Autobiography by Brian Brown

 Autobiography 

by Brian Brown

     When I was an early teenager, family turmoil caused by alcoholism necessitated that I move around a lot. In each of my 4 years of high school, I had a different living situation: once with an older brother, once, maybe illegally, with my two sisters who were also in high school, one year in the Servite seminary, and finally with the family of a high school classmate. The two years of junior high had been similar. It wasn’t too bad; it was just what we had to do in those days to hold together the appearance of a normal Catholic family. The alcoholism was not addressed; it was not spoken of; it was worked around and suffered through, because in those times it was a shameful thing, a personal weakness, a family failure.

     Our ancestral home was in a small roadside town in the Mojave Desert where my father had several businesses. By then we were 4 generations in the desert; not many people were. Our father made a good living; he put 7 kids through Catholic high schools and as much college as we wanted. We all ended up with degrees of some sort. We also always had a second house somewhere in Southern California, not a home really, but a base of operations to get the kids through school and a pressure relief valve when things got unmanageable in the desert. Our parents came and went between the two locations as situations dictated. Sometimes they were with us, and sometimes we were alone together, but we figured it out. 

  

     From the age of 13, this migratory existence meant that from time to time I would have to ride the Greyhound bus from Orange County to our hometown of Baker. With people coming and going and the damaged family dynamics, if I didn’t get on the bus, I could be stuck at the house in Orange County alone for a few days, not an acceptable alternative. So, three or four times a year, someone would take me to the bus station in downtown Santa Ana, a grimy place in those days. I would be dropped off with enough money to buy the ticket and some extra for snacks or a meal along the way. When I was younger, I would tell the ticket clerk that I was traveling alone, and they would usually let the driver know so that I would make the transfers successfully. It probably wasn’t necessary, but at 13 it still felt good to have an adult with at least some authority looking out for me. Later, when I was in high school, I stopped doing that. 

      Bus stations had a peculiar reputation. Everyone agreed that riding the bus was perfectly normal and not to be looked down upon, but everyone did, and riding the bus was usually the last possible option. I was repeatedly warned to be extremely careful about going into the bathrooms, where apparently all sorts of disgusting things took place. It was hard to stand at a urinal and take care of business while looking over your shoulder, expecting a drooling deviant with his pants around his ankles to come out of a stall to pull me in there with him. But nothing ever happened, of course. The bus stations were filled with regular people like me, often tired and overburdened, but they were just getting on with their lives as best they could. These trips were my first exposure to black people; there simply were not any in the desert. None. Looking back, it seems that they were so rare in Orange County as to be a peculiarity. I don’t recall much overt racism; they just weren’t there. I learned that they too were just riding the bus and going about their affairs, like the rest of us. Unfair myths and cruel stories I had heard in my childhood were proven untrue and dismissed. 

     Eventually I would board the bus and then be on to San Bernardino, the first stop. I had to get off the bus and navigate to a new gate and bus, a big deal when you are 13 and in the world on your own. They had a crappy snack bar there where one could get an average burger and greasy fries, and sometimes I did. The next leg would take me to Barstow, where I had to wait and transfer again, lest I be launched out towards Needles and Kingman and unknown Arizona. The Barstow station did not have a snack bar, just vending machines. I quickly learned to have a pocketful of change when landing in Barstow. Finally, I would board the bus for Las Vegas, and about an hour down the freeway the bus would pull off into our little town and deposit me at the one stop sign, where our two paved roads met. In the 6 years I did this, I can’t ever remember another person getting off the bus in Baker. It would be after midnight, and the dry, frigid desert air would bite my ears, but it was ok. The half-mile walk to our house under a fantastical starlit sky was always a comfort, a decompression. I was home. 

     At some point during my high school years, Greyhound changed their scheduling for some reason and decided that the late-night bus on Fridays would no longer stop in Baker, but would be nonstop to Vegas after leaving Barstow. This was a real problem for me, and I told my parents. They assured me that the kindly bus driver would make an exception and would surely pull off to let a schoolboy off of the bus. But what if he didn’t? They just shrugged and said, don’t worry, he will. That didn’t answer my question; it gave me no plan B, and so I figured out one on my own. I decided I should wait until the bus was underway from Barstow, and then meekly approach the driver as the other passengers dozed. As politely as possible, I would explain my predicament and put myself at his mercy, just a schoolboy traveling alone and trying to get home. It usually worked well and without incident. I remember a couple of times when grumpy drivers did not want to get off the freeway, and so I told them I would be happy to hop off the bus if they would just pull over at the off-ramp long enough for me to get out, and they did. They left me standing by the side of the freeway with cars whizzing by on their way to Vegas, at midnight, adding a bit extra to my walk, but I considered each such incident a victory. 

     Weekends in the desert were a burst of freedom, running loose with friends in our desert jalopies, shooting, or just lying around someone’s trailer, out of reach of adults for a day. In this tiniest of ponds, my family was the big fish. We owned the only market in town, and my father was the prominent businessman there. It was nice to be special for a time. My desert buddies were different than my high school friends; rougher, perhaps coarse, but already adept in the ways of the working-class blue-collar world. We were all competent mechanics by 15, owned and shot guns and hunted safely by 14, and some had earlier sexual experiences, I think, than my Catholic high school classmates. At least they claimed they did. They lived in a limited world and made the most of it, while on Sunday afternoons I would board a Greyhound back to Orange County. I was the fortunate one, able to go back out into the larger world and the opportunities there. Our boys' school was filled with bright, curious, and clever kids; the really dull ones had been filtered out. We came from middle-class families or better, and I think mostly from families with two parents. If we worked hard and did well in school, we could also do well in the larger world. It seems that has proven to be true.

     Most everyone has heard the expression about the rich kid who was born on third base and thinks that he has hit a home run. It is not a precise analogy for my situation back then, but there are some similarities. Those of us in Orange County were going to get a chance at the plate; we were going to get in the game to take a swing. My desert friends would never get out of the dugout. This disparity became more evident as I grew up, and by the time I graduated from high school, the die was cast for most of my desert friends. They would become truck drivers or work in the open-pit mines, or be short order cooks in the cafes. They would smoke and drink too much and get in trouble with drugs, and most would not escape. Nearly all of them are dead now. 

     In a few weeks, I will be going to a high school class reunion; perhaps a third or more of us are still standing. I will be chatting with retired doctors, lawyers, highly successful businessmen and entrepreneurs. We got up and got going many years ago, and our perseverance in whatever field we followed paid off. We earned it, I think; I don’t know any of my classmates who had a fortune handed to them. We had an opportunity shown to us, and we made the most it.  I don’t think we were privileged, but I do think we were fortunate in many ways. 

     Strangely, after college and a few years of adventures, I returned to the desert, near the place where I had grown up. The lessons I had learned watching my childhood friends do a slow-motion slide into a second-class life stuck with me.  I took the things I had learned in the larger world, married the right woman, and we made a go of it. We lived in the desert, but we were not really of the desert. I had seen the trap that provincial thinking can be, of where the rough life leads, and I avoided it. My curiosity about the natural world and how it worked, which was nurtured in me at our high school, led to a lifelong passion for desert ecology and history. I have been able to navigate both of the worlds I grew up in, most of the time successfully.

   I learned some good lessons from those early bus rides. Don’t always believe what others tell you; some things you have to find out for yourself. Don’t be racially ignorant. Keep a stash of quarters handy for emergencies. Be nice to others, and they will probably return the favor. Be polite, and people will help you out. And don’t judge others by their circumstance; everyone has struggles. After all, we are all riding on the same bus, aren’t we?