Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Chapter Two |
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Second Life: five years 1953 - 58
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| I descended on college without the foggiest idea of what college really is. I thought it was more like a high school polish. For me UCLA became a transition from country bumpkin to CITYBOY!!! Pseudointellectual. Minor celebrity. What a SHOCK that place is, I was coming from the most backward experience you can imagine to this gorgeous factory owned by the best and brightest of UniHigh, LA High, Fairfax High, Hollywood High....stairway to the clouds and you clods, please get OUT of my way! First day of class I lost my car in the damn parking lot and had to wait until everybody went home to find it. Let me go back a bit. Mother accompanied me up there one bright summer day. Right off Sepulveda, can't miss it. We went to the Administration Building and got some papers, she was good with all her experience as a school secretary; always better to have somebody along who knows the ropes. Along with the application was a list of majors, what the hell were majors? I took a look at them and they didn't have anything I liked. At Orr HS I had tested well for funeral director or farmer. They didn't have anything like "don't know what you want to be". We sat outside for a while and talked it over. I finally decided on economics and business because that would be practical. Bring your mom along and she will show you practical. Later on I thought of transferring to a more amorphous but liveable major, something like "letters & science". You could actually major in that, like majoring in going to school. But that meant that many courses I had already taken would be useless for "graduation" so I chickened out and continued to take more useless courses in economics and business. By that time I probably could have taken classes in brain surgery and passed because I had discovered how to take classes which is entirely different from learning anything. Which brings me to: How useless the whole college education/degree system truly is. I got a very good education in college by not following any of the rules, I just got around their program. How can you define a college education by 128 units? I met all kinds of people in college who had the same problem, students are still getting the runaround by following this strange concept. What they do have in the cloistered halls is a factory run for the inmates and other drones who at a very early age are already brain-dead and want to "get through" college so they can get to their job, their wife, their husband, their family, make a lot of money and die rich and famous. GETTING THROUGH college or getting PAST, AROUND, such a magical and enlightening experience becomes a goal to which students and the system conspire. The result is another franchise event: the illusion of learning without the substance of it. But I got lucky. I wandered up to UCLA and took a useless major which allowed me to run around and discover all the good material. But first, I had to survive the FIRST YEAR! I will give them this: if you want to figure out who to flunk pile the course on and see who is still standing after the dust settles. It was very tough for me. Simply put, I was so incredibly far behind all those hotshots from Uni, LA High, Fairfax, Hollywood, the rest of the universe and outlying planets in my preparation for University work. At Orr I don't ever recall taking a book or work home after school, it might have slowed down the faculty cocktail hour. We didn't have homework for 12 years. The good news was that I finished first in my class for the boys, but I didn't know how to study. I didn't know how to take tests. At UCLA I flunked the dumbbell English requirement and had to take dumbbell English. They also gave me language, a science and a thousand other units, and wrestling of all things, I had a full program. To this day I don't know how I ever got into UCLA. Maybe they had a underground quota for the country-impaired. We lived in Inglewood in an apartment we rented from a cop. His job was to direct traffic at Manchester and Prairie after the horse races and he often regaled us with stories of almost being hit by disgruntled ponyplayers on their way home. Whitey had given me his old Chevy as a graduation present. Is their anything so sweet in America as a young man's first car? Everybody should write a story about their first car. I would slog past the fog of Inglewood and drive up Sepulveda (years before the freeway) or any other route that made sense (great LA obsession, find a new way from A to B that you can spring on the unwary---mine included Motor Avenue) to the parking lots designed by Busby Berkeley-- they went to infinity (this was also before the days of parking structures), they got very dusty or muddy depending on the time of year. After classes I would come home and study all night past the blare of the TV. But I did it, I learned in one lost year how to take courses, how to study and how to take tests. Three skills and you can pass anything. I can't recall the content of a single course I took in these first two years, they weren't courses, they were mountains to scale that wore me out. I took Spanish from the person who wrote the text, a real