.
LEAVING HOME AND GROWING OUT OF SCHOOL
FFFF99
The first part of this needs to be written
>103109<
The stuff below is here just to get my bearings - it is unsuitable for public reading, so read it
>103109<
After School – And I Don’t Mean Three O’Clock
“After school” used to mean getting home just in time to watch American Bandstand. After being tossed out of school, however, I was quickly tossed out of the family home and for that matter the family, too. The day I weas kicked out is easy to remember. After spending an afternoon doing whatever I was doing, I returned "home" to the Center Street house and found my possessions piled up on the front stoop, next to the beautiful Bouganvilla. I I was homeless. Much later, I would find a garage room to rent over on Elden Avenue, just a couple of blocks from Orange County Airport (now John Wayne Regional Airport) and less than that from where some years before a single-engine plan had crashed into a front yard tree, firing aluminum shards into the nearby house.
I'm acturally very confused about when I started working at the Jolly Roger at Harbor Center. I know I worked at the Balboa Island location when I lived on Elden Avenue, and yet I think I was working at the Harbor Center store after meeting Marge and the girls (see below). Let's just put it this way for now: however I tell it, I was there when it happened but I don't know where I was when whatever happened. That's partly why this book is called Lies Lies Lies A True Story. It's all true, but the facts are often hard to pin down.
But until Elden Avenue, whenever that was, I was without a real address. My friend Jean Kozinski leaved near Center Street and she asked her parents if I could stay there for awhile. I don't remember much about it, except that even though Jean and I got along well and enjoyed listening to records and playing board games with the rest of her family, it was strange.
It would not be long before I would move on. After all, I was earning about $45.00 a week from Jolly Roger. That would help. I went back to Center Street to pick up that first after-out paycheck which had been routinely mailed to me there. When I asked mom for the check, she handed me an envelope. It was a bill totalling just over $90.00.
I can't itemize it from here but the mom summarized it for me (it really was an itemized bill!). "We had to repaint your room." And something about fixing a tear in the couch. Something about this and something about that. They had to repaint my room because when the removed the album covers that I had taped to the walls, the paint peeled off with the tape.
I still bussed tables [1], scooped ice cream and washed dishes at The Jolly Roger on Balboa Island (most of us Cranfield kids worked there at one time or another because Cecil had worked there right after we moved to Costa Mesa from Laguna Beach, and he remained connected). The bicycle commute was a real effort—racing the clock and cringing in traffic along Newport Boulevard, 8 miles to and 8 miles from, by day and by night. A new “JR” opened in Harbor Center (a pre-mall mall), and soon I worked there for a month or two.
>103109<
My favorite record store was in Harbor Center, which had moved to this big new shopping center from the old place that was just around the corner from the Center Street house, where the first Brown’s Applicance Store used to be. Since I was working at the Jolly Roger in Harbor Center which, by the way was across the street from the Kona Lanes bowling alley, I’d visit the mom and pop record store almost daily days to buy ‘folk music’ by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary, Kingston Trio, Highwaymen, Yarboroughs, Roof Top Singers. Along with the usual top forty stuff that drove my inner motor wild with fun. I know, everybody, Dylan and Baez had records out, too, but gimme a break. This was Orange County, California! It was bad enough that I was one of the few kids in my school who had records by Etta James, Dinah Washington and Little Richard, let alone beatnik music. Wasn’t it the Mesa High School choir director who lost a month-long lobbying battle and finally let us sing Moon River from that ‘scandalous’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie? It was Peter, Paul and Mary who gave Dylan his first hit, their cover of Blowin’ in the Wind. And I was more PPM than BD and I would one day far in the future develop a real aversion to JB.
It was during a Harbor Center hang-around that I noticed a man following me. He was wearing a red cardigan sweater, gray slacks and, most disturbingly, red socks. I could tell he was stalking me. Then, as I strolled along the perceived safety of the sidewalk in front of J. C. Penny's, a station wagon pulled up alongside me and the woman who was driving hollered, “You’re Paul Cranfield, aren’t you.” Yes, I was, but how did she know.
Marge and her Girls
Marge des Jardine knew everything about one thing—teenagers in trouble. She knew a lot about lots of things, but this was her life. She had a foster home for girls, and had been the target of gossip forever. She practically kidnapped me that day, and by evening I was drinking my first-ever cup of coffee and whirling in conversation as part of ‘the court’ at Marge’s kitchen counter. Clarice, Emily, Altha and Peggy were the girls now in her charge. The typical foster home consists of a stable, married couple who would care for however may wards-of-the-court the home could reasonably handle. The state or county government would pay x-amount of dollars per month per child. For most kids, foster home is a station on the way to the age of consent, at which time the kids are out on their own. For others, it is the only safe harbor the juvenile justice system can offer a youngster until such time as they can be returned to their own families, or parts of families. My own experience as a ‘foster child’ is taken up elsewhere herein. The girls now at Marge’s were but four of the hundred or so girls that Marge would foster for weeks or months at a time. As is the case with nearly all foster homes, the charges therein were from rent-asunder homes.
