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A Poor Boy's Gravy for Christmas
It was Winter, 1971 and I was 17. I had spent part of the Summer in Summer School, and the best of it pumping gas at a service station in Eagle Rock, Ca.
Then 12th grade started and I got really bummed out by it all. The fake people and their fancy ways with no one to relate to, and with a fickle non-girlfriend hanging around who was knocked-up by somebody else while she shacked up with an adult lesbian as a teen runaway so that she could avoid putting up with her stepfather was just too much, and so I just quit going to school for several weeks. It was depressing to go from a Summer job to threadbare schoolboy in the blink of an eye. I remember "celebrating" Thanksgiving that year by holding up at my Brother Al's apartment with a whole bottle of Akadama Royal Plum Wine from Japan. And the radio played Elton's, "Holiday Inn", Tull's "Aqualung" and "Alice's Restaurant".
That December, Brother Al got a temp job in downtown East Los Angeles, at the central freight yard guarding a mass shipment of Christmas Trees, nightly.
He was the night man in the yard, protecting those trees in near total darkness from prying hands, and one night I was invited to share the duty.
We got there around 10 P.M. Trees were everywhere among the towering box cars, like a transplanted forest.
Our post was a simple wood board guardhouse, very basic with alabaster slapped on it, and very small. It did include a Sparletts bottled water dispenser with a second hot water tap, and several boxes of nothing to eat but Green Pea and Ham Cup 'O Soup and a few saltine crackers, and I spent much of that night slurping Cup 'O Soup until I had the shits from it.
The weather that night was cold. 40 degrees Fahrenheit and it pierced right through me all night long, except for the portable heater which never warmed the guard shack at all. It warmed as you faced it while being pierced from all sides by arrows of near winter frost.
We brought along a cheap broken AM clock radio and spent most of the time listening to Top 40 hits and oldies, and retuning the cheap capacitor tuner to stay on frequency. It was the piercing cold, the shits, and Barbara Streisand's "Stoney End", Three Dog Night's, "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song" and "One", and a long forgotten tune, "1900 Yesterdays" by a "Carpenters" knock-off group. Toward the final few hours, I had been up all day, and I found myself falling asleep, then falling forward, but being awakened by the shock of the cold and not from the forward jerking slump of falling asleep while sitting upright.
The sun broke the night, with classic smog-laden golden red color, blazing and brilliant color. And we went home.
I made $5.
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VbPnVQIIOlY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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It was Winter, 1971 and I was 17. I had spent part of the Summer in Summer School, and the best of it pumping gas at a service station in Eagle Rock, Ca.
Then 12th grade started and I got really bummed out by it all. The fake people and their fancy ways with no one to relate to, and with a fickle non-girlfriend hanging around who was knocked-up by somebody else while she shacked up with an adult lesbian as a teen runaway so that she could avoid putting up with her stepfather was just too much, and so I just quit going to school for several weeks. It was depressing to go from a Summer job to threadbare schoolboy in the blink of an eye. I remember "celebrating" Thanksgiving that year by holding up at my Brother Al's apartment with a whole bottle of Akadama Royal Plum Wine from Japan. And the radio played Elton's, "Holiday Inn", Tull's "Aqualung" and "Alice's Restaurant".
That December, Brother Al got a temp job in downtown East Los Angeles, at the central freight yard guarding a mass shipment of Christmas Trees, nightly.
He was the night man in the yard, protecting those trees in near total darkness from prying hands, and one night I was invited to share the duty.
We got there around 10 P.M. Trees were everywhere among the towering box cars, like a transplanted forest.
Our post was a simple wood board guardhouse, very basic with alabaster slapped on it, and very small. It did include a Sparletts bottled water dispenser with a second hot water tap, and several boxes of nothing to eat but Green Pea and Ham Cup 'O Soup and a few saltine crackers, and I spent much of that night slurping Cup 'O Soup until I had the shits from it.
The weather that night was cold. 40 degrees Fahrenheit and it pierced right through me all night long, except for the portable heater which never warmed the guard shack at all. It warmed as you faced it while being pierced from all sides by arrows of near winter frost.
We brought along a cheap broken AM clock radio and spent most of the time listening to Top 40 hits and oldies, and retuning the cheap capacitor tuner to stay on frequency. It was the piercing cold, the shits, and Barbara Streisand's "Stoney End", Three Dog Night's, "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song" and "One", and a long forgotten tune, "1900 Yesterdays" by a "Carpenters" knock-off group. Toward the final few hours, I had been up all day, and I found myself falling asleep, then falling forward, but being awakened by the shock of the cold and not from the forward jerking slump of falling asleep while sitting upright.
The sun broke the night, with classic smog-laden golden red color, blazing and brilliant color. And we went home.
I made $5.
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VbPnVQIIOlY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</center>
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