I have gotten to know somethings about these young men, mostly while conversing during long drives, and secondly by training in boxing and stick-fighting. Like many of the younger men who I have trained with, most of our conversations have occurred with them driving and this one in the passenger seat. They occupy a racetrack, an interstate, of sorts in the unmarked country roads of this writing mind. My visual recollections of them are mostly of their right profile while driving.
Work was an attempt to document the working lives of men from around the nation at different stages of their working lives. We should begin with the youngest fellows, lacking seniority and possessing that promise lost to the elders in these lists.
The Vanilla Gorilla
This young man is a Myth of the 20th Century listener who contacted me by phone. He was interested in training. When he divined from my posted itinerary that I was going to be waiting for a train overnight in LA while the Palisades Fire raged, he swept into town in his great blue machine from his Joshua Tree hideout, two hours one way, kept me over night, and took me back, to save me from a night on the urban sidewalks.
Standing 5’ 10” and 220 pounds, he has long blond hair and looks like the power-lifter who starred in the Conan the Barbarian movie with the great wooden hammer. Impressed with his maturity in his late 20s, as well as his alien generation perspective, I was moved to document his economic and social ascent. He is similar to many young men I stay with, an Arуan Ethnocist who wants a traditional monogamous marriage, and therefore marries “a woman of color,” Latina, Asian or Injun. He has rescued me from San Bernardino in summer and Joliet in Winter. He is a far better man that I was at his age and on the track of self improvement. His dedication to his trades of masonry and horticulture, and understanding of plants, and loyalty to his martial arts instructor, and to his father, following him into the crop management trade, impressed me with his empathy. One day I hope he writes his memoirs, of coming of age in such a fractured age.
His faith is Russian Orthodox, heavily informed by Nordic tradition. His father-in-law, a Mexican who forbade his Danish/Mexican daughter to marry a Mexican, and certainly nothing less, is so thrilled with her Nordic groom that he has bought the wedding ring!
Wetzel
A Myth of the 20th Century listener who contacted me by phone, Wetzel is an interesting cat. He is a trained pilot who washed out of one of the branches of the U.S. Military service based on simple prejudice against an enlisted man for the crime of being smarter than his officers. Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, a young fellow barely 30, this man looks like a ginger version of a young Clint Eastwood, 6’ 4”, 175, narrow wasted and broad shouldered. Attending a Costa Mesa training session with The Vanilla Gorilla and Smiling Alfredo, and knowing about my back and hip injuries, he showed up at the train station afterward to check on my well-being. He also invited me to stay with his young family and train and write. We made a patio gym for him and his four-year-old son.
I have stayed with the Wetzel’s twice now. He has a good job and a great wife, a tiny woman who carries around a baby half as big as her. There is also Gloria, the girl of two. This rebel family was fairly born out of the Shamdemic experience of forced medical attention, three children now born at home and raised like frontier children of old. In the yard is an avocado tree, orange tree and apple tree, a wood stove, a shed and work house, tables chairs, pavilion and jungle gym, and a scrap-built chicken coop and hen house. Included in the health regemin is a monthly family field trip to the Los Angeles National Forest far up the side of a mountain favored by bicyclists. Here Wetzel pulls over his SUV on the canyon side. The family debouches below to a fall and pool, the children romping in the mountain spring water. Daddy takes the five gallon water hugs one by one across the road and fills them from the spring flowing from the rock face. He speaks to a man who lives on the side of the mountain in a shack. Some smaller glass gallons are filled. One of these is used to test the water with his kit, which I do not understand. The Wetzels don’t drink from the tap, but from the refreshing produce of their monthly adventure into the mountains in the comfort of a Los Angeles house nestled between hills covered in evergreens and fruit trees that seems rural by all appearances.
Mrs. Wetzel is a mid-high caste Mexican, having submitted to a blood test by her husband. She assists in home schooling and leaves decisions on doctrine up to her husband, who is as strict as he is kind. Their faith is Lutheran, to include a church handbook for a wife. This writer wanted to follow this family into the future in writing, but is too weary to do the Wetzel’s justice.
