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Ray and I tried TGI Friday’s,Lehr’s, Diego’s in Pacific Beach, Monterey Whaling Company, or Andy’s Saloon
But he was mostly interested in Westpac widows
When people ask about my friend Ray, I tell them he is crazy. I tell them that with a bit of discomfort, even guilt. Ray is not really crazy, not in a certifiable sense. Psychiatrists and psychologists, the self-appointed experts who tinker with the complexities of the mind, do not always know exactly how to delineate the boundaries between sanity and insanity. More than once they have released from confinement some axe murderer whose response
to this forced liberation is to head for the nearest hardware store to get a new axe. There are those, as well, who lurk in the foggy no-man’s-land between lunacy and genius, and those of us who have met such people know that it is often impossible to decide just which side of the border they reside on. Ray is no axe murderer. He is just...different.
Ray has declared war on society’s norms. I’m not sure that he is even consciously doing it, or that he sees it as a battle. To Ray, conflict is normal, and a typical day is one that has him at odds with nearly every conformity he comes in contact with. For instance, Ray has fought a long war with the authorities at San Diego Stadium. Because there was a rule against bringing bottles and cans into the ballpark, Ray saw it as his duty to sneak all the bottles and cans he could into the games he attended. So he rigged jugs and coolers with false bottoms and filled them with beer cans and bottles. He had a jacket with deep pockets, and he knew just how to hold it so that the searching squeeze of the usher would miss the hidden pint of tequila. Last year, when the stadium outlawed jugs, coolers, and other such containers altogether, Ray took up the challenge. He fitted his parka with pliable plastic containers for liquids — the kind that backpackers use — and with catheter tubes and even a small enema bag and hose. These he filled with the alcoholic drink of his choice, and into the stadium he went. The ushers thought they were squeezing a bulky jacket.
Ray always insisted that we sit in the general admission seats in left center field. Out there with the drinking, the pot smoking, the cursing, the belching, the shouting, and the fisticuffs, Ray was in his element. It took him hours to customize that jacket, and it took him a long time to clean it after the games, but it was part of his life’s work. In the end, though, Ray could not enjoy his victories over the stadium authorities. He’d sit there, sipping from his enema tube, and say to me, “You know, it isn’t as much fun to get away with this if they don’t
know I’m getting away with it. At least last year I could leave the bottles lying here so that they knew I got them in.” Knowing Ray, someday he will mail them that jacket.
Women love Ray. “Ladies love outlaws,” goes the line from the old country-western song, and Ray proves it. In the film East of Eden, Julie Harris finds herself inexorably drawn to the wild and dangerous James Dean character, leaving behind his good brother, the solid citizen she had been engaged to. My friend Susan, who knows a lot about her own gender, gives two reasons for this phenomenon. One is that a great number of young women find life — and most men — very boring. Guys like Ray offer excitement and even danger. Another reason is a sort of “missionary complex” variation: women feel challenged to “tame” someone like Ray, to save him from himself. Many have tried, none has succeeded — at least in Ray’s case. Susan stresses that this tendency to be attracted to men like Ray is almost exclusively restricted to younger women. The more mature a woman gets, says Susan, the less she desires the problems that such men bring.
Ray’s way with women brought certain windfall profits to those of us who went carousing with him, because the women always seemed to be out in clusters. On Friday nights Ray and I played racquetball and then went to TGI Friday’s in Mission Valley. On other nights it was Lehr’s, Diego’s in Pacific Beach, Monterey Whaling Company, or Andy’s Saloon up near SDSU. At other times, though, Ray was a lone wolf, and he went off by himself to look for a female. One of his favorite haunts was a place in Mira Mesa that was known to be frequented by “Westpac widows” — the lonely wives of navy men who were away on seven-month deployments. Ray is a predator, a night stalker with hot blood and a smooth delivery. I’ve seen him work his magic on 16-year-old girls and 40-year-old women. He is especially attracted to women who have children. “It proves that all the parts work,” he would say, and he would engage the ladies in pleasant conversation, hop- ing for a divorcée or a dis- enchanted housewife. He once spent a torrid afternoon in my apartment with a Clairemont housewife he’d seduced after flattering her in the Vons in Clairemont Square.
Of course, Ray left a trail of broken hearts and hurt, angry women behind him. A lot of the things he did I didn’t like. He lied constantly, coldly. More than once we’d be back at Ray’s house with a couple of women after a night on the town and one of them would say to me, “Gee, I think it’s terrible what Ray said happened to you guys in Vietnam” (neither of us was there), or “Are you guys really football players at USC?” Most of the time I played along; my own blood is not much cooler than Ray’s at times.
Ray’s popularity with women often translated into an unpopularity with the men who stood to gain nothing from his presence at a bar or party. Ray led us into our share of fist fights. Once, he got us into a fraternity party at San Diego State by having us wear bogus Greek T-shirts he’d had made and telling the brothers that we were frat brothers who were visiting from out of state. When he was discovered in an upstairs bedroom with the girlfriend of one of the brothers, everything came apart. We fought our way out of the house. Ray had a pen- chant for small, sleazy bars that were fights waiting to happen. Sometimes we managed to get him out in time, and sometimes we took our licks.
