But I said nothing.

three

IT WASN’T ALWAYS like this.

I have a degree in Electrical Engineering. And a career in sales.

Did I ever like the work?

It was a living. It was, for a while, not a bad living.

But did I ever really like the work?

There was a moment … a summer thirty-four years ago … when just out of Cal State I spent three months climbing electrical poles in that high country near Sequoia. All those crazy tall redwoods and being at an altitude of 8,000 feet and watching snow white out the horizon in May. Then there was this discovery of oxygen. Pure uncorrupted oxygen. After my twenty-two previous years in Los Angeles – where several hundred thousand internal combustion engines define the daily air quality – I was having my first proper encounter with ozone. And I was out in the wild, far away from city and family: that bungalow-bland corner of North Hollywood which hasn’t changed much over the past thirty years. Dad himself grew up in South Central LA. A couple of streets of prole Irish America right near some badass ghettos. Hispanic, black ghettos. A place where being a white guy was decidedly no-go. And where – as Dad never tired of telling me – if you kept to certain rules you could also sidestep trouble.

Dad liked to play the Paddy card. Though he also loved singing the ‘I was born on Mean Streets’ blues the fact is: no one in his family was ever busted by the cops. All of his three sisters – one of whom became a Carmelite in Nevada (yes, they actually have a convent near Vegas) – were classic ‘good girls’ … blue-collar shorthand for not getting caught peddling themselves down a dark alleyway. And to the best of my knowledge there were no gang warfare moments where the tough Irish boys got into a rumble – in pure 1950s teen movie style – with the local Hispanic gang on some dirty boulevard.