Bill Safer

Bill Safer

          After two years at ET Wrenn Junior School, my wife and I took our baby daughter Ruth and the foetus that was to be our daughter Abbie and went to teach high school in the Guam public education system. We were assigned to positions at Inarajan High School, a rural school near the far southern tip of the island, with pupils who came mostly from Chamorro, or the local islander, families.

          Inarajan High School was a place where student academic motivation was a personal matter. Those who wanted to learn what we were teaching did; those who didn’t had no reason to. The way of life that evolved in the south of Guam over the centuries required little advanced literacy. The fruit of the reef, the coconut-palm, and the jungle were still available to those who knew how to take them; the Government provided jobs or assistance for the acquisition of more world-economy needs like pickup trucks and cigarettes and boom-boxes and beer; and the church and the extended families provided social structure and support.

          Guam’s original, indigenous name, ‘Guahan’, means ‘we have’.

          The school was on a hill looking down on a little village with a postcard church, the ocean extending endlessly beyond. It was a large, two-story, concrete structure with external hallways. We joked that the kids at Wrenn would have been throwing each other over the rails of the upstairs passageways. The gym had no walls, just pillars, on two and a half sides, presumably to let the trade winds cool those sweating within it.

          The kids at Inarajan were highly sceptical about haole (honky; anglo; pakeha) teachers in particular, and I don’t blame them. Not only were they accustomed to these statesiders showing up and trying to impose their own, foreign ways on them for maybe a year, maybe less, and then shooting through, but the imported teachers were also, to put it kindly, a motley bunch.

          The Chamorro teachers were, with one or two exceptions, fairly stable, well-adjusted people, educated on the mainland — or at least Hawaii — but absolutely comfortable within island culture. They were the local educational success stories, who had returned to their villages to try to help: they knew the score and had little enough to prove.

          There were also a few Filipino teachers, hired as scabs during a teachers’ strike a few years previously, apparently self-conscious about their Tagalog accents and doggedly ingratiating towards those in authority. I remember once, a month or so into the school year, when the Governor announced that he was coming to Inarajan H.S. to dedicate the new wing. It had been finished for more than a year, but it was an election year and his handlers had identified this as a primo photo op. They told us the day before and made it clear that we were to let our students out of class to be background scenery for the TV cameras. The Filipino teachers went home and came back the next day with huge platters of expensive and meticulously prepared fiesta food for the Governor’s reception — entirely without being asked.

          The stateside teachers were universally — as far as I could tell — bent in one way or the other. There were those who came to Guam for the surfing or scuba-diving or sail-boarding. There were the born-again, fundamentalist bible-thumpers who came to save the natives from the curse of Papist idolatry, Guam being well over 90% Catholic of the sixteenth-century Spanish variety. But most were uncategorisable one-of-a-kinds — adventurers and misfits who had used their teacher certifications as passports to exotic (but comfortable and relatively safe) lives.

          Clearly the most popular teacher in the school was Bill Safer, a tall, lean, loud lefty (just a touch to the left of his hero Fidel, and an admirer of the Soviet Union) with a flowing grey beard. Safer was a science teacher, but, as he put it, “Most of these kids don’t need to know this bullshit they teach as science; I teach revolution, comrade!”

          He had an endearing way of calling everyone “comrade”.

          What he did in the way of classroom teaching was show movies. He gave the kids a list of 25 or so things to do in the semester, if they wanted to, and let them give themselves their own grades.

          Sometime during the first week or so of the school year, I was sitting in the non-smoking teachers’ lounge when Safer came in to use the photocopier. All of us present were just joking around about something, and Safer responded to some comment by saying, “Yeah-yeah,” in a little singsong, the first ‘yeah’ being about three notes higher than the second. And it sounded familiar. I knew I’d known somebody else once who’d yeah-yeah’d the same way. In a few seconds it came to me and I just casually asked him, “Bill, did you ever know a guy named Yabo Yablonsky?” [See #24 in this series]

          Safer looked at me as if somebody had just stuffed an ice cube up his ass. Finally he said, “Yabo Yablonsky and I were on the same swimming team in Brooklyn in 1948!”

          I still had Yabo’s phone number and I urged Safer to call him, but he refused. All he would say was, “What would I say to him?” When I contacted Yabo and told him about running into Safer, he said pretty much the same thing.

          Safer had seen combat in the Korean War and had hated every second of it. “I shit my pants with fear more than once,” was what he had to say about his wartime adventures. He had, however, plenty to say about war in general, none of it complimentary.

          Inarajan High School had a Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programme with a proud tradition of winning close-order drill competitions, the team doing all kinds of fancy things with their dummy M-1s. I thought of them as the boys’ baton-twirler squad. Calling it an ‘officers’ training operation struck me as a cruel joke. The poor kids spent so much time drilling they were rarely in class, and most of them seemed headed for trouble meeting what were then the requirements to enlist in the Army as privates, let alone as officers.

          The teacher in charge of ROTC was an Army major. He used to march about the school in his officer’s dress uniform. It had large amounts of braid. I couldn’t help but salute him when we passed each other in the school’s covered outdoor corridors, and he’d salute me back. Once, unaware of the symbolism of what I was doing, I saluted him with my left hand. He announced loudly that he wasn’t going to return a left-handed salute.

          Then Safer came up, louder than the Major. “I’ll salute you,” he barked. “When I was in the Army they told me to salute the uniform, not the man. But I’m saluting you because everyone deserves respect. I’m not saluting your uniform. The uniform sucks. It doesn’t deserve any respect at all.”

          Before coming to Guam some years before, the Safer family had been living in various parts of the Caribbean, their last location before Guam having been Guyana. They had known the people at Jonesville, the place famous for its mass suicide. Safer refused to believe they’d committed suicide (“Primo people, Richard! Beautiful people!”). He strongly suspected that they had all been murdered, probably by some agents of the U.S. government who had come with the congressman who got killed in the incident. “And,” he concluded, “they were just sharing, gentle people who were no threat to anybody.” I asked him why, if they were out in the jungle and no threat to anybody, anybody would want to kill them all. He conceded that that was a good question.

