Day 10

Day 10: Married in Alamosa, Sonora, Mexico: Romantic Saturday marriage WC: 1737

The best restaurant in Alamosa, Sonora, was one which served rice topped with mole sauce, made of chocolate and pepper and enchiladas suizas. Our marriage was on the morning of March 2, 1972, in the office of the Registro Civil in Alamosa, Sonora, Mexico. The ceremony was recorded in books that were stored in the archives that went back to the times when Spain controlled Mexico, in leather bound books that were unlike books bound today. They were very large and the leather backs had ridges along the spine, and the leather was aged with a patina that spoke of permanence and tradition. It pleased me that the early morning ceremony had no guests, just he, I, and the official who conducted the vows. I had no idea that the marriage would not just endure but be filled with joy for the next twenty seven years. I had found my soulmate, the man who made my heart sing, who made my life a happy one.
We visited a Mexican jail before we left Alamosa.. it was not in the town I believe, but nearby. The inmates there made items for sale, among them braided horsehair belts, one of which Pete purchased for me. Pete told me that some years in his past he had bought what he called “bola bags” from a Mexican prison and sold them to women in California. He was always looking for ideas on how to make money. He told me other things about his life, since he had lived in a different generation than mine. He was 47 and I was 24. His parents had two sons and a daughter. The daughter, the youngest, was just three when his parents took a trip back east to visit one of his father's relatives. They took the train, and it was winter. In the cold of the train, little Shirley took ill and developed pneumonia.She died as a result of that trip. Pete's mother always blamed his father and the trip for the loss, and never quite got over the grief of losing her only little girl. The two sons, Pete and Andy (Norris John and Andrew) were a couple of years apart, with Pete being the oldest. In his years of growing up and going to school, he sold eggs and milk produced by the chickens and cow his parents kept. In high school he worked at a local bowling alley setting up the pins (this was before automatic pin setters had been developed). At 17 or 18 he joined the Navy despite his mother's protests and set out to build his own life. It was at the height of World War II, and he was sent to the islands where battles against the Japanese were going on. He was a Pharmacists Mate First Class, and for awhile was promoted to Warrant Officer. In the fighting against the Japanese in the South Pacific, he was stabbed with a bayonet by a Japanese soldier who jumped into the trench Pete and his mates were in. The soldier lunged out and stabbed him just as one of the others shot and killed him. He kept a scar on his side the rest of his life as a memento of this cut. He told me of an attack where he and other soldiers ran through village huts, looking for the enemy soldiers, and in one of the huts he found a leather pouch with a drawstring. He opened it and found what looked like white buttons. He tossed it aside and later realized they were pearls. He told of being infected with denghy fever, a malaria like disease caused by mosquitos. One of its symptoms is that it makes the sufferer feel as if every bone in the body is broken.. so it became known as “break bone fever”. The other symptoms were chills and sweats, fever, and weakness. When the symptoms go away, the microbe that causes it make a home in the victim's liver where they remain forever. In the years to come, their presence can provoke a liver cancer. He was given a ten percent disability for it, but as he later learned, it should have been a much higher percentage disability. He told me of a friend of his who went into an emotional breakdown, as they were riding in a train back to a military base. The friend was an officer who had seen many wounded, and he suddenly became fixated on a cartoon family, the Katzenjammers. He began weaping inconsolably over the cartoon family, and ultimately was determined to have a traumatic response and he was discharged for treatment and recovery. He told me of the years he spent as a youth in the small oil drilling town of Taft, California, and of his father's work with the oil company. In the years of the depression, he was let go and the family had to survive with chickens, eggs, and short term jobs such as the bowling alley job. The mother did not work then. He told me of the Technocrats group his parents joined during the Depression; it was a socialistic group that promoted more of an eqalitarian society governed by intellectuals and by planning and design, rather than the boom and bust cycles of capitalism. During the war, Pete married a young woman named Lorraine, and she gave birth to their son Stephen. Then, within a year or so, Pete discovered that Lorraine was seeing other men, and he divorced her. Stephen lived with Pete for awhile, but became too difficult to handle. He was diagnosed as a sociopath, a child who could not learn from his experiences, and who had little feeling for others who were affected by his actions. As a child, Steve had stolen his dad's collection of arrowheads and of valuable stamps also, and sold them to a nearby merchant. As a young man and then older, he stole from everyone, wrote bad checks, started fires, and finally robbed a bank. I will tell you more about Steve and the robbery later.
At any rate, after Pete divorced Lorraine, and some time passed, he married Pauline Smith. She had a daughter, Paula, by an earlier marriage. They had a daughter, Pamela, together and set up house in Fountain Valley, California. The house was a sprawling single story home with a triple garage and sat on a corner of Bushard and a neighborhood street. A commercial plant nursery was behind the home. Pete made the inside of the home luxurious, and filled it with custom furniture made and upholstered by himself. His wife Pauline developed Custom Boudoirs, a business he had begun for her. She made bedspreads, drapes, pillows and other bedroom items. Her business flourished, while his did as well. He was hired by Hollywood celebrities to refurbish their furniture and cover their walls with padded silk fabrics. He was hired by Betty Davis, Loretta, Sonja Heney, Bill Dana, John Wayne, Richard Nixon, and the Dupont family. At times he did the interiors of yachts and cruise boats, as well as custom motor homes for the touring stars and anyone else who had enough money to pay the price. Both Pete and Pauline were at the top of their skills, and the clients and the money flowed. They were featured in newspapers and magazines. In time, the marriage faltered. Pete said it was the change of life that brought an end to it. He said Pauline went into emotional tirades at that time of the month. Women have chafed at this summary of problems. They just changed, and the love ended. When I met him, he had separated and divorced her, and was living in a house on the corner of Maui Circle in Huntington Beach. His youngest daughter Pamela was 12 and Paula, the older stepdaughter, was living in the house with her mother. Paula had already had a short lived marriage, divorced and returned to her mother's home.
When I first met Pete, his daughter Pamela was only 12 years younger than me, and Paula was my age but she was five days older. Pete's son Stephen had already been in prison for his various and sundry crimes. We married in Mexico, then returned to California and bought a piece of land, five acres, on the outskirts of Perris. The land was on Souder Street, beside a huge granite boulder that marked the turn for the street from the bigger highway, Cajalco Road. We just had the mobile home, the Spartan. The first few months we built a wood sided building for Pete to do upholstery work in, so we could bring in money to live on. I enrolled in Riverside Community College, and signed up to receive G.I. benefits. I began to take art classes, and was soon getting a monthly benefit check. We were beginning to build a solid life together. I was in love. We made the mobile home rock on its frame making love all the time. Pete's mother Kathryn, and his friends from Los Angeles, Hugh Manning and Ralph Wood, came to visit and have dinner with us. I took botany classes and collected cuttings from poplar trees, which I rooted and planted along one side of the land. They grew in the first two years to over six feet tall. We took several weeks to vacation in Mexico and when we returned, someone had dug up and stolen all my trees. There was nothing left but about a dozen holes in the earth. It surprised me that even trees would be stolen; trees that anyone could have rooted as easily as I had. Sigh... I was receiving about $400 per month in the GI benefits, and used it to cover the cost of travel and books for college. I took an anthropology class, studying Native American tribes. And I took a Spanish class as well as design, drawing, painting, and ceramic classes. I completed the A.A. degree with honors, and looked toward transferring to California State College, San Bernardino, to begin work on a bachelors degree. My determination was to go as high as I could go, without stopping. Stopping, I knew would be the end of ambition.. so I dared not stop.