STRAWBERRY PARK WE LOVE THEE

Smaller and different and totally the same. That's what it feels like to be here in my home town of San Jose. Got in yesterday, drove to my old neighborhood, past the Winchester Mystery House, down Moorpark, past Blackford High which is now part of Harker Academy but at one time was just another public high school in the Campbell Union School District. Eased past the house I grew up in. So strange to think a different family lives there now, in the same house, the same rooms. And how it's not the same house the same rooms anymore. The trees are there, but look unloved, unclimbed. 

And yet, Mount Hamilton still looms to the East, and the Santa Cruz Mountains shadow the west, like they always have and always will, for at least a few more millennia. The air yesterday had that fresh Bay Area thing going which happens from time to time, where you can see for miles, and just breathing it in feels like drinking a tall glass of spring water. There is a life force in the Bay Area, and it just is.

There is something about returning to where you grew up that reminds you of who you are, who you were, and who you want to be. About seeking out places and people who are still part of your life. And also seeking things that no longer are, and that feeling of how it must be some kind of magic trick, this not having everything being just as it was. Like maybe, Blackford is still Blackford, Carrow's is still Carrow's and not a Denny's. 

Maybe Life really is a dream.

Well, in today's dream, I'm sitting in a hotel that is right where there used to be a 7-11, which was my main place to get comic books when I was a kid. Comic books and Slurpees. Behind it there was a vacant lot that had been turned into a sort of dirt bike track with little ramps we could jump our bikes over. I don't know who, but someone, some Johnny Appleseed of bicycles, roamed the South Bay and turned all the vacant lots into places you could do your best to endanger your life by riding really fast and then taking flight on little ramps made of dirt. 

This same Appleseed seemed to have a penchant for dirty magazines, as there was always a stash in all these vacant lots. We had the one behind the 7-11, another one over near Manor Market, one near the Mormon Church over on Borina Drive, and many others.

San Jose, at least the Strawberry Park area, was a magic realm full of danger and dirt of all forms.

I am here to collect things out of storage from when we sold the house I grew up in last year. Also to see old friends, go to the beach and gaze at the Pacific and hear the Sea Lions, eat the best Falafel sandwich known to man, and wander the past, catching up with ghosts and phantoms, letting them know where I'm at and asking them what it all means and meant, to live and die, to be here, in this town, this world, this motel room that once was a 7-11.

I feel the urge now to take a walk along my old paper route path. 

And to find some coffee.

I remember, when the house on Belvedere was my home, waking each morning very early, and already my mom would be up, and the coffee would be percolating on the stove, and I would lay in bed, knowing a cup of life would be waiting for me downstairs as I started my day.

On.

Here's a song. It's Corral Nocturne from Copland's Rodeo. It makes me think of bicycles and huge oak trees and the cool morning air, of neighborhood cats and the world lighting up as the sun rose, filling our little houses all the same with gold and glory, of a brief moment each day when all the madness of the world was confined to the papers in my bag, and a new day was open. I didn't have the easiest life. I don't think anyone does. But I did have golden mornings and dirt tracks for my bike, and a best friend and a dog, and a mom who made coffee, and music like this.

Enjoy.

THE DEMON BARBER OF STRAWBERRY PARK

I had long hair when I was a kid. This was the 1970s, and long hair was cool. Hippies, the Grateful Dead, the musical Hair- these had all paved the way for young men to have long hair. And I lived in San Jose, California- part of the liberal, cutting edge, new age love fest that is known as the Bay Area. Not that I was in the middle of Haight-Ashbury, walking around quoting Timothy Leary to my fellow fourth graders. Life was fairly subdued in my neighborhood of Strawberry Park. Still, I loved my long hair. It was brown, and turned sort of blonde in the sun, and groovy. Often, I'd run as fast as I could down our suburban streets just to feel my hair fly behind me. My hair was my joy, and belonged solely to me. My enemy was the barber, and I visited him as little as possible.

