Note: With no disrespect whatsoever intended to actual veterans, I have decided to reminisce about some aspects of my growing up in Los Angeles. I related a part of this story in an upcoming podcast with Stephanie Winn. My recent rediscovery of the virtues of that phile called GenX made me think I should, so I went into my archives and found these two stories, previously published on more obscure platforms.
TC Remembered
Dateline: June 2016
TC was, in my childhood, one of the best friends I ever had. I found him again this morning, 45 years later.
He was the first kid and only kid in my neighborhood where I could sleep over. He lived one house from the corner whereas we lived in the middle of the block. I can remember that sleepover when we decided, like boys will do, to count all of our scars and scabs and tell the stories of how we got them. Both of us had over 100. TC was a smart kid, polite and trustworthy. In the old neighborhood, the combination was rare. Darrell was trustworthy, but his family was dodgy so he’d cover for them when they didn’t deserve it. Vincent was polite but his mother never let him come outside. The Myers boys were athletic and smart, but full of tricks. Basically they put us smaller boys up to gladiator fights for their own amusement. Lonzo was polite and trustworthy, but not the sharpest tool in the shed.
There were other kids who made decent enough friends, Teedee aka August Lewis whose dad had a real boxing ring in his backyard and whose fine sisters were also named after months of the year. But he lived a mile away on Blackwelder. Ebon Grant was the Huckleberry Finn to my Tom Sawyer, but was about as two-faced as anyone I ever met. Winky aka Kevin Brooks was a fun kid with big curls in his hair, but we fell out after a big fight. His family fell on hard times. TC and I were closest in age, temperament and spirit. So one day we decided, momentously to form a club.
It was probably TC’s idea to form the Travermike. The three of us, he the leader, Verdis the muscle and me the brains, planned to rule the neighborhood with a benevolent triumvirate dictatorship. It formed enough of a bond, short-lived as it was, to keep our neighborhood gang free in the days when Pirus and Crips roamed the blocks and alleys challenging everyone they encountered. The Travermike was dedicated to fair play. In a neighborhood with 50 kids, it was a big deal. Over at Virginia Road School, the local elementary, TC and I stood a chance of becoming kings of the school in the sixth grade. I was already the reticent brainiac, but way too shy amongst kids who cursed up storms and picked fights. I had courage, but not nerve. TC had nerve.
Then he collapsed. Something went wrong in TC’s family and I couldn’t understand it. It had something to do with him hating his father or his step-father. Step fathers and half-brothers were nothing I could understand at the age of 9, smart as I supposedly was. I didn’t understand how kids could have different last names than their parents. I didn’t understand how mothers and fathers didn’t live together in the same house. It was a complete mystery. I remember him stifling tears in the front yard of the school as he told me this story, mad at me for not understanding. Before I knew it, he was moving out of the neighborhood far south over near Sportsman’s Park. In the days when you had permission to ride bikes with your friends 15 minutes in any direction, Sportsman’s Park was a world away.
I never met his father but his mother was a slim, pretty and disciplined woman. Think Diahanne Carroll or Nichelle Nichols. At some point I got a chance to visit my old friend and have another sleepover. This one wasn’t as fun as the other. I remember his mother chastising me for not brushing my teeth before I went to bed, and then telling me I was sleeping improperly, mumbling something about how my parents must be so ignorant. My parents were the strictest of any I knew, but not for TC’s mom. I felt sorry for TC, coming up all alone with that woman and no dad, living way down near Sportsman’s Park under the buzzing high tension lines. After that night, I never saw him again.
The effect on me was deep. Not only did the Travermike end, though the idea of fair play survived, but I felt that I would never have a best friend again. It fell to the two-faced Ebon who taught me how to play poker with daily rule changes, who dissed me publicly at school but traded Sizzlers with me after school. He wasn’t just a friend, he was a boss, and also Third King of Virginia Road behind Mark Vincent and Mark Bavis, both certainly prisoners or dead now. I heard Ebon’s DD-214 wasn’t very commendable. I have had occasion to thank the steeliness of the dastardly knuckleheads of my youth for toughening me up, but I have also long regretted not socking at least one of them in the nose as I knew they deserved. Very deep, psychologically deep in me is the knowledge that I will never trust anyone to be my best friend again because TC left the neighborhood.
