to my flashlight. In all of my times down there, I knew to keep fresh batteries in my flashlight, but I never really thought about how well I could have found my way back if my flashlight had completely failed for some reason.

I came upon some sort of break in the dirt ceiling of this tunnel, where a metal beam, like one that would hold high-tension power-lines, stabbed through the right side of the tunnel, as if the tunnel was inadvertently dug towards this beam, or that the metal beam at some point pounded through the tunnel. There was a very faint light up next to the beam, and I could tell it eventually lead up to daylight. Somehow the earth around the beam was jiggled loose making a little bit of light slightly penetrable at my depth. But, now, looking back and understanding a little better about the topography around those parts, I have to assume that in the great distance I had walked, I was then in an area where the hills had sloped slightly down above me, reducing my actual depth under the surface. That would explain better the little hint of daylight I could see. But the only direction possible for me was forward.

I walked another probably 300 feet, when the tunnel took a sharp turn to the left. When I made the turn, I could see some metal housing ahead of me. I had to climb over a large slab of rock that looked like it had slipped from its natural place in the side of the tunnel and which blocked my way. From there, I was able to get to the metal room. When I arrived inside it, the area looked like some sort of observation perch or control room. There were intercoms, metal controls on a panel board with three seats bolted to the floor, and what had been windows in front of the panel board. But upon looking out of the direction of the windows, there was nothing. It was all welded shut with light green and pale yellow steel. The most I could do was to climb a set of stairs that left this room, like a ship’s tight staircase, which led to yet another enclosed metal room, with even less hint of what it once was. This point tended to be me and my friends' destinations when we went down there during successive visits.

In one freakishly strange occurrence, I woke up one late night in the first part of the tunnel system nearest our bar opening, having sleep-walked, or sleep-crawled into it and then going back to sleep on a mat that I had bought down there at some point. I never disclosed this to my parents because of how seriously dangerous it could have been had I gone a little farther to the ladder area. I thought I had been found out when the next morning, my father told me that I had slept walked. Without my saying anything, he continued on with the story that at about 9:30pm, which was earlier on that same evening, I had wandered into our kitchen in my pajamas, lifted my shirt to him to expose my belly, and proclaimed to him that I had holes in my stomach. I had sent me on my way back to bed. Apparently, that night I had experienced a propensity for sleep-walking, something that has never again occurred since that strange night.

When I think about where our house was, and about what direction I was probably going while underground, I can make a good guess of where I ended up each time I took these passages. Our home is no longer there. In its place now sits an area gym and small corner mall. But, within a mile of our house was a very large industrial complex, which even to this day is still owned by a private company. It has always been inaccessible to the public. The complex sits in the nearby lower hills, which descend from our old neighborhood. An Internet map of it shows that it is not a working site anymore, but is rather grown over by trees and shrubbery. But I suspect that at one time it contained a large quarry or two. It would explain rooms that are now underground, but which at the time needed observation of the excavated area below it. Why any of that connected to our old house in such a circuitous and almost impenetrable way is still a complete mystery to me. I drove back to the area just a two months ago and ask people if they knew of anything like this. A couple of the long time residents said that they had heard of similar stories of underground passages, but they couldn’t give me any definite answers about them.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this account, there were selected friends of my age that I used to bring down there with me; really just two that I remember. They were close friends, and probably as luck would have it, were as afraid of what their parents might prohibit them from doing during their spare time as I was of mine. So they never said anything of this to their parents either. The friend who I used to take down there most often was named Gary. He was slightly smaller than I, and I think admired my confidence and adventurous nature. So I found it easy to explore the tunnels with him and he followed me without question. I trusted him. It was a way of my feeling like I had command of the navigation of these tunnels, and yet at the same time, I didn’t feel all-alone down there. I’ve never seen Gary since we moved away from that little town and I don’t even remember his last name. The other friend that I brought down there once or twice, unfortunately died later in life when he was about 35 years old, so the passages are not a memory that I am able to share with anyone who experienced them with me. I wonder if Gary is still around, and what he remembers of this; if it’s a lost or vague memory of his now, and how impacting versus coincidental those explorations were to him.

When I remembered all of this recently, the most powerful feeling I recall is that of having mastered something. I conquered the unknown and developed an internal map of this hidden underground. In my account here, I haven’t bothered describing all of the pathways that led into areas that I never fully explored, partially because they were so off of the main route that I had worked out, as it were. But there were many of them. So part of the confidence that I felt was from the idea that I could leave the confines of my parents house and navigate these passages in a world familiar to only me; a world that few others even knew existed. It used to give me a sense of self-identity and pride. And just as the purpose of the passages still remains a mystery, I am also at a loss to explain how I had forgotten about them for all of these years.

Aurora, Colorado Theater Shooting

2012-07-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

One of the issues that will invariably come up from the Colorado massacre is how to recognize the signs of someone who is very troubled and would act on their troubles. It is very difficult because there are so many anti-social loners and depressed individuals in our society. I used to work in group homes and psychiatric hospitals, and I saw the gambit of mental and social disorders, including a lot of borderline personalities, which can seem very aggressive and anti-social on their surface. The question is how would someone like the shooter in the Colorado event both be recognized before hand, and then how would action by health care workers or law enforcement actually be taken in a preventive way? Picking someone out and acting on signs could potentially be a violation of individual rights. I'm fine with just about anything that could potentially save lives that would be done in a legal way. But how do you do this without misidentifying a lot of people who don't really pose a societal threat? It is a very tricky issue once you drill down.

The Expression of the Diddles

2012-06-22T15:33:00.004-07:00

Diddles are all around, but very small, on the order of the follicles of a peach’s fuzz. They often borough themselves on the stems of leaves, in paint cracks in doorways, getting uprooted and re-settling wherever they must after being blown around by a moderate wind.

They are observant creatures, watching with the exhausted and bewildered expressions that remind one of Fred Armisen’s impression of Penny Marshall on Saturday Night Live. However, they are not non-thinking beings. They take in their surroundings and communicate their experiences on small instruments made of twisted and braded dust particles, called Deedles, over which they draw their legs the way a cricket does to make his chirping sounds. The vibrations produced from the Diddles’ Deedles constitute their music, or Doddles.

It has been noted that rather than simply playing what they see, they build their music based on past experiences interwoven with current perceptions. So in this way, the Diddle’s music is a sort of oral history of their species. Deciphering the Doddles has not been an easy task.

Researches endured painstakingly long hours of rigging up the most sensitive of recording equipment to archive the musical communications of the Diddles. The sounds are so minute and are of such a high-frequency pitch that an enormous amount of post-recording work has been needed to extract the musical sounds from unwanted background noise.

By seeing what the Diddles saw, and reviewing the recordings of their music, these researchers were able to begin to build a vocabulary of their communications, a sort of encyclopedia of the musical motifs which made up groups of common communications. Working backwards then, the scientists have been able to build a historical knowledge base of the Diddle’s past. Not all is yet understood since this is an on-going project.

But a mosaic from their Doddles has indicated that they are a species that first came into existence from a scientific experiment at a university gone awry. The knowledge base of the Diddles’ Doddles and old hymns seem to all point to a “great escape” from a laboratory setting, probably only a few years ago. Their descriptions allude to a sudden “big bang” in a sterile white clinical setting that begin an exodus of their species out into a much larger world. This would likely indicate that some sort of scientific test of fungi or other minute life form had gotten out of it’s containment due to human error.

The amount of time estimated for their existence as being “a few years” was roughly calculated by unweaving their historical hymns and comparing them to their current music. Using the backwards trajectory of the Diddle’s rate of increased vocabulary in their Doddles over time pointed to a somewhat focused span of time at which their doddles began. This indicates rough idea of when they became a conscious group entity. From a petri dish culture of likely just a few hundred thousand, today’s estimations of Diddles playing their Deedles is around 80 billion strong.

And why the overwhelmed, Penny Marshall type gaze in most of their faces? This is still unclear, but the researchers think that it is a species reaction to all that the world is. One has to remember that the Diddles, though not created in the petri dishes, were harvested there first and therefore probably gained their group consciousness in this quiet setting. Upon their escape from the laboratory, the unexpected slammed into every one of the Diddle’s faces. The loud, changing light, changing colors, dirty busy outside world. Their shock-ridden faces may simply be their inability to completely ever digest the world in which they now live.

Thirty-Seven Years Later

2012-05-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how many times in the past few decades I’ve found myself showing someone where I lived in the Hollywood Hills and have knocked at the front gate to see if anyone was home only to be answered by silence. But just the other day on my way back from seeing my mother at her assisted living home, I decided, instead of driving back either of two routes I always use, I would drive up Laurel Canyon and give it another try. It was about heading towards 6:00pm, and maybe at this time of day, someone would be home.

So up the long haul of narrow roads I drove, keeping an eye out for any down hill speedsters that one must always keep a cautious eye for since there is so little margin for passing error. I drove by Wonderland elementary school, a seeming asphalt island between two converging canyons where several friends of mine attended while I was in Oakwood School. I passed Doris and Neal’s house somewhere on the right. It’s hard to remember exactly where it was anymore. It was a small, rust colored wood home that sat up about twenty feet from the street. Even at the time my parents knew these 1960’s hippie holdout’s well. One time my friend Devin and I walked way down from my neighborhood to this part of Wonderland Drive as a sort of test to see how far we could irresponsibly wander, and we both decided we didn’t want to walk back up the hill. I rang Doris and Neal’s doorbell to see if one of them would drive us. My assumption that friends of my family would always want to be helpful to me was not so on target in this case. Doris answered the door, somewhat stunned and flustered, and told us that we really shouldn’t just pop in like that. She got her thin leather vest on, let us into her beaten old white sedan, and deposited us back up to where we belonged. After that, I shied away from leaning on them again in that way.

Passing all of these memory markers has always been fresh to me each time I have gone up to the old neighborhood every five years or so. There’s the corner house on Wonderland Avenue and Green Valley Street where there was once a large green lawn with a black and white bulldog that perennially sunbathed itself. The owner has since replaced the lawn with dark ivy. And then I headed up the final stretch of Green Valley Drive, where, as the road straightens itself out, our big neighborhood radio tower appeared looming through the white haze of a typical Los Angeles day.

With a quick left onto Green Valley Place, I arrive onto Crest View Drive, park my car near my old house in the cul-de-sac, walk up to the gate, and ring the door bell, which now has one of those security speakers attached. “Hello?” a middle aged sounding man answers. “Oh my God,” I say to myself. “Someone is actually home this time!”

It’s a preposterous proposition, really. Some guy off the street asking to get into someone else’s most intimate of havens. But I solidly blurt out my request. There’s just no other way. “Hi, my name is Fred Herrman, and my parents built this house. I was wondering if I might be able to see it again…” I didn’t even complete my sentence when he says, “Who bought it from them,” as if he had been expecting me for a half hour already and he just needed the password from me. I give him his answer and I immediately hear the front door open from within the gate.

A good-looking, kind man in his late thirties opens the gate for me and we exchange greetings as he proceeds to let me in. I throw out a few quick facts about the house that pretty much no one could know just to reassure him that I’m not a kook. I walk into the entry and feel a little light-headed. I have not stood in this house for exactly thirty-seven years. Revisiting it has always been a dream of mine. I look to my left, and a partition that separates the entry from the dining room is missing. It’s not much of a loss. The partition felt very 1960’s, and now the room feels more open. My mom used to put the Halloween candy out there for the neighbor kids. It’s also where I made my parents set up my record player with the original Disney’s Haunted Mansion album. Each time kids came to the door, my parents were instructed to turn on the haunted mansion sounds on their record player each time the door bell range. My dad was on door duty most of that night, and when I returned, he told me he had done it a good number of times until a group of smaller kids had come and gotten scared by the stormy, haunted sound effects. Well, I determined that he had done a fine enough job for me on that front, so I had no quarrel with him. Boy, what parents will do for you!

On the right of the entry I noticed regular window glass. When I was younger, we had some kind of bottle glass that always frustrated me as a child because I wasn’t able to see the wind swaying the trees clearly when it was raining. We proceeded into the dining room, which was the central hub of this home. Going from anywhere to anywhere else, one had to pass through this room. It was the site of my birthday parties, our putting out the Menorah during Chanukah, and also a center of play for me. I could have a whole room myself; yet still keep my mother in ear’s reach during the afternoons. My dad told me that I was “under foot” often since so much of my time was spent playing on the floors.

I looked down, and there was the same cross-pattern wood floor beneath me that I used to drive my Hot Wheels on. This was really emotional for me. My heart was soaring being back there again. Most of what I remember after I was adopted happened right here in these few rooms inside this very house. The gentleman walked me into the living room. There was still the same white-painted brick around the fireplace and an adjacent wood built-in cabinet where we used to keep our long playing records. My parents seemed to have everything on vinyl back then. Lots of Broadway shows such as “My Faire Lady,” and “Hair.” They also had spoken comedy albums by Woody Allen and Allen Sherman (“Take me home, oh mudduh, faddah, take me home, I hate Granada”), and 1960’s pop and folk music such as Mammas and the Pappas, and The Beatles. I would often come across the “Rubber Soul” album in that stack and imagine my dad single and driving around in with his brown suede jacket in a little convertible red MG that he used to always talk about listening to the Beatles in the pre-Fred days. The time frame wasn’t really a match because they were married before the Beatles became known. But that was the story I made up for that album.

The living room had high ceilings and was always this long, tall, white box to me. It was bigger than most of my friends’ living rooms. As the contractor was laying out the stakes delineating the boundaries of the rooms and perimeter, my dad often told me that he moved all of the stakes for the structural boundary about one foot to the north to make our living room a bit roomier. It made sense to me later as I recalled that the exterior north side easement had a very narrow set back. And now, standing at six feet tall and one inch, it was still a large living room. How nice!

My parents designed this house to have a lot of light coming in with large plate glass windows facing out to the canyon. The owner in between my parents and this gentlemen had removed slatted windows that one can rotate for airflow, which used to populate this house. It had been a security risk in the intervening years.

The gentleman walked me through the large sliding glass door of the dining room and out to our back yard, which overlooked the canyon on the other side of Wonderland Drive. Still a majestic view, though there are more houses on that ridge than used to be. My dad drove me to that other side, a barren dirt road at the time, to see our Christmas tree lit up one night. I pointed out to this gentleman a spot of utility equipment still visible on the southern end of the ridge. “See all that stuff over there? There used to be an old air attack warning siren in amongst all of that. Every last Friday of the month at about 1:00pm, we’d hear it go off if we were home.” He chuckled, recalling something similar in his upbringing. I also showed him where my parents had planned architected a spiral staircase to lead up to the roof over their bedroom for a sundeck. They decided not to do it at the last minute for reasons of expense. But I told the gentleman that the roof over the master bedroom was actually reinforced, unlike the rest of the house for that reason. It was nice to tell a man who’s been living there many years a few things he didn’t know about the house. And it made me feel still connected to it; some sort of mastery of the home.

We then walked to my parents’ bedroom, which has a master bath with a vanity on the outside of it. I said, “Boy, I always thought that vanity area was larger.” He replied, “Oh, that always happens when you revisit places.” The bathtub and the bidet had been removed and the shower expanded, but all in all, it looked quite the same structurally. We exited the back door from the master bath to the part of the back yard, which wrapped around the side of the house, where now sits a swimming pool. It used to be full of dichondra grass and is later where my jungle gym sat. But still, the brick that formed the boarder of the flower gardens, which butted up against our neighbors’, the Norton’s property, was still there, only painted a light gray now. My friend Kristian and I used to put my parents’ hose on one end of this flower garden, build a dam out of mud and let the water back up. On the lower side of the dam, Kristian and I would carve out roads and a makeshift city built of dirt and twigs. When the city was built, and the water was high on the banks of the mud dam, Kristian and I would use the flat of our palms to bull doze through a couple of points on the earthen dam and the water would rush through the openings and obliterate the roads and town that we had built. It was always a success! Obviously, whoever the city planners were hadn’t thought out things too well in allowing construction of a town in the shadow of such a precarious dam!

