My brother, Paul, was killed in a motor vehicle accident forty-seven years ago, on Monday, January 2nd, 1978. Born on Mother’s Day, May 13th, 1962, he did not live long enough to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, which would have fallen on Saturday, May 13th, 1978. Nor did he live long enough to celebrate another Mother’s Day, which fell one day later — the same day that President Jimmy Carter issued Proclamation 4570 to “hereby request that Sunday, May 14, 1978, be observed throughout our nation as Mother’s Day.”
Paul and our sister, Melody, had spent the day hiking with a childhood friend. They had just come off the trails, and were walking along the railroad track. As they approached the Cabrillo Highway, just to the south and west of River Street, Paul dropped a golf ball he had toyed with since finding it on the hike. The ball rolled out onto the highway, and Paul darted out to retrieve it. After picking up the ball, he looked up just in time to see the car, only a few feet away, speeding towards him. A fraction of a second later, it was all over for my brother. He was buried a couple of blocks from where he died.
Paul likely succumbed to his injuries a few seconds after impact, which had ruptured his aorta, knocked him out of his shoes, and sent his wristwatch flying several yards from where he was struck. Our childhood friend, Bret, witnessed the entire event. Melody, who became aware of what had just happened a second or so after impact, lurched towards our brother’s crumpled body, which lay in the middle of heavy traffic, much of which was still moving. Mercifully, she was restrained by our friend, thus avoiding becoming the second fatality on that spot on that terrible day. Days later, after inspecting Paul’s Timex wristwatch, which seemed to have not suffered even one small scratch, all I could think was “it takes a licking, but keeps on ticking.”1
Family tragedies, like this one, bring with them a boundless repository of regrets, both large and small. One of my larger regrets, among many, is the harsh words I had towards my brother before he died. They were the last words I spoke to him. I wanted to borrow his boombox (in those days, not knowing any better, we called it a “ghetto blaster”). It was an unreasonable request for many reasons, not the least being that I was headed to Georgia for several months while Paul was headed off to California. He understandably refused my belligerent, unreasonable demand. I did not respond kindly to his refusal. After we parted a short while later, I would never see him alive again. When my mom and stepfather distributed Paul’s worldly possessions to the surviving siblings, I was gifted the blaster. If I could have persuaded the Grim Reaper at that moment to meet me at the celestial bargaining table, I would have settled for Paul returning to life, reclaiming his blaster, staying safe at the side of the highway, and me taking his place in front of the speeding car.
Paul was born with a speech impairment colloquially called “tongue-tied.” As a result, whenever he spoke, his speech was almost impossible for most people to understand. On the other hand, Paul’s three siblings — my younger sister, Melody, our baby sister, Audrey, and I could interpret anything he said. Therefore if Paul blurted out “ginka gaya” (for instance), either Melody or I understood immediately that he had asked for a drink of water, and would walk to the kitchen sink, fill a cup with tap water, and hand it to him. Audrey, who was still mostly pre-verbal, also understood Paul’s request, but was young enough to get away with letting one of her older siblings fulfill it.
Paul’s verbal constructions weren’t limited to just four syllables, of course. For instance, if Paul, Melody and I were out playing in the street and a stranger were to come up and ask Paul “what’s on your mind, little fella?” Paul might respond with something like “dah wibba Espan fobbin mabbie onnablain.”2 At that point, either Melody or I might jump in to offer a translation to the befuddled stranger — perhaps something like “what Paul means to say is ‘the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.’ Of course, he readily acknowledges that he hasn’t verified this first-hand, but if you could spare a few dollars, perhaps we could arrange for him to travel to Spain and…” I’m joking, of course. At that time, although we lived in a neighborhood that was Santa Cruz’s answer to Portland’s Felony Flats, neither my sister or I — nor any of our other little delinquent playmates for that matter — were sophisticated enough to shake down adult strangers for whatever loot they had in their pockets. At least, not yet.
