It’s four a.m. The school bus recording telling us about no school from snow woke me up. Once I’m up, I’m up. I hear something heavy on the roof. Already dressed for an hour, I take the spotlight outside. I almost break my neck on the piece of shit ramp the Navajo Longrifle built and I haven’t replaced yet. I step away from the house and shine the spotlight up onto the roof. A big bobcat stares back at me. Guess I know where our missing cats have gone. Through his digestive system and out his ass most likely. He’s only in sight for a brief second, then gone into the dark. Sitting back inside warming up, a lot of things went through my mind. Especially this FaceBook deal. Who really cares about what I write? I figure if even one of my grandkids gets something out of my experiences, then it’s not a big waste of time. When I was 14, Frank the Navajo’s medicine man pal told me I was, ‘Many men’. I was to tell the stories… How many times do you just take it for granted there will be a tomorrow?… I’m standing in the middle of Outpost Drive with a warning sign in my hand. I’m bored stiff. I’m working one part of a street safety team to make cars stop or slow for a series of manhole trucks surrounded by orange cones and safety racks, working on installing a new cable from manhole to manhole. I can just see my partner down by the next curve. This part of Outpost is really dangerous because of a natural spring, weeping out into the street off a crack in the natural rock facing, just past the narrow sidewalk. In the winter, cars slide in the green gook, all the time. It’s summer, but some of the green slime is still prevalent. Especially the curve I’m directing traffic on. I hear the sound of a car coming towards me just above the sharp curve. Not much traffic since it was after ten a.m. and all the commuters trying to avoid the snarled traffic on Highland, just down the mountain, the usual route. Nope, Outpost was for the hot shots in the know on a back way into Hollywood. The sort that pass over double yellows and in the parking lanes. As the convertible sports car comes into view, there’s no traffic coming up the hill, so, I give them the ‘SLOW’ side of my paddle. The driver smirks at me, shifts down, then blows on past, not slowing at all. His passenger smiles at me as they shoot by. I hear my partner shout a warning. I see everything at once. The brake lights of the sports car as the driver spots a huge moving van coming up around the bend below. The sports car hits the green ooze, slides into a dozen or so bright orange cones, then, takes out the metal security gate around an open manhole. A tire goes into the open hole, flipping the sports car upside down. It goes the rest of the way on its journey, sliding wheels up. It hits the far curve, flips back to rightside up, then stops against a mailbox, just next to a driveway that headed up to a house out of view. I was glad another car had come down the street. It forced me to keep my position. I really didn’t want to look into that wrecked car. I didn’t think they would be smiling anymore… I’m leaving Formosa garage in my Pac Bell repair van. I’m stopped by Bill Granger, a forman I really liked. He asks me to come along to check on one of his techs who hasn’t called in for two days. I’m the union rep, so, it was company policy if a foreman was going to a tech’s home unannounced to have a union man along. I park my van and hop in his sedan. We find Tom’s triplex off of Willoughby and knock on the front door. Tom’s yellow El Camino is parked in his narrow driveway. No answer. I go through his side gate past his overflowing trash cans, then open the unlatched screen door to knock on the half glass wooden door. No answer, but, from the half opened glass window, I smell death. Granger slits the screen, opens the lock from inside, we go in. We find Tom in his bathtub with most of his head on the wall and the ceiling… I’m pulling off my helmet at work, hear some guys talking about Mike Brummet being dead. What? I was just with him at Dodger stadium, installing pay phones and riding around on the field with the electric cart the maintenance guys had loaned us. He had been out in the desert shooting with some friends. Setting his .45 on the lowered tail gate of his friend’s truck, someone tossed some gear onto the tail gate. The gun went off, hitting Mike in the chest… I’m on a pole just up the alley from another tech, Eric D. We’re replacing a bad drop line to a big party house up the street. The wind is blowing like crazy. I can see Laurel Canyon from my pole, so, I shout to Eric, “Lets have lunch at the Laurel store!” ( I once was in line behind John Lennon of the Beatles buying a sandwich. I say, “Hey, aren’t you one of the Beach Boys?” He smiled and replied, “Yep, surf’s up mate!”) Before Eric can answer, a gust of wind blows down one of those big toothed palm fronds off one of the sixty foot palm trees all around us. It comes down in one of those lazy back and forth deals, then, nails Eric in the head, cutting his right ear right off. I take him to Cedars emergency. They sewed it back on… A drunken supervisor is going home from work. His car breaks down just off the Los Feliz off ramp near Traveltown. He steps right into a fast moving car which knocks his leg, right off. I worked for this idiot once. He was later fired after all the surgeries for stealing on the job… Hmm, stealing… We’ll call him Williams. Mainly ’cause that was his name. He was going to be fired for selling phone equipment out of his van. Chief Special Agents for the phone company HAD HIM ON FILM. Williams walked. He told them it wasn’t him on the film, it was his identical twin brother who had escaped from a jail in Ohio, taken his truck while he was eating lunch at his aunt’s in Crenshaw, sold the equipment, the parked his van again while he was unaware. They found out he did indeed have a twin on the run. Williams was shot three times in a phone booth off Washington later on, so, he was retired early. Sort of a win win for him… Oh, Williams told me a neat story from when he was in the Navy. While on the air craft carrier Enterprise, all hands were excited about getting shore leave in Tokyo. They’re all made to stand at attention for five hours until the armory got back two stolen .45’s. He told me there was so many pissed off guys standing by their opened lockers, the pressure broke the thief…
