Torn Cords of Youth

autobiographical fiction

Photo by Kaleb Becker on Unsplash

Other times—I never told my parents about this—I jumped onto the back of Ken’s huge dirt bike and he’d rocket us off through the muddy paths which hooked away from the driveway and Highway 150 into the deep, thick woods. It felt terrifying and thrilling to hold onto his chest, trees blurring by us, the engine incredibly loud in our innocent ears, mud being kicked up madly behind us, Ken’s arms flexing with muscle and determination, turning us this way and that with the snaking paths. I often thought we’d crash and get killed. That idea seemed romantic. A part of me wanted it to happen. (Or so I imagined.)

I don’t remember how Ken and I met but I must have been about eleven.

I had two best friends already, before him. One a kid from a religious family whom I did just about everything with, and the other a blue-collar kid who lived in a nearby working-class town who came from a dysfunctional family.

Ken, like all my friends, had his own family issues.

I was a rich kid: Pool, jacuzzi, private parochial school (for the education not the religion), no chores, whatever I wanted. That kind of privilege.

I always befriended “those” kids, and my parents struggled to understand why. To this day I can’t quite figure it out myself. This was the mid-1990s. We’d moved to small-mountain-town Ojai, the beautiful glittering little hippie mecca nestled within the snow-capped Topa Topa Mountains, from coastal Ventura, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, in 1991. I met my religious friend in T-ball. I met my working-class friend in Kenpo Karate classes. We three soon became enamored with surfing, skateboarding and BMX.

Ken was different. No surfing, no skateboarding, no BMX. He lived alone with his divorced mother on a small, ragged farm up off Highway 150, the violently snaking, twisting narrow mountain road running out from Ojai up to Santa Paula. You drove along that road for miles and miles, slowly, seeing more and more epic views of the whole Ojai Valley, seeing the rugged mountains nearby surrounding it all, and then it finally straightened out once you crested the peak and you drove along empty green fields and marshland and wheat fields and forest, small farm homes dotting the landscape here and there, perhaps a wild coyote running around in the very early morning.

And when you hit Sulfur Mountain Road you took a right. It would be my mom or dad dropping me off on a Saturday or Sunday, usually. That flat dirt road seemed to roll on forever, with clay-colored dust rising behind the car as we maneuvered slowly. You could see their farm, some horses and chickens and a pig. It reeked of manure and shit and muddy peaty earth.

There’d be his mother’s old white late 80s Volkswagen sitting in the driveway. And then Ken would come out, taller than me by a couple inches, so pale white he was nearly albino, with his thick neck and blue eyes and thin blond hair falling half over his eyes. He looked like a pure-bred farm boy. Being there felt as if we’d left Ojai and California completely and were in Nebraska or something. It felt foreign, alien, almost shocking, even. And I liked that feeling, though I couldn’t exactly say why.

My dad—silently—would wave to Ken and, after I’d jumped out, reverse his beige Dodge Ram truck and head out, back along the dirt road to Highway 150 and back home. I often wondered what he thought of Ken, his mother, their farm, their poverty.

And they were poor. I don’t know what his mother did for work, only that she was gone a lot. Maybe his father helped them financially a little. My parents did give them several loans, which made me cringe with embarrassment when I found out about it. It felt like they were our economic indentured servants. It made me feel like royalty and I hated that sensation.

Ken and I were strange friends.

His mother didn’t seem to like me for reasons I couldn’t fully comprehend but probably had to do with wealth. He and I disagreed a lot. He didn’t get along with my two best friends or really anyone else. We didn’t exactly understand each other. We both had older half-sisters, 13 and 15 years older than us. We both seemed to be attracted to something vaguely decipherable as trouble. Already, even at eleven or twelve, we both lusted after girls.

Many nights we sat in their detached little studio and watched 1990s horror films, Freddie Krueger, Friday the 13^th, etc. His house had massive red Spanish tiles on the floor, tall ceilings, an open kitchen, and steep twisting stairs leading up to a second floor where his mother’s room lay. Ken’s room was downstairs. His room was messy and had two giant Nirvana posters, one with the baby underwater following a hook with a dollar bill in it. His room always smelled like body odor and old socks.

Sometimes we fed the horses and the chickens and pig. We’d get up very early—before dawn—and walk out there in the freezing cold and fill buckets and spread seed out and they’d all do their thing. It stunk badly of manure, shit and mud. It was disgusting but also fascinating.