"I did two enlistments, for a total of 4 years, learning a lot about how to maintain buoys in ship channels and search for lost fishermen after storms. I got my GED to make up for not having graduated high school. I spent the last half-year working in a Coast Guard base sewage-treatment plant, doing double-duty (nights and days), cause I wouldn't do homosexual-sex with an influential 32-year-old lieutenant and his three chief boy-fuckers. I 'dated' Freddie-Feel-Good-and-His-Funky-Little-Five-Piece-Band a lot."
"I opted out of the Coast Guard, my military service done. When I got out of the service, I bought an old Vespa motor-scooter and bummed around the USA, Canada and Mexico for a year or so, sleeping out a lot and just seeing stuff. I was just 24 years old by that time. I was alone, having no girlfriend, no wife, effectively no relatives, no friends, no car."
"Now," I explained more fully, "I did let both Dad and Mom know that I was still alive and well, and gave them my address, such as it was, at the 'Y' and then, later, at the various Coast Guard bases. Mom sent me lots of letters, smeared with lipstick kisses and soaked in perfume, to her 'witto-baby-boy,' who she knew would 'come to his senses' and 'den wive wit his muddu and be her witto oochums-smoochums'."
"I'd reply, asking that she just use English. Then, sure as clock-work, I'd get a hate-filled letter, with threats of her doing horrible things to me, with knives, whips and burning hot things. That seemed to get the stuff out of her system, and then I'd get another two letters, written in English, filled with local gossip. But next would come the perfume-dipped, lipstick-smeared goo-goo baby-talk letter, and it'd start up again. Eventually, Mom started mixing up her letter contents, then paragraphs, and then her sentences. Then she stopped writing altogether."
"Dad sent me one brief letter while I was in town, telling me I was a 'stupid kid' ... that he had really enjoyed taking my high-school girl away from me and that she loved his big cock ... that she said he was 10 times the man I was ... that I'd never amount to much ... and lots of other degrading, mean things."
"I had two other letters from Dad, later, when I was in my 2nd enrollment. One said that Mom had been diagnosed with a not-operable brain tumor, plus something about 'temporal-lobe psycho-motor seizures.' She was in a nursing home for the terminally ill, and I was forbidden to come visit because everything was my fault ... blaming me and my 'immoral behavior' for causing all of Mom's illness ... and for his bad luck in business."
"Also, he'd gotten Connie pregnant; that she'd had an abortion; that she was a now a porn star in L.A., doing coke, into BDSM and gang-bang scenes ... that he was going to sell the home place and go live in Tijuana, Mexico, where 'the little Latina girls really knew how to treat a rich American.' "
"The second letter from Dad, some months later, when I was in the service for my 2nd enlistment, said that Mom was dead, cremated and already buried and that her illness, crazy-mad seizures and her death were all my fault ... that she'd still be alive and well if I'd never existed. A really rotten letter."
"So, pretty girl, by this time I was 24 years old, with no job and no prospects, just a few thousand dollars, plus an investment account earning interest. Plus one beat-up old motor-scooter. I was newly arrived back in San Diego. I couldn't find Dad, since he'd moved several times in Tijuana."
"Checking at the YMCA, I found one old message from him, saying that he was doing an import-export business from there ... that he had a lot of real-young, hot, sexy Mexican girlfriends ... plenty of 'weed' ... and not to try to track him down. That was my last communication with him."
"About five years ago, his body showed up at the border, minus his head and his genitals. I identified it, from scars and fingerprints, took possession, and saw he was cremated and buried next to Mom."
"I took the old motor-scooter all over San Diego, and spent a lot of time here in Ocean Beach. Ocean Beach was a delightful mixture of old hippies, surfers, bikers, retired folks, you-name-it, all getting along pretty well. No one remembered me, or cared much who I was or about my family. Strangers were living in my former home, just over the ridge of the hill, in Point Loma."
"I knew I really didn't want to work for anybody else, but it was 1975, and the United States was in the grip of the worst 'recession' since the Great Depression of the '30s. Nobody was hiring. I knew that my money wouldn't last long."
"So, puttering along on the motor scooter, near the end of the public beach, I came up to the old, rusty fence that divided Ocean Beach from the wasteland of the Naval Electronics Laboratory. The city had just opened a swimming beach there, and there wasn't an on-street parking spot to be had for a quarter-mile back from the beach and ocean cliffs."
"Then I saw an odd thing, which everybody took for granted. There was a set of flat spaces, set to one side of the fence, and sectioned off in a square of old, rusty chain-link fence, with an equally old, rusty gate and an old, rusty padlock keeping the gate closed. Behind the gate, I could see, there were three flat terraces, pretty wide, with an old concrete bunker-thing at the top. Apparently, it was a heavy-machine-gun nest back in WW II days, when they expected a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. It had been a dumping ground for lots of useless stuff since then. The concrete on the ground was old and cracked, and stuff was growing out of the cracks."
"I parked the motor-scooter near the fence, walked up to the gate, and tugged a couple of times on the old 1940's-style padlock ... which fell apart in my hand. So I opened the gate, got the scooter inside, closed up again and held the gate closed with a bit or wire that was lying on the ground."
"I thought back to my time at the parking lot, with Max, in downtown San Diego ... and grinned."