1974 was the year where change was about to come about in my life. During the second part of 6th Grade at the beginning half of the year, I had no idea that my childhood was inching ever so closer to the start of what I refer to as my true teenage years.
Our teacher, Susan Johnson was starting to miss chunks of school because she would get some nasty colds. When this happened, Miss Moreno (the substitute teacher) would come in to take over. I had a little bit of interest in Miss Moreno because she was a little more shapely. She had some curves. And, well you know, when you are at that age, a young guy’s mind gets active.
As far as music and my relationships with my classmates go, everything was still riding on the high from the Fall and the whole 5th Grade experiences of the school year before. But a weirdness was beginning to creep in that I would only figure out with the benefit of years on hindsight. The weirdness was change itself.
To explain the changes, I have to take a moment to take you back to the Fall of ’73 briefly. In music, I didn’t realize that a single by Eddie Kendricks was to be the first hint of change ahead. He released the great danceable Soul hit “Keep On Truckin” then. And then in the early months of 1974, he followed that up with “Boogie Down”. Again, it was danceable Soul music. It was different and in a lot of ways it was progressive too.
It was in the Spring of ’74 that my favorite craze was sprung upon the land. It was even immortalized in a famous Ray Stevens song. “The Streak” and the streaking craze swooped down from the liberated spirit of the ’60s and made its prescence known. And I have to tell you, I loved the idea that you could possibly glimpse some naked girl running around without having to wait until I was old enough to walk into a strip bar like The Pink Poodle on Bascom Avenue.
I was going to need that kind of thinking in mind when I was to witness streakers for the first time because our class suffered through something that shook us. The Spring of ’74 brought us the loss of Sister Regina Marie. Our great knuckle your head buddy was hiding from us that she had a heart condition of her own that she wasn’t doing anything about. She was always so concerned about me and my heart health. I can still remember her having one of our P.E. teachers literally run laps with me and take my pulse as I was running. She didn’t want anything to happen to me and she remembered when I was a baby and nearly didn’t make it with all of the open heart surgery and problems associated with it.
Since I had been a crossing guard, we had an assembly of the different schools doing drill presentations one evening and I’ll never forget the final time I saw Sister Regina Marie. When we were done with the presentation (which I can’t remember where it was held), I will never forget walking side by side with her and seeing that she was as white as a sheet and walking very much slowed down. The glow she usually had in her eyes was completely gone and she was talking in a very labored way. Little did I know that she was going to die in just hours after I saw her.
We were all at school one day when we were all suddenly called into the backyard of the refrectory next to the basketball courts. It was a very lovely clear day and a ton of us were basking in the glow of knowing that school wasn’t far from ending for the year. After we were all gathered and we were all setteled in, the news was broken to us. I will never forget seeing the girls in my class react to the news. It was like they got hit by a sledgehammer. I looke around me and quite a few people were crying. I felt terrible, but I was immediately thinking that I had made the connection to how she looked the night before. And so, for the weeks we had left in school, we had to pick up where we left off and carry on.
There was an incident involving a book report that I’ll never forget. I tried tackling Arthur C. Clark’s Sci-Fi book Rendezvvous With Rama. I had a hell of a time with the book in trying to figure out what it was about and I couldn’t pronounce the word rendezvous. I had picked the book up at the Lucky store that was a couple of blocks from the Camino house and I figured that it would be easy to read since I dug Star Trek and that I was really enjoying the Science Fiction Hall Of Fame books I was reading. Well, I really messed up my book report. Susan embarrassed me by telling me how to pronounce rendezvous in front of the class. It was the first time that I ever really felt like I didn’t live up to a homework assignment (other than the math stuff which I always had increasing difficulty with). It was this incident along with my lazy grades across the board which makes me think that it put the idea into Susan’s mind that Summer School was going to be a possibility for me. Between that and the whole social element of how I integrated myself with others may have been a contributing factor which led to Susan making the decision to send me off to Wilson School for the Summer. This was to be a big hammer blow to me and my feelings of freedom.