          Bill’s wife, Brenda, was closer to my age than Bill was. They had two boys in elementary school and a girl a year older than Ruth. The boys were named Adam and Pol. Adam was blonde; Pol was Micronesian. The girl, Amanda (whom Brenda called ‘demanda’), was also blonde and confidently bolshie, rather like her dad.

          Safer was fond of telling a story about how shortly after Adam was born, the doctor had offered to circumcise him. “‘I’ll circumcise your mother!’, I told him!,” he more or less shouted, and launched into a lecture on the evils of circumcision. When I pointed out to him that his father had had him circumcised, he said, “Ah, but he was ignorant, comrade, and I’m not.”

          One place where he did seem to have a bit of conflict and doubt was in the area of bringing up his kids. Although he despised Western Civilisation in general and the colonial mindset in particular, it bothered him that Adam was growing up like an island kid who felt no reason to learn school stuff. The second school year we were on Guam he and Brenda sent Adam to a church-run private school that emphasised academics. I can remember him hectoring the poor kid: “You’re there to learn the subjects! Ignore the bullshit religion they teach you!”

          An avid anti-colonialist, as one might expect, but living in a colonial environment, he spoke the Chamorro language as best he could. To my untutored ear, however, his Chamorro vocabulary seemed to be limited to a few idiomatic expressions and swear words, but he ladled contempt on the haoles on the island who didn’t even try.

          Safer was at the core of a beatnikish social circle, which meant the availability of what on Guam is called songi. They lived in what people on Guam call a boonie house in Merizo — called ‘Malessu’ by people speaking Chamorro —  a somewhat isolated village on the island’s far southwestern coast. It was a slapdash affair with a big, open lanai; I’m sure it was built before the typhoon-proofing requirements came into Guam’s building code. The feeling it gave me was of adjusting closely to nature rather than of dominating it. Its big lanai seemed to be almost always filled with people.

          Sugar cane grew between the house and the driveway, which was usually blocked by Safer’s sailboat when he wasn’t fishing. A huge mango tree between his garden and the next provided marvellous shade, a place from which to hang a swing, and an enormous number of mangos in season. Chamorros like their mangos green and hard and bitter, sliced up, salted, and soaked in a mix of rice vinegar, raw sugar, garlic, ginger, and super-hot boonie peppers. They don’t seem to like them sweet and ripe.

          The house was close to the neighbours as well as to nature. The smell when they were singeing the hair off a pig they’d just killed was a potent experience when we were downwind from them. Safer assured me that the sounds that came when they’d killed the pig before I got there had been truly horrible.

          Still, the inside part of the house was hot and damp and far from mosquito-free. It was a place where a person would sweat copiously when no breezes could be found. Some people said that Safer had a permanent case of body odour, but I didn’t notice.

          The only part of the house that was air-conditioned was the little room where Brenda kept her computer. In 1986 the computer age was just beginning, and just by being able to use one Brenda was able to bring in money. Brenda was also into homeopathic therapy, the first person I recall having met who was, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Alfredo Valentino had dabbled in it without mentioning it. It seemed like hogwash to me.

          Safer, however, smoked cigarettes (then quit, then started smoking again); he knew how to get the alcohol down and wasn’t above a bit of pride in how strong and healthy he was anyway. Guam’s climate and soil are not conducive to dairying, and at least in the mid-1980s all dairy products were imported in one form or another, mostly from Australia and New Zealand. When at last a milk-reconstituting plant on Guam started turning out full-cream milk he was in heaven. “This is real milk, comrade!” he gloated, a white moustache on his grey one. No wussy fear of saturated fats and cholesterol for him. I didn’t get the point.

          He had highly refined woodworking skills. I think he told me once that he’d worked as a carpenter building Hollywood movie sets after surviving the Korean War. Another teacher, named Mick Subbert, worked out some kind of deal with Safer to build a hardwood sailboat from scratch on Mick’s back lanai. It was a fascinating process to follow.

          When at last my wife got the job in New Zealand and I was preparing to leave, I was astounded by how much Brenda knew about New Zealand politics, which were then going through intense turmoil. I knew next to nothing then.

          We kept in communication on and off for a while after I left Guam. Then Safer retired and the family moved to Tinian, a somewhat smaller, less-developed, and less-populated island to the north of Guam, and we lost touch. An April, 2005 Google search revealed that Mrs. Brenda Safer coordinated this year’s Tinian Elementary School Poetry Contest.

          In about 2013 or 2014 Brenda joined facebook. She posts mostly items of interest on Tinian and solid leftwing articles.

John Ware 1971-1975

John Ware 1971-1975

          After the demise of the First National Band Ware returned to the house in Claremont and that arty way of life. He painted. He started playing the Hollywood Living-Room Circuit, which he described as, ‘this loose-knit group of about 20 or 25 guys who played backup for West Hollywood’s I-can’t-make-it-but-I’m-cool folk-rock guys. Hoyt Axton. John Stewart. People like that.’

          Early in 1971 a character in Herb Cohen’s office called Leon Danielle steered him into producing Nansi Nevins (as she spelt it then), the former lead singer with Sweetwater, the opening band at Woodstock. She’d been badly hurt in a nasty car smash, her voice was affected, and she was out of a contract. Ware got me some work doing strong-back-weak-mind stuff for Nansi, cleaning junk out of the back yard of the place where she was rehearsing. Ware thought she was really brilliant, a really good songwriter, but so far off into her own little world that after working with her for the better part of a year he didn’t think he got anywhere. He did eventually do some demos for Warner Brothers, who just dismissed them out of hand.

