Everything works out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out? It’s not the end.

The Early Years

In the end this will be part biography and part fantasy. I recon that’s what everyone’s written story is. I’m writing this for a number of reasons. The first is that I am the first in my generation to have a digital footprint. This means that my life is not just captured in a hatbox full of old pictures and left on a shelf. My life has been posted. Maybe generations from now some distant relative will read this and gain some insight, or get a laugh. Either one is fine.

“It’s been said that my family suffers from mental illness. The truth is, we enjoy it quite a lot.” That was a salutation from my oldest sister in an email. I am 65 years old and as I sit at my computer this quote rings like a bell. I come from a long line of crazy, as I suspect does all of humanity.

My earliest memory is from about the age of 1 in the house on C Street. It may well have been another letter of the alphabet, but you get the idea. It was one of the tiny Bungalow houses that the military built to house the thousands of troops that would come home and establish a Middle-Class in America for the next 50 years. The front doors opened into the modest living room and my very earliest memory is lying on the living room rug and staring at a picture of pink flamingos on the wall. Yes, it seems my life started with “Pink Flamingos” – I dare you to Wiki the movie. My life at that moment was new and breathtaking and luminous. On the floor at the center of a tiny house looking at flamingos.

I remember the smell. My maternal grandmother had come to lend a hand after I was born. I remember the smell of baking and flowered gramma hands and aprons and being held. I wish my dad Ozzy and my mom Harriet were alive to read this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Ozzie_and_Harriet

I think I must have shared a room with my sister Donna who was supposed to be born with a penis to glorify my father so they didn’t have an appropriate girl’s name picked out (my dad’s name is Don and I am Don Jr.) and I must have been between 2 and 3. I say this because I was walking and climbing and generally raising havoc I am sure. One day, I wanted something that was in my closet. The object of my desire was on the very top shelf so I grabbed the folding chair that was in our room and attempted to retrieve my prize by standing on it. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but the folding chair collapsed with me on board and some part of it turned into a miniature 1950’s finger guillotine neatly slicing off the diagonal tip of my left pointy finger. Mom rushed me to my uncle’s office – he as a physician in the small town of Lompoc and he stitched up my finger. I have a weird sense of the trauma. It was like being awakened to the pain of being human. It sucked. I wailed. Time marched on.

My mom always took pictures and years ago my oldest sister digitized her collection. I have looked through these images and wondered how much of my childhood memory is stolen from these stills rather than being actual recollections. At this point I’m not sure it matters. This is my story and there are no literary guidelines to follow. You have already been warned that this could be a work of fiction.

There are pictures of me with my mom and dad. Some of them holding me as a baby, but then what the hell else do you do with a baby? These snaps are very few and non-existent after babyhood. There wasn’t a lot of touching going on in the Warrick household. It is probably worth mentioning at this point that right after I was born I developed whooping cough. I lived the first few months of my life in an incubator and some kind of weird tent thing when I came home. Better Homes and Babies suggests that not touching a baby after its born can lead to certain behaviors in adulthood, and who am I to prove them wrong. After all, they are Better Homes and Babies. In brief what you end up with, is a misenthrope that doesn’t like to be touched, doesn’t develop relationships and sometimes sucks his thumb. O yea, drug and alcohol addiction almost always come along for the ride.

I’m not sure if this is a memory but I remember sucking my thumb. I remember how wrinkled the little digit was, almost deformed in a way. Unlike Linus and his blanket, I had my sister’s hair. It was soft and blond and I would follow her around with a handful of her silky hair comforting myself. I have an even vaguer memory of the trauma when I was forced to cold-turkey off my thumb addiction. Apparently back then it was unseemly to have a baby over the age of three with a thumb sucking jones. The remedy was simple. You simply applied “Professor Augustus Magnum’s magical thumb suck deterrent” to the offending digit. This was some kind of topical ointment that parents applied to the thumbs of their terminal thumb sucking patients. It was so nasty, so caustic that once the treated digit was inserted in the mouth it was immediately withdrawn. I am sure that whatever was in this paste was completely benign and homeopathic, although it was probably just napalm and glass shavings.

