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I wrote this on a typewriter for a
writing class in college when I was 22 years old (1976). I retyped it
and did some light editing in early 2019.
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Left: Dan, Mike, and Gary in 1955
I grew up in a 2 bedroom flat, located in the outer Mission district of San Francisco, until I was 10 years old. I clearly remember my first experience manipulating a person: Mike. He had just done something wrong and my mother was customarily looking for the belt. It just so happened that I knew where it was and I soon realized that my brother was at my mercy. I forgot just how the conversation went, but I tremendously enjoyed him pleading with me not to tell her where it was. I didn't, but she eventually found it herself.
I had many experiences with Mike. From my naive perspective, he always seemed to do things just right, and I was very conscious of it then. His baseball glove always seemed to break in just right. He built roller coasters just right. He even arranged the food on his plate just right. As hard as I tried to imitate him, I never seemed to do it just right. Now that I think of it, his friends seemed to be the same way. When I was hanging around with him and his friends, if we all had a nickel, we would all buy candy bars. I couldn't even eat a candy bar as cool as they did.
For a time, Mike and I used to pass many of our afternoons playing at the shell station across Mission Street with Bill the gas station attendant. Good 'ole Bill must have been 50 years old but he was one of our friends. We spent a lot of time playing a sort of 'slap-the-hands' game on his desk. I can still fondly smell his office, a mixture of oily rags and gas from the couple of pumps outside. He would let us play with the big hydraulic jack out back and float objects in the water tub used for finding leaks in the old inner tubes. I'm guessing that he was as lonely as we were bored. It was a nice symbiotic relationship.
Right:
Kindergarten
When I started school I was suddenly in a new world. That first day of kindergarten, I saw many kids crying when it became apparent to all of us that when mom leaves, we were gonna be left behind. It didn't bother me much because I guess I wasn't awfully close to my mother at this time, her being busy with lots of younger kids. I'm pretty sure she was happy about not having to worry about me for awhile. I don't think it crossed my mind where Mike was spending his days. I think that was the end of our closeness as I started making friends of my own.
As I look back, I was quite uninhibited then and I adapted to the new environment very easily. Many an hour was passed at the old easel creating masterpieces, one after another. I can now look at my kindergarten picture and see one of my paintings on the wall behind us. I am still good friends with a couple of the guys from kindergarten as we spent the remainder of our school years together.
My good rapport with the teacher was severely stunted one day when she was calling role and she came to my name. I was standing right in front of her, and I told her so and implied that she must be blind. She verbally reprimanded me in front of the entire class. From then on, I made every effort to be respectful to all my teachers.
Later that year, for some reason, she saw fit that I move on prematurely into the first grade. My daily routine changed significantly in the first grade. First, my usual friends were no longer there. The situation was a very formal one and it took time to get accustomed to it. I remember one setting in the first grade where we all gathered around and the teacher asked someone to share something about themselves with the rest of the class, and she would then print it an a big piece of paper. One guy got up and elaborated on the fact that he had dressed himself for the first time that day. I couldn't understand what the big deal was, because I was used to doing that every day. I don't remember feeling better than him; just different.
While attending this school, I ventured out into the world for the first time to explore unseen places. I went to a friends house after school one day, and thought I remembered the way home. I was terrified when I realized that I was lost. I finally got home much later than usual and I was so relieved to finally get home that I didn't worry for a minute about the punishment awaiting me. It never came and I don't even remember anyone noticing that I was very late.
The next year, I was transferred to Epiphany, the Catholic grammar school where I would spend the next eight years. This was a very different setting that was strictly disciplined. Everyone wore uniforms and the order of the day was conform. We even had the same lunch box!
Mike, Me, and Dan getting ready to walk a mile to Epiphany for the first day of school. (Sept. 1961)
If you stand out in any way, there was a good chance of being punished. If you were involved in any disturbance, you were sure to be embarrassed by the teacher a Nun in front of your peers. The first couple of years, our teachers were extremely nice and I often found myself volunteering to help after school. My religious education essentially started in the second grade with the second and third sacraments of the Catholic faith: first Confession and first Holy Communion. In preparation, we memorized answers to questions that the teacher recited. We were all obedient to the rigorous training and no one dared question the meaning of any of this. This God is what the nuns have dedicated their lives to and what this big church stands for. Simply not memorizing the lines fast enough was grounds for the label of troublemaker.
Left: Gramps, Nana, and a boatload of grandkids.
(1962, just before he died)At this age, I remember spending a lot of time with my Grandpa at their house a couple of blocks away. I was often alone with him in the house because, I would later learn, he was deathly sick and could collapse on the floor at any time. I enjoyed my time with him very much. One day he bet me a dime that it was Monday when I knew for a fact that it was Tuesday. I was delighted when I won the bet because I would normally have to work half an hour for that dime sweeping the sidewalk in front of the house.
There was an interesting culture of Chinese guys who owned a grocery store up the street from us. My Mom did some accounting for them and became good friends with them. But even so, I would never be so bold as to make an effort to get to know any one of them personally. They were very strange and when one of them visited our house, they're strangeness permeated the air.
The third grade was a 'shifting gears' process. The teachers were two old ladies and the studies became work. It was no longer fun going to school. My father would quiz my older brother, myself, and my younger brother Dan in the multiplication tables. My father taught us a great deal around this time. He enjoyed baseball and bowling. He taught us to throw a baseball, how to fix the window when the baseball went through it, and how to fix the car when it broke down on the way to get the glass. He taught us how to fix our bikes, how to cast a fishing pole, and how to keep score in bowling. It's not like he spent a lot of time in the teaching process, but he would just do these things in our presence and we would seem to pick it up over time.The few occasions I have to see my father now, I cannot stand to be with him for very long because he is so self-centered talking about his golfing prowess.
