[sic]

I’m fuzzy about dates when anything happened while I was in high school. I wanna say the Palm Springs trip with my volunteer Big Brother Lloyd Miller took place in the summer of 1980 — in fact now that I think about it I’m as certain as I can be in part because I was 16 and had my learner’s permit and on the drive down was sooooo hoping Lloyd would pull his spiff 1979 Cadillac Seville over and let me take the wheel for a bit down the 10 Freeway, but he didn’t and I was too chicken to ask.

I do know without a doubt that Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” was topping the charts because you couldn’t not hear it on the radio. In fact, whenever I hear that song now instead of being transported to some seaside, I’m instead taken back to poolside of the desert condo we were staying in with not a boat anywhere nearby and the sun dancing on the water and the extreme heat and the sweat and the luxury as Cross via a nearby transistor radio chirped about where his paradise could be found.

I’d found mine, too.

On our way to go get breakfast the next morning, we were traveling down some side road bordered by a tall stucco’d wall on the other side of which was a private golf course. It was Lloyd who noticed the helicopter hovering over the course and I had no idea why he suddenly pulled off the road onto the dirt shoulder, pulling up tight against the wall.

Hopping out he answered my quizical look with “You wanna see a president?” Dutifully and still clueless I clambered across the seat and out the driver’s side door. Lloyd was already climbing up onto the Seville’s trunk. “I think Gerald Ford is golfing on the other side of this wall!” he said conspiratorially to my still dumbstruck expression.

So I climbed up, too, and together we stood up poking our heads over the top of the wall. Sure enough about 100 feet away there was Former President of the United States Gerald R. Ford, standing on a green bent over his putter.

The next thing we noticed was the large number of secret service agents stationed in a perimeter around the president. They noticed us as well and did not take at all kindly to our univited proximity. In fact in a sudden burst of radio chatter static, the ones closest to the president interrupted his concentration by positioning themselves between us and him (and the hole), and as Ford stood up to see what all the commotion was about, the agents closest to us started coming even closer. Quickly.

I’d like to say that I or Lloyd yelled out “Hello Mr. President!” or “Have fun golfing President Ford!” and that he smiled and waved, but what happened was Lloyd grabbed my shoulder and pulled me down and said “Time to go!” and we hopped off the trunk dove back into the Caddy and we went. Fast and clean leaving behind several agents straddling the top of the wall and eating our dust.

I tell that story not just because Gerald Ford died yesterday or because that’s the closest I’ve ever been to one of this nation’s leaders, but also because he is and always will be one of my favorite presidents — and here’s why: Because at one of the most disenchanting and most disheartening and most disgraceful times in this country’s history he stood up unelected and all alone in front of the beat-up country that had little confidence in him and even less in its political processes and said he we were down but we were not out. He said he believed our country had never been stronger.

“Our Constitution works,” he said, upon taking the oath of office on August 9, 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Then with quiet dignity and strength and leadership he showed us he was right.

One of the first things he did was give Richard Nixon a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sure, initially I thought that was a bad call. I was angry with what I thought was a major-league backroom-brokered chickenshit cop out. I wanted blood. The country did. But Ford said it’s time to look forward, not back. It took awhile, but later I came around to agree with his choice, or at least his reason for it: that it was time for the country to move on.

We did and now he has too. Rest in peace, President Ford. You were one of this nation’s greatest and finest public servants.

The complete text of Ford’s swearing-in speech appears after the jump.

(more…)

With the pending release of a new video game called Bad Day L.A. in which the city gets tsunami’d, earthquaked, meteor’d along with other natural and unnatural disasters, Mack Reed over at L.A. Voice is echoing L.A. City Nerd in wondering and cataloguing what’s perhaps the definitive worst day in L.A.’s history.

From my perspective I’d say it’s dead even between the riots of April 29, 1992, and the earthquake of January 17, 1994. Regarding the latter, I long ago posted my elaboration of that terrible day in Sherman Oaks, but I’ve never gotten around to making an online version of the column I wrote for the school paper at Pierce College in the aftermath of the riots.

It’ll take some more digging into the archives and/or the decidedly poorly managed stringbooks, as I haven’t been able to unearth it and transfer it to the digital realm. In the meantime, the crux of it was how on the day and at the time the riots broke out I wound up at the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area in Baldwin Hills, far away from Sherman Oaks and definitely too close for comfort to the flashpoint of Florence and Normandie.

Why was I there at that very horrendous point in time? Why wasn’t I hunkered down behind the relative safety of the Santa Monica Mountains in the relative safety of the San Fernando Valley? Because of something as incongruous and innocuous as an assignment for my beginning photo class at Pierce (and I can’t find that end result either, dammit!). The theme was something like “Man’s Impact” and for whatever reason I decided that a shot of the bobbing oil derricks that can be seen uglifying the hills on either side of that stretch of La Cienega Boulevard would do the job.