I believe my father’s mother lived very close. I remember the smell of her perfume. It wasn’t faint and suggestive or evocative, but worn like a poultice to ward off evil spirits. Fortunately, I never had to get very close to her. She wasn’t the grandmothering type, in fact you were not allowed to address her as grandmother, but rather by her first name “Bernice” which morphed in kid talk to “Beese” which she tolerated. She was indeed a product of her time which seemed to me to be the gilded age. She was emblematic of an age of the rich and the rest. She lived and died a dynastic queen who must have time traveled to 1957.

I remember “Bear” and “Dog” and “Emmet the clown”. They were my friends except for Emmet, who at night would become animated and scare the shit out of my in my crib. A pedophilic face looking down at me from the dresser. He was one of those toys you weren’t allowed to play with. Perhaps if I had been allowed I could have convinced him to not be such an asshole.

I hope some of the memories of C street will come back to me and I will be able to add to the first couple years but for now I have turned all the cards face up which makes us jump forward a couple of years (I think).

From Lompoc California to Santa Maria. I don’t think my dad opened up a new dental practice in Santa Maria but was one of the early suburban commuters. I’m pretty sure the reason we moved was to put him across the street from Santa Maria country club a beautiful golf course in a small California town. I’m not sure when golf became his obsession, but Santa Maria is where it realized its bloom. I remember the front doors. The whole house was designed with an oriental motif and there were carved brass oriental ornamentations behind the knobs on the doors. Just to add a touch of weirdness, the landscape designers buried to enormous iron tubs to the motif. These tubs were as I recall the huge iron vessels used for the rendering of whale fat when Whales were still being hunted and rendered for their constituent liquids. I remember this was a house to be more seen than enjoyed. But then it is best to remember that America was just beginning to recognize what it is to consume ravenously, senselessly and ruthlessly.

I have always loved music. Even from the times of the pink flamingos on the walls, my dad was continuously playing Montovani and Mario Lanza. When we moved to Santa Maria I have a memory of having a record player that somehow I was playing with outside. One day my dad came home and inflicted a mortal wound on the phonograph. Everything that happened after that is blurry but I’m pretty sure my dad threw a fit and I was lucky to be uninjured. I know because I have demonstrated the same loss of consciousness rage throughout my life. It can be devastating, I’m sure if you asked one of my kids they could tell their own versions on their own timelines, interwoven with their own embellishments. For a 5 year old kid that day concluded with some corporal punishment and a broken record player. A strange sidebar is that I remember one of the vinyl records was transparent red plastic. Ah childhood, ain’t it colorful.

The upside to these new deluxe digs was that not only did it come with a golf course for dad, but there was a park at the end of the street which had its own little zoo. No shit. All I really remember is the buffalo and I think my sister Linda walking me there.

<INSERT NEW MEMORY HERE>

African big game hunting. In California, there is no such thing as a basement. They don’t typically build houses with them here, the sandy soil doesn’t lend itself to this midwestern subterranean rumpus room. But there was one, the neighbor across the street had a basement. It was filled with the taxidermized specimens of all the big game hunting he had done through his life. There were Cheetah and Antelope, Elephant feet and tusks, pretty much anything you could shoot and kill from a safe distance on the savannah was there is in this basement, on the floor, the walls, the ceiling. On the one hand, to a 5 year old boy in the time of Tarzan and Johnny Weismuller it was like stepping into a comic book. Wow, sounds like Michael Jackson’s goodtime ranch (or whatever they called it) it was Disneyland before Disneyland. A Golf course, a beautiful house, a lovely neighborhood, good schools, a zoo 2 blocks up the street, a golf course across the street and red vinyl records that only broke when your dad parked his car on them. The stuff of great childhoods had been assembled at the starting gate of the happily-ever-after life, so what better time to toss it all away and try suburban poverty for a few years, just to understand the contrast. Yes, my dad woke up one day and decided that being a dentist sucked. He only took the gig because his step-dad didn’t think he was smart enough to be an MD like his half brother Uncle Jim, the stitcher of pointy fingers. So in the blink of an eye, we packed up our bags and moved to the inner city in LA so he could take a residency in oral surgery which would place him a step closer to his big dream of not becoming a real doctor.