Dad was the primary disciplinarian of the family. He never spent a lot of time discussing right or wrong. If you were caught, or if there was reasonable evidence to suspect guilt, the leather belt wailed.
There were some tossup cases where it just depended on what kind of mood he was in, But this was nothing to bet on, because when it came, it was brutal. The worst whipping I ever saw was one that left a great impression on me because I was the fink. Mike, my older brother, was playing magician for me by squirting my Dad's lighter fluid on the top of a table and then lighting it on fire. This scared me to death so I took the liberty of telling my father when he came home. He didn't think the stunt was too impressive to say the least, and when it was all over, I don't think Mike could sit for a week. But I knew he wouldn't set the house on fire. One of the quickest ways to get cracked was to wake dad up on Saturday mornings by making too much noise.
When I was 10, we moved a mile or so towards the school we attended and no longer was it a mile walk to school. However, the neighborhood we moved to was, in terms of attitude, very far from the strict discipline of the school. Our first clue to this was when me and Mike heard the guy next door talking back to his father. We thought it was shocking because we knew what would happen to us if we had even thought of speaking harshly in our dad's direction.
I learned a lot about real like in that setting although we only lived there a few years. We weren't bullied because we all had a fair amount of experience in fighting among ourselves. There were something like 50 to 60 kids on that block. On most summer nights we would gather in front of the house to play games, like hide and seek. There was a definite maturing process in me these 3 years of my life between age 11 and 14. At home, the discipline was very relaxed and there was constant exploration of the world around me, but at school in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, the nuns were cold and very strict. Our class often witnessed defiant kids being spanked at school regularly. As designed, I think the whippings affected me more than them.
At age 11 our family was complete at 9 boys and one girl. I honestly enjoyed being from a large family. We never had much money or the things we thought we wanted, but we always had fun. I never spent much time by myself; that wasn't fun.
In the sixth grade, all the boys were required to be altar boys unless a good excuse was offered. The things I did while supposedly serving God now seem almost blasphemous, but at the time it never seemed to faze me. I once took a sip of red wine with a friend, while preparing it as part of a Catholic Mass. I still think about that whenever I drink red wine. To me it is almost repulsive.
The same nun taught our class in both the seventh and eighth grades which was very unusual, and I don't think that was accidental. She was definitely the most influential teacher in my life. She was sensitive and personal to all of us and we hated to disappoint her, although we often did. The main thing she taught us was our own ignorance in how we treat others. After we graduated from eighth grade, she resigned from the convent.
About 75% of the boys from our grammar school went to the same catholic high school. I was one of them. Even in the midst of about 200 other freshmen, our group formed an inseparable clique. Apparently my Mom was having trouble paying the tuition, and after my first year at Riordan HS, she asked/told me to work at the school. My job that summer was to paint rooms, halls, and even the gym. It's rather shocking looking back at it. The principal was my boss, and he taught me how to paint and what to do next. Then after the summer, I guess they were happy with the slave labor deal, and so they asked me to do preparation and cleanup in the 'Brothers' kitchen for the evening meal. The Brothers were the male equivalent to the grammar school Nuns. I became personally acquainted with many of the Brothers. This one teacher, one of the cooler brothers, asked me and a friend to join him and other kids on a religious retreat during our sophomore year. We obliged, but after we got there, we discovered he was leaving. I wasn't comfortable in the encounter sessions. My friend, however, was so uncomfortable that he talked me into leaving with him before the weekend was over. I now realize this was uncomfortable for me because it was my first experience at confronting myself, and we were with a room full of strangers, kids like ourselves. I guess it was an overdose for my friend. Now, I wish I would have stayed for the entire weekend. Until my graduation from high school, I had the same friends most of my life, and I NEVER talked seriously with an adult about where I was going and what I was doing with my life. I was scared to death whenever I was confronted with the question of my future.
When I was 16, my mother and father broke up very suddenly. This was a great shock to me, mostly because of my own selfish reasons. None of my friend's parents were divorced, so I felt like our family was an outcast. To make it worse, my father left home to live with a lady and her kids a few miles away. He might as well have moved to another planet, because we rarely saw him after that. My grandmother and my Mom highly discouraged us kids from visiting our Dad.
Maybe it was a coincidence, but Mike left home at about the same time, when he was 18 years old. Suddenly I was the oldest male living at home. So I assumed the role by dominating, exactly the way I had learned from my father, with a heavy hand. I got my drivers license when I was 16, and by this time my friends and I had already discovered the pastime of drinking alcohol. At first it was only beer and on special occasions, but as time went by, the occasions became more frequent until before too long, no gathering was complete unless there was plenty of booze. We all belonged to the Epiphany teen club at the grammar school that we attended. This was a great place for us to congregate and mix with girls and plan our shenanigans.
Right: Rich and myself going to senior prom (not as a couple!)
At this time I was rarely without my friends and, when I was, I was not a happy person. I was much more withdrawn and domineering at home. I often went on weekend trips with my friends whenever we felt the desire. My mother never prevented me from doing anything. She was rather upset, however, when she had to drive to Yosemite to get me out of jail for underage drinking. I was never punished for it though. I guess discipline had disappeared with Dad. I made it to school and work, so little else was said.
Still, upon graduation from high school, I knew I couldn't continue living at home. Myself or my Mom didn't have money to go to college, although I probably wouldn't have gone if we did have the money. I felt that I had little choice but to go in the military like Mike.
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