So I hopped aboard my Kawasaki 1000, cruised aaaaall the way over there. And it just wasn’t going to work out. The light was wrong and I was too far away from the derricks and all I had was a 50mm lens so I couldn’t pull the image in the way I’d wanted. Frustrated at having made the long trip for nothing I wandered into Kenny Hahn Park and parked the bike and took to seeing if clamboring up a hillside could get me any closer. It couldn’t. Ultimately I wound up at a horseshoe pit there with a handful of daisies that I stuck into the damp sand and then stepped on all but one. Voila: “Man’s Impact.”

In the midst of shooting this masterpiece from various angles I didn’t notice a middle-aged black woman approach me until she sat down neaby on the pit’s wooden backstop. I nodded to her and she nodded back and then watched me doing my thing for a few moments. I figured that maybe being the only white person in the place made her curious, until she finally spoke up and what she said required no further explanation and chilled me immediately.

“Haven’t you heard?” she asked. And when I looked up she told me “I’m black and I’m leaving.”
The impending verdict in the trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney King had been looming over all of L.A. and I knew immediately what she was telling me: the cops had been acquited.

I just looked at her and said “You’re kidding?” And she shook her head very gravely and by the time she stood up I was already on my way back across to where I’d left my motorcycle. It was then I heard sirens in the distance, but not too far away. It was then I knew I was in the war zone.

I made it to my bike, stowed my camera in the saddlebag and as I was pulling on my helmet, a pick-up cruised into the lot. Besides two young black men in the cab there were several more in the bed and when the truck slowed down to pass me they were all looking at me as if I had a huge bullseye painted on my chest. I could feel the hatred like heat.

I tried to play it as if I hadn’t even seen them, cinching my helmet a little bit tighter in hope of keeping it from being beaten off my head quite so fast. I turned to the bike and slid the key into the ignition, working the choke as I swung over onto the seat. When I looked up the truck came to a stop just past me but instead of anyone getting out, I saw their attention had been diverted to law enforcement vehicle with SAFETY POLICE painted on the door and parked at the far end of the lot with an officer behind the wheel, his back to us and unaware of what was going on.

Safety Police? I had no idea what that agency did or why one of its black-and-whites was there at that particular moment, but I credit it with ensuring my particular safety in giving me enough time to escape injury or at least avoid a confrontation. The guys in the truck looked at the cruiser and then back at me. Then the cruiser again, then back at me. But instead of waiting for what they might bring, I pushed the ignition button and the bike fired up. Seconds later I was northbound on La Cienega, speeding past the old Fedco store on Rodeo Road that was already on fire. It was surreal, as if the world was turning upside down and I was left splitting lanes of backed-up and mostly oblivious commuters trying to outrun being enveloped in the doom.

Back home to Sherman Oaks and a citywide curfew in full effect, I spent the next days glued to my television in despair as the city burned and so many lives were destroyed. It was a few days later in the dark room at Pierce developing my film that I realized the images I got wereones I could have made just as easily in the relative safety of my own backyard.

When I was a teen growing up in Hollywood, the place I wanted to go everyday during the summer was the Fosters Freeze that was on the eastside of La Brea a few blocks south of Fountain for a large chocolate-dipped vanilla cone.

Looooooooved them. More often then not I’d wind up at the ice cream counter of the Gower Gulch Thrifty’s for what was then a 15-cent triple scoop, usually of chocolate mint. Of course, had I my druthers and an endless supply of cash, a C.C. Brown’s sundae would’ve been part of my daily imbalanced diet, but that was some serious green.

Sadly the Hollywood Fosters, Thrifty’s and most heartbreakingly, Brown’s, a landmark on Hollywood Boulevard a block or so east of the Chinese Theater for so many years, has been gone for what will be 10 years this June 8. How do I know this? Well because when news of its impending closure hit the papers, of course I wrote a letter outlining my devastation at the news and my life-long love affair with the place. Hell, I even busted out some freakin’ W.H. Auden for the occasion (overwrought much?):

June 7, 1996

Letters To The Editor
20000 Prairie St.
Chatsworth, CA  91311

Re: “Saturday’s Sundaes to be Parlor’s Last,” Valley section, June 7, 1996

To the editor:

Reading of the closing of C.C. Brown’s ice cream parlor in Hollywood was like reading of the unexpected death of a dear, dear friend.

