Jumping Death

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..." —Jack Kerouac, from On the Road

Phone rings.

“Hey Martha! Guess what? Tomorrow we're going to teach Mike Smith to ride.”

“Cool!”

“You’ll like him a lot.”

It’s August, but the air is fresh. Perfect summer weather for riding and filming; clear light and light breeze, but we’d go even if it were the most torrid day in the history of San Diego. Mike Smith won’t be with us forever, a point brought home with great urgency by Jimmy because it is very important that Mike Smith ride. Our new motto is “Stay on your bike” and that includes me. I've had a lot of fun on the mountain bike I bought, but I’m anxious to get back on the hiking trails. I miss hanging out with the dogs, the smell of black sage as I brush past it, the thrill of a push up a hard hill, the view from the top, the afternoon light, the sweet blasts of Sacred Datura blossoms in the dusk, the flash release of small bats from the crevices of rocks, the chance to see an owl. My injured knee is nearly healed, but I must wait. My future with this leg depends on not stressing this joint before the salient muscles are strong. From time to time Jimmy and I look at each other and say, “Stay on your bike!”

Because he got into trouble last year at school in Imperial Beach, Mike Smith lives with his dad in Arizona. He’s just here for two weeks to visit his mom, and he and Jason are already in big trouble. Two days after he arrived, they broke into a junkyard near Chula Vista (at night) built a car, got it going and drove it out of the junkyard. Then, on the road leading from the junkyard to the main drag, the car stopped. Instead of leaving it (they had bikes) they tried to fix it, were picked up by the cops and charged with Grand Theft Auto. Mike Smith is only seventeen, but Jason is eighteen, an adult. Their arraignment will be in a few days. Then?

I’m not sure this is a bad thing they’ve done, except the stealing part, of course. The rest is pretty amazing. My personal view is that any two boys who can go into a junkyard and build a car in the dark with tools they can carry on a bicycle probably should be punished by immediate employment in a military motor pool.

Jimmy wants to redeem Mike Smith with a bicycle. Jimmy is sure that Mike Smith will stay out of trouble if he just keeps a BMX bike beneath him. Jimmy’s proof for his theory is that if Jason had stayed on his bike and not thought about a car, he would not be in trouble now.

The boys show up at 1:00.

“Martha!”

“I’m almost ready! Hang on!”

I see Jason, Mikey, and Jimmy standing in a row, their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning, hiding something, a surprise, a present. “Here he is!” Jimmy proclaims. They step aside. There stands a 17 year old boy with golden hair cascading in waves to his shoulders. He is about 5’5” with bright, intelligent eyes, an absolutely tight, muscular and manly, six-pack-ab little body, one golden earring. He’s a small lion in Levis and Vans.

“I know all about you from these dickwads,” he says. He puts out his hand, smiling a sparkling genuine smile and tossing his hair out of his eyes.

“I know all about you, too.” I’m suddenly embarrassed. Not all knowledge of this guy is positive.

“Oh well,” I think. “If the subject comes up, I’ll express myself and let it be.”

He grins, then blushes. I like him. He might be bad, but he’s not evil. He’s reckless; there's no malice here.

“Let’s go?” says Jimmy jumping from one foot to another, nervous, excited.

“Yeah.”

After the bikes are loaded, Jimmy honors Mike by letting him sit in front with us.

“You have the camera, right?”

“I do.”

“And you’ll take off the lens cap? I want Mike to be IN our movie.”

“I have a problem remembering the lens cap,” I tell Mike Smith.

“Yeah. We went to King ‘o’ Dirt and she filmed the whole thing with the lens cap on.” It’s true, awful but true.

“We have a great soundtrack.”

“It’s not radio, Martha!” Jimmy laughs.

Mike doesn’t say anything. I can imagine it might seem odd to him, his best friends from school hanging out with a grown up lady. I have already caught onto the fact that Mike doesn’t especially like or trust grownups. I can imagine Jimmy’s persuasion, “She’s OK, she’s like us, she takes us to the jumps,” but I can also imagine it being outside Mike Smith’s ken.

Jimmy shows Mike Smith how to lift up the handlebars and how to stand up on the pedals, lean forward and pull up at the same time. Jason shows Mike some tricks and Mike takes off. He has a couple bad landings, but soon he’s riding the smaller jumps like he’s done this all his life. It’s not exactly as if he knows what he’s doing; it’s more than he has excellent balance and an intuitive physical sense of how to connect with the bike he’s riding. I try to take pretty film of this, Mike Smith’s first day on a BMX. Maybe the film will help Jimmy convince him.

After a few runs on the easy jumps, Mike Smith is lined up for The Doubles. I remember the boys practicing and practicing before approaching this long and difficult jump which involves clearing two large mounds of dirt about four feet apart, with a two-foot trough in the middle. If a rider lands wrong, and most do when they start out, hitting the second mound on the top, rather than the down hill ramp leading away, he gets a bike bar in the nuts or handlebars in the teeth. A rider can land in the trough, rear wheel down, front wheel slammed against the mound, bent or broken, head over handlebars, face in the dirt. In any bad landing, he’s likely to break the fork of his bike, loosen the headset or bend a seat post. Plenty of nice, new solid frames are cracked learning to ride this high misery.

“You gotta’ get this, Martha,” says Jason. His face, which has been sullen and downcast all day, actually grins. It’s not that we especially LIKE crashes, but they are dramatic and/or funny as long as no one is hurt. I wonder how he feels about Mike Smith. I doubt Jason would be facing possible felony charges if it hadn’t been for Mike Smith’s influence.

I yell, “Wait!” and hurry to get down in the dirt between the two humps. Like Jason, I feel a certain drive to prove myself as flare, undaunted and reckless as this golden boy, even though an inexperienced rider attempting to fly above me is damned scary and authentically dangerous.

“Martha! Lens cap!” screams Jimmy from somewhere above me.

“Yes, dammit!” but I check anyway before getting into the position I need for this shot. We actually spent an afternoon making this trough deeper, and digging out the rocks, so, besides giving me a relatively comfortable spot to lie, and a good angle on the jumpers, I could film without being visible and distracting. I wriggle myself into a stable, comfortable position on my back, camera pointed up. I may be here a while. I check the lens cap again and turn on the camera. “OK! GO!” One by one, flash of boy and bike against pure blue sky, pulling gorgeous can-cans and no-foot can-cans, and handlebar spins. Mike Smith clears The Doubles, higher than anyone has cleared it before, or so it seems from my spot in the dust. Perhaps it is just my fear of his falling that holds him so high above me.

“We’re gonna’ go again!” says Jimmy. “I want to try a 180!”

“OK,” I say. “Wait a minute. I got good film of that. I’m going to shoot from the end, OK?” I don’t even want to think that it might be my fear that Mike Smith can’t do jump this twice that makes me shift my spot.

“Was the lens cap off?”

“Give me a break.”

“Just teasing,” said Jimmy, grinning, pausing. “NOT!”

I flip him off and take the camera (lens cap on in this dust) over to a broken down jump about 20 feet from the landing pad of The Doubles, slightly off to one side. The boys love this shot because it makes each one a star, recording each rider as he approaches the jump, hits the lip, catches air, does his trick over the trough, lands, and cruises down to the side.

My cowboy hat shades my eyes. The boys are lined up and waiting by the time I’m ready. I take a drink of water. “Wait! I gotta’ change the battery!” I switch it with the smaller spare, remove the lens cap and take a deep breath.

“OK. GO!”

The bikes come thick and fast. I film everyone who comes over. I can edit out strangers if I want to, when I get to that point, or use them as context. Since most riders are much less driven and experienced than “my” boys, they make a useful counterpoint. Jimmy pulls his 180, a trick that has taken him a long time to perfect on this jump. Timing is everything. The rider lands backward going downhill and has to be completely in the moment at that point. Without question, “my” boys are the best riders, the most brave, the wildest, and most passionate. They are spectacularly beautiful.

They do this jump a few times, and each time Mike Smith gets higher, his form more perfect. No one expects Mike Smith to do tricks, but as he hits the lip to go over The Doubles the third time, he pulls back on the handlebars, lifts up the bike, and suddenly, his legs are off the pedals in a no-footer.

“Holy shit,” I say. “This can’t be his first time.” But it really is. He’s just purely and simply that reckless and that coordinated.

“Next time, I’m going to do a 180,” he says as he passes me.

“Not without a helmet you’re not,” I call out to him. Jason runs over to the sumac bush and brings back The Helmet.

Mike Smith takes it and gets back in line. I know Jimmy is coaching him, telling him how to lift his body off the bike, turn around beneath him, how to land on the rear wheel, coast back toward me, and turn. The trick, it appears to me, is to immediately return the wheels to motion on landing. Otherwise, a rider can stop completely, putting both feet down and lifting the bike slightly. Go or stop; anything else is a crash.