Ray has ways of getting around almost anything. For a while he was using a handicapped placard in his car to park in the reserved handicap parking places. Not content just to park there, he also feigned disability. He could imitate palsy, polio, dystrophy, and a few other handicaps. He claims (though I never saw it) that he once tied his leg up under him the way actors do when they play one-legged roles and then went into a market on Convoy Street on crutches he’d bought at the swap meet. He was always getting into bars without paying the cover charge, and he could pay one admission to a fourplex theater and see all four movies. He has also been an accomplished shoplifter, though that is one of the places where I drew the line in our friendship.
Ray can be a terrible pain in the ass. He’s done a lot of things that I can say I don’t like and some things that I truly disrespect him for. I’ve taken some punches that were meant for Ray, and I’ve thrown a few that I really didn’t want to throw because there was no other choice; Ray had taken me too deeply into a mess. He’s lied and cheated, and I’ve seen him be cruel and even vicious. He has little respect, but great passion, for women.
So why do I like the guy? Why do I call him my friend? I suppose that some of it has to do with the fact that when you go through a harrowing experience or two or three with someone, bonds form. Attachments built under fire like that are the kind that last. Another part of it, I think, is some of that same desire to escape boredom that women see in Ray. Life around him is never dull. Then, too, he is only cruel a fraction of the time. Most of the time he is thoughtful and a genuinely good guy. Some of the things he does are truly funny. He can also be very generous.
I know of nothing in Ray’s past that could explain the way he is. His childhood was not strangled by divorce, abuse, death, or any such trauma. He was from a normal American family. Perhaps that normality became banal for Ray. At some point he began a revolt against normalcy that has not ended. Which is probably why many people, myself included, like Ray despite some of the things he’s done. We secretly admire his revolt against the world at large, and we wish we had the guts to be more like him, more free. We are jealous of the possibility that the fire inside Ray makes him more alive than we are. Some day I believe that a woman will come along who will be able to handle Ray, for it will take a force as powerful as that to control him. Ray, despite his past record of abusing them, does not hate women at all. He just hasn’t met one that is a match for him. When he does, San Diego will have lost a unique if somewhat troublesome spirit. But that has not happened yet. Ray is still on the prowl.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Ray and I tried TGI Friday’s,Lehr’s, Diego’s in Pacific Beach, Monterey Whaling Company, or Andy’s Saloon
But he was mostly interested in Westpac widows
Ray and I tried TGI Friday’s,Lehr’s, Diego’s in Pacific Beach, Monterey Whaling Company, or Andy’s Saloon
But he was mostly interested in Westpac widows
When people ask about my friend Ray, I tell them he is crazy. I tell them that with a bit of discomfort, even guilt. Ray is not really crazy, not in a certifiable sense. Psychiatrists and psychologists, the self-appointed experts who tinker with the complexities of the mind, do not always know exactly how to delineate the boundaries between sanity and insanity. More than once they have released from confinement some axe murderer whose response
to this forced liberation is to head for the nearest hardware store to get a new axe. There are those, as well, who lurk in the foggy no-man’s-land between lunacy and genius, and those of us who have met such people know that it is often impossible to decide just which side of the border they reside on. Ray is no axe murderer. He is just...different.
Ray has declared war on society’s norms. I’m not sure that he is even consciously doing it, or that he sees it as a battle. To Ray, conflict is normal, and a typical day is one that has him at odds with nearly every conformity he comes in contact with. For instance, Ray has fought a long war with the authorities at San Diego Stadium. Because there was a rule against bringing bottles and cans into the ballpark, Ray saw it as his duty to sneak all the bottles and cans he could into the games he attended. So he rigged jugs and coolers with false bottoms and filled them with beer cans and bottles. He had a jacket with deep pockets, and he knew just how to hold it so that the searching squeeze of the usher would miss the hidden pint of tequila. Last year, when the stadium outlawed jugs, coolers, and other such containers altogether, Ray took up the challenge. He fitted his parka with pliable plastic containers for liquids — the kind that backpackers use — and with catheter tubes and even a small enema bag and hose. These he filled with the alcoholic drink of his choice, and into the stadium he went. The ushers thought they were squeezing a bulky jacket.
Ray always insisted that we sit in the general admission seats in left center field. Out there with the drinking, the pot smoking, the cursing, the belching, the shouting, and the fisticuffs, Ray was in his element. It took him hours to customize that jacket, and it took him a long time to clean it after the games, but it was part of his life’s work. In the end, though, Ray could not enjoy his victories over the stadium authorities. He’d sit there, sipping from his enema tube, and say to me, “You know, it isn’t as much fun to get away with this if they don’t
know I’m getting away with it. At least last year I could leave the bottles lying here so that they knew I got them in.” Knowing Ray, someday he will mail them that jacket.
