‘The Story of Mike’

I need to preface this story with the fact that Mike was a friend and I remember him fondly. The many events I relate here are the story of his life as Kevin (the West Coast Bureau Chief) and I remember from witnessed events and conversations with Mike. At times in these stories Kevin may appear to treat Mike harshly, but Mike shared his childhood stories with Kevin and any recognition at all seemed to please Mike.

Mike was the most unusual person I ever met. He had more bad luck than anyone needed in two lifetimes. Mike was shaped like a top, small head, slightly larger shoulders, very wide waist, narrower hips, slim legs and small feet with extraordinarily long toenails that would occasionally show through the holes worn in the sides of his sneakers.

The first time I saw him he was applying for a job at Unisys. He was brought into the lab there on a brief tour and I saw his dress was immediately, obviously all wrong. He had on a wrinkled polyester shirt, a tie that didn’t go with the wrinkled shirt, a pair of pants that were also wrinkled and shoes that didn’t go with anything else he had on his wide, short body. He was semi-clean shaven, for the first and one of only two times I ever saw him that way. We spoke briefly and he noted that he too had been in the Navy. I knew right away he was an intelligent man and a nice guy, but couldn’t imagine how an ex-sailor could get so un-squared away so quickly. Mike was still young, perhaps 24 years old. Something told me he was a guy who marched to a different drumbeat and I didn’t think he would be hired so I thought I’d never know much more about him.

I was wrong; they hired him and he was working in the lab with us the next Monday. Thus began a long friendship that lasted until I left the job some 10 years later.

Before I tell you Mike’s story as a grown man I’d like to share his childhood memories with you, as told by him.

Mike and his friends would go to the Saturday matinees up in Washington State and see the movies and serials made for kids. One Saturday the Lone Ranger and Tonto were left precariously hanging on a sheer cliff, with questions of ‘would they survive?’ Mike and his friends left the theater and noticed the rough brick wall that was on the side of the building. In unison they began to imitate the Lone Ranger and Tonto’s climb. They made it half way up the side of the building, got scared, and were stuck there, holding on for dear life, frozen with fear. The local fire department was called to bring the rescue ladder and pick them off of the side of the wall, one at a time.

On another Saturday Mike and a friend were riding home on bikes when they saw a drainage gutter being installed on the side of the road. They rolled into the gutter and took off down the hill at a high rate of speed. The gutter took a sudden right turn leaving Mike and his buddy to hit the end and go tumbling down the hill and into the woods, destroying the front wheels on the bikes and scratching up Mike and his friend.

Mike learned to ice skate at a local rink and was getting pretty good. He discovered how to drag a toe and slow down gracefully. Then Mike being a young boy and wanting to show off got the idea to race up to his friends and jam both toes into the ice and come to an instant halt. It would be so cool! Mike circled the rink building speed, cut straight across the rink directly at his skating group, and then hit the brakes with a flourish! The skates dug in and stopped on a dime, but the laws of physics took over and sent Mike flying head first to the icy surface, splitting his head wide open on the rink. It took the Zamboni crew two weeks to get all of the blood from the ice.

Mike’s younger sister came home from self-defense class one afternoon and was excited to tell Mike what she had learned. “Come at me like you’re attacking me,” she said. Mike did as she requested and when he drew close enough, she kicked him solidly in the groin, dropping him like a sack of potatoes! Mike went into the fetal position and vomited all over the floor before being ambulanced to the hospital for two days of recovery.

Such was our Mike in his younger days.

Now on to his Navy career.

The first thing I learned was he had been an electronics technician, which was one of the specialties in the Navy that required the highest level test scores, so he was a smart guy. He finished school at Treasure Island Naval Base (San Francisco) and headed for the amphibious base at Coronado. He detoured by Las Vegas on the way. He was playing 21 in his Navy uniform and was winning several hundred dollars when the dealer said: “ It’s about time to take your winnings and go sailor.” Mike didn’t think so, not while he was winning. He said he never won another hand and left Las Vegas with just a few dollars in his pocket. He partially filled his gas tank with the money he had left. Mike was cruising on nothing but fumes as he approached the main gate at Coronado. The car died right at the main gate and Mike was totally broke. Base security had his car towed away.

