September 18, 2010

• Friends and Neighbors: Part Two

  Friends and Neighbors (continued from HERE)

  

  This is the second part to Friends and Neighbors: A "Friendship Week" post. It was inspired by Kelly's (webofsimplicity)  "Friendship Week" entries on her blog. I am tagging some of the people who commented on the first entry.

  There was a bit of a shakeup in my family in 1974 when my father passed away after suffering a massive heart attack. If not for my friends, I would have probably followed up on some of my deepest suicidal thoughts and feelings which bore through my brain deeper and faster than at any time previous. I was on vacation with Buck and some other friends camping up in the hills above Sausalito, CA when I got the news through the park ranger that Dad had passed away.

  Buck, my best friend in high school, and his family helped me through this time. Mark, from work, and his family were beneficial in my return from grief to normalcy. Tom remained a solid rock on whom I could always depend to get me in a better mood, with his gut piercing laugh and his total embrace of joi de vivre. My mother remained in the nursing home, pretty much living as a vegetable, not able to move nor speak, permanently hooked up to a dialysis machine. My sister married, and my brother moved in with a friend. We had to sell the family home so mother could receive medicare benefits to pay for her stay in the nursing home. Many times I would spend holidays at the families of my friends, and I had a series of "surrogate families" at the time which would not have been possible without the friendships I collected.

  I took trips to San Francisco with Bill and Mark, who found "religion" and introduced me to the Pentecostal religion. There I met additional friends, and the fellowship was really wonderful at a most distressing period in my life.

  I lived in my Rosemead apartment for roughly a year, and then moved to the South Bay in 1975 when the company for which I worked expanded operations and opened more stores. I didn't lose any of my buds in the San Gabriel Valley either. I just gained more friends in the South Bay. I still saw Steve, whom I'd known since junior high. He got married to his high school sweetheat. I hung out in Hollywood, visiting clubs and going to concerts with Tom. I would spend long evenings discussing religion and philosophy and deciphering song lyrics with Jon, who would later become a deacon in the Worldwide Church of God.

  Chief among my new group of friends were Harry, Morgan, and Steve, who worked in the Torrance Ole's Home Center, where I was the new Garden and Nursery manager. I immersed myself in the drug culture in the South Bay at the time, and partied pretty heartily with my buddies after we got home from work. Remember the scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" when stoner Jeff Spicoli and his friends fall out of the back of the van, followed by billowing clouds of marijuana smoke? That happened in the Ole's parking lot in another friend Bill's van many times after and even before work.

  

  Harry was the maintenance man at Ole's and he also was assistant manager of a small apartment building in Torrance, into which I moved. My friend Tom helped me to pack a U Haul truck with all the stuff from my apartment in Rosemead, and it took us most of the day. When I showed up at the apartment building in Torrance, Harry and most of the guys who lived in the building helped unload my van. This process took all of a half hour or so, and then we all went to Harry's place and proceeded to party.

  As I immerse myself in memory of those times, the party didn't seem to end for most of the decade, and into the early 80s. I thank my elephant's memory that I can even remember most of what happened back then.

  My hedonistic lifestyle got the better of me in 1977. After an extended vacation with Harry, his wife and two kids, to New Jersey to stay with his wife's folks, I returned to find myself first demoted, then eventually fired from my management position. Harry and quite a few others were let go, too, for a variety of infractions, none of which held any inkling of the truth. We were let go in a "sweep" because we all partied when off work, and although I was always on the job and on time, Morgan, Steve, and Harry might call in sick, or show up late. 1977 was also the year that my mother passed away quietly in the nursing home, and my siblings and I received about $4000,00 each from the settlement with my father's employer, which was awarded us because my father had his heart attack while on the job.

  I took my first acid trips with Morgan, Steve, and Harry. I moved into a management job at a new SoCal retailer, FedMart, pretty quickly. The store manager, James, whom I will always call my "godfather" taught me the ropes and became a friend. He even roomed with me for a while after he separted from his wife. It was during this time I met my friend Jim, whom I still call my current best friend. He was a friend of a guy who had moved into my old apartment when I moved into a larger one in the same apartment building Harry had managed. Harry moved into a house with another of his friends, and the new managers of my apartment building had come to California from Chicago. Their son, Kevin, was a drug dealer, and he moved into a bachelor pad next door to his parents. I hardly had to leave the apartment building in those days, except to go to work, and met too many people to list in this entry, as it would take quite a few paragraphs. At one time I had two girlfriends living in the building across from each other, and I was wooing a third. All this time I sort of lived a double life. At work, I graduated from warehouse manager of a furniture store, to shuttle truck driver for the Southern California division, to warehouse manager and then hardlines manager for four different stores, eventually being sent to Culver City along with a "dream team" of managers to "clean up" the worst store in the chain.