One Sunday morning in February, 1976, my mother announced it was time for us to get hair-cuts, handed my older brother Jerry some cash, and sent us off to the dreaded Strawberry Park Barbershop. If barbers were my enemy, the Strawberry Park Barber was their king- known the world over for hair-cuts that made you look stupid, lame, and infinitely uncool. There were other barbers in the area- more expensive hair salons, places that weren't quite so awful. But the Strawberry Park Barber was cheap. Thus, our patronage. I begged and pleaded to be spared from this cruel and unusual punishment. I promised to do my chores, to clean the whole house- anything! But to no avail- Mom was adamant, and so we quietly got out our bikes, and pedaled to the House of Horror. We rode in silence, each contemplating how bad our hair would be in a short time. When we got there, the barber's chair was empty. My brother and I looked at each other, two condemned souls. Jerry bravely said he'd go first. I sat down on a chair, dejected, and tried to read one of the boring grown-up magazines they laid out for customers. You'd have thought they'd at least put out a few comic books to ease the pain, but no. So I picked up a copy of Time, and flipped through it, page after page- trying hard not to notice what was happening to my brother mere feet from where I sat. I didn't want to look up and have to see what they were doing to him. It was too much to bear.  But Time magazine just couldn't hold my attention for so long. I looked up, to see how Jerry was doing. 

It was awful. Jerry's hair was popping up in strange places, and combed back in what was called the "wet-head" look. He looked like Dagwood Bumstead- and I am not exaggerating. I don't know how they'd done it, but they had.  Jerry smiled at me, hoping no doubt to get some encouragement. I probably should have smiled back, told him it didn't look so bad, that come to think of it, his hair looked pretty good. Jerry kept smiling. I kept staring. Jerry asked me, "Well, how does it look?" I froze. what could I tell him? I didn't want to lie, but the truth was too horrible.  I don't know how long I stood there, staring at him, mouth agape. He asked again, "How does it look?"  I blurted out "You look like Dagwood!", and ran out the shop, jumped on my bike, and pedaled away as fast as I could. I often wonder what Jerry must have thought, sitting in that terrible chair as he watched me make my escape. But at the time, I just rode as fast as I could, as far from that damned barber as my bike would carry me.

I rode without thinking. I ended up at Murdock's Creek, a natural creek that had been altered by the city with a couple of little dams that made perfect pools for swimming. You had to climb a fence and over a trail to get there, which gave it a sense of isolation. There were lots of trees, and frogs, and I loved it.  It was the unofficial spa for all the boys of Strawberry Park. When I rode up that day, my buddy Noel, and a couple of other guys, were goofing around, throwing rocks, climbing trees- doing all the things that could make a normal day fantastic. As I rode up, everyone was daring everyone else to climb one of the trees that surrounded the pond and jump. "I dare you to climb up ten feet and jump". "I dare you to climb fifteen feet and jump." They were somewhere near twenty feet when I arrived. Noel turned to me. "I dare you to climb to the branch with the rope swing on it and jump!" I looked up. That particular branch was pretty high up. At the time, I had a sleight fear of heights. "Scared?", Noel asked. "No", I lied, and began to climb. It didn't seem so bad up there. I got the branch and looked down at everyone. Some of the guys looked impressed, which felt great. Then Noel called up, "I dare you to go higher." All the other kids started to chant "Higher! Higher! Higher!". So up I went.  After about five more feet, I looked down. "Higher! Higher! Higher!" I climbed, higher than I had ever climbed before. I could see over the tops of the other trees to the rows and rows of houses in the distance, and beyond them, the Santa Cruz mountains, covered with clouds.  I could feel the tree sway beneath my weight. I edged my way out on the last branch that I thought could hold me up, far enough out so I could drop into the water. I looked down. All the guys were silent, awestruck, even a little afraid. Perfect. "How's this?" I yelled down. "Awesome", Noel yelled back up. I looked down. The water seemed far away. A cold wind was blowing. What in the hell was I thinking? I didn't want to do this. But I couldn't go down  now. I'd never hear the end of it. I'd be a loser, a wimp, a nothing. And I did not want that. I took a lot of dares back then that I ended up regretting- did things that were stupid and dangerous but that seemed to impress other people. If you wanted someone to jump off a roof, make a prank phone call, or ride their bike over a ramp- I was the go-to guy.  And here I was, out on a limb way up in the air on a cool February day.

