Young and Stupid

Italian Death Machine
Echo Park, 1968

So, I was half-listening to the TV news and a piece came on about some teenager swimming somewhere who jumped off a high bridge into five feet of water and broke both legs. And I thought to myself, Lord, how stupid can you get? I was shaking my head, when I had a flashback of repressed memory and realized that my hard-won experience sometimes tends to gloss over the stupidities of my own youth ...

On me, it looked different.

In retrospect, I have to believe that there is a deity who watches over fools and children, having been both at the same time, yet still somehow managing to survive. That god must have gone out to lunch when the kid leapt off the bridge, but, I can recall more than a few times when I did incredibly stupid things and didn't die, against all reason.

Three incidents spring immediately to mind, two involving motorcycles. Well, a motorcycle, and a motor scooter. And one involving a tall building.

The first was when I worked as a swimming teacher/lifeguard at a recreation association pool. I did this for three years in my late teens.

One day, a thunderstorm rolled in, as it did a lot of summer days, and there was enough lightning and thunder so we immediately closed the pool and sent everybody home. Since it didn't slack off for a couple hours, the four guards decided to bag the day and go home ourselves.

At the time, I owned a little Harley-Davidson motorcycle. So I climbed on it and rode home, which at the time was maybe ten miles away.

No big deal, right?

Save that all I wore on that ride was my little black nylon Speedo suit.

No shirt, no shoes, no helmet, nothing else but my itty bitty suit, rolling through the rain on a glass-slick expressway at sixty miles an hour ...

On a wet road, had I put the bike down, I would have been one monster abrasion.

Stupid.

In L.A. a couple years later, we couldn't afford a car, so I got a Lambretta scooter. One of those little two-cycle death machines, all the weight behind the rider, fat little tires, and one of the most unstable things on two wheels. Sounded like a sewing machine when you revved the engine: whing-da-ding-ding-ding ...

One Saturday, I had to go into the office for a half-day. After work, a couple of the guys and I went to a nearby bar to have a few beers and shoot some pool.

Among the three of us, we drank maybe five or six pitchers of beer in a couple of hours. I got plotzed.

How, ah, plotzed was I?

I remember getting on the scooter and cranking it. And I remember getting off the scooter when I got home, a distance of some fourteen miles through L.A. surface-street traffic.

I remember nothing about the trip. Nothing. Nada. Complete blank.

Stupid. (Learned from that one -- never did it again. Scared the shit out of me.)

The third incident was when I went to visit a friend to get back a camera he had borrowed. He lived in a high-rise apartment building in Hollywood, facing the old Columbia Records building. Sixth floor. I took the urine-scented elevator up, knocked on his door, but he wasn't home.

I needed that camera. This was long before cell phones. He didn't even have a landline.

His bedroom window was a few feet from where the stairwell opened up over the street. He had casement windows -- you know, the kind that open like a book, using a little hand crank? I could almost reach the partially-opened window from the stairwell, leaning way out.

Almost. If I jumped a little, I could grab the frame.

Six stories up.

All those years of reading Spider Man must have rotted my brain.

I climbed over the railing and did a little hop, caught the casement frame and swung through the window, ta da!

Really, really, stupid.

I would like to be able to tell you that I never did anything that foolish again, but that would be a lie. I did, however, gradually begin to do fewer and fewer idiotic things, when I realized that a mistake like those I had been making COULD KILL ME DEADER THAN BLACK PLASTIC!

So I cut the teenager a little more slack after that bit of head-shaking nostalgia. Not that much, but a little. And my advice for him: The fool-and-children guy might be on a break next time you decide you are invulnerable and gonna live forever. Keep that in mind.