  

  Kevin and my new best buddy Jim were musicians, and formed a band together, not coincidentally called "Friendz". One of the guys in the band was gay, and introduced me to Keith, another drug dealer, who was also gay. At around the same time I met Cecil, another gay drug dealer. (I knew lots of drug dealers in those days, and that's another story entirely.) When Kevin's parents moved from the apartment building in which I lived after his father (or was it his mother, I'm pretty surprised I can remember anything from this period in my life) died, the new managers decided to remodel the building and switch from month to month tenancy to long term leasing. Jim and a bunch of other friends helped me to move, and I and Jim shared a two bedroom apartment in Lomita, the town next door to Torrance.

  I also shared that apartment with Kevin and with a friend from the Culver City FedMart store, Ed, at different times when they needed a place to crash for a few months. FedMart was only in SoCal for a few years, and went out of business in 1981. I went to the going out of business party in a rented limosine with a few other friends wearing a coke spoon around my neck. I stuck with the company till the bitter end, and received a six month severance package, which meant I could continue the party without even going to work for quite a while. Tom and I vacationed in Texas for "Buddy Holly days" that summer. My friend and roommate Jim would criticize me for not trying to find a job. Eventually I got a job at Gemco in Culver City, quit drinking, and straightened up my act somewhat. But then Jim kept drinking, and I kicked him out of the apartment one evening when he pissed me off over something or other.

  I tried to find another roommate, since I couldn't afford the rent alone, and Jim moved in with Cecil, my gay drug dealer friend, in Hermosa Beach. Eventually he moved out, and I moved in with Cecil. While there, I met a lot of his gay "buddies". We cooked a lot of freebase cocaine in that apartment, which overlooked the pacific ocean. Although I'm straight, and was wooing two different gals at the time, I would party with Cecil and his friends, and immersed myself in the gay scene in West Hollywood, which was not as "open" as it is now. In those pre AIDS days, a lot of the subculture hadn't "come out of the closet" yet. I've always been a good dancer, and cut a few rugs at gay bars during this period. I also went to country bars with Tom. I was content with knowing a lot of disparate groups of friends, and those groups rarely mixed. I can't remember at any time being bored, that's for sure.

  

  Cecil contracted AIDS in the end. But first he hurridly fled the apartment one evening when bigger drug dealers were on the lookout for him. He'd left me holding the bag for three months back rent. I'd paid him, but he'd used the money for drugs. One of my buddies from the Culver City Gemco, Scott, was looking for a place, so he moved in to Cecil's old room. When he joined the Navy, I invited my old friend Jim, who'd lived there with Cecil before I got there, to move back in with me.

  I began to lose track of my ex high school buddies, and would go for long stretches without even seeing Tom. My relationship with him was a bit strained, because I'd sometimes kick him out of my place in Torrance when my girlfriend (who lived in the building) dropped by. One evening I got a call from Tom's father. Tom's parents always invited me to spend time with them on holidays. Tom had been in an industrial accident at work, falling 20 feet and breaking his spine. He had an operation, and I spoke with him via telephone immediately following. Later that day, blood got into his lungs and he perished. I was one of the pallbearers at his funeral, and I rode my motorcycle at the head of the funeral procession for my best friend. I suffered a lot of regrets for not having been closer to him in his final years. He was only 37 years old.

  Back when I'd lived in the first apartment in Torrance, I'd met Joel, who was one of Jim's friends, and lived in the apartment building next door. Through Joel, I met Bob, (whose place I called "The Frat House" when I lived there, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.) Jim and Joel were pretty tight, and one evening at a bar, they chatted up a couple of gals. One of them was Claire, who is now Jim's wife. Jim and I moved from Hermosa Beach back to Lomita, and when Bob's mother died, I was invited to room with him in "The Frat House", so told Jim after our lease was up that we'd have to split up. Eventually Jim moved in with Claire and they married soon after.

