THE BOYS AT 9TH & VALLEY
by Bob Arter

The year was 1965 and the Ford was 1957, a two-door I bought for $150 at a police auction and the thing was, it was the day of the night of the Big Dance. I don't remember which Big Dance — I hated them all, tux and carnation and Judy would be encased in thirteen different garments so it would be like peeling leaves from an artichoke to reach the tender parts of her, nirvana.

The cops hadn't recovered the keys so I had to start the car with a screwdriver, reach across and goose the carburetor, get it running one more time. When are you going to get keys? Judy kept asking. I'd say, Hey, I'm working on it.

Actually, I was working on the water pump. The bearing had been knocking bad for two months and a work stoppage on the night of the Big Dance would greatly lengthen the odds against my getting some, which at that time was my central ambition in life. So I came banging into my dad's gas station around ten that morning, giving myself plenty of time to swap out the water pump for a rebuilt, get home, get clean, get dressed, get a condom in my wallet and a song in my heart — and go pick up my dolly.

You have to understand that this was an age when gas stations pumped your gas and washed your windows and checked everything you had and a lot you didn't even know was there — and sometimes wasn't. They also did mechanical work and changed all your bodily fluids and barbers still whisked your neck and with talcum powder and all there was to worry about was war and civil rights and assassinations and bra-burning women who wrote bad, bad poetry. I always wished that Judy would burn hers-under the proper circumstances I could always tolerate a crippled sonnet or one of those girlish prose meanderings busted up into random lines-but she wasn't political, unfortunately, and kept her little boobs in a little bra with 47 hooks that took me the entire first feature at the drive-in movie on Saturday night to undo. I rarely saw the second feature, but youth is all about learning to prioritize.

My dad's name was Lee, just Lee, and I was Donnie, just Donnie, and they called us Lee and Donnie. My dad's gas station was Lee's Texaco and his help was as unlikely a gang of mongrels as ever you'd want to know. His chief mechanic was a one-armed man named Dennis Cash, known as Dick or known as Cash, old boy out of Friendship, Arkansas. Cash had worked the green line at a timber mill there until his right arm got caught up in the chain and yanked off and the Vocational Rehabilitation had given him a correspondence course in mechanicking, which was entirely useless because he was illiterate, but he took to it anyway and they bought him a big chest of tools and wished him luck and closed the book on him.

You ever see a one-armed man do a brake job? It's a thing to see. But Cash spent a lot of time overhauling carburetors, tearing down some big old Chrysler four-throat and boiling it out in a bucket of goop and putting it back together with all the tiny little pieces in a Holly carb kit. He couldn't read the instructions but there was an exploded diagram that I couldn't make sense of, but he could read like a palm-witch on the Santa Monica Pier. There were always parts left over — this was a hallmark of the mechanical work done at Lee's Texaco-but they always worked. If not, my dad's Corporate Pledge came into play: "We guarantee your car off the lot if we have to push it ourselves."

My '57 Ford Tudor — the soul of automobilic aristocracy — had a 272 V-8 under the hood, 190 horses, doesn't sound like much but I wasn't into boring and stroking and oversized valves, all that crap, boys with nothing better to do than rake their cars, put big cheater slicks on the back, snap the drive line or blow out the U-joint once a week, glittery-ass paint job and no money for gas, come in for fifty cents of regular and three pounds of air-my Ford was as easy a car to work on as you'd ever want, pop the hood and plenty of room, easy to reach and power nothing; it was not yet the age of power except those goddamned Caddies and T-Birds. The water pump was four bolts and a belt, two of the bolts maybe eight, ten inches, easy, through the pump and into the block. I found a rusted-out thermostat inside and threw it into the leftover box-don't need one in Southern California, except for the mountain people, the hippie Paul Bunyan motherfuckers who rented you rowboats with oars or Evinrudes so you could catch four-inch bass and bluegill, all bones and no flesh — I loved to wet a line but hated to catch those newly seeded hatchlings, gut and clean and scale and fry and eat their bones, their eyes, their pierced ears and tattooed tails, God, Ebola in our waters and girls on paddleboards, layers of well-placed fat beneath bikinis, rounded and cute with all their makeup washed off, smelling of Coppertone, thighs that would cradle you off to heaven...

