Author Archives: Nik

Luckys supermarket 1956

The following is a short of specific memory from my childhood, part of a larger piece about my life, so far a few hundred pages long.
When we moved into Fairway Park, a fifties housing tract, it was pretty much complete except for the shopping center. That shopping center started with a medium size grocery store called Luckys market. While it was being built us kids went to the construction site many time after the workers had gone home and played in the piles of dirt, rummaged the construction debris, and turned into jungle gym the steel beams and wooden rafters sometimes thirty feet into the air. It’s a wonder no one got hurt.

In a world of sameness, each house the same, each neighbor the same, each front and back yard the same, the construction site was a wonderland of difference. Each evening there were new things to explore, sawn ends of steel and wood beams, discarded rivets, electrical wire ends, plugs, and once in a while a tool accidentally left by a worker that we couldn’t figure out what it was used for. We never thought to take anything home, even occasionally when an expensive saw or drill was left behind. We would simply play with it trying to figure out how it worked then discard it usually in a different place where we found it. The actual destructive behavior would come much later.

When Lucky’s opened in the grand style of the fifties, with a small circus and spot lights, it was more of a disappointment because once it opened its doors it joined in the mediocrity that was so prevalent in those time.

Thing is, playing in the construction site of Luckys made way for other things which soon faded from memory until a few years ago when I was sixty-four and I happened to be visiting my ailing eighty-three year old mom.

I went to the shopping center and Luckys who had changed names many times over the years was being gutted to make another super store. The walls were gone, The ceiling was gone, all that was left was the outer shell of the building. When I walked by, there they were, the old beams we played on so many years ago.

I stood there with tears in my eyes gandering at the skeleton of a building as the memories flooded back in, finding electrical knock outs and pretending they were gold treasure, using strips of wire as swords, playing king of the mountain of the piles of dirt temporarily pushed out of the way.

Flamenco Flood #14

CHAPTER #7 CLANCY’S BAR AND GRILL

I was dropped by that old pharmacy guy, then walked down the side of the levee, across the two-lane and through the doors into Clancy’s. I was hoping Dog was waiting, because I had a story to tell and only The Dog Man would believe me.

He was nursing the last bit of color from a third Bloody Mary. He liked to line the glasses. He looked at me and his face lit. “What the fuck, I thought you were dead.”

“Shit, Dog, can’t get rid of me that easy.”

I told Dog Man what happened. I told him about rescuing the ultimate Babe, but I saved the best for last. Continue reading →

Double Terminated Crystals 1982

It was winter. I was in warm Tucson selling my jewelry in yet another in a long series of craft shows. I had done forty that season.

The show was busy and the potential of making money was in the air, something not so heard of at that time of year.

An endless line of potential clients paraded by my booth, some stopping and trying things on and a few handing me checks and cash for my efforts. I was busy and I was happy.

A little Native American woman lugging a heavy suitcase, not much taller than four feet and almost as wide came up to my booth. With a highly wrinkled tentative grin, not too many teeth left, she got my attention by placing a quarter inch wide, eight-inch long, perfectly formed, double terminated quartz crystal on my glass case and saying in horribly broken English, “you buy Crystal?” Continue reading →

Flamenco Flood #13

On the dry end of town, inside Clancy’s Bar and Grill, in his own unique way, The Dog Man was grieving his friend. Dog saw Billy run for the truck, then disappear into the wall of rain. By the time Dog arrived at the half-submerged truck, Billy was gone. Following our plan Dog went for the canoes, but they were gone too. Continue reading →

Freeman House 1960 (Nik’s story)

Although every house in our neighborhood was cookie-cutter similar in that sea of sameness, one single house stood out, some said like a sore thumb. It wasn’t bigger or more stylish in times when those things were important. It was only notable because the people who lived there were so very different than the rest of the entire boring neighborhood. Everyone knew of the Freeman home.

The middle-class neighbors barely tolerated them. When something went wrong, the police would stop first at the Freeman house.

Much later the truth of the neighborhood would come out, murdered husbands buried under houses, children abused, suicides, drug and alcohol abuse, gambling addictions, but in those early days everything was successfully kept behind closed doors and on the surface the neighborhood looked picture perfect, except the Freeman home.

Continue reading →