The kids had either been runaways or in other ways their behavior reflected the dysfunctional American family. If any were sociopaths, it would be for courts to decide, far off in the future, when a cut from an ugly moment in childhood would transmogrify into the horrible consequences of the psychopath—having only scar-tissue to guide their emotions. Yes, I’m “talking like Marge” used to talk. And that was in the days when psychopathic behavior was treated in mental institutions instead of in the daily news.
Marge had a husband, John, and a son, Bill. But she was the center of the house. She made the community happen. John gave the community muscle, and he gave Marge all the love and support that she needed. John always grimaced but never grinned. When boyfriends or families or policemen brought tension into the home, John was the muscle, and that muscle always won out. He was an Orange County Marshall and moonlighted as a security guard at a boat building firm in Newport Beach. Bill was another story: a big, clumsy, smarty-faced brat. Because John worked those two jobs, the usual ‘household’ consisted of Marge, Bill, the girls, hangers-on and visitors.
It was easy for kids to communicate with Marge. She was in her own way rebellious, and ultra observant of the teenagers’ world. You always felt that Marge was on your side—even if your side was not exactly straight-and-narrow. Her openness belied the deeply conservative nature that Marge inherited from a long family line of law-and-order personnel. Indeed, her uncle was a designer of the Federal Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
I remember Clarice because her family came bursting in one night to take their daughter home. Emily’s a name I’ve made up for the girl whose name I forgot, who threw a glassful of milk on my head to put out what she thought were flames in my peroxided ‘surfer’ hair which’d caught fire—singed, actually—when I leaned too close into a stove to light an ever-present cigarette.) Altha is remembered for two big reasons: first, she was a lesbian and from a pretty well-to-do family, and second, she introduced me to her brother, Tommy, who lived on Balboa Peninsula where shortly after meeting him I’d be renting a room and finding out that there were ‘gay’ people all over the place. People who listened to Billy Holiday records and Nina Simone’s newest stuff. People who could get you into a bar for a drink no matter how young you looked. And Peggy? We’ll all get to know her now.
Peggy Noden
Peggy Noden was more than from-a-rent-asunder-home. Her new Corvair was the cheap compensation paid by her mother so that she could take Peggy’s baby with her to Clearwater, Florida. Forever. Peggy was Wendy and Wendy was Chatasma Cactus, the never famous East Village Poet who really did love her leopard-skin pillbox hat.
Peggy and I became instant friends, partners in crime, terrorists, lost souls, victims of a world run by adults of all things. Now, in spring of ‘62, I’d cross the USA twice, by thumb, and though we would part now and then, our lives would be in synchronous orbit until her last “I love you, Stormy, good-bye” in 1967. Those five years seemed like 10--now, and when they were happening. I always thought I’d known Peggy for 10 years, but it was ‘only’ five. It’s hard to believe how many lives we lived in those eccentric orbits by which ordinary time is stretched and turned like fine-wire springs.
Peggy’s daughter Lisa was a year old when Peggy’s mom, Elizabeth, decided (with a little help from the courts) that it would be best if Lisa moved with her to Florida. Peggy’s mom had possession of a brand new Corvair, too. And Peggy’s psychiatrist had possession of Peggy’s innermost thoughts. According to her mom, “everyone knew” that Peggy was not only a communist sympathizer, she was barely able to manage her own life, let alone take care of a child.
But the Corvair, well, she could take care of that. And the Corvair became our soap-box. We careered around the whole county in that black car. At one point we had butcher-paper banners taped to either side of it, emblazoned with S-A-A-M, which stood for our Society Against Adolescent Maturation. We would make up foreign languages as a ploy to panhandle money from innocent bystanders. We’d go door-to-door collecting empty bottles so we could cash them in for gas-and-cigarette money. We spent one afternoon at Whittier Center (a shopping center that was almost a mall), where I played the role of a mentally retarded boy in the company of his nurse and where we got chased from the place by a security guard who caught us attracting a crowd around our toy roulette wheel that we were ‘playing for pennies.” Peggy’s interaction with the guard caused him to exclaim, “you’ve got the mind of a ten year old,” to which Peggy responded, “My psychiatrist said I have the mind of a twelve year old, so there!” Her favorite book at the time was “Last Babylon” a gothic science fiction tale about the end of civilization, when all the world’s mineral wealth had been exhausted and salt was the most valuable commodity. One afternoon, while doing our empty bottle hunting in a very new Costa Mesa subdivision, I drove the car while Peggy sat on the hood and hollered for whoever in that ghost town could hear, “Save salt! Sin while you can!” It meant nothing then, really, and nothing now. Just a silly rallying cry. It was one of the ways we had fun.
