In elementary school, in Glendora, where the San Gabriel Valley backed up into a flat area against an “L” shaped pocket of the foothills that trapped the air blowing in from LA leading to some of the most severe smog on the planet (sometimes you couldn’t see the houses across the street), I was the target of a bully. He never did any of his own fighting. Instead he cajoled a big relatively dimwitted guy to beat me up occasionally. They stopped after about four or five of these beatings. Guess it wasn’t that much fun as I’d never fight back. I don’t recall their names.
My best friend, Fred, and I would play basketball on our elementary school’s playground with his twin brother, Karl. My buddy was the best all around athlete in the school. He was kind of like the guy in the book, “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles who ended up dead in the end as my best buddy, too, died at the age of 17 from cancer. Not many people with the kind of strength and coordination, as my best buddy was also as considerate and kind. Here I was, basically an egghead, not an athlete at all. I was kind of fat and slow and here we were, two very different people, and we were best friends. His brother and I would play against him alone and he’d invariably win.
Once, a guy who was usually pretty nice was heckling us and stealing the ball occasionally and generally messing up our game. Something snapped in me. He was bigger than me and pretty over weight. I picked him up, turned him on his side and dropped him, knocking all the air out of him. He didn’t bother us anymore. I’m not proud of this action of mine but it was the first time I saw such a state in myself. The next time was about ten years later in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. My sweetheart, a friend and I were walking through a park late at night. A gang of about 5 guys started to hassle us. One was a real troublemaker though he was relatively small, the others in his gang were obviously the brawn but they just stood at the ready. It was pretty frightening. This little blond guy who seemed to be slightly drunk or under the influence of something or other started to slap our friend, who was quite a gentle hippy guy. Without any thoughts in my head, I put that kid on the ground and screamed, “You’re not to blame!” Then I left him and we proceeded on our way. I think we were that close to being stabbed or otherwise hurt but, maybe my proclamation about there being no blame, staved off an attack and I really didn’t hurt the guy, just knocked the air out of him. A couple of blocks away they drove by in a car and hurled a few insults our way but that was it.
In 1980 I was in what proved to be my last year in the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, a liberal arts college in Socorro, NM. When I first arrived there, about four years earlier, a student body run office called “The Women’s Resource Center” was renamed “The People’s Resource Center.” In my first year there I became the coordinator of this office, being handed the keys by the woman who had managed it before in its first incarnation. The stated purpose I adopted for the PRC was to obtain and make available “Anything of potential benefit that is not conventionally available.” We were an umbrella organization with membership in “Friends of the Earth,” National Wildlife Federation, NORML, and other organizations. I played tapes of Buckminster Fuller, Noam Chomsky, and others on our school radio station. I suggested we try to get Buckminster Fuller for a speaker series and he did come with me as his personal driver from and to the Albuquerque airport. My step-father was the head of the math department at the time so it seemed proper that he have dinner with us at the solar heated house my step father and I had built. I got to share my social theory with him at that time, giving him a stack of papers to look at in his motel room. It was actually the second time I had met with him, having gone to a small lecture in San Francisco in 1976 where I showed him the basic graph of my idea. I had told him then I had a lot of work to do and he said, “Looks like you’ve done much already.” At the airport the next day over breakfast, just before he left New Mexico, he commented on my theory, “There appears to be a reasonable excitation.” I’m afraid he died not too long after that, having a heart attack at the hospital where he was told his wife would never wake up from a heart attack induced coma.
We sponsored speakers and events on alternative energy and issues such as nuclear energy and pollution. PRC actually paid my expenses to participate in a conference on such issues in Albuquerque. Before Uranium mine wastes being held in ponds on the Rio Puerco in Arizona breached their confines and flooded an Indian reservation where cancers, still borns and mutations consequently increased, we uncovered the potential and added our voice to the protests that called for a closing of the mines, clean up and containment of these ponds, alas to no avail. I hear now that a water based method of mining is planned or perhaps already underway, that will put radioactive pollution into the aquifer of thousands of native Americans. We once sponsored a dance with the only resident reggae band in New Mexico at the time, Roots. Though alcohol use was commonly supplied by other school organizations at music events, we did not. Instead, we actually used some of the student body funds to buy some herb and rolled up a couple of ounces into some fine fat joints, passing them out at the entrance to the dance held on the grounds surrounding the school pool. There in the desert, good herb could be hard to come by. The dance was a great success and people really loved the refreshments
. For a school parade, we made big long posters that covered my ’62 Mercury Comet with a list of endangered species on one side and a graph of defense spending on the other side. Though I slipped out of the line up before the judges stand, I could swear our “float” received more cheers and applause of any there.At one time I was the head of PRC, the manager of the janitors of the student union building and an elected senator of the student body government. I instigated and got class surveys happening. I resigned as senator with disgust at one of the student senate meetings. I remember going into my office, as head janitor, where the student union building sound system was housed. As the senators left their meeting, I put on Elton John’s “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” where he says “The one where the players are acting surprised saying to me that love is just another four-letter word.” Looking back, this was I sowing the seeds of my being railroaded out of that town.