I had skipped two grades but had to stay in sixth grade two years because it would have been considered child abuse to send a kid my age and size to the local junior high. A year later I took the bus across town to attend Holy Name of Jesus School and by then my alienation was complete. I kept my head and took advantage of my second chance to make first impressions. Did well academically but wasn’t a real Catholic, survived and went even further afield to summer school in posh Pacific Palisades, and finally on to Loyola High where I met Richard Peete who was polite, smart and trustworthy. Except Richard was nowhere near as scrappy and feral as I could be when pressed. So I doubt that was ever as true a friend as I might have been to him, the man who introduced me to the literature behind Star Trek. I suppose if I were George Orwell or Christopher Hitchens I might go on in this vein of old schoolboy memories for several in-depth chapters, but that is not the point of this material which must suffice until I reorganize it in my retirement (provided the clouds of Typepad, [Medium and Substack] remain intact).
When I think about what is required to know what makes me tick, complex monster that I have become, it always seems necessary in my inventory of qualifications, that one must have known what it was like to grow up in my neighborhood. It is something I have felt was never done right, and if there is any hope of it, then that job falls to either myself, Paul Beatty, Wanda Coleman or Jervey Tervalon. I have possessed and cultivated a surplus of disgust for other auteurs who might have done it right but went the Hollywood route which also illuminates the specifics. I lament the failures of that portrayal to materialize although it can certainly be cobbled together by knowing the works of us four, but I more greatly lament those of us who fell silently. Men and women on my Facebook friends list who remain steady reminders of who we were and what we went through, Gerald Brown chiefly among them, but also the late lamented Patrick Reese and the lost but unforgettable Steve Butler. What it is worth to have known such men and such women as the Brown sisters and the Raymond sisters and the Andrews sisters goes beyond any one man’s ability to tell, and yet we are all the poorer for not knowing such lives as they were lived in the cauldron my my generations coming of age in America. I am an alien familiar with my old world, watching its denizens die, all of us too busy living to be bothered to spare a Friday evening drink together. We were a black community once. I’ll never quite know if I am a defector or a survivor. Perhaps I don’t even care enough to know. It’s hard to say. Ernest is dead. Scoobie is dead. We use death as an excuse to make for unbridgeable gulfs between us. Between myself, my actual neighborhood, and the myths of South Central there are thousands of stories that can never be told. Who has time to stop living in order to recreate the past? Who can even answer such questions?
TC is back. Just wow. That’s how I remembered him. I wonder who the man is.
Note: TC changed his name and established the appropriate physical and psychological distance from his criminally abusive father. He worked his way through an MBA degree and made a successful life and career as a logistical project manager in Florida. More fascinating details will be revealed after Stephanie’s podcast drops in June 2024.
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The Wayback Machine
Dateline: December 2005
I just met somebody on the blog that I went to elementary school with. Gerald Brown is another brother who stops by here every once in a while. He too grew up in my old neighborhood and incidentally has no use or tolerance for Crips. But this coincidence has released a flood of memories of my old stomping grounds, well actually I had little feet, but I stomped nonetheless. In fact, we had stomps on the playground at Virginia Road. And we played suicide and open chest and bb-britches and all kinds of Tom Sawyeresque games.
One of the biggest pastimes for a while, especially after the Sylmar earthquake in ‘71 that destroyed the cafeteria, was to stomp on the little packets of French dressing we got with our school-provided sack lunches.
