Life of Brian

2001

Who's seen 2001: A Space Odyssey?  I don't believe I've ever watched it myself.  It came out in theaters in the year 1968.  My dad was in Vietnam.  My mom was in Ojai, I think.  Maybe she had gone back to New Mexico?  Now I'm gonna have to watch it so I can see what insights it provided about the future.  I however am here to talk about the past. 

 In the year two thousand and one I was 26 years of age.  The five-year mark of marriage was notched off on my belt and things were going swell.  I was having a blast working at Armored Transport.  My partner Dave and I got along very well.  He loved to chew Copenhagen tobacco, long cut, while at work.  I was already very familiar with most variations of alcohol, I mention this because I'd been buzzed on alcohol numerous times, and I'm not one to pass something up just because it's "bad" for you.  Illegal drugs are where I'd draw the line on that.  Obviously, I had to try some of his 'worm dirt'.  I took the tiniest of a pinch and stuck it in my gums.  About ten seconds after, I immediately spit it all out!  Not because it tasted bad, but because I was getting an immediate buzz off of it.  Dizziness and operating a 26,000-pound vehicle don't equate.  The buzz wore off fairly quickly.  I would not try the brown buzz bomb for another five years when another good friend of mine was a full-time chew-er.  Dave could chew that stuff all day long, even while drinking a soda!  He and I would joke around with one another on a daily basis.  Our armored trucks had windows, but they did not roll down.  We had a side door that opened and two back doors that opened after removing a pad lock from the outside.  The drivers' compartment was separate from the 'hoppers' compartment.   You could slide a very thick, bullet proof door closed and seal off one compartment from the other.  We called the guy that got out and picked up money inside the stops the 'hopper'.  If you had two employees with their gun permits, you'd trade off this duty halfway through the route.  You might be thinking it prolly got hot in that truck, and you'd be right.  There was an air conditioning unit in the cab with the driver that cooled air for the hopper.  This would be the air intake for the AC.  The hopper controlled the air flow from the back.  On a particularly extra gassy, hot day, Dave decided to close the bulkhead door and started ripping some extra juicy flatulent air bombs.  The AC box efficiently picked up these biscuits and sent them gale force right into my face sitting in the hoppers seat in the back.  All I could do was turn the fan off and wait for the stench to clear.  This was not pleasant.  I'd smelled plenty of shit before that did not belong to me, but these farts were atrocious!  I had no way of retaliating.  Or did I ... !  We kept a book of matches in the truck for this very circumstance.  I had lit a couple to make the air smell like something other than poop when an idea popped into my brain.   Dave would eventually have to open the bulkhead so that I could throw deposits up there for him to bag.  When he did, I pulled a match out of the book.  Flipped the matchbook inside out, placed the match in between the book and flipped it through the air.  This worked better than I had expected!  Little flaming fireballs were flying up right around Daves lap as we traveled down Hwy 126 at sixty miles an hour.  Once he figured out I was flinging matches at him, his concern for his polyester pants catching fire grew and grew.  The bulkhead was slammed closed, and he promised to curtail the release of methane.  

