 
The Gaslite Motel

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2018

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

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Mel C. Thompson Publishing, please contact:

Mel C. Thompson

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Cover photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons license by Søren Wedel Nielsen.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Two Taiwanese Settle In Orange County

Chapter 2: Mr. Lin, The Richardsons & Me

Chapter 3: Buena Park As A Context

Chapter 4: An Air Traffic Controller Moves In

Chapter 5: An Ending In The Middle

Chapter 6: A Bully Confesses

Chapter 7: A Brief Moment of Profitability

Chapter 8: A Pentecostal Family

Chapter 9: Two Inexplicable Women Visit

Chapter 10: The Panama City Boys

Chapter 1: An Attack

Chapter 12: A Man of Honor

Chapter 13: Eviction Day

Chapter 14: My Own Gaslite Motel

Other Smashwords Works By Mel C. Thompson

Chapter 1

Two Taiwanese Settle In Orange County

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It was 1979 when I first met Bruce and Sonia Lin. Without intending to, they changed my life in countless ways. They did not intend to hire me, but were forced into it. Little did they know our relationship would last for years, and they would come to trust me enough to let me manage their large motel single-handedly for 32 hours per week. It was a complicated place, and, as usual, I was pushed into management and forced to use my full array of skills to deal with employees, accounting, sales, evictions, security, and hospitality; and this was a job where being bilingual came in handy every day.

Although I could only walk with a heavy cast on my leg, and although physical therapy had failed and I looked severely maimed, and although I seemed like a maniac and had hair down to my shoulders and a weird red beard that everyone hated, the labor shortage was just too severe, and so, just months after yet another hospitalization, I was again at work. After what had gone on in the past year, and after what my psychiatrists and orthopedic surgeons had said, it was patently absurd for me to go back to work again, but I did. To my surprise, I actually succeeded at this job and could have spent a whole career there. The reasons I left after a few years will be covered repeatedly.

Bruce and Sonya Lin settled along the corridor of Orange County known as Beach Boulevard. To the passing traveler Beach Boulevard appears to be a long, straight, flat, wide street stretching on infinitely into a bleak suburban emptiness. That's true, but to simply flick it off as any old nothingness is not quite accurate. It's a vast and peculiar sort of nowhere that is at once the curse of the world and also the center of the world. Further complicating our job was that the thing was a crash course in foreign cultures, and the world was not yet a global village, and so the busloads of foreigners we worked with were often truly disoriented. And, of course, no one in Orange County really knew what to do with the millions of international people coming to move there permanently, or to live and work there part time.

Knotts Berry Farm was just two blocks away, and all the travelers who'd tired of Disneyland but felt an urge to keep coming back to Orange County, found that this secondary amusement park was just the ticket to make their next trip novel. But along with that novelty came crowds trying to wedge their way into anyplace along Beach Boulevard. Our motel was as large as one could be without being a fully-fledged hotel, and so our dozens of extra rooms kept stressed-out tour operators calling us again and again, filling our parking lot with huge white busses filled with curious people from places I never thought I'd bother to go to.

Tourists fell in love with our motel, and so did locals. It was not unusual for a worker to stay there while some remodeling was done on his house and then later decide to just live with us for years. Many people came, intending to stay for the week, and simply never left. Everyone on staff just simply loved our customers and they loved us. For many reasons, I did not feel I could choose to stay there for more than a few years, but if I'd have felt free to, I myself would have never left. Sometimes I worked forty hours straight without going home, and so I was sleeping there too, being woken up every ninety minutes or so to tend to a late arrival or an early departure. I continued working 32 to 40 hours, even when I was taking up to nineteen units in college.

Now Bruce and Sonia had exotic-sounding and complex Chinese names that they knew the xenophobic people of West Orange County could never bother with, so they simply adopted simple American first names and kept their short last name.

Their journey was a curious one. They were somewhat older than me, which means they very well may have lived through the revolution in China, probably trying, at first, to live under Chairman Mao and then at last following Chaing Kai-shek onto the island of Formosa, which would later be renamed Taiwan. However, at that time, Taiwan was no great place of opportunity for the average worker, and so Bruce and Sonya set out to the new world, but they came here in an odd way.

They first settled down in South America where they established small businesses of some sort. Both having amazing minds, they were able to learn the two main languages of South America, Spanish and Portuguese, well enough to conduct business and thrive in that land so alien to them. It must also be noted that Bruce Lin could also speak Japanese and Korean, along with his native Chinese. When one added English to the mix, it must be assumed that Mr. Lin spoke six languages actively. More astoundingly, he did so with seemingly no effort or concentrated study. He was not a bookish man by nature, but picked up languages the way he picked up building maintenance skills, on the job and in his spare time and in an off-hand way. I myself heard him speak several of these languages to customers and workers. It was astonishing.

Sonia, his wife, was not quite as astute, and therefore could only speak four languages. She could however, do that while taking care of her children, tending to the front desk of the motel and cooking dinner for several people.

Bruce and Sonia worked from sunup to sundown. Being ambitious people, it was only predictable that they would eventually settle in the United States which, at that time, was the only super-economy and the only place one went if one wanted to be among the super-rich. Even by that time, they were already super-rich. I cannot imagine the amount of money they eventually retired with, but it would have had to be in the millions.

As the reader may have guessed, no two people on earth would be more opposed to me, and just about everything I stood for, than the Lins. Thus, did God, in His infinite trickery, elect to bring us into a collision course. The Lins would, in order to expand their vast holdings and build their economic empire, purchased this aging-and-trashy, but somehow luxurious-and-beloved motel on Beach Boulevard called The Gaslite Motel. As fate would have it, I came there begging for work. I had no idea at all what I was getting into, and neither did the Lins. We all survived the experience, but it must be noted that a few times we barely survived, and are, indeed, lucky to be alive.

Chapter 2

Mr. Lin, The Richardsons & Me

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Of course Mr. Lin did not get to be a multimillionaire in the 1970s by lacking savvy. He was one of those rare breed of businessmen destined for inconceivable wealth. A true businessman, when confronted with substantial financial losses, or possibly large gains, reluctantly, but eventually, puts his own personal tastes and whims completely to the side. He is, in the long run, willing to submit to objective reality, maybe not at first, but eventually. He knows what he likes and dislikes, and he knows who he likes and dislikes. However, he puts all that aside, and his ego too, and precisely does what is the most profitable thing, even if, at first, he protests that he'd rather die than do it.

When I had a successful job, (and the reader must be reminded here that the failures outnumbered the successes, but did not eliminate them), it was often for a reason similar to this: The boss took one look at me and his face said, "I really don't like this person. I'd do anything to avoid having to see this oddball every day." Then a pause, whether a five-second pause or a five-month pause: "I am completely certain I can make a lot of money off this employee, or at least avoid losing a lot of money if he's around."

Sometimes the thing would begin with an outright refusal to hire me; and sometimes this refusal was met with fierce resistance from his underlings who, having heard about me, decided I was the right person for the job. For the finely-tuned executive, this is often a wake up call that his initial call was wrong. Valuing his fortune, he sets his ego aside and goes with the majority opinion if, in truth, it turns out his underlings knew better than he did. Sad are the fortunes of those who could have had profitable workers, even slavishly devoted ciphers off whom they could have easily enlarged their empires, but who, completely moved by aesthetic whims, sent those people away simply because they found them irritating on a personal level. Real greed, when it exists, sets aside the mere fact of being annoyed in favor of the cold, hard truth about what does and doesn't make money.

The Richardsons, as fate would have it, were a perfect match for the Gaslite Motel, which was why Mr. Lin hired them. It almost goes without saying that Mr. Lin found the Richardsons offensively grotesque. And furthermore, he profoundly disliked their laid-back style, their-overly casual dress and their breezy attitude toward everything; and he also was displeased with their absolutely indomitable spirits and their rebellious pride. But Mr. Lin's latent sagacity won the day, and he came to realize that the Richardsons, once you had their loyalty, would treat customers like friends to whom they were unflinchingly generous with their willingness to serve. He knew that regular travelers would be taken by their hospitality and the hotel would fill up with happy guests.

The Richardsons were one of two classes of alcoholics. There are the alcoholics who drink furiously and who cannot work well and who cannot be punctual and who will finally fall out of the workforce altogether. Then there are the alcoholics who will work sixteen hours a day for practically no money and will do a professional job, albeit in a seemingly leisurely and flippant way, without demanding raises or improvements in work conditions. The Richardsons were of that second class. They were, for the employer who could overlook their lack of respect for arbitrary authority and their non-corporate style, simply a gold mine waiting to be exploited.

It was the Richardsons who were to both live at the Gaslite Motel and also to be its titular managers. They were the ones who placed the ad in the newspaper looking for a motel desk clerk. The job, of course, paid minimum wage. Also, the technology at the front desk was primitive, even for 1979. The antique switchboard was the most annoying part of the job, and many a clerk was driven mad by it and left to work in more modern surroundings. All of the paperwork there was done in pencil, including the reservations and the nightly accounting. The job was simple, at least on the surface, but it could suddenly get complex and dangerous. So the matter of who to hire for it was a delicate one. The person accepting the job would have to be desperate, but at the at the same time subtle, nuanced and flexible. The call about whom to hand this outsized minimum wage duty to would be a difficult one. The situation would involve guessing, at best, and the guess would probably be wrong, but the attempt had to be made, however fraught with peril. For reasons that will become apparent later in this saga, the quality of life of everyone working at or residing in the motel would depend on who they picked.

The Richardsons talked to me for a few moments and made a snap decision to hire me based purely on instinct and the great chemistry we had. Their decision, in retrospect, turned out to be a brilliant one, because only a weird person would both take such a job and enjoy it, (and you will eventually see how weird this job could be). In the long-term, the choice could not have been better, but, in the short term, the choice created a lot of tensions.

The Richardsons knew, in me, that they would have a good companion, and being a good companion was the thing that turned out to be the most crucial factor because, as the hotel became more and more residential, the desk clerk would be a person people did not merely visit, but someone they virtually lived with. Furthermore, they needed a clear communicator who, in spite of having that skill, would be willing to stay in this confusing place which, on one day, seemed to be a haven for the upper-middle-class, and, on the next, seemed to be like an urban slum. If the motel was a person, we might say that it never figured out who it wanted to be, and that made the need for flexibility in employees a profound concern. The Richardsons, believing they saw these qualities in me, decided that letting me leave the interview without offering me the job was simply not an option.

They frankly loved me at first sight, and simply had gotten a revelation that the chemistry was so right that were they to delay hiring me for a moment, the opportunity would be lost and much suffering would result. They were right on all counts. The Gaslite Motel was the right place for me and the Richardsons, and that was that.

Now Mr. Lin was rather miffed at my being hired, and, at first, he committed the sin of letting his personal emotions rule over his business decision-making. The first problem was, from what I gathered, that the best prospective candidate was to be cleared by Mr. Lin before the hiring was finalized. He had apparently ordered the Richardsons to offer no one the job until he had a chance to approve of the candidate, but the Richardsons thought to themselves, "We've got to score this worker now. Mr. Lin will just have to understand." But Mr. Lin, at first, did not understand.

Mr. Lin hadn't been long in America before America was inundated with hippies, hippies who, to his way of thinking, were the exact opposite of reliable and obedient workers. One thing he thought was for certain, hiring a hippie-like person was inconceivable. At that time my hair was bright red. It was long, down to my shoulders. To top it all off, I had an obvious facial scar, a lopsided nose and a scraggly beard. To him I would fit the stereotype of a Los Angeles drug addict. He had clearly been looking for someone who was professional-looking. In instantly offering the job to me, he thought the Richardsons had gone off their rocker. He was understandably indignant.

Also, it did not help that I limped badly, as I was still recovering, or rather failing to recover, from my motorcycle accident, and I had a walking cast that went up to my thigh. In truth, objectively speaking, I looked rather monstrous. Since the Orange County of the 70s was not a place where employers worried at all about employment law, Mr. Lin shouted at Mr. Richardson while I was in the room about to begin training, "Why did you hire a crippled person? I don't want a crippled person working here!"

At that point Mr. Richardson laid down the law. "If he goes, we go!" Mr. Lin was dumbfounded at this instant loyalty to me. Why on earth, he was clearly wondering, would anyone risk their job for a total stranger who looked like a disabled hobo? I too was surprised and looked on curiously. A spirited argument ensued, but Mr. Lin backed down under much protest, indicating that while he might not fire me today, eventually he would. He complained bitterly of my presence there for some time, but each time he did, the Richardsons restated their mantra, "If he goes, we go." Mr. Lin knew he was extremely lucky to have the Richardsons, and so he was not about to fire them simply to display his authority. And in this way, he proved he was a real businessman first. While he may not have liked the Richards or me, on a personal level, he was not about to put his empire at risk merely to feel superior about winning an argument.

Over time Mr. Lin came to see that, as Mr. Richardson had predicted, I was an almost magical fit for the Gaslite Motel. The customers, even the conservative businessmen, far from being turned off by my counter-culture appearance, were charmed by me, often opting to hang out in the lobby all night plumbing the depths of my odd philosophical mind, rather than enjoying the very active nightlife available in that center of tourism. And eventually, allowing the facts to take precedent over his feelings, he spoke of dismissing me less and less often, and, at last, came to rely on me deeply, turning to me for help even years after I'd gone on to other jobs.

The Richardsons and myself became family to many a lonely traveling executive. Also there were regular visitors from overseas who came to view the hotel as a second home, many of them renting rooms by the month, which was extremely expensive. Some higher-paid workers simply abandoned ordinary apartments and moved in to live with us regardless of the expense. The Gaslite motel itself was a middling facility overall, a dive on the worst days and a puffed-up luxury on the best days, but none of this mattered. People paid real money to live there because it was a perfect fit for a certain type of person who had real money, but did not want to be overly ostentatious. Japanese multi-millionaires liked it because the service quality was high, but the appearance of all but a few of the fancier rooms was modest.

As you might have guessed, it was not long before the U.S. military found out about this peculiar deal to be had in Orange County and began stationing officers there semi-permanently when regular military housing was in short supply. The military men practically lived with us in the front lobby, staying there philosophizing with whoever was on duty until it was time to go to bed. The Richardsons and I, by our welcoming sociability, had added a profitable feature to the property. Mr. Lin, although he'd threatened to fire the Richardsons many times in the past, could not fool himself. His motel was completely full, mostly with prime customers. He knew not to risk ruining a winning formula, and so, in spite of the fact that his moods militated against me and the Richardsons, he would have to tolerate us, and that was that.

