August 1973 - On My Way On My Own

The Camaro was already packed out in front of the house on Cypress.  I remember the morning I left as if it were yesterday rather than nearly 50 years in the past.  I left early that morning, possibly 7:00 AM or before.

Within a few days after I left, mom was moving to San Pedro.  She'd stayed on in South Gate until we kids had finally left home for good.  Ann had moved out a couple of years earlier.  She was on her own path that would take her from working at the phone company, providing phone numbers to those too lazy to use a phone book; to driving a school bus; to cleaning offices in high and low rises in Long Beach; to working for Western Airlines, a job she got through her future husband Mark's aunt. 

Mom already had a duplex unit rented in San Pedro.  All of my record albums and comic books and books and other remaining items were boxed up to move there along with her.  I had already given a hamster I inherited to Lorri, my half-sister.  When I got my first permanent assignment out of OTS, I would retrieve all of what I had left behind with mom.  But the rented house on Cypress (1964-1973) would soon slip into my past, as had the apartment over the garage on Orchard in South Gate (1963-4), as well as the house on Lomita in Orange (1960-3), the duplex also on Lomita in Orange (1960), the apartment in Orange (1959-60), the house on Foxley in Whittier (1954-1959), the house on Broadway in Santa Ana (circa 1952-3), base housing in George AFB (circa 1951), Valdosta (circa 1951), and Bayshore Drive in Tampa, FL (1949-50).

Only Whittier and South Gate ever seemed like home.  The rest were just temporary waystations. 

5818 Bayshore Drive, Tampa

                                                                Base housing George AFB

                                                                1915 S. Broadway, Santa Ana

                                                                13222 Foxley Drive, Whittier

                                                                    253 South Oak St., Orange

                                                                    1745 Lomita, Orange

                                                           2875 Orchard Place, South Gate

                                                              8940 Cypress Ave., South Gate

I took Firestone Blvd to the Long Beach FWY north, then out through Riverside where I stopped to get a sub sandwich at The Sub Station, where I had my first sub sandwich with Darryl Butler near the University campus.  But it was still way too early for anything to be open.  So I got back on the freeway for I-10. 

I had previously installed, with Dennis Madura's help, my 8-track tape player in the Camaro, so I did not have to rely on radio stations, fading in and out, for music.  At some point I remember Diana Ross singing "Touch Me In the Morning" before I left the Riverside area for the desert and Phoenix beyond.

I arrived in Phoenix in the afternoon where I was staying at a motel near the airport.  I swam in the pool and met a handsome, leanly muscular young man who was in the Marine Corps Reserves and was working highway construction near Phoenix.  We had dinner together but diverged to our own rooms for the night.  I drove East early the next morning after breakfast (the Marine had had to leave even earlier for work on the highway).  I arrived in El Paso, TX, that evening.  

Three other guys who were also heading to OTS were to meet up with me at the same motel in El Paso.  They had decided to leave a day later, each driving his own car, from the L.A. area the morning I was already leaving from Phoenix.  I now only remember George Tucker by name because he and I ended up in the same flight (in the blue squadron) once we arrived at Lackland.  The other two ended up in other squadrons (yellow and green, I think).  

The following morning, the four of us in our four separate cars headed further East for San Antonio over what seemed like endless stretches of highway going nowhere.  But we finally arrived that afternoon where the four of us were staying at a motel in San Antonio near the base.  Our arrival at OTS was scheduled for the next morning.

After OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, finding myself part five

Those last few weeks before Air Force OTS, I was usually on cruise control.  I might see a movie at one of the malls, or just putter around the house before I had to leave for Santa Fe Springs and my security guard job at Accuride.  Whereas there had been a guard in the back of the facility and at the front while the strike dragged on, and I was usually stationed in the front; now that the strike was over, the company only paid for one guard, and we were given an old pickup truck to drive around the site, over dirt and black top, not that there was anything to guard against, the workers having all gone back to work.  It was on one early evening that I saw a missile launched from Vandenberg break apart in the sun-streaked skies to the West, not knowing what would await me. 

One afternoon, after I had turned off of Firestone Blvd. and was headed toward the Accuride plant, I noticed something unusual on the painted white line in the center of the road, between the single lane in each direction.  I slowed the new Camaro down to a stop--fortunately nobody was behind me.  I opened the door, reached out, and grabbed the tiny gray kitten that somehow had perilously gotten itself out there without being killed but had stopped.  I scooped it up and set it on the passenger's seat.  It was so very young, and even today I cannot imagine where it could have come from and how it had managed to wander that far.  (A woman who lived across from the plant was always having her dogs dig their way out and wander out onto the road.  I had to open that gate, corral them and lead them back to her house.  She began to accuse me of luring them out, but she soon found the hole they had dug.  And her small dog was hit by a passing car.  I thought he was dead, but he fortunately got up and walked off the road.)