The horror show. I write this here only as a sidebar to amplify and punctuate how deep the freak show went. We moved to LA and my dad entered a residency in maxillofacial surgery at USC. He was putting faces back together after catastrophic trauma. Traffic accidents….a guy who tried to commit suicide by blowing off his head with a shotgun but only managed to blow off his face, shit like that. Not the kind of images that kids should be exposed to, and yet…this became a pastime in our home. Mom would break out the 35mm slide projector and we would be treated to before and after pictures of the most gruesome scenes you can imagine. For dad, this was just a parlor game. I remember him telling me about a motorcyclist who was brought in after a severe traffic accident. When they got the patient on the table he was alive. When the surgical team removed his helmet, apparently his brain came with it. It didn’t end well for the patient, but made for some great bonding between father and son. Also explains why I was never allowed on a motorcycle, though I don’t count that as much of a loss.

While in LA we lived in two different houses. The first was in Norwalk I think and the second was in Buena Park. It is interesting the bubbles that you live in. Inside each bubble we keep our friends and acquaintances, our colleagues and our family. In Santa Maria the bubble had a zoo and golf course and whaling pots. The first little house in Norwalk was filled with blue collar families. That meant that there were fist fights and drinking and behavior that in general I was not familiar with. I remember the big guy down the street picking a fight with a neighbor over something and I saw adults become combatants. That had never been in any of my bubbles before. I myself had to engage in the arts the Marquis de Queensbury with the offspring of that same particularly brawny Irishman from down the street. In essence, he kept kicking the shit out of me until one day, my 2nd oldest sister decided that it was time for me to learn to defend myself. I believe her strategy was for me to march right up and punch him in the nose. I don’t recall how that particular match went down but I was a very tender child and suspect that I never followed through and no noses bled. I do remember another aspect of her training regimin. She would grab both my hands and pummel me in the face with them all the while mocking: “You like that? You like that?” I didn’t but couldn’t see how it was preparing me for fisticuffs with the bully down the street.

It is worth mentioning my dad’s addiction at this point because it prompts memories for me of this time. My dad was addicted to new cars. He would constantly trade one car for another model or make or the latest offering from Detroit. What was weird in moving to LA was that the scale of his addiction had to decrease. There were weird little foreign cars in the garage. I remember a little bug shaped Renaud, and a couple other weird European commuter vehicles, all of which drove my mom crazy and they were a bitch to drive, especially after the land yachts disappeared for the sake of our new poverty. It is worthy to note that the last land yacht I remember in Santa Maria was a 1964 Lincoln Continental 2 door (my dad always bought coupes, fuck convenience). I believe I was with him for either the purchase or the trade of that vehicle on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I have a clear memory of the showroom floor and a brown wooden loud-speaker in the lobby and the news coming across it. I remember the stunned silence which was beyond my reckoning.

Dad on the other hand had his own commuter vehicle, usually a lesser Detroit model which he also changed as often as his underwear. There was the Pontiac Star Fire which I thought had a really cool name and the Oldsmobile and I’m sure a Ford or two. Waxing and washing of his car was a weekend thing out of Normal Rockwell.

Living in LA put us close to a male cousin whose name was Jody. His name was a derivation of my dad’s stepfather’s name which was “Joseph Dekalb Warrick” – Joselph Dekalb became Joe-D or Jody. He was a criminal and a very very broken human being his entire life. I remember Aunt Will (my dad’s half sister) and Uncle Dale (her husband) and Jodi showing up frequently while we were there. When Jody the juvenile delinquent was around there was always trouble. I remember once he though it would be fun to hurl dirt clods in the air and watch then break apart like bombs when they hit the sidewalk. This lasted until the one clod went aloft and landed on the hood of my dad’s car. This is the first time I remember corporal punishment from my dad. The belt came off, there was no hesitation and the ass-whoopin’ commenced. But that was the way it was back then. Jodi, on the other hand was being reared by parents that subscribed to the Dr. Spock school of child rearing and was told not to throw rocks at cars ever again. That sucked. They spared the rod and spoiled the child when in fact, at an early age they should have started attaching electrical leads to his nipples and making him live in a a dog crate. Do I digress? Yup. Sorry about that.