geezer with a boozy breath who was so tired out from teaching QUE PASA? to boneheads like me it was amazing he showed up each day. Went to the big orientation before classes started. Joe E. Brown did a turn and I thought we all had to wear beanies, no such luck. WW II had knocked off the high jinx. Got my uniform and joined AFROTC, I was totally lost the first day of drill and had to walk across the entire drill field under the glowering eyes of the cadet staff. You had to take some kind of military the first two years. College is the most perfect time in your life, everybody should have it once. Write it into the Constitution. I learned the system: How to get preregistered instead of standing in lines that went past Bakersfield to get a class that was full. How to ask one interesting question per class to get the professor to notice you. They know you are ass-kissing but they love it anyway. How to work parking. How to survive on student food. How to find anything on that monster campus. Now it is three times as big. How to use the library. The library is one of the great secrets of UCLA and I discovered that if you looked bookish enough to be a grad student and steamed past the proctor as the gate you could enter the caverns of ---- books, books, books!. Floors and floors and miles and miles of books. For somebody who was library-deprived it was a serious addiction in the making. I discovered entire fields of inquiry that I didn't even know existed? For instance, Criminology. Caryl Chessman's journey. Social Anthropology. Geology? Geography? You can major in maps? Now--should India be blue or Pakistan green or red?. Psychology? Now there was a hoot, later on I would study it seriously. All knowledge was all there, right there in all those damn books hidden away from the righteous students bent on going to football games for their education. For me the library was heaven. Back at home it wasn't too good. I was moving on and my parents were still in Orr but living in Inglewood, that was all right but it wasn't for me. I found my more liberal thinking made me a pariah around my father. His sincere Republicanism made him dogmatically distrust my growing leftist sentiments, we began to argue. Rather, he would lecture and conquer the dinner table with the strength of his dialogue supported by his position as head of the household. My parents had finally bought a house on 94th Street after the aforementioned much-dithering, a small, tract item under the approach to Runway 15R at LAX. As the jet age expanded the place would shudder to full bore takeoffs and there was a faint kerosene bouquet in the air during rush hour approaches. This house was a little tight for us all so I got a little trailer back of the garage. It also had these precise little dicky lawns that require much mowing and edging to keep them in perfect alignment with the communal middle-class expectations of Inglewood. Father bought a huge, gas-guzzling, belching and farting mower for this operation that he wheeled around until he got bored with it and so serious mowing and edging became one of my additional duties. I didn't mind it too much but edging, which was performed by another gasoline-powered turkey throwing clods of dirt or edger blades at you during the process of giving the lawn its weekly boot camp haircut was a burden. One morning he hauled me out of bed after a late night study session and gave me a smart slap across the chops for sleeping in when I should be out working on his dream lawn. What came off as a terrible scene became for me the best thing that could have happened. People who do any form of violence to you never realize that in so doing, they also liberate you from their power. I was free at last. No longer did I perceive my life as being affected by his values, his power over me as a parent. He gave me the freedom to leave and discover myself. Everybody has to do it sooner or later. If you don't, they have you your entire lifetime because they know the buttons to push and you know how to jump. By this simple act I became an adult at 19! I decided to move out of Inglewood and up to the campus, I had been recruited by a marginal fraternity called ACACIA which was a Greek name instead of letters. It was a foundling home for geeks, intellectuals and nonconformists, and I fit in quite well. I moved up to Hilgard next to the Religious Conference for the next three and a half years, and got a job working as a dishwasher, I eventually moved up to salad guy at the Chatham. Waitresses never shared their tips so I developed a lifetime aversion to tipping that I have only recently overcome. Later I waited tables at a sorority. (The pinning ceremony: after dinner the lights are dimmed, tension mounts, a candle is lit and passed around, as it goes past girls with steadies and potential pinees they all gasp. The girls play it for everything they've got. They pause, but no. The candle inexorably moves on from girl to girl. Suddenly--- a girl --- BLOWS IT OUT!!! She is pinned. Screams. Cake. More screams. Back in the kitchen we roll our eyes. Another sucker down the tubes. Is he getting any?) I finally got the best job you could have on campus, I went to work for Audio Visual. We checked for damage on films, shipped out films, etc. but the most fun was going into all the different kinds of classes and showing