The reason we had found ourselves in a “felony flats” type of neighborhood is because we were throwaway kids. Our throwaway mom headed up our four-child throwaway household. We became throwaways after our father learned that our mother had become pregnant with a fourth child — one who would become our youngest sister, Audrey — and decided he wasn’t going to stick around to be burdened with yet another child, even though he had fathered all four of us. Eventually our mom remarried, and our new stepdad, Ron, joined the Army so he could support his new wife and four new stepchildren. Ron had already served in two previous enlistments, and had three children of his own: two daughters, Marva and Vallee, and one son, Craig. The girls lived with their mother near Seattle, and Craig found himself stuck with four new live-in step siblings.
Shortly after our stepdad completed Basic Training at Fort Ord, the Army relocated our family to Fort Hood (since renamed) in Central Texas, and we settled into a little house in a sleepy little neighborhood of an even sleepier little town called Copperas Cove. Almost immediately, the Army shipped stepdad off to Vietnam. At age forty-two, stepdad was too old for combat, so he was assigned to “signals intelligence” (SIGINT) in DaNang, where he transcribed intercepted “enemy” communications. Stepdad got the job because he knew how to type.
Not long after we arrived in Central Texas, Paul came down with tonsillitis, and underwent a tonsillectomy. (It appears that procedure is discouraged these days, unless the patient has experienced repeated throat infections over the previous year.)3 In the days that followed Paul’s surgery, we siblings noticed that his breath smelled worse and worse each day. His nose was also continually plugged up so severely that he could not breathe through it, no matter how hard he tried. After about a week or so, mom took Paul back to the doctor, who discovered he had neglected to remove the stuff that was placed in his nasal passages during the surgery. He then informed our mother that Paul was lucky she brought him back in when she did, before he had developed an infection and died. That was how the Army medics rolled in those days.
Not long after stepdad returned from the war in Vietnam, the Army ordered us once again to pack our bags and move out — this time, to Fort Gordon (which, like the aforementioned Fort Hood, was also renamed since that time, and for the same right and good reason). We settled into another modest little house in yet another sleepy little neighborhood situated in a tired little bedroom town called Martinez, just outside Augusta, Georgia, the home of James Brown. After mom, as was her custom, picked out a little backwoods Assemblies of God church to start force-marching us kids to, Paul, Craig and I quickly joined the Royal Rangers, a sort of Boy Scouts for religious zealots. At our new church, the Royal Rangers also had a bit of a paramilitary vibe. The highlights for my brothers and me were when the team leaders would take us kids out to somebody’s old plantation manor in the deep backwoods near the Georgia swamps, where we’d divide into teams and go out into the night on all-night patrols. Half of the teams were instructed to evade capture, while the others were assigned the task of capturing teams trying not to get caught. We had so much fun!
Paul, Craig and I also joined the Augusta Boys Club (now known as the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Augusta), where club leaders also took us out onto camping trips that we enjoyed. Like many kids of that era, we were ardent outdoors enthusiasts: an enthusiasm that began when we were just little street urchins running along the levee of the San Lorenzo River in order to scamper over the train trestle that crossed the river and deposited us near the Boardwalk. We loved to fish, and would catch those fish in bodies of water all around us, small and large — from the sewer soaked drainage ditch behind our house on Barson Street, to the river and even to the sea, where we fished from the Wharf.
Shortly after I turned 15, biological dad — perhaps suffering fleeting remorse for having tossed his family aside so unceremoniously nine years earlier — invited me to come live with him and his replacement family. I was eager to get back to my hometown, Santa Cruz. Stepdad had just extended his enlistment for another three years, and it was a certainty the Army wasn’t going to relocate him back to the Monterey Bay area. Biological dad lived just over the hill from Santa Cruz, in a little suburban town called Los Gatos. I decided to take biodad up on his offer.
Soon after arriving in Los Gatos, I began to sense that I had made a mistake. Although some of the kids I met in school were nice and quickly became friends, others were hostile. None of my charm had any perceivable effect on the cute upper middle-class girls at Los Gatos High School — at least nothing like the effect I was able to conjure with the backwoods beauties at Evans High School, where I had just transferred from. Having no experience living among prosperous suburbanites, it was difficult for me to comprehend the soulless dispassion many in this well-scrubbed milieu called upon to animate their days.
