Huckleberry Friends
Jimmy was a goof. He was a gangly kid, a couple years older than me, with crossed-eyes and flat feet and a crooked back and the demeanor of one of the Three Stooges. He had a brother Danny in my class at Ramona School, but I never tramped around with Danny as much as I did with Jimmy.
They lived in a ramshackle place in Carmelas, just down the street from the Mexican Store, a tiny little market on the highway that served the predominantly Hispanic half of our neighborhood. The Reeses were probably about as poor as we were, with several more kids to support, so Jimmy was always taking odd jobs here and there, wherever he could find one, yet I don’t think he ever left the house in the morning with a dime in his pockets.
I rarely if ever had to look for Jimmy. He was always hanging around our house, waiting for my brother and his friends to ditch him. They were pretty cruel with him by present-day standards, I suppose but Jimmy didn’t seem to mind much. He’d suffer their jibes and jabs, and entertain them with a few nyuk-nyuks, and every day he came back for more. I didn’t mind being ditched myself, nor did I mind his company after they all tore out to go chasing after girls at Knott’s Berry Farm or the beach. I did mind that Eddie left me with most of his half of the yardwork, but that didn’t stop me from chipping in my share of the profits for their gas money either. Besides, Eddie had asthma, and I didn’t.
The yardwork never took that long anyway. Most of the time we would pull a few weeds from around my dad’s rose bushes, that he had planted around the perimeter of the backyard. The hardest part was avoiding the dead fish-heads that he had buried, and swore up and down were fertilizing the soil. Mom, of course was happy if we just stayed out of the house for awhile.
We always had bikes to ride, but most of the time Jimmy and I would just take off walking. Sometimes we went east to the “Big A,” the large new discount store about a mile down the highway, and he would tramp along beside me on his flat feet. I liked to go there because they had a wide selection of record albums that I couldn’t afford, but it was fun to look and make plans to save up for a new Beatle album. Other times we’d cross over the Santa Ana Freeway via the Shoemaker bridge and scout for pollywogs and frogs in the drainage ditches that ran alongside the interstate. But most of the time we would go the other direction, past the outdoor Harvester’s Market to Front Street, poking our way along the railroad tracks as we went in search of coins, bottles and other valuable litter. Sometimes we’d stop in at the Salvation Army store, that I always imagined smelled like dead people’s homes, and I’d browse through all the old books and records looking for anything about the war. Then we’d go to the library.
It was a small library with a roof that leaked in the winter, and the books were arranged according to the Dewey Decimal system. Each time I would start on the same side at section 100, where the books about Philosophy and Religion were kept, and slowly make my way down each row, noting all of the books that I wanted to read one day. I didn’t choose just any old book – over the years I had developed my own system of judging a book not just by its cover. My system involved many criteria, beginning with a cursory examination of the typography and layout of the book, but mostly the book had to be interesting and reflect a commanding knowledge of the subject matter by the author; I could usually tell that in the first few pages. I hated to see one of my books checked out though, because sometimes they never came back. I’d take each book down from the shelf, and page through it, and sometimes try to read a few pages or a chapter. I remember one book in particular – a book about Philosophy with a red leather binding. It was written by a professor in England, and I remember it so vividly because it was one of the books that got checked out and never returned. Each chapter was about a different branch of Philosophy. The first chapter was titled Epistemology, and the first time I read it I didn’t know what it meant. The writer explained that it was the theory of knowledge, and he outlined the subject and then proceeded to tell what each of the great philosophers had to say about the subject. There were other chapters on Ethics, Empiricism, Naturalism and many other philosophical subjects that I could have used in my life. But one day it was gone, and I can’t recall the author’s name.
Besides Philosophy, I had earmarked many other books for future reference. There were books that taught foreign languages – even then I already knew I wanted to learn at least German and Russian. In the section on Mathematics, I had noted a whole string of books on Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry all the way up to Calculus. When I would peruse one of the Calculus texts, it felt as if I was gazing upon some sort of sacred language or book of tomes. The names of Newton, Descartes, Laplace, Riemann were magical names, that struck magical chords within me. Their equations were so advanced they needed new, funny-looking symbols to express them, and that piqued my curiosity. There were books on Chemistry and Physics on my list too, specifically books about space and rocketry, and Orbital Mechanics and Nuclear Physics - all the things I wanted to learn.
Meanwhile Jimmy would wander off by himself, and every now and then he’d bring something over to show me – a book with a humorous title like “Take it Away, Sam,” or that of a movie we’d just seen at the Norwalk Theatre. When I got to the 900’s, in the last row, where the books about history and especially WWII were shelved, he would join me and we would pull each book one by one, so as not to miss any new ones that might have slipped in, and we’d discuss them. I usually would check out three or four of them, but I don’t think I ever read them all. I read a lot of them, books like ”God is my Copilot” and “Thirty Seconds over Tokyo” and “Sink the Bismarck” and “Guadalcanal Diary,” that have over the years become my very favorites. I read “The Great Escape” and saw the movie, and after that I couldn’t get enough books about escaped POWs – there was “Escape From Colditz,” where the men were incarcerated in an escape-proof medieval castle, and another called ”The Wooden Horse,” where the prisoners dug a tunnel beneath a vaulting horse that they would carry into the exercise yard each day. I imagined what it must have been like to be shot down over Germany, wandering alone at night in a strange land to make my way to the English Channel or to Switzerland. I wondered why they always got caught though – why didn’t they just dig a hole and hide underground, until the Germans tired of looking for them? Years later, I read Simon Wiesenthal’s autobiography, and learned that at one point he did just that. He buried himself in the backyard of an old woman’s farm, and she would slip him food and water whenever she could.
I also read Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl,” and knew the story of how she and her family hid from the Nazis in Holland, and were captured and taken to a place called a concentration camp, but her story didn’t touch me like those of the POWs. I knew nothing about the Holocaust, or the Final Solution as it was called then, until I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
One summer between 6th and 7th grades, I took a class and the teacher had a paperback copy sitting out on his desk that he had been reading. I had never seen such a thick book, and I asked him about it, and he told me that it was all about Hitler and the war, and about how the Germans put all the Jews in concentration camps. He wouldn’t give me that book, but he lent me another about a man named Trachtenberg, who spent some time in one of the camps, and while he was there he thought up quick ways to perform mathematical calculations in his head. I tried to learn some of the techniques, but they were all just tricks that only worked in certain cases.
The idea of concentration camps fascinated me though, so one day I asked at the library if they had that book, and the librarian told me that it was on reserve and there was a long waiting list of readers. Afterwards I saw it at the Big A for $1.65, and I saved up and bought a copy for myself. I was a little disappointed with the book though – only a small portion of it dealt with the war itself, it being mostly about Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. And the concentration camps weren’t really places to think at all, but were brutal death camps. Why I wondered would anybody put Anne Frank in such a place? And what was so different about Jews, that they should deserve such treatment? The only people that I knew were Jews were in show business, like the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny and George Burns, and they made me laugh.
When we left the library, Jimmy and I would usually walk back on Firestone boulevard and stop for a soda or a burger at Norwalk Burger if we had the money. We’d sit and read our books and make plans for our next excursion. Until one day I heard my brother and his friends talking about how some of the older boys had stuffed Jimmy in a trash can at the high school. The next time he came over I just couldn’t face him – I asked my mom to tell him that I was busy.
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