Roads, Mills, Laps

I’ve just begun reading Jack London’s semi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden. It’s about a young, aspiring writer who faces constant rejection and refuses to give up. I like it. It strikes a chord, though I’m hardly an Eden-esque character; I’m not in my 20s and I’m not stuck in the 20th Century; I’m certainly not caught between a well-to-do woman I adore and a passionate woman who adores me. No. Rounding up, I’m 40 and pretty much think I’m all set with my second wife.

But this essay isn’t about Mr. Eden; it’s about 9th Street. Mr. London is the connection. A few years ago, I was alone, living in some dead-end condominium in the worst parts of Connecticut. I could hear my neighbors watching NASCAR races outside—out sitting in the middle of the street with their nicotine-stained hands wrapped around cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I missed Benicia and decided (after randomly searching my bookcase) to read what Jack London wrote about our town.

Ironically, the summer before, I was in the basement of the Benicia Public Library at the used book sale. My mother and father frequented those sales and brought me along. Over half my present library has been supplied (on the cheap) by those sales. It’s a shame for the public that the library discards so many old and decent books. Well at least they’re safe with me (and my parents).

Anyway, at that particular sale, I picked up a collection of London’s works. In it was Tales of the Fish Patrol—a story about London’s travails policing the Carquinez Straits for illegal salmon poachers. Reading it reminded me of 9th Street. I spent a great deal of time down there. My friends and I rode our bikes from Southampton—quite a trek. At the time, I owned a generic-brand BMX bike. On its padded frame, it bore the enigmatic name SCHUCKS. Back then, kids’ BMX bikes were familial status symbols—revealing much about parental wealth. Rich kids rode Redlines and the Diamondbacks; poor kids rode Huffys; I was from a six-child family, so I rode a SCHUCKS.

I had a blue backpack with lots of zippers. In it, I stuffed my plastic tackle box. I had to tilt it vertically to fit; this upset any semblance of organization. By the time I had descended the Southampton hills and arrived at 9th Street, hooks and lures had burst forth from my tackle box. Spinners had wrapped themselves around spools of fishing line.

I never really caught anything at 9th Street. At the time, I didn’t know how to fish—didn’t know what lure to use; didn’t know how to cast; didn’t know how to jig; didn’t know what bait to buy. I wasted my allowance at Raley’s buying the biggest, flashiest lures—the kind reserved for tarpon off the coast of Cabo San Lucas. I remember on one occasion that an unfortunate mud-sucking bullhead accidentally ran into my lure. I thought I had a record-sized sturgeon on my line and set the gargantuan hook like Captain Ahab —nearly eviscerating that dirty, palm-sized fish. By the time it surfaced in front of the pier, it was belly up. I used pieces of it for the next two hours to bait my hook—acting under the idiotic, survivalist assumption that striped bass like to feast on sun-baked sections of bottom-feeders.

The ride home from 9th Street was the worst. My hands smelled like tidal estuarial bait. I was sunburned and tired. Except for that one sick fish, I never caught anything down there but driftwood (dating back to Mr. London) and snags. Worst: I had to end my trip pushing my SCHUCKS-brand bike up the 20% grade that comprises Chelsea Hills.

That next week, I’d mow the lawn with my dad’s jerry-rigged lawnmower (started manually with speaker wire wrapped around my hands). I’d get my allowance and then get that dopey dream again, picturing those elusive, trophy-sized stripers in my hands. I imagined calling my parents using my emergency dime that was taped to my generic-brand Vans shoes—telling them to put the seats down on our silver Suburban to make room for my big catch.

That never happened.

The 9th Street pier only gives me memories of lost luck. But fishing down there taught me not to wallow in self-pity–to persevere and to keep throwing my proverbial line out into the water: exactly the same lesson Jack London sought to teach when he wrote Martin Eden.

Before I paste the nostalgic crap in, I should pause to let you know that I’m reading this book.

If you have a second to think about it (or remember or read about what it’s about), you’ll understand why.

Now, on to more pressing things: My bullshit memories–hardly worthy of publication.

The Hill

Finding my boyhood home on Google maps isn’t as easy at is reads. As I sit here looking at my pixilated screen from the vantage point of a circa.1989 NAVSTAR satellite, I can definitely pinpoint Southampton—a big swath of development-esque houses with their rectangle lawns and their cedar fences. But I have to do a little work to find my home. I have to start with that little green patch: the Southampton Park. Then I have to triangulate, using the sacred object of this essay: The Hill.

