1970 Colonial High- part 6

There is something I must take the blame for. Truthfully, at the time, I had little or no idea that the monster I created would follow me the rest of my life.

it started just so innocently. Jerry Carr and I did a lot together in high school and on into our 30’s. Then Jerry got married, had kids and a full life of his own. In high school., it was usually 3 of us, me, Jerry and Paul. We all had our own friends, but the 3 of us did a lot. And you know how it goes with guys, we had our own jokes, favorite sayings and more. in fact, just the other day I saw Jerry and he right away came up with one of those wisecracks. I think it was a radio call he learned at Cablevision: “What the F? ÒVER” only not as cleaned up as that

It was a good time of life and there was one particular thing we liked to do that may have driven adults crazy…we really liked to cuss. Almost as much as a good HBO show on TV now. Back then, you didn’t say the F word unless you were getting ready to kill somebody. But we did. And there were a lot of what you might call homophobic stuff in there, but to our ears, it was merely stuff to drive adults mad, our secret kid language. it must not have been just us, but I’m pretty sure we were on the bleeding edge, and not one day behind California in this trend. yes, our everyday communication was not safe around anybody.

i first learned that i had a real problem the summer of 1972, when i was invited to participate in a trip that included all of the 18 year old children of POW/MIAs on an all expense paid trip to Alaska. Looking back at that now, I was the recipient of a vacation package I could never afford at any point in my life! But, I was 18 and the main thing I wanted to know, would there be girls? There was something like 30 of us from all over the United States. We all flew to Seattle, slept on the floor of the airport and spent the next two weeks getting wined and dined in Alaska. It was cool as a moose (as my cousin liked to say back then). That trip was a story all by itself, involving everything you might see in an old movie, including me accepting drugs from somebody I had just met at a party with kids I didn’t know…that wasn’t the best night I ever had, but it was quickly topped by a deep sea fishing trip out of Seward’s Bay where I spent the afternoon over the side of the boat, revisiting what I’d had for breakfast. By the way, the waves we went over were plenty large enough to surf, better than most days in Florida. The boat captain said don’t worry about life preservers, you wouldn’t last 3 minutes in that cold water anyway. And I went back to work, feeding the fishes.

the point of the Alaska trip, was even though there were plenty of girls, I had a couple of the guys pull me aside and say, hey man, you shouldn’t talk like that around girls….first the first time, I realized Jerry, Paul and I were AHEAD of California on a trend. I tried really hard, but not sure how successful I was. I probably went down in history as the foul-mouthed son of a sailer from Florida.

Well, you might think we finally matured and grew out of that stuff, or at least Jerry and Paul would, but something very different happened. We graduated from Colonial, and got summer jobs before college and Jerry got in on the ground floor at Orange Cablevision. Paul was working with Jerry’s dad, and I was starting at the bottom at the Volvo dealer. Surfing was big and we started getting into dirt bikes. Jerry introduced us to having cable tv and it wasn’t long before we were really good at cussing! Blazing Saddles, The Last Dragon, how many movies did we watch repeatedly until we could say the lines with the actors?

This was when the truly unseen, unfortunate thing happened. I met Pam at FTU, and for an unknown reason, instead of cutting me off from my guy friends, she joined the pack. Pam did have 3 brothers, and although when I met her, she was quiet and demure, I soon learned she wasn’t always like that. So, instead of us boys cleaning up our acts around Pam, she learned how to talk just like us…and she was working at Disney and learning to be an elementary school teacher. It wasn’t long before there were trips to the beach, and eventually a cross country trip to the mountains out west in a modern hippie van! But in the middle of all that, I had to watch as Pam tell her mom and Dad some things, using those quite useful terms she learned from us and watch their faces and they tried to figure out where they went wrong…at some point they both looked at me.

Flash forward 50 years, and listening to Pam sometimes, I have to think, yeah, I did that, it wasn’t the best thing I ever did….now just wait until she reads this…

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1970 Colonial High-Part 5

 Music...it always tied things together for me. My parents were into Broadway musicals and I grew up hearing "Ain't Nothing Like A Dame" and of course, the whole "Sound Of Music" album, but that was not my music. This does not mean, you will never catch me humming "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets", but I always lean towards harder rock. I'm pretty sure my introduction to this was when my dad was driving us to Florida for the last time, and somehow the radio station in the Buick was set on, started playing "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals. That was the moment I knew I was separate from my family.

