After High School

After getting out of high school, by that time I was not under constant ridicule by my older brother.  He had done like everyone else.  To move up in the world you leave San Antonio.  Move up in the world.  Is that what you call it when you leave a low wage paying city and move to a higher wage paying city?  He was still punching a clock.  Anyway, at that time, if one wanted to make more money, they would leave for Houston.  It's like not living at home, but your still within driving distance.  So, I was less apt to be ridiculed on a daily basis now.  Yet, I was still getting my feet wet on how best to approach women.  After a funky job here and there, I finally landed a job at the world's large insurance company in San Antonio.  It paid more than any other job I had found there.  It was also a place to have a real smorgasbord as described in The Train Runs No More.  At the time, it was probably seventy-six percent women and twenty-four percent men.  I had a hard time working there because there were so many good looking women there.  Most would wear clothes that they couldn't afford on the salary that they made.  Many were there in search of a husband.  Others were there to have more than their share.  Every once in a while, I would go down to the parking lot on my break time or lunch time.  I would see a car with a couple inside hammering it out.  Either the husband wasn't getting enough at home and find some extra there, or the wife wasn't too happy at home and she was giving some away at work.  Doesn't matter the situation, the smorgasbord was there, and a guy could take a real advantage of it if he wanted to.  The parking lot was nice and dark in places like a cavern, completely full, and rarely checked by the over paid security force there.  Plus it was convenient.  You could meet a woman there, take her to lunch or dinner there, and get some ass all while being at work.  The problem with that was, if anything happened, like someone getting pregnant, someone cheating on their spouse, or even more embarrassing than that, then that piece of news spread like wildfire, not just in the department, but it would go from one end of the building to the other.  It may as well have been printed in a news bulletin.  I also became a victim of that.  I ran into a beautiful Mexican girl there.  She and I began hammering right from the start.  You can draw your on conclusions as to what happened after.  I didn't know how to handle all the gossip and speculation, the ridicule and embarrassment, so I quit.  And I didn't get to continue with the girl either.  Probably better off.  As attractive as she was, she was still from the west side of San Antonio, where white people aren't supposed to get lost unless they are looking for trouble.  It's ridiculously poor there, and strictly Mexican.  No whites allowed.  Digressing back, if one were looking for a spouse, or looking for some strange, that insurance company would be the one to work at.  It was a city all to itself, with entertainment, every once in a while one could buy their average clothing there, have their meals there, child care, it was all there.  I wasn't able to handle the ridicule though.  So, I left.