If I were trying this, I’d want to have intimate knowledge of the slope on which I would land. I would ride up and down it hundreds of times until the feeling of it is part of who I am. The boys have actually done this in their uncountable jumps, but Mike Smith’s only taken this jump three times.

Third in line now, Mike Smith puts on the helmet. Jimmy goes ahead of him, pulls a beautiful 180 and rides over to me to watch Mike Smith.

“Do you think he’ll make it?” I put the camera down to take a drink of water and talk to Jimmy.

“He might. I told him what to do. If it isn’t working, he can jump off.”

Jimmy struggled hard for this trick on this jump. His friend might make it on his first day riding. How would I take that? Not like Jimmy does. With some things in my life, I have a streak of competitive pettiness. Jimmy just wants to do the best he can. He’ll tease and scrap and criticize and compete with the others on the surface, and push them to do better as he pushes himself to do better, call them “lady” and “butt crust” but deep inside, I think he honestly just wants everyone to do well.

“Martha!” calls Mike Smith, “Are you ready?”

The sun is slowly dropping, and the light is perceptively more red, the shadows longer. This will be visually beautiful film, red dirt, blue shadows, the green of the few sumac bushes intensified, softened. Speeding boys in bright shirts and gleaming bike chrome. Mike Smith turns to ride toward me.

“OK!” I send Mike Smith the thumbs up.

My heart is pounding, marking the beat of fear. He pedals fast to the lip, takes to the air, lifts his body off the bike, turns the bike beneath him, and lands. The landing isn’t as beautiful as the jump, the trick, but he doesn’t fall, just sputters and puts his feet down.

“Sorta’ fucked up there at the end,” he says, reaching his hand out for Jimmy’s to shake, then Jason’s. Jason takes his bike and checks it over; the headset has loosened in the landing. Jason rolls it over to the bush where we stashed the tools. For now it seems Mike Smith’s wild ride is over.
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There was a day in the winter, before I got the camera, when I arrived after a hike to see Jimmy about to take a jump that paralyzed me with fear.

“Hey, Martha! You’re just in time! Jimmy’s going to jump Death!” Jason announced when I appeared with Molly and Kelly.

“Death?”

“Yeah, come on!”

We went up a hill north of The Doubles to the most terrifying jump I’d ever seen. I saw a very slow slope of dirt, about 10 yards, leading to a granite lip, effectively a low cliff. Below were all the sharp bushes of the dry chaparral and some 15 feet ahead of it, a landing level. To make it, a rider had to pedal extremely fast to the edge, instantly lift the front of his bike, lean as far forward as possible, pushing his weight ahead of the bike, higher than the bike. The goal was to land on the back wheel, gently drop the front, and ride off, triumphant. If he landed forward, it would be all over. This jump is perfectly named, and Jimmy had never made it before. Everyone lined up for the jump was wearing a full-face helmet, except Jimmy who didn’t have one.

“Hi Martha!” he waves. “I’m going to jump Death!”

“Who’s that?” asks a kid next to him, “Your mom?”

Jimmy doesn’t even answer. Anyone NOT us is beneath his contempt.

My rule has always been not to interfere, not to play the grownup, the “mommy.” We are pals, peers, co-conspirators anti-gravity anarchists, all of us. There were times I said, “No!” in a grownup voice, but more often it was, “You’re out of your fucking mind,” in my own voice. This is a moment where the distinction is clear and instant to me. I am a grownup and I love them and I never want to cart home a broken boy.

“Jimmy,” I said to him, “come here, please.”

He looked at me for a moment, not comprehending. There is, I knew, on that hill a huge cloud of invisible boystosterone, a marvelous, primitive driving substance. I knew Jimmy didn’t want to ride out of it. It would be embarrassing.

“Why?”

“If you don’t, I’m leaving right now.”

“Let me make this jump first.”

“No. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to pick you up. I not having anything to do with this. I’m fucking out of here.” I began picking up things, the cooler, my back pack, grabbed my dog who was tied to the sumac bush in the shade with a bowl of water, and turned toward the trail leading to the truck. If Jimmy insisted on doing what I did not want him to do, he could ride the ten miles home or lie there in the dirt until someone else picked him up, hauled him to the hospital and called his mom.

The distance between us demanded significant vocal volume. Everything stopped up there.

The kid next to him leaned over and said something to him. I saw Jimmy nod. He got on his bike and coasted down to where I stood, my heart in my throat falling back into place as he got nearer.

“Martha, that guy says I can use his helmet. If I wear his helmet, can I jump it?”

I stopped. “I want to see the helmet. I want to meet the guy.” My voice was flat, determined,
there was no negotiating. This is what would happen or nothing would happen. I was, in fact, responsible.

Jimmy motioned, and the kid rode down to where I stood beside the sumac bush. Nice boy. Expensive, full-face helmet. The jump seemed designed for a full facial neck-breaking landing and the helmet would save Jimmy’s skull, face and neck if he crashed.

“Does it fit you?”

“I dunno.”

The boy took it off and handed it to Jimmy who strapped it on. It’s a little loose.

“No,” I said. “A helmet that fits wrong is as dangerous as no helmet.”

“He can adjust it,” said the boy. Jimmy handed back the helmet and the boy showed Jimmy how to make the helmet fit. It did. It fit perfectly.

I took a deep breath. Surely this boy’s parents loved him, too. “Go first,” he said to Jimmy. “I’ll wait here with your mom, and when you’re done, just come back and then I’ll take the jump.” The boy offered himself as hostage.

“Come on. Let’s go watch,” I said, knowing Jason Craig, and Mikey wanted to see Jimmy jump and we were so far away. I knew this boy would like to be closer, too.

Jimmy got in line. One-by-one boy after boy jumped. No one missed, but some rides were more beautiful than others. Jimmy’s moment came. I watched him take a deep breath, circle back about 10 feet on his bike, jump on the pedals for a faster start, lean forward, and, pedaling like a sonofabitch, hit the lip, pull up the front wheel, his body forward over the handlebars, absolutely perfect, his straight little back and helmeted head making of himself a bike-bottomed rocket. Time slowed down. My heart pounded. Out of frightened silence, the boys beside me cheered as Jimmy landed, perfectly, on the other side. My eyes were filled with tears.

Jimmy had jumped Death.

Soon after, realizing they had ridden themselves to a new and higher level, they managed, between them, to get a very good, adjustable, bright red and yellow full-face helmet.

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The light is slanted and intense, shadows lengthening. I hope we’re leaving soon. I’m tired and thinking about where and how to feed these guys. The viewfinder window tells me the battery has only a few minutes of power left. I stand up, no longer focused on the boys, but focused on myself, that I’m thirsty, stiff, tired, in the same shape as the battery. The boys are standing off a ways, talking together, animated. I have no idea what their talk is and don’t care. Jason is beside me tightening the headset on his bike, but it’s not right.

“I think the stem is cracked,” he says.

“Shit, Jason. I’m sorry. You haven’t even gotten to ride today.”

“Yeah, well. It doesn’t matter. I probably won’t be able to ride much more anyway this year.” He knows he’s probably facing several months of house arrest, life with his miserable slut mother and a tracking device on his ankle. He’ll be able to go to school, as if that mattered to him, and it doesn’t.

This worries me. If his bike is broken, it will be very hard for him to stay on it, and I agree with Jimmy.

“I can’t believe you guys built a car,” I offer.

“Yeah.”

“It’s amazing, Jason. That’s talent. You built it in the dark?”

“Yeah. The cops don’t think it’s amazing.” Jason is beautiful. He reminds me of my Uncle Hank when he was young, slender, with dark, soulful eyes, a sweet nature. But Jason is very easily influenced. As long as the influence is good, Jason is good. Any tweak in the opposite direction, and he just as rapidly falls down a hole. “I’m sorry, Martha,” he says. “I let you down.”

“Jason, I know I should give you a lecture about stealing cars, but honestly, I’m too impressed by your building one to say that. It was a shit car someone threw away until you guys built it. I can’t even clearly see how that’s theft. I know I’m wrong, but it’s how I feel. But you gotta’ use your sense. You have to take care of yourself.”

“I just get so confused.”

“Life’s confusing, Jason. Obey the law and stay sober and it’s a little less confusing.”

A few months back, out of concern for his friend, Jimmy backed off from his territorial possessiveness and allowed Jason to get closer to me, even letting him sit in the front of the truck. Jimmy’s intuition is right on; Jason needs to be and feel important, and he is important to me. I like him very much, his low-key sweetness, his abiding respect for me, his boyish flirtatiousness, “Hello, sexy!” Jimmy remains my “best friend” but Jason becomes my “favorite.” A bone of contention has been country music, which Jason loves and Jimmy hates. Driving back from the mountains one day, we listen to “Meet Me in Montana.” I’m always a little homesick, and I start to tear up.