I could not keep the kitten I had just rescued.  The parakeets were all gone or deceased, but I had a long drive ahead to San Antonio, Texas, in a couple of weeks.  And my mom was not a pet person.  She would not have taken care of it.  When I arrived at Accuride and parked the car, I went into the office and mentioned what had happened to a woman who answered the outside lines and transferred calls with the sexiest voice I had ever heard in person or over the phone.  She didn't even try to make her voice sound so alluring; it just came naturally to her.  She was always sympathetic.

She explained that her husband would kill her if she brought home another pet, but she promised to let the local shelter know to come and pick up the little one which they did not too long after she called.  I always hoped it was adopted and found a loving home that appreciated a sweet little soul that had managed to make it this far in life and survived.

But my own friends were either gone or going.  Daylin Butler was in Michigan at the University.  Darryl Butler was about to graduate from the University of Riverside and moved to Indiana for graduate school at that University.  Mike had gotten married and moved to the valley.  Dennis Madura had gotten married though he and his wife lived in South Gate.  Dave Moore was in the Air Force, though I would lose complete contact with him by 1974.  Pat Byrne was still in New York, flying routes to Europe for TWA.  I was no longer friends with John Robertson.  But I had already driven out to 29 Palms when Dennis Zito was temporarily stationed at the massive desert Marine base.  He'd left his wife back in Ohio and had driven out to California, renting a trailer near the base.  I still owned my Mustang when I visited him there.  While waiting for him to show up from the base near by, I took the top down and stared up at the star-filled sky that night.

While at the base, Den and a friend visited me in South Gate; and we all had piled into the Mustang and drove down to San Diego to see the sights.  (I believe the third guy in the picture immediately below was Den's twin brother, David Zito.)  

We stopped by the Marine training base in San Diego and had lunch at the El Cortez Hotel rooftop restaurant.  The photos below were from a later visit Den made to 8940 Cypress.  His little Fiat had hit a coyote on his way and got a bent bumper out of the collision, and I had just acquired the '73 Camaro parked out in front of our house.

These days, there are so many cars on Cypress whenever Mike and I revisited the old block that you would have a hard time finding a place to park on the street. 

A few years ago, I did find that Dennis's wife, Beth, had a profile on Face Book.  I sent out a friend request that was not answered.  Recently, I could not find that profile.  From 1973 onward, we would keep in touch for several years, just into the 1980's before we lost touch.  They were good friends back then, and when everything fell apart with the Air Force in 1979, Beth would be such a kind and decent listener when I called and explained how the entire situation was tearing me up.  I would spend hundreds of dollars on phone calls to friends in 1979, trying to cope with the humiliation I experienced being yanked out of the closet, forced to defend myself and my reputation.  But in 1973, I was getting ready to leave for OTS, and all the joys and recognition and awards and assignments were all ahead of me.    

After OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, Finding my way Part Five

Accuride was on strike before and when I first started working there.  Part of the reason the company hired a security guard company was because of the strike and some of the difficulties with the strikers and those who began to cross the picket line.  By the time I began work there, the numbers of strikers had been seriously reduced.  Most of those who had worked in the manufacturing area with the drawer sliders and the chemicals appeared to be Hispanic.  The office workers and management personnel were white.  I tried to remain neutral, but I was saddened that the workers lost.

One afternoon, the floor manager was at the gate.  Another man was on the other side of the gate.  They appeared to be glaring at one another intensely.  I asked if I should open the gate, but the manager said no.  I realized that the man on the other side of the fence was the head of the union.  Another afternoon, I found nails on the entrance driveway, the kind that were in thick cardboard squares so that the nails stuck up and more easily could have punctured tires.  I picked them all up one by one, probably as many as a dozen and more.

I got Darryl a job for the security guard company for a time, but it seems that the wife of the owner of the company took a disliking to him.  Soon enough, he quit.  I followed the Lakers once again, and though they made it to the finals against the Knicks yet again, they lost.  Slowly, the weeks passed and my reporting time for OTS loomed.  

My friend Dennis Madura and I had been looking to buy new cars.  My '66 Mustang was now several years older and causing maintenance issues now and then.  Because I knew I had been accepted at OTS, I figured I would drive there so that I would have a car while there.  I did not believe the Mustang would stand that distant a drive.  Grandpa Sanchez had given each of us two kids a second mortgage that got paid off early for $400.  Dennis and I were looking to buy the new 1973 Chevy Camaro.  Unfortunately, the GM plant building them was on strike.  Each week we waited to hear that the strike had ended and Camaros would begin rolling off the assembly line in the Mid West.

About the time that the strike at Accuride was broken and the disappointed workers returned to the manufacturing floor, the GM strike was nearly at an end and '73 Camaros began to trickle into GM dealerships.  We intended to buy ours at Cormier Chevrolet off of the San Diego Freeway.  Finally, just a few weeks before I was going to depart for OTS, enough Camaros arrived at Cormier so we could buy one.  The maroon one I chose was $4000 without air conditioning.  I used $400 as a down payment.   I then sold my Mustang for $750.  Not long after, I was driving along Ocean Blvd. in Long Beach and I saw my old car parked on the street, never dreaming that as the years passed an early Mustang would be worth far, far more than I sold mine for.