          Ware then spent almost a year as a sit-down drummer in a six-night-a-weeker playing country standards at a bar in Glendale. It was, he told me, ‘a hideous gig, but it put money in the bank.’ I went to see him once at this gig in 1972. The bar was a barn-like place in a truly dismal neighbourhood. It wasn’t an impressive experience.

          Then a guy he knew from just being around the scene for years approached him about playing drums for Johnnie Tillotson in Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t a fan of late-50s-early-60s white bubblegum pop, but he’d had it with the LA folk-rock-psychedelic music scene and the dive in Glendale, so he and his old high-school bass player from the Continentals, John Selk, started playing some gigs with Tillotson. He spent the summer of 1973 playing with him.

          “Playin’ Las Vegas. Playin’ the Flamingo. Playin’ the Tropicana. Playin’ the Sands. In the lounge. I’d go on stage at ten to ten-thirty, and then I’d go on stage again at about two. It was just awful. I can’t tell you how many times I played ‘Poetry in Motion’ to six people. Sometimes it was six people, one of whom was like Johnnie Carson, with two bimbos de soir, but essentially I was playing to fat, lower-middle-class, drunken gamblers.”

          Whilst engaged in this labour he ran into Kenny Edwards from the Stone Poneys in LA. Edwards had been back in contact with Linda Ronstadt, who was selling tons of records by that time, had a tour lined up with Jackson Browne, and, according Edwards, needed to get serious about a band. A few phone calls later Ware had an audition. He said it felt strange to audition for someone he’d already played with, but he got the gig.

          He loved working for Ronstadt again. He thought she was singing wonderfully, and the band she’d put together was fun to play in: Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Bobby Warford, Kenny Edwards, and Andrew Gold. Jackson Browne also had a band Ware thought was great. They toured for a year of hardly ever being home, both acts travelling on a Continental Trailways bus. It was hardly a rock & roll bus, until they started ripping seats out and getting blow-up rafts from army-navy surplus stores.

          In the autumn of 1973 I was living in Wilmington, Delaware, working for my step-father — just as in 1961 — and married to a woman who had mental-health problems with which I was having difficulty coping. I was wallowing in a sort of beaten-down-by-dead-end-job, terrorised-by-wife state when I heard that Linda Ronstadt was coming to Wilmington, and would be playing at my old high school’s gym. Ware and I were still in touch with each other fairly regularly, and he let me know when the entourage were likely to be arriving at the Hotel Dupont in downtown Wilmington.

          My wife appeared to be in a bit of a quandary over this one. Ware was, manifestly, not a woman about whom she could make a pretence of being jealous. She was, however, intensely jealous over anything and everything that had to do with my former life in Hollywood. She finally made it plain that she would tolerate — barely — me catching up with Ware, but any contact at all with Linda Ronstadt, including going to see the show for free, even if she and I went together, would almost certainly provoke a savage reaction.

          So, after some disruption when Ware — the West Point Hippie and, it seemed, always the unofficial roadie — moved the entourage from the Hotel Dupont to a suitable suburban motel and checked out the concert venue, he and I went out and about on a bit of what in rural New Zealand is called a tikitour. I took him by request to the Duponts’ Winterthur Museum. He seemed to sympathise with my bedraggled state, but he clearly had problems relating to it.

          He really tried to help by telling me a few obvious truths — such as, for instance,  happiness comes from staying at it — and then apologising for sounding smug. He said he was handling continuing life on the road by checking out museums and by practising his drumming constantly, often on a wood-block, to maintain and increase his level of professional competence. He came to the house for a bite to eat and to meet my wife, and then it was off to the concert for him, and a strong bourbon-and-soda and early to marital bed for me.

          The Ronstadt-and-Browne show played in Washington, DC in late 1973 or early 1974, not long after Gram Parsons died. Ware had heard about a girl named Emmylou Harris that Gram had been hanging out with, but he’d never heard any of her music. He met her in a backstage drink-up there.

          “Playing with women is different, backstage. The backstage people are mostly weird. It’s not groupies. Not even groupies for girls. There were, for instance, all those goddamned months that Jerry Brown was on the road with us. Yeeesh! Jerry Brown, governor of the fucken state of California, and his bodyguards, on the road with us. Sitting around in the back of the dressing room kind of wistfully, with moon-struck puppydog-eyes. I couldn’t figure that shit out.”

          At the end of 1973 the tour took a break and Ware took his wife on a three-week vacation to Ireland. When they returned he received a phone call from Peter Asher, who was then managing Linda, telling him that the Heart Like A Wheel album was done, and it was time to go on the road — first class this time. Ware wondered how the album could be done if he hadn’t played a note, himself.

          Asher told him that Gold, the rhythm guitar player, had played drums on the record, that he’d learned Ware’s drum parts by listening to live tapes, and that he’d played on Ware’s drum set, which he’d taken out of the storage hall because that’s the sound that everybody wanted. Asher was mystified that Ware was pissed off, but he was, and he quit.

          About a week later somebody called him and told him that Ian Matthews, who’d been with Fairport Convention, Matthews Southern Comfort, and Plainsong, was back in LA and was looking for a band. Ware knew him from when he’d been in London with Nesmith, made a couple of phone calls, and took the gig. He moved to New York to play with Matthews’s band, which Matthews was calling Plainsong again. They played in England and New York. Ware enjoyed it, but was still earning about $200 a week, plus per diem, and mailed it all, in cash, to Linda Ware in Claremont from a tobacconist on Third Avenue.

          In late 1974 Ware and Matthews were back in LA, looking to put together another band. They fell to networking the bars and recording studios. Ware ran into an old friend named Bobby Warford, who’d been playing some gigs backing up the Everly Brothers, along with Warren Zevon on piano. After tensions with the Everlies had come to a head (Phil Everly smashed his guitar and stormed off the stage midway through a concert), Coleman started looking for country-rock players to come in and play the San Fernando Valley. A scene grew out of this at the Sundance Saloon in rural Calabasas. It was a fairly small dive, but eventually there were six or so bands playing there each week. Each night had a different band, made up of people from major bands who, when they returned to LA from the road, gathered to play with their gang of Tuesday Nighters, or Wednesday Nighters, or Thursday or Friday Nighters, playing only for beer.