I cannot imagine my Los Angeles without the legendary birthplace of the hot fudge sundae and I am not coping with such tragic news very well. There are many memories of that wonderful place I grew up with: my first wide-eyed visit as an 8 year old with my mother; an hour spent sequestered in one of its high-backed booths with my first date in junior high; a rowdy stop with a group of high school friends on a Saturday night; a quick call upon the place with my wife on our wedding day—she in her wedding gown, me in my tux; and my 5-year-old daughter’s first wide-eyed visit there last year. All recollections are now shrouded in the knowledge that there will be no new ones to add to them after C.C. Brown’s serves its last Buster Brown banana split tomorrow.

W. H Auden sums up my heartbreak best:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Well, I will come. There will be one final memory. I will be there tomorrow at C.C. Brown’s on its final Saturday to say goodbye, and I will linger in one of its walnut booths and lay my hands on its cool marble table and do my best to keep tears from falling into my sundae as I look around the place one last time and bid farewell to yet another cherished part of my vanishing city and to experiences never to be.

William Campbell
Encino, CA

An old ice cream place might seem like not much to get worked up over, but I think it’s just a cumulative effect of living a life in L.A., where few things here are ever so hallowed or hearty as to escape either the wrecking ball or a strong enough temblor. But anyway, I didn’t turn this post into yet another sob story about my vanished landscape. All I wanted to do was exclaim that Susan and I made a special hot-afternoon trip over to the Fosters on Fletcher at the the south end of Atwater Village* where we found the place still soft-serving ‘em up like I remembered them from back in the day when I’d raid the bottom of my mom’s purse and bike through Hollywood to get me some (I believe the one on Eagle Rock Boulevard in Eagle Rock is still in service as well). It was fantastic!

Susan loved hers, too!

*btw: that intersection where the Fosters is, served as the location for the scene in Pulp Fiction after Bruce Willis’
character kills John Travolta’s where he runs into Ving Rhames’… literally.

I’m moderately seriously thinking about nicking myself and going by “Dub” instead of “Will”… if not in person than in whatever print and online bylines I manage to generate.

Now before you go rolling your eyes (I know: too late) it’s not like I’m gonna call myself “Rock” or “Bear” or “Boss” or “The Edge” or “Dice” or “Two Times” or somesuch nonsense. Obviously short for “W,” Dub would just be one more informal link in the chain from William to Will to Dub. Plus it’s different and fresh with a pinch of hip: Dub Campbell. I like it. And in fact, it would actually work to alleviate a lot of uninvited liberties taken with my name. I could certainly stomach “Dubby” far better than the “Willy” that raises my hackles when spat from the mouths of those who don’t know or can’t comprehend how insulted I am by that.

In addition Dub would eliminate the frustration I experience by those who never fail to dismay me when I introduce myself or sign my emails as Will and they come back calling me Bill. How the hell does that happen? Is it a mild form or retardation? Denial? My name’s not Billiam, for corn’s sake! It’s William, with a “Wuh” not a “Buh” as in bastid, which is what I have to stop myself from calling those who label me Bill. And it’s soooooo much fun to correct those idjits with “If you don’t mind, I prefer Will to Bill.” Then I look like a retentive, controlling jerk. Thanks for that. Really.

Grrrrrrrrr.

Sure, there’s the school of thought that self-monikering will make you go blind and put hair on you palms and doesn’t really count because a nickname must be bestowed by another for it to be true.

And other than my ironic and ultimately despised baby nickname of Twig (I was almost two feet tall and nine pounds six ounces at birth) that’s only happened one glorious and shining time in my life when I played first base on team in a slow-pitch city softball league in the late ’80s. Called the Bounty Hunters, the team was captained by Rich, my then-first wife’s now third ex-husband (I was her second; he took over after we split), and whose roster included Mark of the dynamic KLOS duo of Mark & Brian. We had been battling for first place all season and we wound up tied for it and playing the team we were even with at a park in North Hollywood for the title in the final game of the season. Do or die.

And we were dying, at least offensively. Recreational high-arc softball is not often a showcase for defensive battles, but that’s how this one shaped up. For whatever reason our normally high-powered bats struggled all game to bring runs home, but the other team wasn’t faring much better and in the bottom of the final inning with the scores strangely in single digits we were down by one and things just weren’t looking too good. With two out and a runner on second base I stepped to the plate having swung lousy in my previous at-bats that night. It was up to me either to keep things alive or kill our championship dreams and finish as losers in second place.

No pressure.

I can’t recall if it was the first pitch I swung at or the third or fourth or whatever. All I remember was the one I hit came a bit inside on me there where I waited for it on the right side of the plate and I turned on it but good smacking it solidly into right where it faded away from the fielder poorly positioned closer to center and toward the foul line dropping just fair inside and contining to roll beyond and away from its pursuer. By the time he picked it up and heaved it back in our runner on second had scored, tying the game and I was standing with both feet on second base, my chin high and my arms crossed over my chest like a conquering superhero. My teammates and our spectating wives and girlfriends cheered me on like mad.

