Convent Avenue. Café Olé. Adobe Bombs

 

I was working slowly on repairs of the adobe home on 484 Convent Avenue, with carefully developed plans. One detail was an open wooden staircase ascending across the front window, which felt like moving up in the world. Then turning left on a platform after removing the saguaro ribs in that space only, to continue across the room in a bridge-like walkway with two mesquite rafters now at elbow high, then two additional steps carved on the central thick adobe wall to where I slept.

 

You would be crossing an unusual space higher up on a house providing a unique experience. There is a symbolism in the experience of ascending those steps that made me think that poor people are deprived of education in economics to move up in the world. While for students with university education, it is taken for granted. I am not so sure about available ethics studies either, but that should also be mandatory for everyone, since economics and ethics should go together.

Two redwood logs were used in a V-shape to support the platform. Now every time I look at a picture of an adobe home, my memory brings back the wood smells of redwood, pine, mesquite and the saguaro ribs, permeated by the aged adobe wall, combined with the unique experience of moving thorough that three dimensional space years ago as I went to the place where I slept.

I wanted inlayed floors by the fireplace with glazed, colorful handmade clay tiles made by me, in flowing lines radiating from the center out.

For a bath in the dry blistering heat of the desert summer days, I was looking forward to the cool touch and smell of wet stone around me. I fantasized a rock bath floor to ceiling, water flowing down the smooth boulders and cascading by my shoulder into a small pond or large tub made of stones brought from distant mountains, maybe with gold nuggets still in them.

The edge of the tub had several levels, big enough to seat five people, with places to recline your elbow, flat areas to place lit candles, steaming coffee cups, and gently sloping sides for comfort. I fantasized that women would want to test it so much that they would want to take a bath with me. The final tub never happened and therefore neither did bathing with the women. I even tried to imitate a small horizontal tunnel ending in a hole facing upward like when the tidal waves cause a blow hole in the Pacific coast or Yellowstone Park, so the child in me could make a jet of water shoot upward. I contacted a friend from Saint Francis High School in Oregon, now an Engineer, to get advise on the scientific dynamics of water hydraulics.

Incredibly, the plumbing inspector approved my design as I went along, but since I didn’t finish it the day after I left with only fifteen percent completed, he nixed it.

My ideas were great but not my implementation. Lack of patience was just like my failure with girlfriends; my productive time was spent elsewhere. Here I had not yet the knowledge necessary to complete what I started. Therefore, I was not proud of the results. I did not fulfill my side of the bargain with Mr. Rollins and at the end, I was still starting. Perhaps the landlord’s two workers laughed at my work when they had to fix and redo some of the things I did, like removing those rocks. Interestingly, although I thought my flaw was in the implementation, not in the design, with time I also found out that my unique design was inappropriate for a historic building.

Here I was transforming the inside of the house into a totally different entity, obliterating any kind of historic significance. It is not a matter of good or evil. Free thinking and creativity do not always support tradition and stability. I am not a traditional guy, but we need to strike a balance. We need tradition and creativity. However, mutual respect is important in this constant tug-of-war. I had much to learn. Fortunately, people do change, as I did. While years later I thought I did wrong, even later I thought I may have been doing right. People who die young don’t go through this trauma. The main reason is that I was only thinking of myself. I was happy with my plans then but to any history buff, I was committing sacrilege.

At first, my construction skills were close to nil. Later, I learned the trade.

For a while, Ray spent a lot of time helping me with the restoration. He was artistic and innovative, which often caused us to get sidetracked by details that consumed much time, but it gave us time to talk about the condition of the world.

Around that time, I met Nancy, a wonderful girl working at Cushing Street Bar. I was very attracted to her. I wish I had paid more attention to romancing her, but my living conditions were not conducive to having guests at my house. Look at that fireplace! I had little to share. I found that I was paying more attention to the Barrio than to any serious romantic relationship. Only a few girlfriends lasted a year. One lasted five years, of which three were excellent and the last two very painful. Another, who might have been a life-long companion, she lasted only two years. You would think that my training in psychology would have helped me behave with more understanding towards women, but it didn’t. I learned that many people in psychology, teachers especially, are there because of their own unresolved search for healing.

Academic psychology didn’t help me enough with women, and architecture didn’t help me with respecting culture. I was heading downhill fast. College can be so overrated, and I began slowly to regain a foothold. In the meantime, I came to know the Barrio a bit more.

The Gomez family lived next to José’s family across the street. The Lopez family lived a few doors down. The young Lopez daughter Isabel was the same age as Charlene and just as pretty, was inquisitive and alert, and she had a brain too. However, girls disappear from street life by the time they reach adolescence. Surprisingly, Isabel was turning out to be a good person, while the same could not be said for her younger brother Pepito. A good sister, a bad brother. Pepito was the same age as Manolito across the street, but he was more mischievous and was cruel toward animals. For some people you know there is hope, such as Manolito, while others you wonder, such as the case of Pepito.

It was from Pepito that I learned about roof bombs. A handful lump of hardened clay from any melted adobe thrown at the top of a corrugated tin roof will disintegrates upon impact, creating a very loud metal bang to be heard blocks away. Inside the house, it creates a reverberating alarming and thunderous explosion. The pulverized clay then rolls noisily down the pitch of the metal roof, creating a cascade of disagreeable screeching sounds echoing all the way to the end. At 2:00 AM, the racket lasted forever. Cringing, while waiting for the next bomb that you knew was soon to follow, it would keep you awake for hours. Yelling, screaming, chasing after the culprit was of no use. He was on his turf and it would only entice the kid to go and find his friends and keep this up all night.

Pepito thought he was invisible. He didn’t know I was up high and could see him through a hole above the adobe wall. Many punitive plans crossed my mind the first and last time he did this to my roof, such as thoughts of Africa where they cook people by boiling them alive, but I opted for a different approach than boiling him. If you can’t beat them, join them.

The following day, I recruited several kids including the culprit from the area and asked them to help me. I was composing a musical and a freak accident had caused a wonderful noise on my roof. I now had a tape recorder and wanted each of them to throw up to ten roof bombs in the proper sequence, to create a resulting melody I could record, and get rich as a result. Of course, Pepito was not sophisticated enough to claim a percentage of my profits. The little culprit was the first one to get tired and leave. Risky, but I never had my roof bombed again.

I got along with kids. I challenged them in mental and physical games. Jerry and Jose came by daily, often with other friends. They kept asking me for more challenges and, at the same time, kept me from doing much work on the house. The skill I was learning in wood construction at work were of minor value in an adobe home.

In between paying jobs, my real work, not my learning, for the TBA was done at Café Olé away from neighborhood interruptions. Every morning I drove my pick-up truck seven blocks for coffee at a bohemian coffee house downtown owned and run by Larry and his wife who served excellent expresso and cappuccinos. Every day two cups of coffee for three quiet hours of thinking, planning, and plotting. With little money, coffee had to keep me going until the evening. After two years I began to get more and more parking tickets from an expired meter, until I realized that some cop was timing my meter and walking by at the exact time, maybe even waiting around the corner. I was tempted to pay my tickets with pennies but didn’t. Once I saw that cop, I began to leave my truck behind and walk the seven blocks. In this small world, I would meet the same cop later in the company of the Chief of Police.