  The times in the "Frat House" are somewhat legendary among my friends that are left. Bob had lived there with his mother since childhood. He was an only son. He invited me and another guy named Mike to move in. Our group of friends were known as "The Backyard Buddies." Besides Bob, there was Pete (popeet), another Jim (the professor), Scott ( nervous guy, yet ANOTHER South Bay drug dealer), Paul (the godfather), Dan (the crazy canuck) and various others. Bob had an early big screen television and we'd all cram into his rather large bedroom on Friday nights or weekend days. My days in retail management ended after Gemco went out of business and I didn't last one year with Target stores. I got my present job in the electrical industry because Jim first worked at the place I do now, and he got me a job there.

  I can remember wild conversations at the Frat House about how we all met each other, and the shared friendships we harbored with other people in the South Bay. For most of the late 70s and early 80s, a lot of us in our 20s and 30s knew each other because we all got our drugs from the same people, and attended the same parties. Each of the backyard buddies would recount how he met each of the others in the room. Sometimes it might have helped to have a geneaology chart to keep every connection straight. And since we were high most of the time, the term "straight" couldn't be applied anyway.

  In another bout of roommate roulette in the ensuing years, Mike moved out of the "Frat House", Jim moved in, and when he got married, moved out and Joel moved in. Then I moved out when I met Pat and Joel and Bob lived together until Bob died a few years later. I'd broken up with Pat at the same time, and Joel and I looked for lodgings together. Our "temporary arrangement" lasted 14 years.

  

  Joel and I lived together in a rented house two blocks from where Jim and Claire lived. Pete and another Jim, a friend of Joel's from his schooldays, became constant visitors. Many a weekend was spent playing chess, or watching movies on my 60" bigscreen TV. Jim formed another band with another Jim and his brother Scott plus two others. Dan, whom we always called "The Crazy Canuck" and who used to work alongside Bob in the late 70s, had been deported to Canada, yet he always came back to SoCal to visit Joel and I until he contracted lieukemia, and finally passed away. I spent a two week vacation in Toronto with him in the late 90s and met his friends and neighbors. Dan lived in the same neighborhood in Toronto for his whole life, and worked as the head janitor at the elementary school he'd attended as a kid.

  Eventually drug use got the better of a couple of the group. Joel's friend Jim stole money from both of us, and stole his roommate Pete's laserdisc collection to buy methamphetamine. He was late jailed and I don't know what happened to him. Pete was a very artistic sort who worked as a well paid designer at Xerox throughout the 80s. He was given a severance package when Xerox went through some hard times in the 90s and he blew it all on drugs and online gambling. The last time I saw him was a year or so before Joel died knocking on our front door. He looked emaciated and hungry, and confessed he was now homeless. Seeing good friends of mine deteriorate in this manner was quite a wake up call for me. I stopped drug use cold turkey, and cut way down on my alcohol intake.

  Joel contracted cancer and died in 2008. He was 53. Jim got hooked on the World of Warcraft and I see him occasionally. He's also turned into quite a cook. I moved into the mobile home estates where I now live in early 2009. I've made lots of new friends among my neighbors. Three of us, my immediate neighbor Mike, (yet another ) Jim from down the street, and Jeff always hang out together down by the pool, and we've had "parties" (with no drugs and only a little booze) and movie nights at my place.

  I've had many friends over my long history on this planet. I'm grateful for all of them, although I'm sad to see what happened to some of them because of drug abuse and bad life choices. I'm now 57, in better health than I've been for most of my life, and I'm still making friends. One drawback of living in a senior mobile home park is that some people die, but that's the last fact of life, as I've always said. My first female friend here, Paula, passed away a couple of months ago. She used to walk her dog across my property, and that's how we met.

  

  From my neighborhood in El Monte, where I met childhood friends, through my apartment in Torrance, where almost everyone who lived there was a buddy or a girlfriend, to my present digs in my mobile home park, where my neighbors pal around with me down by the pool, I have had great folks within a stone's throw of where I stand, and everyone I meet, either here in the park, or here on Xanga in cyberspace, is a potential new friend, with whom I can share my deepest thoughts, observations, and feelings. I sometimes like to be alone, but I'm never really lonely, thanks to my friends. 

  • 1:27 pm
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