The Good Years

In the summer of ’67 a young mother bundled up her two sons, aged 4 and 5, and boarded a bus for New Mexico. They had spent the previous two years living with a madman: a brilliant, self-taught artist/sculptor and precision machinist, who was also a former inmate at Camarillo. 

She met him at a roadside bar in Huntington Beach where she worked nights serving draft beer and peanuts. Tall with red hair and freckles, he was intense, unpredictable, and married to a nurse who was addicted to painkillers.

He bounced back and forth between the wife and the girlfriend until the wife came in the middle of the night to vandalize the girlfriend’s '55 Dodge (that she had just bought with a month’s wages). For good measure the wife shot out the windows of their upstairs apartment with 30-06 armor piercing. 

The police came and made a report, retrieving a spent cartridge from the rumpled covers in her children's bed. The machinist stayed. Her riddled car was towed away and a few days later his was repossessed.

Everything changed. Everything stayed the same.

Eventually they moved to a nicer, bigger apartment. At times things seemed almost normal. She quit her job at the relay factory in southside LA and stayed home. She took in ironing, made lemon meringue pies, and ate them before he got home from work. Her sons remembered this as the good years. 

She babysat his three kids alot. Most afternoons she’d load the baby into a shopping cart and trek over to Kmart. They all loved it except her youngest who would trudge behind, his chubby face screwed into a child’s version of The Scream.