Another Bell Tolls

                                    MM, CRB, JDV, Pacific Beach, California 1985

*Apologies in advance. This post is a memoriam, and as such may digress into a bit of maudlin sentiment regarding my youth. It's also going to meander a bit before I get to the point, but that cannot be avoided.*

This past visit to SD was too short. It was only for two days, and two days were just not enough time for me to visit with all the people I wanted to visit or do all the things I wanted to do.

I had dinner with my sister T and her husband and their son (my nephew J), and I spent time with my Mom, who is now smaller than ever - my Mom is well into her 80's and it seems to me that every time I see her she just gets smaller and smaller. She is a bit frail physically, but is remarkably strong in her mind and voice. It was great to sit and talk with her for awhile.

I spent time with Don Tequila and Sonny Rickles, enjoying a terrific breakfast in La Jolla and a picture-perfect morning/early afternoon on the beach. I even had a chance to go to the Ballast Point brewery again, and pick up a few more bottles of their Indra Kunindra, currently my pick for best beer on the planet.

But the one thing I did on this visit that had the most impact on me was something that I had not planned on doing this trip. I paid a visit to one of my closest, dearest friends from childhood (and early adulthood), MM.

That would be the man standing to my right in the picture above (for those who never knew me when I was thin and had hair, that's me in the middle of the picture). He and I met the summer after we had both turned four - we were born the same year, a month and two days apart. 

MM and I met when his family moved into our neighborhood. Our neighborhood, which I have written about briefly before, was filled with tract homes and a huge apartment complex that was pretty much a housing project. While it wasn't Navy housing, a large majority of the residents were either Navy families or former Navy families. 

Most of the families were two-parent households, but I was part of what was an anomaly for the times - my Mom was a single parent raising six kids, and back then there was a stigma to that. There were families in our neighborhood that actually forbade their kids to play with us (such as the Donhoffers two doors up the block), and there were families that openly mocked and insulted us for our somewhat destitute situation (we were a white welfare family in SD in the '60's/'70's - on food stamps, with regular visits from social workers, etc.)

As a kid I could never understand what we had done to incur such treatment - it wasn't like I had asked to be abandoned by my father before my second birthday and left to be a member of the poorest family in a lower middle class neighborhood.

Such is life though, and while I had to develop survival and coping mechanisms most kids, least of all white kids in SD, never had to, I made it out of the neighborhood okay. Sorta.

A big part of the reason I made it out of the neighborhood, as I expounded on in my "Thanks To" post a few years ago, were the families that did accept us, warts and all. The first of those families that I clearly recall accepting us was MM's family. 

MM was one of six siblings just like me, and in fact was the fifth born of six siblings, three boys and three girls, just like me.

We became fast friends, thick as thieves through and through. From when I met him at four until I left for the USAF after high school graduation, we probably spent at least five days a week together.

Everything you can imagine two boyhood chums doing together, we did together. We explored the canyons that surrounded our little neighborhood, built tree forts and had rock and dirt clod fights with kids from the Coralwood, Skyline, and Prairie Mound Way side of the canyons. We fought each other and for each other. We spent nearly every weekend of every summer of our pre-adolescence at Imperial Beach playing in the ocean or hunting crabs on the jetty. We went fishing at Chollas Lake or the 24th street pier together (when MM's Mom or another adult in the neighborhood with a car would take us that is - my Mom didn't have a car and never learned to drive).

Together we experienced many of the rites of passage for kids growing from puberty into the teenage years - learned to ride bikes together (rather, I learned to ride a bike riding MM's bike), shoplifted for the first time (and got busted for the first time) together, drank first beers (we were 10, it was one Coors Original Banquet beer) together, smoked our first cigarettes together (a rather brief thing for us both, as neither of us smoked cigarettes again after the age of 13). We built our own skateboards and skateboard ramps together (well, MM could actually buy a skateboard, a nice Tony Alva one with griptape on the deck, a skidplate under the kickflip, Tracker trucks and Kryptonite wheels that had German precision bearings - I had to piece one together from a plank I made in seventh grade woodshop and parts I pilfered at the SV swapmeet).

We even saw our first dead person together (no need to go into that, it was a very "Stand-By-Me" experience, you know, the movie based on the Stephan King book).