I jumped. The water was freezing, but I didn't care. I was alive, and all the guys were yelling their admiration. Life was good. We spent the rest of the day running around, discussing the latest issue of Spiderman, and told whatever dirty jokes we knew. I was shivering most of the time, but didn't care in the least. Life, for that moment, was perfect. At the end of the day, we rode off into the sunset, young heroes who could do no wrong. The incident at the barbershop was a distant memory.

Sadly, my mother did not find the days events amusing. She said she had told my step-father Vern what had happened, and that he would talk to me when he got home. Sometimes, on Sundays, my step-dad had to go into work for a few hours. Usually, he was home by four. But it was past four already, and he wasn't home yet. This was not good. The later he got home, the more likely he'd been drinking. At seven, he still wasn't home. A dread silence pervaded the house. Nobody said anything- by this time, we didn't have to- a storm was coming, and there wasn't anything we could do about it. Around eight or so, we got sent to bed. Still no Vern. Then, sometime past nine, I heard his car pull up, the front door open, the tell-tale uneven footsteps from door to kitchen. Not good. I could hear Mom talking with him, and then I heard him call.

"Kelly! Get your little ass in hear. Now!"

I was scared. Dad, as we called Vern by then, had never beaten us or anything like that. At least not yet. But I was certain it was only a matter of time before he lost it and killed one of us. He'd gotten pretty angry before, and broken some plates and stuff, and it didn't seem like that much of a stretch for him to just go completely psycho. Sometimes late at night, as I lay in bed, I would hear him in the kitchen, opening drawers. We had this one butcher knife that was ridiculously huge, and I had this idea that he was looking for it, and that once he found it he would walk down the hall, open my door, slowly walk up to the bed, and cut my throat.  Whenever I could, I pushed that particular knife far back into the drawer.

"Kelly, God Damn it!"

I climbed out of the top bunk, looked at Jerry, who tried to smile for me. I slowly walked to the kitchen. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, I hoped. Maybe I'd only get grounded, or spanked or something. Maybe they'd take away my bike. That wouldn't be so bad.

I stepped into the kitchen. He looked extremely pissed. Sometimes, it seemed like actual waves of anger would come off of Vern. I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Come here", he said.

I didn't want to do that. He knew it. I knew it. He pointed to the floor, right in front of him. "Come...", he said, and pointed again for emphasis, "...here".  This was something he'd do, pointing to the floor in front of him, commanding you to "come here". His entire body was tense, and I remember thinking he kind of looked like a snake about to strike. I still didn't move. He frowned, and his eyes somehow got meaner.

"NOW!"

I inched my way towards him, step by step. I've taken many walks in my life, even some pretty long hikes- miles in the mountains and through Europe and once almost all the way around Manhattan in the middle of the night, but I have never taken a longer journey in my life than those few steps I took that night in the kitchen of the old house in Strawberry Park.

Vern crouched down so that we were face to face- our noses almost touching. I could smell wine on his breath- sour and mixed with cigarettes. "I understand you had a little trouble at the barbershop", he said. slurring his words just a bit. I looked down and mumbled, "Yeah".  He cocked his head, as if he was looking at some strange, slightly disgusting animal. "Yeah. From now on, you do what you're told. Period." He liked to use the word "period" for emphasis a lot. I always thought it sounded stupid, but didn't think this the right time to tell him. "Is that understood?", he asked. "Yes", I said, trying to sound as contrite and pathetic as I could. But something about my answer was wrong. His nostrils flared, and he snorted out his breath like a bull. "Yes, what?", he demanded. I had no idea what he was talking about. Yes was a pretty direct answer, I thought. Yes. Positive. Affirmative. What had I said wrong? Should I have said "Yes, Dad" or "Yes, wise and powerful one" or "Yes you crazy son of a bitch?". He kept looking at me, expecting something. Then it hit me. Of course! "Yes, sir". He held his glare for a moment, then sighed. "Alright".

