Dad’s “Worthless no good friends”

Everyone knows people that they are not exactly proud to claim. Many of these folks in our lives are there by virtue of the “three P’s”: proximity, persistence and politeness. Generally, these slack moraled criminally prone types were a part of your life because they were proximate to you growing up, and persisted, having known you for a very very long time and under sundry circumstances. Guys like your cousin’s charming criminal ex-boyfriend, or a neighborhood kid turned con man that was on all your baseball teams from age eight on. Due to Politeness, or whatever strange fascination we have with these types, we can never really tell them straight up “get out- leave my life, never contact me again”. Such it was with my Dad and a certain group of guys, that gave even me, a fearless five-year-old, the willies. Dad inherited his well-mannered politeness from his mother, who was genteel and believed in the social graces with a fervor bordering on religion. My mom had a catch all phrase for these guys that didn’t quite fit with her precepts of acceptable societal norms; “your worthless no good friends”.

I was fascinated by these guys, who seemingly had the good sense to mostly drop in on my dad when mom was busy on a Saturday hanging sheets in the backyard on that backwards umbrella frame shaped device, and thus unavailable for interaction which doubtless would include severe mom vibes of disapproval. Also, I really was just as fascinated by seeing an adult, who was terribly FLAWED in some awful indescribable fashion, so unlike my own parents who were perfect in keeping with the perfect code of the perfect suburban family in a perfect neighborhood of the perfect 50’s. The Fifties were paramount in their representation of the social structure to us kids, and adults were not only authority figures, but unquestioned in their motivations. It was not unusual for someone’s mom you didn’t know, speaking with the same authority you recognized from your own mom, to reach out and whack some kid who was unsupervised and acting out of control in some public setting; just a cuff like a mother bear to her cub, which was an acceptable form of social public discipline then in the far reaches of Los Angeles suburbia. I suppose like so much else this social construct was a holdover from the days of the World War, where absolute unflinching authority, loyalty, and social order went hand in hand with keeping the home fires.

Back to Dad’s friends. They were friends of dad from childhood, high school and the war. My Mom used to remind my Dad of these friends of his whenever she was particularly cranky, probably on a day where we kids had been particularly annoying or misbehaving miscreants of the garden variety. Then as now, we baby boomers seriously outnumbered the other folks, and sometimes a flicker of a bad idea erupted into a neighborhood-wide child riot of noisy attitude. Poor dad would come home after one of these days and mom would mention that “one of his no good friends” had stopped by or called and off she’d go, reminded anew of one or the other of dad’s friends misadventures or other transgressions which usually resulted in our family losing money. There was Phil, faithful as the day was long, through thick and thin for Dad from childhood in West Los Angeles bean fields to college after the war. He coaxed dad into co-signing for his car loan and obtained a beautiful used convertible which he drove off in — -and out of dad’s life. He never made a single payment on the car, and mom and dad were stuck with the car payments. So, I heard this particular story every month around the first for what seemed like forever.

There were others. There was Jerry Tugens. I never quite understood whether it was high school or the war dad knew him from, but he was someone I liked a lot despite his dark side which I did not understand until my own friends came back from our own war. A lot of guys ended up like Jerry; we just didn’t know it, because “these things” were never discussed in polite company, especially around kids. What we knew of the War then was based on the relentless retelling and mythologizing of early postwar media — comic books, movies and early TV shows, bags and bins of green plastic army men, smelling of smoky industrial molds in Pacoima or those factories with the oiled dirt parking lots down by Crenshaw. Or the red paper cap-powered weaponry in the local toy store. The hero always came back whole and if they got shot, they didn’t explode in crimson mist and bits of flesh in a wailing shriek of horror. They usually grabbed their stomachs, grimaced, and keeled over. That was how we played; WAR was a popular pastime amongst us boys. When you “Got it” you grabbed your stomach, grimaced, and keeled over. We had NO idea of the random horror dealt to real life soldiers in the performance of their duties. No concept of seeing things so awful that you couldn’t speak of it ever again, and yet you relived it every night in your dreams. Jerry was like that. Funny guy, always kidding around, yet his breath always smelled like the cork in my grandpa’s ceramic whiskey jug. I did not judge him, he was an adult. I did not sense his angst or the fact he was haunted by the war.