Remember me saying that not all Search and Rescue call outs were fun?  Many of them were not, some were pretty grim.  Back in 1998, when I was just a newbie on the team, a teenage kid from Ojai had murdered a younger girl, also from Ojai.  Her name was Kali Manley.  She was a student at Nordhoff Highschool.  She initially was thought to have been missing, and our team was called out to search for her.  This was around the month of December if I recall, and it was fairly cold out at night.  We searched extensively around the river bottom between Ojai and Ventura.  Her murderer, after a couple of weeks, decided to fess up and tell the Sheriff's department where he had dumped her body in the forest.  She was indeed where he told them she would be, and our search ended.  This was a sad event for our little valley.  The A hole that took her life is still in prison to this day and hopefully will not be let out on parole any time soon.  The following year our team would be called out at 2 a.m. in the morning.  There were reports of a car wreck off of Hwy 33 near Ventucopa.   Supposedly there were multiple victims over the side, so we were called out to rappel down and get them.  We knew these individuals were already deceased, but circumstances kept getting stranger on the hour-long drive to the accident scene.  We were told the driver had shot himself because he was distraught over killing everyone else in the vehicle.  Sure enough, when we arrived, down at the bottom of the river bottom lay a man who was in full postmortem rigidity!  His body lay about fifteen feet away from what looked like a full-sized station wagon.  This station wagon ended up being a full-sized pick-up truck that had landed upside down in the river bottom and had been squashed to half it's normal height!  The man laying out on the ground had been the driver.  He survived the crash, but when he came to, all he saw were two girls in the rear cab smashed to death and his male passenger knocked out.  He thought his front seat passenger was dead.  He walked down the creek bed to a bar called The Place and phoned for help.  He then walked back to the scene of the accident, pondered that he'd just killed three people, and decided to shoot himself in the head.  This is how we found him when we showed up.  His arm bent at the elbow, his hand still pointing to his temple.  His body lifeless.  There was a fog in the air that night and it was cold.  As I watched two very experienced team members rappel down to the crash site, I felt sorry for everyone involved.  It was morbid and saddening all at the same time.  I did not go down and look inside the truck.  The two females were smashed something terrible I was told.  Other than seeing my grandpa in his casket before burial, I'd never seen a dead body.  This would not be the last dead person I'd come across over the next few years unfortunately.  When paramedics arrived on scene well before us, they found that the passenger still had a weak pulse, and the helicopter was called in to medivac the guy out to a hospital.  I don't think he survived however, so the driver had indeed killed everyone in the vehicle.  The truck had vaulted off the side of the road and plummeted upside down about fifty feet.

Another call out, around the same year, involved carrying a DB out of the creek near Steckel Park.  We were called out around 10 a.m.  We were told that this was a body recovery and that if any of us were hesitant about participating we could hang out at the trucks and not have to see the dead body.  This young man that lay dead in the creek had evaded the police the night before.  He and his buddies would hop in a car and lead the police on a chase up behind Steckel Park.  On that side of the park there was about a seventy-foot drop-off down to the creek.  When his buddy's car came to a dead end, he got out and tried running on foot.  A Sheriff's deputy chased after him and recalled seeing him one minute, and then he just disappeared!  He had run, full stride, right off the edge of the seventy foot drop down to the creek.  This killed him on impact.  The deputy almost followed him over the edge but was able to catch himself just in time.  As we hiked into the creek where this young kid lay lifeless, I did not feel any remorse for him.  He had committed a crime, ran from the police, endangered countless civilians while doing so, and then almost got a deputy killed by nearly luring him off a cliff.  One thing that stands out in my mind is how you could tell there was no life remaining in that body by the glassy look of his eyeballs.  The lights were definitely out.  We carried him out of the creek and back to the coroner's vehicle, who was also with us in the creek bed to confirm the death.  I saw and learned a lot from my time on the team.  One evening we were called out to search for a missing adult female and her mastiff.  She had gone hiking up the Pratt trail while the sun was still out and hadn't returned by dark.  A guy by the name of Drew and myself were dropped off at the trailhead while the other team members were flown by helicopter up to Nordhoff Ridge.  On this search I would learn how to follow tracks in the dark.  We'd been told what kind of shoe she was wearing and of course she had the dog with her.  By shining our flashlights at a horizontal angel with the ground, we did indeed pick up her sneaker tracks.  She was wearing Reeboks and sure enough, we could see the logo printed in the softer dirt on the trail.  We'd radio in that we still had tracks heading up the trail and the helicopter would take other team members and drop them off higher up the trail.  This poor woman had become lost in the dark and no longer knew which way to go.  She ended up walking all the way up to Nordhoff Ridge and followed it east towards the look out!  I think she was actually found walking down hill towards Rose Valley Lake!  Besides she and her dog being dehydrated, she was in pretty good shape.  VCSO airlifted her and her big ol mastiff in the helicopter back down to the parking lot at Nordhoff.  Our team had done a good job, and it felt good knowing that we may have saved their lives that night.  Plus, we got to fly in the helicopter at night which was also really fun. 