And that was that. I couldn't believe it. Was that all? Fantastic. I turned, and headed back to my room- but he stopped me before I got out of the kitchen. "Where the hell do you think you're going? Your mother wants you to get a hair cut, and you're going to get a God damned hair cut".

And then he turned, opened a drawer, and pulled out the butcher knife.

"Come...here".

AFTER THE WOMBATS

Things were pretty rough after Daddy Jay headed north to Alaska pursued by Wombats. Money was tight. Mom had been an elementary school teacher before she had us, and hadn't worked in years. Now, she had three kids, a mortgage, and an ex-husband who wasn't paying alimony or child support. At this time, there was a glut of teachers in Strawberry Park, meaning no work in that field other than some substitute teaching- which doesn't exactly pay the bills for a family of four. We didn't know any of this. My brother, sister and I were busy being kids, and things seemed pretty much like before. Maybe we all got hand-me-downs more often when it came to clothes, and maybe we didn't go out to eat pretty much ever, but life didn't seem too weird. Yet.

Then, things started to disappear. That was a little strange. First, it was all the old stuff in the garage. Mom had all this old furniture in the garage- things she had inherited after her mother died, a beautiful set of  mirrors, chests, things like that. To me, they were just unused stuff, but Mom was hoping to one day live in a big house where we could use all those beautiful antiques. One by one, they vanished. And then Juliet disappeared. Juliet was Mom's '57 Chevy. It was sky blue and white and very cool, and she loved it. Mom talked about Juliet like it was a person, an old friend who she had had many adventures with. Then one day, she was gone. Within a few years, Mom re-married, and so began life with Vern.

My step-father Vern was a complicated man. One of my first memories of Vern is from when I was five or six years old.  I was hanging upside down from a branch on our magnolia tree in the front yard and saw him walking up to our house. I shouted out "Daddy". He smiled and said "not yet".  He came across as really nice. He laughed a lot, told jokes, and let us watch Get Smart when we visited him at his apartment. He even got us a dog shortly after he and Mom got married. We had only had one dog before, a little white dog named Spot that Daddy Jay had given us. Spot ran away around the same time  my father left. We named the new dog Gigi, and I loved her very much. Life was pretty sweet. For a bit.

Something was shifting in house. At first, it was hard to pin down, just a tension that seemed to fill the air. Mom would get a little jumpy when we got loud or left our toys out. And in the mornings, especially on the week-ends, we were told to stay quiet until Vern got up. And he would sleep in pretty late. Sometimes, Vern would swear. It was exciting to hear these forbidden words, but also kind of creepy. Adults weren't supposed to talk like that.  And sometimes, Vern would yell at us. Now, being a kid, I was used to grown-ups yelling now and then. But there was something different about Vern yelling. More intense. More scary. Mom said Vern had had a hard life, and so he drank too much sometimes, and we needed to be understanding, that he just got into bad moods from time to time. Well, it was true about the bad moods, and we learned quickly that if Vern was in one of his funks, it was a really good idea to be on our best behavior. Life became something like dancing with a polar bear. Still fun and exciting, but now much more dangerous, and if you weren't careful, you would most likely get an eternal lecture on how stupid you were and how meaningless life was and told that you should never have to be asked to clean your room, you should just do it. Shouting and crying and fear were regular dinner guests. And somehow, I became Vern's favorite. He'd tell me jokes at dinner. I'd pour his wine- red with ice cubes. I'd ask him to tell me about his life, and he'd tell stories about being in the army and sitting through a hurricane on a base in Florida, or when he ran a television repair store near Sacramento, or about the Porsche he used to drive. And this seemed to calm the savage beast, to make him happy. And when he was happy, he was nicer, less prone to yelling, or throwing things, or getting into big blow out yell fests with Mom after we went to bed. So making him happy was job number one. I learned how to make him laugh, mostly through trial and error. If I said certain things a certain way, Vern would laugh. You could tell when a laugh was needed, when things were heading south, as they say. Usually, there would be the inciting incident- Vern would ask if we had done all our chores, or been good at school- some quotidian thing like that. And he would only ask if he knew that we hadn't. So he'd ask the question, there would be a moment of silence, and if you didn't manage to make him laugh, the interrogation would begin, dinner would be effectively over, and who knew what would happen next? Usually it would be yelling, but there was the occasional glass thrown, and on one infamous night, he back-handed my sister in the face. Vern was a big, scary man- and we were little kids, scared out of our minds. So whenever possible, when the moment came, if at all possible, I'd make him laugh, the moment would pass, and we'd all breathe a little easier.