It's funny how the siblings in my family all have their own likes. I think Cindy pretty much still like what my mom and dad played. Paul, somehow got into what we would call New Age music now. And I remember how that happened. First it was the Tangerine Dream soundtrack to the movie Thief and then we found the band Aorta...suddenly, I wonder if Lee Mckee's older brother with the fancy stereo had something to do with that introduction. Last but not least, is Steve, who is still back in the disco days. He loves to play that music while riding bikes. Right now, "Rolla Costa!" is looping in my head. Unlike the rest of us, Steve came up during disco, and learned to dance, while I was curling my upper lip at this non-music. Truthfully, I like it better now than I did back then.

A strange thing is, I married a girl that came from Winter Park High, and she is only a week older than me. I still remember the days at Colonial when we thought, man Winter Park gets everything, and we get nothing. Fancy cars, at pool at the school! And we were jealous of the girls as well. Pam's life was very different than mine, and maybe more like yours. She grew up in the same place and knew all the kids from kindergarten all the way through high school. We met while in college, but it wasn't until years later that we started realizing something...we almost never met.

There is an old song by Martin Mull, titled "They Never Met". He's mainly known as a comedian and the song is funny, because it sounds like a romantic ballad, but it's about two people that were perfect for each other, and passed like ships in the night, never meeting. It wasn't a sad song, it was a tease, giving you the opposite of what you expected in the chorus. It's odd to think about how much chance plays in how your life works out. Sometimes I think our main job is to just not screw it up.

Pam and I met while in History class, me chatting up her best friend, who was the talkative one of the two. It's kind of hard to remember Pam as being a very quiet person, but around her friend, she was. They must have played Rock/Scissors/Paper..because her friend wanted nothing to do with me, but Pam did...and maybe I started doing all the talking...but that didn't last forever!

Thing is, we grew up in the same town and went to the same concerts! We both remember going to the Colleseum on Orange Ave and seeing Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and the Young Rascals. There were many other shows out at the Place in Union Park, where they had Pro Wrestling. I can still remember that one time I went all excited about Jimmy Buffett, and they cancelled the show because he was pissed about the PA system. Another time, I stood transfixed, watching the bass player from Cactus do a solo intro for the song Parchment Farm. Pam was at those same shows! Did we bump into each other, and she goes "what a dweeb!" or "wow, I wish I knew that guy"?

Maybe our life was more like "When Harry Met Sally"?

Music...as much as I love it, reading has been the longer passion, and if there is one thing I'm truly grateful for, is you taking the time to read all this stuff. Everybody says, we have no attention span, AI is taking over, and Idiocracy is almost in place, and you are flying in the face of that, spending more time than anyone could predict to read the ramblings of some old guy...with no axe to grind, and no clicks to bait....by. the way come back tomorrow for 10 things you must do right now before you drink your second cup of coffee! and make sure you hit subscribe!

1970 Colonial High-Part 4

Try to put yourself back in time for a moment. You’re in Orlando in 1970. Traffic is bad. Two lane roads like Curryford and Crystal lake are bumper to bumper at rush hour. There aren’t too many alternates, and when you pull up to Lake Underhill, all you see is the airport on the other side. No giant expressway flying over the lake, no 8 lane toll road full of commuters…but it’s still crowded and we gripe about the traffic. We didn’t get an email or an article in the paper saying, “guess what! Disney World is coming and your life will never be the same!” Nope, they kept that baby secret while Walt bought up all the land he could at a reasonable price. There is some legend of an old lady that wouldn’t sell and how they took care of her for life……nowadays, she would have gone overboard while on a free timeshare cruise to the Bahamas.

We didn’t know what was coming, and when we finally did, what we heard was “jobs for everybody!”. Somehow they left out the part that the musical jobs would be competed for by every musician in the United States, not just Orlando. And they also left out the part about the haircuts and facial hair. Man, when I see girls all tatted up, working in an office job, I think “they have no idea”. Instead of playing piano at Coke Corner and regaling families from around the globe, I was pumping gas at Tenneco. Maybe hair should not have been so important to me, but I was not alone. My wife, on the other hand, benefitted greatly from her waist-length hair. She got to be a waitress at King Stephen’s right when they opened, and she never found a job again that paid that well.