In May of 2001, Sarah and I would become parents.  Our first child was a little girl.  She was born with jet black hair, and quite a bit of it!  Her eyes a shimmering blue!  I don't recall ever being nervous or scared to become a parent.  No overwhelming sense of responsibility ever plagued my mind.  I looked forward to being a dad.  We'd eventually bring Kaylie home to our apartment on Grand Ave and I would eventually switch to working nights so that I could take care of her during the day, and so Sarah could eventually go back to college.  Kaylie would be the first of three girls.  She changed our lives absolutely for the better.  I miss those days quite a bit, but it is also cool to see them becoming young adults.  I'd watch countless hours of The Wiggles and many other cartoons and fun kid stuff.  In reality, I was really still just a kid myself.  My older sister had already given birth to a boy in February.  Our parents were now grandparents, and my sisters were now Aunts.  Sarah's brother Kevin would become an uncle.  Our daily lives became ever busier, and our sleep dwindled.  I am very lucky to have been able to spend time with my kids in these early years.  We could not have done it without help from family though.  Family, as I've said before, are the most important people on this planet.

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.  Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet earth."

-Arthur C. Clarke Space Odyssey 

Life of Brian

Year 2000

Twenty-five years ago.  A quarter of a century.  A fourth of a dollar.  How ever you want to look at it, it's a fairly good chunk of time.  In less than thirty days, the year 2000 will have been exactly twenty-five years ago.  I was born in seventy-five.  At 25 years of age, these things were checked off my list.  Marriage, full time job w/ benefits, a rented roof over my head and good health.  Not only for me but for everyone in my family around me.  My day job still consisted of working on the armored trucks.  My route covered some of Ventura, Santa Paula, and Fillmore.  Sarah worked at the bank, and we still lived in our apartment in Ojai. 

In January, Alaskan Airlines flight 261 crashed off of the coast of Hueneme.  I think it went down into the ocean between the islands and the coastline.  Closer to the islands if I recall.  I belonged to Search and Rescue at the time and got to be involved in the search for debris that could have included human remains.  My day job hours were from 7 a.m. to around 3:30 p.m.  I volunteered to go out with search crews after I got off of work.  Our team all gathered at the Sheriff's academy grounds where we were briefed on what our job would be and what to do should we spot any debris that was about to wash up on shore or had already done so.  This was an exciting call out because we actually got to drive a black and white Sheriff's vehicle.  Light bar, search lights and all with no placards indicating it was an off-duty unit!  The vehicle we were given was a ford bronco 4x4.  As the briefing wrapped up, I remember the last thing the Seargent told us before heading out to our sectors was DO NOT GET STUCK.  I was not a newbie when it came to off roading.  My cousin Mike had taught me quite a bit and I had a four-wheel drive truck myself in which I had done plenty of off-road driving in.  I had even successfully completed the Miller Jeep trail in my truck.  That is not an easy off-road trail if you've never been on it.  I had also been out to Pismo Dunes a number of times and had a fair amount of experience driving in sand.  Off we went, me and one other SAR member.  His name was Andy.  Andy took the first shift as driver.  We were to patrol the area of Mugu rock.  This included a couple of the parking areas for day use of the beach.  The first thing we noticed were the looks we'd get.  The public had no idea we weren't deputies, nor did they know we had zero authority to get them into any immediate trouble.  Individuals in cars would quickly shuffle around when they saw us.  People standing outside would quickly lower whatever was in their hands down out of sight behind their vehicles.  We got a good laugh at it, and it was absolutely good to be the ones inside that vehicle.  While we were indeed scouring the water line for debris, we also had a little fun with our newly gained power.    We'd park just out of hearing distance facing most of the parked cars and turn our headlights off and just sit there.  We knew that brains were spinning inside all of those civilian cars.  They didn't know that we were simply civilians as well just hanging out at the beach.  This was absolutely one of the best call outs that I would be a part of.  Our shift was from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.  At the six-hour mark, I took over as driver. Seeing as how I had some experience driving in sand, I decided we needed to drive out on the beach to the north of Mugu rock and get a closer look at the waterline.  We were told it was ok for us to do so, so why not.  I pulled out into the sand and drove towards the ocean.  Everything was going just peachy until I stopped, parked horizontally with the water, and began searching the water with our spotlight.  The waves were of medium size, and it looked as though the tide was coming in.  We searched the water for about fifteen minutes and saw nothing but the waves getting ever closer.  I had stopped about five feet from where the dry sand turned into wet sand from the waves lapping up on shore.  When I put the car back in drive and pushed the gas pedal, we immediately began to sink the rear tires into the sand.  Uh oh!  I had it locked in four-wheel drive and also had let a little bit of air out of the tires.   If we were indeed stuck, the only option left was to air down the tires substantially and start praying!  Adding to the stress was the fact that the tide was coming in.  The sound of the waves crashing seemed to be getting closer and closer!  Both of us jumped out and began airing down the tires even more.  We did not have a gauge mind you, so we were guessing.  We kept the searchlight pointed at the water and boy that water was getting really close!  A civilian from the parking lot walked down and asked if we were alright.  Well, of course we had to lie and tell him in very confident voices that we were indeed ok.  We thanked him and he walked back up to his car.  With all four tires deflated to where we could visibly see them bulging, I jumped back in the driver's seat and put it in drive.  Slowly we pulled out of the ruts we had half dug out with our hands and I immediately turned right towards the water.  I knew the wet sand would be harder packed and we could get momentum to get back over the small sand berm we'd become enslaved to just minutes prior.  It worked!  Thank the lord.  All I could hear was the Sergeant's last words and the humility if we would have had to have a tow truck come get us, or worse yet a bystander.  Even worse, I believe within 30 minutes our Sheriff's vehicle would have been overrun by the waves!  We made it back to the paved parking lot, let out a sigh of relief, and began driving to the nearest gas station to air our tires back up.  Our night concluded without any sightings.  By five a.m. I was absolutely exhausted.  Knowing that I had to drive straight to work for another eight-hour shift was not encouraging in the least.  The plane crash was a terrible tragedy to start off the year.  Eighty-three passengers and five crew members lost their lives as the plane supposedly turned upside down and plummeted into the Pacific Ocean.

