4
San Leandro
San Leandro High was big and busy, with an overwhelmingly white student body. There were, of course, a few Chicanos. Back then, everyone called them Mexicans. Because I was the school’s only Indian and had dark skin, I was usually treated as they were. A few poor white kids attended the school, but most of the students came from comfortable middle-class families.
So far, I had done very well in school. At the end of second grade in Vallejo, Mrs. Fox, my teacher, got together with Mrs. Woodward of the third grade and talked with my mother about my skipping third and maybe fourth grade. I remember Mom’s words. She said, “Oh, my God, no! He’s already too young. I started him too young in the first grade.”
In one sense, my mother was absolutely right. I wasn’t the social or physical peer of fourth-graders. But when those teachers recognized my academic abilities, it should have prompted my parents to take a greater interest in my schooling. It’s impossible to know with certainty, but I will always believe that if my parents had cultivated my abilities, my whole life would have been very different. When I got to high school, I needed something more from them—and I didn’t get it.
In fact, I got damn little. Pops’s untreated alcoholism had progressed to the point that to get money for drinking, he sometimes pawned things—my brother Ted’s saxophone, Mom’s silverware, small appliances—whatever he could take. All too often, Pops lost the pawn tickets and then couldn’t remember which hockshop he had visited. To make up for the income lost to his binges, Mom worked longer and harder, as a purchasing agent. Moving to San Leandro had forced her to transfer to Alameda Naval Air Station. She was exhausted when she got home every night, so tired she had no time for me and not much for anyone else. As much as I wanted it, no one at home showed any interest in my schoolwork by the time I started tenth grade.
I realize now that if my mother was abusive and unsupportive, it was largely because she was trying to keep a very bad marriage together, mostly for the sake of her boys. Nevertheless, without the kind of attention I needed at home, I began to bend the rules very severely in school. I tested every teacher, and easily dominated those who were wimps. Aside from that, most of the teachers at San Leandro High favored the white elite, all but ignored the dark-skinned kids, and did almost nothing to make my studies rewarding.
For the first semester of tenth grade, I took the college-prep program, including French and algebra, and got good marks. It was all too easy—I had no challenges. Losing interest, I found sitting in a classroom excruciating.
At fourteen, I was younger than most of my tenth-grade classmates, and still small for my age. Although I was very athletic, I couldn’t really compete with kids a head taller. It became obvious to me that I wasn’t going to get into the varsity lettermen’s club, which, not incidentally, was pure white.
The other social elite at San Leandro High was made up of students with cars. Many drove flashy ’54 or ’55 Chevys, rakish customized “Deuce” coupes, souped-up or tricked-out hot rods of every description. I had no car, no money, no chance of making even the junior varsity—and so at San Leandro High, I was a social cipher, a null, a black hole. By default, just about the only kids I could pal around with were guys whom I’ll call Don Miller and Richie Sharp, two poor whites who lived near my house.
Richie’s parents, who were nice people, had moved to California after World War II. Don’s parents, third-generation Californians, weren’t very friendly, and he was just a redneck bully. I was still fairly naive and trusting. Not until I had moved away and grown up did I realize that Richie and Don, classic ne’er-do-wells, had always used me as their patsy. When I lived in San Leandro, they included me in their plans and acted as though they were my friends, and I responded with loyalty.
Most of my other friends were Chicanos, especially Richard Sanchez and Leroy Benevidez. The Chicanos were “right on.” I liked the way they dressed—super-starched khakis pressed to knife-edge creases, and sweater vests. I began to emulate them, wearing my hair short and combed straight back. With my dark skin, I was a low rider without a ride. My mom was very happy when I got past the peggers and rolled-sleeve sport-shirt look, which she called “gangster dress.”
Hanging around with Mexicans, I followed some of them into the fields which then rimmed lower San Francisco Bay. It was backbreaking labor, working weekends and after school—sometimes instead of school. Aside from mowing chintzy little lawns in the housing development for next to nothing, it was about the only money I could earn. I picked cherries and dug potatoes, too, but mostly it was tomatoes. I got fifty cents a lug—a big wooden box that held almost two bushels. I had to make sure they were all good tomatoes, no rotten or bruised ones, and that each was green near the stem but otherwise ripe.