We walked back inside back through my parents’ room and the dining room and into the kitchen. On the dining room side of the kitchen, we used to have wallpaper which consisted of a light brown burlap. It was stringy and because I used to grab at the door jam as I'd pivot from my hallway through the dining room and into the kitchen, this burlap began to ware thin. The stringiness of the material eventually fell apart around that area from where I had worn it thin. My mother was never pleased of this progress.

Though the kitchen’s general shape and location of appliances had not changed, the mood was much different now. When my parents built the house, they had chosen an avocado and gold color scheme. It took my asking my aunt after visiting the home to recall that exactly what had originally been in there. We had flowered wallpaper with these colors and with a texture of what my aunt remembers as being called, grass cloth. The paper alternated between a smooth paper feel and fine vertical striations, which one could feel by drawing one’s had horizontally across the wall, not unlike the feel of those pictures that change as you turn them, usually the prize in some children’s cereal box. The floor was cream white linoleum with pinky-finger sized, amorphous-shaped splotches peppered throughout.

On the counter next to the dishwasher was a metal breadbox that somehow we still had as late as about three years ago. Amazing that it lasted that long. In this breadbox were cookies. My parents kept cookies for me, and also there was a dish of candy next to the entry. My parents’ feeling was that I would never get obsessed with sweets if they were just always available and not to be fussed over. Their plan worked with the exception of Oreo cookies. I still obsess on those. But my friends of yore were always amazed at the sight of candy sitting out in the house in a neat little dish by the front door. When asked, “May I have a piece of candy, Ms. Herrman?” my mother always told them, “Take just two…moderation.” She was always the teacher. I had a lot of friends visit me there.

The breakfast nook where my dad and I used to build model airplanes together, and adjoining service porch looked almost exactly the same, minus a Pacific Bell wall-hung dial phone. Looking into the service porch, I even asked him, “Are these the same machines?” referring to the clothes washer and dryer. I realized the stupidity of the question as soon as it came out of my mouth. He answered, “No, these are newer machines.” “Of course,” I thought to myself, “There’s probably no chance this hip young man would have kept machines from the 1960’s, nor that they would even work anymore.” I wasn’t intending to fit every single thing that was currently in the house back into my own childhood experience, but the excitement of being there and also the spatial familiarity, well it was pretty overwhelming for me and distorted the reasonableness of my questions at times.

We then proceeded back through to the dining room towards the other two bedrooms. Along the hall to the bedrooms was a full bath. This bathroom now had a much different look. Gone was the vertically striped blue, green, red and white wallpaper, and instead, present were more reasonably paint colored bare walls. A much smaller mirror, nice tub and floor made it all look very modern. This had been my bathroom. As we walked into the bathroom, I was reminded of the pattern that once occupied the floor. It had been a cream color with dark green marbling. When I used to go in there as a child to sit on the toilet, there was one pattern that looked like a skull winking at me and consistently freaked me out at night. I would put my foot over it while doing my business. I told this gentleman about the time I had crashed my bike on one of the empty lots near Glen Campbell’s house with two of my friends. The kickstand on my Schwinn bike, which had developed the habit of coming down, had done it’s thing in the middle of a jump between two lots, and acting as one leg of a tripod, had thrown me over sideways as I landed. Oh, that hurt! This bathroom had been the triage site for clean up of my bleeding forehead. My mom was probably upset seeing me all bloodied, but thankfully, seemed calm about the whole ordeal. I guess that’s one of a mother’s pragmatic jobs in the face of bike wrecks.

We finally arrived at the last two rooms. My room was the larger of the two. Large closet space, one of those hutch doors you’d find in a barn, which lead to the back yard area where the jungle gym had stood. This was the room where I learned about music. Classical music from my mom and I listening to “Peter and the Wolf,” pop music such as, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” many of Glen Campbell’s hits, John Denver, and later Elton John and many more songs. I played all of my music on a little blue and white record player that had a build in speaker covered by a sort of plastic weaving on it’s sides. My room was dressed in Dr. Seuss furniture, which was comprised of a single sized bed with multi colored slats in the head and foot boards, bright orange and green beehive and hanging lamps of varying shapes, tables, chairs, and at least two bean large bags. It was like a Dr. Seuss book had exploded in this room. I liked it a lot. I had a fish take with lots of guppies. There seemed to always be a few that were pregnant in that tank swimming around obliviously their rectangular domain. This was also the room that when I first came to live with my parents and was still quite unsettled in spirit, they would read to me until I fell asleep. That was so sweet of them! They told me later that I had recurring nightmares of dead animals floating in the sea, probably triggered by an afternoon when my parents and I happened upon a beached dead seal near our Malibu home. But more likely, the dreams were a remnant signpost still bubbling up of having just lost my biological father just a few months earlier.

Someone had made the suggestion to my parents of getting a pet who could sleep with me. One day, three puppy Weimaraner-Lab mix female dogs were brought to my parents’ house by a man who’s female Weimaraner had gotten pregnant by a neighborhood chocolate lab jumping a six foot fence to mate with it. The three puppies were lined up in the kitchen entry near the dining room (I can’t write this without tearing up), I walked over to them and one of the three puppies came to me. I chose her and named her Willie, after the first book I ever read, “Whistle for Willie.” She was my best friend always.

The gentleman and I went to the spare room, which was now his office, and I told him of the opare we had from Denmark, named Inger, who although she was with us for only a year or so until she missed her boyfriend aback in Denmark so much that she finally left, was always considered part of our family from that point on. She was charged with keeping an eye on me and taking care of me while both of my parents were working a lot. She was a sweet, patient woman. After she left, she always sent me these Danish calendars for the month of December where I could open each door for each day leading up to Christmas. I always looked forward to these heading into the Holidays.

My tour that day never included the garage, but I can only assume that hasn’t changed much. It wasn’t so important for me to see it, though David Haskell and I used to park our bikes in the empty garage after school with water bottles in our hands and pretend that it was Station 51 from, “Emergency.” We’d imagine getting the call,”Squad fifty-one, squad fifty-one, respond to a brush fire on the Norton’s lot. Time out, 3:45. Okay, this is engine fifty-one. We’re responding…KMG365” and then we’d holler our pretend sirens and be off to fight the fire with our water spritzers. This was also the garage where when the lot catty-corner from our house was open, I used to ride my bike around, and one day an older kid from down the street started bullying me and telling me that I couldn’t use the dirt jumps with my bike as if he owned them. My dad happened to come outside, walked over and yelled at the kid. “You don’t tell anyone what they can and can’t do,” and that was that. Yeah dad!!! He was my hero! Although, ironically, my dad was telling him just that. With his tail between his legs, the kid then came over to our garage and showed me how to turn my stock Schwinn into a quasi-dirt bike, acquiescing to my father’s earlier confrontation with him. And in this same garage was a combo fridge and freezer in the garage too mostly stacked with meat to be rotated into the house refrigerator. But sometimes, it contained the overflow of frozen ice cream bars. I learned this pretty quickly. My dad had his boxes of Playboys in this garage dating back to the 1950’s. And my friends Devin, Nick and I used to scour all of the magazines for every picture, each article we could understand, and every cartoon. To this day, I feel like I intuitively understand the evolution of Playboy Magazine’s looks, layouts and photography better than most people. A lot of dedicated research went into this knowledge.

My tour came to an end. The owner was literally one of the nicest and most sincere people I had met in a very long time. I thanked him profusely for allowing me to tour the house. He could have just as well said no, as probably a lot of people might have in this day and age. What made me happy, aside from seeing all of this again and reliving so many memories, was that this gentleman, who had lived in the home longer than the former owners and my parents did combined, was that he really loves the house. He cherishes the privacy, and functionality, and the beauty of the home. It makes me happy that he is the owner.

The sun was dropping behind the Hollywood hills now. I got into my Jeep, started off, partially running over a wooden pallet that had been left on the side of the curb next to some trash cans. The pallet creaked and crunched until my right front tire passed completely over it’s edge and released the pressure from the pallet, and then I made my way up Crest View Drive. I felt the excitement of just having been inside the place where my parents built their life together on the west coast, made their careers, and then later adopted a child. My mom and dad were strong, vibrant and alive. They gave whatever they could of themselves, far beyond what could be expected from parents. And as I continued driving home down Skyline towards Mulholland, I began to feel something else. It was strong. Sadness. The sadness of what wasn’t anymore. My father is gone, and my mother is confused and frustrated in an assisted living facility. I compared all of these things and asked myself how all of it, the early life on the hill, the traveling, their respective occupations, all of their friends of that time, how could it all could have been reduced to this; my mom with dementia in a place that is really not home to her. It just seems unfair after all that they accomplished both individually and together, and yet, I know that this is all a part of life; the joy and the sorry. I felt both feelings deeply as I turn onto Mulholland Drive and looked at the city below, a view that my mom, my dad, me and my best friend, Willie, once shared together on a daily basis.

A House In The Hills

2012-04-12T00:25:00.016-07:00

I grew up near the Mulholland Tennis Club on Crest View Drive, which ran from a Skyline Drive along rows of small to middle sized homes whose fronts and garages butted up against the street with no yards. The street ended in a cul-de-sac where sat the house that my parents built for fifty-five thousand dollars in 1962. My dad always told me of how when they were laying out the stakes and strings on the lot that would define the walls of the home, he moved a whole row of them one foot to the north in order to make our living room slightly more roomier.

My parents decided to build up in the Skyline tracts because it was private up there. As I alluded to earlier, the architecture of the homes was closed and reclusive. You couldn’t see inside the homes at all from the front. Many entertainment folks in the 1960’s bought in this and surrounding neighborhoods because the area was so tucked away up on the hilltops. We had a few neighbors who were not openly gay, but co-habitated together out of sight up there. It wasn’t hard to figure out why two flamboyant fifty year-old men were living together. One couple lived right next door to us in a home that had been modeled after ours, but whose floor plan was flipped. These two men were special effects and make up guys and put on a great Halloween show. When we rang their doorbell for trick or treating, the door opened slowly to reveal a casket under purple black lights and candles. Two bodies would rise from behind the coffin with white glowing masks and with gloves that would reach into the casket and pull out some candy to give to us.

There were very few trees on these hills. Those that were there had been transplanted into this quasi-granite desert whose only soil consisted of rocks pebbles and was not naturally hospitable to growth. Standing guard over all of the community was a radio tower hundreds of feet high that served as a structural beacon indicating "home" from wherever we were in the Los Angeles area. Most of my childhood was occupied with either riding around on my green Schwinn bike, skateboarding, or climbing down the hillsides from various open lots and back yards. The neighborhood felt both old and new at the same time. Old because, though there were cement sidewalks throughout, they weren’t particularly well maintained. There was dirt on a lot of them, and the sidewalks felt hastily installed with non-uniformly graded cement. It made skateboarding a pain in the ass since it meant that we got bounced around a lot.

However, in reality, the neighborhood was relatively new at the time I lived there with my folks. There was a high percentage of open lots. There was an open dirt lot just beyond our cul-de-sac, from which you could see the downtown buildings and the lights of Dodger’s stadium at night. We called it the Norton's Lot, since it was just adjacent to our neighbors, the Nortons a husband and wife director and script coordinator respectively. There was also a dirt lot just a few houses from ours on a corner that we called the Cooper Lot, since it sat next to the Cooper's house (a hugely successful entertainment attorney). The Cooper's lot allowed for dirt jumps to be made for our bikes. And beyond our little Crest View Drive area, up on Skyline, there were rows and rows of dirt lots. There must have been about fifteen or twenty in a row. This street, in the section I am speaking of, has a slight downward grade to it. So we used to take our bikes and jump from lot to lot, descending along the way. It was great fun.

The last lot ended at about where a street called, Skywin Way fed off of Skyline and met a street called, Edwin Drive. As we left the last of this series of open lots from Skyline and headed to Edwin Drive, as we made a left, there was another cul-de-sac, and three more open lots. These lots were at differing heights to each other, which allowed for a very big dirt jump. This was the biggest of them all in our neighborhood. One time, I was jumping on my bike, along with my friends David and John on their bikes, and during my jump, my kickstand fell down, and it occasionally did, and as I landed, the kickstand hit the ground and angled me off into a terrible fall and tumble.

I got up, realized that my forehead was bleeding, and rode my bike home crying all the way. David and John followed behind, I think feeling partly responsible for staying with me since they were both a year older than I, and they wanted to make sure my parents didn’t blame them for any of it. We got to my parents’ house, and I ran in crying to my mother. She brought me into the bathroom where we could all inspect my head in the mirror. I had a big bruising bump already growing as my mom dabbed the blood off of my forehead. David and John jumped up and down with a kind of gawker’s excitement, saying things like, “Wow, you really banged your head hard, man,” which made me feel like I had accomplished quite a feat that afternoon. After all, neither of them would have wanted to do that, and all of the attention wasn’t bad either. That was my worst bike smash up.

My parents found quite a few places for great walks in the area. There were several dirt roads that connected portions of the neighborhood, which no longer exist. One, for instance, was an appendage of Skyline Drive that kept going south and eventually connected to Green Valley Drive, several hundred feet below. My parents and I would go on casual summer evening walks after dinner with our chocolate Weimaraner-Labrador mix named Willie. We would watch the Hollywood Hills sink into the pink and purple sunset haze of dusk. Those are some of the nicest times I remember having with my parents.

Another great hiking location used to start from a place nicknamed, “502 Mulholland,” because of all of the drinking and racing that occurred there. There used to be Start/Finish banners occasionally hung over the street from telephone poles copping to the nefarious activities that had gone on the night before. This area is now a development that has very expensive and exclusive homes, and is the location of Britney Spears’ home during the time she was engaging in those directionless driving binges.

There was also a very special spot. I say special because it’s the location of some tender pictures of my and my parents and our puppy-dog, Willie. The site was on the north side of where there is a large radio tower still today, and looked over the entire San Fernando Valley as well as over Mulholland Highway. It was a spectacular location. These pictures show both my mom and I, and also my dad and I together in a way that I seldom saw after that. I looked like I trusted their love, and they were being affectionate with me. I’ve always trusted them since, it’s just that when one goes through later childhood and then the teen years, there’s some water that can’t go back under the bridge. And these photos show us during a time before any skepticism on either of our sides.

That special site is exactly where in 1973, about three years after those photos were taken, a huge house was built. Over 14,000 square fee, two stories, eight bedrooms, five full bathrooms, on 6.65 acres of land. This house was absolutely massive, and its driveway began at the end of the cul-de-sac of Edwin Drive, about the same location where I had my huge bicycle crash. My parents and I were all three saddened by the shutting off forever of this site that was so special and serene to us.

It wasn’t long until we found out who built the house, and actually, it took a little of the sting away from the loss we had suffered. It was Glen Campbell. Yes, Glen Campbell had moved into our neighborhood. The man who had so many hits on the radio for so long. My absolute favorite to this day is, “Wichita Lineman.” I just love that song.

My friend David, one of my cohorts during that bike accident, was the son of a very prestigious and in demand music arranger named, Jimmy Haskell, who worked with Simon and Garfunkle, the Carpenters, Barry Manilow…the list goes on and on. I used to go up to his father’s studio and play one of his keyboards; just simple things I was learning on my own that I wanted to show him. He would say, “That’s very good, Freddie!” Little did I really know how important to the industry Jimmy was back then. Had I really been aware, I’m sure I would have been petrified with fear and self-consciousness.