No, we didn’t have access to information back then, not like now. Hey, the Orlando Sentinel was called the “Slantinel” even back then. All the news that was fit to print, I think. We didn’t know a lot of things, but we did have legends, and I’m proud to say, I’ve lived long enough to have some answers.

Probably the most famous thing that everybody knows now, is about the inlet at New Smyrna. This was one of a couple epic journeys a surfer could make. The other was Sebastian inlet. What we did know, was if the waves sucked everywhere else, they’d still be good at the inlet. So, why didn’t we just surf there every time? Numerous reasons, the biggest one being, we didn’t have big four wheel drive trucks and if the tide came up high…you were screwed. It was a good 30 minute drive down the beach from Main Street on the beach, mainly because of the speed limit. We didn’t know much about tides and stuff, so, you just kind of rolled the dice and decided to leave before the tide got too high, or just surfed at Main Street. The second reason was, well surfing was still in this new stage of short boards and short tempers. The popularity of surfing had started with The Beach Boys vibe, but that was before my time. I came up when Twin fins, Fish, and other short boards meant fast turns, moving fast down the line….and yelling at people that got in your way. And….being from O-town was not an asset. In typical, lets-be-just-like-California style, surfers started getting territorial. They could tell we weren’t from the New Smyrna, and me, I just stayed away from the pack. By the way, somebody that didn’t mind surfing right through the pack and insults, was Mr. Larson from Colonial High School. I can still see him coming at me down the line, with his scuba suit hanging unsnapped. We didn’t honor our elders in the water I guess, I thought, I hope I die before I get that old. (my wife doesn’t get that reference: its from the lyrics of My Generation by The Who….man, I hate spelling things out)

The 3rd reason is the one you already know, as does everybody in the whole world. The inlet is the shark bite capital of the world. They did not call it that back then, and I doubt anybody outside of surfers that surfed there knew about it, but I never went there without seeing a shark fin. You could probably say, well, there’s lots of bites but no fatalities….small comfort when your barefoot legs are swooshing back and forth in the water, trying to be cool, while some other kid with long bleach blonde hair yells at you “going right!” When he’s just sitting there next to you. And I had little desire to go into the Guinness book of world records as the first guy to die from a shark attack at the worlds most famous inlet.

There was one particular time that I was out with Paul and he remembers this vividly, a giant fin popped up right in front of me and a turtle head came out of the water inches from my face. My body froze, while Paul was yelling paddle! Paddle! Paul recalls bravely paddling out to me and the shark scampering away deciding two surfers was too much to take. It was probably 10 years later on a fishing trip that I finally learned that I didn’t have a psychotic episode. I was fishing with my friend Mark and we hooked a Cobia at a marker, and he explained you could find Cobia by following sea turtles. For some reason Cobia, like to follow them, and guess what a Cobia has? A giant fin that looks just like a shark. Paul still insists it was the biggest shark anybody ever saw ever. Just ask him.

Years later, I get to revisit all of my fears, when my young son gets an acting job one of the big theme parks by Disney for of all things… the JAWs ride….

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1970- Colonial High- Part 3

 It took a bit of doing, but I found I still had the old 1972 yearbook, and as I browsed through it, the first thing I thought was, Man, we were not good at photography back then! I also realized that whatever else I was doing that year, I wasn't in any clubs, or playing in the band. I was pretty self-absorbed and I'm pretty sure I only had one thing on my mind. You could probably guess the number one thing on a 17 year-old boy's mind, and you'd be right: Money. And right now, that good old tune I first heard performed by the Beatles, comes to mind and is playing in an endless loop.

I did have a couple of things going on that didn't show up in the yearbook and one was Young Life. I had found the group of people that made me feel at home and not some kind of cult-kid from being raised in Christian Science. And I still remember the thing of the times, "the rap session". We had two leaders, and I'm sorry I can't remember names, but the guy in charge was really nice and a bit on the nerdy side. I believe he was married and his wife was part of the group, but the important figure was the guy that pretty much looked like a modern day Jesus. He had the long, and I mean really long hair, and was the most laid back dude around. 