I still remember all of my teachers. In Kindergarten I had Miss Hallenan, then for first grade I had Mrs Kissick and Mrs Pleasant. In the second grade I had Mrs Pollack, the wonderful Jewish lady who said I shouldn't rub my nose side to side but pinch it so it wouldn't get flat like a..oops! Why I remember that I don't know. She was cool and loved me and my younger brother Deet. Not like Mrs Hoskins that everyone hated. Her nickname was 'Bullface' because she had huge jowls. In the third grade I had evil Mrs Byers. She got fired after I left the third grade. She used to deny kids the chance to go to the bathroom during class, made us pee ourselves. She said our parents were ignorant for not sending us to school with our own pencils. In the fourth grade I had Mrs White, who was black but could pass for white. She was incredibly strict, but never unfair. She eventually became the school’s principal. In the fifth and sixth grade, I was in Miss Milliken's class. She was without question, one of the best teachers I ever had, and was the first one who told me without question that I should go to college. USC, specifically. She was the kind of teacher who would make bets with us that we couldn't do something she knew we could do. She paid us money to find mistakes in the textbooks and rewarded us with a Big Mac if we finished a color group in the SRA reading lab.
There were a bunch of kids I remember from school. Doreen Horn, Pheobe with the big mouth, Diana White with whom I had an almost fight. The kings of the school, Ebon, Daniel, Mark Vincent, Mark 'Baby' Bavis. A kid named Danny Henderson whose ass I kicked and later really felt sorry for. Shermalyn Thompson, my first girlfriend. Pamela Pratt. Nudie, Suitcase, all of the Arnold Kids, Verdis, Derrell, Teresa, Rabo, KK. Jerry who lived right across the street from school. August Lewis and his foine sisters. Tracy the kid who lived on Victoria made Eagle Scout. Mario Nesbit and his little badass brother Marlon. There was Chuckie McDermott and the kid who stole my bicycle whose name is blocked in memory. There was Freddie, the Japanese kid who didn't play football, and all the kids my younger brothers and sister knew. There was Margaret Chung and all the adopted kids on Somerset, plus her blood sister Vivian. Mark Levi, Deet's best friend. There was Cherry Woods the smart girl whose face got burned in a fire and her big brother Ronnie. Ronnie was always a nice guy. There was stupid Marcella and her even stupider brother Richard. Their father married a white woman who never came out of the house. She was so stupid that when Richard got a 8th percentile on the SAT, she thought he was in the top 90%. There was Lonzo, Frankie the pimp, the low life Chambers family. There was Caroline and the Turners, all them redhead frecklefaced blackfolks. There was nasty Anita and her sister. There was London and his brother Victor whose dad worked at Mattel and drove a new 260Z. There was Kevin 'Winky' Brooks who was my best friend who moved away. Kevin had a tall skinny sister and a big curly headed brother Harold Jr. His dad drove really fast. Then Tracy Caldwell who became my new best friend then he moved away to over near Sportsman's Park and then to Ohio.
Our principal was Edna Cohen. She was also president of the Links of West Adams. She was a black woman who could pass. Her portrait hung on the wall at the Wilfandel Club up in Arlington Heights. My grandfather Edmund played there once with his New Orleans jazz band, and didn’t he ramble? Cohen was part of the reason my parents chose our neighborhood which was full of every kind of fruit tree that grows in Los Angeles including the plum tree next door. Oh. I forgot Roosevelt Ivory whose grandmother grew the sweetest peaches on the planet. We called Rosy 'Tank'. He ended up coaching football in Hawaii and then at Santa Monica College. I could tell his parents thought we were all little rowdies. We were. But Tank was a real friend.
Charles Rixter was the neighborhood Crip. Well he claimed to be a Crip but I never saw him with other Crips. He always used to say “I’m a San Bernardino boy, not no LA toy”. He got Wanda pregnant when she was 16. I have to think, in retrospect that Pops was afraid of Rixter or that at least it came to a threat of violence that Pops was unwilling to face. We know he broke in our house once. But he wasn't around long enough to cause too much trouble. So off to jail he went. We were a neighborhood of sports roughnecks as well as dirtbike mechanics and skirt chasers. Me Tracy and Verdis thought about forming a gang - the Travermike. But when Tracy moved away that collapsed. While he remained we had our secret handshake and basically ran things around the neighborhood. But that was before Mr. Arnold died and Rixter came around. The Arnold's 8 kids came apart and poor Mrs. Arnold was overwhelmed. Verdis, who was a brilliant mechanic and always QB of our football teams, oldest boy of the Arnolds collapsed under the strain. He got caught up in the stolen cars game as far as I recall.