It was during this first half of 1974 when I got to really enjoying being around Chris R. He and I were really into Star Trek (just like Bill R. was). We began to start seeing each other after school occasionally. It was Chris who taught me about Bruce Lee. In fact, we went to see a Bruce Lee movie at one of the movie theatres in town. It was a year after Bruce’s death and I made an immediate connection to Bruce Lee. It wasn’t just the fighting thing which appeals to any guy at the age I was at, but I was picking up on the whole Eastern philosophy and how he carried himself even though I didn’t understand it and couldn’t really put any of this in words yet. But he was a completely different kind of guy I had ever seen. Plus, I remembered my fond memories of seeing him as Kato in The Green Hornet back in the ’60s. I liked Kato even better than The Green Hornet back then. I guess I always loved the minority guys who must have been translating into underdogs to me in some way. I felt like one in a lot of ways even though I couldn’t express it in those terms yet.
The Oakland A’s started their run to their last of the 3 straight World Series Championships as school was beginning to wind down. I was aware that a new season was starting and that I was going to get to go up to Oakland and see more games with my Mom and Dad.
In the Spring of ’74, two songs were to play a vital role in my going up to San Francisco with my Mom to be dropped off for a scheduled angiogram to determine the future of my life in a lot of ways. My Diagnostician and heart specialists wanted to determine once and for all what started all of my heart problems. I was scared. I wasn’t worried about my life. It was about sports. I was told that this catherization was going to determine if I was going to be able to play contact sports as 7th Grade was going to be when I was going to be able to go out for basketball and even to play tag football again (which I did briefly in 5th Grade to great failure).
On the day I was to go up to San Francisco, I was dropped off at school to spend a couple of hours there as normal. And then Mom came to see me. Susan told me before I left that the class was going to say a prayer for me when I left.
And it was during the drive up and I had the radio on (it was KFRC the whole way up) that I heard Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away”. The song spoke to me in a way I had never known before. While listening to it, I realized some of my fears I had with the coming operative procedure. It became the lullaby I needed to get through the other side of those very fears which invaded me. I also remember hearing The DiFranco Family’s “Heart Beat (It’s A Love Beat)” and jokingly considering how appropriate it was this was a big hit at the moment. I was hoping I was going to meet some hot nurse. Instead, I got better than that, I met a very nice female doctor whom was married to the guy who was going to perform the angiogram on me. I was going to pay for it. Trust me!
When I got settled into my room in San Francisco, I was with a few other kids and we shared the room. The kids loved that I started grossing out the nurses immediately when I began cracking my knuckles for them. The nurse told me she didn’t like that I was doing that. So, naturally, I kept on doing it. I used to enjoy making the other kids laugh. I think all of them were younger than I was. I just wanted to feel like I was making their stay a little more pleasant.
When my Mom left for the night to go back to Santa Clara and told me she would see me when everything was over and I could go home, my heart sank in a big way because I loved her so much. I got lonely very quickly.
On the evening before my angiogram, I got to meet the female doctor. She took me to a room where I was placed on a gurney so that she could listen to my heart and the murmer I had. It was during this exam that something very unique and unexpected happened. I swear before all of you that I did not consciously do this. By the time it was over, I only then realized what had happened.
She was listening to my heart as she was using her stethoscope and she was concentrating very intently. I was very aware of just how quiet things were in the room. As she was doing this, I didn’t realize that I had raised my arm up straight as she was leaning over me. Even in my my most braggadoccio moments of brashness (which was rare even for me), I still was in enough fear of women in a light, non-heated moment at this stage of my life when my modesty would always prevail very strongly. You would have thought that the hand attached to my right arm which went up would have gone in an angle other than where it ended up. I keep thinking that my hand should have gently landed on the side of her left cheek on her face or perhaps on her left shoulder. But for some reason which still escapes me after all of these years, my right hand ended up right on her left breast and it stayed there momentarily. Nothing sexual happened. My hand didn’t move for a cheap feel or anything like that. After the moment passed, I pulled my hand back and I was slightly stunned that she didn’t seem to even register that anything had happened.