I think that even though we were all just neighborhood kids playing in the streets, David had kind of a connection with Glen’s son, Travis, since both of their dad’s were so heavily in the music industry, which meant that I got to know and ride bikes with Travis as well, and occasionally naively trotted around this American music legend's house; another example of my not realizing whose presence I was in. I remember one time when me, David, and Kristian all went to visit Travis. We were walking through this mansion sized house when we realized they had a little river running inside under one of the hallways, almost as if you were in a diorama in a museum. The kitchen, the rooms, and the general space in this house never ended. Again, it was just gargantuan.

My dad and I loved Glen Campbell, and we used to listen to his 45’s on my record player in my room. “Country Boy,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and “Southern Nights,” among many others. When the song, “Country Boy” came out, I heard the lyrics, “You get a house in the hills, you’re paying everyone’s bills, and they tell you that you’re gonna go far. But in the back of my mind, I hear it time after time, is that who you really are?” The story was about a guy whose made it big in the business, but who mourns the loss of being with his kin back in the old country. All of that was lost on me, and I simply thought to myself, “Hey, Glen Campbell's singing about our neighborhood in this song,” and that gave me pride.

I’ve driven back to the neighborhood several times, and most recently, about two months ago, just to fill my girlfriend in on some of these stores and show her where things actually happened. The lots around my Crest View Drive cul-de-sac, the Norton's Lot and the Cooper's Lot, now have houses on them. The appendage of Skyline where we'd take those walks at dusk...completely closed off as a private road. Those fifteen or twenty lots on Skyline that we used to jump down…all houses now. The three lots on Edwin Drive where my brilliant kickstand initiated bike crash happened…three houses there. The black gate that led to the Campbell’s house several owners later...chained shut for a couple of years now.

But the trees. There are finally trees up there. They’ve sprung up all over the place. I looked down from a spot near the Mulholland Tennis Club on Crest View Drive where I used to be able to see David's house from above. No more. Trees and bushes everywhere. They’ve taken root and have flourished. It’s an old neighborhood now. My old neighborhood. My house in the hills.

Junior High Lunch Scalpers

2012-02-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

I went to Robert A. Millikan Junior High School in Sherman Oaks. It was nestled in a mature residential neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. I say mature because when I was fourteen, the area was already populated with tall, full trees that created a sort of umbrella over the streets as I made my way up them on my yellow Raleigh ten-speed bike. I’d cut through a neighborhood not far from my house down a street that ended at the 101 freeway and had a pedestrian tunnel that shot me directly to the school.

I truly hated junior high school. It was the most awkward of ages, being a kind of way station along the path to those grown up kids in high school. I remember how uncomfortable everyone was the first time we all had to strip for physical education in the locker room. Our small, Chinese P.E. teacher, Chet, “Wing” Wong, as he narcissistically called himself, told all of us during our first day of P.E., “Okay guys, get stripped, put your street clothes into your lockers, and get your P.E. shorts and shirts on.” Nobody moved, but instead, we all sat on the wooden benches in front of our lockers with our shoulders slouched and looking down at the floor.

Everyone was so self conscious about getting naked in front of everyone else who they’d been going to school with for the past some-odd years that we were all paralyzed with inaction. Mr. Wong demanded, “Get stripped now! Your all guys, and you’ve all got the same parts, it’s not a big deal!” At that point (and thank God, 'cause I wouldn't have), one or two guys started stripping, and everyone followed suit. I suppose that Mr. Wong and others like him had to go through this every year with the freshman in seventh grade.

The school’s P.E. department used the worst smelling disinfectant in the shower floors and on the towels. It was absolutely rancid in there, and when we wrapped the white, half-sized towels around ourselves, the smell made me dizzy. Whatever was used to clean them must have been a neurotoxin. I still have the memory of that smell. It was that bad.

My best memory of Millikan Jr. High was that completely untrained, I got onto the miler board. In the gym, there was a board that showed any kids’ names that ran the mile under 5:40. One day, someone told me I should go run it for fun, which I did. I came in at 5:38, beating out one of the best athletes in my grade, Kevin Keller. He crossed the finish line at something like 5:45, looked up waiting for him as he caught his breath and said, “You son of a bitch!” And though I wasn’t too fond of being called such a name, I knew his frustration born was out of a non-athlete beating him in a simple foot race, and this made me happy.

The other thing I remember doing was that during lunchtimes, our school cafeteria was segregated into two sections. Not by race, but by the means by which one would pay for their food. Cash paying kids like me would go to one set of lines where we would pay for our food with money. Our food cost something like twenty-five cents and was terrible. It was a mish-mash of bland and boring concoctions. And yet, I (and apparently my mother) was too lazy to pack myself a bag for lunch, so the school’s stale eatery was what was available to me.

The second set of lunch lines was for kids with lunch tickets. These kids consisted mostly of those bussed in from poorer communities, and were almost all black and Latino. By some strange arrangement, these lunch ticket lines had better food, in my opinion, than the cash lines. They almost always offered hamburgers, which was the main draw for me. At some point, I discovered, probably from one of my acquaintances, that a lot of these bussed kids were selling their lunch tickets for cash.

The going rate was fifty cents, and these kids stood near the lunch lines, keeping a low profile since they weren’t supposed to be selling their tickets. Like anyone looking for their fix, we buyers developed an eye for how these kids were hanging back in the lunch lines with their radar up for any offers. I would approach one of them with, “Lunch ticket?” discretely showing fifty cents in my hand. We’d do the swap and that was that. I got a tasty lunch, and who knows what they used their fifty cents for; probably on whacky-packs after school. My mother knew of this and didn’t approve since the inner city kids were selling off their government assistance, but then again, she didn’t have to pack a lunch for me either and I seemed happy.

One particular time, I remember having trouble finding an available seller for a few minutes. I must have been late getting out there that day. Finally, after locating one, this African-American girl must have recognized in me that I was desperate for a lunch ticket. She probably saw me dotting my head around with a worried and confused look.

I said, “Lunch ticket?” holding out my two quarters. She said, “Dollar-fifty.” I didn’t even hesitate and dug into my pockets for four more quarters and handed them to her as we made the exchange. And as I paid her three times fair value, I half-mumbled, “I’ll just splurge today.” It was a phrase my dad used when he was being carefree with his spending, but I remember that as I said it, I realized that I had been “had” with this kind of price mark-up. I knew instantly that if I had just held out and offered seventy-five cents, I could have gotten what I came for. But such was the value of those hamburgers to me. Oh well, live and learn!

The Gramma Phenomenon

2012-01-08T01:48:00.000-08:00

There are grandmothers (grandmas), and there are grammas. I had two grandmothers that I remember, but never a gramma. I mention, “two,” because of the fact that I was adopted and actually had four grandmothers; the natural grandmas I never got the chance to meet.

The difference between a grandmother, and a gramma, in my opinion, has not only to do with the grandparent’s temperament and kindness, but also with the accessibility and how the larger familial unit is either clustered, or spread out in my case.

Both of my grandmothers lived in New York. As I can best recall, they both loved me, gave me a hugs and gifts when I saw them, and I believe, genuinely enjoyed spending time with me. But the reunions were often half a year, to sometime years apart. My parents and I lived in California, so with the exception of a few times when my maternal grandmother came out to visit, these reunions generally required a visit out to the east coast, and most often during Holiday seasons.

My maternal grandma, Sonia, was a very small-boned, thin and somewhat rigid woman who looked older than her years. She grew up in Poland and became one of the first female doctors in that country to practice medicine while my grandfather came to the United States to find work. He succeeded in making money, eventually went back for grandma Sonia, and in doing so, also paid for all but one of his seven brothers to come to the U.S., thereby saving them from being killed in the Holocaust. The one brother who elected to stay behind died at the hands of the Nazis. With all of the struggle and chaos, I think that grandma Sonia experienced a lot of life in a short amount of time, and it showed on her.

Grandma Sonia lived in a high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s west side. It was a busy area with a plethora of food and shopping, and sirens that never ceased. That’s the one thing about New York that I always forget about until I’m there; the constant sounds of taxi-honking and emergency vehicles ricocheting off of the walls of buildings that are tall enough to make one dizzy to look down from. When gramma Sonia did occasionally visit us at our Hollywood hills home, she complained that she was kept up all night by the lack of the city sounds that she was so used to. “How can you live like this?” she would ask my mother in her thick Russian accent. “It’s so quiet up here, you go crazy in the head!” My mother would let her know that we got along just fine with the panoramic sights of the twinkling city lights from our crest view home.

My paternal grandmother was a thin, white-haired woman who had a sweet smile named, Florie. She also lived in high-rise in Manhattan, though I have no recollection where anymore. I saw grandma Florie less frequently than grandma Sonia. My memories of her were of a very sweet, gentle woman, and I recall always seeing a tickled look on my dad’s face when he’d see me and grandma Florie spending time together. I wish I could have spent more with both of my grandmas, each of whom died when I was about twelve years old or so.

Growing up a big city, I had never even once experienced a “gramma” before. And what is a gramma? Well, truthfully, I still don’t fully know, but I’ve been observing for quite a few years now. The first girlfriend I lived with, Kristin, came from West Bend, Wisconsin. Their family was a pretty tight knit group who all lived within a few miles of each other. Kris talked about her gramma incessantly. Cooking, clothes, holiday activities. Everything seemed to somehow involve and center around her gramma. Kristin and I must have lived together for a good year before I ever met her family. I think they wanted to see if our relationship might ‘stick’ before laying out the carpet. It was during one of the Holidays when Kristin and I flew out to Wisconsin and I met her father, stepmother, brother, uncles, her grampa, and finally...her gramma.

As we walked into their house, there was her gramma, Florence, ready to give us both a hug. I remember entering into the living room which was dark and not very updated inside. I seem to recall dark orange or green carpet and furnishings that were from the 1970’s. I wasn’t sure if I felt at home at first. But quickly I could see that there was a meaningful connection between Kristin and her gramma, as if Kristin really belonged to her Florence and not her parents in some ways.

What I began to understand after some time was that I was witnessing a relationship that I had never experienced myself. Having a gramma that lived close by to where one lived, and whom one could go to as almost an escape from home life. The conversation that arose between Kristin and her gramma seemed picked up as if from the day before. There was closeness and an endearment that was very special to both of them. Her grandparents were funny too. They were folksy and made jokes and poked fun at themselves; really authentic people. Her gramma had a kind of irreverence at times. She decided what mattered and what didn’t matter in her life without much need for introspection. Quite a difference from the household I grew up in where issues tended to be analyzed until nothing was left of them but a fine powder.

I remember during one of the trips out there, we drove up to a little cabin on a lake that her grampa and gramma owned. It was beautiful. It had a little dock that stretched out a ways onto the water, and a rowboat for floating around the Lilly pads. Our first visit, Kris and I arrived there before her grampa was supposed to meet us. We waited on the porch for maybe twenty minutes when he came zipping up in this little convertible MG. Ralph, her grampa, was probably in his mid-seventies, and I just thought it was something to behold. And slightly plump old man racing around in a hot red sports car.

Since Kristin didn't have a vehicle in California, her uncle John decided to fix up an old burgundy 1979'ish Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme for her. John was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, and yet, he loved working on cars. He had a whole system of getting himself on onto one of those shallow dollies to work underneath the chassis.

When John finished work on the Oldsmobile, the drive to California would be too far for him to deliver the car, so grampa and gramma decided to take it out themselves and make a road trip of it. By virtue of one of those strange bits of information that stick in your head forever, I still remember precisely Kristin’s family address, so I can note very confidently here in this writing that her seventy-something year old grandparents drove that Olds Cutlass 2,099 miles from West Bend, Wisconsin to our canal loft in Venice, California.

And so her grampa and gramma arrived a bit fatigued as if it had been a little trip they had taken from across the city. They sat on our couch and rested while Kristin beamed at their presence. She loved them so. And never an important occasion or memory went by that Kris didn’t refer to her gramma in some way. Some funny story, something that her gramma would have said in that given situation, or some oblong shaped object she’d wanted to send to her gramma from one of the Venice Boardwalk stores we lived near. It was an eternal connection, and it was really something else to witness.

My sweetheart now is Brenda. And Brenda has a gramma. Her name is Eva. It’s when I got to know Eva that I realized that this was a real, honest to God, thing. A gramma. I suppose that previously, I may have thought that it was of some fluke that Kristin and Florence were so special to each other, such as some family dynamic that had forced a needed closeness. This was very much a skeptical error on my part not having grown up with a family all in one place. Brenda’s gramma, Eva is such a sincerely nice woman, and a woman of the land so to speak. And this you gotta hear…

Eve’s life follows, or I should more correctly say, maps out ahead of time, the story of “Grapes of Wrath” exactly, as if John Steinbeck had written the novel directly from her life story. Eva was born in 1925, the youngest of eight children of parents who were hired farmhands in Perry, Oklahoma. At the age of five, the Dustbowl event happened in the Mid-Western United States, and her family fled across to the west in an old gilapi, sputtering and bumping all the way to the California’s Central Valley where her father could find work in one of the labor farm camps.

During the trip, one of her older brothers slept on the floor of the old car since there wasn’t any room anywhere else, and during a rest stop in a small town, they couldn’t wake him up. They pulled him out of the car and realized that the floorboard of the car’s interior had filled up with exhaust fumes. The family got him to the town doctor who was able to revive him and told the family that if he had been exposed to the fumes for fifteen more minutes, he would have died.

The family first entered California via Los Angeles and then went north. She always says, "We went by Los Angeles, then up through the Grapevine back when it was a two-lane road; one in either direction, and then came down into the San Joaquin Valley with it was nothin' but old ranches and farmland." Eva’s parents worked in the labor camps through the depression and then eventually settled in and around Bakersfield, California where even today, most of their family lives within a few miles of each other.

As I got to know Brenda, I could see almost immediately how special her gramma was and still is to her. Their lives are intertwined with the simplest of things. “Gramma needed some pop (soda pop).” “I’ll grab some stamps from gramma.” “Oh, she’s got a few old clothes she wants ma to have, so I’m gonna run over and get 'em real quick.” “I took gramma and ma down to the second-hand (discount clothing store).” Whenever Brenda goes back to help her mother with a few things, there’s always plenty of gramma in there. Eva, now pushing 87 years, has a mind that’s clear as a bell. It makes me wonder of life outside of the stressful cities wears less on the mind. You can’t keep Brenda’s gramma Eva from getting out every day and doing some gardening, chasing her dog around, or calling a family member to take her for Mexican food.

It’s quite a phenomenon, this gramma thing. And I now understand much better how Kristin’s gramma, Florence, was so key in her life. There’s just something about having a gramma Florence or a gramma Eva around the corner who is always there, who doesn’t really have the parental responsibilities to you, but can be there to listen, make things with you, spoil you with Christmas cookies, or hand you a plastic grocery bag with a few cans of pop in it for the road. A gramma sounds like a really nice thing to have had, and I’ve found myself living life vicariously with a borrowed gramma or two along the way.

External Forces

2011-12-05T16:41:00.000-08:00

I listened a Podcast of a RadioLab piece last night that was interesting. It had to do with getting to the bottom of things; the ultimate source of a phenomenon. The piece was called, “Patient Zero,” and was split into several segments. The first, having to do with the first Typhoid patent, and the second section discussing the search for the spillover of HIV to people, first from two kinds of different monkeys to make a hybrid SIV virus within the chimpanzee likely hundreds or thousands of years ago, and then a second set of spillovers from chimps to humans probably around 1908 (yes, the turn of the century). It was a fascinating piece.

