Blues

Haroot Teramian’s business was buying factory seconds and overruns, including dolls, cosmetics, small electrical appliances and just about anything else and then reselling it. While it waited to be resold it sat in eight foot stacks all over the ancient downtown building. One day I came upon a record, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” by Derek and the Dominoes on the floor. It was close to five o’clock, the back door was open; I was ready to abscond with it, but Haroot’s cousin caught me. Just an old blues album I  told him. I love  the blues, Giragos whined. I was sure he didn’t.

War

The oversized Collier’s Pictorial History of The European War waited on the end table next to the wing chair in the corner of the living room, by window that looked at the quince tree and Catalina Street. In the spring I would crank the window open and inhale the rust of the screen if a breeze moved west. After 100 pages of important generals and dignitaries, battleships, tanks, dirigibles, horse-drawn cannons, soldiers with their chests out, and refugees fleeing, there is a picture of the exact moment a mortar shell explodes, and the ghostly silhouette of the photographer, arms up, surrenders to death.

Christmas Eve, 1957

The yellow light of the kitchen is steady and calm. The window holds back the black night, the wreath in the middle of the window, its white light illuminating the red cellophane, something new. I imagine someone outside in the night seeing the wreath in the window feeling less scared. Mom is not singing or speaking. She is moving behind me, putting things away. The floor squeaks. Dad’s at work. The quiet is a comfort. I move my hand, toward the light of the wreath but it is hot. Bedtime Mom says, tomorrow is Christmas.

Ceramics

I was 10 when I went to the ceramic studio on Verdugo Avenue with my sister and paid ten cents for a baby doe that they insisted was a lamb. I painted it as a lamb and then they said they guessed I was right. I didn’t say anything. I liked picking something and painting it. I liked the quiet. I had more dimes and more time and I went there without my sister one Saturday and painted a kitten and when it was done they told me to not come back, that this was something for girls and I was a boy.

Picnic Lottery

Who will chose me? The question of adolescence. So we create protocols to answer it. It was after the horseback riding at Pickwick in Burbank there on Riverside Drive. The picnic had a twist to it. The girls brought a picnic basket; the boys did not. We would have lunch with one of the girls. We would not be allowed though to pick the girl. Maybe it was some kind of lottery, I can’t remember. So far I had successfully ridden a horse without looking foolish and now there was this new question. What if I don’t like the contents of the sandwich?

Student Observation

The bespectacled, thin-lipped, longhaired 40ish year old man in a local punk band, was also the Language Arts department chair for a middle school. Ed 60 required “five hours per week per week with the teacher.” So I learned about Monday’s vocabulary words, Friday’s spelling test and the Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursdays movies. He would disappear for long stretches and then return, gripping the podium in the dark. He didn’t show at all one day so I threaded the projector and shut the lights off for a documentary on the Beatles. Afterwards a student said, “Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”

Barbershop

A football helmet covered in dust on a shelf, a painting of a pin-up girl posing on a nightstand next to a stack of books, pictures of motorcycles, rifles bolted to the wall, pictures of a P-51 and a Spitfire, and a picture of a stock car racer stopped me. The three barbers stood looking at me. No one spoke. Finally the eldest asked if I came to have my ears lowered or just raise hell. He told stories. A neighbor planted a tree in a pothole in the middle of the street. He dropped the comb three times. The haircut was perfect.

Sad Christmas, 1989

He sat in the big chair in the living room on Christmas Day waiting for someone to ask what was on his mind. I offered him more mezza or something to drink. No, thank you he said. I sat down in a folding chair and waited.

“There is no such thing as Armenians,” he said.

“The house is full of them today.”

“And where were you born?”

“Well, but…”

“There is no country called Armenia. We are all something else.”

“Armenia…”

“Even if we have a tremendous scientist from Armenia who saves the world, he is from the Soviet Union.”

“But…”

“Therefore, we don’t exist.”

The Parade

Dad wore sweaters under his sweaters. When he was a kid he marched in the parade commemorating the end of World War I and didn’t wear a sweater, he said. In Worcester, Mass, it was bitter cold and he followed the parade for miles. He got a chill and a fever and almost died. His mother stayed up with him praying for three days and three nights, putting cold rags on his face. Finally the fever broke. He never told me about the influenza epidemic that killed a thousand in Worcester and the millions throughout the country that winter.

Freshman Football

            I stood on top on the blocking sled. My scrawny freshman squinted at me through their helmets. I blew the whistle and two of them charged the sled, which rejected them by not budging. I choked back a laugh and told them they had to hit it harder, that I wanted them to knock me off the sled. I slapped the top of the pad. “This pad right here is a guy who just got in your face and said your mama is a cross-eyed, bald, gap-toothed hooker over on G Street.”

Like bowling pins they fell on the ground, laughing.