In that piece about briefly staying at the Thousand Palms Oasis I mentioned that the main ranger woman hand a graying bowl cut that reminded me of the Concord Condor character from Tiny Toon Adventures but I neglected to add that I have a bit of a history with not really getting along with this particular archetype. I had another bowl cut and khaki lady as an Archaeology professor when I was taking classes at San Diego City College in the early 2000s.
Her name was Lynn and when I switched to SDSU I had another one for a class that was also named Lynn. I found out the two Lynns had a bit of a rivalry when we took a class trip to an archaeological site near where I had grown up in deep Spring Valley. For some reason, most likely a city/county thing, the site was split into two jurisdictions with each falling under the purview of a different Lynn.
When I mentioned the trip later to other professors in the department they were mildly surprised that both Lynns were in the same place despite the mutual antipathy. I would learn the reason why and it wasn’t for the purpose of cooperation. As we walked around both halves of the site I happened to pick up some gopher bones I saw in the dirt. Animal remains aren’t really studied in archaeology unless there is evidence tying them to ancient human activity like hunting or breeding.
Gophers are of special interest to archaeologists because of the effect they have on the Principle of Superposition – the idea that things in the ground are either more or less recent depending on which one you find on top of the other one. Gophers complicate this through a process called bioturbation: essentially mixing shit up and moving it around through their constant tunneling. It is important to know whether or not this is happening at a site but it was hardly contingent on a handful of bones less than a year old.
The ground was clearly riddled with enough gopher holes to trouble a trypophobic. Nonetheless when one Lynn discovered I was carrying these bones but had found them on the opposite side she insisted that I throw them back over the fence as they belonged to the half she was in charge of. This, then, was the reason we had gotten a two for one deal on Lynns for this particular afternoon: they didn’t trust each other, anthropology students or anybody else for that matter.
The first one of these khaki bowl cut types I came into contact with was my 9th grade Biology teacher at Bell Junior High. She had the kind of classroom that probably doesn’t exist anymore with gas lines for Bunsen burners on the raised counters and shelves and cabinets full of reference specimens in formaldehyde. Jars full of coiled up oversized centipedes and fetal mammals like cats and pigs floating with their eyes closed.
It was the only class I ever failed to pass with a D which seems like a pointless grade if the only thing differentiating it from an F is its effect on your cumulative grade point average. Anyway this only happened because of pure laziness, the material did interest me and I was even playing SimLife on my home computer that year, I just hadn’t worked out the subtleties of getting the best grade for the least effort yet.
It didn’t help matters that something about me rubbed the teacher the wrong way and vice versa. This basic pattern would persist and continue to not help with all the khaki bowls. I was just looking back over my earliest e-mails with the Thousand Palms one where she was already irritated that my e-mail address used a stage name as opposed to a legal one – she found it “unprofessional”.
Of course my mother insisted that I make up the Biology class credit that very Summer but I had two options as to how I would do this: I could either go to Summer School with kids my own age or I could take Biology 101 as part of the Summer Session at San Diego City College and then fill out paperwork to transfer the credits to San Diego High School where I’d be starting in the Fall. It was no contest – this was my first “long Summer” as my Elementary and Middle schools had been on the year-round schedule but having to take this class didn’t feel like a loss of freedom.
On the contrary the option to spend time downtown and be treated like a college student in a class full of grownups felt like the greatest freedom I’d ever known.
For the beginning of Summer my mom was dropping me off and picking me up from class. I would drift off to sleep in the backseat lulled by Willy Nelson’s soothing voice on a cassette of his recent release Across the Borderline. I just read through the track listings while checking the release date and could instantly hear each track in my head the instant I read the titles including a duet that I’d never realized was a Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush cover or that it featured Sinéad O’Connor.
The ability of things like smells and sounds to unlock chunks of forgotten memory is truly astounding. LaPorsha has been burning some incense lately that smells exactly like this magic smoke ointment I’d completely forgotten about making. I had this strange book of magic tricks when I was a kid that instructed me to burn the striking strips from matchbooks face down on aluminum foil to yield a few drops of a reddish brown oil that would make smoke rise from my fingertips as I rubbed them together.
I was also playing some older David Bowie albums like Lodger on a recent car trip when I thought to put on the eponymous album from his brief lived band Tin Machine. I remembered looking at the CD on the rack when my family first upgraded to a CD player but didn’t have any clear recollections of the music. The opening strains caused me to break out in goosebumps as recollections of exactly how it sounded on our speaker system and how it felt to be sitting inside the house’s new addition for the first time came flooding back.
The Biology class had a lab portion directly afterwards once a week. We got to do fun things like look through a microscope at samples of pond water to find microorganisms. I was totally the kind of kid that had my own microscope at home but it only had an adjustable mirror instead of built in back illumination. This meant that I could only use it in direct sunlight and the magnification didn’t go up as high. On the more powerful one in my classes lab I was the first to find an amoeba that was busily engulfing an even smaller creature.