As for myself, I could have stayed there forever, and I would have, had not another violent crime wave swept through Orange County when I was a few years into the job. That crime wave, which was pointedly focused on robbing and maiming desk clerks at motels and counter clerks at small stores, swept many good folks in many motels out of the motel business for good. By the time I left, I had been attacked in broad daylight and Mrs. Richardson had been robbed at gunpoint and beaten up so badly that she'd had to undergo a stay in the hospital. We all simply had to leave for our own safety.

Had it not been for that crime wave, this book would have never been written because my career story, and my quest to find a home in the working world, would have been concluded when I was nineteen years old. I would have gone on to be full-time manager of that motel after the Richardsons retired. And since managers got free apartments there, my chronic housing problems would have been solved also. Free rent would have enabled me to afford to continue driving a car, which meant I would have never moved to San Francisco, since the availability of good, inexpensive mass transit was my main motive for moving to the Bay Area.

But alas, a crime wave is a wave, and if it's big enough, and if it's coming right at you, you have no choice but to run or be swept away. Being a man unwilling to die for a minimum wage job, on principle, I ran.

Chapter 3

Buena Park As A Context

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Those of you who have not had an experience of oneness with the Universe may be at a bit of a loss here. So I'll put this in terms that, while not exactly accurate, will help the non-mystical reader "visually" comprehend the states of mind I have during "ecstatic employment."

Till now I have mostly vented against work. In fact, as this chapter unfolds, the reader of the previous "books" in this series may be a bit surprised at this turn. I declare here the possibility of work itself as the blissful union of human beings and the Cosmos. And, typical of mystics, I say I know this not from hoping, or believing, or praying, but from direct, concrete experience.

Mystic experiences, while being "far out" are also very earthy and so palpable that they seem about to burst into the physical realm. This very tangible sense is what I call "the pre physical." It's not a world of wishing or fantasy, but a place of extreme present-moment presence. And hence, in the previous paragraph I use the hard word "concrete" to describe how very worldly this ecstatic possibility of ordinary work can be.

And all this is mentioned because work, were we to promote it, nurture it, supervise it and grow it in the right way, could really be the salvation of humankind. Of course, as it stands, persons who attain "work enlightenment" do so as "odd cases," or as a result of "lucky timing." They attain spiritual grace at work not because of, but in spite of, the American working atmosphere, which again we must sadly note that the world is rushing to duplicate and worsen.

And something mystical seemed to permeate my employment at the Gaslite Motel. My time in the city that surrounded the Gaslite Motel, Buena Park, was one of almost surrealistic warmth and soulfulness that I believe would be almost unthinkable in most cities or jobs today. Don't get me wrong, the job sucked a lot of the time, and the reader will be familiar with that soon enough. But there was enough humanity allowed there that the sun of workplace fulfillment could shine there; and the sense of belonging in a world, however seemingly pre-fabricated and garishly phony, could be found there. I can literally still taste the food I ate there. I can feel, surging in my very blood, the people I met there. In short, life, as a truly human thing, could be lived and had there.

Having said all this, in this segment I will delay getting into too much detail about the "job adventures" themselves and try to describe this City of Buena Park in which the Gaslite Motel was located as I further outline some generalities about that job. I will try to describe how the city of Buena Park both nauseated me and also got me very high. Being a person who suffers fools and phonies gladly, I must say that I could get very stoned, without drugs, on the very atmosphere of that "tourist trap." (But we definitely did the job with drugs too, but all of that I may attempt to cover later.)

My relationship with Buena Park continues to this very day. I have returned there as recently as a few years ago, and the city was still revealing new and odd things. This last visit consisted of me being allowed to explore the depths of a Jain Temple. (Jainism is a sect from India that believes in harming no living thing, to the extent that some wear masks on their faces to prevent accidentally breathing in innocent life forms and others sweep the ground in front of them as they walk so as to minimize the number of microscopic animals they might step on. Many of their great saints virtually starved to death so as to let go of every worldly attachment and have the smallest possible footprint on the planet.)

Why would a Jain temple be in Buena Park? I don't know, except to say that Buena Park always attracted certain phenomena. And I began getting high on Buena Park from the time I was entering the third grade until now, which is over fifty years. The combination of being in Buena Park and working created a rush for me.

My blood circulated. I was eager, alive, and, it might be added, manic, irritable, hyperactive, depressive and moody in every way. The management and the owners and me seemed to understand, after a short while, that we had a sacred relationship on our hands, and so we tolerated each other. There were times when I would literally order the owners to leave their own motel office when they were nagging me or being overly-anxious about nitpicking details. Of course no other employer would tolerate how temperamental I was in those days, but the owners themselves had stormy tempers which allowed them to forgive, back down and be flexible in the face of the anger of those below them. They were, perhaps, real Taoists, in the ultimate sense, if not literally. In fact, they proclaimed themselves to be Atheists, and ardently so, which was exceptional for Taiwanese who, on point of principle, did not like the Atheism of the Mainland. Be that as it may, they let the Yin and Yang flow, and, when the moment called for it, simply put their own egos aside and did what had to be done. In that sense, we must say that they deserved their wealth.

It must also be noted that as my employment there progressed over two years, I became a bit of a drinker, a bit of a marijuana user and a blatant sex addict. And hence, as time went on, I might show up to work sleep-deprived, blasted on mushrooms, paranoid and anxious. Be that as it may, I committed myself to delivering loving, professional, efficient and lively service to all who entered our "home." The situation there was a rare thing for my life, a real relationship with an employer.

But back to Buena Park, what is it? What was it? Why do people, to this very day, come from every corner of the earth to go there? Many Californians have never even heard of Buena Park, but the travelers of the world have, and they flock there by the hundreds of thousands. Paradoxically, the town can still be deathly quiet, extremely boring and profoundly depressing and bland. It has a dual nature which may or may not reveal itself to any given viewer.

Of course the main attraction to Buena Park, then and now, was the theme park known as Knotts Berry Farm, (now sometimes known as just Knotts). On their website, this business refers to itself as the nation's first theme park. Now it has roller coasters and lots of modern rides for the sensationalistic people of today. Before that, though, it was a thing of beauty. Knotts Berry Farm was originally modeled after an Old West town, and boards and beams from ghost town buildings were transplanted there. And yes, in the very beginning, berries were sold, and then a restaurant was formed. And the restaurant became so popular that they built a small old-town street around it for people to to walk around while they waited for their seats in the restaurant. This series of fateful accidents created a whole world for children to explore. There were horse rides and artificial mountains built that trains went through, taking passengers to models of underground gold mines and glorious caverns, and on and on it went, till the world press became aware of it all.

Meanwhile, for reasons I'm not aware of, they were constructing one of the world's very largest wax museums just blocks away from Knotts Berry Farm. The twin attractions caused a string of little motels to line Beach Boulevard for miles in order to accommodate people from Europe, Canada and Japan. (Our hotel tended to be frequented the most by Canadian and British tourists.)

As fate would have it, the small Japanese minority of the area built a scenic Japanese village complete with a deer park. Outside of the massive Catholic churches I went to as a child, the deer park in Buena Park was one of the first places where I ever had a sense of "the sacred." I was still young, but being manic, I was already experiencing God all around me and was the type that the Hindus would have referred to as "a God-intoxicated person." This further added to the distraction and detachment I felt from ordinary Orange County Society.

And then, to complicate matters even more, there happened to be a huge alligator farm in the neighborhood. And, given the popularity of the Wax Museum and Knotts, there were often overflow crowds looking for something, anything, to add to their constant amusement. And thus the Deer Park and the Alligator Farm also started to become major tourist enterprises as well.

Disneyland was, and is, such a gigantic phenomena that it always seemed to overshadow the emerging phenomena of Buena Park. However, deeper tourists, after a few trips to Disneyland would often conclude that, "Knotts Berry Farm is where it's really at." Indeed, Buena Park was richer, more complex, and often more satisfying than the more Institutional and Orwellian experience of Anaheim and Disneyland. Buena Park was funkier, quirkier and more appealing to the more jaded travelers.

Beach Boulevard itself, which runs through the center of so many cities in Orange County, is massive. It doubles as a kind of surface street and freeway, making it dangerous, crowded, polluted and occasionally hypnotic. Beach Boulevard starts in the far northwest of the County in the spiritual void that is known as La Habra, cuts through the distant and lonely Fullerton Airport District, then gains its full stature running through Buena Park as it surges through town after town, finally, dozens of miles later, (over fifty miles according to Wikipedia), ending up in Huntington Beach, an iconic surfing mecca and surf-lingo incubation chamber. (I have, by the way, walked the entire length of Beach Boulevard, in short segments over several days, several times.)

Buena Park keeps evolving, and so does Beach Boulevard. I cannot even say that I know how many new tourist attractions have opened and-or closed since I last went there. It falls to other people or the media to tell me. If you drive through Buena Park, you'll still miss some of them unless you do a web search or consult a tourist information center. Before I wrote this, I revisited many sections of Beach Boulevard, and, as always, much of it, even in a few years, had evolved beyond recognition. And yet the sleepy Latino neighborhoods, bustling Vietnamese districts, and defensive white enclaves, still maintain their traditional, flat, suburban streets with all of their loneliness, self-absorption and existential remoteness. Orange County, North, South, Central and West, remains inscrutable.

Chapter 4

An Air Traffic Controller Moves In

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Tom came to live with us at the Gaslite Motel. He was a highly paid air traffic controller at Los Angeles International Airport. He was, for reasons I never understood, unable to stay with his wife and children. But he remained married and loyal, and, on a daily basis, he lived with us when he wasn't at the airport. He had an amazing bond with his German shepherd, and the motel management made an exception and allowed that large, but perfectly behaved, animal to live with us. We never got a noise complaint nor a cleaning-related complaint regarding that dog. We all loved them both, and so, each night, before bed, Tom and his dog would join the others for socializing in our lobby.

Air traffic controllers have unbelievably stressful lives due to unethical, chronic understaffing of our control towers, (another semi-permanent gift of Ronald Reagan, since, apparently, closing all the mental hospitals was not enough budget-cutting to satisfy his mighty sword of social injustice; and it also didn't help that the Democrats who came into power after him rather liked all those budget cuts and never did anything to restore the numbers of aircraft controllers or mental-hospital beds; because once the Republicans did the nasty work of cutting everything, the Democrats cooperated by pretending not to notice that the cuts that left this whole country in a 3rd World state are still in place). And this stress usually found its way into the family lives of these heroic, hard-working, selfless public servants. (I must continually repeat the refrain of my lawyer Brad Seligman: "No good deed goes unpunished." While Democrats and Republicans hate different things some of the time, they are both united in their agreement that goodness should be driven into the ground and reduced to empty symbols.)

Tom was a twenty-three-year veteran of that business and thus could go wherever he wanted and live in practically any circumstance he desired. And, it so happens, upon reflecting on the sweet and loving home the Gaslite Motel could be, he decided to make our Motel his home. Living in a mid- level motel is a very expensive proposition. But money was no object. His position, though seemingly a very public one, left him feeling isolated. He therefore needed to be in a caring environment where he simply felt comfortable being himself; and at the Gaslite Motel, almost everyone really relaxed into being themselves after a few short weeks. Our customers and ourselves were quite simply happy to be together, in spite of the hardships, and many were to come.

It was an unusual choice to pay so much money to live in such an outdated atmosphere as the Gaslite Motel. It was a place of odd inconsistencies. The maid service and front desk service were excellent. The covers of the beds were luxurious and the furnishings adequate. However, the phone system was from the dark ages which created an odd relationship between the guests and the desk clerks. The gist of it all was that you had to pay a lot of money to live in a room without modern phone service.

Because eating at the Mexican restaurant, or managing to get a batch of Mrs. Lin's Chinese cooking, was easy enough to do, it was hard, once one arrived home to the motel at night, to get in the car and go someplace else. The cheap beer at the Mexican restaurant would serve as the bar. Additionally, we had the scruples to keep the pool clean, (and it was a big pool), and so swimming and sun bathing or just sitting in lawn chair around the pool getting intoxicated, were additional options. And too, the guests got to know each other and would, for entertainment, go to each other's rooms and drink and watch sports, (or make love, if the chance presented itself, and the chance presented itself a lot).

Guests like Tom had to call the front desk every single time they needed to make a call out, and some had a lot of calls to make. Additionally, every time someone called for a guest from the outside, they had to call our desk and be manually transferred. Some nights most of the job consisted of being a 3rd World phone operator using a switchboard like one would see in the first black-and-white movies with sound.

If a guest needed to make ten calls in a single night, they had to call me each time. And each time I would have to run to the antique switchboard and put a patch-cord into the hole below the room number and pick up the ancient receiver. Then the guest would have to tell me which phone number they wanted to dial. I would then put another patch-cord into an outgoing line and laboriously dial the number on an antique rotary phone where each number dialed was met with a heavy resistance from the slow, grinding dial. And if too many people tried to call out or in at once, we simply ran out of lines and the call had to wait till a line opened up.

The guest was charged twenty-five cents, each time, for this calling service; and we kept a call log, in pencil, of every number dialed out on behalf of a customer; and then we had to add all those phone charges into the nightly accounting along with the ordinary room charges, which were also kept in pencil on cards we slid inside of thin metal slits. All day and night, as various charges came through, including restaurant charges if the client needed credit, we added them to these cards which we moved in and out of these slits all night. (The number of slits used matched exactly the number of rooms, so you knew you were sold out in a very analog and visual way. You simply ran out of thin, metal slits to put accounting cards into.)

Weirdly, during each phone call, after dialing the outbound number, I had to stay on the line to see if the call was picked up on the other end, then, once the person being called picked up their phone, I could get off the line. But at certain times the person was calling someone who had previously lived at the Gaslite Motel, meaning that the call might turn into a three-way party line, and thus the years of endless conversations would go on and on.

There were no computers, or even typewriters, for reservations. (There was one primitive manual typewriter like Bukowski might have used, but that was only for when the owners or managers needed to do official hotel correspondence. If that happened even once a week, I'd have been surprised.) All reservations were kept on huge sheets that covered the entire calendar year. These reservations were also in pencil, and simply erased if canceled. It was amazing how few major errors occurred in this system. It was far more accurate than today's computerized reservation systems. And too, clerks and managers were given some leeway regarding how much to charge, managers and workers and customers often haggling it out in the old world style. There were no corporate policies to override every decision. We really did make decisions instead of reading everything off of a computer screen and simply defaulting, as everyone does now, to whatever is written on the screen no matter how nonsensical it might be.

So, guests like Tom, (although he could afford to live wherever he liked), sacrificed the option of having a modern phone that they could use without having to call a worker and detail to that worker each number they called. (Also, the guests often said how guilty they felt about having to put us through this primitive outbound dialing process countless times per evening. But there was nothing anyone could do. Mr. Lin was addicted to the old ways.)