We worked for a traveling carnival together for three summers when we were teens, and walked into our first bar together (Mad Dog Morgan's in Costa Mesa - we were over-sized 15-year old boys, covered in grime from a day spent putting together carnival rides at the Costa Mesa County Fair - we looked the part of older men well enough that two cops who came into the place walked right past us playing pool and checked the ID's of two young sailors having drinks at the bar).

Along with MM I had one other white friend in the immediate block I grew up on whose family also accepted me unconditionally (well, not completely - there were a few reservations on the part of the father). A couple of years after I met MM, a young boy was adopted by a couple that lived eight houses up the street from me,

Except I didn't know he was adopted then (Huh, a blonde-haired blue-eyed kid shows up at the home of the Italian-Mexican-American couple up the street and I didn't realize he was adopted until I was in my teens...)

That kid is the man who is seated to the left of me in the above picture, the guy with the mullet and pornstar mustache. JDV was just about as much a part of my childhood as MM, except he was four years younger than MM and I, and he was far better off in terms of kid riches.

Frances and Edward V. doted on and spoiled the young boy they adopted, just like parents of a single child often do. It wasn't unusual for their house to be a gathering place for most of the kids in the neighborhood. JDV had two or more of almost every toy a kid could want, from squirt guns to bicycles. His Mom, Frances, seemed to be cooking all the time and would make all of us kids quesadilla's and macaroni and cheese. 

JDV's dad, Edward, was not around very much. He worked on North Island Naval Air Station as a metalsmith and spent a lot of time at the VFW hall afterwards. It wasn't until years later that I learned he was significantly older than most of the other parents in the neighborhood and had served in the Navy in WWII.

JDV's Dad also had two classic cars stored in the garage. One was a 1955 MG TF midget roadster, and the other was a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. Both of them were in excellent condition, and neither of them ever left the dark and dusty garage.

We played in those cars a lot, pretending we were driving or using them as places to hide during games of hide-and-go-seek.

It was while playing one of those games of hide-and-go-seek that a significant discovery was made.

No, it wasn't a body. It was something far more shocking to our young senses. It was a box of late '60's and mid '70's Playboy, Penthouse, and OUI magazines.

That right there marks the time when I went from wanting to draw superheros and cartoon characters, to wanting to draw women. Beautiful, sensuously curvaceous women like I saw in those magazines. 

It was in those magazines that I discovered the pin up artists Alberto Vargas and Alain Aslan, and the Harvey Kurtzman/Will Elder adult comic Little Annie Fanny and Oh, Wicked Wanda by Ron Embleton and Frederic Mullally.

The influence on me as a artist, and as a young man who was just becoming sexually aware, was rather pronounced.

There is great debate as to whether humans are born primarily heterosexual or not, and whether humans can chose their sexual orientation or not. I'll leave that debate for greater minds than mine. All I can say is after I discovered those magazines, my sexual orientation was cemented as flaming hetero. 

With that bit of back story about the two men to either side of me in the above picture, let me jump ahead a bit.

By the time we were all entering adolesence a number of marked differences were developing that separated us a little. 

MM didn't share my love for comic books, or art, passions I shared with Sonny Rickles, whom I met in the second grade, and with whom I spent a lot of time drawing, going to Comic-con, listening to music, etc.

And JDV was still in elementary school when the rest of us were finishing junior high school. 

While we still pal'd around together, it did become less frequent as first junior high, then senior high, expanded our individual circle of friends. MM grew into a huge teenager (6'4" and 265 by the ninth grade) and played football, I grew into a big teenager (6' and 200 by the ninth grade) and wrestled - MM did join the wrestling team one year, but that was just to stay in shape.

JDV was growing into a big kid himself (he would be 6'3" by ninth grade) but was not much for sports, though he played basketball with us in our frequent neighborhood pick-up games. 

There was also the introduction of the one thing that would become the most divisive element to ever curse our lives. Substance abuse.

It is not my place to state what anyone other than myself was doing or taking, so I will state that for me, it was just alcohol. For the others, well, it was something a bit more insidious, something that became the scourge of Southern California and ruined the lives of many, many of the friends I knew from my childhood.

It didn't take hold until after I left SD for my four-year stint in the USAF. In the few years I was gone, the friends I grew up with went from finding fun in sharing a surreptitiously procured case of beer once or twice a month to full blown addictions to physically and mentally crippling substances. 