On nearly the first day of class a younger woman started talking to me. She was married but her husband was military and shipped off somewhere – she’d just had a baby named Kian and had written his name all over the white parts of her Converse All Stars. She was clearly bored and lonely but it seems odd that she both immediately went for me and didn’t seem discouraged by the fact that I was only fourteen years old.
She’d asked to exchange phone numbers but I was awkward on the phone and randomly handed it off to Francois who happened to be sitting next to me. He clearly understood her intentions even though I was oblivious and gave her a bit of a hard time about it. She was angry about this the next time I saw her in class but when I only shrugged she gave up and stopped talking to me.
She turned her attentions to the next youngest guy in the class who I would later learn also went to San Diego High two grades ahead of me. He had alternative length brown hair while mine was to my shoulders so she might have had a type. Looking back on it now I wonder if she was deliberately picking teenagers so it would be easier to get rid of us when her husband returned or if she was looking for something she’d missed out on by getting married and pregnant too young.
Most likely a mix of both – I forget how old she said she was but remembering her face it was probably around nineteen. After that her and the other guy would always show up to class together and I started to notice that they always either both had wet hair or neither of them did. The class was early in the morning and her hair was also long and brown – in a Goldilocks array her hair would have been the longest while mine was in the middle: “just right”.
Even though I’d just failed this subject at the ninth grade level I soon stood out as a star student from my lecture participation and grades on the first couple of quizzes so I attracted a circle of adult friends eager to sit close enough to copy. There was a Chinese man who barely spoke English, a black haired older Russian named Vadim and a jovial overweight Black man.
We also started hanging out before class and on breaks so I would hear Vadim making creepy “jokes”:
“Yesterday I go to mall and see many young girl so I think excellent, excellent pet shop!”
Me and the Chinese guy never said much of anything but the Black guy gave him the reactions he wanted:
“Ahahahahaha! You’re crazy Chester! They’re gonna put you in jail! They’re gonna take you away!”
Every time the group of us stood together it would be a variation of the same joke and the same laughing response. Neither of them seemed to get bored of it – I think at least Vadim also smoked cigarettes during these moments. Toward the end of the session we took a class trip to a nature trail in Balboa Park but as I was one of the few students without a car I rode along with Vadim.
He drove a sports car and asked me if I liked Russian music. I answered that I was fond of Tchaikovsky’s Flight of the Bumblebee – I was just growing out of the phase where I only listened to Classical music and The Beatles. A year or so earlier I had gotten on the Graviton at Balboa Park and had been horrified, not by the ride’s physics, but by the modern rock soundtrack blasting out of the speakers. In the sports car Vadim laughed and put on some upbeat Slavic Eurodisco.
The class ended with a research paper and I decided to write mine on the general biology of the tuatara – an ancient New Zealand reptile that is the sole surviving species of its class, although it resembles a lizard superficially, and has a third eye hidden beneath skin on top of its brain. I got a C on it and thought my professor was accusing me of plagiarism but later learned that I wasn’t using proper college level citations.
I included a bibliography page in the back but didn’t put specific citations anywhere in the body. I didn’t know that paraphrasing a chunk of text was almost as bad as outright copying if you didn’t provide a source and it wasn’t your own research. This brought my overall grade in the class down to a B which was still a lot better than what I’d gotten before.
As the session dragged on my mom started to be later and later to pick me up and I would stand by some hedges to wait on the side of the campus. One day I looked underneath the bushes and found a little mouse hopelessly struggling against a glue trap. I was a vegetarian at that time and was horrified, still am actually, at the pointless cruelty of placing such traps outside. The mouse had already broken one of its legs trying to pull itself free.
I started laboriously and delicately working it free from the glue one limb at a time. It was difficult but after twenty or thirty minutes I finally had it detached. In the moment that I pulled free the final leg it suddenly bit me hard enough to break the skin – this was the broken one so besides the general fear of being touched by me at all it would have been in a lot of pain.
Without thinking I flung it down at the sidewalk with enough force to kill on impact.
On this particular day I must have been standing out there waiting for at least an hour. I was able to convince my parents to just give me bus fare and started walking to the same stop I would be using for all of High School and years to come. I’d never been by myself on the streets of downtown San Diego before and I began to explore what would soon become my 24 hour playground.
Not long after I would start exploring empty buildings and wandering near empty ones with Francois, Paul, Bryan Welch and other friends. In the building that sat on top of the Spreckels Theatre we saw a frosted glass door with the printed name of a private eye service like something out of a Raymond Chandler movie. This same block had sections of sidewalk where the concrete was set with squares of purple transparent glass.
Somebody had heard that there were tunnels underneath and in the daytime you could explore them by the tinted light that the glass tiles had been designed to provide. Nobody was ever able to find a way inside and I can’t say with any certainty whether these tunnels still exist or even if they ever did at all. Nonetheless I was on the threshold of Underground America.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 