Memories of Diamondhead

     
      My memories begin in 1973, in a dark empty volcano they called Diamondhead.  I remember the shadow of my big brother Duane and my father Tom looming like a giant as I wailed in fear and ran outside to the sunlight and bright hot sand.

    Then we are in San Fransisco and I am 3 or 4 and I have a sister Michelle and I can remember my Grandmother is a kind, soft spoken woman and she never stops making the most wonderful smelling chocolate chip cookies.  I can still see the red and white checked table cloth and the warm heaping plate in the middle.  And grandma always smiles, yet now thinking about it, seems her eyes never did.

      We lived in a historic gingerbread house downtown.  The shingles are brightly painted greens, reds and oranges.  And the air is always cool in the morning.  Filled with mist.  We always seemed to be indoors more than out with the shades drawn and a low light brimming in the lamps and we had a wind-up monkey that clapped cymbals together and jiggled from side to side.  And I can remember my grandfather entertaining us for what seemed like hours with this simple thing.

      My Mother is a dark thin gypsy ghost.  Her eyes hooded and her skin olive.  From old polaroid photograph's, yellowed with age, I can read the dates, maybe the place her image is captured.  And yet there is never a hint of happiness in her.

    Sometime later my mother and father got a small apartment in San Jose and they screamed and fought and cursed.  My Father grabbed her and started slapping her and I can remember grabbing a small plastic knife and trying to stab him with it.  I think I saved her from a beating that day.

      And then suddenly Mom is gone and we live in a small shabby house that skirts a closed freeway and behind us lives a kid we call Tony Baloney, I can't remember why.  Dad is gone all day & Duane takes care of us, maybe this is why he grows up to be so good at that kind of thing later on.  One night Duane wakes up and a 2 headed vampire bat has flown in the window, curled up next to him and died.  A very odd & imaginary memory it seems, but to this day it was very real to the both of us.

      Some days we would toast bread in the morning and cockroach's would jump out of the bread slots when it popped up.  Tom would take Duane and I to the community pool.  I think he left Michelle with a neighbor and I refused to wear the mickey mouse floaties.  I was probably four at the time and I remember almost drowning in 5 feet of water. No one was watching as I scrabbled up the wall and clawed my way to fresh air.  My father was there at the edge of the pool, turned away from me, and when he heard me break the surface we just looked at each other and said nothing.


        We spend all of our days playing on the dead end of a freeway and dry humping the 6yr.old girl from the apartment next door.  Dad gives us two bucks and we walk to the gas station a mile away and none of us are over seven years of age.  With that two bucks we buy a six pack of root beer and a few blasting caps that come in a roll and we wedge the caps in a small metal rocket and toss them in the air to hear the loud Snap as they hit the ground.  And I cannot remember feeling sadness or fear or want from those days.