Oh yeah, Judy. Squeezing her thighs together, a nice girl. I dreamed of motels, two-hour rates, and wondered if I could last two hours. Do what for two hours? They sure as hell didn't offer room service. Guy I knew from the baseball team, Dennis Vickers, said they had those coin-operated vibrating beds at the motel out on 66 that looked like concrete wigwams. Would a vibrating bed freak out Judy? Of course it would. I could hear her: "Donnie, what's going on?"

No way in hell we could watch the fuck-films on the coin-operated TV.

The Big Dance. I headed for the parts store, bought a water pump--on my dad's resale number it was cheap enough, more for the gasket and why not toss in a tube of gasket glue? One for the shop?

I'd bought the damned corsage. Wrist, she'd said, and I had fallen to my knees to thank All That Was Greater Than Me because I knew I wouldn't pierce her baby breast with a straight pin as her parents looked on, she shrieking, I diving through the sugar-glass, her father, George, hammering me with a breakaway chair in a saloon brawl, defeating me at one-on-one one basketball in the driveway. So crushing, being thumped by a forty-year-old pipefitter at the foundry, thirteen weeks of paid vacation a week and they wondered why they went broke and the Japanese finally bought out the business.

So Cash was sitting on a stool by the work bench, all the pieces of somebody's carb laid out in front of him, studying his diagram and talking to Marv, a loud fat Highway Patrolman who stopped in for donuts every day instead of locking up the speed merchants on Southern California's favorite invention, the freeway. Cash was expounding on his most recent annual pilgrimage to Arkansas.

"Me and Mama stopped at a Stuckey's in Amarillo," Cash said, fitting a tiny ball to a tiny spring, "and got us some burgers and ever' thang, and that piece of meat warn't no bigger than that." He displayed his only greasy palm.

"Oughta be a damned law," Marv commiserated. "Oughta be a damned cheeseburger law."

"Put the Highway Patrol in charge of enforcing it," I said, applying fresh glue to the gasket. "Along with donut violations."

"Don't you go getting smart-mouth with me, Donnie," Marv said, "or I'll catch your young ass out on the interstate one time and spoil your whole day. You get that piece of shit registered yet?"

"The temporary's under the visor," I said. "You gonna pull a gun on me, Officer?"

I'll be damned if he didn't check to see. "Looks okay," he announced with some regret. "Tail lights work?"

I pressed the gasket against the front of the block and said nothing. My car was barely legal, but she'd pass. I didn't want to give Marv too much lip because he'd caught me and Judy one night, parked out in the sand hills, half out of our clothes. He hadn't mentioned it to my dad yet, not that I was too worried about that, but I didn't want it to get back to my mom. Or Judy's mom.

Cash's brother Glen wandered back into the lube bay, saying nothing, as usual. You could say Glen was quiet or you could say he was dim and either one was close enough to true. He generally pumped gas and couldn't do much repair, but the man had a genuine talent: he could sure God clean a restroom. Glen performed this task daily (and with great relish), always beginning by mixing up a bucket of his special cleansing agent: Tide, Lysol, bleach, Pine Sol, Bab-O, and the same industrial-strength cleaning solvent we used to clean the floors. A favorite part of the gas station day came after Glen had wiped down the restrooms with this potion, and the restroom was visited by a customer — who would come staggering out the door, choking like a soldier in a trench full of mustard gas back in the war to end them all.

It didn't.

I took a break and called Judy. It took a few minutes because she lived over on the west side of town, where everyone had a pool, and she had to towel off before coming to the phone. Actually, she almost never got wet, just lay out on the deck and worked on her tan, little bitty swimsuit she never swam in, nicest ass you ever saw on a girl.

I said hi and so did she and I gave her a progress report on the water pump. She told me my boutonniere was teal, which I didn't comprehend or care about as long as it wasn't pink. I told her I was about to put the new pump on, which she didn't comprehend or care about as long as it got us there. She said she had a tuna sandwich and iced tea for lunch, and I figured one and one-half low-cal potato chips besides, that she was keeping from me, like the girl needed to diet, and I didn't mention that I was about to get sent to the A&W to buy the greasiest lunch this side of an infarct for the boys at 9th and Valley. Judy and her mom Betty watched Peyton Place every Thursday night — God, that Allison was hot, but there was no talking to the women while the show was on: Who's pregnant now? Oh, that-that-that cheat? Well, what about her? She's such a little...