“Would I like Montana, Martha?”

“Yes, Jason. You’d do well there.” I believe he would. It’s bigger, wider, safer, a more appropriate world for a boy like this one.

“Is the sky really bigger there?”

“Yes, Jason. I have no idea why, but it is.”

“Take me with you when you go back, OK?” Jason wants to live with me, but my life is too chaotic to invite a boy like this into it. I know my marriage is breaking up, I seldom see Jim, and a couple of other men are scouting the periphery of my life. I don’t know what will happen. Like Jimmy, I pretty much only feel safe when we are all together in the hills taking absurd physical chances. Random, accidental death in the middle of a sport doesn't seem as scary to me as facing the future.

Jason and I are still talking when Mikey spins down to us. “Jimmy says bring the camera. Mike Smith is going to jump Death!”

“Camera’s out of juice, Mikey. I can’t film it.”

“Oh man, that sucks. Are you gonna’ come watch?”

I cannot say no to that, but I’m tired of carrying this heavy camera. “Carry this for me, would you?” Jason shoulders the camera, and, walking beside me, pushes his bike to the jump. Mikey humps it up the hill beside us. Now Mike Smith is riding Jimmy’s bike, lined up with three or four other guys to jump this monster.

Jimmy, at the far end of the jump, motions for me to lift the camera and take off the lens cap. I shake my head and shrug to mean there’s no more juice. Jimmy shrugs back. We love the movie, but ultimately, it’s the riding, not the filming.

The sun is behind the boys, and their shadows stretch in dark blue sinuous distortion against the rock. It’s an eerie image. I wish now there was juice in that battery.

One by one they back around, pedal fast, hit the lip, catch air, take off. The landings are all solid and safe and now it is Mike Smith’s turn. The boys ahead of him are the first he’s ever seen take this jump. It’s all he knows about it, what they’ve done, though I’m sure he and Jimmy looked at it and talked it over before he put the helmet on his head and his feet on Jimmy’s bike pedals. He circles back, takes a breath we can all feel though we cannot see him breathe. He whoops, then cranks the bike as fast as he can to the edge, a place where many, many more experienced boys have turned around, grinned in embarrassment, and said, “Fuck it, man, I can’t do this!” He pulls back on the handlebars, lifts himself up on the pedals and takes to the air, a flare of red and yellow helmet, a long fringe of golden hair, a bronze back, Jimmy’s silver bike, dark blue jeans, all held for a moment in the late afternoon blue sky.

Ice Cream Ford

The golden haloed entrance to a time warp under a street light. Covered with leaves and shadows, mesmeric. “Jim, look at that car.”

“Yeah.”

“’49 Ford,” I said in hushed, reverential, tones. “My parents had a car just like that, when I was born.”

“You can’t remember that.”

“No, but I remember the car. It’s one of my first memories. You could take the back seats out. My dad took us out to the bombing range, my Uncle Hank and me. It was my nap time so he took the seat out of the car and put it in the shade and put me down there for a nap.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know. Three, I think. They bought another car that year, a ’55.”

“I don’t know how you can remember that.”

“I don’t either.” My memories are beside the point. I’m haunted by this car here in the yellow dark of a San Diego night. “Hey, it’s for sale!” We bought it for $500. The guy, Steve, who sold it to us was an ex-biker living in a motorhome by the park. He actually drove it to our house. I walked up to the park the next day to pay for the car and ride back with him. It made a hell of a racket and smoked all the way. That and the fact that it was so old, rusted, multicolored and just flat out interesting made it -- and Steve, a pot-bellied, brown-bearded grinning man looking like a movie star in the driver’s seat -- something like a parade in our hood. People along the way stopped what they were doing to watch this show. From then on, until he got chased away from the park, Steve sometimes brought huge boxes of donuts for the boys to eat while they worked on their bikes. The next morning, Jim and I went out to look at our new old car. Somehow I had the idea I could restore it, insane, I know, but at the time it seemed possible. It DID run. We lifted the hood. Nice flat-head six engine which had, to our surprise, a head-bolt heater. Paper work -- a small registration card from the late ’50’s -- showed the car had belonged to a physician in North Dakota. Stories rolled in my mind, this man plugging in his car at night in the freezing North Dakota winters, making house-calls to outlying farms, delivering babies, responding to farm crises. He needed this dependable car. North Dakotans are the butt of jokes for Montanans, and so, to get the last word, North Dakota has posted a sign on the interstate going into Montana. It says, “You are leaving North Dakota. Remember; when General Custer left North Dakota, he was alive.” This is true. Custer left what is now North Dakota en route to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There was nothing we could do but name our car General Custer.

As time passed, we bought a second ’49 Ford and put it in the back yard with the General. I don’t know what we thought. I was no more equipped to put those two cars together and make one decent looking, operable ’49 Ford than I was equipped for space flight. By the summer of ’92, tall grass reached up the doors of the General and his pal. Field mice and rats had nested in the seats. The cars weighed heavily on my mind, but I had no solution. What had been a dream was now a problem. At one point I tried to trade them for a bass guitar, but even that didn’t work out, and so they sat, rusting further, several tons of steel and stories no one knew.

---------------------------------------------

There are a lot of things like that around my house. One of them is an old ice cream freezer that fascinates Mikey, so, on our way home, I decide to stop at Vons. We’re going to make ice cream. We buy ice, sugar, salt and cream.

“You’re in charge of ice cream, Mikey.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You’re the one who wants to make it. We’re going to make it.”

Mikey jumped and whooped and danced around the shopping cart. Mikey would go grocery shopping with me anyway. We had Von’s that we liked (those from which it was easy to shoplift bulk candy) and those that we liked less (those from which it was impossible to shoplift bulk candy). This is going to be a great evening, with grilled burgers, marshmallows, homemade ice cream, whatever anyone wants. Potato chips with dip -- that’s a treat none of us have often. We run up and down the aisles throwing things into the cart. It’s looking good; it’s looking like fun. Soda. Mountain Dew.

“OK, guys,” I tell them once we’re home. “I need an hour to shower and regroup, OK? Come back, I dunno, 7?”

“We’ll do everything, Martha,” says Jimmy. “We’ll start the grill and everything. You don’t have to do anything.”

“OK, but I still want a shower and I need to feed the dogs and...”

“We’ll feed the dogs,” said Jason. “I’ll take care of them.”

“Look, you have to go home and tell your mother what’s going on. Give me an hour, OK?”
I close the door. I’m alone. I take a deep breath, unleash Molly, open the back door and let the others in. I love them so much. A dream I’d had as a kid was to have my own pack of dogs. Not long ago, I realized that dream had come true. I put the video camera battery in to charge. Who knows? There might be more to film when the boys return. This last-minute picnic deserves recording as much as any BMX stunt over The Doubles.

By the time they return, I’m ready for them. I feel better having showered. They’ve cleaned up, too. We’re all different, though. It’s as if we have had all we can stand of each other, but still do not want to be alone, really. Jason goes out to General Custer. Jimmy goes into my bedroom (where he often does his homework), sits down at my computer and starts to write a story about riding at Mission Trails. I measure out the ingredients for ice cream and get the ice cream freezer going. Mikey is so excited, but cranking the handle is not a one man job. Mike Smith takes turns with Mikey. I start a fire and make burgers and put other food out on the table. Mikey gets up from the ice cream freezer and goes to see what Jason is doing. I go get the video camera. I like this going on in my backyard.

Jimmy is still writing.

“This was the best day of the summer, Martha,” says Mikey.

“I think so, too.”

“Are you going to let Jason fix the Ford?”

“I’d love that,” I say. “Nothing would make me happier.”

He’s taken off the air filter and cleaned out its housing. With the video camera running, I come through the twenty or so stalks of corn that growing beside the old cars.

“What’s that, Martha? Did you build it?” Jason cracks up. It’s an allusion to Field of Dreams.

“You never know.”

“Do you want me to get this running for you, Martha?”

“I’d love it, Jason. It’s yours to work on.”

“Hey Martha!” yells Mike Smith. “The burgers are ready.”

I go find Jimmy. As we eat, we keep taking turns cranking the ice cream. By the time we’ve eaten all the food, the ice cream is ready, as sweet as the day. When it's gone, we roast marshmallows in the dark. Jason sits close to me, shoulder touching shoulder. I can feel he's scared, but for the moment, all is well with him. Mike Smith sits on the ground with Kelly who's in golden retriever bliss with a tennis ball in her mouth and the hope that someone might just throw it. Jimmy goes back to my bedroom and writes another story.