Later, the show went into a search for the person who made the first cowboy hat. They had an answer. It was the son of a famous hat maker on the east coast who had gone out west. But it didn’t end there. The British journalist who set out on this quest then came up with two more theories. One being that it was actual working cowboys who, through repetition and wear, influenced the popularity and style of the cowboy hat. And then finally, he suggested that it was really the external conditions; the hot sun, the high winds, the hard elements of the Wild West that ultimately shaped the hat we all know.

I pondered on this for a while, trying to glean some insight into how this same phenomenon of external shaping could apply to my life. With some thought I realized that there have indeed been times in my life when the conditions were rife for shaping my own world, and then there have been other times when I’ve felt that I was in turn shaped by the conditions that were laid out around me; an ebb and flow of self-initiated destiny versus day to day reactive survival, the latter not allowing for a great sense of self-actualization.

The idea of the cowboy hat being destined to appear on the scene at some point due to the external conditions makes sense to me. It didn’t matter who made it. As the British journalist finally surmised, someone would have eventually come along and kept making hats until that perfect Aristotelian cowboy hat that you and I think of would come to pass. And so, I think in our lives, we may be more a product of our time and deterministic conditions than we would naturally think. From the moment you are born to your passing, your life could turn out a hundred different ways. A good portion of the final result ends up being the product of what circumstances were overlaid around you during the life you lived.

Listen to the RadioLab Podcast

Descending Whole-Tones

2011-12-01T15:06:00.000-08:00

I never take anyone’s psychiatric disorders lightly, so when I tell this story, it’s out of a kind of relief from some of the other more serious patients I used to work with, rather than mocking this woman in any way.

In one of the psychiatric hospitals I worked in, there was a very overweight African-American female patient in the adult step-down unit, the unit that had fewer restrictions with patients than the locked units. I will call her, “Betty.” She was out of her mind, but it was an entertaining way for many of us.

Poor Betty couldn't sit in any of her groups for more than a couple of minutes, thinking she was short on time and needed to get ready to go out for shopping or socializing. We would try walking her back into her seated circle of patients along with the group leader, but alas, within a minute or so of returning to the nurse’s station, I’d hear the door open again, and out would pop Betty.

She would walk up to someone, usually a male, and say, "Don't...you...ever!.... Don't...you…EVER!" as if someone had intruded on her chastity or offended her whole being. It was truly strange, not only because of the fervor with which she accused the hapless person (often me), but also in that her mood just a few minutes prior and after these episodes were often moments for her of light fluttering about the ward halls with smiles and humming.

But the strangest of her behaviors by far was that Betty would go into the recreation room, which had a piano in it, and she would play a single note, and then practice whole tone scales. Briefly, a whole tone scale is a scale made up of notes that are exactly two keys (including black and white) away from each other on the piano. With a little experimenting, one will find that there are only two whole tone scales in music. One can simply begin and end at different points on either of these scales. They are used often as fillers for augmented chords in jazz music. For Betty, what this meant that at some point in the past, she had been through some amount of musical training.

She would start at a high note, and then cascade down an octave, landing on the note she played on the piano. She would give this last note a lot of vocal vibrato and then would let it fade out. Her process had an unsettling quality to it, like that of an unknown voice heard far off in some vacant house in the fog.

These bouts of practice session would last all of about a minute, and then she would be on her way down the hall. It was as if she was trying to hold onto some part of herself by connecting with the piano several times per day. The distant, echoing tonality of her whole-tone scales still resound in my head even this many years on.

Oh, I have so many isolated moments in my head from those days!

Water Flowing Under...Ground

2011-11-26T23:16:00.000-08:00

I was driving down Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank the other day when a song came on the radio. It had been a while since I heard it, and it reminded me of a writing assignment I struggled with and had since always felt I had failed at.

One of my tasks in 11th grade English class was to take a popular song and deconstruct it, explaining it’s meaning in an essay. I chose, “Once In A Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads. I couldn’t have chosen a more difficult song for me, personally, since at that age, the meaning totally washed over me in my seventeen year-old teen-aged bubble brain.

One evening, I got to work on my assignment and sat in my room and playing the song over and over, appreciating the complicated rhythms and layered sounds. However, I found myself forever stumped with it’s meaning. “What is this? Water flowing…holding me down, finding myself here, and then there? I’m driving a really nice car, and then I’ve got a gorgeous girl? This doesn’t sound all that bad to me folks. Can I just write that in my essay?”

But some part of me knew that there was more to the song than was apparent on it’s lyrical surface. I was just naïve. So I called my mom into my room for help. It was one of those last steps I never liked to take; getting help from my mother. I liked to think that I could accomplish my studies on my own, as lacking and half-assed as they were at times. And calling her in to listen to a pop song; well, it was crossing a universal adolescent boundary that added unpleasantness to my already bruising ego. But I just couldn’t get past this task on my own.

My mom sat with me on the edge of my twin bed, and I played the song for her on vinyl while I held the album cover hoping she might glean some meaning out of what she was hearing. As new and exciting at the rhythms were to me, they were very confusing and distracting to her. My mother loved the fluidity of classical music, and this was its antithesis. Not even the straight on rock and roll I listened to day and night had acclimated her to this new wave sound. As the song ended, she gave me with a quizzical look and asked, “Would you play it again?”

As I put the needle onto the beginning of the track again, she took the album cover from me and inspected it as we listened through again. The lyrics were written on the album sleeve, so when the song ended, we read over them talked about what they could mean. I suppose that by that time, she had deciphered it’s meaning and was now helping me arrive at an answer for myself.

“Well, you hear him talking about getting all of these wonderful things, and he’s sort of questioning it all, isn’t he?” “Yeah,” I replied. “What could that mean?” She nudged. “I don’t know…he’s wondering how he got them?" God, I was just lame. I just wasn’t getting this. The idea of unattained dreams and misuse of one's own time sacrificed for materialism was just too far beyond my conception. She eventually led me to understand the idea of what David Byrne and Brian Eno had written, but honestly, I might as well have picked another song because I don't think at that age, I ever fully digested it all. I simply didn’t have the life experience nor the perspective to appreciate this artistic work. I don't actually recall, but I'm guessing my essay was mediocre at best.

It’s ironic in a way, because as I was driving the other day I though of how much I love music, writing and thinking about the meaning of the tunes I hear. I often ponder what the lyricist might have personally been going through when he penned a particular song. And I thought to myself, it would have been nice to have had that same assignment a few years on down the road.

Psychiatric Smoking Wards (an excerpt)

2011-11-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

To this day, I still don’t really remember why I left CPC Westwood Hospital. I know what I said was the reason. That I wanted to get more varied experience working in varying environments, and that a lower grade hospital would be good experience. I still had the goal of attaining an advanced degree. I thought I would either get a PhD, or a PsyD in psychology, and of course, the more experience I had in the interim, the better for applying to graduate schools. But something else was going on inside me. I had one of the cushiest positions at CPC Westwood that one with my experience could have being the favored Mental Health Worker with a 9am-5pm shift with nurses and doctors who enjoyed working with me. I think it had just gotten old after three years or so, and furthermore, I believe that there was the kernel of a thought that maybe I didn’t want to go into psychology after all.

I lived with a woman at that time that worked as an assistant at WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering). She did internal training for employees, and her office was in a loft space of the then WDI Library in Glendale. We lived in Venice together, and often, I would have to pick her up after work since we were sharing a car. While waiting for her, especially during winter afternoons, I could see into the windows of some one story bricked buildings along Flower Street. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at, but I could see painting backgrounds left in people’s work spaces. Some of the traditional background artists would leave their light boards on, which would illuminate towards the street and draw me to their windows like a gnat to fire. They were fascinatingly beautiful to me, and at some point Kristin, my girlfriend, told me that most of those buildings were for the Disney animated features. In hindsight, I think I was seeing some of the backgrounds for “Aladdin” and some of the visual development for “Lion King.”

All of this was brewing in my mind when I made the shift from CPC Westwood to the hospital in San Fernando. Almost like it was a way for me to ensure that I could pick Kristin up and be close to this little hub of creativity in the east Valley each day. My work at Disney, however, was still a couple years away. It’s interesting how a seed is planted and can take a while to flourish.

My work at San Fernando Community Hospital was the most dismal of all of the jobs I’ve ever had with the exception of the cleaning of chicken racks at 5:00am working at Hughes Market in Studio City. That will always be the bar I’ll strive to remain above (note my great aspirations). This hospital served people with psychiatric disorders who were brought in by the LAPD from the streets and from very low socioeconomic situations. With severe psychiatric patients, there is always the issue of hygiene for some portion of the psychiatric population. However, with this hospital, it was an issue with almost every patient. People, who could not care for themselves, were homeless, hooked on drugs, and just absolutely out of their minds. I saw police bring patients into CPC Westwood only on occasion. But with San Fernando, it was just round the clock, and more so at night. A pair of police would deliver someone, either in handcuffs, or holding him or her, and the intake person would hit the officers with the same set of paperwork every time. The intake nurse would also fill out her paperwork rapidly and get the person admitted within fifteen or twenty minutes. It was a constantly rolling intake door.

The patients would be delivered into a kind of new arrival wing. I only once or twice had to work that wing. It was the hardest because at that point in the process, no one wants to be there; not the patients, and not the workers due to the volatility. Making a person feel at home in a room with a twin sized bed that has plastic fitted sheets, one regular sheet, one pillow with a pillow case, and one seemingly always rust red-colored blanket is almost impossible. And a few who were out of control needed restraining here and there. One worker actually got his finger bitten off at CPC Westwood and then subsequently committed suicide. So I was very careful during take downs to keep clear of anything that might cause me to regret having taken the position. There was one very strong patient who needed to be restrained in an isolation room. It was the only time that I can remember really feeling afraid of having to go in there. I quickly yelled to the nurses to call Howard and Dan in immediately. They were the two largest psych techs on the premises with builds like big bowling balls. I waited outside the isolation room for their arrival and let them go in like storm troopers, while I basically mimed helping with the assist. I’m still content with myself that I did that! I’d rather have felt slightly impotent rather than have lost a digit. I suppose that can apply to more than one situation.

My job was to work as a Psych Tech on a locked unit that had some benefits for the patients. The unit was shaped like a “T,” with the nursing station being at the head of that T, and had a television recreation room, and also an outdoor patio for the patients (and staff) who liked to smoke outdoors. I must point out here that the TV-rec room was also okay'd for smoking. And so was, to my extreme discontent, the nursing station, where tenured overripe old nurses with raspy voices puffing their cigarettes like chimneys. They had the practice of writing in their patient logs with one had while their free hand fed their faces an endless chain of tobacco sticks. All three hallways, even those parts not particularly near the TV room or the nursing station, were filled with a light, constricting fog of smoke. Had there been laser pens at the time, I would have put on an ‘80’s light show for everyone in that thick haze. Kristin used to smell the stench on me as soon as I walked in the door of our Venice loft. It would radiate loudly from my clothes and hair and waft along behind me as I moved from room to room.

There was a cute worker with a very attractive body at the hospital, Pam, who constantly flirted with me. She lived with her boyfriend, as I did with Kristin. Yet, everyday, she would say things to other workers in front of all of us such as, “I think I’ll take Fred out to my car and do him now.” That brought some levity to my work day. Pam would trot around the unit in tight jeans and loose tops constantly seeking my attention. She even trapped me in the medical supply closet one day, asking me how I thought she looked in her Halloween costume, which was basically a black leotard, a skirt and some ears. I said, “Yeah, it looks good,” the moment so full of sexual tension that I was unable to add anything else to my sentence. The hospital was lax regarding professionalism in many ways.

But one day, I’d had enough of the smoke. I was about half way through my shift, maybe about 1:00pm, when I walked off of the locked ward and over to human resources. The H.R. person was posted in a rickety trailer with an unbalanced, soggy carpeted ramp leading up to it’s front door, in which, guess what….the H.R. person could smoke too!

I walked up to her desk, as if I were in a scene spewing out bad dialogue from a B-movie about some disgruntled blue-collar industrial worker, put my pager down and said, “I’m quitting as of today, and as of now.” When I explained to her that the smoke injesting was just too much for me, she said, “Well, I know it can be an issue for some people, the smoking. But what is the real problem. Is someone harassing you in any way?” I flashed to Pam in my mind, thinking that maybe this could be a great opportunity put in an official request for Pam to harass me more frequently each day. But I said, no. It was only the smoking, and that there had been an L.A. Times article recently that pointed out how second hand smoke was just not good for people. She seemed perplexed that someone would leave just because of the smoke. I had no desire to educate her more on the matter or on my discomfort, so I just left and took a bus down San Fernando Boulevard to Glendale since Kristin had our car that day and waited for her to get off of work. The hospital called me on three separate occasions after my abrupt walkout to ask me to fill in for various shifts.

When Kristin emerged from the WDI building into the parking lot, I declared to her, “I just quit my job.” She was shocked, I could see it in her face, but to her credit, and especially during a time when neither of us had been making much money, she immediately replied, “Good for you! I know you hated that place. Good for you! You’ll find the right thing.”

"The Inmate-Out Experiment" - A Short Story by Fred Herrman

2011-10-23T01:12:00.000-07:00

Someone recently tipped me off to a fascinating account, that when I first learned about it, I could not believe it actually happened. Yet, I’m sure in the history of the world, this would pale to some of the things that were brought upon people. But I’d say that this is definitely one for the books.

I was on a hike with several other people as part of my friends’ work-related affair. It was a kind of bonding on a weekend type of experience for their company, and I tagged along. We were hiking in the Sierra foothills just outside of Big Pine for the day, and stories were swapped back and forth about places each of us had been to as well as other life experiences. One of the guys on the hike, who happened to settle into our hiking subgroup, was an ex-military person who was well spoken and descriptive in his accounts. I must say that I found his varied and detailed experiences in life to be fascinating at times. His name, I’ll refer to here, as Richard.

Richard is in his early fifties. He served in several branches of the military, spending most of the latter part of his career in various special ops. As he talked, I found I could tell that he was self-editing some of the details, which likely would have revealed things that the general public was not supposed to be privy to. Richard was still in great shape; slim and athletic, military style haircut and full of the type of reserved energy one might expect in a person with years of special-forces experience.

Towards the end of the afternoon, I suppose with everyone was well oiled with stories and more comfortable with one-another, Richard told us of a project, which was really an experiment, that captivated everyone that day. He said that, unlike some of the other stories that we would have no way of checking into, any citizen with some effort could research this one. This was because the information about this account had been made available through the Freedom of Information Act (2002 Amendment).

It was called the “Inmate-Out Experiment” as it was referred to by the few sociologists who knew about it at the time was one of many such experiments that crossed the line into the inhumane. When Richard finished with the story, I was so arrested by the account that I pledged to myself that I would see if I could actually verify it. I did some research, and over time, I was able to access the government files that contained the information about he project.

There has always been some question about how much criminals can be rehabilitated, and more than that, what exactly is baked into their general abilities from either genetic predispositions, or from social circumstances. It’s the aged old nature versus nurture question. Apparently in the late 1970’s, some entity of the government took on social science experiments and wanted to test the ability of a repeat criminal, or a “lifer” as they’re sometimes called, to survive on their own.

The files don’t reveal the exact entity of the government that backed the experiment, but the information does clearly indicate that this experiment did occur, and that it was officially referred to as “Deep Drop.” “The Inmate-Out Experiment,” which was how Richard referred to the project, was apparently the familiar name given to “Deep Drop” by people who were aware of it. It’s likely that those not directly associated with the task were never aware of the official name at the time. I have posted the front page of the file, along with Arthur’s notes, which are a part of that same file. To post the whole file itself would be too voluminous and possibly illegal, so I’ll spare myself the possible consequences.