But comedy would only work up to a certain point, for so many glasses of wine. After that, all bets were off, and the thing to do was shut up and look for the closest escape route. It is a very curious thing to watch someone change right in front of you, to morph themselves in a sort of slow motion imitation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; to see the eyes blur and grow mean,  smell the breath become danker and danker,  physically feel tension and anger fill a room, like an acrid fog. Curious and terrifying. And heartbreaking.

By fourth grade, I had abandoned all hope of Daddy Jay ever coming back. Life was harsh, and nothing could change that. There was only one thing I secretly hoped would happen, one thing that might bring a little bit of magic back to the world.

Snow.

I  realize that might sound like a fairly dull dream to a lot of people. But you have to understand, it never snowed in San Jose. Ever. Not once in my life. The only snow I ever saw was on tv and in the movies. Snow was glamorous, even mystical. You could go sledding, have snow fights, eat snow pies, make snowmen. I had a few vague memories of going up to the mountains, way back when Daddy Jay was still around- and I remember it being fun and that I loved it. And I wasn't alone in my hope for snow. Every kid at Strawberry Park Elementary wanted snow. If it got below fifty degrees, we'd look to the sky, and dream.  So snow was it. I became an avid fan of the weather reports- but the news was never very promising. Still, many nights I'd go to sleep wishing fervently for snow, praying to a god I wasn't so sure was up there anymore to make it snow.  Snow would make it all okay. Santa would return, with Melvin the Great sitting in his sled. Vern- or Dad, as we called him by then- would stop drinking. Everything would be all right again, all thanks to the Messiah called Snow. It was the last bastion my soul had against an encroaching reality.

A WOMBAT ATE MY FATHER

It's funny the things I remember. Crickets, tomato soup, Lincoln Logs. Good things. Red wine with ice cubes,  long silences, knives. Bad things.  I grew up in San Jose, California, at the time a quickly growing city nestled in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley, which used to be called the Valley of the Hearts Delight but was morphing into the urban sprawl of Silicon Valley, land of strip malls, tract housing, and freeways. I can still smell the cherry trees that grew near my house, see the weathered barnyards covered in moss , hear the sound of thousands upon thousands of crickets at night- so loud they'd wake me up in the middle of the night from time to time. My mother used to tell me that when she first came to San Jose, in 1953, a person could tell where they were by the scents of blossoms. Peaches were one area, oranges another. In my first memories, the area we lived in was surrounded by orchards of all kinds- but each year, more and more of them disappeared,  replaced by 7-11s, Dennys, and multi-plex theaters. The  nightly orchestra of crickets shrank into a sad little blues combo, and then vanished altogether, replaced by the distant roar of the new freeway.

