Paula’s Dilema

Miss Lily came to our house a month later and just maybe, saved my sister Paula’s life. Well, what happened may not have actually killed her, but if Lilly hadn’t been there, it would have put a serious crimp on Paula’s ability to eat properly, chew or speak. Not sure how the Appalachian looking, leathery-faced smoker found out. Could have been my mom’s hysterical pleas that drew her in, or she happen to be walking by at the right time. Don’t recall. But she came upon an odd dilemma involving my sister getting her tongue stuck in a coke bottle. What the circumstances were remains a mystery.

Here’s my hypothesis: I do know physics was involved. Let me explain. It has something to do with pressure being proportional to the product of density and temperature. Forcing her folded tongue inside the bottle opening, Paula sucked out the air, producing pressure inside the bottle. Creating a seal, the inside pressure dropped to below the atmospheric pressure, thus, creating a vacuum.

I heard the commotion in the kitchen and ran in to see Paula standing in the middle of the room clutching a coke bottle connected to her distended purple tongue. She appeared to be in a panic state, her eyes were bulging; she was very sweaty and mumbling, making incoherent animal-like sounds. I stepped behind the safety of gathered siblings when I saw Miss Lilly rush into the room, via the back door.

“Good Lord, Jesus!” she drawled before flicking her cigarette deftly into the nearby sink.

“Uhhnngawww,” Paula moaned.

“Get me a hammer and a towel!” Lilly ordered.

A minute later, Paula was on her knees, her head wrapped tightly in a towel lying across the hard wood chair seat. Lilly stood with her back facing me, her fist around a hammer swaying by her side. The scene reminded me of an executioner at a beheading. I could see that Paula’s blue tongue and coke bottle were exposed on the chair’s seat.

“Ready girl? I’m gonna count to three,” Lilly said. “One…”

“WACK!”

The bottle exploded into a carbonated concoction of caramelized beverage and shards of green glass.

“Two, three,” Lilly continued, then laughed.

Paula, although traumatized, emerged unscathed and was truly grateful for the neighbor’s quick thinking and hammer skills. Lilly didn’t stick around and left shaking her head.

I guess we were a bunch of dumb asses! We Adams have a history of stupidity involving orifices that defies human logic.

One time, my brother Joe got a marble stuck up his ass after filling the bottom of one of those huge cast iron claw foot tubs with marbles. He rolled back and forth for a ride and somehow lodged one of the glass spheres into his rectum.

Years later, during summer break, when I was in high school, I mowed acres and acres of lawn at Wildwood Cemetery in Williamsport. During a lunch break I got high with a friend. I can’t explain, except to say it just happened, but I managed to get an acorn stuck in my ear. It was agonizing as my stoned co-worker tried unsuccessfully to pry it out with various sized sticks. Resorting to a pocketknife, he partially skewed the thing and flung it out.

In the late seventies, my sister Karen became an RN. She was ordered to give an elderly patient an enema. The old man was embarrassed about the procedure and talked my sister into letting him do it himself. Having had them before, he would do it if that would be OK. Karen, God bless her heart, left the room and the man to his privacy. Returning five minutes later, she found the man covered with sheets, facing away from her. To their mutual horror, things had gone terribly awry. The old man had been successful with the enema bit but had forgotten to take the cap off and shot it inside! Much worse than removing an acorn, Karen spent ten minutes digging the cap out from the man’s buttocks.


If we learned from our stupid mistakes, I guess we’d all qualify as geniuses.

The Widow's Web

The neighbor in the house next door, on the opposite side of the Smiths was a widow in her mid fifties. She went by: Miss Lilly. She wasn’t from a hollow in Tennessee, but you get the descriptive gist. She was a chain- smoker and had a wrinkled hard face. She was sinewy thin, 5 foot tall if that, with straggly hair. Not even a slash of mascara decorated her face. Miss Lilly was a hard-ass and wouldn’t take crap from anyone, including me. When she looked at you, her expression, said, who the hell do you think you are?