Most of the other pickers were braceros, legal migrants from Mexico. Man, could they work—at least three times faster than I could. I couldn’t have averaged more than $1.50 an hour, but that was good money for a kid in the era before state minimum-wage laws. I was paid cash, with no deductions, at the end of each day. The braceros worked harder and made more, but they lived in squalid camps. I went home to a hot shower and clean sheets. I didn’t envy them.
I wasn’t the only Sioux working the California fields. Some Bureau of Indian Affairs genius had come up with a plan to send a few hundred South Dakota Indians to pick tomatoes in the Salinas Valley: The bureau would pay the growers half the pickers’ wages as an incentive to hire Indians instead of undocumented workers. Of course, the damn growers put the Indians where they normally put pickers—in cesspool camps with one water faucet for the whole place, slit trenches for toilets, leaky-roofed, falling-down shacks, and filth everywhere. They were fed nothing but slop and treated like undocumented workers—with insults, tongue lashings, pushing, and shoving.
About the fourth or fifth day, a white foreman shoved the wrong Lakota and the Indian punched him out. That night, the grower sent in six or eight goons to bust the guy up—the usual tactic of intimidation. But those were not illegal immigrants, living in fear. When the goons grabbed one Indian, the whole camp rose up. The Lakota chased the goons away, then burned down the camp and started to tear up the fields. They were headed toward the grower’s mansion when the police arrived. Before it was over, the Indians had started several fires and overturned a bunch of cars. The BIA immediately shipped all the Indians back to South Dakota. To cover his ass, some bureaucrat claimed that the Indians had rioted because they were drunk. I knew some of those guys, and I learned that they were not drunk—most had no money, because none had been paid. Nevertheless, one grower was quoted widely as saying, “If I ever see another Sioux Indian, it’ll be too soon.”
When I wasn’t working, I often ditched school and went swimming or rafting in San Francisco Bay or one of the estuaries. With my young friends, I made precarious climbs up huge, creosoted timbers to the corrugated-tin roof of a big boathouse near the Oakland airport. We climbed out on the lip, thirty or forty feet above the water, and dived in. When we got tired of that, we flipped off a nearby wharf and splashed around the bay.
When I was fifteen, I began to go to a teen club in the elementary school gym on Saturday nights and dance to records. The teachers, of course, wanted to play waltzes and that Teresa Brewer crap. We wanted hip music like Fats Domino and the Platters, so the girls—only girls had records back then—brought their 45s. When the teachers refused to let us play them, we staged a little strike outside. We said, “We’re not going to dance until you play our music. If you won’t play it, we’ll all boycott the teen club.” After maybe half an hour, the teachers relented and said we could play our music.
Right about then, Bill Haley and the Comets were a hit. His music had a different beat and parents didn’t like it—but at least it wasn’t colored music. Suddenly it was all rock and roll, it was for white kids—but we all started bopping. Bop was different from jitterbug, different from anything. For the first time, dancing was freestyle. You bopped with a partner, but you each did your own thing. The Charleston had come and gone, and then the jitterbug, but the bop stayed. It’s still going on, but now it’s just called dancing.
The teen club became a big part of my life. Almost every Saturday, I would get dressed up and head over there. My cousin Tody Means, a sharp dresser, lent Richie Sharp and me some sport coats. We dressed top-notch, with peggers and shirts with a loop underneath the collar so we could button it all the way to the top. I wore my hair in a ducktail.
Before going to the teen club, Richie and I would go to a liquor store and steal a half-pint of whiskey. Two drinks of that gave me courage enough to talk to girls and to dance—the only way I could do it. We would share the rest of the bottle with friends, and then go in and have a rollicking good time.
As my sixteenth birthday approached, I was spending more time with Richie and Don and less in school. My mother was all but indifferent to my grades, but she didn’t like my friends, didn’t like the way I dressed, didn’t like where I went or the music I listened to. In fact, Mom didn’t much care for almost everything about me. When she was home, she wasn’t shy about telling me so.
