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.