A warm spring afternoon, almost evening, in Burbank; the air was actually clear enough to see to the top of the Verdugo Mountains, beneath which Mama and I lived. Mama had sent me to the store to pick up groceries for dinner: hamburger; onion; tomato sauce; a few other odds and ends. I held the bag in my arms, not quite two or three blocks from our apartment, gazing up at what I thought were radio antennae: red lights blinking slowly in the deepening blue sky above the peaks of the mountains. A couple of kids walking toward me on the sidewalk caught my eye. They talked to each other as they walked, but they looked at me, as if I might have been their subject of conversation. They smiled. One of the kids was smaller than me, smaller than the other kid he walked with. He could have been Mexican: his hair and eyes and skin were dark. His eyes seemed to glitter as he smiled. I remember thinking, this is a happy kid.
We met, but instead of walking past me, they halted right there in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking my path. I tried to step around them, but they mirrored my movement so I couldn’t pass. I was suddenly confused. What’s happening? I thought. I stopped and looked at them. The smaller kid said, “You wanna fight?” He was still smiling. He looked at me as if we were great friends, running into each other for the first time after a long separation. I knew he had to be kidding; this was some sort of joke. I smiled back at him and said, no. Barely had the word left my mouth before a fist shot up suddenly from below my field of vision, where a fraction of a second earlier I assumed it had hung from his arm as a regular, relaxed hand. The knuckles smashed into my face just below my nose. A crushing pain exploded through my head, beginning in my teeth and working its way backward through my skull. It felt as if he’d driven his fist all the way into my brain, the way I imagined it might feel to be shot in the face with a bazooka. I was stunned. Senseless. Tears suddenly exploded from my eyes. The bag of groceries flew from my arms.
The kid looked at me with that same smile. Nothing changed. He didn’t say anything else. Just looked at me. Smiling.
Five minutes later, I was still crying as I stood bleeding in the doorway of our apartment, clutching the mangled bag of groceries. Mama asked me what had happened, and I told her while she cleaned the blood from my face. She listened. Then she asked me what I’d done to make the kid want to hit me in the face. I looked at her in disbelief. “Well, you had to have done something,” she said. She finished tending my wound, and went into the kitchen to start dinner.
Mama and I were evicted from our apartment later that week. It was after dinner. Mama was reading, and I was watching Batman on TV. There was a hard knock on the door. Mama answered it, and an older woman I didn’t recognize, holding some papers in her hands, asked Mama to come out onto the porch so they could talk in private. I could tell something was wrong. Mama had a startled look on her reddening face. She stepped outside and pulled the door almost closed. I could hear their hushed voices, back and forth, though I didn’t quite hear what was going on. A few seconds later, Mama stepped backward into the apartment, clutching the papers. “Well, you can just go to hell!” she yelled at the woman. She threw the papers out the door and slammed it shut as hard as she could swing it. The walls vibrated. She stood there for a few seconds, simmering, just looking at the door, listening as the old woman’s clipped footsteps faded away down the brick steps.
“Who was that, Mama?” I said.
Mama turned with eyes flashing. “That was the landlady,” she growled. “We’ve been evicted. We have three weeks to find a new place to live.” She went back to the couch and lay down and picked up the book she’d been reading.
“Why?” I asked.
“Mind your own business,” she said.
I watched Mama chewing the inside of her cheek, her eyes fixed unmoving on the page, not really reading. I could tell she was worried. Moving was going to take money we didn’t have.
Nevertheless, two and a half weeks later, Mama managed to rent another apartment less than a block away, on Tujunga Street. I didn’t ask how she’d managed it, and she never told me. We spent the better part of the following Saturday carrying our stuff, one or two boxes at a time, down the sidewalk to the new apartment. I asked Mama why Carol couldn’t have helped. She stiffened a little and said Carol was busy and couldn’t get away.
That night, our first night in the new apartment, Mama made us baked potatoes with margarine for dinner. Mama sliced the steaming potatoes in half and put them on bread plates, so they wouldn’t look so small, then lathered on the margarine and sprinkled them with salt and pepper. She brought them to the table, and we ate. The potato tasted good. Mama was quiet, almost sad-looking. “I’m sorry there isn’t more,” she said. I was shocked by her strange words: it was the first time I’d heard my mother apologize to me.
“It’s okay,” I said to her, “it’s good.” I took another bite and smiled at her.
By early spring, 1966, Mama had had it “up to here,” as she liked to say, with the smog-filled Burbank sky. She pined for San Diego. She yanked me out of school and called one of her old drinking buddies, a tough-looking woman named Beverly, and asked her to drive up in her beat-up Dodge station wagon and load our meager belongings into a U-Haul trailer and move us back down to Ocean Beach. Beverly loaned Mama the first month’s rent on a furnished two-bedroom duplex on West Point Loma Boulevard, identical to the one we’d lived in on Greene Street when we first came to San Diego five years earlier. It was so close to the beach, there was white sand right outside the back door, and you could feel the salt spray in the air. I’d never thought I could miss a place so much. As soon as Beverly and a couple of her boyfriends offloaded our hastily-packed boxes and Mama’s console TV into the cramped apartment, I felt as if I could breathe again. I started thinking about the future and making plans.
Mama called the county the very next day to arrange for us to be put on welfare. Then she dutifully marched with me the mile or so over to Collier Junior High School, where she scribbled her signature on my registration forms and unceremoniously walked out with scarcely a wave goodbye. I watched as she passed by the office window on her way out to the sidewalk, an unmistakable lightness to her step, almost a skip. Not my problem anymore, I imagined her thinking.
My transfer grades from Muir Junior High were pretty crappy, really. I hadn’t fit in at Muir (despite the glowing endorsement from Chris Joy), either academically or socially, and so I’d used every excuse I could think of to miss class as often as possible. My grades showed it. The one academic counselor at Collier, a prune-faced looking woman with thick glasses whose unfortunate name was Miss Bloeman, took a cursory look at my records and promptly assigned me to all the bonehead classes Collier had to offer (although I would have the satisfaction the following year of reversing the situation by working my way back into advanced classes). For the time being, I was in remedial Math; Basic English; Current Events, where you spent the hour discussing items from the newspaper; Wood shop; A science class entitled, “How Things Work”, apparently for kids who couldn’t seem to figure out things like: how pencil leads were put into pencils, or how distilled water was made; and, of course, the requisite gym class. By eleven o’clock that morning, I was sitting at a desk in the back row of Mr. White’s crowded eighth grade English class with a dog-eared copy of Steinbeck’s The Red Pony before me. I looked around at these fidgeting kids, many of whose faces I recognized but hadn’t seen in nearly four years. The idle thought came to me then that Mama had left without giving me any money for lunch. I remembered then a phrase I’d once heard from my seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Freshet, which I didn’t understand until now: the more things change, the more they remain the same.