I have loved the smell of Eucalyptus ever since Buena Park. Now that I think about it, I recall that the Buena Park house was a rental, so for some reason we must have sold our home and moved into this well-worn tract home. Details are unimportant. In fact this whole paragraph is unimportant except for the Eucalyptus. It is the scent I associate with the first human being I fell romantically in love with. Her name was Diane and it was the only time in my life that I saw her. She must have been in her early teens and I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7. She became the esthetic model of the perfect female face which has been with me all my life. And yes, before you ask, my wife does look an awful lot like Diane. Oh, and just so you know, she was my cousin on my mom’s side but boy did she give me a boner.

For some reason, the Christmas that I remember from this time rocked. I think this is largely influenced by the afore mentioned family photo album, but there were certain aspects that are genuine memories as well. My favorite gift of all time was a suit of armor. It was actually a suit of cardboard printed to look like armor. Insert tab A into flab B. It was marketed under the banner of my favorite TV show “Ivanhoe” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051286/ I remember what a magical experience the costume was. It was the first time that I felt absolutely transformed. Welcome to the theater.

This is also the time when the family Scottish Terrier “Mac” shows up in my memory. Since I can’t recall when he arrived or his puppyhood, we will assume that he manifested as an adult dog, avoiding the tiresome process of paper training. Scotties are cool dogs. They have ginormous heads for their overall size and are an ancient breed of hunting dog for small game. Several years later I was taking Mac for a walk on a choke chain and a metal leash when he encountered a black Labrador whose scent he obviously didn’t appreciate. Mac broke loose his bindings and like the dark poop streak on a carpet he darted like a bullet toward the unexpecting animal. He never slowed down, he never stopped to bark or growl, he simply tilted himself at a full run and grabbed the other dog by the neck. Then the head thrashing began as terriers do with a dish towel, only there was a lab attached. I don’t remember how we got them separated (I’m thinking a neighbor with a hose) but I do remember having a different understanding of this squat little fellow with the head the size of a German Shepherd. No one was wounded, but it was traumatic as shit.

At home, Mac was my dad’s dog. I am pretty sure it was an FDR thing, but he was most congenial to all the family and his most endearing talent was the ability to say: “Hello”. No seriously, when Scotties greet their people they say hello. Unfortunately the articulators for speech are not there, so you got more of an “Arrr – rooo”. But it was completely understandable. Just Mac saying hello as you put your lunchbox on the kitchen counter when you got home from school.

It is during this period that I also remember the darkness in my mom and dad’s relationship. Many were the nights when my sisters and I would huddle in our rooms (at least I was) listening to the ungodly arguments and fighting. Home was not a safe place, especially for an extremely tender hearted kid. It’s also worth mentioning that it was at this time I discovered my own unregulated temper. I could fly into a seething rage and be locked in my room until I could control myself. Can you say “Bi-Polar”…I knew that you could.

This time really marks my first memories of my sister Sherry. I can recall that she had adopted the same obsession with cars that my dad had. The first one I remember was an Olds Cutlas I think. She suffered from this addiction for years and finally broke it with an 82 Camaro which she drove the wheels off of. Sherry was already an adult and out of the home by the time I came along. This isn’t entirely true as I think she lived with grandmother Bernice. In order to understand this, you need to know a little something about Sherry’s history.

When my dad was drafted into World War II, he was newly married to a lady named Claire and they had a baby, my half sister Sherry. While my dad was serving in the south pacific as a medic in the navy; Claire contracted polio and died. I assume my dad got a hardship discharge and went home. Bernice adopted Sherry and she lived a weird Alice in Wonderland existence (at least in my imagination) living with Beece and her Husband(s). Apologies if any of this is out of joint – it is a little out of joint in my head, so don’t feel bad. At the end of the day, Sherry didn’t really show up in my life until she was graduating from nurses school. Not to jump ahead to the end of the book, but just so you know….Sherry is a personal hero.

