Tape 8, Side B
[Begin Tape 8, Side B]
So, as you were saying, even though it was a surf high school…
… yeah, a Southern California surfing high school, pretty laid back…
… it was still…
… in some areas I think, possibly depending on the teachers or the department, the English department or something like that, because you know when I first started doing it they expected that everybody would do this kind of work and they were doing it and I wasn’t able to because I didn’t know how to think like that.
So would you say your education up to that point had been more rote?
No, I think it was all there, it was all there, I think I just wasn’t paying any attention to it [laughs]. I wasn’t keyed in to that way of dealing with the world of information. I had no thought about the future, about preparation for anything else. I mean I liked certain things; I liked mathematics. I had taken all the mathematics, even though I didn’t do well in them for grades and tests because I didn’t like tests, you know and sometimes I wasn’t there in the classes, but I liked mathematics, in fact I took all the mathematics that they offered in the high school and was meeting after school with a math teacher and some other kids doing calculus, you know he was just volunteering to do that.
Really, and you would stay after?
Yeah, until you know I didn’t, until after a while I didn’t. But I tried, it was volunteer, because I was interested in that stuff for some reason. In the English classed you know I could read all that stuff, in fact I was reading way beyond, I was reading all kinds of stuff. I was reading, because of all the philosophical and Asian stuff I had discovered right over my little wall in my little garage, I was starting to read Being and Nothingness and Kierkegaard and all sorts—not that it, I mean I knew what the words meant and I could put the sentences together and some of the things I retained, so I was just reading them because somebody said: This would be interesting to read.
So that was sort of branching off from all the Eastern religious material that you were reading?
Yeah, ‘cause all this stuff was mentioned in various aspects and also some of the magazines that I was reading then. I read the Saturday Review; Saturday Review you know said read John Cheever, so I’d go read all John Cheever’s novels; read John Updike: read ‘em all. Try this; try that. Go back and read Thomas Wolfe over again, stuff that I’d read earlier in high school, so I’d read them, you know I’d just read everything. Where is it now?
That was all out in the garage?
No, that wasn’t, that was just the spark. They weren’t out there, I had to go get them somewhere, you know like the library or…
When you had your own space out in the garage.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah, I spent a lot of time reading out there when I wasn’t going to gym [laughter]. So that F in gym translated into something else. But I wasn’t ready to deal with any of these… I just thought they were stupid, these assignments like discuss the symbolism or compare and contrast. I had no interest in any of that, in fact I thought it was spoiling, you know it was really ruining the stuff that I was enjoying. I wanted no part of that whatsoever. But for some reason on the very last assignment, the last writing assignment of the senior year English class I wrote a paper on The Great Gatsby and I got an A+ on it, and you know I’d never gotten anything like that before.
Do you remember…?
No. I carried it around for a while though. But I remember having a conversation with the teacher and she was saying—‘cause I guess I was going to try to do something else, like you know go into science or math if I went to college—she said: No, don’t do that. Go into reading and writing and English; go that way. So she was trying to encourage me there.
Did that have an affect on you?
Well you know for fifteen minutes. It was kind of interesting to get this recognition, but on the other hand I guess I didn’t identify too much with this. I mean I worked at the little paper, and I read the book and I tried to understand—I even forgot the angle—but no, after a couple months it didn’t make any difference, you know, because I was out of that environment completely.
When your brother Bob arranged for you to go to school, what was your intention, what area of study did you want to pursue?
I had no idea. I think it was partly a scam, you know, just to see if, to keep on going along with the program that I’d known and was able to manipulate and play with so well, with as little cost to me personally and effort as I could manage. You know I didn’t really want to do anything; certainly didn’t want to work, but when I found out that I had to, I was game, you know. I didn’t want to let him down at that point, I just thought I had misunderstood something very fundamental about this whole arrangement, but I figured it was my fault, you know, that I wasn’t paying attention. So I had this suit, somehow I had this suit left over from graduation. I don’t know how I had that suit. They must have bought it for me. It was pretty cool: it was a sharkskin black iridescent suit, you know, narrow stingy little lapels, and I had these cool boots too; those I bought myself; I remember those. They were lovely. They were like ah… real pointed toes. So I got one of my brother's ties, and every day—more or less—I would get up in Van Nuys, scan the want ads and go hit the road. And you know I really looked for stuff, part time stuff: plastics extrusion, factory work, whatever.
And you were all dressed up, going out there.
