Chapter 6: Welcome to the Hotel California

With Dad's VW van fully packed, we charted a path westward across our vast nation.  With no air conditioning, our plan was to stay to the cooler north for as long as possible before dropping southward toward California. With pets aboard, our pace would be slow, hampered further by some obligatory sight seeing along the way. 

The lush Eastern third of the US was familiar and comfortable, the hilly green foliage soothing, the excitement of our journey still fresh. It was the central part of the nation that tries the traveler's patience. The flyover states, where all our food gets grown. The plains states, both figuratively and literal. From North Dakota to West Texas, its a long tough slog no matter what your latitude. 

My folks set their sights on South Dakota, with Mt Rushmore and Yellowstone Park the coming attractions. But a quirky little town captured our attention along the way. Wall Drug, SD. All the signs. All the promise.  Wall Drug, only 337 more miles, Wall Drug, only 211 more miles, Wall Drug, next exit, don't miss it or you'll regret it.  Pulling off  I-90 full of hope and wonder, only to discover we'd been played, with Wall Drug nothing more than a tourist trap. A virtual one block town of cheap souvenir shops, anchored by some fake dumb-ass dinosaur. All the build-up, such a let down. Expectations dashed, was Wall Drug foreshadowing of what our westward migration would be?

The mood in the van was tense. Our house had remained unsold. A perfectly lovely split level home on a flat acre and a half with a tennis court in the highly desirable Boston suburb of Andover and we couldn't get 70 thousand for it in the year 1978. (you should see the list prive now). Adding to the tension, my beloved Red Sox had begun their historic summer of 78 collapse, to be immortalized in baseball lore by one Bucky Dent late inning dagger to my young sports heart one early September afternoon.

But the real tension resided within our family. Seven days, 3000 miles with literally no conversation between us all. There were no sing-alongs or driving games nor shuffling of seats to shift the dynamic. Surrounded by my family, yet it felt like I'd been imprisoned, sentenced to solitary confinement.

Being only thirteen years old, I was too young to be reflective, yet not worldly enough to daydream of a better life. With way too much time to kill, I spent the long hours gazing out the window at the monotonous landscape just like I'd done on all those long drive's home from tournaments, performing my best sorcery, trying to make something out of the vast nothing as we sputtered along at barely the speed limit to a future unknown, with only my trusty Snoopy transistor radio keeping me company, listening to the  prairie preacher-men tell me how sinning and flawed I was, wondering if he and my Dad were friends.

I was already having a bad summer, having to say good-bye to the only home and friends I knew.  The drive was torturous, trapped in my head for seven days straight of loneliness and confusion, my father's dark mood amplifying my feelings of rejection, my brothers and myself unable to provide each other any comfort, each of us withdrawing ever further to our own private twisted worlds of isolation and depression. And the heaviness of the unknowns. Where were we going? Where were we going to live? Would I be able to make new friends again? And when could we finally escape from this fucking prison cell of a van? And as I stood on the precipice of my 14th birthday, nary a tennis ball had been struck that summer of 1978.  If my goal was to hit the ground running when we reached California, I didn't even know where my shoes were.

With Mt Rushmore and Yellowstone's Old Faithful checked off the bucket list, we descended southward through Las Vegas and the California desert toward our final destination, the coast of Southern California. 

The Van had been slowing down, either tired from the long trip or an impending mechanical breakdown loomed on the horizon. It turned out to be the latter. As we pulled off the 405 Freeway on the South Bay loop in the non-descript town of Torrance, with the tennis rich Palos Verdes peninsula jutting out toward the sky in the distance, the van sputtered to a near halt as the clutch gave out directly across the street from Russ Thor Volkswagen. Little did we know then how fortuitous our seeming bad luck would be.

Ragged from the trip, we unpacked our exhausted selves to a local hotel, just so glad to no longer be driving. Dad got himself a rent a car and in a matter of days researched Torrance, deeming it a worthy enough town, quickly finding us a house to rent to call home. 