Women love Ray. “Ladies love outlaws,” goes the line from the old country-western song, and Ray proves it. In the film East of Eden, Julie Harris finds herself inexorably drawn to the wild and dangerous James Dean character, leaving behind his good brother, the solid citizen she had been engaged to. My friend Susan, who knows a lot about her own gender, gives two reasons for this phenomenon. One is that a great number of young women find life — and most men — very boring. Guys like Ray offer excitement and even danger. Another reason is a sort of “missionary complex” variation: women feel challenged to “tame” someone like Ray, to save him from himself. Many have tried, none has succeeded — at least in Ray’s case. Susan stresses that this tendency to be attracted to men like Ray is almost exclusively restricted to younger women. The more mature a woman gets, says Susan, the less she desires the problems that such men bring.
Ray’s way with women brought certain windfall profits to those of us who went carousing with him, because the women always seemed to be out in clusters. On Friday nights Ray and I played racquetball and then went to TGI Friday’s in Mission Valley. On other nights it was Lehr’s, Diego’s in Pacific Beach, Monterey Whaling Company, or Andy’s Saloon up near SDSU. At other times, though, Ray was a lone wolf, and he went off by himself to look for a female. One of his favorite haunts was a place in Mira Mesa that was known to be frequented by “Westpac widows” — the lonely wives of navy men who were away on seven-month deployments. Ray is a predator, a night stalker with hot blood and a smooth delivery. I’ve seen him work his magic on 16-year-old girls and 40-year-old women. He is especially attracted to women who have children. “It proves that all the parts work,” he would say, and he would engage the ladies in pleasant conversation, hop- ing for a divorcée or a dis- enchanted housewife. He once spent a torrid afternoon in my apartment with a Clairemont housewife he’d seduced after flattering her in the Vons in Clairemont Square.
Of course, Ray left a trail of broken hearts and hurt, angry women behind him. A lot of the things he did I didn’t like. He lied constantly, coldly. More than once we’d be back at Ray’s house with a couple of women after a night on the town and one of them would say to me, “Gee, I think it’s terrible what Ray said happened to you guys in Vietnam” (neither of us was there), or “Are you guys really football players at USC?” Most of the time I played along; my own blood is not much cooler than Ray’s at times.
Ray’s popularity with women often translated into an unpopularity with the men who stood to gain nothing from his presence at a bar or party. Ray led us into our share of fist fights. Once, he got us into a fraternity party at San Diego State by having us wear bogus Greek T-shirts he’d had made and telling the brothers that we were frat brothers who were visiting from out of state. When he was discovered in an upstairs bedroom with the girlfriend of one of the brothers, everything came apart. We fought our way out of the house. Ray had a pen- chant for small, sleazy bars that were fights waiting to happen. Sometimes we managed to get him out in time, and sometimes we took our licks.
Ray has ways of getting around almost anything. For a while he was using a handicapped placard in his car to park in the reserved handicap parking places. Not content just to park there, he also feigned disability. He could imitate palsy, polio, dystrophy, and a few other handicaps. He claims (though I never saw it) that he once tied his leg up under him the way actors do when they play one-legged roles and then went into a market on Convoy Street on crutches he’d bought at the swap meet. He was always getting into bars without paying the cover charge, and he could pay one admission to a fourplex theater and see all four movies. He has also been an accomplished shoplifter, though that is one of the places where I drew the line in our friendship.
Ray can be a terrible pain in the ass. He’s done a lot of things that I can say I don’t like and some things that I truly disrespect him for. I’ve taken some punches that were meant for Ray, and I’ve thrown a few that I really didn’t want to throw because there was no other choice; Ray had taken me too deeply into a mess. He’s lied and cheated, and I’ve seen him be cruel and even vicious. He has little respect, but great passion, for women.
So why do I like the guy? Why do I call him my friend? I suppose that some of it has to do with the fact that when you go through a harrowing experience or two or three with someone, bonds form. Attachments built under fire like that are the kind that last. Another part of it, I think, is some of that same desire to escape boredom that women see in Ray. Life around him is never dull. Then, too, he is only cruel a fraction of the time. Most of the time he is thoughtful and a genuinely good guy. Some of the things he does are truly funny. He can also be very generous.
I know of nothing in Ray’s past that could explain the way he is. His childhood was not strangled by divorce, abuse, death, or any such trauma. He was from a normal American family. Perhaps that normality became banal for Ray. At some point he began a revolt against normalcy that has not ended. Which is probably why many people, myself included, like Ray despite some of the things he’s done. We secretly admire his revolt against the world at large, and we wish we had the guts to be more like him, more free. We are jealous of the possibility that the fire inside Ray makes him more alive than we are. Some day I believe that a woman will come along who will be able to handle Ray, for it will take a force as powerful as that to control him. Ray, despite his past record of abusing them, does not hate women at all. He just hasn’t met one that is a match for him. When he does, San Diego will have lost a unique if somewhat troublesome spirit. But that has not happened yet. Ray is still on the prowl.
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