For instance, as I rode by bike home from school one day, a station wagon (the ’70s equivalent of the ’80s minivan, the ’90s SUV, and so on) driven by a suburban mom, and stuffed with suburban teens, carelessly sidled up to the curb. Unfortunately for me, the space immediately adjacent to the curb was, at that moment, occupied by me and the bicycle I rode in on. The vehicle’s impact knocked me off of my bicycle and sent the bike and me skittering across the sidewalk. The kids tumbled out of the station wagon, stepped over my bike, and walked right past me as they made their way to a nearby strip-mall. As soon as the kids had exited the vehicle, suburban mom drove off. I briefly wondered if I had somehow turned invisible.
Making matters worse, within a couple of months of my arrival, biodad accepted another sales exec position at some little outfit in the Washington D.C. area. Soon afterward, biodad moved his replacement family and me to a nondescript little bedroom community way outside D.C. The middle-class teens in this new environment were a bit less snooty than the Los Gatos teens I had encountered, but more violent. For the first time in my life, I found myself forced to affect a sort of “bad-ass” attitude, and to constantly carry a weapon (a knife) that I occasionally felt compelled to brandish threateningly. The cul-de-sac on which we lived was made a bit more bearable by two cute sisters who lived literally next door; they were about as sweet on me as I was on them. The sweet sisters notwithstanding, I was motivated to jump away from biodad and his replacement family at first opportunity. As part of my strategy, I convinced the school counselor to help me craft a pathway leading to early graduation. Thus, at sixteen, I received my high school diploma, and was on a commercial airliner days later, flying back to mom, stepdad and the siblings, who the Army had relocated to West Germany.
The Army had assigned stepdad a three-bedroom apartment in an Army ghetto for enlisted soldiers called Pattonville, located in the southwestern part of West Germany, and sandwiched in between Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg. The Vietnam War having come to its ignominious end only a year or so earlier, morale among the enlisted ranks was at perhaps an all-time low. Enlisted soldiers and their families, coming from all walks of life (most particularly the working class, welfare class, just-got-out-of-jail class, and so on), brought their grievances, hardships, violent attitudes and other social pathologies with them. Almost instantly, I felt at home.
Upon my arrival, Paul and our little sis, Audrey, gave me a tour of the neighborhood. Many of the smaller kids in the neighborhood, having never lived outside a military environment, puzzled over my ultra-long “freak flag” hairstyle, prompting one little kid to come up and ask Paul if I was “a boy or a girl.” Paul snapped “he’s half boy, half girl and half monkey,” making up with acerbic wit what he may have lacked in mathematical precision.
In short order, I made several new friends, many of whom Paul was already acquainted with. My new crew’s first significant activity was a camp out, which we set up in a field on the other side of the housing complex. After setting up our tents, Paul, my newfound friends and I went marauding through a nearby German village called Kornwestheim. Upon our return, we were immediately surrounded by a large group of angry teens, who had set up camp about fifty yards away. They accused us of breaking all of their tent poles and trashing their encampment. Despite their heavy use of Ebonics (called African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE in more recent decades), their intention was unmistakable: we were doomed. Not only did I want to save my own skin, I also had my kid brother to protect. Those twin burdens in mind, I began scanning our encampment for a potential weapon. One of the kids from the opposing camp quickly spotted me eyeballing a ball pein hammer that lay a tempting arm’s length in front of me. He then immediately made it clear that if I reached for that hammer, it would be the last thing I’d ever reach for.
All the while, I noticed that Paul appeared remarkably sanguine, as though he had nothing to worry about. Given our apparent dire predicament, I was mystified by his calm, almost detached composure. Suddenly, one of the kids from the opposing camp, perhaps the same kid who had threatened me a few minutes earlier, pointed to Paul and yelled “Yo! It’s Paul!” Turning toward me, he shouted “You Paul’s brother?” adding, before I could even squeak out a reply, “You cool; we won’t kill you!” Paul, it turned out, was quite popular with these kids because he came over a couple of times a month to mow the grass surrounding their building. It was one of the several after-school “jobs” he had. Every time he came over to mow the grass, he would laugh, joke and clown around with the building’s residents. He was enormously popular there.