          Ware was in the Tuesday Night band at the Sundance for a few years, when he was off the road. Don Everly was the lead singer, and it included Skunk Baxter, Bobby Warford, John Selk, John Hartford, Sneaky Pete, and Albert Lee. If enough people were off the road there were a dozen people in the band, playing behind Don Everly.

          Meanwhile, Ware and Matthews ran into a songwriter named David Palmer in a bar in Pasadena. Palmer had just finished writing all of Carole King’s Jazzman album. Matthews and Palmer didn’t combine well, but Palmer hooked Ware up with Charlie Larkey, who was Carole King’s husband. Larkey was a bass player, playing with Bobby Keys, the legendary sax player.

          Ware started playing a few nights in bars with Larkey and Keys, and whatever their pick-up bands were — usually some of the loose guys from the LA part of the Rolling Stones’ touring band. Keys didn’t like Ware’s playing style (“too simplistic”), but Larkey liked it, and invited Ware up to his and Carole King’s house. Ware went. Then he dragged a set of drums up there. Then David Palmer started falling by.

          After they’d been up there for a few thousand cans of beer, Palmer started bringing songs up. Then King and Palmer were singing together, and they added a couple more people, and started having auditions for more people, and there was a band going, with a talented keyboard player-singer named Michael McDonald. They moved out of the house and into the Alley Rehearsal Halls in North Hollywood, where they worked hard for several months, calling the band Honor Bright. Ware thought it had more than promise, and that in the studio it was a killer. Lou Adler, King’s manager, was excited and chasing record companies.

          But Honor Bright either just was never meant to be, or didn’t happen fast enough. King seemed to Ware to be losing interest in the band and in Larkey. Then the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers OD’d, and in a panic the Doobies called Michael McDonald and asked him to come join them for the rest of that tour, and he left Honor Bright. After two days of what Ware called “acrimonious snivelling about Michael leaving us,” he ran into one of the roadies from the Linda Ronstadt-Jackson Browne tour at the rehearsal hall. The roadie asked what Ware was doing and he told him. The roadie then told Ware that he was just starting work with Emmylou Harris, and she’d been calling around trying to find out who the drummer was downstairs, because that was the sound she wanted.

          That night Ware got a call at home in Claremont from Eddie Tickner, Harris’s manager. He asked if Ware would like to come play drums for her. Ware mentioned Honor Bright and Tickner told him who else was playing with Harris, all of them people Ware thought were great players. He couldn’t say no. He called Palmer and signed off, and two days later they started rehearsing the Hot Band.

          The first gig the Hot Band played was April 15, 1975 in San Francisco, and Ware’s life changed forever on that night. He was staggered. The playing was hotter than anything he’d ever experienced. When Harris ran out of songs, Rodney Crowell jumped up and sang. They’d never rehearsed. There weren’t any rules. They just played.

          After finishing the first 115-minute show, with another show to go, Ware estimated that he’d probably already lost eight to ten pounds (3-4.5 kg) in sweat. It was all over the floor underneath his drum kit. He ran back behind the curtain and sank to the floor, almost passing out. He looked next to him and saw that Crowell was there doing the same thing. They looked at each other and both said, “Wow! What was that?” And they embraced. Out front, the crowd went insane. Close to three years of what for Ware was the most staggering music possible followed.

          I remember sitting in my dismal little “garage apartment” in San Antonio Texas, where I was eking out a miserable living as a waiter in an overpriced steak house, reading a letter from Ware in which he told me that he had just joined this new outfit called the Hot Band, which was more fun than anything he’d ever done before in his life. They were playing behind some singer named Emmylou Harris. I think I’d maybe heard of the name, but she really wasn’t in my frame of reference. I wasn’t plugged into that stream of popular music in the mid-to-late 70s.

George Dancause; Raúl Gonzales

George Dancause

         In the summer of 1984 I had my teacher certificate, but I didn’t have a job, Dean’s list or not. Maybe it was the old guy-with-a-beard rap one more time. I don’t know. Not performing further with Margaret in Curtis’s erotic video started to look like a mistake. I put out applications almost everywhere and fell into a groove driving at Yellow Cab.

          August was almost over and the teaching job offers were not flooding in. Then one evening my ex-girlfriend Marian, who was a teacher, phoned me. She was teaching out in the Edgewood District, and had, over some after-school enchiladas and beers at a West Side roadhouse, heard one of the principals complaining that he still hadn’t staffed one position: a new thing the state was requiring schools to do called in-school suspension (ISS).

          So the next day I brought my cab back to the depot at noon, climbed into my Toyota, and drove out to the deep West Side. The principal, Ricardo Bocanegra, was well enough impressed by my height and burliness. About my glittering references and Dean’s-list honours he showed little interest. He hired me.

          Edgewood Independent School District was dirt poor. I read somewhere that at the time it hired me, it was the fifth poorest school district in the whole United States. Poverty of that magnitude carries with it a skimpy tax base, which meant that at that time teachers in Edgewood got paid less than teachers elsewhere, but I had a job. The demographic at the school that hired me, Wrenn Junior, was about 90% Chicano and 10% African American, or black, as was the phrase back then.

          The idea behind ISS was that kids who got kicked out of class for being disruptive, or got busted for minor crimes in the rest rooms, would all get sent to a special disciplinary classroom in a modular structure standing free from the main school building, rather than be sent home. Sending kids home on suspension was a bad idea, went the reasoning. Suspended kids were being deprived of school, often had homes where they would be unlikely to have responsible adult supervision during the day, and were likely to spend their days doing burglaries, which the community understandably didn’t appreciate.