Tom used to come into the office almost every night after work. Or, if he was working nights, he would come in every morning after work. (There was always instant coffee or tea available in the lobby, and that old-style instant coffee was apparently good enough for him.) Tom would come in with his german shepherd and enjoy a few cups of coffee or tea and watch the world go by along Beach Boulevard. Sometimes everything went quiet, and I'd be back there reading Philosophy books and he'd be there, staring transcendently at the endless procession of cars, pedestrians, bikes, busses and motorcycles. Those silences were one of Tom's specialties, and as the brown-orange of dawn or twilight hit the muggy air, we'd all just sometimes put down what we were reading and just gaze out into the expanse. Everyone knew we had something real there, something that could never be replaced, and knowing that, we savored it together.

Mrs. Lin, tired of her own house, although immensely wealthy, would bring her baby in and send me off on breaks, sometimes taking over the kitchen in spite of our general rule of not wanting the owners in there causing problems. By the time I got back from my break, the whole place smelled of home-cooked noodles and vegetables. Since I was working sixteen hours a day sometimes, she'd look at me condescendingly and shovel out a massive plate of food that could feed a far larger man than me. She'd shove the plate in my face and say, "Five dollar!" Then, seeeing my crestfallen look, she'd laugh and say, "Just teasing," and give me a free dinner.

If the Mexicans who partially-owned the restaurant saw that Mrs. Lin was not feeding us, they'd sometimes just bring us over extra-large burritos that would fill us all night. If Tom was there, he got some noodles and burritos too. Somehow, in some way, everyone took care of everyone without even having to be asked. And even though so many people were living off of minimum wage, somehow everyone was better taken care of than now, and in some kind of way that gave us some primitive form of dignity that is unimaginable now in today's low-wage working environments.

The front lobby of the Gaslite Motel was all glass and the view opened up onto Beach Boulevard where the cars, the vagabonds, the criminals and the occasional hooker would wander by. Due to the odd mixture of eras in Buena Park, one might look out and see a multi-seat horse-drawn carriage driven along by cowboys carrying loads of women in wide Southern belle dresses, or you might see a rock star in a limousine coming to play one of the concert stages of Buena Park. (Some rock stars felt as though they were prisoners of Hollywood when not on tour, and some liked to come to Buena Park to wind down.)

I often envied Tom and the other clients like him who could live this semi-bohemian life in this off-beat motel. And, if I'd had the money, I would have lived there too.

When one visits a small family motel, one sometimes notices that the actual living quarters of the on-site managers are sometimes actually attached to the office of the motel itself. If the managers are gregarious people, like the ones at the Gaslite were, they would open wide the connecting door between the motel lobby and their own living room. If they also had children and cats and dogs. those too would be wandering about the lobby/living-room area playing and socializing with the desk clerks and the customers. In a gesture which showed how human conditions were there, both sets of managers I worked for said, "Our home is your home. When you work here, you live with us. You may use our kitchen or our living room and our office as you like. While we're here together, we are one family." I'm trying to picture any minimum-wage job today feeling anything like that. If things were busy, I worked very hard. If not, I sat in the managers' living room and watched their big television till business picked up.

From time to time Mr. Lin would come in and say, "This is not work! Look at how relaxed you are! In China we would not consider any such thing to be working. In China people work hard for their money, and they are paid almost nothing." I would tolerate this for a while and then give him my usual, "I have had about enough of this," grimace and he would back off and go and attend to the whatever the duties of multimillionaires are.

I was in college at the time, sometimes taking as many as nineteen units at once. The slow times at the Gaslite often allowed me to get lots of homework done. How I managed to work thirty-two hours per week and take nineteen units at junior college is something I still don't understand. In any case, Mr. Lin would see that I had philosophy books on the desk and would come in and say things like, "Philosophy is not so good. In China we had plenty of philosophers. It's better to work hard and save money."

But Mr. Lin obviously had studied a bit of philosophy and theology himself. Since this was Orange County, it goes without saying that born-again Christians were always hitting up the desk clerks with their religious come-ons. Sometimes I'd see someone trying to convert Mr. Lin, but Mr. Lin would say, "You know, I have read your Bible and I don't believe in your God. God is not so important. If we want to have a happy life, we need to work hard. I see people everywhere try to pray to God. But it's no good. You need to do things for yourself." (Mr. Lin's attitude toward the supernatural changed a bit after he lost an infant daughter due to the rash of sudden crib deaths that had begun to happen all over Southern California, a phenomenon no one has ever quite explained to my satisfaction.)

When business was slow, the cooks, with nothing to do, would come out and take their cigarette breaks in the pool area. Sometimes the door remained open for hours and guests and workers used the pool and restaurant as yet another living room in Orange County's vast world of living rooms. (The Bay Area by contrast is a place where every square inch is in constant play. Every bit of open space is fiercely competed for, closed off and exclusive, and suspiciously and jealously guarded. In this way, a kind of role reversal between Orange County and the Bay Area occurs in which the Bay Area plays the penny-pinching miser with no soul, and, in a certain light, under the right conditions, Orange County appears generous.)

* * *

When Tom came to join us in our theme-park of the absurd, he was a somewhat nervous person. Planes had been crashing around the world at a higher rate than usual. (This was during the DC10 crisis, which was resolved by the government eventually deciding to inspect planes less and firing lots of air traffic controllers. Of course in the beginning they made a symbolic show of interest in passenger safety and consumer protection. But, finally, no two subjects bored the Republican administrations more than those. In Orange County, we got really, really rich by taking your tax dollars and just spending it all on weapons, which is to say "defense contracting." The "urgent necessity" of defense contracting, often Orange County defense contracting, was the thing that ate up all the money; and it was the conservatives' way of making sure as few poor people as possible got any slice of any pie. Apparently you are not upset at being bankrupted by weapons, but you are upset at being bankrupted by the poor, so we Orange County folks built you your weapons. Happy now?)

Although Tom often worked sixteen hours per day with countless thousands of lives in his hands, we were able to do him a lot of good. We were good therapy for those with worldly worries. Back then I was reading the Tao Te Ching over and over, and was always spouting things about the calmness and the oneness and the absolute acceptance that are at the center of our universe. Apparently this was a very agreeable thing for any worker to hear who had the weight of the world on his or her shoulders.

How Tom came to us was simple. He came in seeking a weekly rate for a modest room, and then he stayed for two years. The rising rates of tourist accommodations never seemed to bother him.

I used to talk to Tom and the other guests at length about one of my passions at the time, zodiac boats. An inflatable boat of a certain type is often called a Zodiac, although technically, like the word Xerox, Zodiac is a brand name.

Real inflatable boats are not merely blow-up balloons with engines. They are, ideally, a mixed media sort of affair. Generally the internal skeleton of the boat is made of up rigid wooden, fiberglass or metal parts which can be rapidly assembled, around which is an inflatable hull. It is this mixture of a rigid internal structure combined with the light-as-air exterior that produces incredible performance in the water. There are things one can do with an inflatable boat that would be difficult to imagine with another sort of craft. They are generally the domain of aggressive fishermen and military types. (Blocks from my home there is a defense contractor that only builds inflatable boats for the military. I went in and asked if they'd sell me one. They were not charmed.)

My particular hobby was a dangerous and illegal one. I enjoyed surfing with the boat, not only surfing ocean waves, but also surfing the waves of big ships and power-boats. Waves or wakes of about ten feet high were my main joy. I liked to pull the boat up onto the crest of a wave formation and ride it for miles. Then, just for fun, I'd suddenly run up the face of a wave and the entire boat would fly through the air, perhaps landing on the crest of another wave. Somehow I never came close to losing control of the boat. Only later did I come to realize how dangerous my maneuvers were. At the time I was crazed with the love of the sport, and I knew every inch of my boat and could rebuild it from scratch in a half hour each time I took it out. The Coast Guard and Harbor Patrol would pull me over and threaten me and yell at me, but, rather like in my early and unorthodox automotive life, the authorities just somehow never arrested me or ever seriously fined me, but always let me off with some tiny infraction or simply waved me away and ordered me out of the part of the shoreline or highway over which they had jurisdiction. (Only later, when my mania subsided, did I understand what a menace I was. So, I drifted from lake to harbor, evading previous authorities and, in turn, annoying new ones.)

Tom, back at the motel, not being a man to back down from the idea of danger, did indeed agree to ride along with me one time for a ninety-minute session. (Since all his jobs were nothing but hair-raising danger, the initial description of this mad hobby did not phase him.) And so he subjected himself to a real ocean adventure where we used my boat to surf real Orange County waves. Why on earth the surfers around there did not have us tossed in jail, I can't say. Somehow we coexisted, and only occasionally did they order me out of the way with authoritative shouting; but throughout all of that phase of my life, I was never treated like the pariah it would have been appropriate to treat me as. (One of the properties of mania is that the people of the world never reject it fully, but seem to refrain from completely debunking the thing. Perhaps they love the hopefulness of it, and perhaps that brings life to things. Here I am only speculating, as it is all ultimately a mystery to me.)

He seemed to endure all of these wild goings on with total calm. Flying over the tops of waves with me without complaint, enduring a few angry insults from other boaters and surfers with good humor. And, all-in-all, not seeming to react badly when the entire boat, including the engine, roared out of the water though the air. Only later, as we were driving home did he say, "Never again." That was my first inkling that my style of boating was a bit extreme. It was my first boating reality check. (It should be noted that I had no excuse to be so oblivious, considering distant relations were extreme boaters, and I knew that hobby often ends in death.) This caused me to sober up and research my habits more closely. It was then that I found out that such fellows as I deserved to be arrested by the coast guard and tossed in prison. At last, because of Tom's thoughtful, but firm input, my life was probably again spared, because, it now seems, one day, had I kept up with that hobby, bad things were sure to happen, if not physically, then legally. So, in the end, just like with my crazy motorcycle riding, I eventually decided to abandon the hobby before something fatal happened, (and I had already almost died as a result of my frequent and risky use of two-wheeled vehicles). Selling the only boat I was ever the legal owner of, one that had to be registered with the DMV as a real boat — that made me sad; and, to this day, it hurts to be without a Zodiac. I never stop missing it. But sanity is an important thing sometimes, and, in this case, with that little hint from Tom, I was guided toward the light of reason, if ever so briefly.

I often wonder where Tom is now. I wonder if he remembers the Gaslite Motel as often as I do. As I search for him on the Internet, nothing comes up. But again, he was substantially older than me back then, and I am 58 as I rewrite of this story, so it's possible he never got into the Internet age too much. All of that remains enshrouded in mystery.

Chapter 5

An Ending In The Middle

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I am writing this book in what many people believe could be the twilight of my artistic life. My state is such that I'm having to write this book in repetitive layers. And, not having the strength to edit as I should, I will retell two earlier stories about how I left the motel industry and retell the story of the crime committed against my direct supervisors. Also, my fragmented memory is such that with each retelling of some of these stories, new details emerge and new commentaries emerge. It's not a very professional approach, but this is all I have the strength to do at this point, and I can only hope my next work will be better and that my mental health will improve.

As I mentioned earlier, the Richardsons were the resident managers who had hired me in the beginning. They would be replaced by a Pentecostal family which I intend to mention later in this text. But, just after the Pentecostal family left, most astoundingly, the Richardsons returned. This was unexpected because the Lins and the Richardsons had not severed relations on the best of terms. However, the Lins were creatures of habit, and when they trusted someone, it was likely they would eventually turn to them again and again. In the end, the Lins wanted what was best for business, and they had no compunction about eating a little humble pie, as I made clear in earlier chapters, if that's what it took to get the job done.

About the time that the Richardsons returned to the Gaslite motel, the Orange County crime wave I previously described was beginning to go completely out of control. This was a time when all deterrent had been lost in the justice system. Murders committed in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses got plea-bargained down to manslaughter and the manslaughter got haggled down to two years in jail with five years of probation. Your killer could easily only

spend twenty-four months behind bars and kill again on the twenty-fifth month. In truth, it generally took about three murders to get someone to serve a serious prison sentence. The first murder was almost a free walk.

In that environment, it goes without saying that mere robbery and assault, and even attempted murder, were nearly waved off as almost nothing. In fact, when the police took into custody a man who brazenly attempted to murder my fiancé and myself. They only took one of his weapons, though not all of them, gave him a short talking to along with some stern warnings and just sent him on his way. And thus, as the reader might imagine, motel desk clerks, sitting alone in lobbies with large boxes of cash, were like sitting ducks.

Slowly terror began spreading over the motel industry around Buena Park. Other motel desk clerks would call our clerks and tell tales of horrible, brutal robberies and assaults. One after another, all of the motel clerks were being beaten, pistol whipped, shot at, stabbed, robbed, tied up, disfigured and terrorized. I knew for a fact that it was only a matter of time for us. Our motel was larger than many others. It's cash transactions accounted for at least half of our business. There might be a thousand dollars in cash just sitting there. It was inconceivable that the gangs doing these systematic robberies would overlook this obvious fact. Our staff was feeble, or old, or both. Never could a softer, more inviting, more fool-proof target exist.

One day I got a call from Mr. Richardson asking me to work an additional shift. When I asked why, he told me what had happened to Mrs. Richardson. She was in the hospital. She had been robbed and gunpoint, and the armed robbers, having all the cash they could have hoped for, felt it would be fun to break a few bones and do a little pistol whipping just for kicks. Mrs. Richardson never really recovered from this and her already precarious health spiraled ever downward thereafter. In any case, someone would need to work her shift that night so Mr. Richardson could get some rest.

When I got there I gave my condolences to Mr. Richardson who said, "Isn't it enough that they get their money? Why do they have to beat the shit out of people?"

I knew why. I had a close friend who was a retail clerk at an Albertsons supermarket get a shotgun blast in the stomach during a daylight robbery in a crowded supermarket. Again, the criminals could be that brazen, since there was virtually no penalty for such behavior. My friend died horribly and senselessly, and the killer had no remorse, no human feeling. And he did it just for show, just for fun, because it was a guaranteed cakewalk. The murderer was caught pretty quickly, but the perpetrator was absolutely unconcerned. He'd be out of jail in a short time and kill again at his leisure for sheer amusement.

Another friend of mine had been tied up by robbers and stuffed into a back room and was lucky to escape alive. Other friends who had worked at liquor stores had been terrorized by gunmen who knew no real penalty could possibly result from their actions.