In the Fall of 1978, I would enroll at Torrance High, the generic high school.  Not a lot of excitement happened at Torrance High School. Our most famous alumnus was Ernie Zamperini of  Unbroken fame, with our more current claim to fame being the use of the school's elegant Spanish facade for the hit show Beverly Hills 90210. Other than that, Torrance High appeared to be an assembly line of mass mediocrity,

Not a lot of excitement happened in Torrance either. The Grateful Dead once played there at a bank. Members of punk icons Black Flag once called Torrance home. Upper middle class engineer crowd, very white, ultra conservative with an alarming lack of culture. Torrance was the buffer city between the affluence of the beach and the grittier communities of Carson, Wilmington and Gardena. Torrance would make national news from time to time, usually for all the wrong reasons. A Mobil refinery explosion or a Justice department settlement against its policing practices. For there were no gangs in Torrance, and the Torrance PD was determined to keep it that way. So much so, Torrance paid out 8 million dollars one year in settlement money for its policing abuses against minorities, with hardly a complaint from its citizenry. You can use your deductive reasoning as to why.

But the remarkable thing about Torrance was how little it changed. Same population, same demographics. In Torrance, people mowed their own lawns and cleaned their own houses, and seemed pretty content with their lot in life. Being a home owner while raising your family in Torrance was as ambitious as most of these folks got, and that applied to my family too. My parents bought a home in Torrance in 1979. They never moved again.

Torrance not being exciting was appropriate at the time, for I wasn't very exciting myself, nor did any excitement seem on my immediate horizon. The end of the summer of 1978, Dad entered me in to a couple local SoCal tournaments. Rolling up to the tournament desk wearing my National Hardcourts t-shirt from earlier that summer, I turned a few heads but earned little respect, getting crushed three tourneys in a row, not even by the section's top players. If I still held aspirations of becoming a big time tennis player, I apparently had a long long ways to go.

Torrance High would be my fourth school in five years. Being the new kid at school again had already gotten old. I'd pretty much resigned myself to being a shy hyper self-conscious introvert. The thought of making new friends again was like auditioning for a role I didn't want. I would make some acquaintances though, running cross country and wrestling as well as in my classes, but as for being accepted by any of Torrance High's social cliques, I would remain on the outside looking in throughout my years there. Which meant spending inordinate amounts of time alone: walking to school, walking between classes, during lunch break, during assemblies, at football games and all other school activities.  The writing was clearly on the wall. If I was to have any sort of a meaningful teenage social life, it wasn't going to happen at Torrance High.

Whatever Torrance may have lacked in curb appeal, it more than made up for in tennis. It was 1978, America's tennis boom was peaking, with participation skyrocketing to levels once thought unimaginable. To meet the surging insatiable demand, a visionary entrepreneurial class emerged, looking to cash in on tennis' heat. The vehicle, the modern tennis club. In the South Bay area of Southern California, it seemed every couple miles, just add water and up sprung another brand new 20 court full service tennis facility in just a matter of months.

For if tennis was to keep growing, clubs were the only places to play. Public parks were dumps, high school courts had metal nets or ball destroying asphalt as a surface. Even with all the feverish building, the new clubs couldn't keep up with tennis' surging demand. As we settled in to Torrance, my parents soon went club shopping, only to be shocked by the cost of entry to these magical new facilities.

Clubs like West End, home of one of tennis' first celebrity coaches, Robert Lansdorp, cost 4,500 to join, and had over 500 families on the waiting list. The Jack Kramer Club, home to future world #1's Tracy Austin, Pete Sampras and Lindsay Davenport was 6000 with an even a longer wait. And these were 1978 dollars. Clubs throughout Torrance and Palos Verdes had similar barriers to entry. Fortunately for my folks, a new club was being built just three miles from our home. With only a trailer in front taking deposits, my Dad beat the rush, plunking down the 3k to join before a shovel ever hit the ground. This club, the Rolling Hills Plaza Racket Club, would soon became my second home

Back in those halcyon days, a club's stature was determined by the quality of the juniors who trained there. Sandwiched between the Kramer Club and Landsdorp's West End, RHPRC had some catching up to do. But our Director of tennis Dennis Rizza had a plan. He let the tournament playing juniors like myself bring in guests for free. I was soon to discover there were no shortage of great players in my new home to do battle with.

Indigenous SoCal tennis was an absurdity of riches. So much history, so many great champions. Then tennis' great migrations began. Playing against ball machines and your Dad would only get a talented teen so far. Tennis was now big business, with juniors from all around the world seeking out the next tennis hotbed of the moment, and blessed by good fortune, my new home in the South Bay section of  Los Angeles was soon to be it.