All dressed up, going out there, walking all over the place; that’s what I remember, although sometimes I would stay home and watch cartoons or something like that, then they’d come home from their jobs and I’d say: Well, couldn’t find anything today. And they were nice, I mean jeez they fed me and housed me and bought me clothes and talked to me. And we went to see The New Christy Minstrels, when Barry* what’s his name was still with them, Barry, you know that ‘Eve of Destruction’ guy.
Oh, was he with The New Christy Minstrels?
Yeah, you remember ‘Greenback Dollar’? That’s Barry before he flipped out, Barry ‘Eve of Destruction’. And we went to the drive-in or something like that, but it just wasn’t working out, you know, there might have been some arguments, there might have been some tension, bad words might have been said back and forth; I don’t know.
So it was more than just a sense that you had of misunderstanding.
Yeah, I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t doing enough or I wasn’t taking it seriously [laughs]… oy! And I wasn’t getting anywhere. I don’t know if I was going into these places with the attitude [laughs], you know, like: You know you wouldn’t have any jobs, would ya? You wouldn’t have anything. So I don’t know, but I went to a lot of places, I remember that. But there must have been some kind of tension or something ‘cause I remember I, you know I told you I was going around putting calluses on my hands all the time, so I was punching holes in his garage wall and—little holes with just the tips of the three fingers. One time I was so mad I tightened up and just gave it everything I had and twisted around: I put a hole right through the door, his garage door, all the way through. Say Mike, do you know what happened? No sir, I don’t know what happened out there. I saw that too; I saw that myself; what was that? I thought.
So you would get just really angry about these…?
I guess so.
And he was kind of mad or annoyed.
It was the indignity, yeah, right, and here I was under somebody else’s thumb again, so I don’t know what happened or how it happened, plus I didn’t like the atmosphere of Van Nuys, it was the hot valley, dry: I wanted to get back to the beach, walk up and down the beach with the melody and sunshine, everything so groovy. So I don’t know how it happened but I wound up living back in Hermosa Beach with Gene in this tiny little apartment that he had on the beach; and he was hurting for dough, I mean he was just able to scrape by, you know, he had the big new car and maybe he was paying the alimony, I don’t know, but he wasn’t helping me, he wasn’t giving me any money and I wasn’t going to ask him for any. Maybe if I asked him for some he would give me some, but I knew there would be some little thing with it, some little object lesson or little quid pro quo of some kind, I don’t know, so…. But he had this huge jar of pennies and I would filch pennies from that jar every now and then. It was huge and it was big and it was full, and by the time I’d left it… I didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything but we both knew what was going on. So I was living on these pennies, and I had a friend whose mother would every now and then whip up jars of split pea soup and he would come over and give me some split pea soup.
So it was a pretty lean time?
Pretty lean. I was walking around, walking endlessly. You know if The Insomniac had been there I’d have gone there and hung out, but it was gone by then, so I was just walking around the beach endlessly. Then I started looking for work for real.
So it finally got to you?
It was the only way out. By then I had come around to… I would start imagining how it would be and that was a very powerful incentive: I’d be on my own. So I went right out and got a job as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan Beach called Nachitos, and within a very short time after that, found a place, found a place, it was like a little house in back of another house, just a five or ten-minute walk away, and then a very short time after that the guy who was the cook, the main cook at Nachitos, left, he just disappeared, he just didn’t come in. And by then I had observed, it wasn’t real cooking, it was steam table stuff, you know. They would come in real early in the morning, the people who owned the place, and cook up the beans and get everything ready, so I started doing a little of that prep work: shredding the cheese and cutting the onions and cutting the garlic and getting all the salad dressing ready, and then they started me rolling up the enchiladas, putting those in pans, fixing the tacos, putting the toothpicks in them, then I could help the cook. But in a very short time: I was the cook, I was the head cook—here I had just turned seventeen three months ago—and I was the head cook at Nachitos, it wasn’t really cooking, but I was doing it.
So all this happened pretty fast.
Pretty darn fast.
The thing with Bob blew out in a couple of months?
It was a summer. That summer was gone because I realized: I’m not going to college in September [laughs]. Nobody’s talked to me about that recently, they just want me to get a job.
So that was all kind of dropped, that whole…?
Yeah. They realized, everybody realized it wasn’t gonna work out. And maybe one of the reasons I got out of that was because Gene talked to Bob and said, you know, and they understood… It wasn’t my decision to do any… I didn’t take any action; I just found myself there, so maybe they cooked that up, I just don’t remember. But then it didn’t make any difference because I was just exactly where I wanted to be, at last, you know nobody was in control of me; I didn’t have to please anyone, except at work where they’re paying you [laughs], but I enjoyed that too; that was just a trip because it was a total power control, speed trip thing, you know, that kind of work: you were totally in control; there were three waitresses and you go in and make sure everything’s ready and just work your ass off for six or seven hours straight, getting the orders in, pushing the food out.