films and slides. I went into classes on engineering, medicine (including the dissection rooms during the break), education, public administration, art, music, film, film history, on and on. It was like having an extra free education, if something looked interesting, I would follow up on it at the library. Eventually I did the big shows in Royce with the 16 and 35 mm arcs at union wages. I was defining UCLA for myself. I couldn't find a program that was me so I made my own program. It was much better and I learned so much more. I had to put a year in at the frat house to pay the dues, go through the shit, learn the system in order to get cheap housing. This is no excuse. There were no dorms then, you were either in a house or a "NON ORG". Part of the dreadful class of homeless college students. The brotherhood quotient I am still doubtful of. I got along but I made no long-term close friendships within fraternity definitions. After the pledge year it was easy stuff, I let them have their panty raids and water fights, I was somewhere else. I had discovered the Daily Bruin. With my previous experience in journalism it was a natural. It all started quite innocently, I drew a cartoon of two bored college types sitting at a table in the cafeteria saying something, and took it up to the Bruin office. They loved it, ran it the next day. Bob Rosenstone (now head of humanities at Cal Tech) was the feature editor, he and I wrote other captions for it and ran it for a year as a repeating, inside joke. That was my entire career as a cartoonist, but with that small event I had gained entry to excitement. There was ajournalism department on campus but they had nothing to do with the Bruin. The Bruin was simply the center, the heart and soul, the politburo of UCLA student life and politics. Every malcontent, operator, hustler, politician-in-training, person-with-a-cause, was there. First, the library and now the daily paper, I was in pig heaven. I became a hanger-on and eventually, a player. The Bruin was going through an in-house purge of alleged commies (those were the days) and extreme leftists. I felt that their politics wasn't the problem, it was more like educating them to personal hygiene. True believers invariably don't have much time for showers. All the editors were canned and nobody was left standing save us gofers. Same story how the guy in the mail room gets to the top, he is there. I had gotten to know a strange, charismatic, whirlwind of a Puerto Rican named Joe Colmenares from Lawndale, bordering on greater Inglewood. He had a brother and two sisters and a father who was a complete womanizer and seldom seen. JC was also a very brilliant young man. But José (as he changed back to, I never thought Joe fit either) was not only intelligent, he had personal power, charisma that simply attracted people to him. He became the Editor and appointed me Feature Editor. I had not a whit of experience for the job but a great deal of drive, we were on the way to reconstitute the paper in our image. I found the feature page a shambles. It had been used as an organ for far leftist polemics which was turning everybody off, letters to the editor were continually bitching about small things like coffee in the cafeteria and parking. Other letters were bitching about the editorials. There were no features to speak of. I issued a call for interested people and wound up with a talented staff of amateurs---Pete Hatchi (hot peachy), Al Goldenberg for entertainment, Marty Kasindorf for exposés (now the head of the Newsweek office in LA) and John Garrett, an English exchange student hanging out of ACACIA for review of campus events (now a member of Parliament and still a good friend). I balanced the editorials which miffed both sides but at least everybody got in print somehow, and wrote most of the letters to the editor myself. Nobody writes letters to the editor unless they have an ax to grind and that can be tedious if that is all they have. I would write a variety and attach a name of somebody I knew and tell them about it. Goldenberg was great for hoaxes and got us into hot water, one night he went down to the composing room when a hole opened up in the front page and wrote a small announcement that went: "In a surprise move today, the Administration announced that by 3 p.m. today, all students must...." and the rest of it was garbled as if something got mixed up, the next day they were just about holding off students with fire hoses. Seems he tweaked student paranoia a little too much. The Dean almost fired us. Before José there was Clyde Rexrode, then José, then almost me as Editor-in-Chief. I ran for the post and lost an all-student election by 200 votes, but that was all later. José and I became the best of friends, he lived in his car or crashed anywhere he could. I let him use ACACIA any time he wanted and the brothers were more than happy. Time speeded up. I was working on the paper, going to classes, showing movies, studying, going to other lectures and events that populate a major university like UCLA, meeting with visiting delegations from Africa or Moral Rearmament, meeting with the Dean, the Chancellor (they took very close looks at our operation because we often made other papers or the local evenings news), or William C. Ackerman (now a building), the despot who ran ASUCLA and our nominal