Because politics is such a pendulum, when California finally decided to do something about crime, it went insane in the other direction, and now the state has a higher imprisonment rate than North Korea. And now, in California, if you commit the slightest infraction, the justice system might literally descend upon you and see to it that you never escape the revolving-door for-profit slave-camp prisons that have come to be the state's only solution to all social ills. Now the state itself has become the leading sociopath on the loose. There is now virtually no justice available to non-millionaires and prosecutors routinely hide exculpatory evidence and simply throw anyone they can in jail to improve their conviction records in hopes of being reelected again. The corruption is beyond 3rd World standards.

And California prison officials admit, in rare instances actually on the record, that our prisons are actually controlled by the gang organizations within the prisons and that nowhere near enough officers are employed to have any hope of instituting true control of these vast human warehouses. And furthermore, rehabilitation in such an environment is truly a fantasy. In most cases, California prisons are places prisoners go to hone their skills at gang organizing, assassination, rape and drug dealing.

There has never been a Governor of California with any serious interest in reforming our prison system. The police vacillate between doing absolutely nothing and-or simply arresting and prosecuting anyone they are in the mood to. Whether or not the police and prosecutors should act, and whether or not a defendant is or is not guilty — those questions are completely uninteresting, not only to the police, but to the whole ruling class of the California Republic. California public and private leadership, as a whole, with notable exceptions, is mostly interested in not disturbing whatever it is that is allowing them to shovel money into their own mouths at record-speed while a record number of people die in jail and on the streets with absolutely no access to police protection or access to a justice system. Our dear Governor Brown and the far-right Democrats that rule our state, are simply sleeping in a cloud of denial as the upper-middle-class party proceeds without so much as a hiccup.

Of course I agreed to help the Richardsons out for a short while, but, as I noted in a previous section, in a few weeks I left the industry altogether. The gangsters would certainly come after me next. One would have had to be suicidal to stick around and wait for the inevitable to happen. Apparently I keep wanting to live to fight another day, or rather, to escape from fights another day.

For me this is all a tragedy. I was good at that work. I really would have been happy to stay in that business and try to use it to build a stable life. The fact that I could not safely do so meant that I would seek work in many fields alien to my nature where only frustration, isolation and unhappiness waited to overwhelm me.

In today's world, workers are told that they must be willing to change careers every five years and continue to get new degrees for their rest of their lives and work until they are seventy, and to always promise to be cheerful, high-energy and perfectly accurate and always socially flawless. Today it would be hard to get any sympathy for not being able to adapt to a new line of work, but, in truth, I did have trouble adapting. Every time I got a career success for a few years, it was inevitably followed, when that happy job ended, by years of desolate vocational drifting and a long series of failed enterprises. I was not only ill-suited for "jobs" in a general way, but also fairly devastated when a career option worked for a while, but then had to be abandoned.

Chapter 6

A Bully Confesses

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It seems almost inconceivable now from my perch in the Bay Area, but back in the Orange County of the 70's, a high percentage of young men considered it almost a morally praiseworthy thing to assault and mock deformed people. If a disabled person were murdered, and high-school boys heard about it, perhaps half of them would have the attitude, "That's what losers, mutants and cripples deserve." Orange County was just really that harsh.

While macho male high school culture has almost always been inhumanly deplorable, it reached mind-boggling depths in North Orange County where I actually heard more than one conversation go down like this:

Boy # 1: "Wow, so I heard that the government in Poland just crushed the latest democracy demonstrations and jailed their leaders, and a bunch of other people got killed, some run over by tanks and stuff like that. Wouldn't it be horrible to live in a country like that."

Boy # 2: "Well, that's what you get for being such a loser that you're born in Poland. That'll teach 'em a lesson. Fuckin' Polacks anyway."

Of course we were rabidly anti-Soviet. But anti-Communism was secondary to anti-Loserism. Hence the consensus was that while the Communist government in Poland was usually considered wrong on most issues, still, if they crushed allegedly weaker people who were perceived as unpopular and stereotyped as ineffectual, then you kind of had to hand it to the Stalinists for properly kicking some loser butt. I wish I could say that this kind of attitude was rare, but it was not. The first order of business was always to be strong and be a winner. Then, once it was determined you were always strong and victorious, then ideologies could be haggled about later.

The following conversation actually took place between me and a relative:

"We're tired of paying taxes for the Indian land we're leasing."

"Yes, but you have to pay those taxes to support the Indian nation, since, after all, you're on their land."

"But why should we pay anything to them. We fought them and we won?"

"Yes, but we murdered their race of people and almost drove them into extinction. And so we finally felt guilty and gave them a little someplace to live."

"Well, I don't see why. After all, they lost."

By the way, this relative was actually considered to be one of the more liberal relatives I had. The more conservative ones simply believed certain races of people simply weren't human, and if they should happen be exterminated like dogs, all the better.

Reflecting on this environment for a moment, try to picture yourself born into it with a severe facial deformity and a high-pitched voice. Quite simply put, it felt like this culture killed me a dozen times over. It's shocking than any part of me remains alive.

In addition to the general prohibition against any diversity or weakness, aging itself was considered a kind of moral failing. Fragility was considered beyond repugnant. The elderly, with the exception of richest and most famous elderly people, were considered disgusting examples of people who "decided to accept" illness and wrinkles. By the way, if you should ever become sad about being in your eighties or nineties and being unable to walk and having had most of your friends die, you were labeled as hopelessly negative. We all "knew" that when we got older we would, with the iron force of our free-market free wills, simply kick aging's ass and send it packing. We were a very confident lot.

The complaints of people with such things as bad backs and destroyed knee cartilage were simply called "fraudulent malingering" which warranted no discussion whatsoever. If such things were mentioned, people simply turned their faces away from the speaker and talked to someone else in the room. The speaker may as well have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and have reported seeing aliens in their bathroom. (Did I mention that half of these people called themselves Christian?)

It was common, even among "grown-up" men with children to boast in mixed company about having been "manly" enough to "beat up a fag" or a "cripple" or a "freak." By the way, it was specifically a rule that any innocent person could be attacked at will. You merely, before attacking them, had to publicly announce that the attack was justified. This justification was

very easy to achieve. You simply shouted, "Freak!" or said, "What are you, some kind of freak?" Then if two or three other people were in the mood to watch a fight, they merely said, "Yeah!" Based solely on this, most people who suffered physical attacks were basically without recourse.

In more conservative counties, or in counties with extremely conservative police forces, I have actually observed the following: An effeminate person is attacked, or threatened with attack, and

somehow the police are called. The police arrive ready to arrest the person who issued the threats or committed the assault. The guilty party needed merely to shout to the police, "But that guy is a fag! A fag!" In such cases, generally, the police would back off and suddenly look very grimly at the victim. Then a wide smile would slowly come across their faces. In short order they would look for a way to discredit the report and be on their way without arresting anyone.

Using this airtight logic, attackers felt that they were immune from any possible punishment if they assaulted me: A harelip was a deformity, and all deformities were, by definition, gay, and gays, by definition, had no human rights. Case closed. To criticize brutality in North Orange County would have been seen as a greater blasphemy than criticizing Christianity itself. (Orange County Christians, as a general rule, stood idly by watching significant portions of the population be physically brutalized back then. These same Christians now do nothing as even more people are economically brutalized and sent into economic exile, many forever banished from the only county they have ever known or lived in. Anaheim, the largest city in Orange County, has so many marginalized people now that the problem has become epic. In true Orange County fashion, the sole solution Anaheim came up with for the legions of dying people was to remove bus stop benches to reduce the number of places the dying might sleep during their last few years on this earth.)

Hence, because I had a facial deformity, I could never prove to the satisfaction of others that I was heterosexual enough. And so my working life could be quite rough. Coworkers could mock me, physically abuse me and even sexually harass me. Since I fought back and refused to be molested, I lost out on a great job at Allianz, a job that had the potential to turn my failing clerical career around. Allianz paid well, even at the low-level jobs, and had great training programs. But, because male clerical workers in the 1980s in Orange County were seen as both failures and potentially bisexual, they were seen as fair game for sexual harassment. When one added a facial deformity and a high-pitched voice into the equation, well, I had all the protections of an overpopulated deer colony in hunting season.

Sexual predation, from one man to another, was covered by an odd Orange County rule: "The person doing the harassing, if he is stronger, is, by definition, not really gay, since strength is itself inherently heterosexual." Hence, if an allegedly-straight man had accidentally stumbled upon a willing gay man, he could claim to have "overpowered him," and thus could be heard bragging to other allegedly-straight men of his escapades, as though they counted as straight encounters. (One wonders what on earth the gay men in question must have thought of these "straight-through-strength" fellows.) Playing into all this duplicity was, for Christians, the always-classic rule that "blowjobs aren't really sex," still a popular one throughout America. (Did I mention that I grew up in a county where people claimed to believe in "family values?")

My direct supervisors, at certain clerical jobs could do nothing to defend me from such predators, since those supervisors noted they were "already in trouble with their bosses for hiring a 'fag' in the first place." I ultimately never was raped or forced to do anything against my will, but I did have to almost get into fights to get people to stop groping me.

The Gaslite Motel proved to be an exceptional place for me in that I was only subject to mild harassment from certain female customers (who occasionally called us to their rooms only to appear almost nude at the door). But thankfully managers and coworkers at the Gaslite motel never caused me any stress this way. Such were the ups and downs of the curious culture of Orange County at that time. It was a cesspool of sexual double-standards run amok. And, because I was a harelip, there was another unwritten rule that, "You can't be fired for harassing a harelip, since they're deformed and all wrong anyway, so it's not like doing it to a real person."

One of these tenants at the Gaslite Motel, a very successful businessman who could have stayed at the Hilton if he had wanted to, chose to live in our tourist motel because it had a cozy feeling. He did not like OCD perfectionism or pretentious ostentation. Like the other businessmen, he enjoyed our staff, a motley collection of philosophers, preachers, alcoholics and Atheists. Whatever their philosophy or religion, all our clerks were super friendly and talkative. Hence, such businessmen confessed almost everything about themselves to these clerks.

This general situation led this one customer, one dark and balmy night, to enter our front lobby after work and sit on one of the comfortable couches and chairs we kept there to make our guests feel at home. After the usual amount of fun banter, newspaper reading and beverage drinking, this gentleman suddenly took on a grave appearance of considerable severity and spoke just above a whisper. He got up and approached the desk.

"I feel guilty, Mel. I see now that, even though you're a harelip, you're a fine young man. And I realize in my childhood I must have been a horrible person. I used to pick on harelips and fags, just for fun. And now that I know you, I realize how cruel it must have seemed. You're not a fag are you?"

I smiled patronizingly and reassured him that I was only sleeping with women and would go on to marry only women. And thus, apparently not yet ready to concede that beating up gay people was wrong, he at last had come to a place in his life where he conceded that beating up heterosexual harelips was a sin that would weigh heavily on his soul.

These days some parts of Orange County have become more progressive. Some people have even publicly declared themselves Democrats. Not only do they now have a semi-workable transit system in some areas, (which seemed theoretically impossible many years ago), but they also have gays and lesbians living openly and freely in some areas. I'm even guessing that in some parts of the county disabilities may not always be labeled as the result of moral failure on the part of the sufferer, although that may be stretching hopefulness a bit too far. (Sadly, in South Orange County there has been some retrenchment. There, unfortunately, the New Age philosophy of Positive Thinking has taken on a blame-the-victim tone that is attempting to spiritualize their intolerance for weakness. This actually destroyed what was left of my social life, since formerly sweet people now examined each disabled person fiercely to see why they "chose to manifest poverty in their life." It's a scary development that's left me alone in late life with few people to really turn to.)

In spite of certain reservations, I can now imagine that a harelip in Orange County might have at least a small chance of escaping childhood with his or her sanity intact. When I say that I was born in the wrong decade, I really mean it. My life back then was really a wrong-place / wrong-time phenomena.

Chapter 7

A Brief Moment of Profitability

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In the 70s, desk clerks at motels owned by penny-pinching real-estate barons, all of whom always consider themselves just ordinary guys trying to get by, were paid minimum wage, or less. Did I just imply some folks in Orange County got paid less than minimum wage?

Yes, motels are a great attractor of sub-minimum-wage laborers. California is a Pacific Rim slave-camp. And to answer your question in advance: No, there never was any serious labor-law enforcement in California whatsoever. Regarding the rare instances of the actual enforcement of labor law you may have heard of in California — realize that you only heard of such enforcement because the enforcement action made the news. By definition, actual enforcement is so rare that it's a news story. The Department of Labor Standards Enforcement is designed to isolate a worker reporting wage violations or working-conditions violations. The DSLE will not investigate an industry-wide problem for fear of offending corporations. Remember, the California Democratic Party is simply a pro-corporate industrial advocacy group. It's true that they are tolerant of millionaires of all races and millionaires of all genders and millionaires of all sexual orientations, but, as I must repeat, they do not like poor people at all, not one tiny bit.

The DLSE won't allow a lone worker to report mass-violations where an employer is stealing from dozens or hundreds of workers, nor will they examine an industry where a worker reports that all the companies he knows of are stealing from workers. Instead, the DLSE will force the worker to be revealed to the company as the lone complainer, and the DLSE will focus solely on that worker's claim, meaning that now the worker's job atmosphere is absolutely ruined. The employer, now furious, will begin to examine every detail of the worker's performance to find flaws. After they find three flaws, they issue three written reports and fire the worker for some trumped up insubordination charge. (Insubordination is the one thing a worker can't get unemployment insurance payments for.) Now the worker has a bad job reference, no current job, no unemployment insurance and is fighting not to be homeless. In fact, several months later, after the worker is homeless, the DLSE will indeed announce the worker is entitled to the $200 of wages he or she was cheated out of.

The DLSE will protest and say, "But if the employer retaliates against a worker for reporting wage violations or working-conditions violations, that employer has violated the law." However, who in the state government would that worker report that illegal retaliation to? Perhaps another state agency who will, rather than look into systematic retaliation in any given industry, again further isolate the complainer and grind the complainer down till, years later, an inconclusive report will be produced about that one instance, but never about the industry? By then the worker could well have died homeless and alone, abandoned not only by his government, but also left to die sick and insane on the streets but by his family and his spouse. California people are, if nothing else, consistent in their complete and headlong flight from anything that doesn't smell like quick and easy victory.

If the DLSE gets a number of complaints about the same employer, they'll treat each one separately, making sure to ruin the life of each worker that complained. They'll pretend that they don't actually see that the same employer is in continual violation and therefore a systematic abuser, but will, rather, treat each allegation as "a thing we just learned about for the first time today." I've tested this by sending two different people in on the same day, and, like all Democratic-party-run agencies, they each say, "This is the very first time we have ever been made aware of this problem." You can actually send a person in five minutes after the last person you sent in, and the clerk will say, "The problems you are describing have only just been brought to our attention by you." Some employers have been cheating workers out of their wages for the whole thirty years I've been in San Francisco, and if you brought this story into the DSLE office, they would say to you, "This is the very first time we have every heard of any such wrong doing." Welcome to the world of California gaslighting. It's a frigidly cold-hearted and emotionally-barren place. (Again, see the Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. Little has changed about California since he wrote that.)