I made the mistake of bragging that I was an escape artist. …I read a biography about The Great Houdini AND I and saw the Tony Curtis movie. I fancied myself as a younger version of the great one. Saying he could break out of any restraint, Houdini challenged the superintendent of the Boston police, that he could escape the city prison, called The Tombs. After being thoroughly searched, he was manacled in cuffs and leg irons and placed in a locked cell. Not only did Harry manage to pick the locks and escape, he did so naked. And with swift bravado, was out of the prison and down the street in ten minutes. It was a sensation.

I never tried an escape while naked; if you didn’t get out of it, you’d be exposed in more ways than one. But my brother Joe tied me up many times and I always escaped. You would have been impressed had you witnessed it.

The neighbor lady wasn’t impressed in the least and scoffed at my braggadocio. “How much you want to bet, boy! I’ll double it.”

“All I got is a couple bucks worth of coins,” I said.

This was easy money I thought as I retrieved a jar of coins from my under my bed and returned to her back porch. She sat there smiling with a long coil of rope in her lap.

“Put them pennies on the rail and get down on your belly then, right there,” she said and pointed to my feet.”

I obliged as she scurried from her perch spider-like and straddled me. I recall she had a boney ass. Within a minute I was wrapped in her tightly tied web. She had hog-tied me and left me there, squirming in the dust. I caught a glimpse of her varicose ankles below her black Capri pants as she casually scuttled inside. As I rolled and wriggled I could see her in the window watching me behind a haze of grey smoke and screen. She was laughing. I pulled and tugged at the ropes and could not budge them. Exhausted, I rested and was sweating profusely from both the exertion and the embarrassment. This lubricated my bindings and I was able to free one of the constricting loops.

Houdini could dislocate a shoulder to get out of a straight jacket. If I could only dislocate all four limbs, I could have escaped. After 20 minutes, I was defeated. I rolled over and looked up at the window red-faced and dirt caked and mouthed, “I give!” She wasn’t a lip reader apparently, so I yelped, “OK, I give up….” She feigned deafness and cupped a hand behind her ear. Sounding suddenly soprano, I tried one more time, “ I QUIT!” Miss Lilly shrugged back and shook her head with incomprehension and disappeared from view. She made me lay there another 30 minutes before she came out and untied me. I heard her shake the coin jar triumphantly as she went inside. I crept home. I could never made eye contact with that woman again.

Canal street continued....

I was in sixth grade intermediate school at Saint Boniface. It felt like military school with a barrage of rules and regulations to deal with: White shirts- tucked in, navy blue tie and slacks, black shoes. Hair/bangs trimmed above the eyebrows and ears. It was strictly enforced. Even though it had been a number of years since my last parochial experience, I was able to assimilate into the mix. I wasn’t what you’d call a wallflower and made an effort to be a friendly wise-cracker without stepping on people’s toes. The fact that I was from California and could curse in Spanish made me interesting for a good week or so. In the schoolyard, I impressed my peers by being able to take a punch to the stomach without collapsing into a heap and my uncanny ability to walk on my hands across the yard. We listened to a smuggled in transistor radio and sang Beatles songs at the far end of the paved parking lot. That led to my trying out for the Saint Boniface All Boys Choir, where I managed to snag a spot as a soprano. I wasn’t self conscious about it and enjoyed singing. Puberty, for me at least, was some way off and I had a lovely high-pitched voice. At home, I’d crow “Ava Maria” in Latin ad nauseam near an open window like a demented castrato.

My sister Laura developed asthma in that house. The smoke of the coal ash sure didn’t help. Occasionally, she would have a full-blown asthma attack and lay helpless as a fish out of water gasping for air. Like that wasn’t miserable enough, she developed a nasty skin condition, eczema, which left her arms brittle, sore and cracked.

I awoke one morning with pink sores on my arms and legs. I asked my mom if I was getting eczema too.

“No, well maybe…” she said.

