Encino, California, 2013
HUCK FINN AT 120 DEGREES
For a long time, I was angry. Angry at life. Angry at people. Angry at the world. But I wasn’t always like that. The early years of my childhood were ideal. I was like a modern-day Huckleberry Finn, but one whose footloose and carefree Mississippi River had been traded for the burning sun and decomposed granite sands of Southern California’s desert basin.
I was raised in Palm Desert, California, an affluent sister city to the more famous Palm Springs in Riverside County’s Coachella Valley. Back then, in the sixties, it was still semi-rural. There were vast stretches of unspoiled desert, alive with birds and reptiles, but in town, there were golf courses, tennis and basketball courts, and all the normal amenities of upscale California suburbia: restaurants, bars, shops, and markets. It was an idyllic place for a kid. There was always something to keep me occupied. I had my family around me, my mother and my father, my three sisters, and my aunts and uncles. There was always something going on and our house served as a base of operations for trips to the golf course, motorcycle rides, barbecues, and fishing trips with my dad. I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood. I was the center of the family’s attention and I felt loved. I had a lot of fun. I didn’t know any better. It was an alcoholic household.
The mistake most people make when they conjure an image of the alcoholic household is that they picture it as dark and grim. That’s not completely true. If there’s one thing that most drunks—and addicts—love, it’s music. They can’t live without it. Music keeps the party alive. It keeps it going. The Forrests lived by that motto. In the family room was a huge console hi-fi, its cabinetry a work of art in dark, cherry-stained hardwood. At full volume, you could hear it down the street and the floor and walls of our home would vibrate with the sound pushed out of the speaker grilles. If I stood close enough to one of them, I could feel the air move with each stab of sound. In the den was another, equally big and beautiful stereo rig. Along with those, we kids each had smaller record players in our bedrooms to spin the latest 45s, as well as our little portable transistor radios to catch whatever made the charts on the local Top 40 AM radio stations.
KHJ “Boss Radio” had the wattage to blanket most of Southern California with the station’s signal and featured the “Boss Jocks,” all of whom delivered the hits in rapid-fire teenage patter. I may have been too young to decipher a lot of it, but I somehow sensed that what they were saying was cool. It helped that my sisters loved rock-and-roll music and through them, it became the day-to-day soundtrack for my little kiddie life.
My dad was Idris Forrest, but everyone knew him as Idie. He made a good living and worked out of downtown Los Angeles, where he ran his own sign business, Fudge Neon—named for some nebulous, long-forgotten reason—with his brothers. In those days, there was a huge chain of discount supermarkets called Thriftimart. The stores were ubiquitous throughout Southern California, and each one featured a forty-foot-tall red neon T perched on the roof. You could see those fire-crimson electric beacons from miles away. My dad’s company had the contract to supply the Thriftimart chain with these signature pieces, and Fudge Neon built them and maintained them for the company’s growing empire. Idie would take me with him when he would supervise the crews that installed and maintained them. I remember climbing up the iron ladder that ran up the middle of the T with him when I just a little kid. By the time I was ten, I knew how to bend the delicate glass tubing that held the neon gas that provided the eye-popping color in those signs. In the early sixties, neon advertising was a lucrative business, and it put the Forrest family solidly in the upper middle class and knocking at affluence’s golden door.
While Idie was a fun guy, my mom, Helen, could be kind of a bitch. She was high-strung. Idie loved her, but I don’t think she liked him at all. She believed she could have done better. Before Helen married Idie, she had dated future College Football Hall of Famer Bud Wilkinson, the head coach at the University of Oklahoma from 1947 to 1963. After Bud finished coaching the Sooners, he went on to get involved in Oklahoma Republican politics and was ABC’s lead commentator for the network’s college football coverage before he returned to the field and coached the St. Louis Cardinals for the 1978 and 1979 seasons. He had also served on John F. Kennedy’s President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Bud had an impressive résumé, I’ll give him that. Helen followed his career, and I think she always resented that she’d missed out on being the wife of someone famous. I’m sure she blamed it all on my dad.
Because Fudge Neon was located in downtown Los Angeles, during the week, Idie stayed at the other house we owned in nearby Inglewood, and my mom, my three sisters, and I stayed in Palm Desert. But if there was a Dodgers, Lakers, or Rams game scheduled on the weekend, my mom would drive me out to Los Angeles, where my dad and I would catch the action at Dodger Stadium, the Coliseum, or the Forum and then head over to Chinatown for a feed at Hop Louie’s Golden Pagoda, a rickety, templelike structure that served up Cantonese grub. There was always an old guy who wandered the haphazard Chinatown alleys and footways with a hurdy-gurdy and a flea-bitten squirrel monkey that would come and harass you for coins under the brightly colored paper lanterns that hung overhead. There were live-food markets stuffed to the rafters with turtles and frogs