Mike’s job as an electronics technician gave him the opportunity to be stationed on any ship or shore installation in the world, wherever the US Navy prowled the seven seas. What he got was, as far as I know, the one billet in the Navy that existed as a tech on the Navy’s PBR gunboats patrolling the Mekong Delta and the tributaries that fed into the delta. Mike was the one tech out of thousands that was working to repair electronic equipment and frequently getting shot at, at the same time.

The delta area was overrun with rats and in the early days of Vietnam there were no nice sealed portable-potties down there. It was old-fashioned Army dugout latrines. The rats would go into the latrines. The rats there drew cobras (snakes) in after them. The cobras were menacing, so someone managed to get some mongooses to take care of the cobras. The problem was neither the mongooses or the cobras understood that a Louisville slugger and a matching set of baseballs in a glove dangling below the rim was no threat to either of them, so they would strike at any unknown entering their domain. So before one could sit down he had to stick his face down far enough to ensure there were no occupants camped out below, but not so close as to trigger a response from said inhabitants.

The rats turned out to be a defense mechanism more than once. Mike and his buddies would catch them, keep them in cages and on those nights when they knew the Viet Cong were moving about the perimeter, prodding for holes in the defenses, Mike would soak rats in kerosene, light them off and turn them loose. The rats ran like specters out into the jungle night, frightening the superstitious Cong and chasing them from the perimeter.

Mike was on liberty in Saigon one night, sitting at a bar drinking beer when he ran out of smokes. He asked the sailor next to him for a cigarette and received it. What Mike didn’t know was that the cigarette was laced with heroin! He remembered being extremely mad right before he passed out. He woke up hours later and delivered a huge right cross to the sailor sitting next to him. The problem was the guy who gave him the heroin laced smoke was long gone and the guy sitting next to Mike was an innocent bystander. Mike had to hotfoot it out of there before the other sailor regained consciousness.

He completed Vietnam duty and was assigned to a supply ship for the rest of his enlistment. Mike liked the Navy and said he had decided to re-enlist when his time was up. He was on his way to personnel to sign his papers when he skipped up a flight of stairs and was stopped by an old Chief, who was the local master-at-arms, and who promptly placed Mike on report for skipping stairs. That changed Mike’s mind about re-enlisting and sent him out into the world.

He went to school under the GI bill and completed all but one semester for his bachelor’s degree. He never told me why he quit, but he left school, bought a bicycle and left the California shores for the New York island, pedaling the 3000 or so miles and when he got to his destination he threw his bicycle off of a pier and headed back to California.

Mike spent a period of time in Los Angeles working in the then flourishing electronics industry of the seventies. He left his job, reason unclear, rented a UHAUL truck and headed for San Diego. He stopped in beautiful San Juan Capistrano for one of those delicious Denny’s lunches. He finished his lunch, walked out into the sunny afternoon and stopped dead in his tracks. His rental truck was gone! Someone had stolen it right off of the parking lot! Everything he had in the world, including all of his savings, was gone with the truck. Mike reported the incident to the police, but that was the last he ever heard about that.

Mike continued on to San Diego, hitching a ride into town. His few dollars left in his pockets was soon gone, leaving him to live on the street during the day and sleeping under the bridge in Balboa Park at night. He was on the street downtown one day when he met a Christian street minister who offered to help Mike with a place to stay and food to eat until he could get back on his feet. The minister took Mike to his storefront ministry and fed him. The reverend guided Mike into his office after lunch and began asking Mike some questions about him to create a file for his church records. What Mike didn’t know was the minister was taking the information and going to a friend at the state welfare office and creating an account in his and dozens of other homeless people’s names to draw welfare. Mike later found out about the scheme and confronted the reverend. The reverend exploded in anger and kicked Mike out of the shelter.

So Mike was back out on the street again with nothing. He was only downtown for a day when he saw the right reverend running through the crowd at him. The reverend attacked Mike in Horton Plaza, screaming at him and forcing Mike to defend himself. The police were quickly there and when they separated Mike and the reverend, the reverend concocted a story that Mike had molested his baby daughter. Mike was thrown into the downtown lockup and the reverend was released.