          My immediate supervisor and colleague in this enterprise was the assistant principal, George Dancause. He was a big, strong, jolly family man with a round head and a ready smile inside his goatee. Bocanegra clearly went for size for his disciplinary staff. George was from some rural county in deep South Texas near the Rio Grande Valley. When I was telling him about a new machete I’d bought as a weapon in my losing war against some bamboo at a house I’d moved into he responded with a tale about how in his home county people call machetes belduques, since in the nineteenth century they’d all come from the Bell & Duke Foundry in Houston. I still have my hyper-sharpened belduque hanging within arm’s reach of this keyboard, just in case.

          We did morning duty together, trying to maintain some sort of order before the bell rang to get things going. My station was inside the school, in the central hall, keeping an eye on the banks of glass doors front and back. George prowled outside. One of our duties was breaking up fights, which were fairly frequent. George was the first responder; I was backup.

Boy fights were easy. We grabbed the would-be combatants, who had been circling each other throwing shadow-boxing jabs and dire imprecations, from behind until they cooled off. The whole business tended to be a showing of peacock feathers. They rarely struggled much in our grasp. Girl fights were an entirely different matter. Girls wanted to kill each other. I can remember George, who must’ve been a good 115-kg-plus and me, no shrimp, wrestling pairs of skinny 12-year-old girls to the ground and they’d still be pulling out handfuls of hair and applying fingernails to faces until we managed, with difficulty, to tear them apart.

George was full of such job-specific wisdom as grabbing kids caught smoking in the Boys’ room by the wrist and taking a big whiff of the tips of their thumb-and-forefinger to determine by smell just what they’d been smoking there. He also told me that most of the misbehaving at school was by the slower students. ‘Kids don’t like people thinking that their dumb,’ he explained. ‘There’s so much more peer-group status in having a reputation for being bad. I mean, Michael Jackson hasn’t made a billion dollars singing, [here he went into falsetto and a little finger-pointing-into-the-air dance step] “I’m dumb! I’m dumb!”’

          When I married the girls’ PE teacher between my first and second year at the school he told me to put a marble into a jar every time we fucked, and after our first wedding anniversary taking one out every time we fucked, adding that the jar would never be empty.

          So much wisdom in an assistant principal of a small intermediate school in a heart-rendingly poor neighbourhood.

Raúl Gonzales

         Since most of my detainees at In-School Suspension were repeat offenders, I got to know many of them fairly well. Some of them were sad and pathetic, some of them were nasty and sociopathic, some were boringly rebellious, and a few were absolutely charming. One of these was a sort of Chicano Bart Simpson — displaying most of the signs of foetal alcohol syndrome — named Raúl Gonzales.

          Raúl was doing the seventh grade for, I think, his second and third times doing the two years that he regularly visited me at ISS, but he was no dimwit. He had a good deal of sly intelligence that he directed into areas that seemed promising to him. Most schoolwork failed to fit into this category. He lived with his older brother Freddie, who was also in seventh grade on the five-year plan, his father, who ran a conjuntos night club, and a series of step-mothers.

          Whereas Raúl was effervescent, charming, and cheeky, Freddie was quiet, polite, and always respectful, at least in front of me. Freddie was definitely dyslexic, which probably made him feel stupid (whether he was or wasn’t), but I don’t think special help for dyslexia was available for kids like Freddie Gonzales back then. The way of the world required Freddie to spend a good deal of time in ISS, too.

          Whereas Raúl drank this and that and smoked this and that, Freddie wanted to be a bantamweight boxer and lived a healthy lifestyle. After school I could often see him doing roadwork, jogging at a good pace along the road.

          One of the school’s English teachers, a former priest named Carroll Ray, found both Raúl and Freddy to be greatly entertaining. After he showed his classes Reefer Madness as an example of a certain type of movie he told me that Raúl had loved it – thought it was wonderful and wanted to see it again. After seeing another of the movies Carroll had shown them Freddy decided to take on the ring name of Little Big Man.

          They told me that what the kids in ISS needed was structure, so I covered the walls with posters repeating over again the same basic four or five rules: QUIET, and YOU MUST WORK, and FACE YOUR OWN DESK, and ONLY ONE TRIP TO TOILET BEFORE LUNCH, and ONLY ONE TRIP TO TOILET AFTER LUNCH. The ISS room had its own toilet, in a little cubicle back in the far corner from the only door.

          I can’t be sure, but I think that one day Raúl actually sold some dope to another kid in ISS! On the way to and from the toilet. Slicker’n shit and I didn’t catch him, but I think he did.

Al Lavelle

Al Lavelle

          I did my student teaching in early 1984 at a large suburban high school named after Theodore Roosevelt. TR High. Al Lavelle was two classrooms down. He taught world history, Russian, and Japanese. He taught me that a teacher’s best friend is his or her stapler. And I believe him to this day.

          At the time I met him Al was approaching retirement age. He was mostly bald, and what hair he had was white, as was his moustache and goatee. He was shortish and roundish and had weaknesses for skinny cigars and a confection called Gummy Bears. He once told me that, after a certain age, a man’s metabolism slows down, and he grows rounder and rounder until he gets cancer; then he starts to get thinner and thinner, and just about the time he’s starting to look good again, he dies. Al delivered little gems of wisdom like this with an impish smile and Irish eyes that twinkled.

          He told me he’d grown up in a starchy upper-middle-class Irish-American family in Colorado. They’d dressed for dinner. He’d started his career as a pilot when he’d been a teenager in the 1930s. He had, he told me, been involved back then as a bush pilot with an expedition mapping the Amazon River basin. When I knew him he was almost 65 and was continuing to do aerobatics in his microlight at least once a week. He’d been a military pilot of some sort during the second world war and in Korea, and there were still people around who addressed him as Colonel Lavelle, but he didn’t seem to like that.

