Learning to Fly

When I was little we lived in southern California, Chula Vista, just south of San Diego. We lived in a ranch style house in a new development along with many other newly affluent middle class. My father was an aeronautical engineer working for Rhor Aircraft. He owned a white 1964 Chevy Corvair Monza, before Ralph Nader made it a crusade to stomp the thing out of existence in order to keep us all safe at any speed. What a crock of shit. I don’t need any goddamn crackpot lawyer setting the ground rules for safety for me. But that’s another story.

We would drive the thing across the border to Tijuana Mexico at least once a month to get haircuts at the old fashioned barber shop that smelled of brilliantine and talcum powder. I’d wait for my turn looking at cheap Mexican crime magazines complete with gory photos, trying to understand the language on the pages, understanding a few words here and there before the barber with the Yosemite-Sam moustache would beckon me up into the red naugahyde covered board that lifted me high enough for the barber to shear off whatever hair I had down to the number 4 or 6 blade length. The whole experience took the better part of a Saturday morning and was one I dreaded, and is probably the reason I no longer cut my hair.

My best friend Steve Warren lived across the gully and we’d made the fields and ditch our domain. On the west side, we dug subterranean forts beneath the old abandoned melon fields that Mr. Iwashita once cultivated, covering them over with discarded two by fours, burlap bags and dirt, leaving a shelf at one end where we’d make a fire over which we’d cook cans of pork and beans, pretending to be warriors. During one particularly dry Santa Ana day, around the time that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedys’ head off a spark from our fire caught the adjacent dry vines and grass on fire. We tried to put it out, Steve and I frantically beating it with an old mildewed piece of carpet we kept inside our lair for creature comfort, stomping and pounding. Steve ran over to their property and turned on a long water hose, but it was too short, and the water just dribbled out of the end anyhow, there was no pressure, as the flames quickly spread across the field resulting in the Chula Vista fire departments response, and a general neighborhood scene. That was the end of our fort days, and our network of hideouts were filled in, never to be used again.

We were good at causing the trouble that only ten year olds can.

Seems like we were always setting things on fire. Fireworks were illegal there in southern California, but we seemed to manage to procure them, usually from Steve’s older brother. We’d pop black cats and lady fingers over by the bamboo stand that grew along the eastern margin of the gully, taking refuge in the drain pipe, where Steve had stashed some old copies of his dads Playboy magazines. I saw my first breasts on the waterlogged pages of those Playboys, wondering what it would be like to actually touch, smell, taste those wonderful appendages on a real life woman. Just the thought made me dizzy with lust.

Sometimes we’d accidentally set this domain on fire, but we always managed to quell it before it got out of control, but not before it left a tell tale smoke column. One day the smoke signal caught the attention of a cop passing by, who immediately investigated and caught us in the drain pipe, loaded us into the back seat of his patrol car and drove us to our houses, which caused another neighborhood uproar, all of the middle class housewives seeing the commotion, coming out into their yards to gawk as the blue clad cop marched us up to our respective parent unit much to our humiliation and their embarrassment.

Damn was I in trouble.

I spent the next several weeks on restriction, but that was OK because I had a balsa wood flying model of a world war one SPAD airplane that I needed to build anyway.

During those years I was a lonely only child, and I spent a great deal of time at the public library there in Chula Vista reading everything from ancient Egyptian history to the history of flight. My hero’s were the early aviators, people like Octave Chanute, Otto Lillienthal, Samual Langely and the Wright Brothers. I dreamed of flying.

Deciding to do just that, I designed rudimentary gliders after the designs of these early pioneers harvesting bamboo from the gully where we once popped fireworks, cutting it into sections with my dads coping saws, bending wing ribs and covering my big flying models with my mothers good linens, starching them to stretch them tight over their gossamer frameworks. Some of the designs flew, some didn’t. Some were wild designs, like the one I attached to my bicycle pedaling wildly down the nearby hill at Sierra Way, crashing before any sort of airborne takeoff could be achieved, smashing the wing and myself in the process much to the amusement of any onlookers.

I was the oddity of the neighborhood, and the other kids mostly thought I was completely stupid, crazy or both. They took to calling me Peter Pan, taunting me every time they saw me, so I began to conduct my experiments in secret in the gully on the hill that ended at the ditch where the bamboo grew. My friend Steve Warren remained faithful, often acting as my assistant, steadying the wing as I’d charge down the slope, trying to get the glider to lift it and myself into the air.

One day we succeeded, but I had no way to control the thing, and apparently the center of gravity was way out of whack, and the thing lifted me up, up into the air, nosing sharply upward in a profound stall, and like Icarus, I plunged back downward, except instead of crashing into the sea, I slammed into the hard ground, severely spraining both ankles, and splintering the glider into a pile of bamboo shards, twisted cloth and wire rigging. Steve was seriously worried as I lay there screaming and writhing, clutching at my swollen ankles which were beginning to take on a life all their own. I finally managed to hobble home, hiding my injuries from my parents and every one else, despite the pain, filled with wonder and awe that I’d actually flown aboard a contraption of my own design and manufacture.