So that takes us back to finish off our stay in Los Angeles, as I am certain my dad finished the program and was off to start a new practice. Instead of being Donald F. Warrick D.D.S, he was now: Donald F. Warrick D.D.S. ~ yea, I know, I only wrote that part down because it looks strange on paper. But he had indeed upgraded his skills and credentials. Dad was an incredible surgeon and should have stayed in the inner city where his skills would have been useful. Instead, he went back to Lompoc to open a private practice. Now imagine if you will, having spent two intense years learning how to do facial reconstructive surgery and you plan to do it from a small town practice in little town of 25K in Cali. Yea, didn’t think that one all the way through. There were a few procedures that he would occasionally have an opportunity to perform that he learned from Marsh Robinson MD at USC. One was called a Prognathism. This was a procedure for people with an underbite, whereby a section of the mandible is removed and the jaw moved backwards to the teeth properly meet. Another procedure that comes to mind was called a Caldwell Luck, I have no idea what it was but I am sure I have seen it on the menu at Chinese restaurants. But I digress, again.

When you have a set of skills that has a very limited audience in rural America, you have to focus on what you can do to make the doe ray me. This turned out to be the removal of wisdom teeth from teenagers. You see, one of the big benefits of becoming an Oral Surgeon was that he could administer anesthesia directly in his own office. This little bit of information will come back into prominence in about 20 years, so keep reading.

One last tidbit before we leave Donnie in Lost Angeles. I remember a night when I kissed my parents goodnight. As was always the custom, I would crawl up into their lap as they sat in their lazyboys and I would get a kiss before following the sandman back to my bedroom. On this particular night, I kissed my mom, then hopped up into my dad’s chair. He gently grabbed me under the arms and set me back down on the floor. All he said was: “Big boys don’t do that any more”.

So back to Lompoc we go. I am guessing that I am 7 or 8 at this point. Instead of moving into the old downtown where I was born, dad found an upscale “I Dream of Jeannie” neighborhood called Vandenberg Village, and the Village Country Club. It even had a windy road to get into the development which was chic but a bitch to ride your bike up. We were about to start livin’ the life. The first house he built I think was the Culberson house, that was the contractor who I think lived next door, it was a 3 story split level with what amounted to an attic bedroom on the third floor. This room was occupied by my sister Lin who would soon soar into beauty pageant fame and be named: “The Flower Queen” in the annual flower parade. It is worthy to note that Lompoc’s history was based on two industries. One, the growing of ornamental flowers and seeds and two, the production of diatomatious earth at the John’s Manville plant. We were a rocket ready to be fueled by adolescent hormones and the fuse had been lit.

I am in love for the second time. What is this crap? Why is my pulse pounding? Why am I light headed and doodling her name in my third grade notebook. Really, more scribbling I don’t think I had mastered cursive. Mrs. Salazar. She was a Goddess. She didn’t walk around the classroom, she floated, her glowing golden hair spilling on to your desk when she would lean in to answer your question. This is where I take a pause to state the obvious, that this is a work of literary fiction and I am indeed insane. But let’s continue. Mrs. Salazar was indeed my first teacher crush. I wish that I had been able to study with her longer as she was one of those teachers who taught you how and WHY to learn.

While in the tender care of Mrs. Salazar I was cast in the lead of the 3rd grade play “Jack and Jill in Wonderland” – This was a musical which came naturally, except for the choreography. I also remember zealously going off script on the occasional ramble just because I felt the feedback from and audience for the very first time. It was my first theatrical production. My dad wouldn’t attend such a thing. I think for him it was in someway demeaning to watch me up there. You see, I think he was a talented child as well and instead of just an absent father, he had no father at all.

All the rest of the bitches I had after Mrs. Salazar where worn out, timeclock punchers who smelled of elderberry wine.

