Rick M...
Rick strode purposefully across the square. He had long, shiny
brown curls trailing out from under a black fedora. It was summer.
He was wearing a white sleeveless t-shirt ( a "wife beater"), loose levi-cutoffs,
and shower thongs, with white gym socks. Billy Idol's " Eyes Without a Face"
video was playing that summer, and many had joked about Rick's
resemblance to Billy.
Striding purposefully, thongs, fists perpetually clenched, thumbs out. Except for this day, one fist holds a gas can. He was out of gas, he was 17. His ancient, primer- covered Comet was sitting parked around the corner.
Rick was always out of gas. In fact, that's how my friends and I always ran into him, he would be walking with his gas can.In winter he wore fatigues and combat boots. That's the only thing that changed with this scenario.
Rick was half -Phillipino, a fact that not many knew, because Rick didn't want them to know. It didn't fit the CYA ( kid's prison) notion of being white, pure.He lived down the street from me.
Rick lived with his grandparents, a very sweet and diminutive old Asian couple. That was why I knew. Because Rick looked odd standing next to them. He was a big guy, white, green eyes, didn't look Asian in the least. Until you stood next to him and his grandparents, and if you were perceptive, you'd start to notice a bit of resemblance in the faces of the 3. People that think they knew Rick would probably be surprised to know that about him. I initially thought that they were a foster couple. Rick and I had that in common, we'd both been in the system quite a bit.
Me in foster homes and the receiving home you go to when the cops take you away from your parents who are the bad ones in these cases.. Gave me additional cred, though.And it was deserved, those places are bad! You have to defend yourself. And it's like adult prison, in that way and many others. But I digress...
If you get the idea that Rick was a good-looking kid, you'd be right. He had no shortage of pretty girls around him, but I personally wasn't interested.
Rick and I met when I was 13, he was 12. I am the person he has known the longest, in San Diego. I am like a sister to him, he is like a brother to me. We met at a Halloween party, playing spin -the- bottle. We had to kiss. A funny thing : I think he was wearing the fedora even then, at the age of 12. At least, that's the way I remember it. A 12 yr old baby faced kid in a black jacket and fedora.
I'm not sure why I wasn't ever attracted to Rick. He was a bad-boy, good-looking,
legitimately a hard-core badass but loyal to his friends. He was a character. I guess I just thought of him as a character, a brother, and sometimes not very bright.
Although even this isn't quite true. He had a good sense of humor, he was very bright when it came to certain things, unfortunately those were usually things having to do with guns or some sort of criminal activity. He taught me to fight better. The fighting techniques that I learned from Rick, I still remember, and in fact they work very well. This is more street fighting stuff, not anything fancy. Work on one eye.
I remember that we spent literally hours sparring. We were kids.
" Elbows, block, move in, work on one eye."
He was protective of me, and I appreciated that when I got a little older and had my own place. One night when I was 18 and had a little studio ( I worked full time 6 days a week at a dry cleaning plant, exhausted all the time.Didn't have a car, my parents were persona non grata.) I heard a noise at my back door, opened it, and it was Rick.
" You shouldn't have opened the door. I was patrolling the area to make sure everything was safe." : )
Once when someone hurt me, Rick wanted to fly out to this other state and take care of someone in the most permanent of ways. And he claimed to know people that dealt with those sorts of problems, and we all believed him. I believed him. He didn't talk about that stuff to everyone.But the point is, even though Rick and I were strictly platonic, he was extremely protective of me, and I needed that, being young and on my own.
So Rick is walking with his gas can. For a guy wearing thongs with socks, he is pulling off a surprisingly bad-ass stride that one wouldn't think is possible.
" What's up."
" Hey, what's up." We can actually see what Rick is up to. It's rhetorical on our part. We all joked about Rick's car ( with Rick in on the joke, he did have a good sense of humor), and how we always saw him walking everywhere. More often than not.
The Comet was always being spotted at some curb around different areas of S.M.
And he ran out of gas so often that if you actually SAW Rick driving the Comet, it was an event! :O
In fact, an example....
One day I was walking to his house ( his grandparents liked me, and I was one of the only people allowed over there), I was almost there when I saw him come rushing out of the house with a heavy wooden box. Very heavy. Black graffitti all over it.
He was struggling with it, but hurriedly. He was almost panicking. He sees me...
" Hey! Grab one end!"
No "hello" or "hey what's up" , but a "Grab this! Careful - C'mon!"
So we are walking up the street, but this box is heavy. It's wooden military box, a foot locker with metal handles that aren't so easy to hold onto. Plus it's heavy as hell.
"Hurry!" He says, because I guess I'm not walking fast enough.
" Where are we going?"
"Housing".
Which is where I'm from originally, but at this time much of the decrepit housing is abandoned.
I remember when we first moved there, my mother took one look and started crying.
" We can't live here, Charlie, we can't live here!" Cried in a heartbreaking way...
But at this point it's years later, and the housing is condemned, abandoned.
So Rick and I are hurrying towards the abandoned housing, where we all have been
hanging out and partying that summer, still too young to buy alcohol. We are 17 and 18.We get to the housing, and we even have to carry it upstairs, which sucks.
But I see what Rick was going for, and to my surprise, we huffed and puffed and got that box hidden on the second floor, in a closet.
But not before I got to see what was in the box.
As we were hurrying along, Rick had said in a hushed tone " My P.O. is coming over, right now!
I need to stash these!"
So before we hefted the box up into the attic, he lifted the lid and showed me what was so incredibly heavy.
Guns.
Lots and lots of guns, more guns than I'd probably seen in my whole life, handguns, shotguns,even an ak-47 that I'd already known about long before this. All kinds of guns. And If I hadn't come along when I did, I don't know how Rick would've gotten that box all the way to housing and stashed upstairs in time for his P.O. to come over.
Where does the car come into this, you ask?
That night, I'm walking up through the square, by myself. And there is Rick,
slowly driving in front of me. He has a car load of people, the music's blaring,
weed, beer, fun. " Hey!!!"
Wanna go to the beach? We're cruisin' to the beach."
I go over to the driver side, where Rick is. I say in a low voice,
" So I take it everything went ok today?"
He says in an equally confiding voice " Yeah, but we're cruisin to the beach to drop something in the ocean.Do you want to go?"
"Ah....Nah.That's ok... Well, have fun. "
" Thanks for today, I owe you...Later!"
And they drove off.
It was one of the rare occasions where I saw him actually driving the comet!
A year or so later I drove the Comet when he decided that I needed to learn to drive.
I got to drive it all over the stadium parking lot, Rick fretting nervously and sounding so unlike his usual self that it was funny and kind of sweet...
I'll have a part two coming because it's interesting what happened to Rick.And because I got sidetracked there, he's such an interesting character...