The lockup was central holding for every variation of criminal in town. Mike was smart enough to keep quiet about what he was charged with so when he was asked by another incarcerated character; Mike replied he was in for armed robbery. Mike was locked up with another guy who was also being held for bank robbery. His cellmate and the cellmate’s accomplice thought they would rob the downtown Bank of America and they figured the best time was on Friday afternoon when the bank had a huge supply of money to cash paychecks. What they didn’t figure on was the bank was also grid locked with traffic on Friday afternoon. The two of them got the money, but were still stuck in the parking lot in their get away car when the police arrived. Mike’s opinion of criminals was that they were pretty stupid when he heard that story. The police did some investigating and decided there wasn’t enough evidence to hold Mike or to prosecute him so they let him go 48 hours later. Mike was back out on the street and two days after that the reverend ran up to him, pointed a gun to his head and shrieked: “you’re not going to destroy my ministry,” and then pulled the trigger. The gun didn’t fire so the reverend squeezed the trigger two more times and the gun misfired twice more. The police arrived on the spot again and separated the two of them. This time Mike was taken to the Salvation Army, and that was where he got the clothes and a bus ticket for his interview and our first meeting.

Mike was rather liberal and a sharp contrast to my conservative ways in those days. I was both impressed at how smart he was and somewhat appalled at how reckless he was with arriving on time to work and how sloppy his dress was in a place with a stringent dress code. Blue jeans weren’t allowed at work and there were guidelines on what was and what was not allowed, even though the place was a factory making IC circuits, it was also a circuit design house. Every one dressed in business casual; it was after all California. Once Mike hadn’t showed up or called in for days, so I went by his house to tell him he needed to at least call or he would lose his job. All I received for my efforts was some coughing and spewing right in my face, but that was Mike.

Mike would only occasionally arrive to work early and I would be sitting at my bench every morning reading the Wall Street Journal and drinking my coffee. He would sit down by me and begin talking about something. He had a habit of leaning forward and twisting the hair above his temple into knots (many very brilliant men have this habit). Mike would be twisting his unwashed hair over my coffee cup forcing me to discreetly move the cup out of his reach. He never even realized what he was doing.

There were few subjects, if any, on which Mike wasn’t well versed. He wasn’t a braggart, didn’t bore anyone by droning on about all the things he knew, but was mostly quiet unless engaged in conversation on some issue. His passion was computers and baseball. He could remember more statistics than anyone I ever met. His favorite sayings were “life is a subset of baseball” and every year when baseball season opened he would happily state, “ life is now in session.” Mike was a big San Diego Padres fan, and would go to Las Vegas every year to make his pre-season bet on the Padres winning the National League Pennant. The Padres were originally a good minor league team, but not fit for the major leagues when the N.L. expanded and included them. The Vegas odds were 150 to one on them ever winning a pennant, but Mike went and placed his bet before opening day each year. One year the faithful were rewarded and Mike won thousands of dollars. The odds makers never again gave such odds.

Mike had only worked at Unisys a few weeks when the government people saw his Social Security number come up on a pay stub, somewhere in the system. I seems that Mike had some of those student loans outstanding and they showed up to put a lean against his wages. That was bad enough, but the federal government contacted the state government and soon after the state showed up to take its cut of his wages for the aid the reverend was given in Mike’s name during his tribulation with the clergyman.

It wasn’t long after Mike arrived that Kevin was hired to work in the computer memory lab, which was shared with the product-engineering lab where Mike and I worked. Kevin, still a best friend 30 years later and our west coast bureau chief, was fresh out of school with his Associate’s degree in electronics and his already long developed fun loving personality. Mike endeared Kevin with the title “The Large Child.” Kevin was always working on some prank and quite often Mike was his prey. Mike was a good-natured victim.

Mike hated to have to answer the telephone and would avoid it at all costs. Whenever Kevin would have a few moments he would check to see where Mike was. Kevin could see out of the room where he worked, into the area we had. Mike’s bench was next to a telephone, so Kevin would dial the number of the phone on the wall by Mike. Mike would act busy, hoping someone else would pick it up or the caller would hang up after a few rings. Kevin would hide behind the test equipment in his area and watch Mike as the phone rang on endlessly until Mike would finally get up to answer. Just as Mike would pick up the receiver, Kevin would hang up. Mike would sit down and Kevin would ring the phone again and keep it ringing until Mike would get up to answer. It actually seemed like an incredible series of circumstances, and was very effective.