“You know what we should call our movie, Martha?” Mikey blows out a burning marshmallow.

“What?”

“Ice Cream Ford.”

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Jimmy’s stories:

My times at Mission Trails…….

When I started going to mission, I was the same age I already am the first time I went to mission trails I whent with the Dirt Brothers and they were skying over the doubles and I was scared because they might laught at me when I crash. Then I took Ryan and we had a blaast so we kept on going and going and after a while King of Dirt came and I was suprissed to see people actually doing back flips and some off the wall stuff. So after King of Dirt I was going with Martha and Ryan in the truck so I was happy because we didn’t have to ride our bikes there and she can go hicking with Molly (dog) so after I was going for a while decided to start taking Craig, Jason, Jurki mean Greg and the Queer Leo the Lop these are my so called friends except Craig and Leo they both are niggers they only scrounge around from people like meeeee and Martha.

Then when Jason and Greg started coming up we whent in the truck to mission trails and they were afraid of the doubles and didn’t jump them and I did that is because I have been going there for a while and are better than them at Mission. Then Jason finaly jumped the doubles. And so does Butt Crust I mean Mike.

Metallica

This band started out in 1982 with there debute album Kill em All and I really didnt hear about them until 1984.When my aunt Karen(bitch) saw them at the sports areena and she said that they were awsome and they kicked ass along with joan jett[not so awesome]. well, anyways then I said can I hear them and she said no [That is why she is a bitch]. Anyways, she is not into it anymore she is into sinhead o'conner [nasty] then the heart breaking news came along in 86 that their tour bus overturned in england on their way to larses realitives house and my favorit bassist whent throught the screen and killing him instantly i was sad and so was my bitch i mean aunt. I thought they were going to split upfor good but they didn't they kept on and interviewed others and they found one named jason newsted he isnt the same as Cliff but hes alright.

KILL EM ALL is my favorit album out of them all because they are played by the old METALLICA.With Cliff james kirk lars and the bassist for hit the lights was dave mustainwho is now the lead singer of megaqueer{megadeath]. this album consistes of my favorite songs like hit the lights anestesia whiplash etc.

RIDE THE LIGHTNING..is one of the best albums ever made by METALLICA because it not only had cliff in it it has three of my favorit songs in it. FADE TO BLACK CREEPING DEATH and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.The reason I like this album so much is.....I dont know i just do.

Then ther is MASTER OF PUPPETS witch is jasons favoite albu because he can play the first part of sanitarium.I like that song because its cool along with BATTERY, DAMAGE INC and ORION. AND JUSTICE FOR ALL is i guess mikes favorite it has a few songs i like on it such as ONE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER THE SHORTEST STRAW and AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.........

METALLICA
THAT is the new album from them i relly isn't that good except for a couple songs like sad but true and the unforgiven my friend of misery and wherevever i may roam.

that is the history of metallica that i know of and that is all

Jimmy Buckins, August 15, 1992

Lens Cap Productions

I want to write. I teach full time. I have four dogs. I have a hiking habit of at least two hours a day plus an hour commute round-trip to Mission Trails. I feel my life slipping away as I approach, reach, and pass forty, and I’m desperate to get something done. I don’t know what to write, so I write a lot of long letters to people in Germany and a couple men who live just across town. I fill journals. I write stories that are little more than transcriptions of my conversations with friends. “Do you HAVE an imagination at ALL?” asks my brilliant Indian friend Madhu. “There’s nothing in this thing you call a story beyond our conversation from yesterday!”

“That’s a story!”

But he’s put a bug in my ear.

There might be something more to writing than all that “write what you know” stuff. Maybe an artist will write what he doesn’t know, hasn’t seen, and doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s a rationale behind art (I always believed it was) but I don’t have anything better than my own life and the odd conversations and events happening around me. Sometimes it really gets to me, and I shut the front door, turn off all the lights and hide in my room to write in front of the tiny black and white screen of my Mac Classic. One such night, the night after we start making our film, there is a persistent knock on the front door. I try ignoring it.

I’m fed up, fuming. “Fuck!” I think, “I told them, dammit. I told them I wanted to write!" I get up and go to the door, preparing to yell or to help, depending.

Expecting Jimmy, I'm surprised to see Mikey alone.

“Martha, can we talk for a while?”

“Mikey, what? I told you I wanted time to myself. I'm writing.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Stories."

“Why?”

“I want to be a famous writer, Mikey. That’s my dream.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Mikey sighs, looking straight ahead into the street.

“I don’t want you to be a famous writer. I just want you to be a Martha with a red truck."

I give up and sit down on the porch beside him.

“Martha, this was the best day of my whole life. I love our movie.”

We'd spent the day filming. It WAS wonderful, but exhausting.

The boys showed up early wearing their best BMX costumes, with fancy numbers on the fronts of their bikes. They’d seen BMX films on X-treme sports shows and somehow thought what we were doing would be of that caliber. They learned pretty quickly that while I, director and cameraman ,was passionate, and would lie sweating in the dirt between the humps of The Doubles for hours just to capture that great and dangerous shot (I could get spiked in the chest if there was a crash, a wheel came off and a fork came down), I could also forget to remove the lens cap. When we realized this, we’d already been filming for nearly an hour, the sun was gruelingly high in the sky, and the boys were tired. Undaunted, and laughing at me, they dusted themselves off and we started again.

Hours later, we were back at my house, watching. The boys emptied the fridge onto the Chinese table in my living room, covered it with paper plates, bread, cold meat, mayonnaise and mustard, chips, bottles of soda.

The shots from the ground as the boys arced above The Doubles, against the bright blue sky, took our breath away. I loved the talk, the boys behind me commenting in their language, their way. No one thought of that; we had been intent on images. We had thought of music and talked about a sound track, but their own talk was so good, alive and vital.

When they finally left, I was drained. I needed time to alone to ride my own unicycle through the time warp, to pound the keyboard in an activity that just could not be futile, to practice my own 180’s and can-cans and hope to god somehow I’d learn to write, I loved it so. I knew that tomorrow would be more of the same, the boys would arrive at 8, we'd be back at the jumps by 9. Early is better on Sunday; lots of kids go to church and we’ll have it all to ourselves. Again, I’d lie in the dirt and point the camera at them and they’ll yell at me about the lens cap. We'd leave earlier, after eating at Taco Smell, since Jimmy and the others had to get back to IB that night for school Monday, and I also had to prep for school. I had wanted this night, but I would not have it.

A lump rises in my chest, and time slows way down as the beauty of this moment sinks into my soul. A half-moon peeks through the branches of a eucalyptus tree across the street. It’s nearly 11. Truffle pants softly behind the closed screen door. I reach behind me to open it, and she comes out, lies down beside us and pants some more. I put my arm around Mikey. He’s here because his happiness is too big for his mom’s tiny house. I don’t have to be a famous writer tonight. "I love our movie, too, Mikey."

Surfing U.S.A.

Summer. School's out. Theirs, not mine. I'm teaching my ESL class in one of the long-lived temporary classrooms at the ALI. I have a mixed group of students from all over the place, Turkey to Brazil. It's a reading class, higher level. The students speak English well enough do to most of the things they might want to do. At the moment, they are in groups working on a vocabulary and comprehension worksheet.

It's about 9:30 a.m. The door opens part way. One at a time, the boys squeeze through the narrow opening. I'm amused by the melodrama; there's no way they can sneak in.

Jimmy. Cut off work pants, cut off diving suit legs, worn Vans, stretched out white socks swinging around his ankles, T-Shirt, enormous grin. Craig, homemade Mohawk, wife-beater T-shirt, jeans, beat up Vans, safety-pin hanging from the lower lip of his grin. Mikey, his mom still dresses him. Jeans, boy's plaid button-down, undershirt, freckles, grin. Jason, tall, shirtless, a character from a Paul Newman movie, narrow hips, broad shoulders and strong abs from lifting the front end of the bike on jumps, wheelies, tricks.

I am grinning, too, at the expressions on the faces of my students. I don't think they've seen anything quite like this.

"How'd you get here?"

"We rode. We took the trolley from IB then rode from my mom's house up here."

That's twenty miles or so. I shake my head.

"How'd you find me?" I ask them.

"We asked at the office," said Jimmy.

Alrighty then. This lot has been to the office asking for me. Ah the stories about ourselves we never hear; this will be one of them, but I can imagine it. "I'm teaching, guys."

"Yeah, we know. We'll go outside."

My students protest and I think, "Hmmm, these are real, live Americans here, unique specimens." I say, "You want to help my students? They're working on a project -- wait, I have an idea. Put your stuff away," I tell my class. "We're going to do something different." I see the fascination in their eyes looking at the boys. I decide to capitalize on it. For some of these kids, it'll be their first conversation with an American; for all of them it will be their first conversation with Americans from the world the boys come from.