It wasn’t long afterward that some of the older neighborhood kids caught me behind the oleanders separating our house from the neighbors, pinned me to the ground and proceeded to endow me with a “pink belly”, slapping and pounding my bare stomach as I lay there screaming, crying, taunting “Peter Pan, Peter Pan”, in a cruel manner that only children know. When it was over, I composed myself and went home, not mentioning that either, just figuring it was my fate for being different.

But, I never built another glider after that, and it wasn’t long before my father was out of work as the aviation boom of the sixties came to an end, and we moved from southern California.

I gave up my childhood fascination with flying things for many years, until much later when I became an aircraft mechanic, specializing in what else? Structural repairs and airframe fabrication.

Jokes on You

Last night I stopped over at one of my favorite eateries to catch a quick bite to eat. I’ve been way busy lately, and dinner has been an afterthought.

So, we were enjoying a quiet beer and a pizza when some folks I know walked in and the husband immediately said to me; “well looks like we have a new County Judge…..”, “He’ll sure be better than what we’ve got!”

“Oh yea” I said to him. “Well tell me about this guys record, what has he done?”

The guy admitted that he didn’t know.

“Well” he said “he’s gotta be better than what we’ve got” and his voice trailed off.

By this time I was getting irritated. “Just how in the hell can you vote for a person and not know his qualifications, his record?”. “Jeezus H. that’s about as fucking stupid as you can get, are you on drugs or something?”. “I mean, just to get somebody OUT of office?”…”How do you know your guy will be any better, he might be worse.”

“That’s irresponsible”.

I could see the guy shrinking, his wife grimacing. I guess they hadn’t thought of it that way.

Yesterday the fiends of Isla Blanca held a 5th grade like pep rally at the park. “Go Cascos go” they chanted in unison.

Fucking rah, rah, rah.

Well folks, the truth of the matter is that you elected an (as Teddy Kennedy says) unelectable abomination. You didn’t bother to check out the mans credentials, you voted for him just to get your hated opponent out of office.

There was no mandate for Carlos Cascos. No, the mandate was against Gilbert Hinojosa. Because of this you have opened a pandoras box.

You were more concerned with preserving your pot smoking parking lot than the good of Cameron County. You don’t care if this guy is good, bad or ugly…..and as a result of your selfish selfcenteredness, Cameron County will probably suffer a period of chaos and disorganization as the faithful and the faithless battle it out. And there are a lot of innocent folks caught in the middle.

You didn’t give a goddamn about the welfare of this County. Hell, a lot of you only voted here under technicalities, establishing residences in Isla Blanca from Hidalgo County and even other states just so you could protect your vested interest, cheap rent, a good place to smoke dope, your hallowed surf break.

Pathetic bastards.

Do you really believe that this guy will take care of you now that he’s in office? Do you know his track record?

I thought not.

Keep smiling motherfuckers. The joke's on you.

Tom Bell

Obituary here

A glowing testimony to a worthless piece of shit.

What they failed to mention was that he was a white trash, perverted, evil son of a bitch with a hair triggered temper who had no compunction against destroying relationships between fathers and children, eliciting violence, and pounding people in the face with coke bottles….

None the less, I feel strangely connected to this death as he violated me in a way I don’t think anyone ever has. In a rednecked rage, the man took me to the brink of my own death, and it was only by the intervention of God himself that I survived. It is a frightening and fragile part of my own psyche that I only take out on occasion to examine.

I have forgiven him, and tried (and try) to expunge the venom from my own life lest it consume me. My heart holds compassion for his children (daughters), and even his fucked up son who is a one balled, crack cocaine addict with the same penchant for violence as his father had.

I have a harder time feeling sorrow for his wife, who is a manipulative evil cunt, holding the same lack of values and honor as he had. They belonged together.

We all have to answer for the things we do in this life.

A dreadful chapter of this book is closed.

Coca Cola

The trauma shrink said that peoples' minds are like mailboxes; someday I'd fill the mailbox with other mail that could be taken out and examined at my discretion. That this incident would fade like newsprint on an old paper.

It was a sunny Sunday day in February, I had returned the previous evening from a five or six day trip to southern Mexico, Colima and Michoacan doing some undergrad work in petrology, vulcanology, some required classwork for a degree in geology. I returned to find my world turned and twisted like the broiling lava flows that I had been mapping for a week.

When a child smiles at you for the first time, when you see their newborn face, the whole world is right, the awesome responsibility is worth it. You are complete as an adult.

This child would never see the world. It ended it's life as a 12 week old fetus, sucked down some ungodly drain in some unholy charnel house while I was gone. Neat and tidy, the entire cost paid for by plastic credit card, provided by caring Christian neighbors.