It was in the middle of that auditory adulation that one of them — I don’t know who — yelled “Now that’s what I call clutch, Campbell!” Then there was a pause and it registered with someone else who yelled out “Clutch Campbell!” And then everyone started screaming “Clutch Campbell! Clutch Campbell! Clutch Campbell!” and I thought proudly to myself “Oh yeah, that’ll work.”

Now the pressure was on the next batter who rose to the occasion, smacking a single that moved me 60 feet closer to scoring the winning run. Then Mark came up and looped one that dropped to the outfield grass. With two outs I was off at the crack of the ball against the bat and had already come across the plate when it landed. Game over: we won. And dangit I had my spankin’ new nickname! And it wasn’t “Weasel” or “Choke” or “Smiley” or “Rinse”. It was “Clutch.” Fuckin’-A Clutch! The kind of nickname that a man wants and wants to keep around.

But it soooo didn’t stick. Instead it was a short-lived nom de guerre, so to speak. With the season over and the team disbanded and no one to call me by it other than my wife who usually marinated it heavily in sarcasm before those rare occasions she’d actually utter it, it lives only in my memory.

But what a memory.

Rather than toot the trivial horn, I dug into the archives and came up with this posted exactly 730 days ago today:

[04.05.2004] — There are days in a person’s life that provide course-changing, defining moments and yesterday will prove to be one of them in mine and Susan’s.

I spent 19 some-odd years living around the San Fernando Valley: Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Burbank, Glendale, Van Nuys again, Sherman Oaks again, Encino, then back to Sherman Oaks one more time before coming to Silver Lake in 2002.

The valley is what it is and I’m not inclined to bag on the place other than to say I’m much happier to be in a section of the city that is without a doubt more vibrant. Part of my trouble is that looking back over the generation I spent there, the years of my life just run together, broken up only by a handful of various incidents and mental snapshsots. As the relatively textureless canvas that stretch of my life was painted upon there’s just not a whole bunch of people or places that stand out high on the recollective.

But then from a link via LAObserved (who found it on Tabloid Baby) there comes the reminder that my valley was not entirely blandness and forgetability. Unfortunately it’s delivered via a touching remembrance from Jon at his Hollywood Thoughts blog for the recently deceased Sherman Oaks newsstand guy — at least that’s all I knew him as. Jon new him better:

I never knew Greg’s last name, but I considered him a friend. He passed-away very unexpectedly last Sunday night after working his shift at the Sherman Oaks Newsstand (the corner of Van Nuys and Ventura boulevards). You’ve probably seen him a million times as you passed the intersection: he was in his late fifties… always wore a ballcap… and, of course, sported his trademark ZZ Top beard.”

Jon is spot-on about having seen Greg a million times. With my mom’s house up the street from that intersection, I’m pretty sure I saw him a million-and-three times over the years, and certainly had occasions to buy various newspapers and magazines from him. But I never had the opportunity nor inclination to strike up a conversation or get to know him better.

The one time I had any contact with him other than transacting for a publication came in 1993 on my way to visit my mother one afternoon. Eastbound traffic was backed up a bit on Ventura because the southbound cross traffic at Van Nuys Boulevard traffic was blocking the intersection. On my motorcycle I was able to cut through the gridlock and when I turned the corner I found the source of the standstill was a stalled out Porsche 911 directly in front of the newsstand and inside it the frustrated driver was unable to get its engine to turn over. On several occasions during that period of my life I’d made like a good sammy and offered assistance to stranded motorists and this was just another opportunity to do so.

Dismounting my bike I approached the driver and asked him if he’d like a push to try to popstart it or at least get it out of traffic. He did, so I got behind the car, signaled for the driver to put it in neutral and get off the brake and I leaned in hard to get it rolling. About 40 feet later the driver threw it into first gear, let out the clutch and the Porsche spluttered and coughed but somehow managed to stay lit. Gunning the engine for a few seconds I gave the driver a thumbs-up and he waved his thanks and high-tailed it out of there, thus restoring order to that corner of the world.

Walking back to my bike, I caught newsstand guy — Greg — out of the corner of my eye. He was sitting on his barstool next to the register with his ever-present cap and wiry beard, watching me. He had a bemused smile on his face and when I turned my head to look at him directly he commenced a polite ovation in recognition of my good deed. I gave him a little bow and salute before climbing back in the saddle and moving on.

Rest in peace, Greg.