This interests me because your thing about driving, it always seemed like it’s all the things you have to do and everything. Now this must have been really high pressure…
It was, it was pretty high pressure.
…and especially since you had come up really fast into this position where you really had to be on top of it, ‘cause if you’re the head chef then everything’s going along really fast, the orders are coming down and you’re really on the spot, so it sounds like…
You’ve gotta deal with all the waitresses and their complaints and problems and peculiarities, and the owners, wow, what a trip they were. Yeah, two guys: one of them was, he was an Anglo guy, probably was in his fifties then, immensely fat, and you know he had sort of a cultured way of speaking—what the hell was that guy’s name? I don’t know—but he sort of was the power, he had the money, he started the restaurant I think, and his sister was, she was the one who came in real early and started cooking everything and putting all the food together, she had some assistants too. And the other guy, Luis, he was the Mexican of the bunch, and he supplied the authenticity, and he used to run the kitchen and the steam table, all that stuff; he was amazing! I had these tongs, they became my other second hand because this stuff, it’s either coming off the grill, not the grill but the—I don’t know what you call that thing: it’s a big giant hot sheet, that’s where things are resting and bubbling, and then there’s a broiler up above with flames shooting down—you cook the things on the oven and then sprinkle some cheese on it and throw it in this broiler for a little bit, the cheese melts and you take ‘em out, and there’s this huge tub of hot grease over here that the tacos go in, and…
Sounds kind of dangerous.
That’s why you had to have these tongs. He never used tongs. He could take these plates out of this broiler and put them on the thing and he would take the tacos out of the grease [laughs], you know…
Did he have big calluses or what? How’d he do it?
He had great big old hands.
Sounds like he was studying karate also.
He probably just worked hard all his life, you know, did all that stuff. And these guys were gay but I didn’t really realize, it took me a while to realize it ‘cause I didn’t know what that was all about anyway. Every now and then I’d—John, that was the guy’s name, the older white guy; he had white hair, mostly bald on the top—I’d come by the bar and he’d be reading this book of, I don’t know what it was, The Manly Physique or something like that, and he’d be talking to Luis [vaguely WC Fields voice]: ‘The male body is so much more beautiful’ or something like that.
So it took you a little while but then you finally got it? Were they lovers?
I guess so, and they’d been together for a long time I imagine, but there was nothing at all overt in this. You just had to put two and two together. But the other thing about that was the jukebox, they had a jukebox that was just plugged with crazy Mexican music. I never heard any of that stuff before: they had mariachi music and… on all the time because they had a pretty healthy Latino clientele too, mostly they would stay at the bar and just eat chips and hot sauce and stuff, and everybody else, the families would go in the back and have the stuff that was on the menu. The bar was raucous, and the jukebox would be going all the time. So that was a real treat, plus you know then I started getting involved in other decisions: what kinds of things to feature on the menu that day, and should we hire this guy? do you need an assistant? that sort of stuff.
So your sense of responsibility, sounds like, must have really come into play.
Yeah, I guess so although I wasn’t thinking it through really I was just taking it wherever it went, doing whatever I thought I should do; I wasn’t able to evolve any theories about it or think much about it other than: that’s my job, okay, do this; but I realized I was having fun and that I was good, realized I was good at it, and they said I was good: I’d get raises. Pretty soon I had money! I had a place to live; I had a job; I had money in my pocket. And this place was great. I just found it by accident. This guy—I guess he was gay too; I fell in amongst this nexus of Manhattan Beach gay life, or maybe he was just shy [laughs] in Lily Tomlin’s: Remember when there were no gay people, everyone was just shy?—he was a bachelor and he lived in the front part of the house, worked for TRW I guess, and…
TRW, is that…?
It’s right there in Manhattan Beach.
I’ve forgotten though, it’s real estate?
It’s aerospace, yeah, aerospace kind of stuff, but then they got involved in some other… they’re one of the big credit rating companies. Maybe they just changed their name or something too, I don’t know. But yeah he was some sort of scientist, engineer guy. He was an interesting, real interesting guy. He never put the moves on me, in fact he was always on my case for making noise, even though there was nobody else back there but me. I had my stereo—I could have a stereo. I bought a big stereo and a reel-to-reel tape deck, and buying records, yeah, buying everything that was coming out, buying books, subscribing to magazines [laughter]. I guess a dollar went a long way in those days.
It sounds like you were living better than your brother Gene.
