Because I was working so much, playing music, my grandmother and I moved to Los Angeles so I could be closer to the jobs, and in 1941 we were living on Seventy-third Street between Towne and San Pedro and I was going, on and off, to Fre-mont High School.
I had no friends at Fremont. I went because I had to go. I might as well have been on a desert island. But one day in study hall I looked around and saw a girl sitting at one of the desks. I looked and there she was, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I started thinking about her. I’d think about her at night and everything, you know, but she was a “nice girl” and the only kind of girl I could have anything to do with would be a bad girl, a nasty girl. I started sitting behind her in study hall, and one day she turned around and talked to me. She asked some little silly question about math or did I have a pencil. I wasn’t able to speak to her. I started sweating. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I mumbled something. About a week later, I walked into class a few minutes early and she was there. She said, “I don’t feel like studying today.” I said, “I don’t feel like studying either.” It just came out before I realized I was being intimate with her in replying like that. She said, “Why don’t we leave and go someplace else?” We got up and walked out.
We left the school. I kept looking at her thinking how beautiful she was. I couldn’t believe I was actually with her, and every now and then I’d brush my hand against her arm. Her teeth were white; they sparkled. Her eyes—the whites of them were almost a blue-white. She had dimples and this real innocent face, a kind of bewildered look on her face all the time. She had very light skin, no marks on it, and from the neck down . . . What really moved me was she had a body at fifteen or sixteen that was a woman’s body, full breasts, full hips, small waist, and she had a flirty look about her. She was a real flirt but I always thought that was just her way; later I interrogated her about it and she said she was a virgin. That really excited me. She had beautiful breasts and legs and skin and fingers and ears and it was almost more than I could stand. I didn’t know why she had asked me to come out there, to leave the class, and I didn’t know what to do, so we just walked around and talked and she told me about herself. She said her name was Madeleine Moore but to call her Patti because she didn’t like Madeleine. So that was Patti.
She lived about twenty blocks from me. I walked her home, and we talked and talked and talked, and for the first time I began to doubt all the feelings I had about myself. She thought I was wonderful and that I was handsome; I could tell from the way she looked at me, from the way she acted. And she seemed like a nice girl. I was certain she was a nice girl and that she liked me. And it was so different from the night before and what would happen tonight at the Ritz Club or the Club Alabam. We spent a long time together. I finally said I had to go home. I took her to her house and no one was there but I didn’t even try to kiss her; when I went to leave she took hold of my arm and looked at me and said, “Don’t you like me?” I said, “Of course I like you.” She said, “Well, you don’t act like it.” I grabbed her arm and gave it a squeeze and then I turned around and walked away. I almost started crying. It was unbearable. It was like a pain and I had to get away from her. I walked home and from that minute .. . It would have been better to have gone on the way I was; I’d grown comfortable. That meeting was too much. Now I knew no matter what happened, no matter what, I knew I had to have her. I couldn’t do anything but think about her and want her, to have her and protect her and look at her and smell her, just to brush my hand against her arm.
We started meeting and talking. We’d ditch school a lot. We’d walk around. I didn’t try to do anything sexually with her for a long time, but we kept seeing each other, and then I kissed her, and then we started messing around. Sometimes, if my grandmother wasn’t home, we’d go over there. I’d borrow my cousin’s car, and we’d go park, and we’d pet.
I met her mother. Her mother had been married to a musician who’d treated her bad. I could see that that was going to be a problem. I had to sneak around to see her because her mother was afraid of me, but I had fallen in love and I think Patti had, too. One day her mother woke up with a pain in her stomach, and she died that evening. She had gangrene of the intestines, I think. She had had several abortions, and probably those caused that. Patti was sent to Arizona to some relatives before she could contact me. She wrote and told me what had happened. I was miserable. Finally, she came to visit an aunt in Glendale.
They were going to send her away again, and I couldn’t stand that. We wanted to get married. Patti was sixteen and I was seventeen. My dad thought we should hold off and see how we felt in a year or so, but to us that seemed like a lifetime. I borrowed my cousin’s car and we went to Tijuana to one of those places, and some guy married us. He called in his secretary and a guy from the street and they witnessed the ceremony: “Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?” In broken English, and we were married. I wanted it all to be legal. I didn’t want that love ruined by our living together without being married because at that time I was extremely moralistic.
We came back with our little certificate and there was nothing the families could do but okay it. My father was furious because he wanted to have us married in the house with my grandmother there. I was his only son and he wanted to do it right. We had another ceremony to satisfy him, and then we rented an apartment down by Adams above Fiqueroa.
Before we went to Tijuana we’d work each other into such a state it was unbelievable. She kept asking me, telling me she wanted me to do it, and once I tried, but it was a horrible, horrible scene, and then she started bleeding. So after we got married, it was agony trying to have intercourse without hurting her, but finally I got through, and it was perfect from then on. As I look back I see that all we had was sex, that beauty, and we made love continuously. I remember once we made love eleven times in one day and I came all those times.
For a while, before we got the apartment, we stayed with my grandmother. We’d wait until she left the house and the minute she was gone we’d take our clothes off and start making love. We’d do it in the front room so we could look out the window and watch for her. When she was home we weren’t able to contain ourselves, so we’d go out to the old garage in the back, which was filled with stuff; there was a place at the top where there were two mattresses on the beams we could climb up onto. Patti would wear a cotton housedress with nothing on underneath, and we’d go make love by the hour. Sometimes my grandmother would come calling us and we’d stop and hold on to each other and not breathe and be giggling up there. I’d finally found someone who loved me.
| 3 | The Avenue1940–1944 |
WHEN I WAS at San Pedro High, because I was a musician and played for the dances, I began to get popular. All the chicks dug me and would vie for me, smile at me, and flirt with me. The guys came around, too, and listened to me play, and they wanted me to hang out with them. And one day this guy Chris came to me, him and a couple of other guys, and they wanted me to join the club they belonged to. It was an honor.
In San Pedro at this time there were a lot of different gangs. Chris had a gang called the Cobras. I thought I might be happier if I was with other people more and I also wanted to join because I figured it would impress my dad: the Cobras had a reputation. I joined and got a jacket with a cobra on the back.
We used to go to the Torrance Civic Auditorium to the dances, and Chris, who was the biggest guy in our group, would find the biggest guy on the floor, who was a member of some other gang, wait until the guy was dancing, and then go up to him and tap him on the shoulder to cut in on his date. The guy would say, “Hey, there’s no cutting in here! Get lost!” Chris would just hit him on the shoulder again, grab him, turn him around, and Sunday him, you know, punch him. And when he’d hit a guy, he was so good that no matter how big they were they’d go down. The guy would go down, and everybody would get all excited, and Chris would tell him, “We’re the Cobras. We’ll meet you at so-and-so.”
There was a street where some city or county lines met—Wilmington, San Pedro, Torrance,