Later that week, Joe had the same sores on his legs. Joe had itched his into bloody spores. that night, itching and unable to sleep, I turned on the lights and discovered our beds were crawling with tiny bugs, bedbugs. They weren’t the only infestation in the house. We had cockroaches in the kitchen and I saw a large rat in the basement. You know, both rats and cockroaches eat bedbugs so maybe between them it would cut down on the onslaught.

If that unpleasantness wasn’t enough to endure, our next-door neighbors were a tough bullying lot who made life even more miserable. Always up for a fight they were truly poor folk and angry at the world. Mr. and Mrs. Smith were semi-functional adults and full-blown alcoholics who couldn’t take care of themselves and raised a clan of surly wild kids. I think at one time or another my younger siblings got into a fight with one of the Smiths, usually just for looking at them and pissing them off. It was the typical provocation:

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing…”

“Who you calling nothing?”

Then, a push, a slap and kicking, followed by a wrestling match in the dirt. Sometimes we would win, sometimes not. The crying losers ran back to their respective houses. When they weren’t fighting with us, they wailed on each other. I have to inject here, that the Smiths had a daughter around my age. I’m not sure how it happened, but miraculously, Mary was not so wild or mean and she was good looking and never picked a fight with me. Though I was ready to wrestle her in a heartbeat. She is an exception to my harsh description of the Smith clan.

I recall that winter was a cold snowy one. Next to the warehouse across the tracks, Joe and I built a fort out of wood pallets. (No matter where we were, we had to build a fort!) The snow was so heavy after a particular storm that the fort could have passed for an igloo. Up the street was a bakery. A vent on the side of the building blew out a warm and delicious aroma of fresh cooked bread. Loved that smell.

It was not a good time as we waited for our ticket to ride to Philadelphia. But there were occasional times that were worth remembering. That spring I was thrilled when my mom let me get a pair of pointy-toed shiny two inch heeled black Beatles boots. Man, they were boss and felt mod and a little taller wearing them.

Although I was a Beatles fanatic, somehow I became a Monkees fan. The Monkees show debuted on TV in the fall of 1966. Remember: "Hey, hey we're the Monkees- and we don't monkey around." The show was horribly corny, and their songs, pop-corn. It was easy to digest and didn’t give you gas. Like most of the kids my age, I sang along with Davy Jones, "I’m a believer."

Canal Street

PART TWO: WILLIAMSPORT TO WILIAMSPORT

A light rain began to fall as I quickened my pace, head down, in a useless attempt to outrun it. The wind blew hair across my face as I searched for a rubber band in my pocket to tie it back. I looked up uneasily and didn’t like what I saw. The sky was a cauldron of dark expectant clouds ready to boil over at any second. Gunshot blasts of lightening exploded behind me as I flinched, looking for cover. There was none. I turned to see a wall of rain roaring towards me like a tidal wave. I braced myself as the cold stinging rain rolled over me, pelting me relentlessly until I was soaked to the bone.
I was caught unprepared in a deluge and it was miserable. Why did it always have to be so miserable? If I kept going I would eventually get out of it.

**************

I was 11 yrs old the first time I arrived in Williamsport, PA. It was a long trip from California. We were supposed to be moving to Philadelphia, but bad-luck would detour that plan. Our Naval barracks home was still occupied and scheduled for renovation; it would not be move-in ready for six months. Why we didn’t stay in California wasn’t clear to any of us, neither was the fact that our dad was only dropping us off and had to return to San Diego. We were dumped, and I don’t use that word lightly, in what had to be the lowest class neighborhood in Williamsport, PA. The house was on Canal Street, in a shabby warehouse neighborhood. Canal Street was an unfinished dirt and gravel road that ran parallel to a railroad track that serviced the warehouse on the other side of the street. We were going to have to live in an old three story shingled shack of a house.