The Camaro was my first new car.  The Mustang was used when I bought it for $1950.  The Rambler had been my mom's car that I inherited when she bought a new 1969 Ford Galaxie.  I drove that Camaro everywhere in the years ahead as the photos below attest:

  

The top photo is in front of Minot AFB, North Dakota, circa 1974.  The middle is at Air Force OTS, San Antonio, TX, with two fellow cadets in August of 1973.  The bottom photo is from Vandenberg AFB, CA, in the Spring of 1974.  The one directly below is in the parking lot of Minot's BOQ, and the bottom is in front of my new house in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
  

After OCS - June 1972 to August 1973, Finding My Way Part Three

From 1964 to 1970, local L.A. personality Ralph Story hosted a popular show called Ralph Story's Los Angeles.  Starting in February 1971, he was host of a new morning show called AM Los Angeles along with Stephanie Edwards.  They looked at all kinds of phenomena and products, personalities and local experiences, and unique events and places.  One woman guest touted the benefits of bathing using citrus fruit instead of soap, for your skin and for the environment.  Since we had a grapefruit tree in our backyard that we did not otherwise draw from, I used grapefruits to bathe with after watching one episode of the show.  Here is the tree that apparently was cut down years later when the owners paved over any remaining plants or grass with cement and used that space to park a car.
   

I don't remember when I became aware of, and soon addicted to, the show in 1972-3.  But it was something I looked forward to watching every weekday morning when I had days off while unemployed or working the swing shift as a security guard.  I found it a great way to start the day, especially when I had nothing else to do or nowhere else to go.

One show featured a new process to self-publish from a brand new company called VeloBind.  Obviously, I have had from early on the desire to publish my collection of poetry that I had been writing since I got an honorable mention for my first serious poem, Tourist Trap, at East LAJC.  The VeloBind process seemed the perfect means to do so.  I contacted them and eventually came up with enough money to print and bind 50 copies.  I may have sold a few copies to friends and family, but I gave away several more over the years.

Of course, another significant national event that occupied my time and interest was the Watergate hearings that began in May of 1973 and continued through the summer and into the fall, ending in November with the eventual resignation of Nixon.  This was something that McGovern had warned about in the Fall of 1972, though it benefitted him not at all at the ballot box that November; but finally the truth was exposed regarding what Nixon and his minions had been up to so as to ensure his re-election in 1972.  At the time, I am sure I never imagined that this would not be the only impeachment I would witness in my lifetime.  

After OCS, June 1972 to August 1973 - Finding My Way Part Two

After my return from back East, I had at some point indeed heard from my Air Force recruiter in Huntington Park that I was now eligible to attend OTS as a pilot candidate.  Even at the time, I was wary of a pilot assignment, not really sure I had the right stuff to be an Air Force pilot.  I sincerely felt that I had a much better chance of remaining in the Air Force were I to be a navigator.  But, again, those scores were not good enough for that potential assignment, but I was eligible to become a pilot.  I took the opportunity I was offered.

Some time that Spring, I drove to March Air Force Base near Riverside for my physical.  No issue with blood pressure or anything else.  They had to dilate my pupils to check my eyes, so I had a dicey drive to the University of Riverside to see my friend, Darryl Butler with blurry vision. 

Yes, ever since I had become friends with Daylin, I also became buddies with Darryl, who was attending UC Riverside with a psychology major.  At this point he was living in the dorm.  At various stages at that college, Darryl had lived in an almost communal situation in a big old, wooden house in Riverside, and then the University had contracted with the historic Mission Inn in Riverside to house students there.  I had even written a paper for a class called "Utopias and New Communities" about the various dorm arrangements at UC Riverside.  Several of the students in my class had discovered almost forgotten living arrangements of former hippies or new age devotees and others from several different eras in the past regarding communities that we might regard as almost utopian or differently organized from traditional households in earlier decades. 

One of the course books was Walden Two by B.F. Skinner.  Of course, over the next several years I read many books that Wiki includes in its list of those about utopias.  And, in many ways, the Rainbow Arc of Fire pagan band, and the later super-hero team, would incorporate similar ideals in their Solstice and Equinox retreats in the mountains and in their creation of the underground facilities beneath Cheesman Park in Denver for their equipment and space ships when they join The Alliance team of galactic super-heroes.  People can live better together; people can coexist in harmony and peace.  Even when the team lived in separate spaces outside of their underground facility, they were still in a way a close knit "family".

Darryl was quite different from his brother.  More of an idealist and free thinker, he always offered different perspectives on the world, different ways of imagining.  Yet both brothers had tried marijuana and even LSD.  Daylin pointed out to me authors that had different ways of looking at the world through the words they chose, language being a key to understanding and enlightenment.  So while I was choosing one of the most traditional means of making a living, joining the military, I was still being influenced or challenged by the two brothers not to be entirely boxed in by tradition al thought. 