Gene, I don’t know exactly what he was doing at that time. He seemed to spend a lot of time on the road. Every now and then he’d come into town and see me at Nachitos. He had a key to my place. I gave him a key to my place. He could go there. I have the feeling there may have been trysts there. He may have had…
You mean you’d come in and see evidence?
No, not evidence. The only time I came in and saw evidence… no, he didn’t like the way I lived actually. I was having a little art environment, you know, I had trash everywhere and sometimes I cleaned it up and sometimes I didn’t, and sometimes I just liked to let everything go, you know: pizza boxes every place, unwashed dishes for weeks. And I came home one day and almost everything in the apartment—I had this great big white rug; this was a furnished apartment; it had a kitchen, bathroom, bed and everything like that; it was big; it was a house, and the three things it came with was a bar, a wet-bar area and bar stools, and this big white rug and one of those butterfly chairs—everything was tied up in this big white rug. He’d taken all my junk, all my trash, tied it all in this big white rug and tied it all up and put a note on it that said something like: So this is the way you want to live? or something like that, you know, just give me a little twist.
So he still felt, even though you were working, making a lot of money, that you were still the little brother…?
Yeah, I still wasn’t utilizing my potential, and I wasn’t going to… He didn’t like it I was[laughs], he didn’t like it that I was, I mean he started me talkin’ the jive talk. I used to call everybody Jack [laughter]. Hey Jack! What’s happenin’ Jack? He started me listening to Lord Buckley and all that sort of stuff and that was my lingo at that time. So he didn’t like that because he thought that would be [confidentially]: You know when you go to a job interview, don’t talk like that.
So he thought you wouldn’t know the appropriate times to talk that way.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe he’s starting to feel bad that he put me on this path, I don’t know.
Was he right? Did you have trouble…?
No. I had a job. I had a job.
And you didn’t talk to the boss like: Hey Jack!
No, I didn’t talk to them like that and I didn’t talk to the waitresses like that. They were all, they weren’t that good in English, so you know I was speaking kitchen Spanish and simple English to them. Didn’t have that much to say anyway, but to some of the other kids that we hired, yeah, I called them Jack, and one of them got mad and said: Don’t call me Jack, my name’s Bill or whatever it was. So I said: Okay, all right. But I was starting to grow my hair long too, and my brother was slightly embarrassed by that I think, because it would attract attention. This was what… sixty-six… well okay, this was a little later.
Was it before the Beatles came along?
No, it wasn’t before, this was like a year or so later. But we’re in ’63, right before… So there I am doing all this stuff and then November the 22nd 1963, nothing really changed but that was a day to remember. And I don’t know if the restaurant closed but there was no business; there was no business that day; nobody came to the restaurant. Yeah, I think we stayed there and nobody came. Everybody was just sad everywhere and I didn’t know what to make of it.
It hit everybody pretty hard, the assassination, but would you say that maybe—because there was a big controversy about electing a Catholic president in the first place—I wonder if say the Mexican’s would have been… of course I don’t know, maybe they didn’t feel invested in the whole thing anyway, but you know, a Catholic president, maybe it hit Catholics harder than other people. I don’t know.
It may have, I just don’t know. One of my friends at that time was--I’d go over to his house from time to time--Richard Solario, and his parents had pictures of Kennedy up on the wall.
‘Cause usually they had the Pope and they had Kennedy.
The New York Times was publishing a west coast edition at the time so I bought a copy of that and I still have that to this day.
So that was the beginning of your cataloging?
Yeah, one of these days I’m gonna catalog this [laughter]. So that fits into the timeline, there’s a peg point right there. But it didn’t create any other trauma that I remember, it was just everyone was really sad for a couple days; then everything went on, you know, everything went on as normal. I had that job for the next… almost two years, so for the next two years I was just exactly where I wanted to be. I was completely alone, you know, completely out of anyone’s control but my own, and I did whatever I wanted to do, I mean that was ideal, and I didn’t have to lie to anybody or hide anything or pretend—except at work, pretend to be good. But some of the time at work I was on desoxin gradumets, which is a kind of, well it’s like kind of a pre-Ritalin sort of a speed thing.
Say it again.
Desoxin gradumets [laughs], that’s what it was, that’s what that was; and that was very interesting because it was a fast job anyway but…
You made it even faster.
Paradoxically it made it even faster but somehow I was able to do it slower, so... [laughter] It was like you were able to occupy those little interstices, those little spaces between the moments, and so you could actually exist at a—although you were moving at a higher rate you were actually existing at a lower rate of metabolism or something like that. It was very strange. I still don’t understand it. But then the normal just frantic high-paced work of keeping all this stuff together it became—[tape ends]
[End Tape 8, Side B]
So, as you were saying, even though it was a surf high school…
… yeah, a Southern California surfing high school, pretty laid back…
… it was still…
… in some areas I think, possibly depending on the teachers or the department, the English department or something like that, because you know when I first started doing it they expected that everybody would do this kind of work and they were doing it and I wasn’t able to because I didn’t know how to think like that.
