Noisy Neighbors

To say that the noisy neighbors were next door, with loud arguments between a wife and her husband about one thing or another, was an overstatement. They did that of course from time to time, with pots and pans clanging, screaming and the like; but it was we who were the noisy neighbors. The four of us were living in an off-campus apartment with cheap furniture, cheap beer cans every where and a more or less constant party, if one could call it that. A party in those days was where everyone was supposed to have fun dancing and getting laid by some beautiful co-ed. None of that happened, at least as far as I can remember. And by looking at a picture of the four of us, one could understand why.  

Rob Roy Cheek was our leader in a way, and was what later became known as a beatnik. He would have said that he wasn’t, but then Rob didn’t like terms made up by media people trying to categorize others. What Rob did like was wearing his old beat up red cossack hat, driving his equally old MG sports car into the desert for a few days and living on lizards and whatever else he could find out there, which wasn’t much. He rarely bathed and his clothes were washed even less frequently, but I loved him. He was my hero. I was the opposite of him, thanks to my mother. Clean, well groomed, well-kept and bored out of my gored. Rob saw that in me almost immediately and invited me to live with him, Bob and Gary. Bob liked to shoot things and eat them so we had a freezer full of illegal, underage, out-of-season dear meat. And Gary talked all the time, all the time that he talked anyway, which wasn’t very often, about sailing into the South Pacific. Trouble was that he had never sailed, and didn’t have a boat, but I was all in, so to speak, until I told my mother. I had yet to learn that mothers shouldn’t be told much of anything. They just get worried. And if they have to show up in court one day, as mine did, when I was charged with some misdemeanor that I can no longer remember, my mother just sat there looking bewildered and when I was called before the judge he asked me if I was a student. Yes. At 18 I was a sophomore at a teacher’s college in Oregon. I had no idea why I was there, and had no interest in becoming a teacher, but the information impressed him enough I suppose and he waived the charge. Today we would call that white priviledge.

My mother and I had one of those on-again, off-again, relationships. She worked most of the time because my dad didn’t make much money and had no health insurance. I rode my bicycle around, picked up empty beer cans and pop bottles from along side Heine Road, the road we lived on across from the cabbage patch. Anyone care to guess what a field of dead cabbage smells like after a big rain? Then, when I had a few bottles and cans, I would walk down to the gas station on the other side of the railroad tracks and buy candy.  

All of that was fine with me. I got a paper route, worked in a hard-ware store later on and went to school, where some dude and his friends decided that I needed grooming, taught me how to wear clothes, how to eat soup correctly, which meant that the soup spoon went forward into the bowl rather than backward, and alter my clothes so that they were close fitting. I became a freak, and if it weren’t for a man, who the others knew, coming over to my apartment one day wanting to give me a back rub, I might still be one. I liked Rob much better. Who cared if he wore a communist hat, we lived in a pigsty and we each tried out best to sleep with women we didn’t know because neither we nor they wanted to go home after a party and say the truth — that nothing happened.  

It was on a morning after one of those all night events during which Gary blasted In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida all night long and loud enough to rattle the windows, that there was a knock at the front door. It was a quite Sunday morning, and the girl I didn’t know just rolled over in the bed we were in, and nobody moved. Except me. And that wasn’t right away. Then there was another tap on the door, so I got up. It was my mother. She had decided that Sunday morning to drive her blue Plymouth Valiant the sixty miles down the highway to where I was and deliver a box of apples. “Hi! Do you want some apples?” I don’t remember what I said, but took the apples and closed the door. Six months later I went on probation, dropped out of college and joined the Navy so that I wouldn’t have to listen to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida anymore, smell the garbage in the kitchen and then be drafted and become a ground pounder in Vietnam. When I told my mother, I made sure it was after the enlistment, so she couldn’t do anything about it. Well I guess that wasn’t really true. She pulled strings and got me to take an entrance exam into Westpoint military academy. I passed, despite hearing a woman’s voice in my head telling me to hurry up. When I turned down the appointment, it was the last time my mother suggested anything to me, not even if I wanted a box of apples. When I finally saw my mother the following Christmas Eve after I had left the noise of my apartment behind and drove to Tijuana with someone I don’t remember meeting, she hid at the end of the table looking embarrassed and ashamed at her wayward son who would just willy nilly join the military during that war. 

But I was gone, if not physically at first, then at least mentally. I had had enough, whatever that meant, but I was willing to serve, so the military liked me. And my friend, Rob? He was later run over and killed by a large truck while passing another vehicle in his MG. So here we go Rob, this one’s for you my friend. Thanks for helping me become a noisy neighbor.