It was a God-awful shock compared to our beautiful home back in sunny California. Our Aunt Martha picked this place out for us. Apparently it was difficult to find a place for a sixth month stay and it was all that we could get under the circumstance. Still, I could never forgive her for that. Aunt Martha and my cousin Mary Margaret came out to visit us in California the year before. They saw how we lived, where we lived. How in hell could Martha even think about putting us in this hellhole?

The looks on our faces, when we walked into the house, were similar to someone unexpectedly finding a bloated rotten corpse in a dark room. It was disgusting. What a dump! The floors, all the floors, were covered in cheap linoleum, each room had a different multi-colored pattern you could make out where it wasn’t worn down from years of wear. The walls and ceilings were water-stained and dusty. In the center of the living room was a single light bulb that hung from the ceiling at the end of a frayed black cord. Large heating grates in the floors, one in each room, breathed hot gassy coal air into the rooms. It was stifling. The kitchen had an old stove with greasy units and a broken oven door. The cabinets were stained with dirt around the knobs, on the doors that had knobs. Below those was a chipped porcelain sink and directly below that the linoleum was worn to the floorboards. Gross!

The upstairs wasn’t any better. The bedrooms had recently installed shiny linoleum that curled up along the walls in dinghy rooms with old-fashioned roll-up window shades.

“We’ll be out of here, soon enough. It won’t be that bad,” our Mom said hesitantly in an unsuccessful bid to reassure us.

Really?

I don’t recall hearing the term, “ghetto,” at least not for a few more years, but we were quite aware we were literally living on the wrong side of the tracks.

My Dad didn’t stick around long enough to worry about it and headed back to sunny California. We unpacked, filled our dressers and arranged our rooms. Joe and I set up our beds about 4 feet apart, parallel to each other. Mom had the one bedroom with a door, Karen, being the oldest and grouchiest, got her own room. Paula, Laura and John shared the other room with barely a foot between the beds and dressers crammed in the room. The landlord stopped by the next day to show us how to light the furnace and keep it burning. A truck would pull in the back yard every week and dump a load of coal down a chute into the coal bin. Besides annoying my siblings, it was my job to help keep the coal burning.

None of us were happy to find ourselves in this kind of predicament. This unhappiness, this psychological, sociological shock would hang like a pall over us for much longer than the time we would endure there.

A Few More Months

That summer was fleeting, more so because it would be our last one in San Diego. In a few months, when the orders came down, my dad was to be transferred to Philadelphia. We weren’t happy about it because we loved San Carlos. But we weren’t Californians, Yugoslavians or Marylanders; we were Navy brats, seasick for a final port we could call home.

My Cub Scout troop would be camping out for three days in the Anza Borrego Desert along with another local troop. I knew for months this adventure was on the horizon and could barely contain my anticipation. I was true aficionado of the Hardy Boys; having read most of their books my father had saved from his childhood. My mind was filled with thoughts of mystery, undiscovered silver mines, bandits and legends of lost loot. I planned to scour the landscape for clues. Glints of silver and hidden caves would beckon.

The Anza Borrego is the largest state park in California, second biggest park behind the Adirondack State Park in NY. It was a two-hour drive from San Diego. It was an incredible wilderness of desert framed by large stony mountains. Once we left the main road we drove into the open valley and set up camp in a clearing surrounded by sage scrub and occasional cacti. We were in the basin but I’d describe it as a frying pan because it was broiling hot. Our quarters were definitely old school- canvas two-pole tents pegged into the ground on. After the tents were set up and our gear stored, we dug out the communal latrine. It was essentially a 3 ft trench, the dug up dirt piled along the rim. You shoveled it in over your business when you were done. A small tarp hung from a strung rope to give you privacy. Most importantly, it was downwind from the campsite.