Years later, in the early 2000's, when I contacted Daylin by email after learning that he was teaching at a college in Augusta, Maine, he told me that Darryl, who had gotten his PhD at Indiana University (where I would visit him and his wife at IU in the 1970's), was teaching full time at a small college there, was still married to the same woman he would soon marry, and that they had had four children (Daylin claimed not to have fathered any children, and he was still single).  When I tried to carry on the exchange with Daylin to find out more, he did not reply again. 

I would get my results fairly quickly from my Air Force physical, that I was accepted to OTS, and that I would be starting in mid August later that year (1973).  Darryl had not only been a good and productive influence on my thinking, he was also a good friend.  In 1970, when he, a friend and I attended a showing of BOYS IN THE BAND at a local theater near the University of Riverside, Darryl later told me that he believed then that I was gay, which I later confessed was true in their parents' garage while working out and talking.  So it was nice to have a friend, in addition to Mike, who knew I was gay and did not judge. 

Those months between OCS and OTS were, in many ways, idyllic.  Troubling of course with not knowing if I were going to join the Air Force or the Coast Guard for many months, troubling because of the end of my friendship with John Robertson.  But liberating because I got to widen my view of the world and open up my mind to other possibilities of thinking.  I had my security guard job that was steady, part time employment when I was soon transferred to a German-owned company called Accuride Corporation, with a small manufacturing plant in Santa Fe Springs.  And when I had my appointment to OTS in hand, I had a goal just a few months away.  I was not going to be a security guard forever.     

I would work at Accuride, that still produces drawer sliders, for the last several months before I would leave for OTS in August.  I was still working the swing shift; and with my mornings free, I would drive to theaters such as at the Del Amo Mall and catch an early show for $1.  I managed to see HAROLD & MAUDE, A SEPARATE PEACE (the result of which was to read the source books from Knowles), and many other films that came out from June 1972 until August of 1973.   

Mike had moved up to working as a sock salesman at department stores throughout the L.A. Basin, including down to San Diego for Neuville.  I even flew down there one evening to have dinner with him at the El Cortez Hotel rooftop restaurant when he was in San Diego.  He and I attended a Jefferson Airplane concert at the Hollywood Bowl, a first for both of us.  The opening band was Poco.  And on our walk up the road to the seating area, I saw the famous concert promoter and rock venue owner (Fillmore West and East), Bill Graham, in the crowd, walking along with the crowd, unnoticed.   In our seats, the smell of pot prevailed.  Grace Slick, our idol, was bitchy toward the lighting crew between songs, "It looks like a hospital up here!"  A guy who worked in the Neuville warehouse, who was with us at the concert, later tried to put the moves on Mike in Mike's Valley apartment which Mike rebuffed.  He told me all about it the next morning on the phone. 

My good friend Dave Moore, however, was having a lot of personal issues regarding where to go in his life.  I had bought a Peugeot bike, and I would take the top down on the Mustang, set the bike inside, put the top back up, and drive down to a sparse trailer park near Oceanside where Dave was living with his older sister, who had divorced from her husband.  Dave worked part time at a Long John Silver's joint in a town near by, though I don't believe that job lasted very long.  But on our weekends off, we used to take my bike over to a huge vacant lot and take turns riding it in that lot with a large pit--this was before mountain bikes prevailed.  Still, Dave was not doing well.    

He had gone to Malaysia with his Marine dad (who had tried to break up his relationship with his high school and college girlfriend, whom I believe Dave truly loved).  As a result of Dave's departure, the girlfriend married a good friend of his instead, he had lost his college deferment during his time in Malaysia, and now he was in jeopardy of being drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam.  This had all occurred before I left for Marine OCS.  By the time I returned, he was living with his unmarried cousin, Mona, and helped care for her fatherless child while she eventually worked in downtown L.A. in the clothing Mart where their fortunes improved somewhat.  Before that, they had been struggling in a shabby apartment and didn't even seem to have enough food to eat.  (I gave him money at least once on a visit that dispirited me immensely to see him so lost and barely getting by.)

At one point when they were living in a better situation in a much nicer apartment in Torrance, Mona told me that Dave had tried to commit suicide recently.  She wasn't certain it was more than a cry for help or something even more calculated.  But he eventually got his notice to report for induction in downtown L.A.  We spent the evening before on a drive through Palos Verdes, stopping at the famous chapel where I threw a coin in the fountain and said to no one in particular, "Please take care of Dave."  I dropped him off at the induction center the next morning, but I got a call from him that he had been rejected because of that previous suicide attempt.  Unfortunately, over the long run, that did not really solve the problem of what to do with his life.

His living with Mona was certainly part of the problem.  She was strange, to say the least.  Mike even drove her to work in downtown L.A. once in a while because she did not have a car and the bus took forever.  On one drive, she told him, "Mike, I'm a freak."  He had no idea what she meant by that, but even he knew he was weird. 