boss: YOU WILL NOT FUCK WITH THE SPORTS PAGES, THE OBSCENE AMOUNT OF SPACE THAT WILL BE DEVOTED TO SPORTS OR MAKING ASSHOLE COMMENTS ABOUT SPORTS OR SCREWING WITH OR MESSING WITH ANY KIND OF SPORTS COVERAGE AT ALL, ANY TIME, OR I WILL CLOSE YOU LITTLE PINKO ASSES DOWN AND YOU WILL HAVE TO MIMEOGRAPH THE GOD DAMN RAG... Yessir, yessir. We understood Mr. William C. Ackerman very well. UCLA was then, as now a sports-giant corporation with too much money, power, jobs, and greed at stake to ever take on and win. You can make your occasional dent but that is it. It was our deal with the devil, you gave sports a third of the paper spaceeveryday and no questions were asked about whatever you put in the rest of the space. Even if they had no news, no events, no nothing, sports would fill the space with speculation. We constituted a small family at the paper, originally Clyde Rexrode was cast as dad (a wry person who seemed ready to storm off to Vegas at the slightest excuse with girlfriend basic Annie), Diane Thatcher from Arkansas became José'scompanion and soulmate, probably understood him more thananyone to this day. There was me, Hal Glicksman who became a curator around LA, Elaine Solomon (later secretary to NIXON!), Joel Wachs, (currently LA City Councilman) and other movers and shakers we called the Kerkoff Commandos, hanging out, clustering around the office and the action and this phenomenon called Colmenares who eclipsed them all. Even Rafer Johnson. José insisted on being a participant in your life whether you wanted him to or not. He had his judgements, he thrashed through all your decisions. He would bounce stuff off you and push until he drove you nuts. If you were a person who couldn't take it, that was too bad. José would push so damn far it would hurt and then a bit farther until he really made you angry. But he was so non-defensive of himself he was impossible to attack. You couldn't get to him, he absorbed you to death. We all took a course in Machiavellian politics by Titus in political science (Your grade indicated your potential as a politician, I got a B) and we all knew the basics, José could run a Nobel seminar any time of the day or all night long. José manipulated people, he amputated them, he dug into the pulsing core of someone to find the lies, the pomposity and corruption we get so good at hiding, he was the psychologist from hell. He did not trust anyone until he had turned them inside out. No one who encountered José easily forgot him. I still find it difficult to understand the magnificence of our relationship. José taught passion and understanding yourself first before you could begin to understand anybody else. He showed you how deceptive your motives could be. His desire to find out, to seek out the human drama was a virus, we all caught it a little bit. I knew him for thirty years. He was a reader, a consumer of culture and an activist. Initially, he thought of becoming a lawyer which had Dean Hahn jumping for joy---the first Chicano leader/Senator/who knows what? José started law school but found it boring and dropped out. He went to India under the auspices of Project India run by Adeline C. Gunther of the Religious Conference. Project India people were all the comers, future leaders. When José's car finally died Chancellor Allen let him live in a guest house at the official UCLA mansion. When I was in Art School I recall a conversation we had in McArthur park, I was whining about something or other about the art/school/career, and he simply turned to me and said, "but Walt, do you really want to go back? What else IS there for you?" He meant that once you discover your dream you can't easily go back, if at all. Of course, he didn't have to pay my dues! I still wasn't aware that he was gay or AC/DC or whatever. He was living over in the boys town area of La Cienega and Melrose with a roommate. Not that it made much difference, for José's essence being wasn't sexual although I think he enjoyed its adversarial aspects. But I was getting the picture, can that many single guys drop in who are all into interior decorating and Judy Garland? He found my reactions to his life style very amusing. Eventually José discovered his power and joy in life: rabble rousing. José became an outstanding California rabble rouser, he even wrote a book about it. He went to work for the California TeachersAssociation and became a union organizer and strike "coordinator". Teacher rabble hate to be roused because they consider themselves a bit above it all, but after being screwed too many times anyone can go to the barricades. José would come in and get them fired up, organize picket lines, organize the logistics, plan the confrontations and meetings with the other side, work the media, manipulate the media, run the media. He absolutely loved it. And obviously he was very good at it. He ultimately became the Director for PR & Media Relations at CTA and moved to San Francisco. Early on I had a small show at the Bob Comara Gallery of some paintings on glass, worked somebody else's opening. For some reason Comara irritated José. He came in to the gallery with an ice cream and Bob ordered him out. José just skewered him with his hooded eyes and FLICKED the ice cream on the floor and walked out. He took no shit from pompous authority. Later on we had a lot of fun with it, replayed