Don't let the blue-state label fool you. It's a prison-industrial-complex state run by such unsavory lobbyists as the Prison Guards Unions and the Prisons-For-Hire industry, all inhumanly heartless and beyond the reach of even the Geneva Convention. It's beyond banana republic dictatorship. It's simply millions of people being left for dead for no reason but the utterly lifeless indifference of the Democratic Party of California. (The DLSE will only do mass-enforcement when the media becomes involved. Once reporters show up, suddenly the DLSE is able to do industry-wide investigations after all; but since reporters almost never show up, the DLSE gives every employer who steers clear of media attention a free ride from real fines and injunctions.

Having fully condemned my government for not ensuring that those poor desk clerks at other motels got their full minimum-wage pay, I note that I was somewhat lucky because I really did get my rightfully-due minimum-wage paychecks from the Gaslite Motel. As for the other workers there, including management, I'm not completely certain how legal or illegal those arrangements were. However, in future jobs I was cheated out of breaks, meal periods, overtime pay, and even hourly pay, and also cheated out of health insurance; and any justice I got was way too little, way too late, and so costly that getting it essentially ruined me.

But, whether minimum-wage or sub-minimum-wage, if one was an Orange County desk clerk back in the 1970s and 1980s who did not live at the worksite itself or live rent-free at a relative's house, then one lived in a state of near-starvation and might have to give up owning a car in order to pay rent. An adult male in Orange County in such a situation was continually pleading with his family and with women for validation, usually to no avail. The loneliness forced many desk clerks into part-time side-gigs as criminals in order to afford the alcohol needed to face the social isolation that downward mobility in Orange County brings.

The situation is less desperate now because the current transit system in Orange County is finally almost half-real, good enough to make it possible to live in much of West and Central Orange County without a car. However, in the 70s, failing to own a car in that part of the world was seen as final acquiescence to death itself. Even if one had a dwelling, if one did not own a car, one was treated as an outcast who was virtually equal to an unemployable drug addict. In fact, a drug addict with a car was considered savable. A sober person without a car was seen as a soul who had already crossed over to Hell.

Since one was forced to own a car, and since I lived on minimum-wage pennies at first, most of my paycheck went toward maintaining my car. Although I got to live at my parents' house, they made me pay rent. Back then, in Orange County, a massive two-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood only cost $400, each roommate only being obligated to pay $200. So, although $100 is nothing now, that was fully half of what an apartment room cost, and that's what my parents made me pay. And, as it turned out, my parent's mortgage was only $257 back then. I came up with rent every month, and my brothers did so off-and-on. Altogether it was enough to pay my parents' entire mortgage. In any case, paying for a car, paying rent, and paying for my laughable attempts at dating — that was breaking me, and I was one of the luckier ones.

All this brings to mind the fact that I just recently thanked a friend for feeding me much of the time during the late 70s and early 80s. He is such a generous soul that it had not occurred to him that he had almost single- handedly saved a decade of my life from an even worse kind of squalor than I already faced.

The Lins, as I previously noted, were generous in a philosophical sense, but not in a monetary sense. However, they knew I was very thin, nearly emaciated, and they figured that there had not been much money for food. They saw that sometimes the Mexican restaurant workers felt sorry for me and would sneak over a plate of food, so, as noted previously, Mrs. Lin would sometimes feed me also.

Not being talented at working on my own car, the mechanics promptly stole every spare cent I earned, often by inventing repairs, intentionally doing repairs wrong and then collecting money off the new repairs from the damage they had caused. By the time I was hip to all these tricks, it was too late. My financial life had already been set on a nearly irreversibly bad course. In the end, and this is no exaggeration, cars would actually lead to my having to file for bankruptcy. Had there been real mass transit in Orange County in the 70s and 80s, I might still have some shred of health and money. In any case, I was dying for any angle to make a penny more.

Around that time the tour bus companies figured out a way to fill their busses and make things profitable for everyone concerned. They began to come around to the motel desk clerks with the following proposition: "Simply sell these thirty-dollar tours and you can keep three dollars of it for yourself." On a good day this could double the hourly pay of a typical motel desk clerk. This was a brief time of actual profitability for Orange County desk clerks. It took a while for the motel owners to figure out a set of rationalizations that would enable them to try to steal the desk clerk's earnings without feeling too guilty. In the meantime, for a moment, being a hotel desk clerk could really pay off.

Bruce Lin, like all miserly motel owners, tried to demand that the motel commissions be shared with him. Of course we all refused. Motel desk clerks, even of rival motels, were on the phone constantly with each other trying to find rooms for customers when their own properties were all booked. These desk clerks discussed salaries and tour commissions and created a kind of unofficial motel desk clerk union in a county that had almost no unions. All of the desk clerks rebelled at once, and thus their commissions were saved for a little while.

Finally, after months of nagging and pestering from motel owners, the desk clerks, one by one, gave way and began sharing their commissions. Then, as though psychically attuned to the

motel owners, the corporate frogs at the tour bus headquarters decided to cut the commissions by a third.

In the end, as is usually the case, American businessmen killed all the gooses laying golden eggs for them. And thus the eggs disappeared. Desk clerks, now penny-pinched and weaseled out of their commissions simply refused to sell the tours at all. Plus many of the good ones quit their jobs in disgust and were replaced by the dull automatons hired by the emotionally- distant slumlords that continued taking over the motel industry.

Soon many of the tour busses had to reduce the number of outings they went on per day, still others had to drop service in many areas altogether. This eventually even created slowdowns in tourism itself in some areas as travel agents could no longer sell package deals involving those now- discontinued tours. Everyone lost money. But businessmen in America have, as a general religious doctrine, that it's better for everyone to go bankrupt than for anyone to tolerate workers having an easy time of it. They themselves would rather be poor than feel obligated to be generous and kind to workers whom they simply despise as the lowest form of life.

The motel industry, like most American industries involving any type of housing, is just rotting in ifs own pile of filth and moral excrement. Rooms of third-world quality are going for over a hundred dollars a night. If you go to certain web sites that specialize in candid hotel reviews, the

descriptions you read are shocking. You have to pay over two hundred dollars to get anything resembling customer service. And I suppose you must pay almost three hundred dollars if you want a place that is actually clean and where the walls aren't rotting.

Hotels and motels are now places of uniform unhappiness. Americans and international tourists must now save all of their money for years on end to afford a dumpy, depressing, noisy room in ugly, uninspired facilities where the service is beyond laughable.

In spite of this rant, it's still true that there will always be a warm place in my heart for the Lins, if for no other reason than that they never fired me, and even trusted me deeply, although I would overtly and repeatedly tell them how I felt about portfolio holders like themselves. I admired the fact that they would take the trouble to debate and argue with me as I confronted them with my endless and merciless accusations against Capitalism. They never punished me for the fact that I relentlessly told them that it was their own class of persons that bore the guilt for most of humanity's sufferings. Could you image anyone in the upper-middle class now with that kind of broad-minded tolerance?

Chapter 8

A Pentecostal Family

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The first time the Richardson's quit, the Lins were in a tough position. They'd have to try to find people they trusted, people who were compliant and respected authority, but who were, at the same time, tough enough to handle running a motel in what had become a dangerous suburb with none of the advantages of either a poor or a rich neighborhood and all of the disadvantages of both, a tall order when asking someone to work around the clock and live on almost nothing.

As always the Lins would have to go with their intuition, and again they guessed right in hiring the Pentecostal family from Beaumont, California.

These days Beaumont has been both blessed by, and cursed by, the California real estate boom. Before that, it was quite simply a dumpy, backward place with no culture. It contained none of the glorious aspects of Southern California while embracing virtually all that was wrong with Southern California. Hence, as one might imagine, housing there was cheap, and people with children who were not upwardly-mobile bought homes there and commuted four hours a day and worked another twelve on top of that and essentially slaved themselves to the point of madness till they dropped dead or became utter zombies.

This theory of living, once a bit exotic, is rapidly becoming the overwhelmingly dominant approach to life in California. We are killing ourselves in order to be close to the beach and feel we are close to a world that is somewhat fashionable and highbrow.

Hindu gurus and Buddhist masters must stare on in disbelief that such a headlong rush toward unenlightenment can be so ardently and unconditionally and unquestioningly pursued by so many millions of people. It remains even more of a mystery why people from all over the planet are virtually poised with baited breath at airports and seaports and border crossings around the world for a chance to be worked till it makes them chronically ill and then tossed into the gutter where they will shamelessly be allowed to die as onlookers rationalize away their guilt. I'm not exaggerating the coldness and inhumanity of Californians when I say that as a security guard and a private citizen, I would receive reports from citizens, and give reports to authorities, about people truly dying, or dead, simply laying there for hours before anyone would interrupt their Orwellian rush to achieve their New Age manifestations of prosperity long enough to report the emergency. And I don't just mean homeless alcoholics; I mean businessmen in suits and proper old ladies, dead, or choking to death, in the midst of a stroke or a heart attack, simply being stepped over by profiteers not wanting even a momentary distraction from their goal of a life of absolutely conscience-free self-indulgence in international luxury and world-class entertainment.

I again repeat Steinbeck's notation that it was one thing to try and understand why Californians were hostile to outsiders and quite another to note that they are not even nice to each other. When I went to New York, at least mean people acted mean, so you knew where you stood. Californians will give you motivational speeches while you're dying, really, while you're dying. Come here if you're really, really strong. If you're weak, truly you're safer in a third world dictatorship.

Against this backdrop, this hapless, feckless and sincere family came to our motel seeking some kind of break in life. Had they not been fundamentalists before working at the Gaslite, it is safe to surmise that the life they were offered there would have driven them to it. The Richardsons had no children, no second and third jobs. How the Pentecostal family got along, I'll never know. Again, I might try to blame the Lins for not providing a decent living, except that the other motels were even cheaper and meaner.

The Lins were truly the lesser of all evils at that time, and therefore, in a land of soul-killing monsters, they seemed like the gentlest of predators.

The apartment attached to the office was now a very busy place with pets and children. The children were, unfortunately, subjected to having to overhear some very rough theological arguments. At that time I had become virulently anti-Christian. If one thinks I am anti-Christian now, one must be informed I am, for all my current hostility, as gentle as a lamb compared to

the blasphemous, iconoclastic terror I was back then.

The father had the poor judgment to come to the front desk and challenge me to theological debates at times when the whole family was home. These days I will sometimes try to spare the feelings of fundamentalists and even attempt to play down the fact that I often know parts of their own theology better than they do; but back then I roared back with merciless, sarcastic and cutting remarks meant to shatter the composure of any believer who crossed me. After one or two of these very rough encounters, one would think the father of the family would have backed

down, but he tried, in vain to compete. He would try the usual conservative and fundamentalist tactic of shouting me down, not realizing that I could shout louder and longer and meaner. The debates always ended badly, but I would neither quit the job nor budge an inch from my harsh and unconditional critique of all monotheistic religions. It was a horrible, nasty business, and I regret that children had to see it, but I was on a jihad against Monotheism and no one who pressed me, nor anyone in the vicinity, would be allowed a moment's peace until someone backed down, and it would in no case be me.

The reader might be shocked to know that, in spite of this nearly-violent side of our relationship, the father of the family and I loved each other and often spent other times expressing a deep devotion to each other. From time to time Mr. Lin would try to come back to the fact that the new

managers and myself were still unacceptably insubordinate, still in the habit of kicking Mr. Lin out of his own building when he got on our nerves. The old rule that stood between myself and the Richardsons stood between me and the Pentecostals: "In one of us goes, we all go." Mr. Lin simply did not trust the American labor market enough to face that kind of walkout, which surely would involve finding replacements, and that would certainly involve all of the unknown elements of a still relatively unknown culture.

Unlike the Richardsons, the Pentecostals were not alcoholics, and hence the Lins allowed their young daughter to come over and lounge about the office and the home of the Pentecostals. The daughter would come and talk with me, sometimes for hours. Like her parents, she was a devout

Atheist, although she was only in grade school. Her analysis of her life was very simple: "When I get older I'm going to marry a Chinese boy and we will work hard and be very rich and have lots of children. I would not mind marrying you, except that you are not Chinese."

Like the Lins, the Pentecostals were also concerned, perhaps alarmed, at how my bad physical and mental health had emaciated me, and they too fed me on occasion. There were some weeks I simply did not have to buy food. Management simply forbid me to get any thinner. Only years later did I admit to myself that I spent much of my life dangerously thin, and decades later some people began to speculate that I had been anorexic. I must confess, I now realize that I would examine myself in the mirror every day and would not permit even one ounce of fat on my body. Were I to see any fat whatsoever, I would refuse to eat till it went away. All of this was finally overcome when my platonic women friends demanded I gain weight, and thus began a decade of force feeding before I could develop a serious appetite of my own.

Mr. Lin, also not shy about Philosophical matters, as previously mentioned, would come and stare in awe at the heating debates between me and the father of the Pentecostal family. (It must be noted that I still believed in God very much, however my view of God was dogmatically liberal. Any hint of conservatism I detected, I sought to eradicate with fervor.) Mr. Lin would listen for a while and then proclaim, "You should not look for God to take care of you. You must take care of your own self. You should not pray for God to help you from Heaven. You have to work hard. In China people are working hard. You Americans . . . waiting for God from Heaven. All this praying . . . this is no good."

The Pentecostal family was especially alarmed at the burgeoning gay rights movement. They also opposed the radical increase in the number of straight couples living together out of wedlock. I explained to them that none of this came as a surprise to me, since half of the Christians I knew were committing adultery or were closet bisexuals. (I have lived in about eight

counties in my life and I must report that the bulk of people approaching me for bisexual encounters were often either conservative or Christian, or both, and thus you can't imagine how bizarre it looks to me to have any "family values" sermons preached to me.)

Orange County itself is the closet-gay capital of the United States and possibly the world. I lost count of the number of men, Christian, Atheist and Agnostic, married or single, that had confessed some sexual desire for men to me. Interestingly, not even in San Francisco did I see such a high percentage of the population being bisexual. And thus my line of attack against the Pentecostals was this: "How can you condemn homosexuals to Hell when we know, statistically, that your own church is brimming over with them?" And indeed, the percentage of people who got caught up in religious bisexual scandals in Orange County was stunning.