The file notes state that on Wednesday, October 14th of 1981, an undisclosed amount of money was set aside to secure a “lifer” named Arturo (Arthur) Davis from Louisiana State Penitentiary, a maximum security prison in mid-eastern Louisiana. Arthur Davis, a thirty-six year old man, was in prison on three counts of murder in the first degree from seventeen years prior. He was a very large man of color who had behavioral problems inside the prison walls. That is the extent of the government files’ description of him. A lot of the file has its lines blackened for the portion of it that relates to Mr. Davis’ information. I find this strange given that they reveal his full name in the file; a name that I was able to verify through other unrelated West Feliciana Parish records. We will call him by his first name, Arthur, from here on.

But further checking into Fulton County records reveals that Arthur was of mixed background. His mother was Puerto Rican, and his father was African American. He had a very big build at six feet, two inches and a weight of about 270 pounds. The county records indicate that Arthur had been in the county system for many years dating back into childhood. There were many interventions that took place early in his life by police and by the department of child welfare.

Arthur had lived in Atlanta as a young child. His father was out of the picture at about age two. Arthur’s mother, who was unemployed, got with a man who did small-time hustling on the streets of Atlanta and was in and out of prison. Arthur stopped going to school at age eight and started getting into some trouble. The county records don’t elaborate on this but do say that Arthur had an active juvenile record in Atlanta extending over a span of four years. At age nine, Arthur went to Baton Rouge to live with his maternal grandmother, who was ill and mostly bedridden.

Arthur’s upbringing in Baton Rouge was dismal to say the least. He was never enrolled back in school and, instead, found some odd jobs here and there clearing brush from people’s yards, shining shoes and what naught. According to Parish of East Baton Rouge records, by the time Arthur was in his early teens, he had been charged with several breaking and entering incidents, three robberies, two assault and batteries, and was the center of one arson investigation that was never substantiated.

At age nineteen, Arthur was believed to be the lead in a Colonel Sanders Chicken robbery that ended with five of the store workers shot dead. Arthur was proven to be one of the two shooters. The other shooter was also incarcerated, but for only sixteen years. Since Arthur was also shown to have planned the heist gone wrong, and since it was also proven that Arthur had premeditated the killing of store employees in order to facilitate the robbery, on June 4th, 1964, Arthur Davis was sentenced to three life terms in prison at the Louisiana State Penitentiary with no possibility of parole.

The government file states that ten candidates were selected as possible experiment subjects. However, it does not clarify how he was ultimately chosen. Arthur was released by the Louisiana State Penitentiary into the custody of the United States Military on November 20th, 1981 at 21:03 (9:03pm). He was transported by a military Sikorsky-MH 53 helicopter to Fort Polk, Louisiana where he was to be given a medical examination. The file states that Arthur was confused while leaving the Penitentiary since nothing had been explained to him. One of the briefs in the file describes him as “…seemed alleviated in spirit through about half of the transport, but became agitated when after asking where he was going several times, he was given no answer.”

Though he was handcuffed and strapped, a Second Lieutenant on board the transport ended up injecting Arthur with a sedative to calm him down. Due to his great size, safety was a concern should he get out of control in the helicopter transport. This was definitely not out of the question. Arthur had attacked inmates during prison rivalries resulting in hospitalization for several of them. He had also attacked several correctional officers during his incarceration, which led to his sporadic isolation terms.

Arthur had tried to take on a few jobs in prison, but with less than moderate success. He most likely had what would now be referred to as ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactive Disorder) and simply found it difficult stay on task for anything. This trait led to successive failures in the ability to follow prison rules, be socially appropriate, or to make any meaningful friendships.

Arthur stayed at Fort Polk in lock up following his medical exam for four days. During the medical exam, a transponder was inserted into the back of one of Arthur’s molars, the reason for which will become apparent later in this account. There is nothing in the federal files that indicates Arthur was told why this was happening to him; simply that he was being moved to a new location in the southwest, and that he needed to stay quiet and do what the military personnel say. It brings into some question Arthur’s clear ability to reason if, as the files indicate, he did not resist anyone while being kept at Fort Polk. One would think that any person, not understanding being brought into military custody and being transported, would go nearly out of their mind with both fear and anger of not knowing about their situation. With the exception of the helicopter transport to Fort Polk, there is nothing that indicates that the military personnel ever had to contend with any other major outbursts from Arthur.

Up to this point, the government files describe the events above as a sort of written prelude or explanation to what was to come. On the next page the file has a header on the left margin that says,

“DEEP DROP - 3NP77A”

This header brings us into the actual notes of the experiment as it proceeded.

Initially, making the connection of “The Inmate-Out Experiment” with the project name, “Deep Drop,” was a challenge. The acquaintance I had met on the hike wasn’t aware of its official name, but luckily in my search, I was given some information about where to look for such a project. Once I got a hold of some government abstracts, the story and time frame matched perfectly with the bits that Richard had related to us. So, after filling out a lot of forms as is customary for ordering items as part of the Freedom of Information Act, I was given access to a photocopy of the government documents on, “Deep Drop.” I was told that I was exactly the fourteenth person to access these files. The story is still not widely known.

This account, hidden for so many years, yielded the basic information to me, for which I could go research peripheral supporting facts. From here on out is the actual social experiment that was performed and funded by the United States government.

At 07:00 on Thursday, November 26th, 1981, military personnel arrived at Arthur Davis’ holding cell and took him onto a Boing C-17 Globemaster III military cargo aircraft. He was seated in a specially made jumper seat that was fitted with restraining belts. There were five personnel on board; two pilots, and three military officers. The explanation give to Arthur of where he was headed was not factual. He was not going to another prison in the southwest, but, rather, was headed elsewhere.

For a short time during the beginning of the civil war in Rwanda, the United States started to make supply drops for the local people. They were later halted well before the genocide began three years later. For cost purposes, the U.S. Government piggybacked Arthur’s experiment onto one of these missions. The C-17 transport that Arthur was on flew from Louisiana to Recife, Brazil with a four-hour rest stop, then on to Rwanda. Arthur was given sedatives in his food and slept for most of the way; not realizing how many hours had passed.

At 7:15am on Friday, November 27th, the C-17 Cargo transport landed in Rwanda, Kigali in the great continent of Africa. Arthur was out cold. Supplies were dropped off for assistance to the local people, and Arthur Davis was taken off of the transport and then loaded by stretcher onto a smaller local military plane that the U.S. had pre-arranged. The file is not clear on this point, but it looks as if only two of the military officers got onto this airplane with one pilot. They flew about 1200 miles north-northwest to an old dirt airstrip in the Kanem region of Chad, northwest of Batha, and just south of the boarder of Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti. When the plane landed, a helicopter, which had also been commissioned by the U.S. military, was waiting. Arthur, still sedated and asleep, was loaded onto the helicopter and flown about sixty miles north of a point equidistant between the towns of Koro Toro and Mao, which are themselves about a hundred miles from one another.

At 10:30am local time, Arthur was taken out of the helicopter, stripped of clothes, and left with a shoulder satchel made of burlap that contained inside it twenty beef jerky sticks, a notebook pad and several pens. Two gallons of water, in the fashion of clear plastic milk style jugs, were also left as his side. Arthur was laid under the shade of some low shrubs, and then the military personnel got into the helicopter and immediately took off.

One has to assume that when Arthur woke up from his sedation in the shadow of a bush, naked and without any belongings, he must have been completely baffled as to what had happened to him. There is obviously nothing recorded about this, but what would someone, who had served seventeen years of a life sentence in a penitentiary, who thought he was being transported somewhere, and left out literally in the middle of no-where have thought?

Had there been some sort of accident during his transport? Was there wreckage to be found around him? And why was he asleep? And probably the most important question; where was he? He had been told that he was flying west, so perhaps there had been a mishap and he was somewhere in the Arizona or Utah deserts?

But instead, Arthur was in the middle of a land that had a rich history dating back to 700 BC. The Kanem region of Chad had several times over been an empire whose prosperous trading routes brought items and slaves from the fertile areas in the Southwest of Chad up through the Sahara desert through to the Mediterranean. The Kanem Empire either was created by natives of the land, or it may have been developed by people immigrating into Kanem as the former Assyrian Empire crumbled. It became a hot seat for territorial and religious conflicts for hundreds of years, which included the introduction of and opposition to Islamism into an area that long held traditional religious beliefs. It was inhabited by the Sayfuwa dynasty, and then later, the site of a mass exile to Bornu.

Seasonal temperatures range from just above freezing during cold winter nights to one hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. Those few settlements in the area were third world in nature to be sure, and there were also nomadic bands of people who survived in different areas during the seasonal cycles. There was often a dull haze to the air; the residue of thousands of small ground cooking pots from hundreds of miles away mixed into the air like drops of milk into a water bowl. There were sounds of small animals scurrying about and exotic birds calling to one-another. This was the kind of endless open space that makes one aware that one is in God’s realm. It was a kind of flat and wild land that one doesn’t find in the Americas. Arthur wasn’t in Arizona.

As the day progressed, it’s hard not to think that Arthur started to feel a sense of panic, mixed with an epiphany that he was free, if only temporarily. His disorientation must have been arresting, and yet the sense that he could go look for an answer or for help in any direction he chose must have felt liberating. He might also just sit and wait where he was. It was up to him and no one else in those moments. And in a philosophical sense, he was free in spirit to determine his own immediate destiny; a taste of existential freedom he had not experience in a very long time. This must have been almost startling to a man whose world for twenty-three hours per day was a six by eight foot, metal barred cinder block cell.

And as the sedatives that he had been given during transport finally fled his system, his senses must have opened back up to him. He was naked to the air and feeling the course desert sand on his feet. Clean, arid air filled his lungs as never been felt before. He could hear the calls of birds all around, chattering back and forth, and he saw a flat land in every direction. He smelled the aromas of deciduous trees, tall grasses and marshes carried in from the southern breeze, hinting to his olfaction a lost exotic life just out of his grasp.

Arthur stayed at his drop off spot all of that day and into the second morning of November 28, 1981. He may have thought that any decision he made, officials would ultimately intercept him, and that he’d better just stay put. We know specifically of his movements from transcriptions of the transponder that the military hospital inserted into his mouth during his medical stopover at Fort Polk.

This transponder, marked in the files as “KDT-7901,” was something presumably commissioned out by the government to a specialty company. In the 1980’s, electronics and technology in general were going through a rapid acceleration in their ability to be smaller and more effective. There were still many Aerospace firms about such as General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Many of these companies were in the satellite technology business and refined ability to track things on planet Earth.

The way this transponder worked was that it would send out a very high frequency pulse every fifteen minutes, which would be detected by satellite. The transponder’s location was then calculated by a crude form of triangulation using just one satellite at a time, and relayed to ground operations in the States where Arthur’s movements would be mapped and recorded. The transponder’s location could be detected within one-eighth of a mile distances, or about 200 meters. At the time, this was considered very accurate in comparison to the quality of tracking that was available just two or three year’s prior. Now, of course, with advanced global positioning satellite triangulation, one-eighth of a mile would be considered very low accuracy.

The government account of Arthur’s activities pieced together from three sources; Arthur’s transponder, general knowledge of western Kanem’s topography, and from Arthur’s notebook.

The temperatures in Chad, though they can very greatly, are not so different from those in the United States in November. There will be hot days, in the 80’s, and occasional storms will start rolling through. There is desert to the north of Koro Toro, and there is plush greenery well to the south of Mao, around Lake Chad.

These areas may mean nothing to the average American reader, and in fact, would look like nothing but open space if one visited. But to the bands of people living and trading in Chad, they are familiar. Most people have heard of the northern Russians who can tell where they are in the most desolate, flat, snow covered areas of Siberia. A local tends to know their surroundings with surprising precision.

To the west of Chad is Niger, to the north, Libya, and to the east, continuing clock-wise, is Sudan, then current day Central African Republic, then, rounding the south east is Cameroon and Nigeria.

That first night must have been very strange for Arthur. As the sun sank down past the flat horizon, a dark night set upon him. There was a new moon, so his ability to see beyond general shapes in his new surrounds was likely very limited. What he did hear were the movement and calls of very small animals and birds. There are many types of rodents in this part of Chad as well as a good segment of the bird population that does the majority of their hunting in the darkness. The sand became cold and damp, and any vague sense of orientation that Arthur may have thought he had his first day was lost on him that night.

The terrain is made up of some low grasses and a mixture of flatland and very small hills; more like slight aberrations in the sand. If one were to wander a few hundred miles south of where Arthur was left, then one would begin to find larger trees and increasingly jagged country. And going north, one moves swiftly, and without any geographic knowledge, lethally into the Sahara Desert.

The first indication of Arthur’s movement from his drop-off spot is at 7:15am on Saturday, November 28th, 1981. He was tracked moving due north. This was an interesting choice in that about two hundred miles in front of him was once a very large lake, Erg du Djourab, but is now the site of endless sand dunes with a very small lake that is only sometimes existent depending on the time of year.

With two ten-pound gallons of water that he was presumably carrying with him on top of his body weight, Arthur was carrying a good 290 pounds around the Sudan. He was tracked for two days heading north, the equivalent of 45 miles, much of which he did into the evening and in the early morning. He must have surmised quickly that setting out on foot during the high sun hours was not particularly efficient. But again, the question on his mind, the most predominant of them anyways, must have been, “Where am I?” One would think that if one starts walking in any direction in the middle of Arizona or Utah or New Mexico, that at some point one would happen upon a road, railroad tracks, or some remote campground. But alas, Arthur was destined never to see any of these things because he was in the middle of the African desert.

On Monday, November 30th, 1981, Arthur’s direction changed. It was first thing in the morning, at about 5:30am that his signal was detected moving to the southeast. He had apparently given his direction a thought over night, and then made a decision in the morning to change directions. The first thought that comes to mind is that Arthur became disoriented, or perhaps in trying to follow small prey to eat, had turned himself around. His first movement of the morning was at a sever angle to the direction he had been leading himself up to now. And in looking at the government file addendum, it becomes apparent that this change was deliberate.

And this is now where the notebook that Arthur was provided starts to come into play. Part of the government files on this project is an addendum set, labeled, “Subject Notes.” The addendum consists of photocopied pages of Arthur’s notebook. Arthur, after some time, found some sort of relief or self-assistance in his own mind to start making notations at this point. And it is also clear that this is part of what the government experiment hoped that he would do.

The description in the government files says simply that the notebook was a “black hardcover bound notebook, wide ruled.” So one assumes that the style of the notebook was chosen deliberately to last as long as possible. A flimsy, soft-cover notebook would have likely not survived the ordeal. It is also assumed that whatever writing was expected of Arthur, it would probably happen during the morning or daytime since he had no light source.

On the first page of the notebook is a crude line that starts from the left and moves up in a straight line, which then makes a jagged angle down to the right, forming an interior angle of about thirty degrees. This was indeed an effort on the part of Arthur to make his first map. It’s likely that he did so when he changed his direction that day to keep track of where he had been. The line going up the page is straight, solid, and looks hastily drawn, rather than a continually extended effort over the last couple of days to track his whereabouts.

This makes sense in that when he first started out, he must have thought that it wouldn’t be long until he came upon some help or something recognizable. When he make his remarkable directional change on November 30th, there must have been a realization in him that he was headed to an area that would not be of any help, and that he wasn’t about to find people going north. He then decided he should start keeping some kind of track of where he had been with the simplest of drawing skills.

And what could Arthur have been thinking at this point? Had he actually been on his way to another prison in the western United States? Why was a military escort and visit to a military base necessary in his case? Was that normal procedure when moving from prison to prison? No other inmates who had moved had ever talked about such a transition.