The Hill was where I played. It’s where I dreamed and imagined; it’s where I fought, laughed, cavorted, and cried. I fired my Crossman 760 Pumpmaster bb gun at inanimate objects placed on it; I dug my first foxhole in it. (It was a Somme-like trench, all muddy and sloppy, but it would undoubtedly stand up against a decent German shelling; I’m sure of that.) I broke my right wrist and nearly fractured my skull for the second time while zooming down The Hill—slamming into the fence at about 50 mph. (To blame: my penchant for installing things, such as Raley’s-brand bicycle handbrakes, without consulting the 1-fontsize directions.)

On The Hill I tasted anise for the first time—walking around with stalks of it wedged into my mouth like leafs of chewing tobacco, swaggerin’ and cussin’ like a 20th Century Tom Sawyer. I chased after black-tailed jackrabbits on it and stared up at the white-tailed clouds and the soaring red-tailed hawks while laying on it with my small head cradled in my dirty hands.

If you don’t know which of Benicia’s many prominences The Hill is, you only need for me to describe its summit to you–for Benicia only has one hill like The Hill: It’s domed; it’s the one that has those aging concrete cylinders. It’s got the stiff antenna and is ringed with vintage World War 1 barbed-wire fencing. I don’t know these days, but a quarter-century ago, white pickup trucks belonging to the cable company du jour used to ascend it. Mustachioed cable operators carrying metal lunch boxes and femur-sized wrenches did enigmatic work up there. (We spied on them as if they were Soviet agents; recall: those were the days of Reagan vs. the Evil Empire.)

My friends and I once built some great forts at the base of The Hill. My recent excavations of the grounds behind my house have failed, however, in uprooting any traces of their existence. Sometimes I feel like Heinrich Schliemann digging futilely for the walls of Homer’s Troy. I suspect that the clayish soil may have not helped sustain those crudely shaped plywood scraps scrawled with “KEEP OUT” or “GO AWAY!” messages. I suspect the briny moisture present in a Benicia morning’s fog may equally have not been too kind to all those 2 x 4s brimming with bent finishing nails. I theorize that all that’s long since rotted. Or perhaps these relics were carted away by Benicia’s equivalent of Troy’s Ottoman Turks: other generations of wandering neighborhood kids out to build a fort or some other less bellicose structure? If the British Empire could get away with stealing the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, I see no reason why a couple pubescent kids couldn’t help themselves to pieces of my memory.

On that same Hill, the same friends and I also built cardboard slides. Cardboard boxes didn’t last long in our homes; we scoured our garages for them (much to our parents’ chagrin around Christmastime and the moving season); we stomped them down flat with our sneakers. Then we carted them up onto The Hill and flattened out swaths of wild brown grass that grew along its steeper sections. It took time for us to groom The Hill properly. Decent, super fast slides required the ignorant patience and perseverance of Sisyphus. It was ironic, because by the time the chutes were at their fastest, the grass would uproot, surfacing clumps of that awful, clayish soil, slowing us down, causing us to retire that particular slide. But that didn’t stop us, because we had the whole Hill to carve out. It was ours—every hardscrabble inch of it.

Now, 25 years later, when I think back about those long, flat sections that we scraped out of The Hill, I fancy we were doing the city (and our parents) a service—creating free firebreaks during the worst of the dry season. The Hill never burned; our houses were never jeopardized. Was that because of us?

Some other time, I’d like to write about all the great and terrible things that we did behind The Hill—out in that once vast and undulating brown expanse that existed between the Hill and Lake Herman. But those memories will be harder to catalog, because that area has long since changed. It’s been paved and developed; cars and people; barking dogs and big boats have since replaced our free playground, our adventurous hinterland.

Only The Hill remains.

When Men Were Men and the James Lemos Pool Had a High Dive

I was home visiting my folks a couple years ago when I first noticed that it was missing. Every time I’m back in Benicia I go check on it—convincing myself time and time again that it really is forever gone from our town.

I’m usually out for a run when I do my check. I’m out taking in the sweet smell of eucalyptus as the winds whip down the Carquinez Straits and blow the fragrance into my nostrils. I’ve usually got two handfuls of anise stalks in my hands as I enjoy being back, basking in good ole’ hometown nostalgia, taking it all in. It’s only when I turn down East J Street that I am reminded that something’s gone from my town: Yes it is. It was ripped up and carted away some time ago—replaced with a carnival-looking multicolored contortion of plastic tubes.