I didn’t get much of an opportunity to explore that day but found a dehydrated carcass of a huge lizard, called the chuckwalla, in the rocks as I searched for firewood for the campfire. I brought with me a canteen that I emptied within a few hours. It must be horrible to be in a desert without water. In a few days, you’d be beef jerky, same as the Chuckwalla. The troop brought along plenty of provisions and gallons of water, so we would survive. I heard there was an oasis nearby and could picture an encampment of baggy-panted Bedouins with curved daggers and drooling camels sitting around a pool of aqua-colored water, in the shade of lush coconut filled palm trees. Behind them, the shapes of their sexy concubines danced behind silk-walled tents. Maybe they all looked like Barbara Eden of “I Dream of Jeannie.” She was pretty hot.

Before dinner, I rested in the shade of my tent and read a comic book of my favorite super hero- “The Flash.” I liked The Flash because I was a fast runner too. He had super sonic speed and was also friends with the Green Lantern. And like most super heroes, one minute he was the public’s hero, the next, a public menace. It was a co-incidence that the Flash was also my dad’s favorite super hero in the 1940’s.

My wise-ass scout leader sent me to the other camp to borrow a left-handed spatula. The laugh was on gullible me as I slunk back into camp red-faced and furious. If I only had a dagger! We had the usual manly fare cooked up in the campfire…hot dogs, burgers, beans, beef stew, etc. I drank a stowed away warm bottle of Crush that made me think of a bigger lizard and a pretty genie with red hair and freckles.

The next day, real early, while it was still fairly cool, we went on a ten-mile hike. I kept my eye open for caves, arrowheads and evidence of lost miners, but no such luck. I captured an albino looking lizard when I turned over a rock and surprised it. It ran right into my hand. We passed a desert tortoise chewing on a cactus and a saw a roadrunner flash across our trail. We examined coyote tracks. You’d never see one, they were wile, you know, but we heard their high-pitched wailing during the night. On a distant outcrop, we briefly spotted some bighorn sheep who disappeared into the rocks. The hike was beautiful but exhausting. I brought back with me a nasty blister on my heel and was rewarded later with a colorful patch for my uniform.

The last night we stared into the clear sky and located the North Star, which was in the vicinity of the big dipper. I don’t think I ever saw so many stars; they were thick, stirred together in milky clouds that spread across the sky.

I took on a number of challenges I had been putting off. I wouldn’t be skateboarding in Philadelphia, made a solo climb of “S” mountain just to see if I could do it. I got into my first fight, one of those quick schoolyard brawls. Starting off with a taunt and an “Oh, yeah,” then “-Yeah,” shoves, followed by a few wild swings and grappling in a heap of dust. In the fracas, I managed to squirm free and get the other kid in a headlock. The kid bucked and punched me but I squeezed until he was in tears and said, “OK, I GIVE”. I got cocky after that and lost the very next fight, unable to secure a headlock, which was my only good move.

Dad took Joe and I fishing to Lake Murray, a mile from where we lived. While Joe and I pulled in a few Sunfish, Dad hooked into something big. His pole curved into an inverted U, on the verge of snapping as he reeled in what had to be a behemoth. The line would surely break any second as the reel creaked under the tension. As the beast was dragged from the depths we pulled in our line to watch the epic battle. Slowly but surely Dad managed to get the thing closer to shore as the water swirled angrily above it. The dark shape of a large catfish emerged briefly then disappeared as it rolled violently in an attempt to shake the hook. Finally, the catfish tired and was pulled within reach. Hooking his finger it under the gill, Dad lifted his fish—fishes. The big fish was tangled in line that trailed back into the lake. At the end of the trailing line was another fish, a nice sized trout, flapping at the bank’s edge. That was the first and last time I went fishing with my dad. In fact, it was the last time I did something special with him, just us, for the rest of my childhood.

The Mysterious Fever

About a month later, my sister Laura woke up when she heard moaning. Paula was sitting up, a restless dark shape in the bed across the room. Laura called out, “Paula…Paula?” After no response Laura turned on the light. Paula was burning up and moaning. Laura tried to rouse her but Paula was too out of it, incoherent and wheezing as she sat in a pool of sweat. Laura, who had asthma, thought Paula was having an attack, she was all too familiar with. My mom said Paula had a fever and filled an ice bag for her forehead. Paula’s eyes were dilated and wild as she continued to sweat despite the ice. Cramps caused her to curl up as she clutched her stomach. She grunted and babbled, unable to answer clearly to “What’s wrong?” directed her way every few minutes. This continued for another hour as my mom became increasingly worried. Dad peeled off the soaked sheets and carried her out to the car.