"Stay in your groups. I know you are wondering what these boys are doing here, how they're related to me, what they are like. OK, you guys, each one go join a group. Students, you can interview the boys and then I want you to work together on a paragraph about the person you interview."

I hear the questions, "How do you know our teacher?" "Why do you have a pin in your face?" "Do you go to school?" "How old are you?" "What do you study?" "Do you like America?"

In spite of the fact that every one of these boys has been short-changed in some way by the "American Dream" they defend their country to these "foreigners". "America is the best place to live," they say to Swiss, German, Turks, Brazilians, Japanese. It never crosses their minds that could be up for debate and might not win and, what's more, they themselves might be the evidence presented to refute it.

The boys ask questions, too. "What music do you listen to?" "Where do you live?" "Do you like it here?" "Do you know BMX?"

Class ends and no one has written anything. I'm proud of the boys, their good manners and gentility in answering some of the questions which were quite rude, actually, very personal. They front for their friend, me. If anyone says anything about them to me later, anything pejorative, they will have to fight me.

"Can we go to Mission now?" asks Mikey as we walk out of the classroom together.

"I can't. I have a meeting."

"Don't go."

I look at this splendid June day. I look at them, think of their long trek, and want to ditch. I want to practice anarchy right here, right now, but I'm still laboring under the illusion that I have a future in this place.

"Let's go get lunch. I have to hang out, but then we can do something." We go to McDonald's. After, they sit on the tailgate of my truck, waiting. One of my colleagues walks past my truck on his way to the meeting and takes the seat next to me when he arrives. "Are you in a gang, Martha? There are a lot of rough looking kids hanging around your truck."

I think that's hilarious. "Yes, John, I am in a gang."

"No, really, who are those boys?"

"That's my gang," I insist. "They are my friends. We're going to Mission Trails as soon as I'm done here." And, at that moment, I decide I'm done there. I put my things together and stand up. "I have an appointment," I tell my boss. "Sorry!"

I take the boys to Mission and then go home to change. I go back with Molly and the video camera, but most of the footage I take is with the lens cap on the camera. We eat pizza after and the boys spend the night at Colleen's. The next day I offer to take them back to IB. No one wants to ride; it's blistering hot. They pile in the back of the truck with their bikes. We have decided to go to the beach near Coronado because it's so hot and we've never gone to the beach together.

"Have you ever surfed?" asks Jason, who's sitting in the front seat for some reason I do not yet know, but will learn before long.

"No. Is it fun?"

"You'd love it," he says. "To bad we don't have a surf board."

"I know where we can get one," says Craig from the back of the truck. The window between is open to allow the air to circulate. My truck doesn't have air conditioning.

"Where?"

"I'll tell you when we get there."

We arrive in IB and Craig starts telling me, "Turn here, go down that street, up that street, go up that alley, down that alley" kind of thing. We stop in front of a house that has an open garage door. Slung from ropes on the ceiling is a long board. "Park here," says Craig. "We can use that one."

"Can you get it down?" asks Craig. Jason is over six feet tall; the others haven't had their growth spurts yet and are still not a lot taller than I am.

"Yeah, you wait there and catch it." Jason reaches from the back and slowly pushes the board toward Craig. Jason runs around and helps him as the board slides forward. They put it in the back of the truck and we head up the Strand to the beach.

Coronado is NOT a surfing beach, and it's a fairly flat day, but there's enough of a swell that the boys think I might be able to get a ride. Jason shows me how to get the board out behind the breaks and when to get up on it. I've body-surfed enough to understand how to find the spot on the wave that will carry me in. They all stay out there with me, past the breaks, waiting, waiting. I'm blind without my glasses and have learned to gauge when the wave is right by noticing changing relationship between ocean and sky. Perhaps all myopic surfers have the same method, I don't know.

"That one, that one, Martha, that one! Just get on all fours like a dog, OK? You don't have to stand up your first day!"

The wave comes. I turn my back toward it. I feel it begin to swell beneath me. I manage to get up on the board as I've been told and ride the small wave all the way in. I take the board back out.

"How was it? Did you like it?"

"I love it." I was ready to spend the rest of my life like that, but never again that day did a wave of any size approach the Coronado shore. Finally we give up, go in, and dig a hole in the sand, bury Jason to his neck and throw Cheetos at him as he tries to catch them in his mouth.

At the end of the day, back in IB, we wash the board at Jimmy's uncle's house before taking it back to the open garage door and hanging it where we found it.

"Do you know these people, Craig?" I ask, finally.

"Naw. Why?"

Knights and Death

Dusk. Friday. Late spring, a normal Friday. Phone rings, "Can we come down?"

"Sure, of course."

"See you in a few."

I go out onto the front porch to wait. The air has that bright end of sunset red tinge. Standing in the middle of my street and looking southwest, you can see a strip of ocean and the lights of Tijuana, on a clear days you can see the bull ring. My old neighbor, Letha, and I sometimes watched fireworks on Coronado and in Imperial Beach on the Fourth of July from that very vantage point sharing a glass of wine. Thinking of that, I get up from my porch and walk out into the street and look toward the ocean. Fog is fast gathering down there and the bright sunset is swallowed, dusk no longer tinged with gold. I hear a gunshot behind me, and not far. I turn toward the sound and take a few steps up the street. My heart goes cold when I see the boys coming on their bikes. Where’s the shooter? They stop at the corner. I began walking as fast as I can toward them. I hear Jimmy, "Don't let her see, Jason! Stop her!"

I’m scared for the boys. There’s someone with a gun up there. Jimmy, Mikey and Marc stay where they are while Jason rides quickly toward me. I wish they would just come here. We could go inside. The news tells daily of drive-bys. I don’t want them lost to that random killing.

"You wanna see me do a can-can, Martha?" he asks and launches into this complicated trick.

"What happened?" I ask.

"How about a Bunny Hop? Do you wanna' see me do a bunny hop?"

"Jason, what happened?" I now hear sirens in the distance, coming from the fire department a mile up the street.

His response is, "Don't go up there, Martha."

"Is it a body, Jason?"

"Yeah. Some guy was shot."

By then I'm at the corner. The boys try to stand in front of me, shielding me from the sight of a middle-aged Mexican lying face down in the dirt beside a neighbor's driveway.

"Is he dead?" I ask the boys.

No one has ventured any closer than the corner where we stand roughly 30 feet from the body.
We hear screaming and running coming from the alley down which this man had run. A woman's voice, a man's voice. If they're saying anything, I can't understand it. It might not even be words, just crying and screaming; fear, rage and anguish seeking expression.

He's just a man. He's wearing navy blue work pants and a white shirt; the kind of sensible, serious black steel-toed shoes a delivery guy wears to protect his feet. That this simple person would be involved in some deathly drama seems absurd. I stare without really getting what I'm seeing. The boys are worried. I should not see things like this. Their Martha should never see anything so ugly.

I realize this and think that it's my job, as an adult, to shelter the boys, but here they are sheltering me. I decide to let them, and I turn toward home.

"Let's go home," I say. "The cops will be here and it's their business, not ours."

"I wonder what happened?" asks Mikey.

No one answers. Not long before, maybe only a year, someone had broken into Ryan's house and cut up his mother. We learned of this the morning after, when Jimmy went down to get Ryan to go to the jumps. The house was cordoned off with Do Not Enter Crime Scene tape. He came back up the street to get me, to go down there, to get me to go look. It was horrifying, chilling. There was blood on the concrete sidewalk by the front door on the stucco walls and on the door itself. Someone had been hurt badly. Neighbors said that the fire department had taken Ryan's mom away on a gurney. Ryan had stayed with the neighbor for an hour or so until his dad came and got him. We never saw Ryan again.

Our neighborhood is constantly in competition with two others for having the most violent crimes. It's the result of the clashes of cultures and drug gangs (Asian vs. Mexican vs. Black vs. White meth farmers and dealers). It’s the result of people working three jobs to hold a life together, exhausted, frustrated, poor people who want more than they'll ever have -- their desires fed by the outrageous entertainment centers for which they’ve hocked their lives. It's the result of passion and love and cheating and child-stealing and coyote depositing and INS deporting and all the rough unjust moving around of people for one reason or the other. It's the result of despair.

Larry McMurtry wrote about California in the introduction to his book of essays about Texas, In a Narrow Grave.

"...present-day Texas is a very rich subject, particularly for the novelist. Present-day California might be even richer, but California, whether as a subject or a place to live, is almost too taxing. There the confusion is greater, the rivalries of manners more intense: the question is whether anyone can live in California and comprehend it clearly now..."