One summer, the idea came up that we could all travel together in his hippie VW van, all the way to North Carolina and attend a Young Life summer camp. Yes, there would be girls, and 4 wheelers, hiking, rap sessions, and more. I don't know how I got my mom to approve, but she had 3 other kids to worry about, and this was Jesus stuff anyhow. We climbed in that van, that could barely hit 55 mph on the interstate, and stuck our heads out of the top. Some of those vans had a stone-age version of a sun roof, like a miniature convertible top that pulled back. We had a blast and maybe the ride up and back was the best part....except for one thing. This was the south, after all. I wasn't black, so I didn't have the biggest problem, but riding in a hippie van with a long haired hippie through South Georgia? I was just hoping we didn't have a flat tire near Valdosta. Was this all in my head? Maybe, but go back and look at some newspaper articles about suspects getting shot and killed while trying to escape custody. It was a fear I had, and heck, I still worry about cops, and I'm an old guy!

I was actually playing keys in the Young Life group, not sure that I added much. I had some Italio organ that looked and sounded like a Farfisa...if you don't know what that is, just think about any Paul Revere and the Raiders songs from the 1960's. We also tried to have a band in my garage. All I really remember from those times were having to hose out the garage, and this really cool Ampeg amp I had that to use it, you opened the top, turned it upside down, and all these tubes were sticking out...it was okay...but if I had it now, I'd be a millionaire. I wanted so bad, to be up on stage, and I had friends that were doing it. I still remember Fritz (I think) playing drums at the little youth center in downtown Orlando and them playing Spoonful. Bad news for me, my favorite songs had no keyboards in them.

My life was consumed by trying to life the surfing life and play keys in a band. Unfortunately, my love for surfing did not match my anti-athletic body. Paul didn't hardly care about surfing and he had a field day in the waves. For me it was a constant struggle to find a board that could float me and magically get me out past the second break on a big day. Maybe that's why I still surf, because I can't quite master it...it's always right around the corner, like some twisted version of gambling where the big payoff will happen next time.

Another unfortunate thing was I had dropped out of the high school band the year before they all went to the Macy's parade. There was something else going on in the world right then...hair. 

Suddenly there was a war on hair. Not really suddenly, there was always a dress code and those of us that wanted to violate it. There were bangs that were too long, dresses too short, and finally it got to "your hair could not touch the collar of your shirt". And this was right when you were either cool or square, immediately determined by the length of your hair, if you were a guy. I wanted the hair and the mustache and I was going to walk the line on what Colonial would allow, but Mr. Holland in the marching band, had a stricter code, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm not sure how pissed my mom was after she had spent so much money on that fancy French horn....one more thing I wished I had right now.

1970 Colonial High-part 2

I was sitting in the school parking lot as the rest of the car drivers pull in, and at Colonial it was an odd assortment of vehicles. There were Simca’s, Saabs, and all kinds of funny looking old cars. I’m fuzzy with names, but Jon had a beat up VW bug, covered with spray paint, looking like a moving piece of graffiti art, loud tuned muffler and no brakes, if I remember right. Scott had some funny-looking little sedan with tail fins and something on the rear windows that made them look like stained glass.

There was a girl I went out with for a while, and she had a really nice Camaro, light yellow, with a black vinyl top and the cool automatic stick in the middle. She let me drive it once and it was a dream. I must have inherited at least one gene from my dad, because he always wanted to drive everybody’s car. Cars meant a lot to me back then, and I can’t lie, they still do. A car equals freedom, and someday when they take my keys away, I’ll know what it means more than anybody.

As I looked around the parking lot, I didn’t think about who could afford a nice new car, but I did think about who could really fix something up. Somebody had a really nice van. Back then, a van wasn’t something easy to have. What a kid could have, is a worn out Ford Econoline from the Post Office. One kid had one that was painted perfectly and it had shiny chrome wheels, looking like a hot rod in a magazine. Another kid had a beat up van that he had fixed up with stuff from around the house and the junkyard….and I liked that one too.

And this is where my story gets strange. I started off with Ralph, the red 1961 corvair. I’d show up loaded with kids and full of pride that I made something cool out of an old junker car. Ralph did not make if far in my life, and my mom threw in the towel of making her oldest son learn about paying cash for everything…after Ralph got towed 6 times in 6 months. Ralph got traded in a a brand new AMC Gremlin X, electric blue with a big racing stripe, and mags and big fat white-lettered Goodyear tires. The little car had 3 on the floor and a giant 6 cylinder engine, with way more power than it needed. Suddenly, I had all the flash I could ever want. I didn’t think much about how well-made this car was, but it sure loved going to the beach, full of surfing buddies, or as my brother Paul would say “kids that were will to pay gas money”..