One day Mike had bought some lunch and ate in the lab. He left the tray along with his coffee cup, cigarettes, ashtray and a pencil to go back to work on the test floor. Kevin got out his super glue and went to work, making a sculpture of Mike’s dirty dishes, tray, cup, tools and his pencil forever glued across the top of the coffee cup. Of course with Mike not liking to answer the phone Kevin decided to glue the receiver to the cradle. It really was quite funny, or so we thought. We were excited waiting for Mike to return, but it turned out the product engineering manager showed up before then and sat down at Mike’s bench to talk with some of us techs. He moved Mike’s mess out of his way to light up a smoke and when he tried to pick up the ashtray when he realized that everything was glued together. For some reason he assumed that Kevin had something to do with the occurrence. Kevin was called into the office and was told that while Rich, the manager, had as good a sense of humor as anyone else, that was NOT funny! Kevin assured me that Rich’s statement proved he in fact did not have the good sense of humor he claimed to have.

One afternoon Kevin had taken Mike to lunch and as usual they were late getting back. Mike wanted to rush inside and get back to work, but wouldn’t open the door until Kevin brought the car to a complete halt. So Kevin being the young at heart guy he was and is to this day kept bumping the car up against the concrete tire bumper so Mike couldn’t get out of the vehicle.

Kevin forever played pranks on Mike. One afternoon Kevin and I went into the men’s room and after washing our hands Kevin noticed there was one pair of dirty sneakers dangling from one of the two stools there. He thought he recognized them as Mike’s shoes so Kevin turned out the lights as we left the room. The lavatory was pitch black when those lights were out, so we giggled uncontrollably as we left. It turned out that it wasn’t Mike in the stall. It was one of the test techs that worked on the test floor. He had been suffering with stomach cramps and diarrhea for two days at that point and was in no mood for childish pranks. He recognized who turned out the lights and as soon as someone else entered the restroom and turned on the lights he cleaned up and ran furiously across the hall and banged on the computer room doors until Kevin and I opened them to see who the nut job was that was rattling our doors. He shook his fists, waved his arms and screamed at the top of his lungs at us for our silly, childish trick. Kevin often wondered if the tech had been feeling better if he would have physically attacked us? Two days of diarrhea will take the starch out of just about anyone.

Every year the Engineering department would have an evening dinner at a local hotel. The head of Engineering would give a speech and hand out an award or two and then the bar would open for all the free drinks anyone wanted. One of those years the gathering place was at a location north of where I lived, which was north of the plant, so Kevin and a friend named Gary came over to my house right after work. We somehow got started drinking before the meeting and were well beyond where we needed to be to safely drive to the meeting. Mike’s house was just a few blocks from mine and he hadn’t been to work for several days so we decided to stop by his place on the way to the Engineering meeting. The three of us banged on Mike’s door and windows, shouted out to let him know we were looking for him but no answer came from Mike. Kevin asked if either of us had a piece of paper to leave a note on the door to let Mike know we had been there. None of us had any paper, but the thought occurred to me that dogs have a way of letting other dogs know they have been at a particular spot and since we had been drinking quite a bit by then, the three of us left a calling card on Mike’s door. It wasn’t our proudest moment, but 25 years later I’m still chuckling as I write this down.

We didn’t know it at the time we left our calling card, but Mike was passed out on the floor of his bedroom. He had been sick with some unknown ailment that weakened him so much that he was unconscious and every time he awakened he would try to get up off of the floor but would immediately pass out again. No one knew where he was and he could never stay conscious long enough to get to his phone. He would have died right then, but it turned out a few days later his landlord went to see why Mike was late with the rent. Mike didn’t answer the door, so the landlord pried open a window and went in to see what was going on. He tripped over Mike’s body as he crossed the floor. The landlord called 911 and got the paramedics there right away. Mike said he was barely conscious long enough to hear one of the paramedics say: “I wonder how long this guy’s been dead?” Sadly Mike frequently smelled like he was dead, and that’s why the paramedic thought initially that he was dead. The hospital and doctors never did figure out what happened or what the illness was, but Mike was back to work a few days later.

One night after the annual Engineering drunk out, I mean awards night, Kevin was driving some friends home because they were too drunk to drive. No one had told Kevin he was also too drunk to drive anyone home and Kevin was always of a helpful nature. The dinner was up by the plant in Rancho Bernardo and Kevin planned his route well to drop off passengers along the way to his home in Chula Vista, some 30 miles south. All went well until Kevin pulled into his home driveway, shut of the key and realized Mike was sitting in the back seat of his car and Mike lived 40 miles north by me. Kevin put him up for the night and at breakfast the next morning Kevin’s daughter Stephanie (perhaps 7 at the time) asked Mike why the cereal in the bigger boxes wasn’t proportionally bigger like the box was? Mike thought the child was a genius!