UPDATE (04/01): Dana Bartholomew of the L.A. Daily News interviewed me yesterday and today I found his nice piece on Greg at Dailynews.com.

Caspar Weinberger died today. When we met it was a far different time in this country. 1985. December. I was about halfway through a solo train trip around the country. I’d come coach on Amtrak from L.A. through the southwest and Texas for a whirlwind overnight layover in New Orleans. Then it was into Alabama where I rented a car in Birmingham and drove up to Chattanooga for an extended visit with relatives in Tennessee. From there I picked up the train in Atlanta destined for Washington, D.C.

I arrived, caught a cab to my hotel, checked in and crashed the rest of the day away. Somewhere along the line I’d caught a cold and it was ravaging me but good. But I was in the nation’s capitol for the first (and so far only) time of my life and I wasn’t going to let any bug or the cold winter weather keep me from spending the next day wandering around and seeing the sites.

The next morning I woke up sick as a dog, but I popped some over-the-counter meds, bundled up and cabbed it first to Arlington National Cemetery to visit John F. Kennedy’s gravesite as well as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Back across the Potomac I came to the Lincoln and Vietnam war memorials and from there I made my way up the mall and through various museums and the Washington Monument and the White House all the way to the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Building and then the Capitol Building where once inside I encountered Weinberger on a staircase.

That’s all. We passed each other. Him going down and me going up. But I’m pretty sure my jaw was agape as I recognized him as none other than the Secretary of Defense. Nevermind that I loathed him the same way I loathed pretty much everyone in the Reagan administration, for a split second I became a lame fanboy who froze on one of the marble steps and turned to watch him as he moved down the rest of the steps and out of view, somewhat in shock and awe at seeing someone of such prominence and distance who I only knew from pictures and video and soundbites suddenly become flesh and blood.

But certainly not larger than life. He was one tiny dude.

Anyway, I followed that up with a tour of the capitol and then walked aaaaaallllll the way back down the mall back to the other end to see the Vietnam and Lincoln memorials after dark when they’re illuminated and at their most illuminating.

Then it was a cab ride back to the hotel where I crashed again. The next day I was back on the train and headed for Chicago where my most memorable encounter wasn’t with any of Ronnie’s cabinet, but instead with two thugs who I faced down and scared away. But I’ll save that tale for another day.

Rest in peace, Caspar.

Such a strong compulsion to write hasn’t happened before or since. It was the summer of 1982 and everything had gone wrong. I’d somehow managed to graduate high school, but not much more than a month later was locked up at the Beverly Hills jail, arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.

In the incident’s simplest terms, I’d brandished a rifle and pointed it at the driver of another vehicle. I apologize for the battery of questions such limited information may produce, but I’m going to save the details of that dreadful series of events for another day and another post and just skip to the end, wherein all charges were ultimately dismissed once all the facts were reviewed by a judge at a preliminary hearing.

But the damage was done. I’d been a candidate for a program with the U.S. Navy called BOOST — Broadened Opportunities for Officer Selection and Training — in which after a successful completion of what amounted to a year-long bootcamp with an academic focus, I’d be eligible to be attached to the NROTC unit at the college of my choice. There was even a shot at attending the Naval Academy. But even with all the charges dropped, the Navy dropped me like a hot potato.

My good friend Mark Burton’s father, David Burton, who not only put up the money to bail me out of jail that night but also sprung for a lawyer for me, also gave me a mini-wage job working in the warehouse of the garment and textiles thread supply company he owned in a nether region not far away from the landmark Coca-Cola building south and east of downtown. I think the name of the place was Georgia Thread Company.

My first day there the warehouse manager, a portly bearded man named Mike who could only move around with the use of two braces, the kind with the metal pieces that wrap around your forearms, handed me a buck knife with a five-inch blade and a leather case and told me to wear it on my belt. Tool of the trade? No, he said it was for protection whenever I left the relative safety of the warehouse for breaks or lunch, or even just to go to my car.

Nice.

So I spent my days there for several months bored out of my gourd listening to Spanish-language radio, eating garbage from the roach coaches that came by, and avoiding confrontations with the locals who always lurked around. My main job was peeling the company’s labels off spools of thread then replacing them with a different company’s. Little did I realize these endless cartons of endless spools of thread were inventory that Mr. Burton and his partner — Dan Silva, I think — had declared stolen in a rudimentary scheme to collect on the insurance.