          He’d had some experience with managing reconstruction with the Occupation in Japan, which is where he’d learnt Japanese. He told me there was even a high school north of Tokyo that had been named after him. After he left the military he’d gone more or less in that direction, and had ended up with the State Department. I think it was the State Department that had him learn Russian. He told me stories about working as a translator of intercepted Russian military communications during the Cuban missile crisis. Russian air force pilots apparently liked to sing bawdy-to-filthy songs to each other over their radios, just for a laugh and probably because they knew the Americans were listening to them.

          He’d then done a long stretch for the State Department in Vietnam, working on village reconstruction and fortification with the hill tribes. It had been what he’d done in Japan, only in a seriously different historical and cultural milieu. But still, he told me, building a wall or a school in wartime Hmong country wasn’t much different from a construction standpoint than it was anywhere. Anyway, he’d learned their languages and cultures and lived with them. He had, he said, accepted wives as presents from grateful tribal villagers, never forgetting his wife and family back in Texas. Well, at least not for long.

          He told me of leaving Hmong country once for home leave. They helicoptered him out to Saigon, put him on a transport to Guam, and then onto a commercial flight for the US. He found himself sitting in a comfortable jet plane high over the Pacific, heading for suburban San Antonio and his middle-class family, and looking down and seeing that he was still wearing all the symbolically-woven bracelets and amulets and so on that signified his relationships with his various tribes and wives. These were things that had been vitally important to him a few days before, and now looked totally ridiculous and out of place. He took them off.

          He did woodwork for creative release — joinery and carpentry. He said he always had. He told me that the key to post-disaster reconstruction work was just knowing how to estimate how much timber, nails, and suchlike were needed to build a certain number of structures. He’d started out his teaching career as a wood-shop teacher; he showed me the photos. Extensive creative woodwork adorned his house at the start of the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio.

          I went out there a few times to be sociable. I remember once he invited me out when his daughter Dawn was there. Dawn was a Navy helicopter pilot stationed on Midway Island. Al was enormously fond of her and proud of her, telling me that she’d always loved challenges, which is why she had such a bizarre job. She was a very good-looking woman, too, and it became embarrassingly clear that Al was trying to set us up, and that Dawn wasn’t having any of that.

          Another time Al took me to the airfield where he kept his microlight in which he did his aerobatics. Then we went to a room he had at another airfield, where they called him Colonel Lavelle, and he showed me various documents and photos and trophies commemorating various stuff he’d done. It was cool, but I didn’t know why he thought I had to see proof of his bona fides; I was gullible enough to take his word for the stories he’d told. Then he showed me an enormous, unedited manuscript of his memoirs. He was concerned that the State Department or somebody in the government would confiscate it. He claimed that it told some truths that had long been hidden. Al had something of an anomaly about him. For all his military-aviation, State-Department-in-Vietnam background, he was, as he put it, a committed socialist and secular humanist.

          Al and I continued to hang out now and again long after I finished at TR, and I enjoyed my visits out to his rancho. He liked to read history so I gave him a book I’d read called The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment. A wedding present he gave when I got married again in 1985 is still the favourite bowl of one of my grown daughters. We kept in touch after I moved to Guam, and he expressed a bit of envy when I told him I was moving to New Zealand, under the mistaken impression that somehow New Zealand was a socialist country, which it never was. Then somehow we lost touch with each other. I saw on the internet that he died in 2008 at the age of 88.

Holly Moe

Holly Moe

          One of my life-long pleasures has been (generally) to interact and (specifically) to joke around with people I run into behind counters and desks and cash registers and so forth. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s relatively painless. And in this way I made friends with a razor-thin young woman taking money at one of the registers at the UTSA cafeteria when I was going to teacher training there in 1983. Her name was Holly Samson and she was a graduate student in the art department, working on an MFA.

          She had a husband, Curtis, who was an officer in the Air Force. He’d joined up because he’d wanted to be a top-gun pilot, but as things turned out he was prone to air-sickness, and kept barfing all over the inside of his cockpit. Pilot trainees have to clean up their own yuck when this happens, so Curtis had washed out of pilot training. He still owed the Air Force some time, though, and since he had a BA in psychology, they assigned him to psychological testing, where he was supposed to be writing multiple-choice items for psychological tests. His quota of items to be produced was, well, small, so he read novels most of the time. I directed novels to him through Holly — at the time I was really big on Harry Crews — and Curtis sent me some strange books back.

          And Holly and Curtis and their MFA friends interlocked with the Chris-and-Florence circle. I started going to some nifty art openings and similar social events. I remember in particular one opening at a new gallery in a run-down formerly industrial area south of downtown – by now I’m sure thoroughly gentrified – at which someone put a few handfuls of magic mushrooms on a plate on the snack table along with the traditional water crackers and brie. Whoopie!

          Holly’s artistic medium was carpets. A glance at the entries about her on the internet indicates that it remained so. By carpets I mean cheap, short-pile carpets, such as a company mindful of costs might install in the offices of its lower-paid clerical workers. She cut it into shapes and used unfiltered ready-made cigarettes to burn lines into it, as if a platoon of clumsy smokers had dropped their smokes onto them and been too lazy to pick them up. She composed these burn-lines into drawings of ordinary things. Fairly recent reviews of her exhibitions reveal that she has taken to using gunpowder, in addition to cigarettes, as a way of burning art into the cheap fibres. To this day I have a Holly Moe runner, into which she had burned a picture of ceramic pots, needing vacuuming on my kitchen floor.

          It was about the time that I started hanging out with Holly and Curtis that I started making hanging sculptures out of flotsam and concrete poured into moulds scooped out of wet sand. I remember the first one I made, in a flat plywood box back by the shed behind Chris’s and my duplex on Claremont.