I did not understand.

We argued.

She left, went down the street to those caring Christian neighbors.

I needed to know.

I drove down to the end of the street where they lived, knocked on the screen door which was open.

No answer.

Like a fool I stepped inside and called her name. No answer.

Then like a whirlwind, big, fat four hundred and fifty pound Tom Bell flew down the stairs as if jet propelled.

I tried to ask him where she was, but before I could get a word, maybe two out, he sucker punched me, and I crumpled to the wooden kitchen floor on my back.

Equally as fast, he was suddenly sitting on top of me, pounding my head into the dirty floor, as if hammering a nail. He was cursing at me and spitting in my face. I did not understand.

I was clawing and scratching, trying to breathe as the weight of his grossly obese body pinned me to the floor.

With uncontrolled rage in his eyes he screamed at me, fleshy contorted face inches from mine; "Why did you have to bring up the abortion?"

We struggled as I tried to break free.

Somehow, he managed to turn me over. I saw his thick arm snake out, near the base of the water cooler, where a stack of glass coca-cola bottles were. He grabbed a bottle, and as if in slow motion, closer and closer to my face it came.

I could read the logo.

I knew I was going to die.

The bottle hit me square between the eyes, and it was as if someone had turned on a faucet of red. Blood poured from my nose in a frightening stream.

Then the bottle came again, only this time I did not feel the whack, I only heard it, a squishing, wet sound of cartilage and bone shattering.

Oddly, I felt myself being handcuffed, but there were no police?

The bottle came one more time, and I disappeared into a netherworld of crimson, drifting vaguely away, detached and musing that if this really were the end, than there truly was an oxymoronic state between violence and the peace.

Then I saw other people standing there, I heard my oldest daughter screaming hysterically: "leave my Daddy alone!".

And someone else was there too, I recognized her.

And then I heard her say, emotionless: "That's enough Tom…."

I could sense the handcuffs being taken off, and I was pulled roughly by the hair to my feet, shoved toward the door.

All I could think to say, to tell him was; "I'm going to kill you".

Somehow, I managed to leave, get in my car, and drive home, knowing that this was the end. I tried to clean myself up best I could. I held my young son in my arms, tried to comfort my little daughters who had been at the house alone.

Soon the police arrived, and took the kids. I could not understand why, but did not argue.

I knew this was the end.

Tom Bell went to church that Sunday morning along with his family, even sang in the choir.

I went to the hospital.

There's a lot more to the story, hell, I even ended up victorious winning court battles, winning damage money from the fat fucker, but to what end?

Needless to say, I never did kill him, in fact I forgave him (in my heart), sent him on his proverbial way. Doesn't mean that I'd eat dinner with him, or even acknowledge his life or death, just that I'd no longer destroy myself with the awful burden of that day.

The trauma shrink was right, I eventually replaced the images, filled the mailbox with other, happier mail. But not before several years of flashbacks to that awful day, which robbed me of time and space as I tried to finish struggling through college (I eventually did).

So when I hear that abortion is simply a private matter for the woman involved, I think back to that day and want to tell them that it's bullshit.

Trans Fat Free Island

Well those jokers who identify themselves as the South Padre Island Board of Aldermen (and gals) are at it again according to inside information.

On Wednesday night the hot topic of discussion was whether to designate the Island a “Trans Fat Free” borough. Extraordinarily pressing issue.

I don’t know what the motive is behind this ridiculous waste of time, but I can just see it now, undercover City investigators showing up at the Palmetto, Jesses, the Seraton with sample kits….maybe a SWAT team, headed up by Dewey Dickwell busting into kitchens to make sure they only use cholesterol free oil. No manteca here folks.

Talk about micro-managerial. These guys really crack me up....

But wait....maybe I got it wrong, maybe they mean fat free transients? What are they gonna do, weigh everyone coming over the bridge? Pepper them with 20 questions "excuse me sir, but do you live on the island?", "when was the last time you consumed Mexican food?".....

Or perhaps they mean endomorphic transvestites? Seems a little more plausible, keeping in line with the Islands sense of tolerence for "alternative" lifestyles. Maybe they need to check each and every cross dresser for the proper amount of body fat? Don't want any fat queens ugly-fying the landscape.

.....OK so here's what I'm gonna do littleman. I'm gonna head over to the Radisson and start out with a couple of king sized shrimp cocktails, followed up by a great big goddamn 48 ounce porterhouse steak fer Chrissake, never mind the friggin shrubbery, just bring me some greasy onion rings, that'll suffice for veggies. I'm gonna tell the management that I'm doing it to honor these jerkoffs new silly assed resolution.

Hell, if they really wanted to trim the fat they'd get rid of do nothing douchebags like Dewey Dickweed and Cate Ballsack....