I’m no runner. I will walk or ride a bike
all day long, but don’t ask me to run for ten minutes. It bores me. If I have
to, I can run on and on, but I’m not fast. But one time I ran very fast.
Since junior high, my avocation has been
martial arts, and since high school, mountaineering. Football, basketball,
baseball, ball games bore me. In school, ball games were sacred, but they still
bored me, even more than running.
I went to high school in Pasadena, CA, not
too far from Camp Pendleton, the Marine base. Most of our PE teachers had been
Marine Corps drill instructors. The rumor was that they chewed through their
chains at night to escape, and came to PHS to teach PE. Sounds about right. Maybe
they really did even hold midnight rituals, sacrificing kids (goat and
elementary school) to the gods of football and basketball.
To say they were serious about football and
basketball is sort of like saying the surface of the sun is warm. We had
endless drills. If I did not show sufficient reverence, or maybe even
misbehaved (who, me?), Coach would tell me to run ten laps. No big deal, okay, I’d
finish ten laps more bored than before, and misbehave again. I mean, do you
really have to put the stupid basketball through the stupid hoop every time?
Can’t you be creative from time to time and bounce the ball off someone’s shoulder?
That takes some good aim, a moving target like that, and it’s even better if
you miss and hit something else. I would rather run laps the whole period than
shoot baskets.
But what I really wanted to do was practice
Kenpo Karate. In junior high, I had the extravagant good luck to become a
student of the great Ed Parker, the Big Kahuna himself, at his home base, the
Pasadena studio. A good Hawaiian, Parker loved to break heads, ribs, and other
vital organs.
One evening when I was 17, say December
1970, I was making my way home to Sierra Madre after a good workout at the
studio.
In those days, I wore my hair long, partly
because it bugged the teachers at school so much. Long for those days: long
enough to reach my mouth in front and hang over my collar in back. For those
days, long.
It did get in my way when I was practicing
Kenpo, so I knotted together a broken shoestring for use as a headband. This
particular evening, I still had my headband on, because I was walking and
trotting.
I was following Sierra Madre Boulevard, the
route of the Rose Parade, which ends at PHS. I had just passed a Chevron gas
station, crossed a street, and was walking by the wall surrounding the gas
works. (Through the miracle of Google maps, I see the gas works – Pasadana Propane
– is still there, but the wall is moved back from the sidewalk, and lower. 250 –
268 N Sierra Madre, Pasadena CA, if you’re interested. I am checking the next
couple street names on Google maps.) Further up Sierra Madre was a dead zone of
torn down houses, making way for the new freeway they were putting in, the
Foothill.
Although there were very few cars on the
road, I thought I might hitch a ride, so once I crossed the street, I turned around,
just as two guys appeared from around the wall. They were coming at me. “Hey,
hippie, give us the headband.” Everybody knows hippies are all peace and love
and flower power and don’t fight. But I wasn’t a hippie. I knew what they
wanted. After a good two or three hour workout, I was primed, and more than
eager to kick their heads for them, since that’s what they wanted.
We engaged in creative dialogue. “I don’t
want to give it to you.”
“Then we’re going to take it.” Chicano
accents.
They were black silhouettes against the gas
station lights. I saw the one next to the wall was holding a ballpeen hammer,
down his right leg. Okay, you go down first. Next to the wall, he couldn’t get
a good swing. I was adjusting my angle of attack when suddenly a car roared out
from behind the wall and stopped just behind me, cutting off my rear.
My reaction was instant. I turned, lifted
my heels, and flew.
They hadn’t expected that, so they were
just a bit slow in taking off. I heard them floor the engine. I crossed Del Rey
Avenue – a two lane LA size street – in two steps. I ran so fast the car couldn’t
catch me.
I reached the first house, on the corner of
Bella Vista and hammered on the door. Just as the car pulled up and slammed on
the brakes, the door opened.
I told the young man who opened the door, “They’re chasing me.” He took in the
situation in an instant. He stepped back, I stepped in, and we shut the door. The
car waited a moment, and drove off.
The family asked if I wanted to phone the
police. I didn’t, because first, the police probably wouldn’t care about a
long-haired hippie in a headband. And what could they do? I could hardly ask
them for a ride home, and Sierra Madre was out of their jurisdiction anyway.
I figured the guys in the car would think I’d
phoned the police, so they wouldn’t wait around. I guessed I had spoiled their
evening; they were done with me. I waited a while, all was quiet, so I set off
again. I was a bit antsy going through the dead zone, but I got home without
further event.
Maybe they had noticed that when they
showed me the hammer, I wasn’t afraid; instead, I was getting ready to fight. Not
easy prey, forget it.
Later I asked around. I had brushed into
some nasty guys. They had strayed from their usual base in El Monte or
somewhere. Nobody knew why they had come to Pasadena, but people knew about
them. The car was full of more nasty guys with hammers and saws for their
evening’s entertainment.
In the following months,
before I went to Viet Nam, I never heard about their coming back to Pasadena. Maybe
they figured that if people in Pasadena run that fast, chasing them is a waste
of gas. Could be.