That day at work, after being up all night, was absolutely horrible.  I asked my partner Dave if I could hop the morning half so that I could just drive the rest of the day.  He kindly obliged.  While pulling up to K-Mart in the afternoon, I needed to drop the kids off at the pool. I told Dave I could pick up the customer after I used the facilities.  I walked in, totally brain farted on going to the bathroom first, and picked up their money.  After picking up the money, I then made the bad decision to use the bathroom.  This was not an employee only bathroom, this was the bathroom open to the public.  I took my gun belt off, took my gun out of its holster and set it on the toilet paper dispenser and took care of doody.  I felt I'd better have my gun out seeing as how I was in a public bathroom with a fair amount of cash in my bag.  All of these decisions were bad ones.  I made it back to the truck without incident and continued driving for the remainder of the route.  Within thirty minutes of picking up the K-Mart, our assistant manager Dennis began contacting us on our two-way radio.  The first transmission he told us we forgot something back at the K-Mart.  We checked the deposit I had carried out and it all seemed legit.  We ignored him.  Another five minutes went by, and he was back on the radio.  Now he was telling us we had forgotten some "Keys", and that we needed to go back there to pick them up.  Dave checked our keys, and we had them all.  What the heck was Dennis talking about we thought!  We told him we had all of our keys; we were absolutely certain.  The last stop of the day came about at Black Angus in Ventura.  I had to go pee this time so after Dave picked up the stop, I got out and used the bathroom.  As I stood at the urinal, my right arm brushed up against my holster.  It felt different!  I looked down at my holster to find it was void of a firearm!  UH OH!  I quickly walked back to the truck.  My gun was not on the floor of the truck, it had not fallen out.  Things started adding up.  Dennis on the radio, our supposed forgotten keys, me remembering I had set my gun on the toilet paper dispenser!  I told Dave I must have left my gun at K-Mart!  He said something like, "Oh Shit".  We couldn't go back to K-Mart now.  We had to return to the office to offload our truck.  This is where Dennis told me in person that Santa Paula P.D. was very kindly in possession of my Colt .45 and that as soon as I was done at Armored, I could go pick it up.  Holy Crap Sauce!  How stupid could I be.  I am indeed a scatter brained individual sometimes, but this was bad.  That drive back out to Santa Paula P.D. probably took ten years off of my life.  What were they gonna say?  What was I gonna say?  Was I going to get in trouble?  Maybe I wouldn't even get my gun back!  Walking into the police station, in my uniform, I politely and sheepishly explained that I was there to retrieve my weapon.  Ugg, it was embarrassing to the ten millionth degree.  The officer behind the desk went to the back room and came back out with a paper bag.  He set it on the counter and sure enough, inside was my colt .45.  The magazine had been removed and the bullets removed from the magazine.  He was actually pretty cool about it.  He didn't give me any lectures, he simply said:  "I bet you won't do that again".  I wanted to crawl under the cement floor.  I said no sir and asked if it was alright to put my gun back in my holster.  I did not reload it.  I was in no trouble, even my work was very lenient and did not hand out any punishment.  Turns out that the custodian at K-Mart was cleaning the bathroom and found my loaded gun.  He took it to management who put two and two together and called our home office.  When no one returned to pick it up, they called Santa Paula P.D.  The following service day at K-Mart I went in again to pick up their deposits.  The managers were grilling me about who had left their gun.  I chose to deflect the despicable error onto another employee who had just quit.  There was a picture roster of all our employees in their money cage.  I told them I couldn't name names about who left the gun and then proceeded to cross out the picture of the employee who had quit.  There was no way I was going to tell them it was me. This is by far one of the biggest disappointments in my life.  Not because I made the mistake.  Because the way I carried my gun, with a round in the chamber, the hammer back and only the safety on.  If a little kid had found it and began playing with it the situation could have become a nightmare.  This incident solidified my choice of quitting the Sheriff's academy.  Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm not the only one probably to have ever left my gun behind.  Heck, some employees actually fired their weapons off in public by accident!  I'm ok with it now, but it ruined my confidence levels for decades.  To this day, Dave and I still chuckle quite a bit about this.