Once he was at an informal gathering of the type so popular in suburbia then; all the families getting together; the ladies drinking martinis or salty dogs, the men, usually beer. It didn’t occur to me that Jerry was a troubled alcoholic suffering from post traumatic stress. But every so often, my visits to his home would end up in the garage where Jerry, like most men of the 50’s and their fathers before them, had carved out a bastion of maleness usually referred to as a ‘workshop”. More often than not an old ice cooler was there, old faded soda ad peeling away to reveal the pot metal underneath, rusty drain spigot dripping a mini-Colorado down the barren concrete floor to somewhere else outside, usually through a small hole cut in the wall. There was always a ratty old chair or sofa, and a makeshift table full of tools or vague machinery in some state of repair. Pegboard held little baby food jars full of nuts if they were really organized; others had battered old Maxwell House cans for that purpose.

There was a stark aroma. Different in every man’s garage, a unique scent all his own as each part of his interests evaporated in various ways; turpentine, auto grease, and yeasty beer bottles stacked for the deposits. Musty stoves, sterno fumes, guncotton, solvents, campfire smells of old potbellies used to heat the place, specific kinds of rust smells depending on what was rusting. Resinous current ozone smells if they were electrically inclined. Jerry’s garage had some cool stuff. It was all War memorabilia, not enshrined really, but hung on the walls; a couple of helmets, one or two rifles, a rusty bayonet, some other stuff that was equipment related. Ammo boxes shared space with boxes of Brillo and a crusty grease-stained bar of Lava on the shelf. They held some faded sepia photos of guys, a few 50 cal shells, maybe spent bullets, and a marvelous set of tattered playing cards that I glimpsed once, with naked ladies on them. I remember how unattractive they looked to me, hideous horse faced gals with too much make up and heavy droopy mascaraed eyes and lipstick, all pendulous breasts and gigantic dark nipples, looking nothing like MY mom stepping from the shower. My mom was the most beautiful lady in the world, and these ladies were….ugh, I don’t know. Yet there was something going on about them that made me want to see them again, just not around here. Or at that moment.

I don’t know why, but you couldn’t go into a garage in the fifties without also finding a coffee can of marbles. This diverges from the subject though. I was always drawn to these places out of boredom during the big multi-family gatherings typical of the times and my solitary inclinations that went along with them. I walked in this time, anticipating snooping in the tools or machinery, and discovered Jerry sitting in there on his chair morosely in the shadows. I detested one on ones with adults, and I could tell I was in for that. I interrupted his reverie and he looked up. “Hey Mikie”, he said, “c’mon over here. I wanna show you this”. He looked weird to me. It was not so much a look as a construct of weird vibes and expression. On the shelf next to the ratty chair I saw a bottle like I had never seen, wrapped in a gold and red colored label with slight off colors that strived for brown but came up a smear of greens and darkish reds; now I know it was a pint flask of cheap whiskey, almost empty. He was in a mood unfamiliar to me. He was twirling a metallic thing in his fingers. He handed it to me. I looked down at my hand. It was a lump of metal, dark gray with no discernable purpose, and had several sharp star-like random edges to it. “Shrapnel” he said authoritatively, and the whiskey smells wafted my way again.