Our home was your typical ranch style suburban home that most people my age seem to have grown up in- three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a dining room, a living room, and kitchen connected to a garage.  Our particular neighborhood was Strawberry Park. I went to Strawberry Park Elementary, bought my comic books at Strawberry Park Drug Store, walked down Strawberry Park Drive to get to school. The weird thing was, there weren't a lot of strawberries. Just houses, vacant lots, the occasional church, and what was left of the orchards. To the west were the Santa Cruz mountains, dark blue and full of secrets. to the east was Mount Hamilton- gold and dry and covered with patches of Oak, giving the the appearance of a great chocolate chip cookie. Beyond the valley was the real world, which as far as I could tell from tv was full of hippies and bell bottom jeans and Felix and Oscar and Hawkeye, and the Zodiac killer, and Viet Nam, and some place called OPEC, and Jacques Costeau. I'd made a few forays into the real world- once to Alaska on a cruise with my mother and father shortly before they divorced, once to Disneyland with my father just after the divorce, and several times to Pacific Grove where my Aunt Alice lived. But for the most part, life was Strawberry Park.

I shared a room with my older brother Jerry, and Mom let us decorate it as we saw fit, in order to help stimulate our creativity. We had a dark green ceiling, wood paneling on the walls, and a multi-colored striped shag carpet that sort of looked like some ogre had eaten a couple of boxes of crayons and then thrown up.  On the wall was a muskrat skin we had gotten in Alaska, an up-turned horseshoe over our door for good luck, a poster of a tiger, and also a poster of King Kong. We had bunk beds, and I got to sleep on the top bunk. I don't know if this is because I whined about it, or if Jerry just wanted to bottom bunk. As the youngest, I often got things by using my pest skills, which were advanced for my age.

Every night, after the lights had been turned off and Mom said good night, Jerry would ask me if I wanted to hear a story. We all loved stories in our family. Mom was a former school teacher, our father a frustrated writer- and they were both full of stories and nursery rhymes. Whenever we drove anywhere, we'd read out loud. I remember very clearly hearing my sister Heather read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe one summer over the course of several drives back and forth to Aunt Alice's. So, every night, lights out, house quiet, Jerry would call up: "Want to hear a story?" He didn't really have to ask, because the answer was always yes. It was just the ritual, and that was that. He would ask, I would say yes, then he would ask what kind of story, and I would always request a scary one. He would say no, I'd get to scared and cry to Mom, I'd swear I wouldn't- and after going back and forth, he'd tell me a scary story. And what stories he'd tell- always original, always somehow incorporating our lives. Blue zombies who lived in our closet, rattle snakes at the foot of the bed- there was even one that had the Creature from the Black Lagoon coming out of our fish tank. Usually, I would get scared, and then he'd switch a story about nothing all that exciting, like a boy floating down a river in a raft or walking to school or something, and I'd drift off to sleep.

My life seemed full of dreams and magic, but by the summer after third grade, things started to change. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny had all gone the way of the dodo for the reasons they always do. But there were starker changes in our suburban home in Strawberry Park. New monsters, not quite so fantastic but much more real, had begun to arrive.



My father left my mother, and my brother and sister and I, when I was four. He had always been obsessed with Alaska- and had decided to go live there. My siblings and I always hoped he'd come back someday to see us- but any hope of that ever happening diminished in direct proportion to the number of letters he sent us. When he first left, there were letters practically every week, full of stories about Melvin the Great, his made up version of himself who went on madcap adventures with his much smarter side-kicks Hairy, Feather, and Belly. Melvin traveled around in a throne that sat on top of a Volkswagen Bug. He always wore a crown, had a bottle of magic pep potion in his glove box that gave him super powers, and was constantly fighting the evil Wombats. Each letter with a Melvin the Great story was illustrated by my father, and I treasured them. I'd read them over and over, never tiring of the stories. We all checked the mail-box a lot in those days. But as time wore on, the letters came less frequently, from weekly to monthly to not at all.  Mom explained to us that Daddy Jay, which is what we called him, had stopped paying something called Alimonyandchildsupport, and we probably wouldn't see him much anymore. By fourth grade, all letters from my father had joined Santa in oblivion. We assumed the Melvin had been eaten by a Wombat.

To be continued...