August 9, 2005 – Getting to Know You, Again

August 9, 2005 – Getting to Know You, Again

A Continental Airlines Flight out of SFO brought me back home to El Paso on Saturday, December 3rd, 1966. My high school buddy RA had driven me to the airport from San Jose. For the past week, I had been camped out in an apartment RA shared with a couple of San Jose State college students in their senior year. The three of them had a fondness for The Monkeys TV Show as I recall. The highlight of my week with RA and his friends was my 21st birthday, which we celebrated at midnight on November 29th--I turned 21 on November 30th. I had also submitted my resume to a number of employers in the area hoping to land a job so I could stay in the area, my one major hope was IBM with the large facility on Cottle Road where I presented myself and requested an employment application, which I completed and returned to the human resources representative. She told me that I would receive a letter within a month that would arrange a time for me to take a test the company administered to all applicants. I explained that I would be in El Paso during that time and she had me add that information to the application. Not to worry she assured me as IBM has an office in every city and I could take the exam at any one of them. Though I took the test and nothing came of it, this would begin my long-term relationship with the IBM Corp. that continues to this day.

Leaving San Francisco on my return flight to El Paso left me with a heavy heart. I was leaving a place I really wanted to be, for a place, that five and a half years ago, I had sought to leave. It was the summer before my junior year in high school and I asked my parents if I could drive my Vespa scooter—top speed 50 miles and hour with one person aboard—with RA out to California. I had saved money from my paper route and he and I would spend the summer with his sister and brother-in-law. RA had taken the Greyhound bus to California the summer before and was planning to do so again unless I could give him a ride on the Vespa. As you might imagine no parent in their right mind would have permitted such an unsupervised journey, nor would RA's parents consent to him riding with me either. It was a great disappointment that took me the summer to get over. My disappointment was aggravated when RA returned in the fall and told me what a great time he had with his newfound girlfriend. Hayward, California where RA’s sister and husband lived had everything that El Paso lacked. They got all the top 40 songs before us. They got the best movies, the best clothes, the best dances, everything before we did. That’s where everything was happening. El Paso was where everything that was happening came, to stop happening.

I would leave El Paso the following year. My father was stationed at Ft Lewis, Washington, a sprawling Army base just south of Tacoma, Washington and we moved from El Paso the summer of 1962, the start of my senior year of high school. My sisters and I had been wrenched from familiar places enough in our earlier lives that one more move was no big deal. Each time, you got over your feeling of loss quicker. It was tough but in the end each wrenching made us better able to handle much of the grief everyone feels in his or her life. I joined the Navy after graduating from Clover Park High School, in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood, Washington. I had begun smoking as a sophomore when I was in El Paso, a pack every couple of days of Marlboro cigarettes. RA my good buddy had brought the habit back from California right after his first trip and it was required to be cool. Just before I graduated high school I told my dad, a pack-a-day smoker, that I had taken up the habit. He said if that was what I wanted to do then I should do it, but it wasn’t good for me.

When I left the family in Ft. Lewis, I never thought I would be returning to El Paso, but here I was flying back nearly five years later. I knew I couldn’t go back home, but I needed to return to reclaim something I felt I had lost when I left. After seven months back home I realized that I had lost my innocence and I would never be able to find it again. In that period of time, beside working and going to school, IM and I had continued the correspondence we had carried on while I was in Japan and she was in Australia. She had gone there to be with her sister and her family after I left her on Long Island in 1965 when my 5-month assignment for the Navy ended. She was returning from Sidney aboard the SS Oriana arriving March 21st, with ports of call in Auckland, Suva (Fiji Islands), Honolulu, British Columbia, and into San Francisco. I told her I would meet her and bring her back with me to El Paso. At the time all we wanted was to see one another again. I had bought a used yellow 1965 two-door Chevrolet Corvair Monza. I left right after work on Monday March 20th and started heading west on Interstate 10. The plan was to drive straight through and arrive in San Francisco, Tuesday when IM’s ship docked in San Francisco. Impatient and impetuous as a 21-year old can be, I pushed the Corvair relentless, reaching speeds of 85 miles and hour, which was pretty fast back then because the highway patrol was far more vigilant for speeders than they are now. But my recklessness put me in Blythe, California just as the sun was rising Tuesday morning.