It’s hard to estimate Arthur’s reasoning skills and critical thinking ability. He had obviously made some serious errors in judgment in his life to end up as a “lifer” in a state penitentiary. Yet, out there in the Sudan, it would be simply up to primal instinct. What was going through his mind at that point? Was he happy at all to seemingly be free? Did he think he was escaping from a mishap? Or was he just trying to find help? To me, the map, as simple as it is, seems to indicate to me that he had started to become concerned. For, why would one start to track one’s steps but to avoid repeating them again for fear of running out of time?

Arthur continued on a south-southeast direction for the next three days. He was undoubtedly sleeping during the mid day, probably in the shade of bushes he came upon, and then traveling during the cooler parts of the day. The next entry in his notebook, which he has started to separate by a simple horizontal line, consists of drawings, which looks like small rodents. There are several rodents that are depicted. He must have been keeping track of some of the prey he was surviving on. The drawings either indicated that he was counting the rodents that he had killed and eaten, or that he was trying to differentiate them in some way. In the past few days, Arthur must have had to make a decision he never thought he would make. Probably on day four, about the time that he made his change in direction, he realized that he was hungry, had run out of his beef jerky sticks, and had to find food for himself. How had he done this? Likely with a simple stick from one of the bushes or shrubs. He might have sharpened one end and gone after one of the rodents he had been seeing along his way.

Arthur made his way in this same south-southeasterly direction for the next seven days and is tracked by the transponder to be averaging about 14 miles per day. We have to keep in mind that none of his notebook journal entries are dated simply because Arthur probably had no fixed date of when he left the Louisiana State Penitentiary since it was all so unexpected to him. However, there are certain entries in his notes that indicate generally where he was at the time.

His next entry contains his first written words. “Nothing here. I can’t find no-one.” It seems to have become clearer to Arthur at this point, if it hadn’t already, that he was really in a serious situation. For him to write these words must indicate some amount of anxiety in him, and rightly so. He was somewhere between his turnaround point, and a river to the south-southwest by about one hundred ten miles.

His transponder indicated steady movement for the first three days, and then became more haphazard both with regard to pacing and direction. As he headed south-southeast, he was crossing a pretty well defined change in climate and surroundings. From his most northern point southwards took him from a very sandy and arid area, into what was becoming more green and populated with larger trees. This meant shade and the possibility of more water. It can only be assumed that, though he was smart enough at this point to ration his water, he must have been getting low on water by now. Seeing more green to anyone, including someone who has spent the majority of his adult life in prison, still must have indicated that he was on the right path so to speak. Though his pacing would indicate otherwise. Fatigue had likely set in on him.

The next entry of Arthur’s was on about the 4th day after his turn around, so say, December 4th. We can be pretty sure of this because of the event that occurred as written in his notebook. His next entry says, “Hyenas attacked me when sleeping. Fought off with walking stick. Left side of my ribs is bloody cut. Using bark and grass to put on it. Weren’t no wild dogs. Hyenas!” Then, below this entry is a crude self-drawing of Arthur indicating where his wound was inflicted during the attack.

The area that Arthur had arrived in was slightly more fertile and had a higher population of mammals, several of which one would not want to come into contact with at anytime, let alone during one’s sleep. Aside from hyenas, there are also wild dogs, leopards, cheetahs, and lions, to name a few of the monsters of one’s childhood dreams that actually live and feed out there. Most often, these carnivores tend to stay closer to water sources than where it is presumed that Arthur was attacked, but they occasionally take a nomadic-like sweep out of their normal range to hunt, mark, and expand their territory.

It goes without saying how incredibly lucky Arthur was not to have been killed by the hyenas that night. He either got himself in the right stance against the hyenas, or the may not have been more than two or three in number, or perhaps they weren’t really looking for prey but were making clear to Arthur their territory. Another helpful factor was that by December 4th, probably around the night he was attacked, there was a new (quarter) moon out, which meant that he could see better in the nighttime than, say, just a few days before. Having a better sense of what was around him may have helped him fight for his life. He was lucky to be alive to be able to write notes about it.

The question would now become how seriously Arthur was injured. He stayed put for most of this day according to the transponder data. He was probably trying to rest his body and get a sense of how injured he was from fending off the hyenas.

Let it also be noted that this entry was the longest so far, and to me, indicates that Arthur wanted to keep some record of what had happened to him, presumably, in case he were to die out there. The combination of a longer entry and a drawn picture of the location of his wound seems as though he’s documenting this for an outsider to read at some point, rather than for his own review.

Surprisingly, his pacing increased after this incident. He continued on his way on December 5th, 1981 in exactly the overall direction he had been traveling. It may be that once he survived an attack like this, he thought that his luck out there was close to running out and that he needed to find someone as quickly as possible.

His transponder went on clocking his south-southwestward movement consistently through to December 7th, 1981, the seventh day after his turn around point, at which time, we can see on a map that he reached the Babr el Ghazal Soro River. He had completed an over one hundred-mile trek from his most northern turnaround point, and one hundred-fifty mile trek from where he had been abandoned.

His next entry is, “Water – river – I fill up my jugs with water.” He is obviously relieved to have found water in this vast land. The Babr el Ghazal Soro River is a water source that flows hundreds of miles in a north-northeast direction and has shallow banks. If one were walking from the desert to this river, one would know that they were getting close to water because there is greenery, not plush, but green enough as compared to what Arthur had been through for the past seven days to indicate that the plants one would see were being fed by a plentiful supply of water. Crossing the river is rather easy as well, which opened up his options in his search for prey.

Arthur made another entry, “Food supply.” He has obviously found some more sources of food, and different from whatever he has been eating during most of his trip to indicate this in his notes. I would assume that Arthur was also able to wash his wound in the river, and perhaps find a way to redress it given the increased types of vegetation around him. It would seem that Arthur has found a place to thrive. His transponder indicates that he stayed at the river for two days.

This is where this story takes a turn. Arthur’s next entry is, “Woman washing basket at sunset.” That’s it, nothing else about this vision that he must have witnessed in the late afternoon. Neither is there any indication that Arthur ever made any further attempt to investigate the first person he’s seen in ten days. One has to wonder if Arthur was somehow delusional. Did he actually see a woman, or did he imagine it.

And I must insert my opinion here that it sure would have been more helpful for us, the readers of this account, if the subject of this experiment had been more able or willing to his about personal experiences. His notes give us but the bare minimum of his actions with no descriptions, and for this part of the account, no insight into what he was basing his decisions on. And so we are left with a void in understanding, and perhaps as a result, a void in greater sympathy for his situation.

Arthur’s next entry into his journal is, “Supplies filled, moving on forward.” His transponder shows Arthur moving slightly away, but skirting the Babr el Ghazal Soro River on December 9th, 1981. He stays near the greenery of the river for about four hours, and then turns southwestward, moving away from the river.

And before I give you my added opinion on Arthur’s reality check, I have to let you in on some information, which Arthur was not privy to, but which most people would assume true. As one moves in either direction along the Babr el Ghazal Soro River, one will find many, as in, hundreds, of small groups of people who live along the river. It would be akin to how a small highway in the southwestern United States would have little town sprinkled along its route. Now, Arthur may have happened to land at just a spot where there were none of these small bands of people, but in one’s right mind, one would tend to stay along a river for the possibility of human contact since it’s a natural resource. Interaction with some of these bands can be dangerous as some of them are indeed not welcoming to outsiders. Several explores have been killed over the millennia. However, at that point, Arthur would not have had any reason to think that anyone he came across would be unfriendly. Again, he still had no idea he was in Africa.

So, I have to believe, that given his judgment with moving away from a natural water and people source, and in his failing to investigate the women he saw, that Arthur was just not in his right mind. Perhaps his injuries sustained during the Hyena attack were more serious than he wanted to note in his book, or maybe just didn’t want to focus his efforts on anything but the most minimalist of writing. Another possibility is that he thought the river ended. There are areas where the Babr el Ghazal Soro River seems to dry up, but then recedes underground for a while, and then continues hardily on it’s way. But the peculiar thing about Arthur’s decision is that the greenery near the river never terminates nor fades out. So there is always some indication that there is water nearby. We’ll never know.

Arthur continues to move in a southwesterly direction. The notable thing about his new choice in direction is that between two hundred-fifty and three hundred miles in front of him is Lake Chad. This is the largest lake in the area and is also populated by about four hundred thousand people. Lake Chad is actually in the Chad region of Lac, and also boarders the region of Hadjer-Lamis, as well as the countries of Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. It is a very large lake. But it is also very, very far away from where Arthur was at that moment.

By December 11th, probably two days after Arthur left the river, there is a full moon, which means that he is able to see well at night. In fact, his transponder shows him doing more nocturnal traveling than he had before. The terrain was not quite as flat in this southwesterly direction. There were areas of rifts in the land with upturned rocks and canyons along his way, some of which are hidden in tall grass and are difficult to navigate. One would have come upon no dirt roads or otherwise in western Chad during these years.

Arthur continued in his new direction for three days. His next entry is, “Got onto more rocks and watching where the sun goes. It was very red colored sunset” Under this entry, he has drawn a crude, but somewhat accurate map of where his trip has taken him thus far. It shows his first jaunt north, then his hairpin-like change in direction to the south-southeast to the river, then his next change toward Lake Chad where he has drawn his path heading into rocks. The only inaccuracy in this crude map is that Arthur indicates the river as being close to his latest direction, which it isn’t. He has veered sharply away from the river and is probably thirty or forty miles away from any water source as this point. This may have been one flaw in Arthur’s thinking; that he was still somehow skirting the river, and that it was still accessible to him.

I think that what he was writing about on this entry was that he had gotten a little unsure of his direction when he came upon the many areas of large rocks that dot the vast land, and so once he was up on one of these promenades, he tried to observe where the sun was traveling since this seemed to be his basis of self-navigation. And while in this process, he happened to see an unexpected magnificent sunset.

In the very early hours of December 14th, 1981, Arthur’s transponder stopped moving. And to describe what’s likely to have occurred to halt his movement any further forward, we look back to his notes, for though sparse, they tell the story clearly.

Arthur’s next entry is, “Lots of bushes, rocks and canyons here.” This is followed by, “Fell, trying to move at night.” This entry is the first of which are not on the ruled lines. This means to me that he wrote this at night when he couldn’t see, or when he was less than fully capable of writing due to an injury; probably both. This is followed by, “Ankle broken?” What an ordeal this must have been; trying to navigate a problematic area at night, and then to fall and break a limb. Apparently, he had become comfortable traveling at night with the recent full moonlight. However, Arthur failed to change his strategy as headed into increasingly jagged terrain. The moon had moved into its last quarter reducing his visibility and making any misstep carry the potential for serious consequences.

Arthur’s next entry is “The stars are all over the sky.” I suppose from his vantage point, being injured and having nothing better to do, he gazed up and the ink sky and took in all of that great blackness, and the dimensionality of the millions of stars sitting above him during those moments, and he felt awe. I’d like to think that, anyways. A kind of celestial gift for all that he had been through, both in his life, and during this journey. Maybe for once he had a sense of internal peace.

His last entry is, “Lions.” Nothing more.

The government file concludes with some facts. Arthur had traveled two hundred sixty-eight miles in seventeen days, averaging a bit more than 15 miles per day, in the middle of the African Sudan. His transponder stopped moving on December 14th, 1981, and his remains were later recovered on January 11th, 1982 by a military team. It was clear when they found what was left of him that he had been attacked and eaten by African lions just where he lay, and had probably seen his killers face to face by the dim light of the moon’s last quarter. His satchel was partially shredded, and it’s contents strewn among the rocks and crevices within about fifty feet to the northwest of where he lay. The map to the lower left show his starting point in green, his route in blue, and his final resting place in red.

And so what are we left with to make of this? Why did the government set out to perform such an experiment on a human being? And more specifically, why was Arthur, or someone like Arthur chosen? One might naturally assume that they chose someone who had no real life left to speak of, unless one is open to calling living in a cell for the rest of his days, a life. The reason for the experiment, and the decision of how a subject was chosen are not put forth in any of the files. For those who become aware of this project, there will be conjecture and speculation. Maybe we can pose our own questions both as to the purpose of the experiment, and as to what Arthur went through.

How would a lifer in a penitentiary react when dropped into the middle of Africa with nothing but a very few essentials? I suppose that was the experiment. It was about shocking transition, blatant abandonment, and finally, about pure survival.

What does something like that do to the psyche? What does it do to basic decision-making? Did this man, who all he had to look forward to for the rest of his days being a cell block, find liberty in being in the great outdoors? Did he find it imprisoning not to know what was going on and what lay ahead for his future? How did he physically get along being such a large man in such arid and bleak surroundings, and with so far to go? The most exercise Arthur got was probably playing a short game of basketball in the recreational area or lifting some weights. But Arthur never engaged in any kind of sustained activities.

Did Arthur feel like he knew himself enough to rely on himself to survive? Or did he feel at a loss? Betrayed by his own psychological make up and upbringing and not able to reason his way out of his predicament; not to be able to count on his own resources to survive.

What was it like for Arthur to even begin to conceive that the animals that night could be Hyenas, let alone having to fight them for his life? What really did he make of the vision of a beautiful African woman washing her basket by the river? Did he in that moment start to conceive that he might be in a very different land? Perhaps that’s why he abandoned the river the next day. It was his way of denying the truly exotic nature of what he had just witnessed a day before, and a sense of place that he was beginning to perceive. And what would have happened had he found a large band of people. How would he have communicated his need to find out where he was to them?

And finally, what was on his mind the last few days? Where did he think he was heading? When he saw that beautiful red sunset, what did he feel like inside? Was he glad to be lost rather than locked up? Or did he somehow desire the familiar penitentiary life? Had prison really become home for him? And finally, did he know he was going to die when he heard the lions? He must have in my opinion. Injured and disabled; there was just no other way. I’m sure you, the reader, can think of more questions to be posed that I haven’t.

I hope that Arthur was satisfied that he successfully survived as long as he had. He had lived a hard life as a child, and then unrespectable and even despicable life as an adult. And yet, there must have been a moment when he realized all of that was behind him. Maybe he was able to encapsulate this journey as a separate experience from everything else and judge his conduct and effort on their own merits. Seventeen days is not a particularly long time to survive, but then again, Arthur had not been equipped either, physically, nor psychologically, for the journey he was to take. Not knowing anything about where one has landed is a serious handicap, especially in the wilds of Africa.

I want to point out once again that Arthur was one half African-American. He was partially descended from this continent that he tried to survive in, but was a complete stranger to it and was ultimately unable to survive in it. I find that irony something that is hard to wrap my head around. It signifies to me that all of us, who were once part of a land weaved in our heritage, have become so removed from that aspect of ourselves that we may not even have the basic instinct to survive in such a place anymore.

As I close the government file along with the addendum of Arthur’s notes, I ask myself, somewhat self-consciously, as cruel as this government experiment that was brought upon Arthur was, in the end, and on a spiritual level, was it better for Arthur to have endured this ordeal or not? The fact that I can’t give a certain answer gives me pause.

Pizza Fly-By

2011-09-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

During my first couple years at USC, I had found work in the summertime at a Dominos Pizza in Sherman Oaks. The store was on Woodman Avenue and Moorpark Street in a little strip mall. The store was actually hidden behind another building and didn’t have much street exposure. I always found that odd that a company as large as Dominos, even at that time, would have selected such a low profile location to set up a store in one of the wealthier communities of the Southland. It has since moved to Van Nuys Boulevard in a much higher area of exposure.