She had converted to Judaism a few years before because she intended to marry the man who fathered her child.  But he died before they could marry, and his family wanted nothing to do with her or her infant child, at least that is the story we were told.  She later was dating a man who was in the astronaut program though I doubt he ever made it into space.  But he knew Neil Armstrong and the others and knew when some of them were not faithful to their wives.  And, if I remember correctly, he was a married man.  He helped Mona out financially, even getting her a small curio shop with a painted dragon on the door so she might have some steady income and not have to work at the Clothing Mart.  And he eventually told her to kick out Dave from the apartment they shared near Palos Verdes, not far from the shop.  Eventually, even before I was scheduled to drive to Lackland, regardless of his former status as an attempted suicide, but with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, Dave enlisted in the Air Force.       

After OCS - June 1972 to August 1973 - Finding my way forward

I no longer remember the order in which the next two events happened, but I either got a job as a security guard for a local company first or I heard back from the Air Force regarding Officer's Training School at Lackland in San Antonio, TX.  

One of the guys I had known while working in the warehouse at A.U. Morse and Company, before I had moved into the office and then been fired, had previously been a security guard.  A part of his sad story was that his father, who was in the military, put both of his sons into foster care.  Perhaps their mother was dead.  That part of the story, I no longer recall.  But while in foster care, one of the families that got money for caring for the two boys fed them dog food--even as an adult he did not seem bitter just surprised and disappointed that they'd been treated that way.  He and his brother were white, so it wasn't racism that caused the two to be treated so inhumanely. 

When I met him, he was married with a child.  Eventually, he left A.U. Morse and went back to being a security guard.  Again, the order of things and how certain events happened, I know longer recall.  But with my unemployment either running out or having just run out, and no other job prospects of any kind on the horizon (I had even for a short period while in the warehouse, but before the Marines, quit and worked at a sock warehouse in downtown L.A. for a company that my best friend Mike worked for), I was in need of some sort of employment, possibly to pay off my '66 Mustang.

(It was at this point that I ought to have gone back to Dominguez Hills, entered a Master's program, and, upon graduation, gotten a job as a community college instructor.  But that was a direction I never considered, but had I done so, there would likely be no Rainbow Arc of Fire.  No husband, Mark.  No military career, even if foreshortened.  So while the safer, perhaps better, path was there, I did not pursue it.)

I don't know how or why he got a hold of me for that job, but the guy who had been a foster kid did get me a job at the same security guard company, run by a husband and wife team, that he worked for.  I had to buy a specific shirt, trousers and badge at a supply store in downtown L.A., and I got my first assignment, working in a tiny guard shack for Yellow Freight in a trucking district somewhere in the Los Angeles Basin, but not too far from South Gate.  That assignment only lasted a short time, but I remember this as my first experience working a swing shift.  I adapted pretty well.  There was a small radio in the shack, so I listened to L.A. Lakers games; and I also remember reading John Knowles's book, A SEPARATE PEACE, as well as his short story collection that included PHINEAS, during those quiet intervals when freight trucks were not entering or exiting the facility.

Actually, I had never been much of sports fan until I met Daylin.  Their household would watch Rams football games and NBA games, as well as college football and basketball, especially with UCLA having their run of championships under John Wooden and USC being a football powerhouse.  His dad would sit in his oversized lounge chair, smoking cigarettes and piling the butts up like logs in the ashtray, Daylin would explain the nuances of football or basketball to me, and pretty soon I started watching on my own at home.  Beginning in 1971, I even drove to the Rams ticket office at the Coliseum, or in the main office in Los Angeles, possibly on Pico Blvd., and bought pairs of tickets to Rams home games. 

I still remember the first night I went with Daylin to my first live game in the Coliseum.   Daylin explained that seats above the end zone allowed you to see the line splits so you could see gaps opening up where the running back could break free and run for yardage.  The running game was far more significant in those days than now.  The Rams starting backfield was two white guys, Les Josephson and Larry Smith.  Their wide receivers, Jack Snow and Lance Rentzel, and tight ends, Bob Klein and Pat Curran, were also white.  It was an entirely different era, but the transitioning was beginning.  Their reserve running back would be Willie Ellison, who would eventually take over for Larry Smith and run for a record number of yards in one game that had never been accomplished before, 236 yards if I am remembering correctly, something quite significant then--this was before OJ entered the league from USC.    

Regarding the end zone seats, of course the end zone seats were also cheaper; and Daylin in those days was especially frugal.  This was 1971, and the Rams had just hired UCLA Football Coach Tommy Prothro with the departure of former Head Coach George Allen to the Redskins. That team had just lost legendary coach Vince Lombardi to cancer and needed to replace him.  (Lombardi had left the Packers after their glorious reign was at an end and spent a single season with Washington before cancer overtook him.)   Prothro might not have been one of the better Rams coaches, but the team drafted two of the best players they ever had that first year that he was coach:  Isiah Robertson and Jack Youngblood.  So while their record did not earn a playoff spot, and was barely winning, their future was being established.  

