Down and Out in Silicon Valley

by Anonymous

When I was in hight school, I/we, my parents and I lived in lower middle class Santa Clara. This was approximately 1969-1972 and at a time in my father's life, when he was very close financially to being a millionaire. He was VERY well off. I would think, "we", had a lot of money, by 1970 standards, anyway. Yeah, we lived in lower middle class Santa Clara as the ONLY thing my father truly cared about was making and having money, but more importantly, NOT SPENDING IT. For anything. Certainly not for when I was seriously hurt or ill. I broke my left arm playing football a couple of blocks away at the elementary school and walked home crying and not knowing what to do, instead of just walking over to the hospital, which was 1/2 block away, instead of walking there, I walked home!!! I needed the love and nurturingof my father and mother to take care of me. I was 15 years old. I was a young 15 at that. I walked through the front door, into the doorway of the den, sobbing, holding my left arm with my other arm/hand, it was all purple with bulging veins everywhere, I said, "I think I broke my arm.' He looked up from his newspaper that he had spread out, sitting in his black "Strat-O-Lounger" chair, with "authentic naugahyde".

Picture a giant V, a few pages in each hand with the newspaper spread out, he lowered the paper, looked at me and started laughing and kept on laughing and laughing and did nothing but laugh and laugh and laugh. That's dad. He never stopped laughing as I turned around and walked back out the front door, sobbing and continued to hear him laugh as I walked down the concrete path to the driveway and then the street/sidewalk back towards the hospital. I walked back 2 blocks to the hospital and got taken care of. I remember telling him right around the same time, that he didn't have red blood in his veins and body like other people did. He had the ink that was used to make dollar bills with. He just looked at me. Making money and not spending it and being a sadistic bastard to everyone he could, if he could get away with it, was my dad. I remember him also telling me that the ONLY thing President Nixon did wrong regarding Watergate et all was getting caught. When I was 10 years old and got caught shoplifting at Woolworth's, after he beat the shit outta me for a while with "the belt", he told me to stay in my room and not leave. He went into the den and started reading his newspaper. I stayed there for a while and then got VERY physically ill, nauseous. Guilt, shame? What? I was throwing up, big time.

I was throwing up in my hands and I didn't know what to do with the barf!!! It was horrible. The den, a different apartment than when I was in high school, was right next to my bedroom and I know he could hear me puking and yes, again, my mother was nowhere to be found. It was really bad, sooooooo, I opened the door to my bedroom and ran down the hallway to the bathroom, throwing up in my hands! He yelled at me, "This is God punishing you, for getting caught!" My father's philosophy was, that doing anything at all in the world was A-O.K. just as long as you didn't get caught. One morning, 4 months or so later or whenever it was that the cast was removed from my arm (I broke my left elbow by the way), and I had pretty much finished a lot of the exercise needed to rehabilitate my arm and elbow movement, I awoke in the middle of the night. Backing up just a little; I remember my father would buy these HUGE BAGS of Pistachio nuts and keep them in his trunk. He would pull out a bunch of pistachios every once in a while or would let me go get some from out of the bags he kept in the trunk of his car. It was 1969 and he drove a little piece of shit Toyota. A guy who was retired, started his own coin-operated Pool Table business and made himself into a millionaire, living in lower-middle-class Santa Clara, driving a little piece of shit Toyota and in the trunk he kept HEAVY papered, beautiful, and colorful bags of pistachio nuts. Remember now, this is the old days; late '60's/early '70's. We didn't think of them as the "old days" THEN, BUT NOW, they are definately the "old days". Who'da thunk it?

He also kept other things in the trunk I learned one day, as I went out to get some pistachios. If you had in your mind, the SIZE of the bags of pistachios, they were 5 pound bags, WELL, he also kept all the money from the coin-operated pool tables in the trunk. He also owned coin-operated washing and drying machines AND machines that made change. Put in a dollar bill, get 4 quarters. That was it, then , in the old days. None of this $5 and $10 change machines going on. He had them in all the obvious places. He'd get LOTS and LOTS of single dollar bills and TONS OF QUARTERS, thousands of dimes and nickels for the change-making machines. He'd go to the bank with a LARGE empty bag or suitcase and all these dollar bills and say, "I'll take twenties please", which was at a time when banks didn't have laws about a $10,000 maximum deposit before they send off the red flags to the federal government or worse yet, the IRS, and nobody wrote nothin' down, like, do you know what I'm saying here? So, one morning, in the middle of the night (if that makes any sense), I awoke and walked out of my room, walked down the hallway, opened the door to my parents' bedroom, took my father's car keys, walked outside and closed the front door quietly, walked to the trunk of my father's car and very quietly, inserted the key in the lock, unlocked the trunk, and opened the trunk, all the way up.

Sitting on the right side of the trunk, exactly as I had seen them earlier, were TWO GIANT HUGE HEAVY CANVAS BAGS OF COINS, mostly quarters. THEY WERE SO BIG, shit. They were easily twice as tall and twice as big around as the pistachio bags and packed solid, like a rock. I stood there, looking at them, opened them up, the heavy canvas, folded it back, leaving as big an opening that I could make and with a vengeance I felt as a killing rage, I grabbed as big a handful as I could, let my left hand and left arm go flying AS HARD AS I COULD, releasing all that there was there. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! What a feeling of release!!! I did it again and I did it again and again and again and I did it again, MANY TIMES and many times I felt that feeling of release and of freedom and of healing! With both hands, from 2 bags, I was now grabbing and throwing all these coins for what seemed like many many minutes. I heard MANY sounds of metal hitting metal, like coins hitting the roofs and hoods of parked cars on the street. I sat there on the curb, looking out at the street, that had what seemed like and felt like thousands of dollars all over it, mostly quarters, many dimes and nickels.

I folded back the heavy canvas and made both bags look like they did when I first saw them earlier, when I opened the trunk and closed it, removing the keys. Holding the keys, I sat there on the curb and had a smoke and just, was. I put it out and went back into the house, very quietly returned the keys to the dresser in my parents' bedroom, walked back into my bedroom and peacefully went to sleep. Awoke mid-morning that same day, my father had already left for work, which was around 5AM, I had breakfast and went outside. This was a Saturday and yes, my father worked on Saturdays. He pretty much worked every day, was never around and when he was around, he still wasn't around. I went outside and 2 doors away from me was a guy, name of Jimmy. He had a nickname of "Kilroy". Kilroy came running over to me like a maniac, screaming WITH THE BIGGEST SMILE I HAVE EVER SEEN ON ANYONE, "GUESS WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT?!?!?!?!?!" "What?" I asked, looking at Kilroy, a little scared, 'cause he was a psycho in his own way. "It rained money!" he said. "What?!" He yelled toward his house: "NANCY, BOBBY, ROBERT!!!!!!" waving his hands and arms like a fucking lunatic for them to come over, which they did and all of their pockets and I mean ALL of their pockets were BULGING HUGE with coins.

The girls came over holding their dresses like a big scoop, with what looked like hundreds of dollars in quarters. Kilroy went on to tell me that inside the house they had MANY shoe boxes filled with coins, mostly quarters, that when he came outside this morning, the street was "covered" in coins. That they were everywhere and still are everywhere. All I have to do is look. They were all over the lawns, everyone's lawn, in the bushes, everywhere. I NEVER to this very day EVER heard one word from my father about this BUT HE HAD TO KNOW! What do you think he was thinking? That his son did this or who and what and why was this done? I can only hope that it haunted him terribly for years to come.