This store had a motley crew of workers. The owner at the time was constantly doing cocaine either in the manager’s office, or just off site. He would come in completely blitzed, full of energy and with a faux sense of camaraderie with all of his workers, including me. I don’t recall him ever offering me any cocaine, but I’m sure that if I had ever been interested in that sort of thing, it would have been easily available. This time was smack in the middle of the 1980's when everyone seemed to be 24-hour non-stop partying.

There was also a manager who worked there that was straight out of the movie, “Dazed and Confused.” He wore corduroy pants at a time when no one did anymore and was always under the influence of pot at work; red eyed, lackadaisical, asking his workers if they wanted to go toke up as soon as the store’s open signs were turned off for the night. His multitasking ability was impressive as he was able to count the receipts from pizza drop offs and tally the money at the end of the night enough to satisfy the coked-out owner. I supposed the owner probably didn’t know the difference.

There were a few girls who rotated in and out of this Dominos as well. Two of them in particular, who were younger than me, were “fast” as they say. One was sleeping with the coked out manager, and a second one was brand new to the store and clearly wanted to date me. I took her out one night to dinner, and then we drove to a street called, Del Gado Drive, which was a cul-de-sac overlook and was kind of a mini-Mulholland Drive where you could gaze at the lights of the San Fernando Valley. It was a well known make-out spot for dates, and so we ended up kissing for a while. But within weeks, she had dated pretty much every guy in the pizza place and then some. She became pregnant by one of them (I always guessed it was the dazed and confused manager) and then announced the news to the store one day while kneading pizza dough by singing Madonna’s, “Papa Don’t Preach.” She eventually become too pregnant to make pizzas efficiently and left our Dominos.

My job was generally two-fold; the first was to answer phones and take pizza orders. These were not difficult tasks. There were a finite number of items any pizza could have, so with the exception of those customers calling who had not decided anything and made us workers wait on the phone an inordinate amount of time for their decision, most phone orders were completed quickly. There was the occasional walk-in customer who somehow found our store tucked away behind the Raldo’s Hot Dog Stand, but these were far and few between. I still remember a few things about taking orders on the telephone. One was that “V” on the order sheet stood for black olives, not to be confused with “O” for onions. I have no idea why this has remained in my head all of these years.

And back then, when asked how big our various sizes were, we would answer with the diameter of the pizza, such as, “That one is ten inches,” rather than with how many slices that particular sized pizza has like they do today. Saying how many slices a pizza has doesn’t make any sense to me because you could slice up a pizza into a million pieces and it still doesn’t tell the customer how large it is.

My other task was to deliver the “pies.” I found that term, pies, kind of antiquated. It seemed to me to be a hold over from the 1950’s when the neighborhood pizza place was delivering to squeaky-clean, ”Leave It To Beaver,” households. But somehow, the wholesome term, “pies,” didn’t sit right with me in the drug and sex induced setting I was working in.

At that time, I still owned the same dark blue 1972 Camaro that I had bought during my high school days. It had a shark grill and hot wheel rims. It also got very low gas mileage. Yet, gasoline was still around $1.00 per gallon at the time, so it balanced out. As I recall, I got paid some amount per hour for my work, but mostly worked on tips from the deliveries. A lot of customers just sort of threw me some change during a delivery, so I had a plastic tub on the rear floorboards of my car in which I would toss loose change from each delivery. It filled up faster than I could spend the change, and I recall many friends of mine looking at the tub in amazement of how solid and heavy it was with coins.

The trick to pizza delivery was, and I’m gathering still is, to deliver as many pies as possible on each trip out. Part of this skill involved being able to route out your drive on a huge map of Sherman Oaks on the wall of the store, then put it into action. We all had our Thomas Guides handy in our cars as well for those hard to find addresses up among the winding hill roads. Back then, Dominos had the "30 minutes or less" campaign still running. I suppose not enough people had died at the hands of speeding Dominos drivers around the country trying to beat the clock to end that campaign yet. There was incentive to speed because, although the $3.00 off of the pie was ultimately paid by the store, we as drivers were pressured to not turn in more than one or two slips per night to the manager with the late charge attached. We had control of how many pies we took, but when the store got extra busy we were often asked to grab an extra two or three pies on top of the three we already had.

I knew the neighborhood very well. I had grown up on the boarder of Studio City and Sherman Oaks, so I had a fairly well internalized sense of where I could drive to in thirty minutes, and, as with today, I really liked to drive. Like running, driving allowed me to see what’s going on in the neighborhood and feel a part of it, rather than staying inside one building throughout a whole work shift as I had done at previous jobs.

There were a few memorable deliveries I made. One was to a young blonde woman. She was a little older than me at the time, but thinking back, she was probably about 25. Her address was in a duplex near Fulton and Ventura Blvd., and she answered the door in a sheer white, see-through nightie with nothing underneath. It seemed like it could have been the clichéd intro to an adult film. "Eh, you asked for the extra salami miss? We're full service and I'm happy to oblige." But I delivered the pizza, collected the money from her, and got back into my car (that’s all I did) and proceeded to be completely unfocused on my work tasks for the remainder of the night.

Another delivery I made was to a really gnarly address off of Van Nuys Blvd. The house was totally un-maintained and overgrown on the outside. I knocked on the door to find a front room full of guys who were partying to the fullest on this Saturday night. The interior was an absolute mess. The person who had ordered the pizza was very long-haired (like to his waist), thin, druggie-looking guy and was probably having a bad trip that night. He was nasty to me, saying I had delivered the pizza late, though it had only been 20 minutes since he had ordered it, and insisted on a discount. I took the pizza, drove to a nearby phone booth since there were no cell phones in those days and I called my manager. He told me to just give the guy the discount and get out of there. I went back to the house and did as told. The guy took the pizza, handed me the money, berated me, calling me a woman, and then slammed the door in my face. Wow! Not a nice guy. I’m guessing he’s been incarcerated a few times since then.

But my favorite story, or rather then story that has always stood out for me, but which I am not completely proud of, was one late night in which I was given two orders to deliver. One was up Woodman just a ways from the store, and the other was a large order on the farthest point of northwest Sherman Oaks that we delivered to. The second order, the farther order, was a large one, and so the pies took up one whole large insulated warming bag, separate from the first order.

I got my order into my Camaro and then made my way up Woodman Avenue. As I was driving, I saw something fly by my back window and, which grabbed my attention. I looked to my back seat to make sure my warming bag was in my car and that I hadn’t been left on my roof as I had gotten my car keys out of my pocket. Yes it was there. Well, one of them was there. Oh God! Where was the other warming bag? I looked in my side view mirror to the street behind me and saw the other warming back lying in the middle of Woodman Avenue. It was late, maybe 10:30pm, so there was almost no traffic. I hooked a U-turn, went back looking out of my driver’s side window and confirmed it was indeed my other warming bag laying in the middle of the dark boulevard. I flipped the car back around, drove up and grabbed it back into my car.

I opened the warming bag, pulled out the pizza box, opened it up, and found the pizza totally undisturbed. It was a miracle. The warming bag hot not only kept the pizza hot, but had insulated it from a fall from my roof onto the asphalt at forty some-odd miles per hour. I closed the box, put it back into the warmer and then proceeded to deliver it to a couple in a large apartment complex up there on Woodman. I know....I know....food....and no matter how protected it was in the middle of the boulevard...bad...I know....I've tortured myself over the years about this... I did refuse a tip from them just so you're aware.

The Key to Fitness

2011-09-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

What a day! After a full Friday’s worth of work, I decide to drive to a trail not too far from my house and do a six mile run. I start at about 4:15pm and all goes well with the exception that I keep having to pull out my cell phone from my hip pack. I use my cell phone as a radio player with earplugs, and since I stream radio shows from the Internet, I occasionally lose the 3G signals on the trails and have to stop, pull out the cell phone, and get it started again. This happens quite a few times during my run.

I take a rest at my three mile out point, my turnaround spot for the day, and I happen to open my hip pack and select a new radio program when I discover that the car key that I keep in the hip pack has slipped out, and isn’t anywhere around me to be found. It’s fallen out during one of the earlier radio adjustments. Oh shit! Well, I have a pretty good sense of the places where I stopped and fumbled around with the hip pack, so as I run back, I keep my eyes to the ground scanning for my key in all of those spots. One stop after the other and nothing turns up. Towards the end of my run I resign myself to the fact that I will be doing some walking today.

I get to my car, vainly try to open the door just in case I serendipitously left it unlocked (I have another key inside the car), but of course the car is secure. How could it be otherwise? I’m Fred; totally anal-retentive about making sure everything is locked. Well, I had to try anyway, right? So in my wet shirt and with the sun dipping down past the hills, I start walking...home. It’s like my childhood friend, David Murray, used to say. You get stuck somewhere and have no other way back, so you point your body in the direction of home and start walking, step by step. It’s not the ten miles in the snow that my parents apparently had to walk to school in their childhood, I know. And so you might ask me, “Well, Fred, you just ran six miles…why not simply keep on going and run home?” Because I just run six miles, it’s humid, and I’m tired! That’s why! When I meet my exercise goal for the day, I’m not out for much more. It’s like the timer on a stationary bike; when it goes off, do you ever keep on pedaling??? No! And therefore, I’m done running for today!

So, one foot in front of the other, I do. The walk is long. From the point of my car to my front door is (I measured it afterwards) 1.97 miles. And walking is slow when you’re supposed to be driving effortlessly in a car chugging some Gatorade and getting some tunes on. I walk past all of the things I normally blur past; a young guy walking his dog, a woman sweeping her porch, a lady doing end of the day plant-watering. There is one forty-something year old man, sort of an accountant looking type in pressed olive shorts and leather sandals carefully manicuring the edge of his lawn next to the street curb with a pair of sheers the size of scissors. The site is a little odd to me, and yet, I appreciate how important this process must be to him. Maybe it’s like his mediation after work.

I am now on the main straightaway to my house. Maybe a quarter mile left to go. But then I realize that the traffic signal I had been doggedly staring at is several blocks back from where I thought it was. I haven’t been noting the street signs. That would be like watching a pot of water boil. Man, two miles is just a long way to walk! Across the street, I see some kind of gathering forming at a park. Maybe ten people setting up for something.

Finally, I make it back home, but without any keys, and my girlfriend out of town. Thank goodness I had the sense of mind to hide a key for myself sometime in the past. I get back in the house, and having decided I would Rollerblade back to my car to quicken the time, I dig around in my closet locating my big white Disney “Tarzan” tote-bag in which my Rollerblades and wrist guards reside. I throw off my trail shoes and grab a pair of white socks, make sure I have my house keys, and head out side to put my Rollerblades and accessories on.

I tend to keep my wrist guards inside my Rollerblades when storing them so I don’t lose them, so as I pull them out, I discover that in my always being prepared, I had kept an extra pair of white socks in the bottom of each Rollerblade. So now I have two pair. Do I want to go back inside the house and put a pair of socks back? No! I’ve got to get back to my car. As I finished my run and checked to see if there was a way into my car, there had been five or six teens on bikes and on foot starting at the trailhead. Maybe having seen me slink away from unsuccessfully trying get in my car, they might consider it abandoned and break in. I am obviously tired and a little paranoid now; I’m aware of this. But it’s time to get a rollin,’ and so I’ll roll up the extra pair of white socks and just hold them in one of my hands as I skate back to my car.

The light is starting to fade from the sky as I Rollerblade down the sidewalks so as not to get hit by any inebriated or straying rush-hour drivers, and as I do so, I discover that the ramps for disabled people at intersections, which are all over Burbank, are convenient in the way that they allow me to get through the street and back onto the next piece of sidewalk. However those blue rough-dotted pads on the ramps that give wheel chairs some traction are very jarring to Rollerblades and make me almost lose my balance more than a few times.

Almost all of my Rollerblading has been accomplished, to my detriment, on the long, slick ribbon of almost flawless cement that is the Strand of Manhattan Beach. So I’m not used to having to negotiate uneven the asphalt to cement seams along streets as well as dodging rush-hour traffic. I pass that group by the park again, and now they look like they are going to film something. I hear one of them on their cell phone say something about not worrying about the Burbank Police as long as no one tells them they’re here...maybe avoiding paying for a production permit? This crowd has also grown, and some of them are blocking the sidewalk. “Excuse me! Comin’ up!” They move out of my way. I’m 6’1” plus whatever the height with Rollerblades on, so I’m a formidable object of motion that none of them wants in their lap or up their ass.

I am not half way to back to my car when I have a terrible epiphany. Can epiphanies be terrible? ‘Cause this one was. It was the worst kind of epiphany I could have had in that moment. I realize that when I was back at the house, I had forgotten to dig out the extra set of car keys. I had been so focused on making sure I had my extra set of house keys and had therefore let that override the need for my spare car keys. Uggh! And, so-help-me if I am making this up, but right at this very moment…the moment of my terrible epiphany, my right Rollerblade breaks! The top strap that kind of binds the whole skate onto my foot snaps, and whole thing comes loose and wobbly. I am crossing a little street at this time and so I get myself to the sidewalk, find a shallow brick wall of a residence’s front yard and sat down. I say to myself, “You’ve GOT to be kidding!!!” as if some grand game of chess was being orchestrated from above.

So, I’ve got to now go back…walk back to my house…carrying a broken pair of Rollerblades the whole way. Rollerblades are heavy when they’re not on your feet. Like ten pounds each. The weight of ski boots. No way! I’m not carrying them back. I hide the two Rollerblades behind the shallow sitting wall. So much for my anal retentive need to keep my stuff safe…I’m just not carrying them back!...well, I’ll keep my wrist guards on…at least I won’t lose those. And I start to walk with the white pair of socks on my feet, my black wrist guards on each arm, and holding the extra rolled up pair of socks in one of my hands. You have to understand that no matter what kind of creative residential route I might come up with to avoid being seen, I have to walk through two major intersections looking like this. I can feel the stares and comments from within the cars waiting at the signals. “Is he homeless?” “What’s with the socks and no shoes, and those black things on his arms?” “What is that, another rolled up pair of socks he’s carrying?” “People are weird here in Burbank! I thought this was supposed to be a safe, conservative city” I want to tell anyone looking that there’s a shaggy-dog story unfolding in progress…but what can I do?

I pass by the gathering at the park, this time I’m on the opposite side of the street. It has grown yet again, and there are two people with white bullhorns. But now it doesn’t like a film shoot, but rather a gathering that they happen to be videotaping. There is a man telling some sort of ironic-style story; though the words aren’t clear, I can tell from the twist in his voice and the sporadic laughs that follow.

I’m back in my house again, this time digging out my spare car keys, rather than my roller blades. My dog, Susie, hasn’t been out since about 3:00pm, so I might as well take her for the walk back to my car. Two birds… She’s happy to go. I check for BOTH sets of keys this time; spare house and spare car. All are in their place in my pockets. Leash, doggie poop bag, my worn black house sneakers, and up, up and away!

Susie and I head down the much Fred-trodden sidewalk, past the gathering; a lady is now telling some strange story with the bullhorn. The story this time sounds like one of self-acceptance. “So I said to him, you either take me this way, or not at all!” Well, she sounds confident, and that can’t be bad. It’s Friday night now; no longer afternoon to be sure. It’s dark out, still humid and warm with just a slight illumination in the western sky. I’m heading the other way.

It’s about this time that I realize, as slow as each of my previous two walks have been, this one is several times slower. Susie and I have made it about five blocks and I’ve just noticed that Susie has decided that she needs to inspect the smell of every telephone pole, every tree, every hedge, and every lawn that we’ve come upon. “Susie, come on! We’ve got to go!” She follows, but then in short order reverts back to her continuous stops. Again, time to resign myself. It’s a nice evening, nice houses I can look at, other people walking their dogs. The wisdom of David Murray resounds through my head. This is just going to take a long time, and that’s okay, we’ll eventually get there.

