Last Man: A Memorial Day Story for Some of The Rest Of Us

One Saturday night around 1972, me and my brothers, Terry and Charley, my cousin Tom, and our neighborhood friends Ben and David piled into Mrs. DeChaine’s blue station wagon – Chevy? Dodge? Plymouth? I think we were a Ford neighborhood – and set off for a night of adventure. We were Newbies, 14 thru 17, wearing Levi’s (we didn’t call them 501’s back then; they were just “button-fly”) and white t-shirts,  some us newly licensed and feeling our freedom.  We had no specific plan, except that it involved beer and girls. (And Mrs. D had contributed a box of Ding-Dongs out of the freezer in their attached garage.)

But first we pulled into the local Far-Go gas station, the one across from Jim’s Charbroiled Burgers on Garvey at Central, to fill the tank as far as we could for a dollar a man.

I was, as usual, clueless to my surroundings until Ben stuck his head in the window and said, “Hey, Bill, you should get out of the car and show them how big you are.”  Me and Ben were both playing high school offensive line in those days.

“Wha’?” I hopped out and stretched. “Who’s ‘them?”

“I said ‘What are you looking at?’” asked a man pumping gas at the island next to us.  He was wearing jeans. Barefoot. Shirtless. Oklahoma look. Maybe 25.  An Adult.

Terry was standing up in the well of the station wagon way-back looking about 7-feet tall. “I’m looking at nothing,” he said with a friendly smile.

“Fuck You!” said the Shirtless Pumper, and the two rear doors of the other car opened. Out of the driver’s side stepped a man in his late-20’s/early-30’s sporting slicked-back hair, a thin mustache, and a polyester pre-leisure suit. From the passenger door emerged a woman … well, I didn’t notice much beyond her gender. This had the indicators of a fight, and she was not a threat.

“Nice shoes,” Polyester Man sneered at me.

I was wearing my new tan and brown suede Oxfords. I couldn’t let that go.

“Nice girl,” I sneered back.

Wrong answer!

Polyester Man came around the back of his car with physical violence in his demeanor. Shirtless Pumper let go of the pump handle and clenched his fists. Ben came around our car and stepped between me and Polyester Man. He defused the situation with “Hey, we’re all from El Monte. We don’t want to damage this guy’s gas station.”

Amazingly, that worked. Our conflict resolved into a series of “Fuck you’s” and “I’ve lived in El Monte longer than you have this is my town’s.”

 As we drove out of the gas station, Terry chastised Ben for defusing the conflict.  “I had the crowbar right in my hand.”

Later that night, me and David threw frozen Ding-Dongs out the back window of Mrs. D’s station wagon at the cars behind us on CA-60 westbound near Hacienda. We never got beer or girls.

This is all true. No one from our car that night can dispute my account because I am the only one from our car that night who is still alive.