We are the walking extinct
Stumblin’ over the bones of memories
We’re the invisible link
Waiting and hoping that someone will see
We are the walking extinct
Watching the fossils fall and break apart
We’re an ark about to sink
Drowning all the magic in our hearts
And it happened so slow
You’ll never know what didn’t hit you
—“The Walking Extinct” (Thornton/Andrew)
WHEN I WAS IN GLENDALE RECUPERATING FROM THIS SHIT, I TRIED to get social services to help me. I tried to get food stamps and whatever, but they needed so much shit from me, so much information, and I didn’t know how to give it to them. I didn’t have the proper paperwork or tax shit, and I couldn’t remember my social security number, so I never got any of the stuff I needed. I was like, “Goddammit, I’m a fucking American, why can’t you help me?”
But things started getting a little better when I got a job for a time. I also had a girlfriend then who kind of felt sorry for me, so she helped me pay for stuff. So I thought, I better start doing some physical activity and eating right, and I joined the YMCA in Glendale. The Glendale YMCA is a nice YMCA, not some shithole, and they had a world-class basketball gym, and since the job I had was kind of spotty—off and on—I could get to the YMCA to shoot hoops most days at seven A.M., when all the regular people were getting ready for work.
There were just a bunch of old men in the locker room when I was changing into my short britches at seven in the morning. I don’t know how old they were then, but it was 1984 and they were World War II veterans, so you figure if the war ended in 1945, that would probably put them in their late sixties then. At the time I thought they were ancient. I would talk to these guys, and a couple of them would come out and shoot free throws with me. Turns out three or four of them were B-17 crew guys during World War II. One guy was a pilot, couple of guys were ball turret gunners, one guy was a tail gunner. Then there was a navigator, an engineer, a sergeant, who was a top turret gunner. I got to love these guys because I’ve had this thing for the B-17 bomber ever since I was a little kid.
MY GRANDMOTHER WAS A WRITER AND A SCHOOLTEACHER, AND AT her house where I was growing up in Alpine she had bookshelves all around the walls. Out of all those books she had, I’d just sit and stare at this book that was kind of blue-gray, but I never took it out. I’d just sit there and stare at it. This was before I could read. Then one day, when I was about nine, after I could read, I pulled it out of the shelf and opened it up. It had all these guys’ pictures, and down there beside the pictures there was a little thing about each one like they have in a high school yearbook. Turned out they were all guys in Clark County who served in World War II. Next to their pictures it would say PFC So-and-So, killed in action May 15, 1942, or whatever, who their parents were, and whatever else. There were two guys in particular that I would stare at all the time. One’s name was Olen G. Allison, and the other guy’s name I don’t recall. Olen G. Allison was a real skinny-looking guy. He had on the regular dress-looking hat tilted to the side, like they had in the old days. The other guy was kind of handsome, looked like a movie star, and in his picture he wore a leather jacket, a white scarf, and the leather flier’s cap. They were both killed in action in World War II. Out of everyone in that book, I would sit for hours and I’d read their things over and over.
I was also drawn to these pictures of B-17 airplanes. Now, I don’t believe in a fucking thing, practically—though of course we talked about my mother who has ESP, and I’m telling you she’s told me shit that only exists in my head—but when I started reading about these B-17s, I was reading about something that I knew.
When I first met Coby, it must have been in 1981, he and I went out to the Chino Air Museum because I’d always had this thing for World War II airplanes, and they had a B-17 out there you could walk around in it. I went in from under the hull, crawled up the little steps, and walked straight to the front of the airplane. Now, if you didn’t know a thing about an airplane and you wanted to know where the bombardier was, you’d probably look all over the place, but—and I had never physically been in a B-17—I walked past the waist gunner’s position, straight past the navigator in the middle there, down beneath the cockpit into the nose of that thing, sat at the bombsight, and felt like I was home. After that I was convinced that I was a bombardier in a B-17 airplane in World War II. Now, it can be complete horseshit and explained by the fact that I just liked airplanes and my particular brain chemistry led me to that or some shit, but why did I pull that book out from that shelf and why did I stare at those guys all the time? And how did I know where every position was before I ever went in a B-17? Maybe there’s a perfectly good scientific explanation for that shit. People get struck by lightning and they start playing Beethoven. All I know is, I knew shit that I didn’t know.
Anyway, when I met these guys at the YMCA, I stuck to them like glue. I was obsessed with them. I went to their meetings and became fast friends with a bunch of guys who were about seventy years old. I became real good friends with one guy, who at this time was a schoolteacher in Long Beach, who had been a ball turret gunner. He would come over to my apartment, and we would sit and talk for hours and hours. He even gave me some books to read. I’d planned on making this movie about B-17 bomber crews, because they have stories that would blow people’s minds, but they already made one over at Columbia called Memphis Belle.
I even started going to their veterans’ meetings down in Southgate/Downey and to a lot of Confederate Air Force events.
They made me an honorary member of the 94th Bomb Group, and I got their newsletter up until just a few years ago. I guess most of those guys I knew are long gone by now, but they were great guys.