We sat, one behind the other, in Ivan Evans's English class in the 9th grade at South Gate Junior High School in the Spring of 1964. Mike remembers that our teacher someone thought that I was from Cuba. He thought that was interesting. Perhaps it was my Hispanic last name or that I was born in Florida. However, we did not become either familiar or friendly then.
When I started high school, I found myself standing outside of the gym building with Richard Meyers. We chatted even though we both were likely supposed to be inside the gym, attending a gym class. Richard was able to enroll in Corrective Gym class. That class was designed for those who were not physically gifted, fit or hunky. In short, geeky. The instructor, Mr. Self, would make his students use free weights and rope climbs and whatever it would take to build up muscles of the skinny guys or take weight off of the fat guys and make them all look better. Each of his students typically got an "A".
I was only able to join Corrective Gyn at a later date, having to put up with regular gym class for several months.
But my encounter with Richard Meyers led me to his small circle of friends which included Mike Mebs and Richard Wright. They would gather at lunch and talk. I was soon part of that trio. We thought many of our fellow students were Neanderthals. What many of them thought of us, if they gave us any thought at all, who can tell?
One Saturday, Mike invited me over to his house. I am not exactly sure what we did that day, but as he lived on Washington St. and I lived over on Cypress, on the Western end of town, it was an effort to go back and forth. I might have walked all of the way--I was quite a walker in those days.
Richard Meyers was the leader of our small band, but he was never the kind of friend to invite any of us over to his house in the un-incorporated area of Cudahy, immediately north of South Gate. (He actually lived much closer to me that Mike did, but it was made clear from early on that we were never going to be invited over to his house. So, Mike and I became friends.
We went on our Grad Night to Disneyland together. Mike took my sister. I took a friend of hers. We attended East LA Junior College together, though not always the same classes. We transferred to Cal State Dominguez Hills, graduating at the same time in December of 1971. He worked in a sock warehouse in downtown LA for Lily Butler. I worked in a wallpaper warehouse on the edge of LA, off of Santa Fe and under the shadow of the Santa Monica Freeway.
With the money we earned working full time in summers and part time during the school years, we eventually make our car payments, paid for gas and sometimes food while still living at home, took flights out of LAX, primarily to San Diego because it was cheaper, took a couple of flights to San Francisco where we hiked all over the city, and across the Golden Gate Bridge and back to the Downtown Airline Terminal.
I was his best man when he married Lida whom we both met at East LA. He had two kids with Lida. And then my mom and I visited them in Tucson, AZ, where he was attending college at the U of A. It had been many months earlier that Mike finally realized that, like me, he was gay. Mom made some random, fateful, stupid comment to Lida when Mike and I went out to the effect that, "I hope he [me] doesn't make Mike take him to some gay bar." A light came on in Lida's head when she awakened to the fact that her husband just might be gay. They would eventually divorce.
I met Mike's first partner, Walt who would eventually die of AIDS before the cocktails would become widely available. I met his current partner, Alex, years ago.
It's safe to say that we have travelled a long path together as friends. From our early teen years to old age, our friendship has persevered.
Now, unfortunately, our frailties and ages are catching up to us. Mike is one month younger than I, born in October of 1949. I have a younger sister while he has a younger sister and brother.
We share diverticulosis and diverticulitis, acid reflux, prostate issues--he now has been told he has prostate cancer. We've both had hernia surgery, him in college, me double in the 1990's.
While we both supported Richard Nixon for President in 1968, that ended as soon as we realized that he was not going to end the Vietnam War any time soon. His "secret plan" was Vietnamization, something Lyndon Johnson seemed to be doing toward the end of his doomed presidency.
It was then that Mike's path and mine diverged because of Nixon's draft lottery. I got 119; Mike was 325, way too high to be concerned about the draft. I went off to the Marine Corps' OCS and then the Air Force's OTS, he graduated from a Teacher Certification program at the U of A, divorced Lida, met Walt, and I helped the two of them move to Southern California, into an apartment building at the Eastern edge of South Gate, not far from his parent's house where he grew up.
We now hope merely to outlive the monster in the White House and experience a peaceful death. With so many ailments, who knows what will eventually carry us off? We talk about the past, the '60's, our shared experiences from the past and present. (He and Alex once lived in the same desert community in CA that Mark and I moved to, where my sister also lives; but then his daughter and son-in-law talked him into moving to Phoenix and we only spent about a year living nearby.)
We yell a lot and bemoan the state of the nation over the phone. Soon after we were born, the Korean War began. The Cold War endured for most of our youth, hence the military draft and the Vietnam War. Then we experienced the Reagan adventures abroad, the Gulf War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, now the Iran War. We have experienced idealized versions of the 1950's and 1960's. Our high school was so peacefully integrated that it seemed almost to go unnoticed.
All of our grandparents died. Then the parents and uncles and aunts. Waves of our television, music and movie idols have passed on and continue to do so. We have no idea how long each of us has. Which one will outlive the other or will we go at relatively the same age? In five years? Ten? Longer than that? His mother died at 94. My maternal Aunt Jean and Grandpa Sanchez died at 94.
We live day to day.