That first night in the Summer of 1971, we emerged from a tunnel at the West end of the Coliseum into an almost indescribably glorious scene.  The stadium with row upon row of seats seemed massive, the field below an almost endless stretch of bright, almost chartreuse, grass bordered and gridironed in white.  The Rams were in their Hospital white and blue uniforms.  The game was a monumental spectacle of bright lights, intermittent, thrilling action, and crowds roaring their approval of one successful play or another.  The Rams still had Roman Gabriel at quarterback; and Coy Bacon and Merlin Olsen, part of the latest Fearsome Foursome (Lamar Lundy and Roosevelt Grier had retired at the point I started watching the team), with one of the greatest defensive ends of all time, David "Deacon" Jones, who coined the phrase to "sack" the opposing quarterback.  I was hooked from that night onward.  

I bought every pro football preseason magazine on the newsstand after that.  Poured over the impending rosters and looked carefully at all the trades in the league, how they might help or hurt my Rams.  I noted that the Rams had traded for troubled Dallas wide receiver (flanker) Lance Rentzel, to pair with Jack Snow.  I even bought and read Rentzel's book, WHEN ALL THE LAUGHTER DIED IN SORROW, about his horrendous addiction to exposing himself to underaged girls.  He'd married the actress Joey Heatherton, but she divorced him when he was arrested after one of these incidents. 

Once I had pairs of tickets to that season and the next, I always managed to rope someone into using my second ticket to a Rams game, once even taking a UPS driver I was attracted to to a night game, though I doubt he was gay.  It may have been for the 1973 season that I had finally purchased a single season ticket to Rams games, but my mom would have to use it once I was gone during the fall season that year.

As I said, it wasn't just pro football that earned my attention in the early 1970's.  During the 1971-1972 season, when the L.A. Lakers had Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Gail Goodrich, Keith Erickson, Pat Riley, Jim McMillan, Happy Hairston, Flynn Robinson and others, they went on an unprecedented win streak of 33 games.  I had picked it up during the middle of the run until Kareem and the Milwaukee Bucks ended that streak.  I even watched the final game of the finals in taped delay when Wilt and Jerry won it all while I was awaiting discharge from Marine OCS in that out-processing building one night.  I believe the small set was in black and white, but the thrill West and the team experienced was genuinely apparent after soo many finals appearances when they had lost, most often to the Boston Celtics.

But that next year, I would try to follow the Lakers even on that little radio in the guard shack at Yellow Freight as the Lakers put away the Golden State Warriors and Nate Thurmond, their Hall of Fame center who always gave Wilt memorable games, as the team marched to yet another NBA Finals against the New York Knicks.          
        

After Marine OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, The Eastern Trip that Failed, Part Two

Especially after Daylin went off to USC and moved into a dicey apartment near the campus, I worked out in his parents garage by myself.  I'd even become friends with his brother, Darryl, who was enrolled at the University of California Riverside.  Darryl was not draft eligible because he'd lost vision in one eye due to a childhood accident.  

In the garage I had skimmed through LEATHERNECK magazines that were lying in a stack.  (Daylin's parents may have subscribed to the publication, or maybe the Corps required subscribing.  I cannot see Daylin buying them himself.)

I enjoyed my brief visit with Daylin and his wife in Ann Arbor.  He had grown his blond hair long, a total turnoff to me because I was attracted to guys with "regular" haircuts.  The picture below was the only one I had taken from that visit--I am certain his wife took it for me.  This was January of 1973.

From Detroit I flew to Washington National Airport where I was picked up by John Robertson's wife.  I was going to spend a week with them, trying to reason with the Coast Guard on my application to OCS.  John and I would spend some time exploring the grounds of Marine OCS.  We met up with Dennis Zito and his wife soon after I arrived.  They even invited me to spend a couple of days with them while I was staying in Quantico.  I should have taken them up on the offer.  A few days with the Robertson's; a few days with the Zito's.  But I felt I had come all this way to stay with the Robertson's, and it would be rather tacky to move out after just a few days.

The whole reason for being there, the Coast Guard, ended up being a waste of time.  They were not going to reconsider my application.  Their classes were very small and since I had a couple of poor blood pressure results amidst the good ones, anything that could disqualify an applicant was sufficient since they had to reject most applicants, regardless.  

The next blunder was just embarrassing.  I was lying on the Robertson's couch in the living room as we three were watching TV.  No shoes on of course.  But his wife proceeded to indignantly explain that she did not even allow her husband to lie on the couch to watch TV.  I felt distinct discomfort so I promptly apologized and moved to the floor.  

A day or so later, however, as she and I were waiting in line for gas at the base gas station--John was at work--his wife was driving.  Trey was in a car seat between the two of us in the front seat.  I was speculating aloud about how the war in Vietnam was winding down.  The Marines were fully out.  It may be that, because there was an anti-military, antiwar sentiment building even stronger across the land, and a Congress that was always looking to save money and cut budgets, there may come a time when they might simply disband the Marines.  It was pure speculation on my part.  I was not expressing my own desire to see the Marine Corps eliminated; I had no such desire.  However, his wife shockingly said to her son, who was not yet 1 years old (his birthday was in a day or two), "Trey, hit him."  