Before we talk more about my tenure at Buena Vista, let’s talk about porn. While walking home from school one day I happened upon a magic stone. The stone was large and flat and seem to be surround by leaves and detritus. Peeking out from one corner of the magic mound I could see the edge of a magazine hidden under some foliage. It was a porn magazine. Remember this is the mid 1960’s and next to heroine, a porn magazine could send you to the big house for 5 ta 10.

It was mysterious. I mean that in a curious not a carnal way. I had never seen those parts on another human being and I was filled with an odd sense of repulsion and curiosity. Soon, I shared my find with some neighbor kids who were sworn by an oath to protect the sacred manuscript at all costs. Being the owners of such contraband was a powerful thing and word got out of its existence. While it never grew into a full fledge business, I do believe I made a nickel one time showing a picture of a vagina to a 10 year old. Take that one off the bucket list.

My dad loved Abraham Lincoln. He had in his personal library the complete works of Lincoln which was a multi-volume set of every word the man ever wrote. For their 25 anniversary my mom bought my dad a miniature statue of the Lincoln Memorial which was always displayed in his office. Hence I loved Abraham Lincoln.

I think I was in the 6th grade and we must have been studying about Lincoln. I memorized the Gettysburg Address and announced to my teacher that I had produced a theatrical event for the occasion of our study. I had discovered the old bank of Century Strand dimmers behind the main curtain of the stage and mastered the use of the antique lighting board on my own. On the day of the performance, I had acquired a wooden rocking chair, and tied a string to a runner. It sat center stage. I opened the curtain to reveal the rocking chair and it slowly started to rock, I brought up the light special on the chair, changed the color of the wash and began to recite the Gettysburg address from a mic I had secreted to stage right near the lighting board. I recited the address, the lights dimmed and the curtain closed. I was in absolute heaven. I discovered the magic and the machinery of the stage. The general consensus of the production from my peers is that it totally sucked. And I agree, from their perspective it did. For me though…it is the moment my ego met the flame.

10 year old boys are the most sexually curious and easily repulsed of all the human larvae. We actually paid a girl to show us her underwear. I don’t think I need to elaborate here it would simply add to the shame. It was about this time that my older cousin Jodi started molesting me. They didn’t travel to Lompoc often, but when they did Jodi being older and larger by far would force me to perform oral sex. I reported this to my parents but it was quickly swept under the rug and I was instructed never ever to mention this to anyone – ever. The molestations ended when I got large enough to defend myself.

At some point we moved from the 3 story house to another house that my dad had built just a few hundred yards away. The landscaping was primarily done by hand by my mom. Only the sod and the sprinkler systems were installed.

I found a bike in the Sears catalogue that I really really wanted

Introducing Fred Goodgame and Eddie Porazzo.

But childhood must come to an end at the end of the 6th grade and the passage into junior high inevitably follows. As does body odor, pubic hair and sexual hyperactivity. At least this happens for most kids that are going into Jr. High after all, you’re going to have to take gym class and stand naked in front of dozens of your peers. Wieners as far as the eye can see, especially in the showers. Within the body of young boys that make this epic crossing there are a few who might be less developed. I was one of those. I was the fat kid with no pubes and a little dick. While my self esteem eventually recovered with the maturation of my manhood; it’s hard not to recall those early days in the shower. We are speaking in generalities, sharing the kind of common experience that I think most young guys have. In my case it was that on steroids. You see, the closest junior high to Vandenburg Village was actually the school at Vandenburg Air Force Base. I was a tubby civilian white kid in a military school with a baby dick and a “Please knock me unconscious” sign. I remember one day not completely locking my locker after heading out for calisthenics. When the period was over and we were sent to the showers, the drill sergeant (PE teacher) yelled at me from the office at the top of the stairs where they overlooked the locker room. I was dressed down verbally for the infraction and made to march the stairs to the office where the appropriate “Swats” were delivered by something akin to a squash racket with little holes to reduce wind resistance. I knew I was finished. Only a miracle could save me. I was to young to die. Then God intervened.