See, Judy and Betty couldn't be saying, you know, bitch or whore or, in those days, even slut — they were nice girls, good girls, and good girls, chastely girdled women, didn't talk that way. Betty had been a cheerleader once, over at San Bernardino High, and of course George had been the captain of the basketball team and the way I got it, they had been a very hot ticket. But you put on Peyton Place and I don't know about George — he and I would talk about Delco ignition parts during half-time, when the females weren't shushing us — but the women were both scandalized and enthralled.

I still had to go buy the food but Judy was talking about the curtains for the nursery in the house we would have after we got married. She was thinking, maybe yellow dotted Swiss. I figured I could afford that before a house, so I agreed, getting that uncomfortable feeling and thinking about the Army and Paris and a Ferrari, something better than a gas stationeer or a pipefitter at the foundry though I knew not what. We did the you-hang-up-first no-you-first okay-I'll-count-to-three thing and, you know, that telephone kissing sound and I went to get the burgers.

As I left, a strong man lurched out of the restroom, choking on the tear gas the cops would one day use on me while demonstrating in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles and that the North Vietnamese Army would use on me in the Valley of Jars, Tet of '68, and I wish now that I'd taken a little pity on the customer. But I wanted a burger whose piece of meat was bigger than the one at the Stuckey's in Amarillo and youth is all about learning to prioritize.

When I came back, Bobby didn't want his burger and fries, but sucked down his root beer so we knew Bobby had got fucked up again the night before. As it turned out, that was Bobby's last day at 9th and Valley. Bobby was a butcher and had lost his excellent job at the local Stater Brothers-this was the supermarket empress of what in Southern Cal is called the Inland Empire, a tattered fringe of the Mojave Desert's windy, retreating border-and had lost his high-paying job when the Meatcutters Union struck the store chain and Jack E. Brown, Stater's CEO and a bad motherfucker to mess with, struck them out with scabs and Bobby wound up changing oil for two bucks an hour.

Lee was no fool.

The problem was that Bobby, who could play the guitar some, had on the previous evening borrowed my saintly mother's Martin, ostensibly to perform at a party in a double-wide, a hobo camp or just amongst some pack of trash and my mother admired musical people and said Sure, Bobby, here you go, just bring it back tomorrow. And then the following morning a local cop named Siegel called my dad and said Lee, somebody pawned your wife's guitar last night, the pawnshop guy said her name is on it with that sticky black tape that has letters? And my dad went and rescued it from hock and came back and fired Bobby's ass, and we all had a pretty good laugh. But you know, I feel kind of bad about that too, the laughing not the firing, after all these years and all the times I've fucked up so bad I can't believe it.

Right now, I can't believe it.

After the burgers my dad wanted me to change the plugs on the only Jaguar I ever laid hands on — Christ, the radiator cap was solid pig-iron and I knew without cue that American hegemony was a gone goose, in the global marketplace and finally on the battlefields of the Third World, lands as alien to us as Io, as Alpha Centauri, as Disneyland; I knew it but I didn't know it; such a dumb-ass kid with my brains in my pants-so I did, and they had shoehorned the engine into that machine so it took forever and busted up my knuckles and for the first time that day I began to worry about appearances at the Big Dance.

Siegel was the umpire at the Little League games and called strikes a foot out of the zone, sneezing, but calls balls on heat right down the pipe so I guess it averaged out. I was playing my last year of high school ball and Judy was on the drill team but they only came out for football games and the Rose Parade; nobody gave a shit about baseball and cross-country. Which my best finish was 8th and my first was 62nd. So I didn't get to watch her waggle her pretty ass on my behalf, but after the football games — I always hoped we'd lose — I'd take her over to The Mug, just off the freeway at Muscupiabe Drive, and we'd do a pizza and I'd try to buy beer but no luck. She wouldn't have drunk it anyway and I'd merely hope I could get in her pants later, under that little short skirt, starting on the sweater, moving along to the 47 hooks. I hated football season.