To say this was unexpected was stating it mildly.  I tried to apologize.  I had not meant that that was my opinion.  Anyway, I thought that John had not wanted to be in the Marines.  He had left OCS when I did.  Since he had been an enlisted man, he was required to finish his initial assignment before the family could return to Tennessee, to be near the folks.  I did not think he cared for the Marines.  But I was wrong.  His wife had taken my verbal ramblings way too seriously.  She was furious with me.

A below-zero frost had definitely settled over my relationship with his wife, no matter what I tried to say or do.  (The previous weekend I had even gone to their Baptist church--I was no longer a church goer--listened to the service from the minister who had become a family friend.  Had even taken communion with the little plastic cup of grape juice and the Saltine cracker section.  I was expected to go and said absolutely nothing about not really wanting to go.  I was a dutiful guest, so I willingly went.)

Later that evening, after John returned home, and I was able to speak to him alone, I attempted to smooth things over with the family, but he bluntly said something that also surprised and disappointed me, "You probably said that because you could not make it at OCS."  

That was simply not true.  And John knew it was not true.  I left Marine OCS because I did not want to complete the course and become a career Marine--just as John did not.  The staff had wanted me to stay and was disappointed that I was leaving, as I am sure they were with John voluntarily leaving.  Unlike some of the others who had previously left the program, we were doing well.  We were generally well liked in the platoon.  The platoon staff had hoped we would change our minds several times during those final weeks.  I was actually still seriously considering the military as a career, and was trying to get into Coast Guard OCS.  I just did not want a career in the Marines.   

I did not know why John said something in his heart he knew to be false.  But then I never realized that he probably had to take his wife's side in a conflict that I sincerely wished had not happened, that I was trying to smooth over.  The extreme frost had now settled over even my friendship with John.  

The following photos are from our picture-taking excursion around the grounds of Marine OCS before the break in our friendship.  (I need not even remind that John and his wife were devout, church-going Christians who ought to have remembered the power and quality of forgiveness and kindness.)

The top photograph was of their son's first birthday, John "Trey" Robertson III.  Neither John nor his wife had a camera.  I took that picture for them.  When I returned to California, I had three additional prints made, one for John and his wife, and one each for each of their sets of parents.  I sent an accompanying note, again thanking them for hosting me on my visit.  But I got no thank you for the pictures.  Nothing.  They never replied.  I never heard from them again.  

Within 24 hours of our dustup, in their guestroom on the mattress on the floor, I started to feel physically ill.  Feverish.  Bodily aches.  Run down.  Generally lousy.  I was due to fly out the next morning from Dulles but did not feel up to it the night before.  I pleadingly asked if I could stay a extra day since I was not feeling well.  But I was soon told, rightly from their perspective, that they did not want their son exposed to whatever I was coming down with as he had been recently ill and they did not want him to get sick again.  Also, and again rightly, I would need to take a taxi to Dulles the next morning.  It was too far for John's wife to drive me. 

The cab arrived the following morning, I again thanked John's wife for hosting me--John had already gone to work.  She sat at the kitchen table and did not even look up, did not even acknowledge my additional apology or my goodbye.  I closed the door to their apartment, walked down the stairs to the parking lot, got into the cab and off we went. 

While it does not seem so expensive today, the cab ride was $50, a lot for someone who only made $1.65 an hour while working and who was now on unemployment insurance, maybe $200 a month cash.  But I paid the driver and entered the airport, checking my suitcase at the counter. 

It was a United DC-8-61.  I paid for headphones for the flight.  All I had was a $50 bill from change from the cabdriver (we were paid in $100 bills from unemployment in those days).  The stewardess took my $50, promising to get change before we got to LAX.  I never heard or saw her again until we actually landed at L.A.   As we were on our approach, I mentioned the situation to another stewardess, but she insultingly informed me, "Don't worry.  She's not getting off the flight before you are.  You will get your money before that."  Of course, I had not assumed that would be the case--that she was trying to steal my $50.  I only assumed that on a busy flight, the other stewardess may have merely forgotten. 

I was obviously creating all kinds of misunderstandings on this failed trip.  

 

After Marine OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, The Eastern trip that failed

I left LAX on a United DC-8 bound for Detroit.  Daylin Butler met me at the airport with his wife.  (Her name escapes me--she was blond and perky and I attended their wedding in Southern California after they graduated from college in the early 1970's--but after a few years of marriage, they divorced.  I never really found out why, and Daylin never remarried.)  

