Billy Straight

9

The park took me in like a friend. I learned.

Things like what times the rangers patrolled and how to avoid them. Which restaurants threw out the freshest food and how, if you worked in the dark, you didn't get bothered while Dumpster-diving.

Who people were.

The guys on Western were drug dealers and all they wanted was to do their business without being annoyed, so I stayed on the other side of the street. After about a month, one of them crossed over and said, “Smart boy,” and gave me five dollars.

I learned how to get stuff.

If you go far enough east on Los Feliz, the fancy houses stop and there are apartments. On Sunday, the people who live in the apartments sell stuff out on their front lawns, and if you wait till the end of the day, you can pick up things extra-cheap because they don't want to bother packing it up.

I bought a green blanket that smelled of wet dog for one dollar and a sleeping bag for three, and I got the guy who was selling the sleeping bag to throw in a pocketknife with three blades, one of them a screwdriver, for free.

Sometimes the people selling looked at me strangely- like, What's a kid doing buying underwear?- but they never turned down my money.

I bought a flashlight, two packets of AA batteries, some old T-shirts, a sweater, and a round couch pillow that was hard as rock and rotted, a total waste.

I spent thirty-four more Tampax dollars the first month. Adding the five I got from the dope dealer, that left fifty-four dollars. I found the Five Places and spread my stuff around them.

I learned when to smile, when not to, who to look at, who to ignore. Found out money is a language.

I made mistakes. Ate bad food and got sick, one time really bad, throwing up for three days straight, with fever and chills, and sure I was going to die. That time I was in a cave in Three, living with bugs and spiders and not caring. On the third day, I crept out before sunrise and washed my clothes in the brook. My legs were so weak it felt like someone was kicking me in back of my knees. I got better, but since then my stomach hurts a lot.

I learned about prosties and pimps and saw people doing sex in alleys, mostly women down on their knees sucking on guys who didn't move, just groaned.

I realized that to get enough money so no one would use me, I'd have to be educated, but how was I going to do that living in the park?

The answer I came up with was: teach yourself- meaning schoolbooks, meaning a school. A junior high, because back in Watson, I was in seventh grade, even though a counselor visiting from Bakersfield once showed me some puzzles and told me I could skip to eighth if Mom signed some forms. She said she would, but she never did, and then she lost the forms and the counselor never asked, so I stayed in seventh, and unless I let my imagination race around I was so bored my mind felt like wood.

I found a Yellow Pages in a phone booth, took it back to the park, and looked up SCHOOLS. There were no junior highs listed and that confused me, so the next day, I called the school board, making my voice as low as possible and saying I'd just moved to Hollywood with my twelve-year-old son and he needed a junior high.

The woman on the other end said, “One second, ma'am,” and put me on hold for a long time. Then she came back, saying, “Thomas Starr King Middle School on Fountain Avenue,” and she gave me the address.

I walked over at noon. It turned out to be around two miles away from Place Three, in a grungy-looking neighborhood and gigantic- all these pink buildings with bright blue doors, a humongous yard surrounded by high fences. I watched from across the street and learned that school ended at 1 P.M., with tons of kids flooding out of the yard laughing and punching each other. That gave me a pain in my throat.

One P.M. dismissal meant I could walk around in the afternoon and not get busted.

I made a schedule: Mornings would be for washing up, eating whatever I'd put away the night before for breakfast, reading and studying, checking out the Places to make sure no one had found the stuff I hid. Afternoons would be for getting new food and whatever else I needed.

I went back to King Middle School again, during ten o'clock recess. Kids were out in the yard, and the teachers I saw were talking to each other. I slipped in through one of the gates and walked around like I belonged. There were two separate supply rooms where the books were stored.

It took eight visits to get what I needed.

It was easy. Who'd suspect a kid would take books?

I got myself textbooks for seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, some pens and pencils and pads of lined paper. English, history, science, math all the way up to algebra.

Without rowdy kids or Moron distracting me, I could concentrate; it only took two months to get through all the books. Even algebra, which I'd never had before and looked hard- all those letter symbols that didn't make any sense at first- but the beginning was all review, and I just moved ahead page by page.

I liked the idea of variables, something meaning nothing by itself but taking on any identity you wanted.

The all-powerful X. I thought of myself as X-boy- nothing, but also everything.

I took all the books back to King Middle School one night and left them at the fence. Except the algebra text, because I wanted to practice equations. I knew I had to keep my mind busy or it would get weak, but I was tired of schoolbooks, wanted some vacation. Different types of knowledge- encyclopedias, biographies of people who'd succeeded. I missed my presidents book.

No storybooks, no science fiction; I don't care about things that aren't true.

I found a library right off Los Feliz, just a few blocks down on Hillhurst, a strange-looking place with no windows, stuck in the middle of a shopping center. Inside was one big room with colorful posters of foreign cities trying to imitate windows and just a few old people reading newspapers.

I was dressed neat and had the algebra book, pencil and paper, and a backpack. Sitting at a table in a far corner, I pretended to be doing equations and checked the place out.

The woman who seemed to be the boss was old and sour-looking, like the librarian back in Watson, but she stayed up front talking on the phone. The young Mexican with the really long hair was in charge of checking out books and she did notice me, came over smiling to ask if I needed help.

I shook my head and kept doing equations.

“Ah,” she said, in a very soft voice. “Math homework, huh?”

I shrugged, just ignored her completely, and she stopped smiling and walked away.

The next time I came in, she tried to catch my eye, but I kept shining her on and after that she ignored me, too.

I started to show up once or twice a week, always after 1 P.M., starting with phony homework, then examining the shelves till I found something, and reading for two hours.

Sometimes I could finish a whole book in that time. On the third week, I came across the exact Jacques Cousteau book I'd had back in Watson and thought: I am definitely in the right place.

I found the other presidents book soon after. It was the first one I took. It's the only one I kept and I'm still not sure why. I took excellent care of it, wrapping it in dry cleaner's plastic. So there was no real crime.

Still, I felt bad about it. Kept telling myself that one day, when I was an adult and had money, I'd give books to the library. Sometimes I wondered if I'd last long enough to be an adult.

Now, after what I've seen, everything seems shaky. Maybe it's time to leave the park. But where would I go?

My foot catches on a rock, but I keep my balance- finally, here's Five, the smell of the zoo blowing through the fern tangle. Time to hide, get some rest, do some thinking.

I've got to do some serious thinking.