So would you say your education up to that point had been more rote?
No, I think it was all there, it was all there, I think I just wasn’t paying any attention to it [laughs]. I wasn’t keyed in to that way of dealing with the world of information. I had no thought about the future, about preparation for anything else. I mean I liked certain things; I liked mathematics. I had taken all the mathematics, even though I didn’t do well in them for grades and tests because I didn’t like tests, you know and sometimes I wasn’t there in the classes, but I liked mathematics, in fact I took all the mathematics that they offered in the high school and was meeting after school with a math teacher and some other kids doing calculus, you know he was just volunteering to do that.
Really, and you would stay after?
Yeah, until you know I didn’t, until after a while I didn’t. But I tried, it was volunteer, because I was interested in that stuff for some reason. In the English classed you know I could read all that stuff, in fact I was reading way beyond, I was reading all kinds of stuff. I was reading, because of all the philosophical and Asian stuff I had discovered right over my little wall in my little garage, I was starting to read Being and Nothingness and Kierkegaard and all sorts—not that it, I mean I knew what the words meant and I could put the sentences together and some of the things I retained, so I was just reading them because somebody said: This would be interesting to read.
So that was sort of branching off from all the Eastern religious material that you were reading?
Yeah, ‘cause all this stuff was mentioned in various aspects and also some of the magazines that I was reading then. I read the Saturday Review; Saturday Review you know said read John Cheever, so I’d go read all John Cheever’s novels; read John Updike: read ‘em all. Try this; try that. Go back and read Thomas Wolfe over again, stuff that I’d read earlier in high school, so I’d read them, you know I’d just read everything. Where is it now?
That was all out in the garage?
No, that wasn’t, that was just the spark. They weren’t out there, I had to go get them somewhere, you know like the library or…
When you had your own space out in the garage.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah, I spent a lot of time reading out there when I wasn’t going to gym [laughter]. So that F in gym translated into something else. But I wasn’t ready to deal with any of these… I just thought they were stupid, these assignments like discuss the symbolism or compare and contrast. I had no interest in any of that, in fact I thought it was spoiling, you know it was really ruining the stuff that I was enjoying. I wanted no part of that whatsoever. But for some reason on the very last assignment, the last writing assignment of the senior year English class I wrote a paper on The Great Gatsby and I got an A+ on it, and you know I’d never gotten anything like that before.
Do you remember…?
No. I carried it around for a while though. But I remember having a conversation with the teacher and she was saying—‘cause I guess I was going to try to do something else, like you know go into science or math if I went to college—she said: No, don’t do that. Go into reading and writing and English; go that way. So she was trying to encourage me there.
Did that have an affect on you?
Well you know for fifteen minutes. It was kind of interesting to get this recognition, but on the other hand I guess I didn’t identify too much with this. I mean I worked at the little paper, and I read the book and I tried to understand—I even forgot the angle—but no, after a couple months it didn’t make any difference, you know, because I was out of that environment completely.
When your brother Bob arranged for you to go to school, what was your intention, what area of study did you want to pursue?
I had no idea. I think it was partly a scam, you know, just to see if, to keep on going along with the program that I’d known and was able to manipulate and play with so well, with as little cost to me personally and effort as I could manage. You know I didn’t really want to do anything; certainly didn’t want to work, but when I found out that I had to, I was game, you know. I didn’t want to let him down at that point, I just thought I had misunderstood something very fundamental about this whole arrangement, but I figured it was my fault, you know, that I wasn’t paying attention. So I had this suit, somehow I had this suit left over from graduation. I don’t know how I had that suit. They must have bought it for me. It was pretty cool: it was a sharkskin black iridescent suit, you know, narrow stingy little lapels, and I had these cool boots too; those I bought myself; I remember those. They were lovely. They were like ah… real pointed toes. So I got one of my brother's ties, and every day—more or less—I would get up in Van Nuys, scan the want ads and go hit the road. And you know I really looked for stuff, part time stuff: plastics extrusion, factory work, whatever.
And you were all dressed up, going out there.
All dressed up, going out there, walking all over the place; that’s what I remember, although sometimes I would stay home and watch cartoons or something like that, then they’d come home from their jobs and I’d say: Well, couldn’t find anything today. And they were nice, I mean jeez they fed me and housed me and bought me clothes and talked to me. And we went to see The New Christy Minstrels, when Barry* what’s his name was still with them, Barry, you know that ‘Eve of Destruction’ guy.
