The summer of 1953, just before turning five and going to kindergarten, Danny Fefferman and I - two goofy giddy kids who had played at getting married when we were two - were jumping on the couch in his living room, play fighting - just as our parents did, when he pushed, I went forward, and my front teeth hit the square edge of the coffee table. This caused a big whoop-de-doo. His mama Helen gathered blood soaked me into a big white bath towel which promptly turned into a bright red splotched bath towel. My mom drove up the hill to fetch me and take me to the dentist who put a mask on my face and told me to count backwards from ten, while I breathed in something funny but familiar.
He pulled out those two front teeth and that’s how I got to look so empty faced when we went to pick up brother Mel in Garapata Creek that August, just before he started sixth grade and I started Kindergarten. Mel had been working the trout farm run by Cole Weston’s family; Brett Weston took a photo of toothless me and my freckles.
The other memorable mishap that happened the first week of Kindergarten was a fight I had with Angelika at her house across the way at the top of our dead-end street in Echo Park. I was bolting out the Fox’s heavy oaken front door to run home, when Angelika slammed it catching my pointer finger. So, here comes Edith Fox wrapping me in a big bath towel. With blood all over, and me wailing in her arms, she ran up the flag-stone steps from the Fox house, all along the dirt path, past the Eucalyptus trees with their tiny diamond shaped pods twinkling at me through my tears, past the white wood barricade that marked the end of the street, and across the gravel parking pad toward my house. I could hear the gravel crunching under her hurried feet. She pounded on our front door, which was really the back door, but the only suitable door for opening on account of this house we lived in was made of redwood and glass and the heavy floor to ceiling sliders required strong stomach muscles, two hands on the handle and a foot braced against the frame to pull them open. So, we always went through the more normal hinged door in the laundry area of the kitchen. Edith pounded and rang the buzzer bell, yelling, “Bobbie!” and handed me over to my mother Barbara whose hair was in curlers - this being a Saturday.
Irv King our family doctor was in Inglewood. A long trip. I was used to breathing through pain, once the shock wore off and I knew I wasn’t going to die, so, after my hiccups and jagged breath subsided, mom and I sang all the way down to Dr. King’s office while I held onto the finger in a washcloth full of ice. He met us there and removed the little chip of bone that had broken off inside the tip of my finger. He took off the mangled nail and put a few neat stitches in the side - just like I’d later learn to stitch up my cloth dolls’ feet or arms when the stuffing came out.
My first year of school had a stand out start. It took the other kids two years to catch up to my trend-setting empty face look. They began losing teeth in Second Grade.
My great finger bandage may have been a trend-setter too, because Warren Harris broke his arm jumping off the Jungle Gym that same term, and Glen Gillis got hit by a car and was lucky to come away with only a broken arm from that encounter. They held a competition to see which one of them could get the most people to sign or draw a picture on their casts. I wondered, years later, when Glen’s dad married Warren’s mom after each lost their spouse, whether breaking the same bones so close together in time meant they were destined to become family.
Angelika and I were Blood Sisters. We poked a pin in the tip of one of our fingers and pressed the blood spots together, swearing solemnly forever to protect each other like real blood sisters would. Then we ceremonially buried the pin. We each had one brother and no sisters except each other. Hers was her twin Peter; mine was six years older than I. His name is Melton. We called him Mel.
Mel was king of the hill. We neighborhood kids - including Danny, Warren, Glen, Jeffrey Killen, Peter and Angelika and I would play this game: Mel would hold a blanket by its four corners and swing it as he spun around in a circle trying to catch our legs and knock us down. When all of us were down and holding deathly still, he’d hoist his jeans by the belt-loops and yell, “New Men!” Then we’d all pop up and do it all over again. Why he was always king was a mystery, and only one of the many things I thought unfair as I grew up in post WWII suburban Los Angeles.
For instance, was it fair that all the daddies in our neighborhood were often sick or mad or just plain crazy?
Angelika came running over to our house when she was barely four, crying, “Daddy is sick again.” Her mom had gone to work, and her daddy Don was supposed to be in charge of the twins, but he was “sick” - meaning he’d drunk himself silly. My mom tucked him in bed and brought Peter and Angelika to our house to play until Edith got home.
When I entered first grade, my own mother went to work leaving Daddy in charge of me and Mel when we got home from school. He worked nights at the Los Angeles Times, so he slept most of the morning. Mel took a bus home from Junior High; the twins and I walked two of the five blocks home with Judy Young and Virginia Nakano, then up the rest of Baxter Street along Avon Street and up our steep, steep hill of Avon Terrace to my glass house at the top. The Fox house was down the path, past the white barricade. It looked like a tree house because a HUGE pepper tree was practically growing into the sliding glass door between the living room and the balcony which overlooked a vast expanse of terraced ivy.
When we were all about six or seven, Don rigged up a thick rope around one of the limbs of the old pepper tree so we could climb up on the balcony rail, sit on a big knot in the rope and swing out over the ivy, jumping off into the soft tangle of roots. We’d gallop up the stairwell, through the living room and wait for our next turn. We loved that swing and truly perfected the art of jumping by holding on high up on the rope and not sitting down until the jolt of the slack going suddenly taut was passed. We had contests to see who could land the farthest from the house. We honed our keen eyes to know exactly where the stone curb at the edge of each terrace was hidden by the ivy.
One summer, when we were about eight, little cousin Jimmy Fox came from Maryland to visit. We showed him the ropes, so to speak, of the great swing. Perhaps we knew exactly where the stone borders were, but we didn’t recognize that we’d grown adept and strong of muscle, eye, and judgement over the course of a couple of years, and had survived many near mishaps - skinned knees, blistered hands and the like.
When it was Jimmy’s turn, we encouraged him mightily - the memory of our own first jump so dim that we couldn’t fathom his fear. Brave he was, and not wanting to be a wuss, he jumped. The jolt proved a stunner for his seat, we heard him cry out, but courageously he sailed onward for two or three swings out over the terraces, then he jumped off near the height of his arc. He was really far from the house. Could’ve won our contest. We heard the sickening thud and ran down the back stairs into the yard. There we found him dazed and crumpled. There was a scrape on the side of his forehead, but he was holding his shoulder.
His trip to the doctor and back with Edith in her blue Ford station wagon seemed to us to take a week. The three of us camped out at my house worried and wondering if there was anything else we coulda-shoulda done to instruct him better.
Ultimately, our little black hearts turned on Jimmy and stopped featuring our own guilt in the matter of his broken collar bone. The rope swing had to come down because of him.
Bless Brother Mel’s heart. In one of his more magnanimous moves, he tied a new rope to a a walnut three that jutted out from the hillside that ringed our “South Forty”, which was just a big empty lot of sandstone covered with foxtail weeds. The only problem with this swing was that it was a lot shorter, and instead of landing in succulent green ivy, if you jumped, you landed in sticker weeds. A low branch had broken off jaggedly near the roots requiring care when swinging back , so you wouldn’t gauge your own back on it.
Those hills of Echo Park hold a lot of blood extracted from us - the hard-playing kids they nourished. I wouldn’t trade the harsh realities of those hills with their poison oak, rattlers, scorpions, centipedes, and black widows, nor the grim realities of my household for anything. Both were equally nourishing and equally poisonous. Turning poison into nectar became my life’s work.
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