It's a very good question. My gang of white adolescent boys and I stand on the edges of this violent, multi-ethnic neighborhood some distant sentimental liberal has named the “Urban Village,” and watch it shoot itself, knife itself, beat itself up mostly in relation to race, custom, language, territory, drugs.

"For the Mexicans," says my neighbor Chayo, "it's about territory, not drugs. For the Blacks and Asians it's about territory and drugs." For the Whites? No one knows. Few hang around, only people like me who can’t move; finances hold us here. Where would I get another house in San Diego for $800/month? The white neighbors across the street have lived here since the ‘60’s when it was a beautiful neighborhood. Most of the older Mexicans have lived here that long, too, and attended Hoover High when it was one of the best high schools in San Diego. Old photos of the hood show fancy cars, immaculate lawns and gardens, men in white shirts and fedoras, women in pretty shirt-dresses with aprons. But this Mexican is face down next to the light pole, dead. None of us knows why.

We sit on the curb under the palm tree in my front yard, watching the street. Night falls soft and starlit somewhere, but here the sky is a wild red and blue disco show of police cars and fire engines. No one asks questions, looks for witnesses or talks to neighbors. It seems they simply examine the body, check his I.D. and haul him away. Chances are good he has no I.D., another "Illegal" come up to earn a living where he might actually have that chance. Most of our stories have no better or more meaningful ending than that.

Born to Be Wild

After he gets beaten up, Jimmy’s mom sends him to live with his uncle in IB, but Mikey is living with his mom, the twins and his little sister in the rickety squat in the alley nearby. When I get home from school the afternoon of the concert, Mikey and his friend Marc are sitting on the front porch, their bikes sprawled across the lawn.

"What's up?" I ask, knowing perfectly what's up. The little boys, age 10 or so, want to go to the jumps. They hope I'm going hiking. I'm always afraid to take them without the big boys who will watch them and care for them in that dangerous playground. I usually turn them down, and this time I have a reason.

"Are you going to Mission?"

"Not today. Jim and I are going to the Del Mar Fair."

"Can we go?" Mike asks.

"We won’t get home until after midnight. That’s kind of late for you."

"Why so late?"

"We're going to a concert."

"Who?" asks Mikey.

"Steppenwolf."

They start jumping up and down and singing, "Born to Be Wild!"

"You know the band?"

"Yeah. It's my dad's favorite." I should have thought. Mikey's dad is a biker guy who lives in Nevada. It's clear from looking at their mom that she spent many tough biker-babe days on the back a chopper.

"You have to ask your mom, Mikey, and I need PROOF you asked her so tell her to call me, OK? You won't get home until maybe 1 a.m., depending on the traffic, and it's a school night."

"Yay!" They jump up, grab their bikes and spin home. Minutes later, I'm on the phone with Mikey's mom.

"Are you sure you want them? They can be a handful."

"It’ll be fun."

"What time should they be ready?"

"We’ll leave as soon as Jim gets home from work. Two hours?"

"OK. Do you want me to send them down?"

"No. Jim's unpredictable. We'll come get them. I'll call you first."

"Great, Martha. Thank you so much. I appreciate everything you do for my boys. I don't know where they'd be without you."

I have a lump in my throat. There is nothing generous in anything I do "for" the boys. We're in it together. Whatever I might do for them, they do ten-fold for me. "It's nothing. I love them."

"They love you, too."

"I know. I just think they're great. I love their sport. Have you seen them?"

"No. I'm too scared to watch. I saw it on TV once. Still, I think it's better for them to do that than all the other things around nowadays for kids to get in trouble with, but I don't want to watch it."

I laugh. "I can understand that, but it's very beautiful and they are very good. See you in a bit."

At 7 we go get Mikey and Marc. I knock on the door of this unbelievable house. It's a white Craftsman cottage from the twenties. The stones and bricks that once held it off the ground have disintegrated or been kicked out of the way. It’s held up, literally, with whatever solid scrap rock and concrete block the boys have found lying in the alley. At one point a plastic milk crate has been pressed into service I've contributed some concrete paving stones I found in my back yard to this task. I have never been inside.

I knock. Colleen opens the door leading directly to the kitchen. The room is lit by candles, to save money on electricity. "They're almost ready." Marc is ready, standing by the kitchen table in clean jeans and a plaid shirt, grinning, his pale hair wetted and combed flat against his head. Normally, he has a "Dennis-the-Menace" cowlick. When his hair dries, the lick springs back up. Mikey comes out. My eyes are by then used to the dim light and I look around. The room is neat, as neat and clean as it could be. This is a one bedroom house in which a woman and at least five kids are living. The walls are covered, literally covered, crawling with, German cockroaches. I think of an article I read of terrible infections from cockroaches crawling into the ears of the sleeping children, dying there, rotting. I'm simultaneously nauseated and moved to tears over this unnecessary poverty. I’m shattered with respect for this woman who holds her family together and opens the little space she has to all the kids who want to spend the weekend up here with her sons and with me. I feel guilty for never opening my much larger house to them, but then I think it’s enough I have a truck and keep the kids from getting into trouble by taking them to the jumps. It is her joy to offer a home.

"You guys ready?" I swallow the lump in my throat.

"Born to be Wild!" they say together, little fists thrust into the air.

"Their dad loves Steppenwolf. I'm sure they told you." The year before, this elusive all-but-vanished male progenitor had sent them money to visit him in Nevada. "Me too," she smiles, and sucks deep on her cigarette.

The drive to Del Mar is the customary mess by which we all earn the right to go to the fair. The stage is set up on the race track and we stand behind the fence, as close to the band as we can. The long summer day drifts into dark; the stage lights come up, and John Kay and Steppenwolf take the stage. The little boys jump up and down in excitement. It's not only their first real, grownup concert, but it's Steppenwolf.

They play all their old hits, the long version of "The Pusher" and "Monster" and some songs from the album that came out after the Berlin Wall fell. John Kay was born in East Berlin and had gone back in 1990 and played a concert on the rubble of the wall. Then, the sixth song, "Born to Be Wild." At the very first chords, the crowd goes nuts. It is iconic. It is style="font-style: italic;">Easy Rider, it's the beginning of heavy metal, it's a generation of people for whom Strawberry Fields are NOT forever, people who wanted something raw and loud with a throbbing bass line. I was such a one such, and at one point in my first marriage, my abusive husband threw my Steppenwolf albums in the dumpster, saying, "There's more to life than a 10 minute drum solo." Whatever that might have been, I don't think he had any idea, none that he demonstrated to me beyond pushing me down stairs and kicking me in the crotch as I lay on the floor. Well, either you like Steppenwolf or you don't. I do, and I am surrounded by paunchy middle-aged men playing air guitars, young guys who raise their fists in the air, and everyone singing along, badly. I look back at Mikey and Marc, who found a place to stand where they can see better, and see two small, freckled faces, singing ALL THE WORDS at the top of their lungs, absolutely happy. Stunning.

"This was the best night of my LIFE!" says Mikey.

"Mine too!” shrieks Marc.

They’re still jumping up and down as we thread through the carnival to the exit.



"You wanna' ride something? You wanna' ride that?" I point at the Bayern Curve.

"Is that a roller coaster?" asks Mikey.

"Kind of, but faster." I realize it's a LOT like a very fast ride on a BMX bike over several jumps, one after the other.

Jim never rides these things, so we hand him our jackets and packs and give the carnie our tickets. No one else is riding. "Sit between us!" says Mikey.

"You don't want that. The guy by the door gets smashed. It's better if you smash me than I smash you. You'll understand when the ride gets going."

"Pull the bar down, guys," says the carnie, and the little boys pull the bar down. "OK kids, hold on!" The carnie shouts switches on the ride. The first circuit is slow, the next a bit faster then the ride gets going, faster and faster. The little boys' bodies slam against my side. Their mouths are open in huge scared-happy smiles; their cheeks are pulled back by the spinning force. Their carefully combed hair stands up and back from their foreheads. They scream and yell and we go around and around and around. Too soon, the ride comes to a stop.

"You guys wanna' go again?" asks the carnie. No one is waiting for the ride. "I'll let you ride for free." This is some kind of perfect night, Steppenwolf and free rides.

"Yay!"

The ride starts up again, slow, faster, fast. This time, the boys know what to expect and anxiously wait for that first fast loop. The ride runs for a full ten minutes. I am loving it as much as the boys are. Fighting the "G-force," I turn to look at them. Somehow, my dad is reflected in their freckles, their grins, their joy at the wild ride. My dad loved a roller coaster, but I never rode one with him. By the time I was big enough to ride, he was too ill.