The new Gremlin was an amazing car, but some things fell apart quickly and were never fixed correctly, like the fancy new all glass tailgate. Ralph Nader never wrote about this car to my knowledge, but it did have one little dangerous feature for a young driver: hydroplaning. You take a very light car, give it a powerful engine, and really wide tires, and some summer Florida highway with puddles from afternoon rain, and your little Gremlin could go ice skating down the road. That is what we did one summer afternoon, heading west on Highway 50 out in Bithlo, near one of the Salvage yards. I was going the Speedlimit, or too fast for conditions, depending on who’s telling the story, and suddenly we were spinning and went off the road sideways. We came to a stop about 3 feet short of T-boning a telephone pole. I can still remember one kid praying in the back seat….if I remember correctly, he became a preacher later on.

~

i told you the story would get stranger…the deal with the Gremlin X, was that I had to SHARE the car with my brothers and sister. Nobody else had a drivers license, so I didn’t really listen to that part of the deal, but when the time rolled around that Paul got his license, I knew I was going to have a problem. Okay, I had a few quirks, but mostly I was the nicest guy you knew, at least that’s what they wrote in my yearbook. Sharing was not my forte, and my wife will easily tell anyone that will listen that if we were out to dinner somewhere and she wanted a French fry from my plate, I might growl. I mean, I wasn’t going to bite, it’s just an involuntary reflex. And I sure don’t like sharing a car.

I found a solution that still informs me to this day. No matter how fuzzy my memory may get about what I liked or things we did, on the day Paul got his license, I bought my neighbors 1965 Impala convertible. I realize that right now, if I could get one in perfect condition it would be worth a small fortune, but Les Gerol was not the person that loved a car the way I do. There was not a 1 foot section of the car that didn’t have a dent. It had a 283 V8 that could sorta pull that big old car around. It was wine-red color with a used-to-be white convertible top and used-to-be-white interior. I looked at this whale of a car, and decided all it needed was glass packs and an 8 track deck and I’d be in business. That car never made it to the beach that I remember. What I do have burned into my mind, is me cruising with the top down, heading to J. Harley Wadworth Volvo. heading down Curryford to Orange Blossom Trail, with the new Deep Purple tape, Machine Head, blasting about me being a highway star. I don’t need a photo…I can see it all.

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Colonial High 1970

It’s 10am on a fall day, and I’m feeling pretty good about this, because it’s one of a very few days I can wear this wool Letter-sweater. Yes, it was for the high school band, not for a sport, so it’s not as cool as it could be, but it proved I did something. I’m sitting in a classroom with the smart kids. I can remember the exact feeling, somebody decided that I was supposed to be smart, so here I was. Math was not my thing, and little did I know that later in life, my job would depend on things I did not pay enough attention to right now. Instead I was looking down at my chukka boots and wishing I had a pair of real Levi’s instead of the wanna-be’s I was wearing. I was in the uniform of the crowd I wanted to be associated with, the surfers. I had on a cotton surf t-shirt, 100% certain that it did not say Ron Jon’s on it. Wearing a Ron Jon shirt was the main way to tell everybody you were a tourist and not really a surfer. The t-shirt was tucked in and I had a really cool leather belt from the Canterbury shop at the Mall. Styles came in slow motion to Orlando. Whatever we were doing was what they were doing last year in California. Surfers were wearing cut-off jeans unless somebody in the family could sew, and then you got real baggies to surf in. Boardshorts hadn’t made their way to the stores in Orlando yet.

It was also the time of the mini-skirt, so my mind was rarely on the blackboard, and what our teacher had to say. To be fair, he was young and no matter what I thought of math, I liked his taste in cars. Right outside those giant crank-out windows of our classroom was his new gold-colored Corvette. That wasn’t a color I would have picked, but that was the coolest car in the whole world at that moment. Even the two-piece hub caps looked cool, and this was a time when having hubcaps meant you weren’t serious about your car. He’s asking some math question and quickly Revonda raises her hand and has the answer. Something is seriously wrong in how God handed stuff out when you get to be a cheerleader AND smart at math. All I heard was “wonk wonk wonk…hypotenuse” and the teacher congratulating her while she smiles and the other girls all high-five her….just kidding….the high-five had not been invented yet.

just like every high school, we had crowds. And just like every person that ever wrote a story, my point of view was that I was on the edge of everything, watching more than enjoying. That is some kind of lifelong thing, seeing life as if I myself am the drone flying overhead, recording everything. Some kind of dream until the bell rings and we head to lunch.