My dad had a story to tell about Siegel. He said Siegel was patrolling our little town one night in his squad car and he found a dead horse on Pennsylvania Avenue. And he was going to write it up but couldn't spell Pennsylvania so he got the chains out of his trunk and chained up the horse by the heels and dragged it around the corner.

To C Street, which Siegel could spell.

I got to drive the Jag back to its owner — I was thinking Hugh Hefner, but it was just a guy sold chickens from his chicken ranch outside the county line — and it was something, clutch had about a quarter-inch of play and it almost left sitting on the blacktop but I got it there. By the time I got back it was getting late, drinking time and someone had already gone across the street to Linko's because Cash was drinking Beam from a half-pint bottle and everyone else had a beer. And it time to put the bolts in that pump and the belt on the pulley and dump in the coolant and get my tux, those fucking cufflinks and steel buttons and I hoped to God it was a snap-on bow-tie because I couldn't tie one and never would learn.

I wouldn't learn in Missouri or Georgia. I wouldn't learn in New York or Chicago or Washington, wouldn't learn in San Francisco. I wouldn't learn.

Siegel can't spell or call strikes. I can't tie a bow-tie or support a war.

Old age is all about learning to prioritize.

So it was after four and I had to be gone by five so I coolly applied the outer glue and found a 9/16-inch socket in Cash's Voc Rehab box and rolled in the bolts between finger and thumb, and then everything went to hell. A man named George Davis had worked for my dad way back in the days when dad still whipped my ass for smoking with my cousin. Both his sons, poisonous offspring the pair of them, still did. George had a bad thing happen to a valve in his heart, lifetime of bacon grease according to my mother, frying up potatoes and those little bluegill eyes, the bones, her breasts, that shapely ass, the little skirt.

She wanted to call our first son Jonathan. Dotted Swiss.

George's sons filled out the roster of the boys of 9th & Valley. They were named George Jr. and Harold. We knew George Jr. as Gomez, after another Gomez who had worked for my dad. The current version lived in a trailer and regularly slumped in, bemoaning the fact that once again he'd found the need to put the boots to his woman on the previous night.

His brother Harold was called Muley, I don't know why, and he lived with a Baptist medical receptionist and came to work at six a.m. with a beer in his hand every day and sent off for a Doctor of Divinity degree. Muley, propped up by a pair of angels, Angels, seraphims, performed the holy marriage of Gomez to...to...who was it? Oh yeah, Garnet. Crazy Fucking Garnet.

She'd ride onto my Dad's lot on the hood of a Ford Falcon, drunk, messed up, laughing, humping the hood, greasing up and self-lubricating, that nasty woman juice that nobody wants but all us men, rooting around down there like hogs after truffles in some philodendron forest, wanting but not sure how...

The first feature, which we entirely missed, was When the Moon Is Full, the Beast Must Die. I wanted to jump her, thinking of Garnet humping the Falcon. Thinking of dotted Swiss.

At a later time, I would leave her-as brutally as possible, but I knew no better way. I hurt her badly. I wanted her forever.

It took four bolts, finger-snug and a twist.

From his shop stool, Cash said, "Not too tight, Donnie-you bust it off and ever' thang."

At that moment I broke off the last bolt, broke it off in the engine block, overdoing, snugging it down, just a little more torque.

Cash laughed, took a final pull on his bottle and got up to put on a clean shirt. "Reckon I better carry myself home an' ever' damned thang," he said, as he said every evening, "or Mama's gonna hold a public ass-kickin', and I'll have to supply the ass."

I would have to tap the bolt out the next day.

That night I borrowed my dad's '46 Dodge pickup, toggle-switch ignition, painted white latex with a roller. The front seat was greasy as hell. I threw a fender-wrap over the seat. Judy didn't like it.

Later in my life, I met a woman prison guard down in Tennessee. She kicks my butt on a regular basis. A regular deer, a chipmunk, a snow leopard, licking her lovely chops and giving me an evil grin and a wink.

Judy is okay these days; I found her on the Internet, and learned that she'd married early and badly, and been beaten when she was a baby machine. I felt very badly until she met another man, a far better than the first, or than me.

My lately woman's name is Sweet, is Honey Mama, is I'm Always Gonna Love You.

But damn. I miss that '57 Ford. And I surely miss that girl.

© Bob Arter 2002

on to page seven   

back to the front page