The World Is A Small Place

When one enters high school, that will be the period of forming who one is, who one becomes.  It not only begins to take on this mold with your academics, but also the type of friends you select, or that select you.  Your personality, your thought patterns, your image, and your friends all begin to take shape.  One doesn't really think about this when they are in high school.  All they think about is the clique they can join, the friends that they want to select so that they will make them look good, and the clothes that they wear.  For me, it was the Vietnam War years.  The Vietnam War was and undeclared war.  We were over there beginning in 1950 only as advisers to the French because the French didn't know how to fight a jungle war.  Our military had already fought many skirmishes in the Pacific Islands with the Japanese.  So our military had experience that the French needed.  In the early sixties, the French gave up, cut and ran leaving our military holding the bag.  Then we had a president whom was not paying attention to any of his Generals and the war escalated with sending more and more of our troops to their death.  I was paying more attention to this than my high school mates and I began communicating with radical groups protesting against the war.  In speaking with some of my classmates, they were more involved in the back seat of their boyfriend's cars, or trying to help me get "saved".  I didn't want to get saved.  I wanted some of that ass in the back seat just like everyone else was getting.  But, I was different.  I vowed I would never date anyone from the same high school that I was in.  I didn't need any gossip.  I didn't need any humiliation that might arise from it should a break up occur.  Shit!  I was already getting enough humiliation from my older brother.  I passed out an "underground" newspaper in high school trying to bring awareness of the Vietnam war.  The problem was the paper was not a local paper.  San Antonio had their head shoved too far up their ass to pay attention to anything like that outside the city limits.  So, while others were in the back seat banging it out, playing football to make a big impression on the next piece of ass they could get, or trying like Hell to be a hypocritical Christian, I was communicating with groups like the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the SLA, and so forth.  I even got removed from class several times because I refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  The only allegiance I had at the time was to help stop sending our boys overseas for a death march.  Being in a small "head in the sand" town like San Antonio, Texas, I protested where I could, described in The Train Runs No More.  I gave up real quick on my conversion of other classmates to become more aware of our politics.  I even had issues with my parents because of the posters of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale on my bedroom walls.  I was in  my own world on this one.  So, here I was doing the protesting that I could where it made the most sense which was no where in the city of San Antonio.  And there were my classmates.  After high school ended and I began looking for real work, I had run into employers where my classmates had already gotten a job.  When completing the employment applications, I referenced those classmates that were working there.  Because of my reputation that I had formed in high school with those classmates, I never got the job.  So.  Always remember.  The world is a small place.  Be careful of whom you piss off.  You just might need them some day.  In today's world with computers, the world has become even smaller.  I had a boss at Lockheed in Marietta, Georgia that I became very close with.  He needed someone to perform a certain job on a C-5 one Saturday.  He needed someone that was going to work.  Detailed in my book, The Train Runs No More, he called me up and asked me to come in.  I asked how he was going to get around the union.  He told me, "Fuck the union!  I want somebody that wants to work and I know that you know the job and when you go in there, you're going to work on the job until it's done.  Now.  Do you want to work or not?"  I was at work within a few minutes since I lived right down the street from Dobbs, A. F. B.  In a crew meeting one day, he was explaining working as a team.  One of the things that he said and that I will always remember, "Be careful of who you piss off.  They just might be your boss one day".  He was right.  But I didn't adhere to that philosophy until after the fact.

I grew up....

I grew up in a small dusty little town called San Antonio, Texas.  When we moved there, there wasn't even a freeway yet.  Even Willougby's barber shop still had a wooden sidewalk existing from it's original construction way back from the 1800's.  The city was squarely divided with the poor whites on the South side, the blacks to the East, the rich whites to the North side, and the Mexicans on the West side.  As time passed on, all of that melded together and when the computer age entered San Antonio, the Asian Indians gravitated toward the Northwest.  We were always going to Grandma's house in Louisiana.  As a younger child I never knew a vacation outside of Grandma's house.  There was a story.  Grandma's house. The imagination that I had of my grandmother's attic was beyond any other.  Read, The Train Runs No More.  Everyone else got to go to Six Flags Over Texas, Disneyland, or some other attraction in the United States.  We got to go to Grandma's house.  Not that it wasn't fun there.  I always made it an adventure, especially riding in the back seat of a car with an older sibling that couldn't appreciate the sight of me.  I'd always have my escape routes around her house.  During the school year, I would get escorted by my brother to school, but I either had to walk ahead or walk behind and never with.  I don't know if I just had that look, I don't know if it were printed on my forehead, or just what it was.  But when at school, I would try to join in with classmates and there seemed to be something that said, "Please Fuck With Me".  So, not only would I receive antagonism from home, but also from school.  As I said before, we never talked at home, so growing up, my parents never knew what was building inside of me.  One day, at school, I felt I had had just about enough from one particular guy.  It just so happened to be a Mexican kid.  He was a nice kid too.  He wasn't a punk or anything like that, but he found a soft spot with me one day and the scab came off at the wrong time with the wrong person.  I doubled up my fist and swung and clocked him squarely in the face.  Too bad it wasn't hard enough.  Because after I made contact, he responded in kind only a little harder.  I did manage to remain standing on my feet and I think what stopped him was a good swift kick to the groin.  But, we both got discovered, taken to the Principal's office and both of us received a paddling.  I hadn't quite placed my finger on what age a child loses his innocence.  Is it ten years old?  Is it thirteen years old?  I haven't made that scientific discovery yet.  But I think when I got reprimanded for trying to protect myself in school, that is when I lost my innocence.  It wasn't too long after that fight, the other kid's father made him drop out of school and go work at the garbage dump to help out the rest of the family.  I suppose in those days that was equal to being an illegal immigrant lawn cutter of today.