One Christmas Joyce bought a nice pale yellow cotton jacket to give Mike because he had so few decent clothes. Mike arrived at work every day with the L.A. Times rolled up and tucked under his arm. The newsprint soon turned the yellow jacket black from the armpit to the waist. Mike seemed not to notice the obvious problem. So Kevin thought it would be fun to take Mike’s jacket and wash it during the lunch hour, dry it, then hang it back on the coat hook and watch Mike’s expression when he picked up the coat and saw it was suddenly clean. Kevin used a huge amount of bleach in order to get the coat clean and the heavy detergent added to the bleach destroyed the title to Mike’s recently purchased motorcycle, which happened to be in the pocket of Mike’s coat. That was the one time Mike really got mad. He was on his way to get the title changed into his name and now he was going to have to file for a lost title.Mike rode his motorcycle to work once he got the title reissued after Kevin’s bleaching the yellow jacket. He suffered through the worst winter rains anyone had ever seen in San Diego, getting soaked day after day on that motorcycle. He took it all in stride, never complained. He was taking night classes at Palomar Junior College. One night he was going to class when a woman, without signaling, made a left turn right in front of Mike. It was impossible to stop, so the motorcycle rammed into the rear quarter panel of the Chevrolet and Mike went over the handlebars, over the Chevrolet and down the street several more feet before hitting the pavement. Yes, another trip was in order to the hospital. When he got out of the hospital, he was without transportation, so I was his ride for two months while he saved enough money to buy a small Datsun B210 car.

One afternoon Mike was in the men’s room and there was another employee in the stall next to him. The guy next to him got up and flushed, but there was something clogging the sewer line below, causing the flush to back up right where Mike was sitting, drenching Mike. Kevin, Gary and I each offered to give him a ride home on the spot, but he said it was only an hour and a half until the end of the day, and he could wait. That was during the time I was his transportation and I was very happy that the VW had vinyl seats so I could wash them off after I delivered Mike to his place.

About a year later Mike was in one of those famous freeway pileups, the accident happened right in front of him and as he hit his brakes to stop the woman behind him rammed his car into the ones ahead. That brought another trip to the hospital with a collapsed lung and some fractured bones. The accident was bad for Mike because he was a heavy smoker and had a cigarette cough to begin with. The doctor told Mike to quit smoking or he would be dead in two years. Mike asked him if it would be okay if he smoked for a year and a half and then stop, but Mike never did quit.

It looked like things were going to get better for Mike when he landed a job with one of the programming departments at Unisys. He moved out of the Product Engineering Department and into the test-programming department. Kevin and I were working second shift in the computer room at that time, doing preventative maintenance. The job put Kevin in charge and there was a lot of free time on our hands, not a good combination at all. We had time to go to Mike’s office and rearrange things on a regular basis. I’m sure everyone has heard stories of workers using the copy machines to copy things that were never designed to be copied, well Kevin invented that long before it was ever in the news and Mike could verify that.

There was a guy named Bill who ran the department where Mike was programming and Bill took Mike under his wing. They were an odd group for programmers, very non-stereotypical. They would hang out together, watch porno together and go down to Mexico in a group to spend occasional weekends at some beach resort. Mike would fell asleep on a raft he had anchored off shore and Bill swam out, disconnected the raft and let it drift down the shore for a half mile or so, then retied it so when mike woke up he didn’t have any idea where he was. Those guys would buy firecrackers, light them and toss them at Mike when they got drunk. It was a regular thing, but Mike enjoyed the company and quickly forgave them.

The layoffs hit Unisys about a year and a half after I left. Eventually Mike’s number got called and he was laid off. The layoff devastated Mike. He disappeared and never even showed up to pickup his last paycheck. No one saw him for almost two years. Then one day Bill got a call from a local hospital telling him that Mike was hospitalized. They called Bill because when the staff looked in Mike’s wallet for some clue as to who to call, Bill’s phone number was all Mike had in his wallet. Bill went and visited Mike and it was evident Mike wasn’t going to live long. Bill found out Mike had a sister in Seattle and he called her. She and his whole family came down to San Diego to see Mike and spend his last days with him. The typically odd thing was Mike had rarely said anything about his family. I don’t remember what he had told me about them, but his family was alive and well and had been looking for him for a long time. Bill said they were very nice people.

Mike died in the hospital, but he will forever live in my mind. I’ve lived a whole lifetime and only met one Mike.