The assistant pro at RHPRC was a Mexican National named Carlos Hassey. Carlos had deep connections to our neighbor to the South. Within months of being at our new club, two young juniors my age arrived from Mexico. The first was Rafael Osuna, nephew to famous Mexican Wimbledon Champion Rafael Osuna. The second was a uber-talented up and comer named Jorge Lozano. (Leo Lavalle would also come up, but his stay in the South Bay didn't work out so well) 

(picture of Jorge w McEnroe)

Jorge would become my twice weekly practice partner for the next few years. Add in a couple talented younger juniors, Woody Hunt and Darren Yates, soon the the back courts of RHPRC were full and loud, as our small little club strived to make a name for itself.

RHPRC was A beautiful state of the art facility, with 15 hard courts, 8 racquetball courts, a pool and three story clubhouse with expansive full bar and lounge overlooking a picturesque two tone sunken stadium court. But it was the members that made the club hum. Southern California was emerging as a melting pot for people all over the world, with many of them finding their way to the upstairs bar at RHPRC. And what a colorful group of eclectic misfits they were.

Every night of the week the courts would be packed, the member's common denominator a passionate love for tennis rivaled only by their equally passionate love for partying. And if the weekdays were fun, the warm weekends of SoCal took that fun to a whole other level. The club became a fraternity house for grown ups, with some of the craziest most charismatic characters imaginable, and not just a handful, but dozens of them, all in one place at the same time, truly lightning caught in a bottle.

I would form my first lasting friendships at RHPRC. With life at home still tense, my folks were just fine dropping us kids off at the club for the day, for the club was where the action was. We didn't need structured camps to get in our tennis, we made our own camps. And though my newfound friends were not all tournament level players, many of the older kids and adults could play quite well, giving me unlimited access to quality practice, a far cry from the barren tennis life I left in New England. And though it's undeniable unsupervised kids don't always make the most efficient use of their time, an awful lot of tennis did get played, and much of it the kind of tennis I loved.

One court, two players, a can of balls, no instructors, no parents, no fed balls, no lines, no walls, no fucking lobster ball machines, no drills and no time constraints. What my training lacked in structure it more than made up for in intensity. Just motivated competitive kids beating each other senseless, away from the often distracting eyes of a coach or a parent. I soon became tennis' version of a gym rat, spending countless hours at my club, playing any and all the tennis I could find and funny things  happened to hungry motivated juniors spending their days at a club playing dawn to dusk. They start improving. And rapidly.

But there was only so much tennis one could play over the course of a day. With minimal supervision, I started spending a lot of time with my new friends. At first it started pretty innocently, going to the beach for milk shakes or the arcade to play Asteroids (my first real love). Eventually we'd start venturing out further. During our breaks from the club, we would all pile in to my buddy's van to tool around the area, but never before my friends smoked a joint or downed a couple beers. Still pretty sheltered, I declined their initial offers to join the imbibing, not quite ready to cross the line to rebellious teenager

It's been said though, if a person goes to a barber shop often enough, eventually they'll get a hair cut. And before long, after months of trying to get me to partake, a joint made its way to my hand and the cajoling began once again. But this time, after months of seeing my new friends smoke pot and have nothing but fun, I broke down, taking my first couple tokes. 

 

Gateway opened, it was Friday, which meant movie night. My friends rolled up to my house, picking me up in their van. But before my butt even hit the seat, a cold aluminum can pressed its way in to my hand. My very first beer. Bitter, sudsy, hard to get down, even harder to put down.

A magical moment in time. My internal life was altered that evening. It was like a scene from the Wizard of Oz, a shift from black and white to technicolor. My shyness and self consciousness were replaced by spontaneity and elan. I was suddenly outgoing, talkative, funny even. The world appeared anew to me now, all from a 12 ounce beer. And if one beer could do all that, just imagine what two could do. Now fearless, unchained, empowered. There seemed nothing I wouldn't or couldn't do, so I had another, and another.
 

