In late July of 1961, Mama moved us from San Francisco down to a little seaside community in San Diego called Ocean Beach. Her boyfriend Ken, who was in the Navy over at Alameda, was being transferred down to a base in San Diego and wanted Mama to go with him. He said Ocean Beach was the best: it was quiet; there were lots of things for kids to do; and a ton of Navy families lived there. Ken helped us stack what clothes and pots and pans we had—those and our precious Magnavox Console TV—into an open trailer hitched to the back end of his gray ’51 Ford, and drove us down. The three of us kids were crammed into the small back seat like worn suitcases, along with our Siamese cat, Tom Junior. We hadn’t had Tom Junior for very long. Daddy got him for Mama while he was still living with us, after he came home one day and discovered Tom Senior dead, hung by his neck with a length of clothesline over our front porch. The drive took us two days crawling along Highway 101. The best part was that we got to eat out in neat little restaurants all the way down. Mama let us have pancakes or waffles for breakfast, and hamburgers and fries and chocolate milkshakes for lunch and dinner. Ken even drove us through Hollywood, and showed us the little studio where they put on “Queen For A Day”. I asked Mama why she didn’t try to get on “Queen For A Day”, and she said you had to have a real sad story to tell the audience, and besides, she didn’t have any place to put all the things they gave you if you were crowned “Queen For A Day”, things like washers and refrigerators and freezers.
Mama found a place for us to live (with a little help from Ken) the same day we got to Ocean Beach, a tiny, furnished two-bedroom duplex on Greene Street, half the size of where we lived in San Francisco, and with barely enough space to put our clothes and a few dishes and knick-knacks. There was no place to hook up a washer, even if we’d had one, and there was already a small refrigerator.
Ocean Beach was great. We lived six blocks from the beach, so close I could smell the sea air when the wind was just right. There was a lemon tree growing right outside our back door. The streets were wide and clean, and there were trees, a zillion of them, in people’s yards and up and down the streets, tall palms, which I’d never seen before except in pictures, looking like huge green spiders languishing atop wood poles stretching high into the sunlit sky. We had just two bedrooms, so now I had to share a room with Karen and Debbie, though Mama said Debbie was going to start going to a deaf school in Riverside, where she’d live all the time, coming home only for the summer and Christmas and Easter. I figured sharing a room was a small price to pay: I was just glad to be there, where it was clean-smelling and where people didn’t seem so interested in beating you up or hanging your cat.
In September, I started school in Mr. Alger’s fourth-grade class at Ocean Beach Elementary School. I had skipped a grade in San Francisco—as Daddy had wanted for me—and so I was a year younger than the other kids in the class. That fact didn’t diminish my burgeoning attraction to the girls who sat around me. Immediately I found myself in love with tall, shy Alma Days, who sat at the two-person table next to Jamie Cooper’s and mine, and whose dark, curly hair and squeaky voice and long, dark eyelashes grabbed my heart and twisted it and squeezed it and tickled it in ways that even Laura Morris’s could not. I would spend the better part of this school year and the next one trying to make Alma Days feel for me what I so desperately felt for her. I would fail miserably.