Category: Biographical

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Maybe your secret friend was someone who you thought others would not approve of. Or perhaps that person didn’t quite fit your style because he or she was quite different from you. It’s not an easy thing when loyalty confronts conventional expectations.

One of my secret friends is a student I teach in the parole office. Give him some hair and remove his head-to-toe skinhead tattoos and he’d be your best next door neighbor. Thoughtful. Kind. Caring.

But with tattooed skinhead symbols, skulls scrawled all over him, and “5150” (“a person deemed to have a mental disorder that makes them a danger to him or her self, and/or others and/or gravely disabled”) around his neck, and he appears to be a social persona non grata. Not the sort of fellow you might want to be perceived as being your friend.

I’ve known him for over two years. He struggles to progress toward the academic goals I’ve hoped for him in my literacy lab at the parole office. Medications cause him to slump over his computer terminal frequently. I wake him up. Sometimes he leaves the class in a drug-induced stupor.

If he stopped taking the drugs, he would resume cutting his legs with his pocketknife. His legs are numb from nerve damage, making it difficult for him to ride his bicycle, his only means of transportation.

He started taking drugs to control his psychoses at the age of five. Growing up, he regularly battled his violent father, who soon left him and his mother. Now he now lives with a girlfriend in a motel, which, because of his disabilities, is partially subsidized by the parole department. Ironically, his girlfriend works as a security guard.

At age 15, he was incarcerated. He served 15 years for attempted murder and for assaulting a corrections officer while in prison.

Once enamored with skinheads, he now disdains them, recognizing that he gave up much of his life to remain loyal to their errant beliefs. An iron cross now covers the swastika tattooed on the back of his hand.

My friend believes in God, in many ways to God, and in many gods. He asks me to pray for him, and I do. He is glad for it, and he tells me so, and he tells me he prays for me.

In time, our paths will inevitably part. And when they do, we both will have benefited from our journey together.

I took this picture of Mike (not his real name) a few months ago. He knew I had an iPhone, and he didn’t own a picture of himself, so I took this portrait and presented him several 5 by 7 inch copies. We bonded over those prints.

Mike rides his bicycle to attend the literacy classes that I teach to parolees. He’s been faithfully attending for nearly a year, gaining remedial reading and math skills.

He is one of 18 brothers and sisters. His father, who died at age 65, was a janitor. To help the family make ends meet, all the children worked in the janitorial business nearly from the time they could walk.

Mike, who stands four feet eleven inches tall, has been in and out of prison for most of his life. Because he has no top teeth left and only a few bottom teeth remain, it is sometimes hard to understand my Zacchaeus-sized student’s speech.

His hearty laughter explodes through his broom-bristle mustache as he relates stories of his elderly grandmother, who stood much shorter than even himself; he holds an outstretched hand to his mid-chest. Other family members didn’t dare cross her; she would curse them if they did, flailing exclamatory fingers in all directions. They lived in awe of her, and she always got her way.

Last week Mike didn’t show up for classes. There were no phone calls or messages conveyed to his other parole classmates. When he eventually showed up in class this week, his eyes were bleary with weariness. He asked to speak with me in private. Though my desk is in the middle of the classroom, I invited him into my “office”. He closed the imaginary glass door behind him. When this door to my make-believe private office is closed, the rest of the class is instructed to pretend they can’t hear anything we’re saying. And they honor the agreement.

Mike’s stubby fingers tried to divert the tears flowing freely down his cheeks, as he explained why he hadn’t been in class last week. Of all his brothers and sisters (evenly divided: nine boys and nine girls), his older sister always cared for and looked after him. He relied on her completely. Now, he explained, she was gone. Last week, she had taken her own life. I sat in silence while he cried, then attempted to give comfort. I offered his weeping voice a willing ear, a feeble attempt at solace, and a Kleenex from my desk. Probably the Kleenex provided the greatest help.

He exited the invisible door to my office and settled into his day’s studies behind his computer monitor.

A few minutes after our conference, his friend, also a student of mine, barely an inch taller than Mike, entered my office and closed the pretend door to my office.

“Look after him,” he begged me. “He needs help.”

I promised that I would, and I wondered what to do next.

Postscript

Barely a day after the narrative about his sister, Mike related the story of yet another, even more recent loss in his life.

Mike lives in an old camper, the kind that fits on the bed of a small pickup truck, except his camper rests in the weeds next to the freeway, in the backyard of the person who rents it to him.

Exiting his dilapidated camper home, tiny Mike noticed his pet, a tiny chihuahua, asleep on the grass. Mike’s approach did not seem to awaken the dog, who appeared to be resting with eyes wide open.

“Suicide,” mused a fellow student as Mike related the story, unaware of the death of Mike’s sister and the irony of his comment.

Mike wrapped his beloved chihuahua in a blanket and laid her in a shallow grave. As a final act of reverence, he removed the dog’s name from the miniature doghouse and fashioned a headstone from it.

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We can still watch reruns of Willliam Frawley playing the grumpy old landlord, Fred Mertz, in the long-running I Love Lucy television show. He was often called upon to bring the air-headed Lucille Ball back to earth. After the show went off the air, Frawley spent five years playing in the situation comedy, My Three Sons.

Frawley’s health declined such that the studio could no longer provide him with health insurance, and he was released from the show, bringing an end to his long acting career, which spanned from 1933 to 1965.

I recently discovered that William Frawley died at the Knickerbocker Hotel, one block from where we attend church in Hollywood. After watching a movie on March 3, 1966, Frawley suffered a fatal heart attack on the sidewalk in front of the Knickerbocker, where he had previously lived. He was brought into the lobby, to no avail.

More about the Knickerbocker Hotel:

Rudolf Valentino used to hang out at the hotel bar and liked to dance tango here. On July 21, 1948, famed director, D.W. Griffith, died of a stroke while standing under the lobby’s $1 million chandelier. Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio honeymooned here in January of 1954. Elvis Presley stayed in suite 1016 while filming “Love Me Tender.” Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Mae West, Laurel & Hardy, Larry Fine (of the Three Stoges), and Cecil B DeMille all lived here.

What else is happening within one block of where I – or any of us – live our lives?

Have you ever heard from a person you have known for 50 years — but haven’t spoken to in 48 years? That’s what happened to me when my childhood friend, Anh-Tuan, contacted me on Facebook. We last saw each other in 4th grade, in 1962, when we were classmates in Germany. And then we found out that we are now living within a 40 minute drive, in Southern California! Finally, this weekend, we got together for an unreal day of catching up. We were later joined at a Vietnamese restaurant by his wife, YLan, a very well-known Vienamese singer. After enjoying dinner, Ylan was recruited to sing a few songs for the appreciative diners — as was Anh-Tuan!