During our time at the Gaslite Motel, some moments of sadness came. And at these times all sectarian strife was transcended. It was at these times I saw how warm and kind and deeply human the Pentecostals were. I would like to end the story with two examples that remain with me to this day. They are perhaps not exceptional, objectively, and yet they touched me deeply, perhaps in ways I can't quite make sense of even now.

One day the father of the Pentecostal family came to me with an extremely forlorn look on his face. He waited till the lobby was empty, till there was a discreet moment. Then he told me with profound compassion in his voice that the Lins had lost their new baby to the epidemic of sudden crib deaths that were sweeping over Southern California and killing many babies who otherwise seemed in excellent health. A darkness came over me because this just kept happening to people we knew, and at that time the medical community was completely unable to produce a coherent reason as to why, suddenly, such a high percentage of babies were dying. It was frightened for all of my friends having children. No one knew why this form of death was becoming so common, and it made all of us feel such an uncertainty about life. What could one trust if not the health of an apparently strong child so full of life?

About that time Mr. Lin came around to the Pentecostals and started asking questions about death and the afterlife. The Pentecostals, although duty-bound to attempt to make converts, were somehow unwilling to push Mr. Lin to convert. The sudden change in his character seemed to worry them. Very rapidly they tapered off their theological fighting with me and somehow seemed to look off into the distance in a distracted way I had never seen before in these otherwise eagle-eyed people.

I would sometimes approach the father and say, "You seem worried today. Are you upset? You know you can tell me anything that's on your mind."

The father, looking sadly into the distance would perhaps remain silent a moment, then turn to me, head hanging down, eyes peering up intermittently, and say, "Mr. Lin keeps talking about God. He and his wife are trying to go to some church. They're looking for their lost daughter who

died." Then he might wander from the room sadly.

After that, from time to time, we might try to revive an old theological dispute or two, but our hearts just weren't in it. Finally, after the father of the Pentecostal family started to get over the shock he felt at the sudden disappearance of Mr. Lin's baby daughter, he would come to me, shutting the door behind him, not really inviting his family to overhear our discussions as in old times, and the conversation would shift to distinctly psychological themes. The tone was becoming more humanistic and sociological.

Religion rarely came up, and if it did, he might drop the theological point of the dispute suddenly and say, "Mel, you're such a good man, an honest man. In this world, really good people are getting harder and harder to find. The worldly people . . . they don't really understand." Then he might pat me on the back and wish me a good night, if I were working the late shift, and turn away to catch a few hours of sleep. (Towards the end of my full-time work there, it got so hard to find good workers, the kind that Mr. Lin trusted, that I might sometimes work twenty-four hours straight in order get all the shifts filled that week.)

The last great conversation I recall with the father of the family took place one busy day, probably in Summer. I was working the desk. It had been frantic, but there was now a lull in the action. He came in and said, "I see all of our wealthy clients heading toward the airport to travel the world. They tell me of their trips to Rome and Paris and Japan. And here we sit, too poor to go anywhere. I've never even been to Mexico."

I inhaled deeply as the truth of this simple observation sank in. I was in one of my more silent and cynical phases that day. Sometimes, in these moods, upon hearing of the hard truths of life, my only response would be a painful and prolonged inhalation followed by a forced and heavy exhalation. Somehow people got used to this as a plausible response which might somehow constitute an entire explanation of my views.

The clientele of the motel had gotten a bit more upscale lately. (The socioeconomic status of our clientele seemed to shift in waves which we could never predict.) That day the motel was filled with people making incomes we could have never dreamed of. Some of the clients were worth

many millions of dollars.

"Sometimes," continued the Pentecostal, in a blues-song kind of way, "I see these folks heading out to every part of the earth and it makes me sad. I'm grateful for all that God has given me, but . . . I feel like life is just . . . passing me by."

My response to this was to thrust my back laboriously into my swivel chair, stare up at the ceiling and put a strained grimace on my face. As I recall this sort of reaction might be followed by a lurching forward in my chair and another set of strained exhalations and sighs.

Then, as sometimes happened, the great street called Beach Boulevard, usually crowded beyond all capacity with the world's commuters and tourists, might suddenly go silent on a hot, shadowy, sticky, moonlit night. And there we were, me slumming through another night shift in a life of lower-middle-class oblivion, and the Pentecostal family man adrift in a world that had forgotten him, both gazing out at Beach Boulevard, unfulfilled, and yet not certain a single thing on the planet should be changed.

We were creatures feeding off of pure grace, our own works, temporal and spiritual, as the Apostle Paul duly noted, absolutely insufficient for salvation. We reached no consensus as to who or what might save us, and so we looked into the thick, polluted sky, dimly glowing with tacky yellow and pink neon lights.

The thought passed my mind that we were close to the Kingdom of God, God loving us unconditionally because He Himself was as imperfect, perhaps even as polluted, and therefore as broad-minded, as all of his soiled and bipolar creation. I looked over at the Pentecostal. He read my mind like an open book with large type letters. "Good," I thought. "He knows, so I don't need to tell him a thing."

I turned back toward the massive front windows, ignoring my stack of books, sweating lightly, absorbing the heat, drinking hot tea anyway. Neither of us had a single thing left to prove. The giant engine of the tourist world turned. We stared on, mouths half-open, shocked at how emptiness and ecstasy, despair and bliss, came together. The clocks seemed to nearly exhaust themselves. A half hour passed as slowly as a century.

Chapter 9

Two Inexplicable Women Visit

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The women drove over to the Gaslite Motel and stayed for several days in a large two-room suite. They were not tourists, nor were they looking for transitional housing. They were of that inexplicable class of folks who had housing and jobs locally, but just enjoyed staying there in spite of the increasing expense involved in such an enterprise. My guess is now that they came there looking for romance, hoping to find other people of substantial income who could spend weekends in hotels simply because they felt like it. And there is no mistaking the fact that the complex had a tacky kind of romantic feeling about it. For reasons I can't quite put a finger on, it was the sort of place one felt comfortable staying at, in spite of the out-of-control crime situation, and throwing open the doors of one's room on a hot, steamy summer night and just letting strangers from other parts of the motel wander in and out.

All night parties, usually quiet and low-key, seemed to form spontaneously, and handsome and ugly single people somehow began mingling in the middle of the parking lot. Often these discussion flowed over into the lobby and lasted for hours. People were plenty high on marijuana and alcohol, and lots of sex was going on, but sometimes the whole sexual aspect would be abandoned and seemingly horny, sexy young pairs of folks would opt to talk all night.

The Gaslite Motel was a place where people came to talk. And some who were the silent sorts came to listen, for hours on end, watching intently each face as it spoke, curious as to every detail of the ongoing and endless questions about life that our customers seemed to have. It's true that only a few of us were trained in philosophy and theology, but there was no subject so trivial or expansive that our customers could not ponder it for hours, days and weeks. I don't know who took care of their homes and their apartments while they lounged and slacked about the grounds in this costly way.

The first of these two ladies was a short and stunning blonde with the baby-face of Pia Zadora in her prime, and the other was a taller, smoldering brunette with a chiseled face, a knockout figure and a slightly disapproving countenance. I was smitten by the blonde who came to the office and spoke to me almost every day for at least an hour. It was sad when it turned out she didn't love me, (or so it seemed).

Also very conversive, the brunette came in regularly. She alternated between a very friendly and confiding attitude to one of prudish standoffishness. She spoke often of the evil of the male race and how men were so preoccupied with sex that they ignored the humanity of women. And for this reason, she often made clear, she had no intention of having any physically romantic relationship with any man in the near future. (Imagine my surprise when she eventually and incomprehensibly seemed to disavow all of that in very short order.)

It appeared, most of the time, that I was merely another hanger-on. Indeed many nights found those ladies in the parking lot in the nearly boiling moonlight talking with strapping, young men of all races and sizes. Many of those conversations seemed about to result in some outpouring of carnal pleasure, only to end with perhaps a motherly peck on the check and a hand shake or some such thing.

They especially spent a lot of time flirting with a wealthy, young Hispanic man who was tall and handsome, rented a large, well-appointed room there, had a very expensive car and wore splendid and costly clothing, and who, in spite of all these advantages, had a completely casual and unassuming air. Oddly, these women viewed him as a very cherished platonic friend. Now this young man had privately told me that he was constantly horny, however he seemed to take absolutely no offense at being romantically passed over. He was what we might call a real stand-up fellow.

One day, as my shift ended, I ran into the brunette in the parking lot. We spoke for perhaps an hour and a half in the stifling midnight heat. I was a little surprised at getting this sort of attention from this beauty in an off-duty situation as I still had hippie hair, a goatish, thin beard, and a full-length walking cast on, and was still emaciated and crippled.

She later admitted that she was moved by the fact that I didn't try to ask her out on a romantic date or otherwise pester her with the usual male hormonal obsessions. She also indicated that she was grateful that I listened to her life story and all her complaints so patiently.

The next evening she asked me to drop by their large two-bedroom suite for a glass of champagne after my shift. I appreciated this gesture, and, as was usually the case, I was thrilled at the chance to mooch some free booze.

Before knocking on the door of these women, I had made up my mind to avoid making any sexual passes as them, given how sick they both seemed of being constantly drooled over. It had been a while since I'd had any dating activity, and frankly, I was rather looking forward to having a new platonic friend.

When I got to the room, we spoke a while in the usual way, and then suddenly, with the blonde working on her makeup in the mirror across from us, the brunette invited me to continue the conversation on one of the large beds in the suite. Then, as my eyes got used to the dim light of the room, I could see that the brunette was actually wearing a diaphanous dress, and one could see her dark pubic hair quite clearly through it. By now I was a little alarmed and confused. Additionally, if there were to be some sort of proposition made, why didn't the blonde girl go to her room or out to visit a friend?

Only years later did I admit to myself that the blonde woman would not leave the room because she was waiting to see how things went with me and the brunette, and, obviously, if things went well, she would decide whether or not to join in. (Years later I had been involved in threesomes, and even one foursome involving me and three women. And it was only after seeing how such episodes are started that I realized, in retrospect what the two strange women were trying to communicate to my naïve, young mind.)

Of course on some deep level I was overwhelmed because such scenarios were quite new to me. They were, as George Harrison once said of some questionable situations he'd bowed out of, "things I didn't want to know."

For a moment me and the brunette had started to wrestle on the bed, and I had rationalized that this was all just playfulness. But then I again looked down at her pubic hair, and thought that this might be a very powerful new kind of playfulness I was not ready for. And I also noticed that the blonde was not budging from the room and was fully prepared to watch, if not join into, any action that was about to go down.

All of this made me very nervous and uncertain and I excused myself awkwardly, having nearly to extract myself from the brunette's embrace. I had so made up my mind to be a perfect gentleman, as I had supposed they had wished, that I just could not change gears quickly enough to accommodate this other reality. In fact, after leaving I immediately went back into denial about the whole situation and had convinced myself that surely they still only wanted to be just friends.

By the next day I was almost at peace with the whole situation, until suddenly I saw a car roar quickly from the parking lot. The brunette was taking off rather rapidly without saying goodbye, and the look on her face was not a friendly one. This made me really begin to doubt myself. Had I done something wrong, after all, by not being more amorous? Surely I had. Suddenly I was overcome by my classic sense of guilt and felt nervous and frustrated and remorseful for much of my day at work.

The wealthy Latino fellow strolled into the office at one point and said in a chiding tone, "Hey man! Why didn't you go for it with the brunette last night? What's the matter with you? She wanted in your pants!"

Since they were all friends, it was obvious that, before leaving that morning, she had complained to him of my having rejected her. I stumbled over my words, trying to make up some excuse, but I was horrified at receiving incontrovertible evidence that I'd misinterpreted everything.

"Ah man," he said as he smiled and slapped my shoulder. "Don't worry. Besides, she's already got one guy paying her child support. You would have been the second."

Chapter 10

The Panama City Boys

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One day two mid-level military officials took up long-term residency at the Gaslite Motel. We knew they were paid fairly well and, on top of that, lived on a military expense account, allowing for their paychecks to be socked away in ever-expanding retirement accounts. Both were young

enough to retire from the military within a few years and still have a long career in the civilian sector. In short, they were in line for the coveted triple-pension so many people dream of.

They were engaged in some vague administrative task, however, I could never quite make out what it was. What I remember most about the Panama City Boys was that they sat around our lobby all day telling jokes and hilarious stories. They were allegedly stationed in Panama City,

Florida, but when exactly they would return there, and for how long, no one seemed to know.

They rarely wore their military clothing. In fact, the occasions on which they felt they should don their uniforms were so rare that, as a matter of principle, they would always stop by the office to watch the expression on my face as I tried to comprehend that these two jokers were really taken

seriously as military personnel by someone somewhere.

The military paid them to live there on-call. In addition to living in this motel, they also got a military vehicle and more than enough food and beverages to make for a very merry life. Everyone loved them. They had very good manners, in spite of all their banter, and I don't recall a single person ever being offended by them. Like other people attracted to the Gaslite Motel, they were broad-minded, always trying to understand the ways of the world and the movements of humanity. They fit in well with this odd house of amateur philosophers.

Regarding their on-call status: The actual call to work, involving whatever kind of work that was, came rarely. In fact, on days that the lobby was quiet, I would say to the managers, "Where are the Panama City Boys?" and I would be told, "They left early this morning. It was something serious about work." Their presence, whenever it was needed, was apparently needed in some very serious way. But these serious periods were brief and might only involve a day or two over a two week period. The rest of the time, the Gaslite Motel was their home, their office and their parlor.

They always spoke of their unwavering devotion to their home town of Panama City, where they expected to work, retire and be buried. They told me that once they were back there, they would be expecting a visit from me. In fact, they made me promise, a promise I did not properly keep.

The Panama City Boys were very happy with us, but they were always homesick too, and they made it clear they were very much looking forward to their return home, once this line of duty was complete, (although it did not appear that it would be complete for some time).

This is not to say that they did not love Buena Park. Like me, they loved Knotts Berry Farm, The Wax Museum, The Deer Park, The Alligator Farm and all the foreign tourists. There were insinuations that they loved all of the gorgeous women that passed through our part of the world, but made it very clear they were men who were devoted to their women back home and would never think of doing anything unethical.

We all enjoyed the liveliness of being surrounded by throngs of tourists rushing in and out of our lives from every part of the globe. The Panama City Boys seemed to get along well with our mainstay clients, the tour buses full of British and Canadian wanderers. They watched these customers and my interactions with them enthusiastically. For them our lobby was like a twenty-four-hour sitcom. As each customer would come and go, they were sure to make jokes about the strange attitudes and mannerisms they saw. But there was never a hint of prejudice in their voices. The parade of humanity that marched past my desk, with all its quirks, was simply the best show in town for them, and that was that.