Oh, was he with The New Christy Minstrels?
Yeah, you remember ‘Greenback Dollar’? That’s Barry before he flipped out, Barry ‘Eve of Destruction’. And we went to the drive-in or something like that, but it just wasn’t working out, you know, there might have been some arguments, there might have been some tension, bad words might have been said back and forth; I don’t know.
So it was more than just a sense that you had of misunderstanding.
Yeah, I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t doing enough or I wasn’t taking it seriously [laughs]… oy! And I wasn’t getting anywhere. I don’t know if I was going into these places with the attitude [laughs], you know, like: You know you wouldn’t have any jobs, would ya? You wouldn’t have anything. So I don’t know, but I went to a lot of places, I remember that. But there must have been some kind of tension or something ‘cause I remember I, you know I told you I was going around putting calluses on my hands all the time, so I was punching holes in his garage wall and—little holes with just the tips of the three fingers. One time I was so mad I tightened up and just gave it everything I had and twisted around: I put a hole right through the door, his garage door, all the way through. Say Mike, do you know what happened? No sir, I don’t know what happened out there. I saw that too; I saw that myself; what was that? I thought.
So you would get just really angry about these…?
I guess so.
And he was kind of mad or annoyed.
It was the indignity, yeah, right, and here I was under somebody else’s thumb again, so I don’t know what happened or how it happened, plus I didn’t like the atmosphere of Van Nuys, it was the hot valley, dry: I wanted to get back to the beach, walk up and down the beach with the melody and sunshine, everything so groovy. So I don’t know how it happened but I wound up living back in Hermosa Beach with Gene in this tiny little apartment that he had on the beach; and he was hurting for dough, I mean he was just able to scrape by, you know, he had the big new car and maybe he was paying the alimony, I don’t know, but he wasn’t helping me, he wasn’t giving me any money and I wasn’t going to ask him for any. Maybe if I asked him for some he would give me some, but I knew there would be some little thing with it, some little object lesson or little quid pro quo of some kind, I don’t know, so…. But he had this huge jar of pennies and I would filch pennies from that jar every now and then. It was huge and it was big and it was full, and by the time I’d left it… I didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything but we both knew what was going on. So I was living on these pennies, and I had a friend whose mother would every now and then whip up jars of split pea soup and he would come over and give me some split pea soup.
So it was a pretty lean time?
Pretty lean. I was walking around, walking endlessly. You know if The Insomniac had been there I’d have gone there and hung out, but it was gone by then, so I was just walking around the beach endlessly. Then I started looking for work for real.
So it finally got to you?
It was the only way out. By then I had come around to… I would start imagining how it would be and that was a very powerful incentive: I’d be on my own. So I went right out and got a job as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan Beach called Nachitos, and within a very short time after that, found a place, found a place, it was like a little house in back of another house, just a five or ten-minute walk away, and then a very short time after that the guy who was the cook, the main cook at Nachitos, left, he just disappeared, he just didn’t come in. And by then I had observed, it wasn’t real cooking, it was steam table stuff, you know. They would come in real early in the morning, the people who owned the place, and cook up the beans and get everything ready, so I started doing a little of that prep work: shredding the cheese and cutting the onions and cutting the garlic and getting all the salad dressing ready, and then they started me rolling up the enchiladas, putting those in pans, fixing the tacos, putting the toothpicks in them, then I could help the cook. But in a very short time: I was the cook, I was the head cook—here I had just turned seventeen three months ago—and I was the head cook at Nachitos, it wasn’t really cooking, but I was doing it.
So all this happened pretty fast.
Pretty darn fast.
The thing with Bob blew out in a couple of months?
It was a summer. That summer was gone because I realized: I’m not going to college in September [laughs]. Nobody’s talked to me about that recently, they just want me to get a job.
So that was all kind of dropped, that whole…?
Yeah. They realized, everybody realized it wasn’t gonna work out. And maybe one of the reasons I got out of that was because Gene talked to Bob and said, you know, and they understood… It wasn’t my decision to do any… I didn’t take any action; I just found myself there, so maybe they cooked that up, I just don’t remember. But then it didn’t make any difference because I was just exactly where I wanted to be, at last, you know nobody was in control of me; I didn’t have to please anyone, except at work where they’re paying you [laughs], but I enjoyed that too; that was just a trip because it was a total power control, speed trip thing, you know, that kind of work: you were totally in control; there were three waitresses and you go in and make sure everything’s ready and just work your ass off for six or seven hours straight, getting the orders in, pushing the food out.