I had met Daylin Jean Butler at East L.A. Junior College during a class we both shared in the fall of 1968.  Mike had wondered if he was Darryl Lynn Butler's brother, a classmate of ours at South Gate Junior High.  I would later learn that Daylin was three years older than we and had gone away to college on a scholarship, Occidental College if I am recalling it right, but flunked out his first semester, I believe, and returned home to South Gate, somewhat broken in spirit.  His dad got him a job at the Firestone tire factory, along with the GM Plant the lifeblood for local factory worker employment in the area.  The tire factory also provided a certain, recognizable stench in the air of South Gate.  Unfortunately, Daylin would become one of the first men drafted by the Marine Corps for service in Vietnam.  His basic training was in San Diego.   Fortunately, unlike Pat Byrne whom I would later meet at Cal State Dominguez Hills, Daylin would have an office job with the Marines and not see actual combat in Vietnam.  He did tell me a story of one experience when he was standing in a external doorway to a building where he worked.  An explosion nearby, possibly from a rocket attack, sent him sprawling backwards and, for a moment, he thought he might be dead.  He had sustained no injuries.

I gathered that in high school he was skinny and geeky, a bit like I was.  But when he returned from the Marines after his single tour, his parents bought him a full set of free weights, weight bar and bench, which his mother had to haul, struggling, into the house, wrap, and push under the Christmas tree.   He set it all up in his parents' garage.   After the first two semesters at East LA when we were required to take gym classes (I took volleyball and badminton, becoming a member of the badminton team after the first semester so that we competed with other junior colleges around LA in the Spring of 1968.  I was horrible in our first tournament, playing Santa Monica Junior College's second best player who beat me mercilessly and effortlessly, 15-0, 15-1--not even sure how I even got one point).

After becoming better acquainted, Daylin extended an invitation for me to work out with him and a buddy in his parent's garage.  I had used free weights in high school during our "corrective" gym class, conducted by Mr. Self, for all of us hopelessly skinny, unathletic students who at least got an "A" for effort.  You had to ask to be accepted into the corrective gym class.  So I stood, shirtless before Mr. Self, trying my damnedest to look pathetic and weak, weaker than I typically might have looked.  Mr. Self took pity and I got accepted, loving every minute of it with all the other unathletic freaks and geeks in our school.  That's where I met Richard Meyers, whom Mike and I now are certain was, like we, gay.

To say I was infatuated with Daylin Butler was putting it mildly.  He was blond, handsome, well-built from the free weights he pushed religiously in the garage, from the diet he followed that included protein supplements, and from a physical frame that seemed to absorb his efforts well and noticeably.  The fact that he had also been a Marine in Vietnam fascinated me.  The war appeared as if it would never end at that point when I met him in the fall of 1968.  Weekly casualty lists were devastating.  The images of conflict on TV every single night were disheartening, even disillusioning.   (The photo below was from a drive Daylin, Darryl, my sister and I took to San Francisco, staying with Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd.)

 

I am certain it was the summer of 1969, after we had graduated from East LA and Mike and I enrolled at the newly built, and slowly evolving, Cal State Dominguez Hills, that I fell into a long and debilitating depression.  I suspect that it occurred because of a couple of factors:  the Vietnam War and the guilt I felt that I was safely deferred in college while others in my age range were either serving in Vietnam or had returned from the war psychologically or physically damaged or dead.  And, of course, the fact that I was gay and not likely to ever meet anyone similarly inclined also contributed.  Even had I confessed during a draft physical that I was gay, that humiliation might not have spared me from being forced to serve.  

Almost since we got cars, Mike and I developed a pattern of driving to San Diego in my sexy convertible Mustang or, less frequently, in his stodgy, tan Dodge.  Soon, one of the places we would stop every time would be the Fort Rosecrans Military Cemetery at Point Loma.  It provided a great view of the city, but also a palpable reminder of the war's continuing toll.   (The photos below are from two different visits, but we stopped there every single time we drove down to San Diego on weekends after our first visit, which also included a stop at the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in San Juan Capistrano.  One other visit, we had chicken from a Chicken Delight joint in San Diego itself.)              

Every weekend we drove down there, more and more headstones had been added during the week.  More families had a place to spend time remembering a husband or son whom they had lost.  After Memorial Day weekend especially, the flowers at the several graves had multiplied. 

"...the old stone tabs we keep on our dead."

My own guilt must have multiplied considerably.  My friend Paul David Moore, who always went by Dave, kidnapped me and took me down one weekend to his sister and her husband's house inland from Oceanside, just to snap me out of my depression.  The escape only helped a bit.  I was even told by a doctor that while I did not yet have an ulcer, I was working on one.  

But returning to my obsession with Daylin, even before that troubled summer, if I had been at Mike's house, a few blocks over from the Butler residence, I would drive by and see the light on in the front bedroom, indicating that Daylin was hard at work studying for a history or philosophy class at East LAJC.  I even briefly got Daylin a job at the A.U. Morse warehouse with me.  Unfortunately, my obsession almost cost me my life.  One night in Daylin's room, somehow Daylin decided to criticize me, just cut me up over something or other.  I was devastated and left his house thoroughly destroyed because his opinion of me meant too much.  I got home and was nearly suicidal.  Fortunately, I called Rhonda Sewell, a good friend from high school, and she must have flown over from her house on the other side of town to rescue me.  She and her gal friend drove me around and around in her car, and we just talked.  Probably a hour or so later, they dropped me off at home and I began to recover.  From my obsession with Daylin and from my depression over so many things that had bothered me so that summer.