          Chris and Holly and Curtis stood around as I rummaged around in the sand to see if the concrete had set. It had. Holly reached into the sand to feel how it was and said, “Oh, Richard! It’s hard!”, as concrete is. Amidst general chuckling at the double meaning, Chris offered Curtis a large, evil-looking garden hoe — his favourite weapon — to use if he cared to deal to me. But that wasn’t Curtis’s way. He had a mild-mannered, almost spaced-out, way about him, not what a person would expect from someone who’d wanted to be a fighter pilot.

          Holly and Curtis moved into an apartment over a brake shop on the light-industrial northern fringe of central San Antonio. Major parades, such as the Rodeo parade and the Battle of the Flowers parade, mustered on the street below, which made their easily-accessible rooftop the place to be on such occasions. Getting in was a bit tricky, due to having to go a short way through the brake shop — and the brake shop’s guard dogs, which made it tricky — to get to the stairs to the apartment, but there was a way and people were okay if they followed the procedure. The apartment often stank of cigarettes burning lines into cheap carpets.

          Then, in late 1983, Holly, Curtis, and some of their artist friends took a lease on a nightclub, which they re-did in punk and called the Bone Club. A couple of my concrete sculptures had the honour of gracing the place, one of them over the table where people had to show their IDs and pay the cover to get in. The club had formerly been a gay bar, and they joked about all the AIDS dust they raised when redecorating it. A spaced-out artist lived and worked in the loft overhead. They had a problem, however, in that there was yet another gay bar next door, and the punks and the queers got along poorly, and in the end — after less than a year, I guess — the gay bar bought out the Bone Club’s lease and evicted them. I was getting ready to be a teacher at the time, and didn’t attend the club as often as I would have like to do.

          Apparently feeling on the underprivileged side artistically, Lt. Curtis got stuck into making amateur, artsy-fartsy videos. Chris told me that Curtis dug doing the camera work while Holly frolicked in various bizarre and erotic ways with artist friends in the altogether. One evening I was up there over the brake shop visiting, sharing a toke or two, and a fellow MFA person named Margaret was there also. It was in the summer of 1984 and I had just finished teachers’ college and was looking for a teaching job. Curtis got out a camera and started shooting tape of Margaret and me. Soon Margaret was naked on a chair and I was down to my Levis chewing on the chair leg. Holly stood to one side, making suggestions.

          Unfortunately, I decided that my upcoming career as a teacher didn’t need any video evidence of my moral turpitude, so I decided not to take the plot any further. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t had such an attack of the straights.

          Holly and Curtis were drifting apart. They moved, along with a few of their art-world friends, into an old victorian mansion on the southern edge of downtown that had formerly been the headquarters of some Nationalist Chinese organisation. A semi-circular sign over the front door read, “Chung-Kuo Kuo-Min-Tang”. They rented the place’s ballroom to Sandy Dunne, a friend of ours who had a modern-dance company, for rehearsals. Holly and Curtis took separate bedrooms, but remained friendly.

          Then Holly got a girlfriend: a somewhat hard-faced blonde woman named Judy Bankhead, a not-all-that-distant relative of Tallulah. Judy was much more demonstrably affectionate than Curtis had been, which, as my new wife pointed out to me after they’d been by to visit, Holly seemed to appreciate. Holly and Judy then adopted an extreme high-garlic diet and became detectable by even the weakest nose from several metres. They, however, claimed not to notice the aroma themselves, at least not in regard to each other. Meanwhile, art continued to be created, shows and galleries continued to be opened, and fun continued to be had.

          Curtis finally finished doing his time and left the Air Force. I missed most of that party. He made an effigy dressed in his uniform and burned it. I saw the remains later. The Corfam^® shoes had been almost totally unaffected by the bonfire. He showed me the photos.

          Just before we left San Antonio there was an art opening out at the McNay followed by a bit of a retreat at Chris and Florence’s house in Terrell Hills. Curtis and Judy were getting along all right. My daughter Ruth crawled around under everybody’s chairs. Holly was being Holly, smiling and taking everything with at least one grain of, if not salt, then dried garlic.

          It was after I left San Antonio that I heard that Holly had broken up with Judy and had taken up with a man, who Chris told me was a good sort. Just what Holly needed. Holly and I got back in touch with each other in the mid-90s. We really didn’t say that much in the two or three letters we exchanged. She sent me invitations to her art-show openings. Apparently she’s now living in Bandera, in the Texas Hill Country a bit of a distance from San Antonio. I’m sure her place out there is extremely hip. I’ve read some reviews of her late-90s exhibitions on the internet, noting that she’d taken her work in carpets in new directions, but she seems to have evaporated from digital view some time around the turn of the century.

Jessica Jewett; Joyce Honeychurch

Jessica Jewett

          One of the sleaziest dickheads I’ve ever known was an advertising agency creep who bought an old house down near the foot of Claremont Avenue. When he wasn’t at his agency’s tastefully converted old house on the park side of Broadway, doing sleazy advertising things, he was engaging in the cocaine-and-other-drugs business, or just getting wasted and doing stoned-out things about the house, pretending to be pursuing renovation. From time to time he’d get wasted and go to a bar and maybe get into a fight or something.

Somehow, he obtained a stop-traffic-gorgeous 17-year-old school-dropout girlfriend named Jessica.

          Jessica was six feet tall, slim and stacked, and had abundant blond hair, flashing blue eyes, and a smile featuring what seemed like an amazing number of perfectly configured and blindingly white teeth. It was summer when I met her and she always wore next to nothing, although sometimes she did wear in-line roller skates. She was, of course, usually stoned. More surprisingly, she was also friendly and flirtatious with me. I didn’t know if she was that way with everyone, or what, but I appreciated it.

          We ended up being friends, even long after her affaire with the advertising creep ended. She seemed to think that I was an intellectual, a “beatnik genius”, as she told me once, and she seemed to think I was an adornment of some sort on her scene. She showed me the trophy she’d won at a ping-pong tournament when she’d been thirteen or fourteen.