About three quarters of a mile out, Susie decides to lie on the grass of a lawn we are passing. I see how this is going now. She’s decided that it’s just too long of trek, and she’s not aware that we’re only about a third of the way to my car. That’s okay; she’s a small Cockapoo. I’ll just carry her. I pick her up and start walking briskly. She’s also a HEAVY small Cockapoo! It's those treats at night. Susie always looks at me like she's going to starve if I don't give her one more treat when we're watching TV. And now I understand the impact it's had on her mass, and on my arms. "Foof! You are heavy, Susie!"

I make a deal with Susie. I’ll walk about three blocks, and then she’ll walk one. It works. We cut across a park, which is soothing to her feet and has a little hill she can trot down. Then, again I carry her for a few blocks. It’s really amazing how expansive a small place like Burbank becomes when you’re walking through it….over and over.

Susie and I make it to the last and final street that will lead us to my car and luckily there’s yet another downhill in this last patch. I put Susie down and walks this last section with me as we make it to the car. Keys open it up, we get in, I open the cooler with my Gatorade that I needed about two hours before. We stop to grab my broken Rollerblades from behind the shallow wall of somebody's front yard, finally arriving back home at 9:51pm.

The journey, one so close to home, started out as an exercise workout. And exercise I did. A six mile run with a five mile walk, a one mile Rollerblade, and the carrying of a dog for a portion of it; the latter three unintended of course. The next day, I’m sore, and Susie, I suspect is sore as well. She’s been sleeping most of the day.

My Hero, My Father - Bill Herrman 5/10/1928 - 8/16/2011

2011-08-17T01:20:00.000-07:00

Bill was born in Far Rockaway, New York, son of Dr. Ferdinand and Florence Herrman. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, NY, and served in the U.S. Navy during WWII. Bill moved to California in 1955 to work at Hoffman Electronics, and subsequently, worked for 30 years at Hughes Aircraft in Public Relations.

Bill was a devoted and loving husband to Marcia and wonderful, caring and patient father to Fred. He was partial to the Marx Brothers, appreciated ironic humor, savored Casablanca as the best movie ever made and never turned down the challenge of a good mind-teasing puzzle.

His great passions were archeology and paleontology, which he enjoyed to the fullest. His participation with these respective departments at CSUN and UCLA led to travel that took him and Marcia to sites and digs in 5 of the 7 continents. Bill was editor of the "Friends of Archeology" and "Docent Doings" newsletters, and served as a docent at the Page Museum in Los Angeles.

He was preceded in death by his brother, Jefferson Davis Herrman, and brother-in-law, Jack Golden. He is survived by his wife, Marcia Herrman, son, Fred Herrman, sisters-in-law, Mary Herrman, Lane Golden, Isabel Brach, and brother-in-law Roger Brach, as well as numerous nephews and nieces. His family will forever love him and cherish his memory.

The Steep Decline

2011-07-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

My dad is lying in a hospital bed after breaking a hip. His speech is garbled and, often, unintelligible. His body is thin and white, sprinkled with the skin splotches he’s always had. He answers my questions, I think. “How are you feeling?” “Huh? “I said, how are you feeling, dad?” “Oh, okay, I guess.” “Did you eat breakfast, dad?” Then an unintelligible answer. This goes on until he is distracted by something he reaches for in the air. A bad eye compromises his depth perception, and so he seems to seek an answer to something above him, but I don’t know exactly what he's experiencing.

There are moments when a little of his old personality comes out. A way of trying to answer with a humorous smile, and the way he tends to put his sentences together; always with a sense of study of what is around him. But so much has changed. And one of the hardest aspects, now that he can't speak very clearly, is being able to gauge if he's digested what I have said. When his ability to talk has so much declined, I can't tell if he understands me, or if he remains confused.

I think back to just a few years ago, when he told me the news. He was sitting in the family room of his home; at a table he always spent a lot of time sitting at. He said, “Fred, I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s." He said it with his usual scientific tone; a voice of reason that he always used when describing things from a third-person perspective.

I told him how sorry I was to hear of this, and I remember thinking to myself how I’d heard of the ravages of Alzheimer’s, and yet, it could never take hold of this logical, well spoken man. Maybe his would be some mild form that would make him a little cloudier, but it just couldn't take him down.

And so standing, looking over him in the hospital room where he appears emaciated and barely able to care for himself makes me realize how swift and severe this disease has been. In the matter of three or four years, it has almost completely consumed him, rendering my dad a shadow of who he was only so recently. It’s a reminder of how quickly life can change, and how important it is to appreciate the small, special moments.

Driving Country Music

2011-07-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

Last night, I found myself pulling up country music videos on YouTube and playing them for my girlfriend. We found a bunch of them that we both used to watch a lot. She and her mother used to have Country Music Television on non-stop when we first met. They lived in a little house, and inside was small kitchen, a little den with a couch facing a large television, and then a bedroom to the back. And on their television, always, were the latest of the mid 90’s country music videos. Jo Dee Messina, Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Reba McEntire, Brooks and Dunn, Shania Twain, one after the other taking their turns putting out the multitude of their artful, and often, flashy videos.

This would have all been new to me but for the fact that I had just a year before been returning from Lake Tahoe at a time before state route 99 had been resurfaced and I had gotten tired of being bounced around from the unkempt highway. So I exited, pulled out a map, and took a little side road with the intention of making a B-line to the smoother Interstate 5, which cut directly south across the width of the San Joaquin Valley at a steep angle in relation to the freeways. If you’ve ever really looked at a map of the State of California, and specifically, of the Central Valley, you will find that the state and its roads generally go from north-northwest to south-southeast due to the angle of the coast. Hence, driving south would eventually connect me from the CA 99 to Interstate 5.

I was now on a two-lane county road, which took me past snapshots of little towns that had maybe two or three stores, a granary and a windmill. The road was about thirty miles long and as straight as a ruler. No kidding. It disappeared out of site in front of me solely due to curvature of the earth. Tulare County must have cut this road following the path of a laser beam.

As I drove in my sweet sapphire blue 1995 Mustang, the sun began to set at about two o’clock to my right. My radio was tuned to whatever stations happened to have recently inhabited the frequency it was set on. It was country, but not the traditional country my dad had been playing on cassette in his Acura since the early 1980’s, but rather a recently evolved, up-beat, driving country that a lot of older, truer country listeners rejected. Some people likened it to simply being recycled ten year-old rock rhythms with a countrified sound. I liked it. It moved me, and it grabbed my attention.

And as I drove, a song started playing that had a simple piano joined by easy guitar and drums. It was about a guy who, having been broken up from an old girlfriend for some time, is thrown back into proximity with her and is hopelessly swept away once again. It was a fresh song with beautiful changes, and it made me feel like I was there with the singer and knew exactly how he felt. The heartbreak of lost love, and then getting pulled into it all again after just a few moments together. Wow, this was a song about something. It was a ballad called, “Texas Tornado,” by Tracy Lawrence.

And so, I was drifting at high speed down the road in my Mustang with a blazing yellow ball dipping into the featureless horizon on my right, and a country ballad playing, and suddenly, I got it. I understood what the stories in country music were all about in a moment of epiphany. It took this strangely isolated time and place, this beautiful summer afternoon in my purple travel capsule humming down a straight highway towards infinity to feel the pain and glory that these country songs were describing. I felt like I had been let in on a secret that a lot of mid-Americans had always been a part of. These songs were about the people and places that had a lasting effect, the broken and cheating hearts, and love re-ignited. They described everyday things that made an impression, and they were about perfect sunsets in the middle of no-where. I got it. And I started listening. This moment has been frozen in time for me.

So when I met my girlfriend, and she and her mom had non-stop country music TV on, I already had a sense of what it was all about. It wasn’t culture shock for me. I’m not too naïve; I understood about all the glitz and glamour the record companies put into these “front” men and woman; the singers and performers. There was some commercial to the country presentation because Nashville was obviously making money with these tunes and videos. But underneath it all, the good songs were about real things. I got so good that I could name the song and artists on the radio before life-long listeners such as my girlfriend and her family. But I must concede that when it came to music from various decades, they had me hands down.

And so last night, when I was pulling up YouTube videos, we watched some of the ones from that time, “Let Me Let Go,” “The Secret of Life,” and “This Kiss,” all by Faith Hill. We watched The Wilkinsons,’ “Angle Song/Fly,” “Jimmy’s Got a Girlfriend,” “Twenty-Six Cents,” and “Boy Oh Boy,” as well as Allison Moorer’s, “Alabama Song.” And we watched, “Holes in the Floor of Heaven,” by Steve Wariner, and a few others; just a smidgen from what was on CMT back then. They were all videos from that time whose hearts were in the right place.

And it made me think of the rush of that time; “rush,” as in whirlwind. I’m talking from about 1995 through to say, 2000, when the stock market was raging and money was flowing. The housing market had not come into its peak yet, but it was well on its way. I was taking weekend trips all around the Southwest, sometimes by myself and other times with my girlfriend, exploring what was out there from the most basic of highway motels to the Drake. And country music was the soundtrack to it all.

The Country Music Association Awards were big and gaining speed every year, and there were a lot of newcomers in the industry. The Wilkinsons fought it out with The Dixie Chicks one year for Best New Artist or Group; The Dixie Chicks won out. Mindy McCready had, “A Girl’s Gotta Do What A Girl’s Gotta Do” out, and Deana Carter had, “Strawberry Wine” on the airwaves. Brooks and Dunn seemed to win something every year, and rightly so. I loved their hard-edged sound. George Strait couldn’t record a song without it charting. Excitement was bourgeoning all around.

These memories funnel into a time when I would sit on the floor of my apartment with VHS remote in hand pausing and recording all of the videos I wanted to tape from GAC, the country cable channel in my area. There were nights, after my long days at Disney, after my runs in Manhattan Beach, and after making spaghetti dinners for myself when I would doze off with my back against the front of my little flowery couch/futon and a spent ice cream bowl laying to my side as GAC filled the room with colorful flickering light. County music kept me company in my bachelorhood.

Having been raised on The Who, I had to somehow cope with letting my close friends who knew me as a rock and roll and jazz enthusiast know that I had gotten into country music. None of them fully related with me, assuming that it was some kind of passing phase that would soon transition into another that might be more along their tastes, but they still loved me. I understood since, like me, they also had never really been exposed to country music growing up, nor had they any meaning attached to it. I had one cohort at Disney who liked country music. She was the head producer on the film, “Dinosaur,” and she never stopped reminding me about how great Charlie Daniels was, so, serendipitously, I never felt out of place on that production being that it was one of the longest projects I would ever work on.

And after my girlfriend and I stopped watching the songs on YouTube, I walked our dog outside in the silent night, reflecting on this dead economic period we’re all in, and I began to think about how different that time was; how much exciting discovery both in country music and in my travels there was available to me a decade or so ago. Now, most record companies are cautious about taking risks on breakthrough artists since they seem to have de-diversified their efforts. Concurrently, there are fewer job opportunities and avenues of income available in this financial climate, which has meant for me, less ability to travel and explore. The contrast made me a bit sad because, simply put, I miss all the fun. But, if nothing else, this is all fodder for another good country song.

The Passing of Yet Another Great

2011-06-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

Jack Sheldon died this past week. He was a trumpeter extraordinaire who worked with such legends as Art Pepper, Jerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. He did music for Schoolhouse Rock, which was mixed in with my Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid. A couple of his tunes included, “Conjunction Junction (What’s Your Function),” and “I’m Just a Bill (Yes I’m Only A Bill).” Jack was also the trumpeter and bandleader for the Merv Griffin Show.

To see Jack live was a special treat, and I must say that I’m lucky to have had the chance ten or fifteen times. He would sit with his guys, usually a quartet (piano, bass and drums) and he’d make the audience laugh, poke fun at them, be a little irreverent and keep everyone on their toes. He told spicy jokes and shaggy dog stories, and yet he always knew where to pull back just before stepping over any lines.

And then he’d count….and one and two and three and…..then the quartet would get going with some hot acoustic jazz numbers with Jack singing, and then taking on a solo or two during each tune. And brother, he could play. He could get the most amazing tonality out of his horn and make it wiggle and waggle. He embodied virtuosity.

It was always a good night with Jack Sheldon. I saw him at Jax, in Glendale, at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood, and at Chadney’s in Burbank, back in the day when the Chadney’s would absorb all of the after-hours musicians from NBC’s Tonight Show across the street; talented guys who wanted to blow, strum or drum off a little steam after work on the myriad of TV shows being recorded late afternoons in Burbank. How many other places in the world could one sit down and see that many fantastic jazz musicians most nights of the week?

And I can’t think of Jack Sheldon without thinking of Ross Tompkins. Ross was a virtuoso Jazz piano player who worked with Wes Montgomery, Benny Goodman and Doc Severinsen’s Tonight Show Band for Johnny Carson. Remember when they’d finish the tonight show theme each night and Ed McMahon would say, “Heeeee’s Johnny!” and you’d hear the piano player sprinkle some thirteenth notes in as the theme ended? That was Ross Tompkins; impeccable timing, and he could play anything.

I mention Ross because he also played most of the same Jazz houses around town mentioned above as the network of jazz players always seemed connected with one another. It’s the nature of the business. A couple of these guys play with those guys on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then with others on Fridays and Saturdays.

My long time friend John and I stumbled into the Money Tree in Toluca Lake one night, probably around 1996 or so, and we sat down at a row of bar stools along a low counter, which was a unique built in feature lining the perimeter of the piano. The club was intimate; dark inside with a subculture of jazz aficionados mixed with friendly east Valley locals. There was a more formal bar on the right, and small tables throughout leaving just enough room around the piano for three or four musicians.

John and I sat down and ordered our drinks. We saw that a duo was in that night and was just finishing setting up. It was Jack Sheldon and Ross Tompkins. John and I knew who they were of course, but to have them right in front of our table was something else.

Jack and Ross played a line of tunes that were some of the most wonderful I’ve ever experienced. Some fast, some soaring, and all with the utmost skill and love. With both of them such seasoned musicians, the audience was putty in their hands. John and I would occasionally exchange, “This is just not of this earth” looks with one-another, and then we’d continue to enjoy this magic.

The last tune Jack and Ross played was Louis Armstrong’s, “What a Wonderful World” (written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss). It would have been fully inappropriate for two men to be crying, but we almost were. Jack and Ross had closed this night with a performance that had entranced everyone in that room. When John and I went outside after the show ended with that song, our hair was standing up on our heads. I remember John slapping at a leaf on a nearby bush as we exited the club, in a way, emoting disbelief of what we had just witnessed. Neither of us had much else to say as it was an evening that couldn’t be topped. We were so lucky to have been there.

And so, I will close with this. I met Jack Sheldon many times after this night, and I hired Ross Tompkins to play piano on an alternate version of my tune, “How I Loved You,” on my CD titled, “Watercolors over the Sea.” I’ve yet to put that alternate take onto iTunes with the rest of the songs; I will soon. How someone like me could hire a musician like Ross Tompkins proves that our universe does indeed have some seams.

But these two men were not only fine, seasoned, legendary musicians, but they were such authentic people. Such nice guys to sit and talk with. I was in Jax in Glendale one night about six years ago watching Jack Sheldon’s quartet perform when Ross Tompkins walked in and sat next to me. In between the numbers, Jack, Ross and I talked a bit, and I felt like I had known them for years. I guess I had.

Note: When you get the chance, grab a copy of the film “Trying To Get Good; the Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon,” which is an excellent documentary about Jack Sheldon’s life and music.

Jack and I after his big band show at Catalina Bar & Grill

Ross and I after he laid down the piano tracks for my tune.