This interests me because your thing about driving, it always seemed like it’s all the things you have to do and everything. Now this must have been really high pressure…
It was, it was pretty high pressure.
…and especially since you had come up really fast into this position where you really had to be on top of it, ‘cause if you’re the head chef then everything’s going along really fast, the orders are coming down and you’re really on the spot, so it sounds like…
You’ve gotta deal with all the waitresses and their complaints and problems and peculiarities, and the owners, wow, what a trip they were. Yeah, two guys: one of them was, he was an Anglo guy, probably was in his fifties then, immensely fat, and you know he had sort of a cultured way of speaking—what the hell was that guy’s name? I don’t know—but he sort of was the power, he had the money, he started the restaurant I think, and his sister was, she was the one who came in real early and started cooking everything and putting all the food together, she had some assistants too. And the other guy, Luis, he was the Mexican of the bunch, and he supplied the authenticity, and he used to run the kitchen and the steam table, all that stuff; he was amazing! I had these tongs, they became my other second hand because this stuff, it’s either coming off the grill, not the grill but the—I don’t know what you call that thing: it’s a big giant hot sheet, that’s where things are resting and bubbling, and then there’s a broiler up above with flames shooting down—you cook the things on the oven and then sprinkle some cheese on it and throw it in this broiler for a little bit, the cheese melts and you take ‘em out, and there’s this huge tub of hot grease over here that the tacos go in, and…
Sounds kind of dangerous.
That’s why you had to have these tongs. He never used tongs. He could take these plates out of this broiler and put them on the thing and he would take the tacos out of the grease [laughs], you know…
Did he have big calluses or what? How’d he do it?
He had great big old hands.
Sounds like he was studying karate also.
He probably just worked hard all his life, you know, did all that stuff. And these guys were gay but I didn’t really realize, it took me a while to realize it ‘cause I didn’t know what that was all about anyway. Every now and then I’d—John, that was the guy’s name, the older white guy; he had white hair, mostly bald on the top—I’d come by the bar and he’d be reading this book of, I don’t know what it was, The Manly Physique or something like that, and he’d be talking to Luis [vaguely WC Fields voice]: ‘The male body is so much more beautiful’ or something like that.
So it took you a little while but then you finally got it? Were they lovers?
I guess so, and they’d been together for a long time I imagine, but there was nothing at all overt in this. You just had to put two and two together. But the other thing about that was the jukebox, they had a jukebox that was just plugged with crazy Mexican music. I never heard any of that stuff before: they had mariachi music and… on all the time because they had a pretty healthy Latino clientele too, mostly they would stay at the bar and just eat chips and hot sauce and stuff, and everybody else, the families would go in the back and have the stuff that was on the menu. The bar was raucous, and the jukebox would be going all the time. So that was a real treat, plus you know then I started getting involved in other decisions: what kinds of things to feature on the menu that day, and should we hire this guy? do you need an assistant? that sort of stuff.
So your sense of responsibility, sounds like, must have really come into play.
Yeah, I guess so although I wasn’t thinking it through really I was just taking it wherever it went, doing whatever I thought I should do; I wasn’t able to evolve any theories about it or think much about it other than: that’s my job, okay, do this; but I realized I was having fun and that I was good, realized I was good at it, and they said I was good: I’d get raises. Pretty soon I had money! I had a place to live; I had a job; I had money in my pocket. And this place was great. I just found it by accident. This guy—I guess he was gay too; I fell in amongst this nexus of Manhattan Beach gay life, or maybe he was just shy [laughs] in Lily Tomlin’s: Remember when there were no gay people, everyone was just shy?—he was a bachelor and he lived in the front part of the house, worked for TRW I guess, and…
TRW, is that…?
It’s right there in Manhattan Beach.
I’ve forgotten though, it’s real estate?
It’s aerospace, yeah, aerospace kind of stuff, but then they got involved in some other… they’re one of the big credit rating companies. Maybe they just changed their name or something too, I don’t know. But yeah he was some sort of scientist, engineer guy. He was an interesting, real interesting guy. He never put the moves on me, in fact he was always on my case for making noise, even though there was nobody else back there but me. I had my stereo—I could have a stereo. I bought a big stereo and a reel-to-reel tape deck, and buying records, yeah, buying everything that was coming out, buying books, subscribing to magazines [laughter]. I guess a dollar went a long way in those days.
It sounds like you were living better than your brother Gene.