the scene and made up new dialogue. I did a portrait of José which for me at the time was pretty good. It was agonized and anatomically bent. Unfortunately I took it back to work on it some more and killed it off in the process. José was devastated, he had really like it. We had a big unveiling and there was a large gasp (lisp?) going around the room when it was shown. All very romantic. He never stopped talking about that damn painting. Our lives continued in a parallel fashion until he moved to San Francisco and I didn't see him as much, but there was never any lack of intensity to the relationship when we met up again. One day he called and said that he had suffered a heart attack, we exchanged survivor stories. A year later I had a small show at Hank Baum's in SF and heard he was in the hospital. I went to see him and hardly recognized my friend, he was wasted and racked with pneumonia from AIDS. It was still the thin brown monkey-like hands and the same piercing, wry insight with no self pity. We talked for an hour and I left. He died two days later. It was the first time in my life that I had known someone else's life that well, participated in it for so long. It was a such surprise to me that his life was now complete. There would never be any more José events, José stories, José perceptions, no more José being around giving life a kick in the ass. No more of that character out there discovering the unexpected in the predictable. José represents for me the human appetite for experience, expression and dissection that makes being alive so rich. He brought out the texture as well as the pain and everything else about being a human being. He never rejected life, he wanted to be in on it and a part of it. His curiosity was an obsession. He is a part of every human he ever touched and he shall forever be a part of me. Back at UCLA. College seems somewhat frivolous to me today. But College is the last moment of your romantic, non-responsible life, and I wallowed in it to the end. I was appointed head of the AFROTC Cadet Corps. I was the Colonel. A Very Big Deal. Everybody had to salute me and I used my knowledge of politics to run the cadets. For all my peers in my class I gave useless big ranks and put them out in the field drilling people. For my staff, which would plan events and make them happen I appointed underclassmen and brought them into my office one-by-one. Said that the most important recommendation on who was going to be the next Colonel was mine. Do the best job and you have it. They worked their butts off, did terrific work and I hardly had to do a thing except take salutes and sign papers. At the Bruin I shared my office with Sylvia Chase who was the social editor, she later went on to big things in TV. Sylvia was a bit lazy at her job and would occasionally ask me to write her column. Of course, I would put everybody I knew in the paper. Power corrupts absolutely. I actually accomplished a few things. After losing the election for Editor-in-Chief, I wangled a weekly column in the paper which I called "Smoke Filled Rooms". Issues and all that. One column got on a high horse about the transportation problem around UCLA, how we needed to have bicycles to cut down on the cars. A man called up next day and said that he had a good quality French bicycle he would sell to students for minimum markup. I went down to see it and next week put his story in the paper, he was swamped. The University had to put in racks because bicycles were flopped over everywhere, the revolution had happened overnight and UCLA was caught with its pants down. They had to build bicycle paths, bicycle racks right away to take care of the problem. Whenever I go to UCLA now I look at bicycle racks. I did that! Professionally, I still didn't have the vaguest idea who I was. I was an average writer, a fainthearted politician, a moderate to pseudo intellectual, a capable but bored student, probably a disaster as a lawyer (even though I passed the admission test). I asked Dean Hahn what he thought my aptitudes were. Being a psychologist he gave me every test imaginable and then called me in one day, fixed me with an intense stare (the kind they teach you in Dean school) and alluded that I was a leader and one day I would wind up behind a desk, leading. What, he couldn't tell. Just the desk part. I gather artist wasn't in the cards. I was gratified, my future was set. I would lead behind a desk. But I did like UCLA. I had extended my stay through five years because I was having such a good time. My achievement was to lift myself past Minnesota and to prepare myself for the world. I had realized that UCLA was a factory, however nice it was, still a factory, you had to create your own education to survive the apocalypse they had in mind for you. I met phenomenal people. I believed in the intellect and the imperative to debate all ideas and values. I had witnessed and participated in minor corruption. I had had notice and celebrity and experienced its narcotic effects first hand. I had begun friendships that would last. But now the Air Force owned me for three years so I regretfully said farewell to UCLA and the best time of my life. So I thought. © Walter Gabrielson 1994 All Rights Reserved ------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
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