          I remember one time I was driving her somewhere, I think to a legendary Italian lunch restaurant near the big wholesale produce markets, and she leaned out my car window, flashed her million megawatt smile, and waved – at the world in general, as far as I could tell. At least one male driver slammed on his brakes and several swerved out of their lanes, fucking up traffic in both directions for about a block either way. I was impressed on multiple levels. She could actually fuckin stop traffic.

          I did have one window of opportunity, not long after her break-up with the ad-creep, to consummate the unavoidable lust I continually had for her. I blew it. Drugs. She’d come by my house, and we had begun getting physical for the first time, on my waterbed. I couldn’t believe my luck. Then she told me she had to go meet a girlfriend of hers at some night club out on the Austin Highway, but that if I showed up after midnight or so, I could ‘pick her up’ and take her back to my place. But I was coming down from some substance abuse, and by the time midnight or so rolled around had reached the severely incapable phase of the process; I couldn’t even get my sorry ass out to the car to drive to the club, and that was that.

          And so Jessica blended into the scene. My friend Chris dubbed her “Bimbo Deluxe”. She got a succession of jobs that involved being pretty a lot, such as being a receptionist, and the like. She got an apartment and some beatnik books, and I recommended Bukowski and a couple other books to her. She invited me to little parties at her place, where nothing really went on that I could see.

          She wore a conspicuous gold cross on a gold chain around her lovely neck. When I asked her why she wore religious jewellery, she expressed surprise and said that she didn’t understand what I meant. I pointed out the gold cross, and she said, “That’s not religious. That’s just a cross.” Okay.

          Not surprisingly, one thing I found it almost impossible to do was to say no to her. One time in 1981 or 1982 she roped me into going on a rafting trip down the Guadalupe River with some old friends of hers — from her early adolescence in her old neighbourhood — and I got entirely too drunk. I imagine I behaved below my usual standards. I don’t remember seeing much of Jessica after that.

Joyce Honeychurch

          I was scrambling after drivable cabs while taking a couple of summer school courses in education in 1983. The most interesting feature of finally taking education courses was a sort of friendship I developed with the associate professor in charge of my course in educational sociology, Dr Honeychurch. Joyce.

          Joyce was, I estimated, a few years older than me. How many years I don’t have a clue and wouldn’t even hazard a guess. She had remarkably pale yellow hair, worn in an unobtrusive professional cut kind of close to her large head, and a roundish Central-European face. She had a way of smiling slyly, in which she caught her lower lip with one of her upper teeth which wasn’t exactly straight. She wore no-nonsense, professional outfits. Over-the-knee skirts that didn’t move much when she did.

          Joyce was a real classroom star — an entertainer to be sure — demonstrating many of the things she was saying with physical theatre and good comedy timing. She could, for instance, crawl around on her hands and knees to demonstrate different learning styles, as I recall from her first lecture, when her nose was running from some virus. And I remember her holding off to perfection on the punchline of a story about a company that demonstrated eye make-up in her daughter’s school, using her daughter as a model (“My daughter does have beautiful eyes”), and then tried to use this foot in the door to peddle serious cosmetics to her. Joyce-the-feminist-professional, y’know? The fool. Sly smile.

          She projected a seriously on-top-of-it, intellectually rigorous persona. Early on she made it clear that she was, first and foremost, a Stanford alumna. Not a person to be trifled with, although macho men and the religiously zealous in her classes seemed to be drawn toward challenging her.

          And then, a couple of weeks into the summer session, she decided to join me in the cafeteria when I was in mid-lunch, eating (up until then) by myself. I would have guessed her for a health-food nut, but her tray was covered with a generous quantity of egregiously greasy food. She packed it away like a movie extra, chatting away all the while about this and that. I was honoured.

          We met for chats fairly often over the summer, even went out for dinner once at my favourite Japanese restaurant. She had a son who was backpacking Europe and a daughter in high school. I don’t recall hearing much about the ex-husband, from whence came the catch-your-eye Honeychurch tag, but I did learn that the on-again-off-again boyfriend back in Palo Alto was “an investor” in the Bay Area. And either he or someone else close to her was with something called the Food Research Institute (FRI) at Stanford. Her father’s nickname had been “the Midnight Czech”. She was of course in complete support of gay rights, but the actual mechanics of what went on in gay bath-houses was something upon which she preferred not to dwell. I couldn’t believe that she took me seriously, but I started to take myself a bit more seriously as a result, even if she did make it clear that romance was not part of the programme.

          Joyce was all set to be my student-teaching supervisor, but then she got an opportunity to be a low- (or non-) paid research fellow back at Stanford, and since she’d never liked Texas all that much, off she went. I guess the thing with the rich boyfriend was on-again. Anyway, she told me she thought I should go and be a researcher at FRI instead of becoming a teacher, and offered to write me a killer recommendation, but I wanted a job with a steady income.

          The last time I saw Joyce was in her snug little office at UTSA. She was packing up her desk and shit to send back home to Stanford. She gave me some cards with high-quality reproductions of various pictures by Friedrich Hundertwasser on them. I’d never seen any of his stuff before. She said she thought they looked like they spoke my language, and of course they did. But at the time I was in something of a depression over money, and having to drive cabs instead of concentrating on academic stuff, and I distractedly left without taking them with me. I regretted this when I emigrated to New Zealand and went in search of Hundertwasser’s stomping grounds in the Bay of Islands.

          A Google search on Joyce’s further academic career reveals that it took her to Alaska and the United Arab Emirates before depositing her at Florida Gulf Coast University. She has authored two online home teaching resources about Alaska, Alaska the Elephant and A Geopoem about Alaska. She has semi-retired to North Carolina, where she keeps a hand in as an independent higher education consultant as she approaches 80.