My heart skips a beat. I had recently dreamt about the boys in a magical dream of my father. In the dream, I sat on the tailgate of the truck on a Friday afternoon, waiting for the boys to show up. They came down the street, whizzing dragonflies on their bikes, brightly colored jerseys, cardboard painted white with painted numbers fixed to their handlebars with twist-ties. Jimmy rode up to me and said, "I made a new friend. He wants to go with us."

In my dream, a kid with dishwater blond hair came up behind Jimmy. He rode the same put-together bike the others have, his homemade race number, shin guards made from a thrown away diving suit.

"Sure. There's room in the truck."

The kid looked up at me from under his baseball hat. I recognized his snow-shadow blue eyes, the curl in the middle of his forehead, the freckles; I knew that face, but whose face is it? He smiled. The broken front tooth. "Hi, MAK," he said. It was my dad. It was my dad as one of these wild boys. "Well, of course," I think later. "This is just the kind of boy he was, a boy who ran away from his brutal, drunken dad at 13 and hopped a freight to Canada. If he were alive now, here, and this age, he'd be Jimmy, or Mikey. Another wild Irish boy lost in America." I woke up then and realized that I was nearly the age my dad was when he died and that the life I would live would be years, a part, a transition, my dad had not lived, and that, miraculously, I'd been given the chance to live this wild boy part, too.

As we spin around the Bayern Curve, I feel my dad is in the car with us. "Live this with all your heart, MAK," he says inside my heart, "this is the part of life I never had."

Off Duty Police Brutality

We are on our way back from the jumps at the end of a Saturday afternoon. Mission Gorge Road is jammed with cars. Once we get past this bottleneck of shoppers going on the freeway, we'll be in our neighborhood where people only go on purpose. I stop at a red light. A blue and gray Camaro emerges from a sports bar parking lot. When the light turns to green, the Camaro is behind us. I expect to lose him at the junction of Mission Gorge Road and I-8, but don’t. Strange. This is not the kind of car for the "hood".

We go up the Fairmount hill to 42nd Street and El Cajon Blvd., where any normal person with a fancy new Camaro would turn west and go away, but he continues following closely. I look into the back of the truck. The four boys back there hunch forward, watching the Camaro through the back window.

This can't be good.

I turn onto Thorn, the closest cross street to my house, then onto my street. The Camaro is still behind me. I am frightened. I wonder if I should even GO home, reveal that sacred locality to the idiot driving that car, but finally I pull up in front of the house.

“Fuck, Jimmy,” I say, “I can’t believe that guy followed us here.”

“Don’t worry, Martha,” he says, “we won’t let him hurt you.”

We jump out of the truck. The boys in back lift the rear window and drop the tailgate, but stay put. The man in the Camaro gets out. He is a heavy-set, muscular Black guy, about 45 years old and more than six feet tall. By then I'm at the back of the truck. I look in to see three of the boys leaning forward, watching, holding big wrenches, cranks, and bicycle forks. “Shit,” I think. Ryan’s hands are empty. He just looks scared.

The driver of the Camaro stands too close to me, and says, "Lady, you better learn how to control your kids. This little punk flipped me off." He pulls Ryan out of the back of the truck, digs his fingers into Ryan's upper arm.

All this drama and angst because a little boy extends the middle finger of his right hand, showing off to the big boys in the back of the truck. Stupid and juvenile, but no threat. Ryan is 85 pounds and thirteen years old. Unfuckingreal.

"Let go of him," I say through clenched teeth, as menacingly as possible. He drops Ryan’s arm, shoving him toward me. I catch Ryan and put my arm around him.

"And I don't know if you know your other little punks back there are brandishing weapons."

“Brandishing?” I think. Sure they are. These boys are all about ‘brandishing’. This man is so inside his own head that he has no idea that when these kids look through his windshield they see their enemy, the big Black guy who will hurt them and their friend. We live in a world of gang wars. How would the boys know that this man is not part of that?

He flashes a badge between my face and the chest of his Hawaiian shirt. "I’m a police officer. I don't like being disrespected."

"He didn't know you were a policeman. From where he sat, you’re just a big guy tailgating his," I pause, "mom."

"That little punk is like he is because you defend him. Women like you shouldn't have children," he says.

At that, the boys jump out of the back of the truck, looking innocent but holding their tools. I shake my head, and motion them to lay the bike forks, cranks and wrenches in the back of the truck. They haven’t seen the badge; I’m not sure they heard the conversation.

"Thanks," I say to him in a voice that slams doors. To the boys I say, "Come on, let's go inside." My arm is still around Ryan.

"Way to go, mom," says Jason, wrapping his arm around my shoulder as we walk into the house. "If he touched you, we woulda’ killed him."

And that was that. Later, I think I should have gotten the man’s badge number, but I guess it is enough that I had sufficient control over "my" kids that he got away alive.

Baby Hawks

When I get to the jumps after a long hike with Molly and Kelly, the boys are all standing around the sumac bush, the bit of shade where they fix their bikes. Five of them. Jimmy, Jason, Mikey, Enrique and Marc. Mikey hands me a large cardboard box with a T-shirt over it. "Here, Martha," he says. "These are for you."

I lift the shirt. Inside the box are two baby red tail hawks. One a dark morph and one light. The sudden daylight scares them and they begin screeching and opening and closing their mouths. In their experience, this can only mean food. I am enraged, "Where did they come from?" If the boys broke into a nest, they are dead. They've killed snakes for me. I can imagine this.

Mikey points at a pickup parked near the gate. "Some guy put them under his truck."

"Under his truck? It's a hundred degrees! How did you find them?"

"We were going down to the river to swim and we heard them," says Jason. They did the right thing. I am proud and moved. But this is complicated; five boys, two dogs, all the bikes and parts, and now the hawks.

"We gave them some Cheetos," says Mikey.

"Cheetos?"

"They look like worms."

I love hawks. I want to fly like a hawk. I want that freedom and that vision. I call all hawks, "My Love." The boys know this. They point to every soaring hawk and say, "Martha! There's your love!"

I recite Hopkins' "Windhover" when I hike, remembering the first time I heard it, recited in a grad school class by John Bailey, Oxford Don, Hopkins expert, spouse of Iris Murdoch. He stutters when he talks, but recites Hopkins perfectly. "I caught this morning, morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin..." His right hand dived and swooped like a hawk as he spoke, marking the swinging rhythm of the poem. Having since watched hundreds of hawks in flight, I realize that Hopkins had, too. He has caught their flight exactly. The boys have heard that very esoteric English major stuff. They know what it is. Mikey has even pointed at the sky and said, "Martha! Morning's minion!"

"What do we do?" asks Mikey.

"We take them to the emergency vet and tell them to call Project Wildlife," I say, "but I don't know how we'll do this." The birds are thirsty, probably hungry even with the Cheetos. They are definitely terrified. They have nothing to grab onto in that flat-bottomed box. They are too young to fly; too young to be comfortable uncovered; too young even to be under an open sky.

If the hawks' parents found them, they couldn't get them back into the nest, and they wouldn't want to. The babies have been too long from home by now and smell too strange. I am desperately in love with them. I ache for them. I am afraid for them. Their chances aren't good no matter what we do. On the ground, they are food for someone, snake, coyote, raven. If I were alone, I might just kill them quickly and try to resist the temptation to put their battered little corpses under the wipers of that guy's truck after smearing hawk blood across his windshield.

I am affecting a cowboy hat these days. It's nothing but a straw basket turned upside down. I realize how to transport the hawks. "Mikey, sit beside me and shift. I'll let the hawks perch on my arm and cover them with my hat. That way they can breathe, but won't be scared." Jason takes the dogs and the other boys take the bikes. Jimmy brings the hawks to the truck, his shirt still covering the box. I get in behind the wheel. Jimmy puts the box on my lap and I slowly, deliberately reach inside with my right hand. The babies climb up as if my arm were a branch. I quickly put my hat over them and swing my arm inside the truck. The birds stop screeching and relax, clinging to me. Wow.

Mikey gets in, careful not to hit my arm. Jimmy gently slides in beside him. There's no horseplay, no jokes about farts or tickle-fighting, no sound, not even from the back. I look in the rear-view mirror and see three faces looking through the window. We are all desperately pulling for these two small lives. I put in the clutch and turn the key. We start to move. I'm glad we don't have to turn around. It's only three stoplights to the vet. "OK, Mikey. Second!"

In wonderment I drive through town with a 10 year old shifting my truck and two baby red tail hawks on my arm. They are quiet the whole way. We reach the emergency vet who calls Project Wildlife, after saying, "What were you thinking? These should be in the nest! They will probably die." I don't even answer him. I know how he feels and I know I didn't do it. I think he's an asshole to say this. He doesn't know how carefully these boys (all of whom are with me in this vet's waiting room) protected these two babies. He's looked at us -- and we are a rough looking gang, I admit it -- and reached his own conclusion. His assistant takes the hawks to a cage in the back. Thanks to some asshole, if the chicks survive, a cage will be their world. I don't know their story, but I know that no one who hoped to rescue them would leave them in an open box under a truck on a 90 degree day.