The moment I realized that Paul and I were in the clear, I launched into an immediate hard-sell in order to try and spare the other kids in our encampment from getting their asses beat, or worse. I begged the kids from the opposing camp to let us find the culprits who had trashed their encampment. And if they found the miscreants first, I implored them to turn the do-badders over to us so we could dispose of them. Although the violence in my rhetoric was exaggerated, I was otherwise sincere. I was convinced that nobody in our encampment had done the dirty deed. I kept up a relentless speed-talking hard-sell for perhaps ten minutes before folks from the opposing camp began losing steam. I never got the sense they bought anything I was trying to sell, but my hard-selling vehemence appeared to wear them down anyway. Ultimately, they dejectedly wandered back to their encampment to try and put it back together as best they could.
Half an hour or so after our close call, a couple of little redneck kids who had apparently been hanging around and getting underfoot all along admitted they had been the ones who had gone over to the other encampment, broke all of the tent poles and trashed the camp. I was horrified and dismayed. I hadn’t even noticed the little shits until one of the older kids told me what the little racist bastards had just admitted to. I was so dispirited that all I could do was spit out a few half-hearted threats and tell them to get out of my sight.
A year and a half later, our time in Pattonville was coming to a close. Stepdad had decided to decline another reenlistment. We were headed back to the States. Biodad offered Paul and Melody the same deal he had offered me a few years earlier, and they both agreed to do a stretch with biodad and his replacement family. That family was still in the D.C. suburbs; ironically, however, biodad would soon accept a job offer in what would eventually become the Silicon Valley. He and his replacement family would then choose to take up residence in Scotts Valley, a little village just outside our beloved town of Santa Cruz.
In the meantime, stepdad, mom, Audrey and I were off to Martinez, Georgia. Before relocating to West Germany, mom had agreed to rent our little house there to our church’s preacher and his family. Almost immediately, the preacher quit paying rent; since our family was halfway around the world, our options were limited. Finally, one of the neighbors managed to pry the deadbeat preacher and his family out of the house. Before we returned to the neighborhood to reclaim the house, the same neighbor reluctantly informed us that the property was in pretty bad shape, and would require extensive cleanup before it would become marketable, or even habitable.
They weren’t kidding. The house was trashed. The new carpet our family had installed for the preacher’s family before leaving for West Germany was heavily soiled and in shreds. The freshly painted walls were smeared with filth. The travel trailer we had parked in the back yard was stuffed with desecrated bibles and gay porn. One of the neighbors claimed that the preacher’s son was walking around town, loudly proclaiming he was “going to hell and proud of it.”
Meanwhile, Melody and Paul had gone back to Santa Cruz ahead of the replacement family, taking up residence with our step grandmother, Dona, who continued to live in the old neighborhood. Biodad had already started his new job, but the house he was negotiating purchase of was not yet ready for occupancy. While stepdad, mom, Audrey and I toiled away at cleanup in Georgia, Melody would occasionally call the neighbor who lived across the street to inform us of one “emergency” or another. Melody called the neighbor because we had declined to get a phone, hoping we would finish the cleanup quickly, then sell the house. On the evening of January 2nd, Melody called the neighbor with yet another “emergency,” and our neighbor quickly came over to let us know. As mom and I walked across the street to take the call, we jokingly wondered what the “emergency” was this time. Moments after mom got on the phone, she blurted out a bloodcurdling shriek: “My son Paul is dead?”
Failing to grasp that I should rush over to comfort my mom, I quickly left the neighbor’s house and stumbled back across the street to our little wreck of a home. Once inside, I croaked to stepdad “Paul’s dead” before collapsing into inconsolable grief. Stepdad immediately bolted out the door and ran to the neighbor’s house across the street in order to get to mom before she could harm herself or anyone else. Only a few hours earlier, Paul, Melody and our childhood friend, Bret, had just come off the trail and were wrapping up their daylong hike. Paul was just steps away from eternity.