Gone are the days when big shaggy men (tough guys who rolled in from the rough bars on lower East 5th Street) bounced up and down on it while wearing cut-off jeans and mullets—eclipsing the sun while doing so. Gone are the days when skinny little kids—water wicking off them like rain falling from the eaves of a house—mounted those ominous stairs, shivering and shaking, contemplating their mortality.

“C’mon hurry up!” I remember the wet line screaming in unison.

The kid would waiver near the top; he’d hesitate and quiver like an Aztec sacrificant, and then shake his head, walking back down reluctantly.

Gone indeed are the days of the high dive at the James Lemos Pool.

I was a lifeguard there for a few summers in the late 1980s. At 16, I was certified to rescue anyone who fell from it. I had been trained and had subsequently passed all the tough tests that were full of apocalyptic, everyone’s-dying-at-the-same-time scenarios. I knew how to strap unconscious people to a backboard and how to tie a tourniquet over the stump of a severed limb; I could dive down to the bottom of the cerulean blue pool and bring unconscious victims back up to the top, safely cradling their head and neck with my hands. I could toss them a hardened ring or reach out to them with a foamy tube in fine textbook fashion. I could even possibly resuscitate them (yuck!).

Of course, I never wanted to do any of that!

I was scared of it—mortified white underneath my brown suntan. When it was my turn to rotate to the lifeguard’s high dive chair, I watched the clock and prayed for a safe shift. I despised sitting up on that chair, wearing nothing but a pair of goofy red shorts, twirling a silver whistle around my shaking finger (and running my fingers over the lanyard’s knots like the amber beads on a Greek komboloi).

The worst times to sit and watch the high dive were late in the afternoon. By then, the little kids had stuffed themselves with ten tons of Sugar Daddies, Jugi Fruits, and processed corn dogs. And the roughs with the mullets and the cut offs had swilled enough cheap beer down somewhere in the dark pockets of East Fifth Street to make them swagger ominously towards my stand. These two disparate groups invariably met at the line to the high dive: both types were intoxicated out of their senses. It was the worst time to be a lifeguard. We really earned our minimum wage during that rotation.

Showoffs invariably appeared too. Those guys basked in their death-defying antics—doing nail-gnawing gainers and “suicide” dives as if they were members of the Flying Wallendas. They mocked us lifeguards while we were stuck in our chairs, getting us wet to the enjoyment of the sugar-high kids and the shaggy drunks that waited in a serpentine line.

I guess I should be happy that the James Lemos high dive is gone. I’m sure it violated some safety code somewhere. Some starched actuary sitting behind a computer found it and summarily sentenced it to the scrap heap (or to some third-world country that isn’t a member of the International Swimming Federation–where it’s still ok to slip and fall head first from 12 feet without summoning an army of preying lawyers).

I supposed that’s a good thing that the high dive is gone and that the James Lemos Pool is better (and safer!) for it. But what kind of wacky stories will some past Benicia lifeguard/aspiring writer be able to weave in twenty years about a multicolored circus slide?

As you can tell, I’ve been doing other things.

I just got awarded my own column in my hometown newspaper, the Benicia Herald; the column is called “Chronicles of a Benician.”

I’ll post it here after it runs for your reading pleasure.

This is my first column. I’m probably supposed to introduce it by explaining why I call it “Chronicles of a Benician.” I’m then probably supposed to start it out by writing about my first day in Benicia—how the long-since-dead old man in that long-since-closed restaurant on First Street reprimanded me for eating the last of that long-since-digested jelly donut on that foggy day back in 1981. But I won’t. I’ll start it out by fast-forwarding eight years later to 1989: October 17th around 5 p.m., specifically. On that day at that time, I was down at the Suba countertop factory on Bayshore Road. I was pushing an enormous, industrial-sized sawdust vacuum with a gaping hole in it. Roger, the factory’s spectacled factotum who reminded me of the boiler room mechanic, Lucius Brockaway, in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, had just tried to fix that pesky hole by mummifying the whole bag with a healthy amount of duct tape.

It just gave us a big scare—it made haphazard janitors like me thankful that Benicia stands on pretty solid ground. It filled me with an indelible memory that has lasted for 19 years.