Colonial High School, was not brand new or even close to that in 1970. It was not air-conditioned, except for the band room and the administration offices. I never thought about the teachers and how they had to dress up and go sweat in a room with us every day. But, like us, they may have been living somewhere without air conditioning. Back then, an air-,conditioned place was like walking into the diary room at Costco is now, you went from slightly sweaty to freezing in one moment. Our lunch break was spent outside in the center of the hub of this spread-out open concept school. Coming from Spokane, the whole thing about Florida schools was still interesting to me. It must halve been the lastest craze in the 1950’s, because Howard Junior high, a really old school, was more like what I was used to, a 2 story brick building with staircases that every kid had to climb. Colonial had the empty space in the middle of a wheel, spoked with covered sidewalks that were almost dry if it was raining.

The surf crew was there, sitting on top of the concrete picnic tables, talking about what we always talked about, where we would be surfing this weekend. Most likely, it would be Picnic Tables at Cocoa Beach. I would do my best to be there. That was where I wanted to be, but a couple of things could get in the way…work and church. 16 years old, and the biggest waste of my life was Sunday School, where I sat at a round table with 4 other kids and talked about saving ourselves for marriage, and finding a nice Christian Science Girl…harder to remember the days when dating somebody that didn’t go to your church was disallowed….i paid more attention in math class than I did there. But, the guys were making plans for the weekend, and the girls would be there in their bikinis, ‘Laying out’. Now if any girl wants to say she was a Gidget in 1970, I’d need to see photographic proof. I’m certain there were girls that could have done it, but it was guys, and young guys only…..except for one old teacher at Colonial.

Surfing is kind of like fishing, if all you like is the thrill of pulling it off perfectly, you’re not going to stick around, because most of the time it is “you shoulda been here yesterday!’ In 1970, gas wasn’t expensive compared to years later, but it was still a big expense for most kids to drive there and back…especially if there turned out to be no waves. We had the Ron Jon surf report you could call on the phone, but to that dumb place, the surf was always decent. The local news didn’t even know what surfing was. Surfing was a kid sport and we were often down to the only accurate means of determining the surf forecast was the “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” sign. I don’t know where this originated, maybe Hawaii, but how it worked was like this: you are driving in your car, full of kids and boards on the roof. You spot a car coming towards you with boards on the roof. If it’s before 10am, you are crestfallen, because nobody would go home that early if the surf was good, but you stick your arm out the window, make a fist with the thumb sticking out and waggle it up and down. Every surfer in The Whole world knows what that means..”tell me! Is is any good?’ If they stick their arm out the window and hold their fist thumb pointing upward, a cheer would go up in your car, and everyone would start seeing visions of 6 foot glassy waves…for the next 40 minutes of the ride. OR, a thumb down meant “do we just turn around and go home?’ Come to think of it, we put a lot of faith in strangers!

it was Sunday, and maybe I only did this once, but the Gremlin was sitting in the parking lot behind the Christian Science Church on Roasalind ave in downtown Orlando. I would be leaving for the beach much later than I ever wanted, but it was going to happen. Paul and I ran out as fast as we could when Sunday school was over and we raced to Picnic Tables. That place is still there. I don’t surf that spot anymore, since I found that is a wonderful spot for bad people to break into your car.

on this particular Sunday, we just wanted to get our boards wet and see the girls…we get their just in time to see the wind getting on it, while the guys stand around, telling the girls about their best rides, while smoking the obligatory cigarette. Of course, Revonda was in the middle of the group of girls!

As my minds eye drifted overhead, capturing the moment, I knew even then that someday soon we would be old, driving to work everyday, raising kids and certainly be something less than cool, and there was no way we would be allowed in the water. The next group of kids would shove us aside,, and we better start learning Shuffleboard, Bridge, and Golf. It’s pretty bad, when you’re 16 and worrying about being old!

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Where Would We Be?