During some afternoons, holidays and other school breaks, I worked as a welder for, get this, a Navy installation there in the desert that had a large bone yard of old jets, trucks, jeeps and other wasted tools of war. I basically built targets and they’d blow them up with ordnance tests. During the four years I was there, I may of done something of real benefit at that installation, building a platform to hold a window to test designs for railroad engines so that engineers wouldn’t get killed by bricks hung off of bridges.
Once I went to a friend’s house and was in his yard using his oxy-acetylene rig to weld something on my car when I noticed a gang of about ten Mexican youths and adults cheering on a big German Shepard as it was attacking a Chihuahua. I turned off the torch and laid it down then ran over, jumping over a sand dune and planted a hard kick to the stomach of that Shepard who dropped the Chihuahua and ran off yelping. The Chihuahua had survived and ran over to a mobile home where the door opened a crack and he slipped inside. One of the Mexicans started to sidle up to me with blood in his beer-laden gaze and I screamed at him “What’s the matter? Don’t you like life?” A girl stopped him and shook her head and he retreated. She could see that I was not to be messed with.
Once, at a disco dance we held in the student union, being the head janitor made me the chief bouncer. A group of students started screaming, “disco sucks” and causing disruption of our function. I went and stood in their midst and told them what I thought about them. They started to move against me and I dropped into a Ju-Jitsu stance and they all backed away then left, screaming epithets. They treated me with much respect from then on.
At the end of that last year at the school for me, I finished a couple of weeks of full time welding work, then dropped into the PRC office for some reason, only to find that everything had been cleared out, furniture, files, books, tapes, everything. I contacted the student union government office and asked what had happened and they told me the office was closed down because we were overdrawn on our account. They hadn’t contacted me. Didn’t ask for any defense to their claim. Well, we actually had about $200 left in the account, as my books would show. They told me that all of the items had been stacked in the corner of a new room that was being added to the union building. I went there to see if I could find the books, top center drawer of the desk. The couch was perched on top of the desk. Well, I didn’t think, just acted. I lifted that couch off myself without taking the time to find some assistance. Of course, my account records had disappeared. I hurt my back pretty seriously and spent the next week lying on the floor (thank all for DMSO) as I found it less painful than my bed. It gave me time to reflect on my actions. I had blown it. Since then, I’ve avoided acting without thinking. Though at the time I didn’t have any money to speak of, my New Mexican girl friend gave me $500 and I built a trailer, attached it to my Comet and returned to California where I’ve been since.
I don’t have the Comet anymore though I had tweaked it until it gave me 30 miles per gallon. While I was getting the funds to rebuild the motor, I was given a warning that it needed to be removed from where I was living quick for building code violation purposes which I found out later was not true. I paid to have it towed to a wrecking yard. They didn’t save anything, the dual headers, vapor injection system, electric fan, etc. Guess I was wrong to of had an emotional attachment to that car. I bought it from an inventor friend in 1976 for $300. After I shared my theory with him he commented "Everything has to start somewhere." We converted half of his laboratory into an efficiency apartment where I lived for almost a year there in Mendocino County, California before I headed off for more schooling in New Mexico. He told me he won the title of inventor of the year in 1980 though I haven't been able to confirm this. I bet someday you'll see his wind vane being used for power generation eventually as it appears to be more efficient than any other.
The desire to be some kind of hero still seems to be with me but I’m a lot more subdued now, I think, I hope. Sometimes life seems like a recurring nightmare of my youth, where a hole was growing and consuming a small planet and I was part of a crew trying to stop it. From about the age of 10 until the age of 15 I would have this dream. In the dream I was part of a work group and as we worked a girl would come over to the lip of the hole and give me some flowers and I’d wake up screaming, though actually I’d start screaming while asleep. My parents would lift me into the TV room and sit with me as I would slowly wake up saying, “I don’t want to go back there again.” The dream happened for the last time when I was about 15 years old when I consciously stepped into the dream and stopped the hole. Now I see it happening again with my home, my planet, and it’s not a dream. Eventually, someone is going to have to step in and stop this insanity that threatens to destroy us all. Maybe that someone is me. I don’t know. If I get railroaded off of this world, I’m afraid I have no Comet to carry me away.