I was very curious about this place, Panama City, three thousand miles away on a part of the continent I had never once been near. It all sounded very foreign and yet very familiar.

There were several times when it appeared the military would stop financing what appeared to be a perpetual vacation. There was talk of them being called back to their base in Panama City in short order. But each of these "close calls" seemed to resolve itself with another extension of their erratic duties on the West Coast.

Although me and the Panama City Boys had passed countless nights together, and although I'd never forgotten my vow to them, traveling there always seemed just beyond my capacity. My vacations were too short, and I was afraid of flying at the time; and it always turned out that some other destination seemed more tempting. The trip to Panama City just never seemed to happen.

* * *

As fate would have it, about twenty years later I won a lawsuit and received a small settlement, really just enough for a few vacations and perhaps to pay off some debts. On one of these vacations I decided to see New Orleans, which, before the hurricane, was one of the most beautiful and strange places on the continent. Still being phobic of airplanes, I would have

to take a two-day trip by train across the Southwest and Texas.

After a couple of days in New Orleans, I realized there was still a little bit of money left and that it would be good for me to see the heart of the old Confederacy. And thus did I rent a car and drive through Mobile and Biloxi. And finally I was inspired to push even further, right to the point of running out of both time and money, to drive over to Florida and see Panama City. And, just for the heck of it, I booked a room in a four-star Hotel and really lived it up.

By that time in my life, it was getting more and more rare for me to fall in love, and my ability to get a proper crush on anyone was already fading, probably by the deepening depression that was ravaging my psyche. But, to my surprise, I got a big crush on a waitress there at the hotel restaurant. My crush on this woman was caused by three things: The first of which was sheer looks. The second was her fun, teasing banter and her sardonic, morbid wit. And lastly, I loved her because she had the same muscle disease as I do, except that hers had already become so advanced that she was living in almost inconceivable pain and discomfort. And, like me, she had decided to work until the pain and psychological torture of the disability made it impossible to continue. (For the record, my mind and body held out in the working world until I was 46, however, my deterioration was much slower than hers.)

Much to my surprise, I regularly find people with disorders similar to mine who are receiving cutting-edge treatment. (The fates had it that, back then, my doctors have routinely been the worst kind of HMO hacks imaginable. And, if they were not the soulless murderers-through-neglect sorts at HMOs, they were the constantly cost-cutting drones controlled by County Medical Clinic Directors whose job it is to see how many people they can send off to their deaths with the least amount of negative press possible.) And so I am always shocked when someone with an ear disease or muscle disease similar to mine receives actual treatment and experimental work by adventurous and generous doctors. It confounds me and impresses me.

This waitress, like myself, had temporarily become utterly bed-ridden. In my case, I was brought back to 50% functionality through a form of very conservative drug therapy. Beyond that, doctors shrugged and said I was incurable, and furthermore, because the causes of this muscle disease were not known, and because doctors don't like arguing with State Disability claims examiners, doctors often balked at signing my disability requests. (Such matters were made worse when friends and relatives were implying I was a malingerer too.)

In the case of this woman serving me dinner, her doctors were real doctors. And her doctors were moved to experiment, to try things, to come up with new ideas. If they ran out of ideas, they wracked their brains and brainstormed and came up with others. Again, they were actually doctors. And, can you believe it, they did something 99% of the accounting peons posing as doctors in our country could never do; they actually came up with something!

All of her major muscles, like mine, had been brought to the point of paralysis. Her doctors were desperate to find some way to get her muscles to move again, since she was in a real bind, having a small child to support. And so they devised a series of battery packs worn discretely under the garments. Each of these batteries had an electrode coming from it, and these electrodes were constantly administering a mild shock, and these shocks kept her muscles moving. (It was understood that her working at this restaurant could not go on forever, because her condition was still deteriorating. However, it bought her many much-needed months to work with her family and the government to figure out how her child might be supported as she slowly became totally unable to work.)

She was lucky in one way: Her family and friends loved her and did not resort to the easy out of calling her a malingerer, which is what most shallow Americans do when confronted with the fact that they may be obligated to help someone, or feel sorry for someone, or understand a depth of poverty they'd rather not look at.

The reader must also be advised that many of the homeless have this disease and were made homeless because of it. Federal and state governments have an official position regarding Fibrocitis and an unofficial position regarding Fibrocitis. The official position is that no such disease exists. The unofficial position is that of course the disease exists and of course it is crippling people, but this can never be acknowledged unless the sickly person involved have the political wherewithal to get senators, congressmen and lawyers to call on their behalf. To be blunt: I am not homeless today because a Senator intervened on my behalf. Since you, the reader, probably won't be able to get that to happen, I want you to know that if you ever get this disease, you will not get disability and your "loved ones" will probably toss you overboard and you will be homeless and die in the streets of the country you think loves you. Did you know that? If you didn't, I just thought I'd use this chance to remind you.

Well, how this woman hung on to life and kept her wits about her and kept a sense of humor and generosity, I'll never know. But I loved her very much and was heartbroken that I only knew her for just a couple of brief hours over a couple of very short days.

After I left dinner one night, there was another interesting emotional issue. Should I call the Panama City Boys and tell them I was there?

From my high room in the glass tower, I surveyed the little kingdom that is Panama City and I thought to myself, "No, don't call. The memory is too sacred to be spoiled by a real-life contact. And probably we'd all changed in ways we wouldn't want each other to know about." Instead I took in the panorama of this odd, conservative, strangely-fabricated community, and I thought, with much force, "There Boys, I have come to your home at last, just like I promised. So sorry I didn't make the phone call."

And somehow, psychically, I felt that somehow they would know. This is probably some kind of delusion, a holdover from my crypto-Pentecostal days. But I went with it. No sense trying to be rational so late in the game.

An odd post-script to this story was that I was dating someone at the time, in a very casual and noncommittal way. And, as usual, because I would not commit, this girlfriend hated me often, and loved me occasionally. In any case, the reader should know that this person I dated was paraplegic, and was even more severely crippled from a more degenerative muscle disease than

mine. And thus was she very captivated by my tale of the Panama City woman's heroism.

I wrote a profound love poem to the Panama City Woman, which was both dark and cynical. It so moved my lover that she was able to forego any jealously and actually admire me for a time, which was rare, even though the love poem was not about her. She read the poem and said, "We are really growing as people."

The time for my Southern odyssey was up. I was out of money, out of time, and due back at work soon. So I turned my rental car around and headed back west over the swamps and bridges and past the graveyards with caskets forever laid upon the open ground toward the New Orleans train station where I would board a train and head back to California.

I never did find out what became of the Panama City Boys, but I can say that I miss them and their weird town and that, because of them, I found an odd kind of love for a strange woman whose memory is still with me.

Chapter 11

An Attack

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There was an old man who lived at the Gaslite Motel and who, for reasons you will see later, was known by me as "The Man of Honor." The Man of Honor and his two sons were, as I will later relate, raging alcoholics and itinerant contractors. I was never sure why it was that they constantly had to live on the move, lasting only a few months here and a few months there. One can only speculate what went on between them and their customers.

In any case, people were reluctant to hire The Man of Honor and his two sons, and so, from time to time, or perhaps even more often than not, there were problems meeting the rent payments. God only knows what had gone down between them and their former landlords, but the whole feeling of their world was one of flight, complication and hard, ugly decisions.

As was inevitable, The Man of Honor and his adult sons would fall behind on rent, failing to make their weekly payments on time. One could understand this because we were all working or living in an expensive tourist district, an odd place to choose for people living on the edge. Confusingly, they rented the largest suite in the complex. Even a stable, well-off person would be hard pressed to pay rent for that particular unit for months on end.

Mr. Lin was at first somewhat understanding of the delays that would come in payment. But since the payments were weekly, being later than a week was the equivalent of not paying at all. Mr. Lin tolerated one, two and even three day tardiness in payments from the weekly tenants, especially those rolling out the big bucks for the big rooms. However, once the payments were more than a week late, Mr. Lin would end up shouting at The Man of Honor. The whole scene got very tense between us and The Man of Honor. It is natural that his sons, who abused alcohol, and God only knows what else, would eventually feel the effects of these financial pressures and, goaded on by alcoholic hubris, start to act out in erratic ways. Furthermore, trapped in the motel rooms together, night and day, under threat of eviction, with little or no work in sight, it stood to reason that they would start to argue among themselves in very nasty ways. Soon the situation broke out into strident verbal abuse. Eventually the chaos of their arguments and shoving matches spilled out of their room and into the public area where they created a scene.

The older and taller of the two sons was clearly being driven to mental illness. He had long, straight hair and looked a lot like Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad.

At last I saw him in the parking lot starting a fight with someone. I was terribly offended that such madness would take place on our property and went out to order them to stop. I marched over and shouted, "Stop this now or I'm calling the cops!"

This diverted his attention momentarily, giving the person he was accosting a chance to escape quickly. But now the madman was facing me, and I was the object of his fury. He leapt upon me like a cougar and knocked me over. He was kicking me and cussing and screaming. At first I thought I was a dead man. And although it felt as though he was delivering blows that would

inflict great injury, for some inexplicable reason, I felt nothing at all, nor did I suffer even a slight cut or a small bruise. To this day I do not understand how that is possible.

But suddenly, out of nowhere, his short and stout younger brother appeared and forced the older brother off of me. And now the wild man was attacking his own brother and I was the one making my escape.

I did in fact call the police who showed up immediately. The police, as I learned from my years in security work, show up in various moods. Sometimes they are rational, take everything with a grain of salt, proceed cautiously and judiciously and try to smooth things over and resolve conflicts in such a way as to avoid the paperwork and hassle of arresting anyone. But there are days when they show up, and their aspect is at once grim and energetic. They are, in short, not likely to leave without someone in handcuffs. On the day in question, they were anxious to earn their money the hard way and they were up for any drama and keen to go wherever it might lead.

Meanwhile, the fight between the brothers had moved back to the motel room of The Man of Honor, and, sadly, this crazed, young beast had actually begun to assault his father. (This shocked me far more than the assault on myself, our customer, or his brother.)

The police and I marched to the suite where the itinerant contractors lived. The original intent was for me to knock on the door and find out how serious the situation had gotten and to show these itinerant contractors that I was capable of appearing with the police and enforcing the motel's authority over the premises. But the police could hear the violent shouting of people apparently coming to blows with each other and they could tolerate no more uncertainty. When I knocked on the door forcefully, one of the occupants answered while the others fought.

I could not see whether the fight was still physical at that point, but the police were convinced violence had already taken place within the room, and, furthermore, I had already told them that I had been attacked. All of that seemed to amount to more than probable cause and equaled, in their minds, a clear and present danger. No search warrant therefore being necessary, the three police officers stormed into the room, ignoring the younger brother and The Man of Honor, and diving straight at the source of the pandemonium.

The boy, seeming so strong just moments ago, folded completely under the weight of the attack and was instantly on the floor, face down with handcuffs on him. But, although his physical strength was now lacking, his tongue showed no sign of weakness. He uttered threats against the police and myself and expressed no remorse. He was taken away, shouting threats like a lunatic. Not only was he booked and charged with assaulting me, but The Man of Honor apparently had no bail money, meaning the boy would stay in the county jail and await trail for assault and probably a number of other charges.

Without alcohol to bolster him, and without his family to abuse, he was just a nobody in a jail in a city he hardly knew. Depression sank in fast. The Man of Honor called his son daily at jail, but The Man of Honor was a man whose honor was offended and so now he became firm and would not indulge his temperamental adult child. With no other connection to the outside world, this son was forced to listen to his father's demands and forced to carry them out. The boy's life was in his father's hands, and since his father was a person I actually liked, only he could persuade me to save his son's life from certain destruction in prison.

The boy was forced to agree to remain sober, even as the rest of the family continued drinking, since he alone had gotten them into legal trouble. The son was also forced to give up all his pride and his masculine bravado and to handle the situation exactly in the manner that The Man of Honor dictated. The boy would comply with it all.

The son's first step was to call the motel from jail. I answered the phone. The son apologized in a most sincere, simple and humble way, promising never to be violent and promising to forever quit substance abuse.

After this The Man of Honor called my desk and said, "I know that you are a Philosophy student, a man who spends his life studying the great thinkers of the world. Certainly you, more than anyone, should know the divine imperative to forgive one's brothers and sisters. You must have mercy on us."

The next day I paid a visit to the District Attorney's office and requested that the charges be dropped against the wayward son. The DA was unhappy and said, "Why you wanna let this punk go!"

However, I was firm in my conviction that the boy had repented fully and would present no danger to myself or others from that day onward. The county government relented, although they made it clear that, given the number of crimes involved, that they could bring the case forward without my testimony. The next day the son was out of jail and residing back at the Gaslite Motel.

From that time onward the boy showed me nothing but the most severe reverence, and I never saw nor heard of him abusing drugs or alcohol again.

Chapter 12

A Man Of Honor

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In the previous chapter I discussed The Man of Honor and his wayward son. Now I'd like to go back and mention how this family came to us.

A large rumbling truck pulled into the Gaslite Motel with all sorts of equipment and boxes and assorted paraphernalia piled and strewn all over. As I recall, the whole mad cargo bed was tied down with ropes and looked completely like a rolling madman's house.

Emerging from the truck was a tall, slender, silver-haired man with his two adult children and a scraggly german shepherd. It was a family of itinerant alcoholic contractors. They did light construction work, painting or any other work they could bargain for.

It was my impression that the kids dealt drugs on the side, but, for them, there was no profit in that, since drug dealers who become heavy drug consumers find themselves in a continual downward spiral. They also find they frequently need to live on the run, leaving behind angry, slighted wholesalers whose wrath is often fatal.

They lived at the hotel for several months, and of course they always had problems paying their rent. The Lins tried on one or two occasions to confront them, and threatened many times to throw them out. However, for some reason, the Lins found it very difficult to actually issue an eviction order.

Mr. Lin instinctively knew that the Man of Honor and his family had a kind of respect for me, and so, with no creative approach of his own, he would ask me to come up with some way to confront The Man of Honor about the issue of unpaid rent. Hence, although I was only paid minimum wage, I was forced to go to this apartment full of frightening people and broach the topic of unpaid rent, having to remind them that the Lins would surely run out of patience soon and force them to vacate the unit.

The family sometimes worked a lot and sometimes worked only a little, but they also consumed alcohol and drugs all night and day. They could not keep up with their survival expenses and the maintenance of their vices.

Each time I would go to collect the rent, I would be greeted by the silvery-haired man as though I were and earl paying a visit to a prince.

"Please, come in, and make yourself at home," he would say with a sweeping gesture of his right hand, as though welcoming me to Windsor Castle. "As you know," he would continue, "I am a man of honor. And men of honor do not simply do business like ordinary people. They visit like

gentlemen."