And Drugs
No, I didn’t take drugs back then. I was somehow some kind of innocent. But Peggy’s doctor had her on Librium, and through Ronnie, the father of their child, she could get her hands on reds (Seconal), yellows (Phenobarbital) and green or white amphetamines. One of the boys she was seeing when we first met had dumped her because of all the pills she took. (“They really make you unstable, you know....”) Being dumped really freaked her out. We went for a drive to Newport and back, and suddenly she pulled over, got out of the car, threw all of her pills into the street, and then immediately started running into traffic in hopes of retrieving the things! That really freaked me out bad. Until that moment, I’d never really been afraid of someone’s independent behavior. Never cried because someone else was having a hellish time. There I was, running into the street after her and pulling her back from the traffic. She wailed in despair over the thought of never seeing her baby again, or was it about the lost pills. Both were important, but there was no way she could properly care for a child. She frequently walked into the traffic. And, as hairy as those moments were, we were also having extremely precipitous fun. Having a lot of fun together in hell. Soon the crises would pass. POeggy did have a psychiatrist but I don't know if he prescribed pills or if she got them all from Ronnie's black market on Pico. Probably some of both.
But Peggy wasn’t so crazy as to rely on “shrinks” alone to find more pills. The obvious signal that Peggy had been around was the simple fact of being deferred by California’s system of Juvenile Justice to Foster Care instead of being locked up in a California Youth Authority Correctional Facility. That she had given birth out of wedlock was another pretty obvious sign that this teenage girl was not too well assimilated into her peer group.
In lieu of her doctor’s perscription, Peggy was able to make an adventure out of finding drugs elsewhere, adventures that were not without considerable emotional risk (not to mention the more dangerous risk of winding up in the back of a police car).
Pico Boulevard and the Yellow Brick Road
Pico Boulevard in East L.A. where Peggy's Ronnie Lived
East LA—it was always a tuff neighborhood. But in 59-62, when me and my best friend would drive up Whittier Blvd and over to Pico looking for Ronnie, the handsome, tattooed father of Peggy’s little Lisa Marie. Ronnie would almost always have a red or yellow downer or a white-cross tab or a green-and-white christmas stree upper. And maybe if the tide had been just right, he’d have some pot—always in the form of a “stick”—a skinny tightly rolled marijuana cigarette. When Ronnie could be found, Peggy would soon be wishing she was his girl again. And when Ronnie could not be found, we’d split for someplace else—usually south and home again, but once in awhile, west, through East L.A. and eventually over to Manhattan Beach. I always held a silent prayer, hoping Peggy would want to take that leisurely ride and, in the bargain be lucky enough to cruise through El Monte just in time to catch the crowds of teenagers fill the streets as they left one of those record hops we’d hear announced on the radio. Then through Pico Rivera, Norwalk, Eagle Rock; back streets, drum beats.
On those nights when my friend could hear my silent prayer she would drive slowly by and through those lucky, luckless teenagers-in-love, and I could stare into the crowds, beyond the crowds, where I would always see him, that special one, my Prince in blue jeans. Prince or no, we’d back-street, skirting downtown Los Angeles enroute to that County’s share of Pacific Coast Highway 101. Cruising a circuit that would take us through towns that wore a “beach” appendage: Long Beach; Redondo, Hermosa, Manhattan, Sunset, Seal. And into Orange County: Huntington, Newport and Laguna. South of Laguna, the “beach” rule falls apart: San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Oceanside, San Diego.
One destination would be Manhattan’s Insomniac, a ‘beat’ coffee house set amidst hamburger stands, summer houses, ancient beach-front motels and beach equipment rental shops (folding wood-and-canvas chairs or lounges, inflatable surf riders, bicycles, roller skates and such). Peggy knew the Insomniac from her Ronnie days—and because she was a poet first, and, second, because she was considered either a radical communist or insane by everyone who wished she was ordinary. The Insomniac was made for people like Peggy.
Those travels would help seal our friendship and form, as if from some strange medium, a kind of sculpture that would be a fountain of our friendship. Our travels together, and our individual journeys which led us to and fro for five wonderful, painful, extraordinary years.