Gotta digress here for a paragraph or so: A few months after I quit my job there (to go work fulltime as a Century City messenger for the long-gone ABC Messenger Service) Silva was found dead at his desk with his throat cut. Later, Burton was arrested and charged with buying his partner’s murder, which was allegedly brokered by the warehouse boss Mike who contracted the job out to some creep nicknamed Bear who he knew from some Santa Fe Springs bar they both frequented. Both Mike and Bear cut deals and Burton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Personally, I’ll never believe Burton wanted to kill Silva, only scare him. But the confrontation with Bear and went bad and Silva ended up spraying his life all over his office. I’m certainly not condoning his murder, but Silva — who at my best impression from the several times I met him was a slickbacked slimedog — brought it on himself by by threatening Burton that he would break his silence to investigators if he wasn’t given a bigger cut of the insurance potato.

Anyway, although it’ll certainly be tough to top that true-crime tangent, allow me try to track things back to my original reason for this post, which was… ah yes: my first and last true and effortless compulsion to create.

It was born from a tire that flatted on my way home from work at the Georgia Thread Company one hot August afternoon. I was westbound in the No. 1 lane of the jammed Santa Monica Freeway approaching the Crenshaw Boulevard overpass when the car started to shimmy and fishtail. Unable to get passage to negotiate the tired old 1965 Mustang over to the shoulder, I was forced to bear right to a stop in the emergency access lane next to the center divider where I then discovered the right rear tire had died. While I had a spare in the trunk, I had no jack. So I was forced to wait for assistance. And wait. And wait, until help finally arrived some two hours later in the form of a CHP patrol car and its rather apprehensive officer who only after it was clear that there wasn’t either an APB or an assortment of warrants out for my arrest, still somewhat reluctantly offered his lugnut wrench and jack so that I could swap wheels — which I did and was on my way home.

But at a point during that eternity of waiting, I looked across the four lanes of slow-flowing traffic at the callbox that was near yet so far away and a story idea just — wham! — blew up inside my head. One moment I was on the verge of going crazy with boredom and the next I was scrambling for scraps of paper and a writing implement and jotting down character and plot points for a tale I couldn’t wait to get home to tell.

When I walked in the door and told my mom what happened and the story idea I’d come up with from it, she shut me up and told me to just go write it. And I did. I sat down at the IBM Selectric II at my desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper and didn’t quit typing until hours later and I had the tale roughly told. I spent several more days doing nothing else with my free time but honing it into a final draft of some 20-plus pages that I titled Breakdown.

In the story’s simplest terms, it’s about a kid who gets stuck on a freeway and help never arrives with apocapyptic results. Obviously it doesn’t take much analysis to find it’s a very personal tale about an angry and confused young man who feels invisible and victimized by a world that’s rejected him as worthless.

Whether it’s good storytelling is open to discussion. The only publication I submitted it to was the long-defunct Twilight Zone magazine, and they rejected it. But what’s pretty cut and dried is that it was important storytelling, not only as a raw and heartfelt way to capture and release all the pent up angst and frustration I was feeling at that time, but also in my evolution — however glacially paced — as a writer. It showed me that I have an inate talent to tell a tale.

The drawback is, that in the 23 years since I have rarely felt that rush — that urgency — to craft. Perhaps I’ve even quelled that talent. Certainly I’ve written a heckuva lot in my years as a journalist. And hell on an annual basis, this blog averages some 200,000 words. But the issue isn’t about my ability to spew keystrokes across a screen. I’m very, very rarely at a loss to do that. What I’m talking about is those few golden moments back in the dog days of 1982’s summer when I reveled in designing and building a piece of fiction — when I was incapable of stopping the process. Where did I put that? Where did it go? Can I get it back? I’m four months from steady employment and I have a strong desire never to return to that grind, but do I have the strength and courage to tap into my creative potential. Can I dive deep through my doubts and fears and come back up holding that power and desire that showed me my worth when I felt so worthless?

Boy I’d better. But first I’m going to dig Breakdown out of its unknown place in my scattered archives. Put my hands and eyes all over its pages. Reacquaint myself with it. See if it holds any keys to open doors locked too long. Maybe even — finally! — digitize it.

A few moments ago I was sitting in front of the TV trying to kill some time before running some errands. I flipped over to HBO and The Ice Storm was in progress — specifically the scene where Elijah Wood’s character stands before a class at school woodenly delivering an oral report on molecules. I immediately flashed on one of the most disappointing episodes of my high school years and shut off the TV to come transpose it here.

My tenth grade English teacher was a man named Stern. I believe his first name was Leonard. I remember he was a tallish dude with curly black hair and he wore glasses. Not old… if I had to guess I’d say at the time he was in his early 30s.

I’d moved back to Beverly Hills from Hollywood in the summer of 1979 about two weeks before the new school year was to begin. Having graduated from Le Conte Junior High I had been all set to follow my friends from that school to Hollywood High, that is until my mom found an apartment in the slums of B.H. and just like that: change of plans. So, much to my disappointment I found myself trying to find my way through this new school where I knew practically no one and resented or envied practically everyone else.