Being all of a hundred pounds, somewhere in the course of that evening's events I discovered the law of diminishing returns. The full stomach, the spinning room. When the lights went down in the theater I never had a chance. To the bathroom I went, to the alley after getting kicked out of the theater, to the van to wait for my friends, out the window on the ride home, in my folks front yard. My first night on the party train was a long one.

Yet I awoke with a buzz about me. For once, I was the center of attention, the life of the party, the source of everyone's humor, and as wretched as I felt that first morning after, it had undoubtedly been the best night of my young life. I discovered something profound that evening. That it was possible to feel differently than I'd always felt. And though my head felt like a pinata mid destruction, I couldn't imagine going through life never feeling that way again.

So when the wellness call came in the next day, it shouldn't have been a hard decision, to stay home and take care of my hurting self. But an urge to feel that way again welled strongly from within. Soon, my friends were back at my house to take us to a "birthday party". And before I even reached my seat, there was another cold aluminum can in my hand. And though the smell of the beer made my knees buckle, I was not about to let my new party friends down. One beer, two beers, three and four, and there I was feeling wretched again. And at 14 years old, already drinking like an alcoholic.

 

Yet I didn't know it was possible to feel that relaxed and dare I say normal. I had discovered the secret to life, a foamy liquid in an aluminum can, twelve ounces of freedom, freedom from the bondage of my hyper self-conscious angst riddled self. And I had another  We parked the van behind the theater smoking and drinking ourselves stupid all night getting higher and higher listening to classic rock and the Grateful Dead and laughing and laughing and laughing and I felt home and as happy as I had ever been in my life, which at that point wasn't hard to top. And I drank another and another and then everything that was glowing so brightly started to spin again and within moments I got violently sick all over myself and the van and everyone who tried to throw me out of the van and I laid on the ground rolling around in beer and vomit and laughter and laughter and more and more and more as I crossed the rubicon in to substance abuse with a Bob Beamon level leap

Not long after that weekend of firsts, altering my state of mind soon became a daily obsession. Being all of 100 pounds with a low tolerance for alcohol, drinking at home wasn't feasible. But I soon found I could smoke pot and nobody seemed to notice. So I started getting high. A lot. Getting high with my friends at my club soon morphed in to getting high before school, during school, after school, before practice, after practice, before studying, after studying and one more toke before bed. And more notably, all by myself. If my outside world was to be this lame and my inside life so angsty, at least mute it with a constant intake of THC.

 

I would take all my tests high, play my high school tennis matches high, be high around my house and at our family dinners and at my home away from home at my tennis club. I was often in the presence of authority figures; teachers at school, adults at my club, my parents at home. It all became like a big game, get as high as I could and try to act as normal as possible. 

 

But it soon became more than a game, for try as I might to slow down, I was finding I couldn't. Which just added to my distress, for I was surrounded by people who'd be extremely disappointed if they knew my state of mind. I had a secret, a secret that needed keeping to myself, not because I feared the punishments that would come my way (though I did)  but something far worse than that. Getting caught would threaten the first thing I'd found in my world that made me feel sane and I couldn't let that happen. 

 

So I got very good at hiding what I was doing. Sure, rumors began to spread in the tennis community that I was struggling with drugs, (just add another scarlet letter  Cheater Choker Pusher Smoker ..starting to look like a sweatshirt from a state school)  and though my reputation was suffering, nothing was going to deter me from using. I had found my medicine. The substances were doing so much for me, I didn't care one bit what was happening around me. 

 

And so my life would be the next year. My days were somewhat simple then. Show up for school, work, practice, tournaments, repeat cycle in varied states of impairment ad nauseum. Life was still somewhat manageable, school came easy so my grades didn't suffer. I was somehow able to keep showing up for tennis, performing right to my abilities, not too good but good enough to avoid scrutiny. 

 

And I had been in California barely over a year now, a far cry from the boy who left that sleepy little New England suburb. I was in the big city now with big opportunities before me, ground zero for junior tennis the world round. Yet I had a secret problem, a problem that was getting in the way of my goal of becoming a great tennis player. Yet I kept pushing forward in fits and spasms, the inertia of junior tennis carrying me from event to event. I knew no other way to be. I continued to lace them up, trying to make a tennis player out of myself, unaware of my full reality that I was a ticking time bomb, that every time I walked on a tennis court I was 15 years old... angry, alienated, and now hopelessly addicted to drugs.