(Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of baseball and the father/son relationship to it)

                                                THE BOHEMIAN BRIGADE

     Instead of hitting a ball around or playing basketball or hanging out with Angus, which was what I usually did on weekends, I was invited to Professor Edwards’s home for a writing seminar that was to be totally ad-lib and spontaneous. I was to bring nothing but my typewriter. Dave lived in a slightly ramshackle turn-of-the-century Victorian home in a leafy part of old Whittier. Couches, chairs, sofas, futons, all blanketed, were scattered about in a spacious sunlit main room with wooden floors. Nearby was a kitchen, its countertop piled with dishes. A huge pot of stew simmered on the stove. Beer cans and wine bottles and glasses sat on ledges and tables. A stereo piped turned-down folk music. Everybody smoked and a few puffed marijuana. Did I want any? No! I didn’t even smoke—another reason to scoff at the stiff.  I did happily swig from a bottle of cheap wine and later grabbed beers from a fridge—all supplied by Dave.

     The group consisted of about a dozen of the most venal anarchists—a few from our class—led by J. Hampton Mills, and various writers who’d studied under Edwards and gone on to 4 year colleges or jobs or no jobs in the real world. Edwards told us to write about whatever entered our minds. I dashed out a slipshod account of an affluent girl from a prime suburban home (modeled after Dawn Meadows) who falls to personal ruin and degradation and becomes a toothless, drug-bedeviled harridan/whore and homeless lesbian. I titled it “Gidget Goes to Hell.” Edwards, while reading this babble, had to halt a few times to laugh, though my cohorts refrained from such levity and exchanged glances indicating I was hopeless. They all chain-smoked furiously.

     I remained aloof, observing from afar, a dog lost and wandering in the wrong backyard. These folks were aloof, self-righteous, intolerant, judgmental, sneaky, jealous of each other, cloaking their true feelings in lies lavishing praise on their precious, sometimes flowery, sometimes minimalist, didactic, acidic, amateurish, plagiaristic, bogusly experimental works. Dave occasionally winked at me, which helped soften my sense of estrangement and lameness, which I actually relished.

     Mills actually lodged here. He found little salvageable in anybody’s work. He now wrote a weekly column in the Cerritos school paper, for whatever that was worth in this institution of apathetic zombies. His main axes to grind were with our government and Americans, whom he felt were ignorant, intolerant, racist, greedy, mindless, cosmetically indulged, imperialistic, war-mongering, materialistic, complacent, spoiled, and, most irredeemable, indifferent to the misery of the under classes here and throughout the world. We were the most hated, hateful and monstrously despicable race on earth. Once, when I questioned his bombast, he called me a misinformed simpleton, and I called him a calculated eccentric and a pretentious fraud, to which he scoffed jeeringly and informed Mr. Edwards he must be “losing his marbles to allow a stunted suburban fool like ME in his seminar.”

    When the subject of Steinbeck, my new idol, came up, Mills said the great man was “written out, contrived, embarrassing…”

     I countered, “You should worship Steinbeck, Mills. He fought for social justice and the underdog. They even called him a Communist, like they do you.”

     “Steinbeck’s lost his way. You’re a living, breathing cliché.”

      They had to separate us, Edwards in the middle. Mills retired to his room adjoining the front parlor. Edwards immediately warned me to watch what I said, because Mills liked to eaves drop and collect material to use in his columns against his myriad enemies. I purposely lingered near his room and spouted my own particular brew of blasphemy, hoping to draw him out of the room for a fisticuff, but of course he was non violent and in contempt of all forms of competition (which was for children), his scholarly rejoinder being to lose himself in the clattering of his typewriter.

     I drove home wondering who I was becoming and if it was any damn good.

     (Next Sunday installment: Big Moe is not impressed with his Kid.)