June 28, 2011

• Rabbit Creek, Fall, 1975

  People often remark on the quality of my memory.  From my perspective, it’s not very good.  I know I have forgotten more than I remember – I can zoom in on some incidents and tell their stories in detail, but those sharply defined times are surrounded by long periods of time with no associated memories.  One thing that helps me remember is the fact that I moved around a lot, and memories are associated with places.  At this point, I come into a period of 23 years during which I lived in the same little trailer, only moving it once in those years.  These times run together and chronology is hard to recall.  Sometimes I’m not sure if something happened before or after we moved the trailer from Rabbit Creek to the Susitna Valley… but that’s getting ahead of the story.

  Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

  I know approximately when I moved into that trailer (an 8′ x 35′ uninsulated aluminum box built in California in 1953) because Charley wrote a date on the wooden molding beside the door.  Trouble is, it wasn’t the date we bought the trailer, nor was it the date I moved in.  I didn’t even notice the graffito for some time after he made it.  When I did, some discussion ensued but we could never agree on exactly what the date on the wall commemorated.  He claimed it was the day we bought the trailer, but I knew that wasn’t right.  However, that date, September 15, 1975, was within a week or two of the night I moved in.

  He was up at Pump 8 on the pipeline, hauling loads of fill and gravel in a big belly dump truck.  I was working at Youth Employment Service in Spenard.  A couple of times I loaded Lucy, the VW bug, with clothes and stuff, drove to work in the morning, then up to the hillside after work, unloaded and went back to Chugiak to reload the car, sleep, and do it all again.  One day in early September, I got up early, loaded up the pile of carpet padding that I used for a bed, and left the duplex clean and empty but for the reason we were compelled to move out:  my five marijuana plants in their 5-gallon buckets.

  That evening after work, I drove up to the trailer park, unloaded, removed the back seat from the bug, and headed down and out to Chugiak for that final load.  It was dark and raining by the time I had my plants stuffed into the space behind the car seats, their tops gently bent under Lucy’s curving roof.  It was an uneasy drive that rainy night, across Anchorage, with every passing car’s lights illuminating my illicit cargo.  The Ravin Decision had legalized private possession within one’s home, but did not address the blatantly open haulage of the distinctive foliage.

  I continued working at YES, and Charley went on with the routine of 2 weeks on the pipeline job, 1 week off.  When we were home, we spent most of our time working on the trailer.  I hung the 8-foot fluorescent fixture for the pot plants from the ceiling, by chains, along one side of the bedroom, and put the two 4-foot fixtures for my tropical houseplants in the front room.  He put a work bench and shelves in the little 6-foot square lean-to that sheltered the door, and repaired a few holes and gaps that let in the weather.  We blocked, covered and insulated the loosely-fitting back door because it let in too much weather.

  The whole time that I had been working at YES, I’d spend coffee breaks around the corner in the adult Job Service office, standing in front of the cork boards where the job listings were posted, looking for a better job.  My hope was to find something in social services, but few positions came open and, despite going out on several interviews, I wasn’t hired.  I widened my scope to include clerical work, but found nothing until one day not long after the move, when I saw a job opening for “recouper and inventory control clerk.”  I didn’t have a clue what kind of work a “recouper” did, but I was willing to give it a try, since the pay was more than double the hourly rate I was getting at YES.

  The Job Service clerk who referred me to the interview told me that a recouper recouped damaged merchandise in a warehouse.  The warehouse in question was J. B. Gottstein’s, the wholesaler that supplied Carr’s supermarket chain as well as all the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction camps.  Uncertain exactly how recouping was done, but confident that I could learn, I emphasized my inventory experience and clerical skills to the clerk and she set up the appointment. 

  I must have made a good impression on the exec who interviewed me.  There was no waiting for a call to find out if I was hired.  After showing me around the big echoing steel building busy with men zipping around on pallet jacks and forklifts between tall rows of steel pallet racks, he led me back to his office, talked to me for a couple of minutes and told me to come in at 8 the next morning.

  First the brakes, and then the gear box, went out on Charley’s belly dump on a long incline with a full load, and he damaged 2 other trucks in passing before bringing it to a stop by ramming it into a roadside bank of dirt.  He was shaken up, banged around, not too seriously hurt, but the belly dump was totaled.  He lost that job and started spending his days seeking work at the union hall or at his “office”, the local Denny’s restaurant where a lot of building contractors hung out drinking coffee and talking shop.

  One evening, he picked me up from work and drove up to our moldy little trailer on the hillside.  The door was open.  My marijuana plants were gone, along with a cookie tin with our stash, and another tin containing pipes, roach clips, papers and such.  Also missing were 35 troy ounces of silver and a box full of cassette tapes. Some of the tapes contained music, but most were tapes I’d made myself, recording Tarot readings, conversation at parties, journal entries and notes for a novel I planned to write.  One, the one I valued most highly, was a past-life reading done for me by Aron Abrahamson. 

  Our moldy little trailer had been burgled.  I called the State Troopers.  It didn’t take a psychic to recognize the bemusement of the trooper who responded.  He’d never before had anyone complain of having their dope and paraphernalia stolen.  He looked around, took a few notes, told us it was unlikely they’d ever find the person or persons responsible, and left. 

  Within a week or so after the burglary, the teen-age son of a neighbor knocked at the door and said his mom told him to come over and apologize to us for her.  His older brother had ripped us off, apparently in the middle of a crime spree that had ultimately landed him in jail.  The boy, Todd, said he didn’t know what happened to my tapes, but that his brother had buried the silver on the hill below the trailer court.  He and Charley went down there several times before snow fell, digging up every likely spot, but never found anything.

  CONTINUED HERE.

  Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you’d like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can’t afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

  
  

  • 9:26 pm
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