Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [7]
Christmas came and reality set in that we were no longer in Kansas City. I was used to getting cool stuff for Christmas. This Christmas would taint my view of Christmas for years to come. I got a baseball glove and a pile of unsalted peanuts (in shell) wrapped in a brown bandana. I did not play baseball nor did I particularly enjoy the game. My favorite color was blue, while the color I hated most was brown, and I had never worn a bandana, nor planned to. After opening these super presents, I was kind of like okay; now let’s hope I get some good ones to balance these out, because otherwise I might have to move back to Kansas City on my own. There were no other presents—that was it! No more.
Even though this is the first Christmas that I can recall, I knew that this Christmas did not measure up to past ones. I could have gotten a broomstick and a dustpan the year before. At least it had been logged as a good Christmas in my mind. So this is really the first memory that I associated with our newfound city. Los Angeles sucks! With the little information I had obtained, I was able to determine this at a very young age.
A short while later, we moved to a house in Echo Park, a “good deal” my parents had found. My sister and I were pretty excited. Our own house again! The excitement was short lived. We moved and it was a nightmare.
The house itself was pretty decent in terms of size. It had at least three stories and was on a hill. But the front door had no knob. It had a padlock that you had to unlock to get in and then you had to take the lock and move it to the inside to lock the door. This seemed odd to me, not like most doors I had seen up until this point.
There were a lot of things in the house that were odd. Plumbing, carpets, closets, smells, sinks, all had oddness about them. It was like someone had lived there before us, but not really.
The hill we lived on was more like the local neighborhood dump. There was literally 50 dump trucks’ worth of trash over a small dirt hill adjacent to our house. I would occasionally see people bring their garbage down the street and just toss it onto the hill.
Apparently no one had lived in our house for a long while. Officially, that is. The house was apparently overrun by transients and squatters. They certainly had not been doing a lot of household repairs or complaining about the garbage being dumped on the hill next door.
My parents did, however, attempt to make it as nice as possible while we lived there, which was only for a few weeks. They were getting a divorce. I don’t really think I understood what this meant at the time, but I knew that it would mean that my mom and dad would be living in different places. That seemed okay to me and not that big a deal.
My dad ended up moving to an apartment on Tamarind Street back in Hollywood. It was across the street from a huge castle. I thought this was pretty cool. My mom ended up living with a new friend of hers on Carlos Ave, right next to Hollywood Blvd. In fact if you looked out the window at the back of the house, you could see Hollywood Blvd!
The arrangement was that my sister and I would stay with my mom for most of the week and spend the weekend with my dad. We liked going to our dad’s place because he had cable TV. My mom did not like TV and did not have one. My dad would also take us out to eat at restaurants while mom had been converted to a “health food nut.” She rarely had edible food in the house during the week, so that weekly restaurant run was a lifesaver.
My mom had a new boyfriend every few months. A lot of times she would end up moving in with her boyfriends and that meant we would have to move too. My dad, however, lived in three places the entire time he was in LA. I once made a list of all of the places we lived in the first ten years in LA and figured out that I had moved