When I had left the USAF I ended up settling back into the neighborhood (after about a year of trying to live in PB while working and going to college). I was not able to keep it together financially in PB, so after MM's Mom and youngest sister R left for China for a year (short explanation - MM's Mom went back to college after MM's parents divorced, learned Chinese(!) and went to China to work as an English teacher, taking her youngest daughter with her), I moved in with MM (and SF, and my younger brother T, and a few other transients). 

We spent a year living in that house together, working, going to college, and partying our asses off. It was, for the most part, a fairly harmless time - we were all working or going to school, we were all being fairly self-supporting, nobody was going to jail.

JDV still lived up the street at his parents house (on and off), but had started to experience serious run-ins with the law, and rarely spent much time with us - he had gone to CYA and met some people there who set him up as a dealer, complete with the magic recipe, and that is how he decided he was going to live.

I could never get into that culture, that scene. I grew further and further away from my childhood friends.

When MM's Mom and sister returned from China, I moved into the garage (which SF and I, with RT's construction expertise, converted into a rudimentary two bedroom apartment - SF got one half and I got the other). 

I lived in the garage for six months or so, until a drunk driver hit and totaled my Jeep and I had to move back to PB to live with my brother T, as it was much closer to my job in La Jolla (that I now had to take a bus to)

That was only for a short while though, as at the end of the summer I quit the job I had in La Jolla and moved to Lancaster, Ca. to live with my USAF pal Wolvie.

That's probably enough background for the point of this post, so I'm going to jump to my visit to SD a week ago. 

Sunday night, March  30th, as I was leaving the old neighborhood after visiting with Don Tequilla, I decided to stop being an ass about avoiding MM and pay him a visit.

It had been a long, long time since I had last spoken with him - hell, I didn't even know if he still lived in the same house. But I pulled in front of the house he had lived in for as long as I had known him and walked up to the steel security door (the neighborhood is now better/safer than when I was a kid, but most people still have steel or iron security doors). I knocked loud and from inside the house I heard MM's voice boom out, "Who is it?!"

I yelled back who I was and a few seconds later MM was happily opening the door, letting me in - except I thought he was his older brother J, what with all of his hair now completely gray.

We hugged and started talking about everything and anything that had occurred in our lives since we had last seen one another. MM told me he had cleaned up almost two years ago, and that he felt depressed at times at having lost almost thirty years of his life to the scourge of Southern California.

We talked at great length about the friends we had in common, and both of our families. I told him how my Mom was doing, he told me about how hard it was to watch his Father pass away from cancer and that now his Mom, who is my Mom's age, lives in Yuma with his youngest sister R's family.

It was truly great to see him, and I am extremely happy I made the decision to stop by.

However, MM also dropped the bombshell that JDV had passed away last year, at the age of 48.

That did not hit me hard then, but a few days later, when I was over 600 miles away leaving Clearlake, it did.

John Dominic Vitela had been a friend of mine for most of my childhood. We had shared in some of the most formative years of our lives, and we had been as close as brothers for a long time.

We veered off on very different paths after I left for the USAF, and especially after I came back to and then left SD for Alaska. I actually cannot recall if I ever saw Dominic again after my move north.

I would get news about him from friends and family who still resided in the neighborhood - he had decided as an adult he wanted to be referred to by his first name, John, instead of Dominic, which was his middle name (the only name I ever knew him by), and he had fathered children, though I'm not sure he ever married (his oldest daughter had died tragically at the age of 16). Both of his adoptive parents had predeceased him - Frances in 1997, Edward in 2006. 

There is a part of me that had always wanted to run into Dominic on one of my annual visits to SD. Maybe we would sit down and have beers together, talk about the old days and talk about our lives as middle-aged adult men. 

That part of me hoped that if I did run into Dominic he would have cleaned up and was living a boring life as a doting Father to his children, or a mundane existence as a retail clerk - anything really, other than what he had become when I last saw him.

Life and death had other plans though, as is often the case. 

There are a number of people from my past, dear friends, good friends, friends that I've avoided because, like MM and JDV our paths had diverged a bit too much. It's probably high time I made more of an effort to reach out and reconnect with them, at least on a level that allows me to thank them for being there with me when I was a kid, when life was at times truly overwhelming.

At the very least I could write a letter or send an email, it's not like I don't know how to write.

Rest in peace Dominic, and thanks for sharing some of the truly great times in life when were children.