Gene, I don’t know exactly what he was doing at that time. He seemed to spend a lot of time on the road. Every now and then he’d come into town and see me at Nachitos. He had a key to my place. I gave him a key to my place. He could go there. I have the feeling there may have been trysts there. He may have had…
You mean you’d come in and see evidence?
No, not evidence. The only time I came in and saw evidence… no, he didn’t like the way I lived actually. I was having a little art environment, you know, I had trash everywhere and sometimes I cleaned it up and sometimes I didn’t, and sometimes I just liked to let everything go, you know: pizza boxes every place, unwashed dishes for weeks. And I came home one day and almost everything in the apartment—I had this great big white rug; this was a furnished apartment; it had a kitchen, bathroom, bed and everything like that; it was big; it was a house, and the three things it came with was a bar, a wet-bar area and bar stools, and this big white rug and one of those butterfly chairs—everything was tied up in this big white rug. He’d taken all my junk, all my trash, tied it all in this big white rug and tied it all up and put a note on it that said something like: So this is the way you want to live? or something like that, you know, just give me a little twist.
So he still felt, even though you were working, making a lot of money, that you were still the little brother…?
Yeah, I still wasn’t utilizing my potential, and I wasn’t going to… He didn’t like it I was[laughs], he didn’t like it that I was, I mean he started me talkin’ the jive talk. I used to call everybody Jack [laughter]. Hey Jack! What’s happenin’ Jack? He started me listening to Lord Buckley and all that sort of stuff and that was my lingo at that time. So he didn’t like that because he thought that would be [confidentially]: You know when you go to a job interview, don’t talk like that.
So he thought you wouldn’t know the appropriate times to talk that way.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe he’s starting to feel bad that he put me on this path, I don’t know.
Was he right? Did you have trouble…?
No. I had a job. I had a job.
And you didn’t talk to the boss like: Hey Jack!
No, I didn’t talk to them like that and I didn’t talk to the waitresses like that. They were all, they weren’t that good in English, so you know I was speaking kitchen Spanish and simple English to them. Didn’t have that much to say anyway, but to some of the other kids that we hired, yeah, I called them Jack, and one of them got mad and said: Don’t call me Jack, my name’s Bill or whatever it was. So I said: Okay, all right. But I was starting to grow my hair long too, and my brother was slightly embarrassed by that I think, because it would attract attention. This was what… sixty-six… well okay, this was a little later.
Was it before the Beatles came along?
No, it wasn’t before, this was like a year or so later. But we’re in ’63, right before… So there I am doing all this stuff and then November the 22nd 1963, nothing really changed but that was a day to remember. And I don’t know if the restaurant closed but there was no business; there was no business that day; nobody came to the restaurant. Yeah, I think we stayed there and nobody came. Everybody was just sad everywhere and I didn’t know what to make of it.
It hit everybody pretty hard, the assassination, but would you say that maybe—because there was a big controversy about electing a Catholic president in the first place—I wonder if say the Mexican’s would have been… of course I don’t know, maybe they didn’t feel invested in the whole thing anyway, but you know, a Catholic president, maybe it hit Catholics harder than other people. I don’t know.
It may have, I just don’t know. One of my friends at that time was--I’d go over to his house from time to time--Richard Solario, and his parents had pictures of Kennedy up on the wall.
‘Cause usually they had the Pope and they had Kennedy.
The New York Times was publishing a west coast edition at the time so I bought a copy of that and I still have that to this day.
So that was the beginning of your cataloging?
Yeah, one of these days I’m gonna catalog this [laughter]. So that fits into the timeline, there’s a peg point right there. But it didn’t create any other trauma that I remember, it was just everyone was really sad for a couple days; then everything went on, you know, everything went on as normal. I had that job for the next… almost two years, so for the next two years I was just exactly where I wanted to be. I was completely alone, you know, completely out of anyone’s control but my own, and I did whatever I wanted to do, I mean that was ideal, and I didn’t have to lie to anybody or hide anything or pretend—except at work, pretend to be good. But some of the time at work I was on desoxin gradumets, which is a kind of, well it’s like kind of a pre-Ritalin sort of a speed thing.
Say it again.
Desoxin gradumets [laughs], that’s what it was, that’s what that was; and that was very interesting because it was a fast job anyway but…
You made it even faster.
Paradoxically it made it even faster but somehow I was able to do it slower, so... [laughter] It was like you were able to occupy those little interstices, those little spaces between the moments, and so you could actually exist at a—although you were moving at a higher rate you were actually existing at a lower rate of metabolism or something like that. It was very strange. I still don’t understand it. But then the normal just frantic high-paced work of keeping all this stuff together it became—[tape ends]
[End Tape 8, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:27 PM
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