By the end of 1962 Peggy was in Florida. Between then and 1966 when we would be together again, we wrote long letters. Tomes. She likened me to “The Saint” (a tv series). To me, she was nothing special. Only my only friend.
Peggy had certain goals. Here are some of them: name a real popular shade of lipstick; be published in Readers
Digest; be published in The New Yorker. She wrote reams of poetry and mad short stories: about clicking heels and snapping fingers; about God up in heaven, coloring in his coloring book, wishing he could keep within the lines; occasionally turning his attention to a prayer machine that looked more like a pinball machine than anything else. He would pull back a handle and “a perfectly formed diamond sphere” would meander—“yes” or “no” or “maybe” or “contact my son, Jesus, on earth - he’s in a street-side phone booth somewhere, trying to get through to me. Maybe it’s you he wants to call.” (Naturally, I only manage here to remember the least of her work. When she passed away, I went into shock, and disappeared.) One thing I remember well: I was never a cynic when Peggy was alive. I was in awe of her.
Next time we met was in 1965, when she was a patient in the Florida State Hospital at McEleny. James (Elliott Roosevelt) Newton drove me down there from Boston to visit. But I was not a “relative” and she could not leave the ward to visit. We shared a few greetings through a hall-door window, the kind with chicken wire sandwiched between thick panes of rippled glass. She was having shock therapy, a procedure used commonly in many places back then, but well out of favor in such jurisdictions as California, Oregon, Massachusetts. Shock therapy is supposed to stifle a patient’s excited reactions to memories and events. Our visit was cut short by the stern reminder that non-relatives were not allowed to visit loved ones who happened to be hospitalized; that in five minutes I would be considered a trespasser on state property. Luckily for everyone, there would be a few zillion happy bumps in our road ahead.
In 1967, death released Peggy from the goals and dreams that propelled her forward like water splashing away when you flick at it with your fingertips as you sit along the water’s edge, talking or perhaps, idling alone. She was pregnant. She wanted the baby, but knew there would be a battle for it, and she knew she would lose. Her mother had won custody of Lisa, and her mother would win again, determined that Peggy could never raise a child, not in that splashing-forward world she knew. There were no abortion clinics, no family planning centers. What young people knew of birth control they learned only from their peers who’d “been around,” or from parents who were wise beyond the norm. Peggy decided things on her own. And 100 or so phenobarbital or whatever, made her decision final. Our fountain of friendship was gone.
Life Goes On Drugs
Peggy was the first person I knew who used drugs recreationaly, but certainly not the last. And by the start of 1966 there would be many more. Unlike the days with Peggy, though, I would share the drugs, not simply watch, in unconscious awe, as others used and abused all manner of drugs—legal, illegal, experimental.
A November 1965 issue of Life Magazine featured as its cover story the phenomenon of LSD, its sister publication, Time, having asked “Is God Dead” a year or so earlier. On January 6, 1966, knowing little more than what Life chose to tell about it, a quizzical quartet-plus-one decided to take the plunge and experiment. We bought the best LSD in town—from the same labs that mixed it up for Dr. Leary at Harvard—and made ourselves comfortable in the Marlboro Street apartment, much to the dislike of George, who came home, took one look around, and promptly made plans to move out.
Our real leader was Ronnie. She was curious but cautious. She would not take any of the drug herself, at least not yet, but would play the role of monitor: observe, take notes, whatever, and leave the “trip” to Billy and me. There’d be no point in telling one of those “acid trip” stories, so I won’t, except to say we had fun. Ronnie freaked out a couple of times because she couldn’t relate to my ability to see through Billy’s flesh. Suffice it to say, with innocence as our protector, we “tasted music” and enjoyed all the psychedelic wonders that was the recreational pleasure of LSD: enhanced color, sound, touch. The greatest thrill came in the morning after that night, when we left the apartment for the first time, walking into a brilliant white snow storm on our way to the store, where our senses tasted the foods that were sealed in jars or cans. Talk about cheap. We didn't have to buy to try.
That first weekend of 1966 would be followed by many more, with Ronnie joining in soon enough and, inevitably, with a bad experience thrown in now and again, just to make us think twice, but not enough to make us stop. Just as inevitably, too, there came the eventual curiosity about other drugs; due as much to curiosity as to bumping into less savory people who came and went at the edges of the early acid scene -- people who abused, rather than used. And it would be the unfortunate fate of many to get caught up in this off-center sub-culture group. Then would come the downers again, and methamphetamine, and needles. Madness. And death.
>103109<
FOOTNOTES
[1] see chapter JOBS
.