He would lean back in the motel's large, stuffed chairs and put his feet on an ottoman, all the while exhaling pointedly condescending breaths.

"So I'm told," he would inevitably note, "that you are a philosopher, a man who's spent his life studying the great thinkers. You are not an ordinary man."

To all of these preludes I would nod patiently. Since the Lins were either not brave enough or nuanced enough to carry out such missions, they would come and work the front desk for me as I went off to do their dirtiest of dirty work. I did not rush into or rush out of The Man of Honor's suite, and so these little diplomatic adventures were also a chance for me to get an extended break from the front desk. The Lins did not like it that I took so long when I went to visit The Man of Honor, but they knew they dared not push the matter with me, since they knew I was both loyal and extremely temperamental.

Mr. Lin was also not approving of the fact that I would be getting extremely stoned whenever I went over to the rooms of The Man of Honor and his family. I was always easily affected by alcohol, and so if I had two beers with The Man of Honor, I would come back to the desk completely high and smelling of booze.

Now as I sat across from The Man of Honor, discussing matters of vast philosophical import, I studied him closely and concluded that, if pushed too hard, he might become murderous. The old fruitcake had no idea that I both loved him and felt that he really might pull out a gun and shoot me. (By that time in my life I had already been attacked many times and had already faced many death threats. I had simply presumed I would be killed one day by some assassin or another, and thus, the mere fact that I believed a person might one day kill me in no way precluded love for them or friendship with them.)

The dog and the children also seemed ruthless and dreadful. One wondered if The Man of Honor might give a command and have his vassals do me in if I displeased him. In any case, the grim environment did not deter me from making these curious visits or from making use of the free alcohol The Man of Honor "forced" upon me whenever I came calling for rent money. And besides, I very consciously thought to myself in those days: A violent and sudden end seems like a logical conclusion to my life, a life horrifically complex and bewilderingly managed by myself, my families, my friends, and my superiors at every level, and under the auspices of practically every institution one could imagine. (I only later learned that all of this is sometimes classified by mental health professionals as "suicidal ideation.")

After great verbal ceremonies, and after long discussions which included tours of all the great faiths of the world, quotations from the Bible, and clarification of the whole ethical framework of humanity itself, I would, with great gentility and humility, still insist that the rent be paid. And, each time, The Man of Honor would give me his word of honor that the funds would be produced somehow by the next day. Shortly thereafter, my head buzzing from the intoxicating effects of the alcohol, I would meekly excuse myself and waddle back to the motel office where a tense and grimacing Mr. Lin awaited my report.

"They're going to pay the rent," I would say.

"When!" Mr. Lin would demand.

"Tomorrow," I'd reply. "He gave me his word of honor."

"Tomorrow is no good!" Mr. Lin would protest. "You tell them they need to pay right now or leave the hotel!"

"But there's no need to do that," I would flatly say as I calmly took back possession of the motel front desk, "since within twenty-four hours, you'll have your money."

"You tell them they must go now!" ordered Mr. Lin.

"That's not going to happen," I'd say confidently. "That would be silly, because not only would they be homeless, but you'd be out the money they owe you. And he will not lie to me if he says he will pay tomorrow."

Mr. Lin, furious, but with nothing else to add, would leave the office in a state of utter dissatisfaction. However, he knew I was right, and he knew I was managing a hard situation in an expert way. It's true that I was then, as at other times, insubordinate, and that, theoretically, he could have fired me for that. But he knew such an act would be futile and result in nothing but misery and extra work for him. The older I get, the more convinced I get that Mr. Lin had a great kind of Zen. He pushed for what he wanted and for what he thought was right, but he greatly respected fearlessness in an employee and knew when to yield.

When The Man of Honor came to pay rent, he would appear with great dignity and note that we were innkeepers of great character and of impeccable class such as were only known in the old world and not since, that the world was lucky to still have persons in the hospitality industry with the kind of judiciousness and nobility that most of the common men of our day could not possibly possess.

In each occasion, when the money came in from The Man of Honor, after the recitation of the heroic and detailed and painful measures taken to secure that money, I would always say to Mr. Lin, "You see. I told you. He promised me he'd pay today, and he paid. He will not look me in the face and lie to me." And Mr. Lin, however displeased he might be, would silently accept these gloating reproaches from me. I don't know what kind of relationship Mr. Lin and I had, but whatever kind of a relationship it was, it was really real. We were both hopelessly ourselves.

After the controversies of the day cooled down, I would, in fact, sit down at the motel front desk and begin to pore over the scriptures and the writings of the greatest minds in the history of the world as Mr. Lin retreated to his den to plan ways of making more money and The Man of Honor, slowly, and with the approval of the Almighty, proceeded to drink himself into oblivion.

Chapter 13

Eviction Day

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Sadly, the situation had so deteriorated with the family headed by The Man of Honor that he could no longer give me his word of honor that the rent would be forthcoming the next day or on any day whatsoever. At that point, I could no longer give Mr. Lin the assurances I had previously. In this case, neither I nor the Man of Honor had any case to bring before Mr. Lin. And thus I did not blame Mr. Lin for issuing an eviction order. The rent was now weeks late.

"They are your friends!" declared Mr. Lin with Confucian certainty. "You go tell them they have to leave!"

On the face of it, this order was faulty. Firstly, some might think Mr. Lin was being cowardly to put me, a minimum wage employee, in the life-threatening position of asking dangerous people to go homeless, one of whom had already attacked me. Furthermore, there was nothing legally definitive about telling them to leave since, even in conservative Orange County, eviction is not taken lightly and the courts are careful in such matters; and getting a court date could take weeks or months, and the deliberations could take longer if the defendant got an attorney. The undertaking of an eviction can be both long and expensive.

The Man of Honor and his sons could have basically stayed on for free for several months if they had chosen to stand their ground and to put forth even a flimsy legal defense.

However, Mr. Lin's instincts were solid on this matter too. Had Mr. Lin gone to evict them, they would feel no obligation toward him. He was merely a businessman and a stranger to them. He would have no credibility with street-savvy people who had no feeling for him.

I, on the other hand, had spent time in their room, had shared their alcohol, had liberated their son from a jail cell, had actually given them cash from my own pocket on one occasion. And, of course, I had listened to every diatribe and lecture on the nature of life that the Man of Honor had in his repertoire. They would, at the very least, be respectful when I called to tell them the bad news.

Mr. Lin was nervous. He knew I was his best hope for avoiding thousands of dollars in lost rent and thousands more in legal fees. The odds of a good outcome seemed long, at best. After all, this family was spiraling downward toward utter doom, and the Gaslite Motel was probably their last stronghold on this planet.

I myself knew the enterprise was risky. One could only imagine the mixed bag of hatred, love, disdain and respect that swirled around me, given the complexities of the events of the last months. When survival is a stake, even the best of friends can become enemies, and these were, to be sure, not the best of friends.

I wandered into the great unknown. Over to the room of horrors I wandered. Of course I knew I could have refused this duty, but something deep inside me told me it was the right thing to do for all parties concerned. Of course, on one level, to refer to myself as a person of moral authority is, on the face of it, a bit comical, but one thing is for certain, no one in that building had any more of it than I did, even if what little I had was somewhat laughable. And so I simply had to go.

At the time I knocked on the door, the apartment was eerily silent. I tapped ever-so-gently. The Man of Honor called for me to come in. The door, per the odd custom of this neighborhood, was unlocked. (I had lived in homes which were only a mile from mass shootings, and still people balked at locking their doors.) I pushed lightly on the door. It glided open.

The Man of Honor was in his usual chair, an overstuffed armchair with an ottoman. I came in and looked at him. Our faces were both grave, and neither of us held in our expressions the slightest trace of pretense. As usual, he offered me a drink and bid me to sit in another large armchair, which I obediently did.

As usual, I did not even think of bringing up business matters prematurely. He handed me a large mug of beer.

"Ah," I thought, "another night drunk at work. What a life."

We sat mutely, as though in the inner sanctum of a Mormon temple. Outside the traffic along massive Beach Boulevard corridor sounded like a slow, rumbling train. The mottled beams of headlights flashed about the multilayered shades. Music was playing lightly on the stereo. It was that warm and blissful time, about an hour before sunset, when the sky of Orange County seems to cry out in hunger.

We mumbled only perfunctory things, and those only in short grunted phrases, as we let the buzz of the beer set in over long, deep silences. We were, at that strange moment, two men who had decided, at least for that moment, that grace was the measure of all things.

At last, without turning his head toward me, The Man of Honor said in a flat, low, sincere tone, "I already know why you've come. You have my word; we will be packing tomorrow morning."

I let a few minutes more pass, and then I stood up in a humble fashion and meekly excused myself.

Mr. Lin's questioning face greeted me when I returned to the office, but immediately he saw by my own expression that the plan had worked. Before he could say anything, I said, "They'll be gone tomorrow."

Mr. Lin could barely contain the urge to insist that I ask them to attempt to leave that very moment, however he did restrain himself, daring not to demand anything more of this good fortune. The situation resolved, he turned and left the office.

The last I saw of The Man of Honor was the next day when, true to his word, he, with his two sons and dog in tow, drove his madly-packed truck, with tied-down possessions scattered wildly within, out of the parking lot of the Gaslite Motel. Toward what horizon they went, and how they lived beyond that day, I cannot begin to guess.

After their truck pulled away, I leaned back in my chair, exhaling with a certain kind of exhaustion.

The warm Santa Ana winds were blowing as busloads of Canadian and British tourists came and went. Down the street, the alligator farm was swarming with tourists and the world-famous Japanese deer park was shimmering in the sun. A few buildings over, at one of the world's largest wax museums, the faces of the stars stared, glistening in the footlights, into a frozen infinity beneath the nearly-plastic Orange County sky. The gaudy spectacle that was Buena Park revolved on its yearly axis like a cheap globe in a universe God had abandoned. I sat in the vortex waiting.

Chapter 14

Thirty Years After The Gaslite Motel

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When I moved into my first Section 8 apartment a few weeks ago, I got accidentally reacquainted with the soulless, boring, lifeless architecture that fills much of Central and West Orange County, including parts of Buena Park, especially the motels and apartment buildings. Oddly, in many areas of both Orange County and Concord, regardless of whether the inhabitants are rich or poor, there is a kind of energy-draining lack of imagination in the 1970s architecture that seems to be all-to-frequently found there.

I had been forced by finances and fate into the second-worst ghetto in the City of Concord, which resembles Central and West Orange County more than any other city in Contra Costa County. My building is in the Clayton Road corridor, one of the two most massive and soul-killing ghettos that radiate from the somewhat soulful downtown core of Concord.

It goes without saying that I tried to get my Section 8 voucher to work in Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Orinda or Pleasant Hill, but alas, landlords there know that all of those neighborhoods have a certain style and a certain continuity with the great San Francisco Bay Area, and hence there will be furious competition for apartments there. They will not be needing Section 8 applicants to fill their buildings.

Even downtown Concord has a breath of Bay Area charm to it, and so landlords can hold out for the upwardly-mobile twenty-somethings who pay top dollar for prime locations and who, while handing over fortunes, accept any kind of abuse to avoid being out of the flow of culture, transportation and style.

That left only two possible areas for me to go. One was the Monument corridor. Monument has two disadvantages. Firstly, the poverty there is shocking and many places border on third-world chaos. Also, it is the last outpost before one really enters East Contra Costa County proper, a place of such economic doom and social dislocation that outsiders are shocked when they learn the full truth of the matter. Hence, the poorest of the poor, if they are to have any hope of not being consigned to the absolute banishment that is Pittsburg or Antioch or Bay Point, will often settle along Monument.

Unless one happens to be within a mile of the BART station out there in East Contra Costa County, (and the odds are greatly against that), anyone forced to move as far away as East Contra Costa County might just as well move to Illinois, since it takes as long as a flight from San Francisco to Chicago just to visit friends or go to work if one ends up stuck out in East Contra Costa. Thus, people along Monument will put up with primitive housing situations and frightening neighbors and crime levels that ordinary human beings simply would not otherwise tolerate. They do this because, for lots of people, Monument is the very edge of the world, beyond which lay the vast nothingness. The implied threat is, "However bad it might be along

Monument, remember, you could end up in the worst part of Pittsburg, and then it would all be over for you."

The other disadvantages I spotted right away, in terms of the prospect of trying to live along the Monument corridor was the fact that the rooms offered there would fail any Section 8 inspection. So, even if one got over one's issues of pride and gave up one's hope of cleanliness and order, one would still be confronted with a Section 8 inspector's certain rejection of most of the units that I saw available there.

If downtown Concord was too exclusive, and if Monument was too horrific, that left only the Clayton corridor, a long, straight, depressing, lower-middle-class ghetto with plenty of Section 8 housing built to just barely pass a Section 8 inspection. My instincts were perfect on this matter. The first two units I looked at were offered to me, and I saw clearly that the Section 8 inspector, under some mild protest, would indeed pass these units for habitation by the likes of myself.

When I first saw the building fate would send me to, I instantly knew the deal was done. It looked like it had been built in that trashy construction boom of the seventies when building codes were mostly symbolic and walls were so thin one could actually hear a neighbor sneeze or snore. And there were indeed echoes of the Gaslite Motel style. It was a two-story building with about thirty units or so, utterly dull and uncreative, nearly decrepit, but not quite squalid, with little accents of class here and there. (The area, overall, resembled the reality of the Gaslite motel in that contradictorily posh rooms could be found in tiny pockets all through the corridor. It was a mix of poverty and wealth that made no sense, and it was all bounded by the architectural style of nothingness. If there were an anthropomorphic god called "Nothingness," this would have been a place he would have endorsed completely.

After moving to Concord, the work on the Gaslite Motel section of my ongoing "Resumé" project came along briskly. The stairs, the cheap railings, the oddly sterile swimming pool, the junky laundry room and the general tackiness of it all feels very much like a layer of karma laid down over my previous lives within this life. The main difference this time, between the Gaslite that I helped manage and the Gaslite I now live in, is that I am now a tenant and not a worker. One cannot say whether I am freed from work or consigned to a prison. The gods never did make it sufficiently clear to the human heart what exactly constitutes freedom or bondage, nor did they ever convince us which of these two states of being is really the more fearful. I only can say for certain that, amidst a confusing panorama of drops of opulence interspersed throughout an ocean of deprivation, most things remain in a state of disrepair. The alcoholic drug dealer next door will be partying 24/7.

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Other Smashwords Works By Mel C. Thompson

The Epic Journey to The Great Palace of Non-Judgment

Khrushchev's Second Chance

The Waste Basket

Antiheroes In Palestine

Love At 19th & Guerrero

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