The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Drawing from My Journal that Day, April 24, 1993

I've been lucky to see hawks train their young. They are relentless and fierce since the baby's life depends on its ability to dive, to feint and to soar. In so many ways, the boys are hawks; they are the Windhover. "Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion"

They practice and practice and practice and practice. I watch Mikey, 10 years old, try the same 180 at Santee Ditch for a solid HOUR until he finally gets it right. Getting it wrong means face into chain link, over and over again, bloody lip, bloody chin, bloody knuckles. I watch them all attempt a can-can over the doubles and fall, and crash, and cut themselves, and break their bikes but they never stop, they never give up, they "...gash gold-vermilion" and get up again and try it again and again and again. And when it works? It is "Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air!" Absolutely what it is! "I really caught air that time, didn't I, Martha?"

When everything begins to go south, my marriage breaks for good, and Jason gets in trouble, and Mike Smith kills himself, it is sheer plod that pulls Jimmy out of hell and onto the pro BMX circuit. But that doesn't happen until after the most beautiful day of all. Ice-Cream Ford.

Jurassic Park

I'm home alone, bored, lonely, frustrated and a little angry. My knee is up and iced; the brace is loosened, but never off. I manage to get to and from class on the crutches belonging to Che Pablo Salvador Mulholland, but it's very hard work. I'm running a seminar for teachers and I never look good, cool, polished, anything but sweaty and irritable and tired. It's the hottest time of the year and the cart that's supposed to transport me from place to place on the campus never shows up. Finally I'm cleared to drive one myself, but I don't like it so I go back to the clump slump crash of crutch walking.

I miss the boys; I miss hiking; I miss my friend Mike with whom I'd broken up a few weeks before when he made the comment that if I had his kid, I'd be giving birth to my own grandchild. He's only 15 years younger; it'd be half-a grandchild. I'd missed a period and was scared; I don't realize I'm just heading into menopause.

The phone rings.

"Martha? It's Jimmy. Craig and me had this idea."

"Yeah, what?" Grrrrr.

"You do so many nice things for us. I know it's no fun being on crutches and stuff."

"No. I feel like I'm in jail."

"Can you drive now?"

"Yeah."

"Well, Jurassic Park's at the dollar movies Tuesday. We want to take you to the movies and to Mickey D's for dinner. It's 25 cent burgers on Tuesday. That's tomorrow. Can you come?"

I'm dumstruck. All bitter feelings vanish. I have a meeting that night of the Citizens Advisory Council for Mission Trails Regional Park, but I think I'm going to miss it.

"I'd love that, Jimmy."

"We miss you."

"Yeah, well I miss you too." I'm super emotional in this ordeal and my eyes fill. "What time?"

"Come and get us at 4. The movie starts at 4:30. Oh, and Martha, we're paying."

"OK."

I get home from school about 3 and change my clothes and get into the truck and head to IB. All the boys are at Jimmy's house. There's Jimmy, Mikey, Jason, Greg and Craig. They're cleaned up and ready to go, grinning, and silly, and I expect them to start turning somersaults and I feel the same way. Jimmy breaks the spell by saying, "Nice crutches, gimp."

At the movies, they pay my way, very proudly having each pitched in a quarter (except Mikey) and we stand in front of the candy counter and they say, "You can have whatever you want, Martha. We have five dollars." I pick some Red Vines and Jimmy says, "You need a Coke, but we'll get a big one and split it, OK? But I'm not sharing it with butt crust (his little brother)."

"Jimmy!" Mikey whines and sulks and stops and gets his own.

We go into the theater and sit together, two rows from the front. The movie starts. We are the audience, except for a few people scattered in the back. We love the movie even when we think it's dumb. At the end, we leave, a lot less hungry than we were when we went in. It's been a candy orgy, but dinner is yet to come and two doors down are 25 cent burgers. We line up.

"Arrrrgh!" roars Jason at Mikey, holding his hands up like little Tyrannosaurus forelegs.

"RrrrrrrrRRRRGH!" snarls Mikey in return, jumping toward Jason's throat.

"Cut it out, Butt Munch. What do you want?"

"I got my own money," says Mikey, still pissed at Jimmy.

"I'm not talking to you, Butt Crust. I'm talking to Martha," says Jimmy, all largesse.

"Umm, I'll just have a burger."

"You can have fries, Martha. I got enough." He holds out his hand.

"OK. A cheesburger and fries and water."

"Water? Don't you want a coke?"

"Just had one."

"You can have another one, Martha. It's OK."

So we order our 25 cent burgers and sit together in a booth in this freezing cold, antiseptic, yellow and red monstrosity. They are on their best behavior, taking me out. No one sticks French fries up their own or anyone else's nose. I feel a little uncomfortable in this formality, but I adapt and am honored.

Then the event is over. I take them home and head back to City Heights feeling loved, less lonely, less angry and anxious for everything to be restored to normal.

Slaying Dragons

I finish a beautiful October hike up Fortuna Mountain and walk out of the park along Father Serra Trail, the road that leads from the jumps to Old Mission Dam. The road is under construction. There is no pavement and no cars. It’s almost dusk. I’m tired and cold. Cotton socks are stupid and cotton shirts are stupid; they absorb sweat and don’t release it. When your sweat doesn’t dry and the sun drops quickly cotton makes you cold. I’d be better off in wool. My hiking stick is across my shoulders; Molly is beside me. It’s a Saturday.

I talked to my mom this morning. As always, there's something wrong with what I'm doing. She's concerned about the time I spend with the boys. “What does Jim think about it?”

“Jim? He doesn’t care. Why would he?”

“Are you sure? He’s a man and you're his wife! He can't like having all these other men around the house all the time."

“These are BOYS and they hang out with him, too.”

“When?”

“In the garage when they work on their bikes.”

“Does he go with you when you take these boys out?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do their mothers think?”

“I don’t know. They’re happy to have someone to drive their kids around.”

I open my mouth to describe the boys' mothers, to explain and justify myself, but decide not to. Fuck her. She’s an Alice in Chains song waiting to happen. It’s “Dirt.”

“They’re just using you.”

“So what if they are? I go up there to hike, anyway and I have a TRUCK. I don’t care if they’re using me.”

“You need to talk this over with Jim and do what he tells you. It's not right, a forty year old woman spending all this time with teenage boys. I’m sure it bothers him.”

She's a pervert.

I know what I’m doing. I’m hanging out with my friends and playing my sport. We’re all doing the same thing. That the boys feel the same passion for BMX that I do for shoving my ass up sharp hills is the sole motive behind everything.

For the first time in my whole life I am part of a group of friends. I’ve never been that kind of person; I’ve been one-to-one with several friends at a time, none of whom knew each other. But here I am. I’m happy with them. I understand what we’re doing, I know what the rules are, I share their values, we never run out of conversation, we like the same music (until I put a Seal tape in the tape deck). This is what friends do. They hang out, play their sport, eat pizza, talk about stuff, listen to music and have fun. I am 100% behind that philosophy.

About fifty yards from the jumps is a fifteen-foot boulder overlooking the road. I have to look at it and when I do, I see a skinny silhouette. “Hey!” Suddenly, five boys are there, yelling, "Martha! Martha! Martha!”

I wave, walking and grinning, skipping a step now and then, and I forget the wet cold feet and back; they don’t matter any more. My mom’s voice stops rattling in my head. She has no clue, and I can't see that her striving to live in a conventional world where everything makes sense according to arbitrary norms has worked so well for her. She should have seen by now that fate has other ideas and pulled the rug out from under her as it does most of us.

“Look what we got you!” says Mikey, completely radiant. “Craig killed it!”

“Killed what?”

“A rattler!”

“You did? Where was he?”

“Behind that bush over there.”

“It’s still there, you want to see it?”

“Yeah, of course.” We walk over to a remote jump with a forgettable name. They had decided to mess around over there for a change and were surprised by a Mojave diamondback just over three feet long. Craig stepped on it behind the head and cut the head off. Then he cut off the rattles. Boys with daggers. What can you do?

The snake is stiff. This must have happened soon after I dropped them off.

“These are for you!” Craig hands me the rattles, attached to a shred of snake flesh.

“Wow.”

“Yeah, we know you don’t like rattlesnakes.”

“No, I don’t.” I’m not about to give the Nature Bob lecture I would have given any other group of teenage boys. These are not teenage boys. They are knights on raging steeds and they just killed a dragon for me.