At the hospital, the doctor was very concerned about her condition and was unable, at first, to diagnose the problem. Paula was in a lot of pain and had broken into a rash. Her temperature was through the roof and she was given oxygen. They cooled her down with more ice and her thrashing subsided enough that she could be moved to a room for further tests and observation. When they lifted her in the transfer, Paula screamed when her leg was touched. On a hunch, the doctor rolled her over and found a telltale swollen red area on the back of her leg.

“Looks like something bit her. We need to find out what!” the doctor said.

My dad drove back home to inspect the sheets. Crumpled in the folds of the sheets was a dead black spider with an hourglass red spot on its abdomen. Paula recovered in a few days but slept uneasily for quite a long time; scared she’d have another unwelcome poisonous visitor.

Paper, Rock, Scissors

My mother was hanging up my dad’s jacket and discovered a note in his pocket. She sat on the bed; her shoulders slumped as she wept. The contents of this little scrap of paper were a bitter confirmation of the suspicion and fear she carried deep in her gut, and had chose to deny. But the diagnosis was in, and it was bad news. It was cancerous, a contagion that in the end would be catastrophic. Unknown to my siblings and I, we too would eventually be sickened and never fully recover from the tragic consequences of the betrayals.

Dad often returned home late from work. …It had been busy at the base, demanding schedules, and uh, they were under staffed. He was stressed out, under a lot of pressure and had, on occasion, stopped by a bar to get a drink. This went on for a while. It was all part of a carefully planned deception.

My mom actually knew the woman pretty well, my dad, very well obviously. She had been in and out of our home many times. Mom babysat her twins so she could have time to do other things. She was a divorcee and engaged to another man while screwing around with my father. My mother, despite being cooperative to a reasonable point, wasn’t enough for Dad’s insatiable appetite. She rebuffed his suggestion that they “swap” with another couple.

“…Everybody was doing it.”

Not a good Catholic girl with six kids!

Sometimes it would be quite late, in the early morning hours, when Dad crept back into the house like a guiltless thief. He had indeed stolen something precious and cast it aside in the crime. Without trust their marriage was as doomed as the girl I described earlier, tied under the boulder waiting for the crushing blow.

Months previous, while getting her hair cut, my mother heard of my father’s recent indiscretions from the hairdresser. Saying, she knew of him from the bar up the street. Mom denied it of course, and may have voiced it out loud, “…that it just wasn’t so, couldn’t be, please don’t let it be.” But she knew the malignant truth and felt it eating away at her on the inside. As with any martyr, my Mother closed her eyes and accepted the torment that that came with the fate.

Fires

I wasn’t a news hound but caught whiffs of the mayhem flashing across the television. Fires- both literal and symbolic were sparked by demonstrators seemingly everywhere. Race riots flared up in city after city as ghettos burned. The US draft calls for the war in Vietnam were increased ten-fold and college students protested loudly from campuses throughout the country. At a rally in Manhattan, a Catholic pacifist and college ballplayer, David Miller, burned his draft card and was promptly arrested, tried and convicted under a new law aimed to suppress the “beatniks” against the war. At the US consulate in South Vietnam, another Buddhist monk torched him self in protest of the war. It made me think of that shocking photo I saw in Life a few years before of Thich Quang Duc, the first Buddhist monk to immolate himself. The priest sat in a traditional lotus position of meditation, not moving a muscle as his body was consumed to a blacked stump.

I knew about martyrs.

Another image burned into the public consciousness was the mug shot of a pock-faced blank-eyed seaman named Richard Speck. Speck brutally slaughtered eight nurses in their south Chicago dormitory. The lone survivor identified the killer as a man with a tattooed arm that read “Born to Raise Hell.” Bon fires of Beatles merchandise burned in the South after John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I never heard any Jesus albums, so the Beatles were still number one in my book.