I have to stop here and tell you I have always liked the whiskey smell, one of my earliest memories of my grandfather was a cool little ceramic jug he kept in a small mini bar near his laundry room that played “How Dry I am” when you picked it up. This forbidden toy like thing always attracted me and I loved to pop the ornate stopper, smell it and taste the end with the tip of my tongue. Whiskey smell. Whiskey taste. Grandparents House; the warmest of fuzzies. So, it was not a red light to me that Jerry smelled this way. I looked down at the metal alien object in my hand again. “That’s what they pulled outta me” continued Jerry. I notice his eyes were red and glassy. “That and about two pounds more” he said, pulling up his t-shirt to reveal a mass of scar tissue the likes of which I had never seen. To me, it looked like an off colored dirty pink parasite spread out like the size and shape of your hand, an alien octopod affixed to his lower stomach. “And here” he said, showing me his arm, the familiar railroad tracks in a little train set on his outer forearm. I knew about that one. I never had connected it to the war. He sniffed a long sigh.” I lost all my squad, all of ‘em…..” His voice began to quaver. It took on a stifled sob quality. NOW I was really getting weirded out. Not hard to do to a little kid who was suspicious of non-parental adults anyway. But I was frozen in a mixture of awe and fear, just like in those dreams you have where you want to run away but your feet are turned to concrete. He trembled with rage and his blue eyes flickered about like in a monster movie. Yikes. “They caught us in the open…no cover … j-j-just tore us to shreds…I watched Bob Linklade and Jimmy Spencer blown to bits! Their blood covered me and then I screamed “look out!” too late to do any good, we tried, oh how we tried, but they just cut us to bits, and everything was spinning I could hear the boys crying for their moms! Every man in wartime screams for his mother when he’s dying, did you know that Mikie?” He locked his gaze with mine and I noticed the tears. His big shoulders heaved with silent sobs. I was too freaked out to speak. I just nodded. “I miss those boys every day. They were so young. Best friends I ever had….” Jerry buried his head in his hands. He took a deep breath. “I think you better go get some Hawaiian Punch, Mikie. We got it in the kitchen in the punchbowl.” “uh…OK Jerry”, I managed to spit out as I slowly backed out of the darkened corner of this man’s personal hell.

I got around the out side of the garage and leaned against the wall. My heart was pounding so loudly I could hear it in my ears. I heard Jerry quietly whimpering. It seemed to drown out the party sounds, which were starting to slowly filter back into my consciousness.

“Jerrrrrrrry! Jerry!” It was Francine, Jerry’s wife, out looking for him. I stood there, transfixed. “Mikie, have you seen Jerry?” she asked. “Uh huh”, I mumbled, looking at the ground. I motioned toward the workshop. “He’s in the garage. I don’t think he feels too good.” The flash of worry that crossed her face told me I was dismissed, and I ambled off towards the house.

The cacophony of four family’s worth of children and the attendant raised voices of housewives who had been drinking washed over me along with the scents of cooking casseroles and cake as I re-entered the party scene, now wishing I was home in the confines of my quiet room looking at an encyclopedia. The daughters of Jerry and another family jabbered away as before. I felt like an alien. I floated through the kitchen almost out of body, weirded out beyond all belief and unable to communicate in the frivolous way that the moment required. It was from moments like this I acquired my reputation as an aloof loner. What gave this moment the boost into the hyperspace of memory was the glaring lack of addressing the issue. Clearly I was disturbed, the adults knew I had been with Jerry in the garage, and they likewise knew his proclivities to retreat from forced social scenes into the bottle. They knew of his trauma, yet everyone continued as if the only problem was dinner might be a little late. I felt like a cowboy in one of those westerns where there’s a stampede and I’m behind this small rock, while everything moves by me in a current of animals.

Things continued in this tortuous route for the duration of the evening. I ate dinner solemnly as if I were contaminated or otherwise befouled; I felt at once ashamed, and fearful with an eerie apprehension like I was waiting for a bomb to explode; a bomb that only I knew ticked away beneath the table full of oddly mirthful contemporaries of mine.

No one ever mentioned this incident again, and the lives of our perfect society spun on in their blissful denial. I awoke the next morning, a Saturday, and things had returned to their state of normalcy. It was an early spring day in Southern California of the type that showed you a hint of summer in the pink warmth of the sun but retained the breath of winter as a wind chilled by a sweep over still snow-capped peaks descended into the valley below. The wind blew steadily, nipping at your bare toes like a snippy old lady’s dog. I found myself seeking the shelter and solitude of my own father’s workshop, deserted except for a neighbor cat stretched out on the old couch.

I aimlessly poked through coffee cans and old cooking pots, sorting through a curious mix of colored sawdust, old pencils and wax wood shrouded primitive markers, random bolts and nuts, vacuum tubes, whatever, looking for that neglected and forgotten gewgaw that could be claimed by a young boy and carried in his jean pockets as a curious form of currency whose value depended on how much it was coveted by another young boy. Out rattled a familiar blob of metal. I had never known what this was, but the ragged pointed star edges now had meaning to me. It was shrapnel. From my Dad. I pocketed this shard of history and ambled out into the warming daylight, in search of new adventure.