Then came a day I will never forget. I was out in the front yard and Mom was inside the house, and we were shouting back and forth about something she thought I had done. Finally, unable to get me to confess, she said, “Get in here right this minute.” It was one of her favorite sayings, a code phrase meaning the leather strap was about to descend on my backside.
That time, I said, “No.”
Mom was stunned. She said it again: “You get in here right this minute.”
At that moment, I realized I was as big as she was, and stronger, and if she tried to whip me, I could take the strap away from her. I said it again: “No.” I danced around, swaying on my tiptoes like a boxer, repeating it. “No. No. No.” I was saying it to myself, too—No! No! No!
Boy, that felt good!
I could see Mom boiling, but there was nothing she could do. I said, “I’m leaving. Good-bye.” I went off to play football with some neighborhood pals. When I went home afterward, I knew I never would have to take another beating from my mom. I was fifteen, and I was free.
Not that Mom just gave up. She kept after me, yelling at the top of her lungs, but I turned it all back on her. Poor Dace would go to his bedroom and close the door when Mom and I got into a shouting match.
Once I had declared my independence from my mother, I continued to ditch classes and drink booze. Hanging out with dropouts and misfits, I drifted deeper into crime. We weren’t quite a gang, but the next thing to it—a bunch of frustrated, rebellious kids who stayed out late looking for trouble. Once we left Gordon’s Drive-In in San Leandro without paying for our food. Another time, several guys and I broke into a railroad car parked behind a supermarket and stole thirteen cases of Lucky Lager beer. I had a car by then, a ’48 Chevy Fleetline. A tire went flat, and I left the car in front of school. When the other kids got caught, they snitched on me, and I was nabbed with a backseat full of beer. I was arrested and taken to juvenile hall, and after sixteen or seventeen days, I appeared in court. Because it was my first time through the justice system, I got probation. Mom, of course, had a fit, but she could no longer beat me.
Later that summer, I was thrown in jail again after a friend stole his mother’s 1950 Fluid Drive Buick, the kind with the front grille that looks like it has big teeth coming out of it. I was riding in it when we got caught, but the charges against me were dismissed.
After two brief trips to jail, my interest in school declined still further, but I had promised my mother I wouldn’t drop out. Whenever I ditched, I wrote my own excuses. Usually I would fake my dad’s handwriting, but sometimes I would have a girl with good handwriting forge my mother’s. After setting a school record for cutting classes, I was suspended for two weeks. Being suspended took all the fun out of cutting classes, so to amuse myself—and make my mark—I went after a new record. Soon I had the most two-week suspensions in the history of San Leandro High.
American education has always seemed much like Christianity to me. It doesn’t deal with reality. Aside from math, which is usually taught with logic, children mostly are taught to memorize the latest theory—a hypothesis based on what the powers that be have decided is “true” at that moment. Of course, all those theories keep changing. Even the way most subjects are taught is illogical. Why should children be isolated by age group? I think that’s insane. Why are students forced to sit in rows, looking at the backs of people’s heads?
America’s educational system robs people of their individuality while training them to accept whatever the authorities dictate. Instead of learning to reason for themselves, children learn to obey—precisely the quality most valued by a society dependent on mass production. It’s no surprise that so many children grow up to become fodder for the industrial machine. It’s all they know how to do. I am a human being. Even in high school, I knew that I wanted to remain one, and that I didn’t want to become part of a machine, replaced and discarded when I wore out.
Forty years ago, I could hardly have expressed such thoughts, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had. To the authorities who ran San Leandro High, I was just a troublemaker. Eventually a truant officer came to our home, bringing with him my whole attendance record. I remember him sitting there, with the evening darkness pressing against our living-room windows as he went through each piece of paper in that file.
“Is this one of your notes?” asked the truant officer.
“No,” said my mother.
“Mr. Means, is this your note?”
“No,” said my father.
I left the house before the officer finished, because I knew my mother wouldn’t be fit to live with for a while. I stayed away until she went to bed.