Cost of living in 2000 was as follows.  Homes were in the price range of $211,000.00 in Ca.  In the nation the average hovered around $119.000.00.  Gasoline in the U.S. averaged $1.56 per gallon.  A loaf of bread cost you on average $1.50.  Pound of bacon cost $3.03.  The Federal minimum wage was $5.15 per hour.  With today's current prices, and eight-hour day in the year 2000 wouldn't even buy you a half a tank of gas!  Residential rental prices in the U.S. averaged $602.00 per month.

Some of the top movies in 2000 were Gladiator, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Castaway, and Mission Impossible 2.  Top songs in the charts were "Breathe" by Faith Hill.  "Smooth" by Santana featuring Rob Thomas, "Say My Name" Destiny's Child, and "Music" by Madonna.

The year 2000 would be me and Sarah's last year of few responsibilities.  Next year we'd be responsible for a tiny human.  Somewhere in this time I would go eat dinner at Sarah's parents' house.  I can't remember why Sarah wasn't there, but it would just be Linda and I having dinner.  Linda was a good cook, and we had many delicious meals.  One particular meal was a sort of soup with veggies etc. I think there may have been pasta in it as well.  While sitting at the dinner table eating this meal, I began to notice large black flecks of something that I thought might have been big flakes of pepper.  However, I'd never seen pepper with legs!  I would point it out to Linda, and she'd say, " I think it's just pepper".  Then I'd say, "But it appears to have legs".  Well, we finally got a little magnifying glass out to look at these black flakes.  This wasn't until the second night of eating the meal mind you.  Sure enough, under the magnification, the flakes did in fact have little legs!  They were little beetles.  The search began for the source of the added nutrients in our meal.  We cancelled out the pasta and it came down to some parsley flakes she had decided to add to the soup at the last minute!  At the bottom of the jar of parsley were ten to twelve of the little critters!  They were deader than a doornail!  This was a very comical event, and it did not deter us from eating the soup.  We both get a good laugh when we think back to the mystery of the black flakes.

"I've never been less excited in all my life for an election.  They're all a bunch of nincompoops."

-Everette Boone, 80, of Glendale, where State Sen. Adam Schiff unseated incumbent Rep. James E. Rogan in the 27 Congressional District race.