With such a wild anti-social life I could often be found haunting the school library, a place where I felt the least uncomfortable. I spent countless lunches and free class periods (they were called “mods,” short for “modules”) in there leafing through bound volumes of Time magazine going back to its beginnings.

If I was in the mood for something a little more stand-alone I’d hit the shelves and pick out the first book to grab my attention. It was this method that introduced me to Allan W. Eckert’s The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, originally published in 1965 by Little, Brown & Co.

I believe I’d heard of the passenger pigeon but I didn’t know they were extinct. I opened it and read the inside of the jacket:

In 1813, John James Audubon recorded the passage of a flock of passenger pigeons migrating south which he conservatively estimated to exceed one billion individual birds. This was only one of many such flocks that filled the American skies. It was estimated that nearly forty percent of the total bird population of the United States was passenger pigeons.

Yet, 101 years later, the last passenger pigeon in the world died at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens.”

I was hooked. And I tore through Eckert’s unique and compelling narrative that heartbreakingly re-creates the permanent erasure of the bird from our planet and the reasons behind it. So moved was I by this tale that when Mr. Stern assigned the class oral book reports of two to five minutes in length and passed out a list of required literature to pick from I approached him and asked if I could do my report on The Silent Sky. He said sure.

Thrilled — and keep in mind what self-respecting high schoolers are ever thrilled at the prospect of getting up in front of their peers and talking — I got right to work preparing my presentation that would teach my fellow classmates all about this book, this bird and its shameful destruction.

When my time came to give the report, sure I was a nervous wreck, but I was confident I could provide a compelling opinion about the book and the bigger picture of the consequences of our lack of environmental awareness. I stood before them at a lectern and took a deep breath.

“The book I read is by the author Allan Eckert and it’s called The Silent Sky” I began, holding up the copy from the library. “If you’re like me you may have heard about the bird called the passenger pigeon somewhere along the line, but you probably didn’t know that it used to fly in amazing flocks that numbered into the billions.”

I held up a grainy photocopy I’d made of Audubon’s famous illustration of the bird. “You probably also didn’t know something even more amazing, that in the span of about a century the passenger pigeon went from those billions to completely and utterly extinct in 1914.”

I looked up from my notes and out at the sea of students. I expected them to be looking out the window or passing notes or staring off into space or sleeping, but no. All eyes were on me. I had their attention. Even Mindy Fenton, who every guy in class pined over. And dang if she didn’t smile at me when I looked right at her.

Mindy Fenton!

I took another deep breath and stepped around the lectern. “Here, pass this around so you can get a closer look of what the passenger pigeon looks like.” I handed the paper to a student at the front of the first row.

Back at the lectern, I talked about finding this book by chance in the school’s library and what a powerful statement it made against the careless destruction of which human beings are capable. I told them that what made this book especially fascinating was that Eckert didn’t just provide a dry documentation of the bird’s demise, but that he wrote it from the perspective of various passenger pigeons, making it not only more intriguing, but entertaining as well.

To illustrate that point I cracked open the book to the page I had paper clipped and read a passage from it. Then to bring home the destruction man wrought I read another passage about a systematic harvest:

It was on the seventh dawn after the hatching that the men moved in. They worked systematically, these 800 or so men, each going about his business without too much concern for the others. Conversation was out of the question, for only when a man shouted into his companion’s ear could he make himself understood over the din.

The females showed no fear of these men moving about and even when a bird in a neighboring hest was grabbed about the middle of the back to pin her wings, and her head and crop werer popped off with one savage jerk, they showed little concern and their bright orange-red eyes stared steadily at the intruders.

The low nests were the first to be assaulted and these were everywhere between five and seven feet high by the tens of thousands. A man working hard and fast soon established a rhythm — step, reach, grab, retract, yank, drop, stuff in sack — and a bird in the bag every five seconds, a dozen per minute, was an extremely good pace.”

To explore the frivolity of men I turned an extended passage describing the many ridiculous “medicinal” uses being found for the birds and their parts into a mini performance by reading that like a snake oil saleman:

“Step right up, ladies and gents! Get your dried passenger pigeon gizzards here — proven to cure gallstones in no time! You say your gallstones are fine? Well then don’t be put off by this next product’s main ingredient but it’s been shown that the birds’ dung — you heard me right — when mixed with molasses was a ready remedy for migraines, stomach aches, pleurisy, colic, dysentery and apoplexy. And if its your eyes that are aching, I’ll have you know that one single solitary bottle of Pigeon Blood Eye-Easer is gay-roan-teed to cure sties, halt failing eyesight, and on occasion can miraculously restore sight to the blind!”