That whole Marvel Comics idea of the multiverse, well it didn’t really start there for me. With me, the kid with the reading problem, it started with Philip K. Dick. If you were a kid that liked to read a lot when I was coming up, you were quickly into adult novels. Sure, I read what passed for young adult books, before they really had that. I can still remember getting excited about Edward Eager’s books about a group of kids finding magic stuff. Looking back, it was kind of like the Disney shows on Sunday night, that featured some wholesome kids, maybe one or two a little older and starting to think that girls and boys might be more interesting than they were the year before. However, once I ran out of those books, it was straight into adult science fiction, where sex, and thoughts about the world and our culture were tossed about. I figured early on that Mr. Dick probably was experimenting with hallucinogens, like those hippies out in California, but I was fascinated by his ideas. How do we know what is real and what is just a dream?

How did I know that this life, the one where everybody was looking at me as the kid whose dad was in POW camp, was the real life? Most science fiction wasn’t all that awesome, and anything made into a movie in those days, was pretty much a drive-in movie. I just now realized that you may not know what a drive-in movie is. They were mediocre movies that were made to show while you were busy walking around the parking lot, getting popcorn, hanging out with friends, or making out in the back seat of the car. Yes, we did sneak people in by hiding them in the trunk…I think everybody did that at least once. This doesn’t mean drive-in movies weren’t watchable, in fact I was probably scarred for life by mom and dad taking me to the drive-in when they showed the island of Dr. Moreau. They told me to lay down in the back of the station wagon and not to look when they warned me. The part where they slowly turned people into animals still haunts my dreams to this day…and then there was the bride of Dracula…just has to get you at just the right age and you’re toast.

Mr. Dick’s science fiction was not like that, and truthfully, I thought he was my secret author and nobody would ever know about him, unless they were a hardcore reader. I had no idea that there were a lot of nerds like me and some would grow up and make big movies. They saw what I saw, if you can’t trust what you see and hear, well that opens up a big can of worms. My favorite book of his was UBIK and I think the movie Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise is pretty much that book.

The idea that has me hooked is one random event begins a path that is radically different than what supposed to happen.

In December 1972, PBS aired a Bill Moyer’s Journal episode about my family, mostly about my mom and her group of MIA and POW wives. They were activists, and the camera crew followed us around for about a week, I think. What still sits heavy with me until this day, is the interview they had me give. They interviewed all of us at separate times, and I vowed to myself, I would not spill my guts on TV like some idiot. I knew the lady in charge was smart, very good at her job, and would be looking for some good stuff…but not getting it from me!

I knew my turn was coming and finally they had to do it at 8am. At this time I was working the night shift at the Tenneco gas station. The one on 436 that was where you turned to go to good old Stonewall Jackson Junior High….now called Roberto Clemente Middle. I think somebody thought that with the population shift, it was kinda odd to have a school named after a Civil War General where 99.9% of the population was from Puerto Rico. But, back then, we didn’t think too hard about the names, not saying we shouldn’t have! I was at that Tenneco, doing one of the most useless jobs there was. I pumped your gas for you. There wasn’t a lot of people getting gas at one am in the morning, so falling asleep on the job in the little kiosk by the gas pump was a large probability. And that what finally ended my career at Tenneco one night when a guy pulled up and said “Do You Know Who I Am!” I didn’t know he was the regional manager, and I was too tired for a witty response, if such a thing existed at that time of day.

So I found myself, sleepless, at 8am in a little roadside park on Lake Underhill, down by where all my schoolmates lived in Azaela Park. I was getting peppered with innocent questions about life as a POW kid, when she came up with, what would you think about your dad coming home and seeing your long hair?

Right that moment, I realized I was in some version of reality. The reality that was supposed to be was I was raised on a military base, saluted the flag every morning, got up and did exercises, and dreamed of being an officer that could bring further glory to the family. Instead, reality was I spent my teen years without a father, living with the civilians, and seeing the military as helpless to bring my dad back home. I felt free, and a life of surfing, living at the beach, and working whatever job could allow me to take off whenever the waves were good. How did I feel about my dad coming home? I was a little bit worried. But, he’d been gone seven years, and nobody was doing anything. Nixon getting on TV talking about carpet bombing Vietnam, but the peace talks had gone nowhere and they were just leaving him there to rot.

Yeah, I told her way too much about how I really felt.

This would be about 1/3 as memorable, except that 2 months later he DID come home and get to see that show…..I was truly in a different universe

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