However, everything comes at a price and for me the price was the Corvair’s engine. The sunrise imbued with renew energy and I-10 from Blythe to Desert Center was straight as an arrow and with hardly any traffic. I put the accelerator down and kept the car right at 80 miles and hour, passing what few cars were on the road. About 15 miles beyond Desert Center I started to pass an 18-wheeler when the Corvair’s opposed six-cylinder air-cooled engine lost power and I was forced to give up the effort to overtake the truck. I fell in line behind him and pulled over to the side of the highway. Without turning off the engine, which was causing a noticeable vibration, I lifted the lid on the rear engine compartment and watched the engine shaking. I had to have thrown a piston. I got back into the car and pulled slowly onto the highway and proceeded on to Chiriaco Summit, where there was a service station with a tow truck. The mechanic on duty took one look at the engine and told me it had to be taken to a garage; the closest of any size was in Indio 30 miles further west.

I dropped the car at a Chevrolet dealership that told me it would take a good week to get the parts and repair the engine. I left the car, found a Greyhound Bus Station and hopped a bus heading for San Francisco. It took me all of Tuesday and half of Wednesday to finally make San Francisco. I knew the city pretty well from having lived there four years earlier. I walked from the bus station to the Embarcadero Road where IM’s ship was docked and found her in her stateroom. If only we could have stayed a few days aboard the Oriana before starting the journey back, it would be wonderful. But, life doesn’t work that way. The Oriana was about to leave for LA and IM’s stateroom would be host to another passenger. We had to gather her belongings and be on our way. A cab took her luggage, a wonderful black 30-in. long by 16-in. wide, and 16-in. high steamer trunk with two latches on either side of the lid and a lock in the middle. It had a couple of steamship luggage labels pasted on the sides too. We checked the trunk through to El Paso and bought two tickets to Los Angeles where we were invited to spend the night with my sister SA, her husband BA, and my nephew GA. The bus was departing at 9:00 getting into LA late morning on Thursday March 23rd. From there we would then continue on to El Paso. We had several hours before our bus was to leave so IM and I walked about San Francisco trying to visit as many of the tourist spots as was possible in such a short time: Union Square, Nob Hill, and a stroll through China Town. We capped our brief visit with dinner at Tad’s Steak House then walked back to the bus station for the trip south.

The bus we took from San Francisco to Los Angeles was a local and it must have stopped at a dozen cities in the Central Valley of California before pulling into LA, where my sister and family collected the two of us just after noon. If you want to test the strength of a relationship, spend a night together on a Greyhound bus. When we arrived at my sister’s place we had a chance to clean up and eat a proper meal. All I can remember about that night was a warm meal, a good night’s sleep, and the kindness of my sister and her husband toward IM and me. When our short stay was over the evening of Friday March 24th, the three of them drove us back to the Greyhound Bus Station in LA for another night trip into the desert of Arizona, New Mexico and on into El Paso. Being in the back seat of their car, I remember marveling at the endless expanse of freeway we traveled between Long Beach and LA.

By now, IM and I had gotten used to the cramped confines of the Greyhound bus and managed to sleep slightly better than on the first leg of the trip. This was aided by the bus not stopping and the interior lights not coming on every couple of hours. The following morning, we made one stop for breakfast, though for the life of me I can’t remember where, before getting back aboard and heading on into El Paso. We arrived in El Paso in the late afternoon on Saturday. My dad came to collect us at the Greyhound Bus Station in El Paso. IM’s trunk was already waiting for us. The two of us had made a difficult trip together and were still speaking to one another. It was a good sign that maybe we could get along.