I can still see her so clearly. I still remember how she was a small endowed woman. And I remember how all so quiet it was the whole time she was examining me. Barely a hello or anything was said between us. And then the exam ended. I guess she was wanting to listen to that murmer of mine one last time before the angiogram the following day.
The day of the procedure arrived and it was an eventful one. I can say this very safely. When it was time for me to go into the area for it to be performed, I was wheeled in by an African-American nurse who did some prepping and then she just hung out with me while we waited…and waited…and waited. Little beknownst to me was that, while I was stripped naked and laying under only a single sheet and feeling chilled because of the conditions, the Australian doctor (the husband of the doctor who examined me the night before) and my beloved champion and Diagnostician Saul Robinson were going at it head to head in full argument mode over how to go about finding what they were looking for.
When the Australian doctor and his wife finally arrived, along with a seemingly truckload of other doctors, nurses and observers (it really was cowded in there), I was thinking to myself about how I couldn’t wait for all of this shit to be over with.
Above me in corners of the room, I could see television sets which were to be the monitors for which I was to be able to see my heart. I was kept awake for the procedure. After I tell you about this next bit, you’ll understand why I wish I had been asleep instead.
The Oz doctor appeared to be numbing out my thigh and leg area with the xylocane (sp? I think that’s what it was) without it hurting too much. Shortly thereafter, I saw him with the tubing he was going to insert into the main artery in my leg which was going to travel up to my heart. He opened up the hole to insert the damned thing into my leg. And then he took the tube and tried to insert it into the hole which led into my artery. Well, I screamed out in incredible pain. And he’s asking me what’s wrong. I told him I felt it. Well obviously, he didn’t numb me out enough. So, he pokes me with the xyolcane needle again numerous times and then tried inserting the tube in again. It still hurt like hell. He had to repeat the xylocane part once again. Finally, I eventually got numbed out enough that he was able to insert the tube in without my feeling it anymore. The thought never occurred to me that his wife might have mentioned about what happened the night before and that he might have been doing this for my accidentally touching his wife’s boob. This wasn’t to creep into my head until many years later as a possibility.
This procedure was something to endure. I was watching my heart on multiple black and white television screens. It was really weird. And then came the part where the doctors shoot colored dye into your heart to find any holes, etc. If you have ever wanted to imagine what it’s like to be a volcano just before it expodes, then this is the very thing to help you imagine it to its fullest. When they shot that stuff into me, the heat was incredibly intense. I mean, I felt like I was going supernova and I wasn’t even in outer space. I was just a prisoner of this operating table. They told me I could sip some water. I kept asking for more. They only let me have a certain amount of it and that was it.
When that Australian doctor finally pulled that tube out, I was relieved and exhausted at the same time. The crowd of people left and it was all over with as I was prepped to go into post-Op recovery with the kids who were sharing my hospital room with me. I had to ride things out until Mom came back up to San Francisco to pick me up late in the morning.
The full time that I ended up being in that operating room for the angiogram added up to something like 4 hours. It would have been a lot less if the argument hadn’t been doing on between the surgeon and my Diagnostician. And you want to know something? After the surgery, they apparently went after each other again with a full-blown argument over the results and the conclusion over what had happened to me when I was born and what caused all of my heart problems to begin with.
When I was born, my patent ductus (the in the womb airflow regulator attached to my heart) did not fall off jsut before I was born. It was supposed to. Instead, it stayed on and was producing a thinning of my right pulminary artery (which was causing me to breath like a dog panting before my open heart surgery) for over a year.
They concluded that the right thing was done in getting the patent ductus lopped off of my heart during the open heart surgery. They did not report any new problems after thorough searching.
Saul walked into the recovery room when my Mom arrived the next day and informed the both of us that he had a few big arguments with the Australian doctor. He then gave me the news I was waiting to hear. He gave me the clean bill of health. He told me I could play any sport I wanted to and to go out and enjoy having fun doing so. God Bless that man!
I will continue on with 1974 in my next post concerning my school days.