I don’t know if it was my age or because I was totally rude, but outside of the home I wasn’t into hanging out with my sisters, the same went for my brother John. The stuff I did wasn’t something you couldn’t drag little girls or four year-olds to. They could be killed or severely injured in my world. I climbed mountains, road skateboards down dangerous steep hills and wrangled lizards and scorpions. At the time, I thought all Paula and Laura did was play house, have tea parties on the patio and dressed their Barbies and Kens in fashionable ensembles. John became a hapless participant in their girly games. Joe and I were too pre-occupied and weren’t there to protect him. Fortunately, there wasn’t any long-lasting damage from this early corruption because he grew up to be a manly man.

The contrast between my way of life and my younger sisters was as different as pastel-pink is to dirt-brown. I talked with my sister Paula, who visited the other day, and we reminisced about San Carlos. I was stunned when she admitted to a deed that to this day had been a long-forgotten San Carlos mystery.

At the bottom of the hill on Lake Badin Ave. was a cemented gully and drainpipe that went under it. The drainpipe was huge, five feet around, a hundred feet long and a frequent hangout for kids in the neighborhood and an occasional snake. We’d go there to cough on stale cigarettes, blow off firecrackers and try to throw rocks all the way through. “The Tunnel,” as we called it, was a cool refuge from the heat, and except for a couple times a year, was dry as a bone. Everything was dry as a bone.

Paula and Laura ventured to the tunnel one afternoon with a pack of matches snatched from a kitchen drawer. Paula just turned eight and was a recent Girl Scout recruit. She had been to a Brownie’s campout and been exposed to campfire craft. All they needed was a little kindling to get it started and add on sticks and such. Dry grass and dead wood was readily available for a hundred miles around. They gathered handfuls of grass that draped into the gully on both sides and piled the tinder into a neat heap in the gully at the opening of the tunnel. The first match was snuffed out by the wind blowing through the tunnel. The second attempt was successful and the pile flared up into a hungry and glorious pyre of hypnotic yellow and gold. Sticks were fed to satisfy the ravenous beast as it blew tendrils of smoke through the tunnel like an exhaled pipe and drifted into the field on the other side.

All of San Diego was kindling; and as luck had it, the winds were fickle that afternoon. The tunnel suddenly inhaled, sucking the fire on to the parched grass along the top of the gully. Paula and Laura beat the flames frantically with sticks then pulled-off sneakers to no avail as the fire spread away in tide of smoke and flame. The pyromaniacs panicked and fled through the tunnel. They came out into the field on the other side of Lake Badin Ave. and high-tailed unseen it to safety and watched in horror from a block away. White smoke billowed as the fire churned, leaving a widening carpet of black scorched earth behind as it steadily devoured the hill and raced toward the houses above. A crowd clustered along Cayuga Lake Drive below and on Beaver Lake Drive above and watched helplessly at the approaching disaster.

The beautiful cry of distant sirens became louder as the fire engines approached and sped by in a blur of red as dazzling as the fire. One stopped to set up at the bottom of the hill, the other at the top of the hill someplace out of view. The fire reached a fence above and roared into a wall of crackling flame. The fence was kicked down by fireman as two others wrestled with a fire hose and dosed the fire at the edge of the yards above, stopping it in its tracks. In a half an hour the blaze was contained.

I was up at Kevin’s a block away on Beaver Lake Drive and we ran outside when the sirens called us out. It happened so fast. Some self-important fat guy blocked the way and stopped us from getting close to the action. We ran down the hill and caught the tail end of the firefight from below. It was exciting but it could have been a disaster. I spotted Paula and Laura in the crowd at the corner of Cayuga.

“Geeze, did you see what happened?” I asked.

Laura and Paula faces were ashen and looked quite upset. They were speechless, but nodded yes.