The neighborhood maintained until Verdis and I and all our cohort left for college or the military. 80-82, Crips, crack, guns, boom. The place was never the same. The very thought that there would be a murder on our street was unthinkable back in the 70s. A fight? Hell, every week. A knife fight? Only if maybe some Mexicans brought them. But a gun? Never. We knew old JC, Mr. Arnold's brother had a shotgun. But he was an old cuss from Texas set in his hunting dog ways and regularly brought rabbits for Mrs. Arnold to cook up with her homegrown mustard greens. You could have thought of Kool Moe Dee's Wild Wild West as our theme song, except that nobody ever brought static. Nobody except the cops, who made us give up our homemade nunchucks and gave us tickets for riding our minibikes.
We were skinny tough kids in sweatpants, Chucks and t-shirts with sweatbands and ankle-weights, heading over to Dorsey or Vineyard for pickup ball. Football, Basketball, BMX, Skateboard, Swimming & Gymnastics. That was us. Pickens made it to the Buffalo Bills, Nudie became a BBall coach in the Valley. My late brother Scoobie played semipro football and he and Doc both played in the Inglewood Basketball League. Donald and Craig Shane could do nohand wheelies all day long. Donald and I build a tandem dirtbike and rode it up and down Crenshaw to applause. Everybody could swim. My brother Deet and I both had full twisting back summersaults and ruled flipflop grass from Centinela to Sportsman's Park to Dorsey Pool.
I used to think of us all as kids in the form of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We grew up on the Three Stooges, Little Rascals and Speed Racer. We ate Cheerios for Go Go Go Power and we busted the President’s Physical Fitness test ready to kick Russia's ass if it came to it. We always watched the Indy 500 and cheered the Miami Dolphins through their perfect season. We smoked weed out of the shoebox and got our hair braided sitting on the front porch in the late summer evenings. We wore fat leather wristbands for our Timex watches and puka shells around our necks. We slow-danced to 'Wildflower' and pretended to be Jim Kelly in Enter The Dragon. We snuck into the Baldwin Theatre to see Chinese Connection five times and stole the flashing yellow lights of the construction sawhorses and put them in our bedrooms. We ogled Angela Davis' blacklight poster and made lamps in electric shop out of 7up cans. We drew afros on all the athletes on PeeChee folders and thought Muhammad Ali was the greatest who ever lived. We watched all the moonshots, listened to 1580 KDAY and rolled six deep to KACE concerts in the park. We had chinaberry fights, played doctor in the garage and mowed the lawn with pushmowers
We put money under Free Parking and never paid the interest to get properties out of hock. If you landed on Go, you got $400. We slammed bones, ran Bostons and played Tonk for quarters. We ate Bomb pops and played 'intendo. We got grease and gasoline from the junkyard up the street, took apart the guts of our kickback threespeeds and put them back together with chickenwire when we lost the bolt for the brake brace. We traded Wacky Packages and peace patches for our notebooks and jean jackets. We read Mad Magazine, ate Chick-o-sticks and spit poly seeds at each other. We popped M80s and did street luge down Arlington Doubles. We rode bikes up to the broken Baldwin Reservoir and hiked into the bowl.
Somewhere along the way to adulthood we learned lessons that seem to defy all the political correctness of today's America. We were all about living as large as possible, our way, with no shame and no hesitation. We didn't know a whole lot about the world except that it better be ready for us, because we ain't backing down. People tell me 'we didn't know we were poor' and we didn't walk around making excuses about being oppressed. We sung the black national anthem and we prepared to look the white man in the eye. I don't think we realized how strong we were. I don't think the world realized either
Black youth in the 70s - that's my generation. There will never be another quite like it.