I was rolling. I had my classmates eating out of the palm of my hand. They were into it. And I started to bring them home. I gave them a series of short passages that told of the decline in the birds numbers and the paltry steps taken that were way too late to save the species.

Then I read to them Eckert’s account of the last known wild passenger pigeon, killed in 1900 by an Ohio boy with a BB gun he’d gotten as a gift:

For the old bird there was a flash of brilliant light as the tiny round pellet slammed through his eye and came to rest in his brain. And in that fractional instant before he died, the old passenger pigeon may have heard the gust of wind which swept through the tops of the trees with a sound not unlike the murmur of a million distant wings.”

I managed to make it through that without any waterworks, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the tears at bay during Eckert’s epilogue, which I told the class shows readers the sadness of the last remaining passenger pigeons at the Cincinnati Zoo. I bit the bullet and proceeded with the final paragraphs of Eckert’s book:

“In 1900, about the time the old passenger pigeon was killed, only three of the birds remained alive in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens; two males and Martha. In April of 1909, one of these males dies and the remaining male now took to perching close to Martha for companionship. But the loneliness was an awful thing —.”

Right about there my voice caught in my throat, but I managed to keep on going.

“…and he became ever more frail until on July 10, 1910, he too died and, with him, any remote hope that their number might increase.”

I was pretty choked up by now and I’m sure I heard a sniffle from somewhere out there among the desks, but I kept my head buried in the book and exhaled deeply in hopes of getting through Martha’s death.

“And now Martha was alone. Alone in a way that can be described but never fully appreciated, for she was the last… the only living creature of her species in the world. For over four years longer she lived in isolation in her cage.

At 12:45 p.m. on September 1, 1914, her head sagged and she trembled. And then, without ever having known the joys of hurtling through the heavens at great speed; without ever hav —.”

I stopped abruptly at the interrupting sound of Mr. Stern clearing his throat loudly and turned to him sitting at his desk looking at his watch.

“OK,” he said very casually, “I’m afraid your time is up.”

I was dumbfounded.

“But… I’m almost finished!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’ve gone well beyond the five-minute limit.”

I turned and looked at the clock then out at the students hoping they might suddenly burst into a chorus of “Let Him Finish!” but of course there would be none of that. They just looked shocked and uncomfortable in the awkward silence.

So I did the only thing I could do. I bolted out of the classroom with Stern yelling behind me to “Come back here and get back in your seat!”

“Fuck that Mr. Stern!” I yelled back and heard some surprised laughter come from the room as the door closed behind me and I ran away. To the library, where I stayed for the rest of the day. Among friends.

The situation was never resolved. There was no reprimand or punishment for me, nor was there opportunity for me to gain any closure or take him to task for his insensitivity. I showed up to the next class tensely expecting Stern to order me to my counselor’s office, but instead we simply stared hard at each other for a few seconds after I answered when he got to my name during roll call, then he moved on to the next name on the list.

I’m not sure if Stern was just anti-enviro or was an emotionless jackass who was getting uptight at my display of feelings and decided it was time to shut me down. Maybe a passenger pigeon shat on his great-great grandfather Moishe during his bar mitzvah and became the laughing stock of the family. But whatever his reasons, his pulling the rug out from under me certainly wasn’t because I’d exceeded any bullshit time limit. Most of other students were hard-pressed to spend anything beyond the two-minute minimum up there mumbling woodenly and disinterestedly about Hemingway or Faulkner or Fitzgerald or Twain or whoever it might have been that they didn’t really give a fuck about.

But where any decent human being or even sub-adequate teacher would have recognized the strong connection I had to the book and the importance of its subject matter and let me read a few more lines and make my closing statement, instead he just flat out shit-canned me, invalidating my feelings and my enthusiasm and my spirit and making me feel not only tremendously helpless and angry, but even more worthless than I already was feeling at 15 years of age and lost and alone in a land not of my chosing — as alone as poor Martha was those last four years of her life, just in a far bigger cage.

It’s a bitterness I obviously harbor to this day and was somehow dredged up from the depths by a snapshot of Elijah Wood in a nine-year-old movie that just happened to be on HBO this afternoon when I turned on the TV.

Perhaps in hindsight, I suppose I should be thankful for what Mr. Stern taught me that frustrating day early on into an entirely frustrating and pathetic experience at Beverly Hills High School. He delivered tailor-made and personalized unto me the hard lesson that the world doesn’t give a shit, kid. Whether it’s passenger pigeons. Or passion.

Well to that I say what I said then” “Fuck that, Mr. Stern!”