Seeing somebody from my childhood, Monday, at a local restaurant, piqued my memory about growing up in the Railroad Avenue barrio.
I saw Johnny Sandoval, who’s visiting from California. He’s the oldest of a family, mainly males, which includes sister Vickie and brothers Narciso, Chris and Lawrence. With them at El Rialto were their mother, Bertha Sandoval, and Lawrence’s wife Antonia.
“How old are you?” Johnny immediately asked me, when introduced by his sister. “I just turned 67 on Friday,” I said. “I’ve got you beat by a couple of years,” Johnny said.
Because the Sandovals house is a full three blocks from where we grew up, we Trujillos weren’t really part of their circle, although we went to the same schools. One occasion in which Johnny took part, and one I hope he’ll recall, after about 56 years, is having attended a party at our house. There was dancing and games, but never any drinking, and only some of the older kids smoked.
My most vivid recollection of that event is that the party ended on a sour note because one of our guests summoned a taxi to our house when no one needed one. It was a prank.
Here’s what happened:
A taxi — run either by the Rimberts or Arandas — which used to be headquartered about four blocks away, on Railroad and Douglas, appeared at our house. The driver honked. We answered the honk and were greeted by an irate cabbie who probably suspected a juvenile prank. Of course, none of us admitted having called the taxi. Why would we, all of our guests living less than a half mile away?
The clincher came in the double threat of the driver. As he got on his car phone and told the person at headquarters “never send a cab to 906 Railroad Ave.,” he punctuated it with, “I have a good mind to send your parents a bill for 50 cents. That’s what it cost us to come here.”
Fifty cents! As I recall, Johnny Sandoval and some of the other guests marvelled at the gargantuan amount the cab driver mentioned. Nobody had that kind of money. If we all pooled our coins we might have come up with the fare, but the second part of the threat was what we really feared.
“If Mom and Dad get wind of this, we’re in deep trouble,” my sister Bingy said.
At Immaculate Conception School, we studied Saint Augustine and other medieval figures, who came up with ways of categorizing angels. There were the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones at the lowest level, and groups like Dominations and Principalities on the top rung. The lieutenant angels in the lower level took care of day-to-day operations, while top tier angels were contemplative.
Though it stretches the simile a bit, when it comes to discipline, Mom and Dad served analogous roles, Mom the enforcer, Dad the pensive one. Mom never afforded us the luxury of an explanation: the cab driver says you did wrong. Get ready to get punished.
Dad concerned himself only with general policy matters, not getting involved in daily discipline, instead deferring action for the weekend. His involvement was something to avoid.
If Mom deemed our infractions minor, she was able to handle them quickly, with the help of a belt. But if the peccadillo were of Mary Magdeline proportions — one that would involve the neighbors, or any blot on our reputation — it was time to consult with Dad. Remember, in my Mom’s world picture, about the worst crime one could commit was disgracing the family and giving neighbors fodder for their gossip-mill.
And because a cab driver was on the verge of sending a bill, well, that made it a contemplative, or third-level, matter. And it never failed: Dad, who used to put in 12-hour days as an accountant for a car dealership, didn’t have time to enforce diurnal discipline. It was always the same thing: “You’ll get it on Saturday.”
Imagine what that drawn-out agony can be. It would have been wiser for any of us to mess up Saturday morning, thereby reducing the waiting period to just a few hours. An indiscretion committed on a Monday, however, required us to sweat it out for the entire week.
Wasn’t it in Star Trek episodes where enemies of the U.S.S. Enterprise always agreed to be “merciful and quick”? Well, Dad preceded Star Trek by decades, and instead was “merciless and prolonged.” Children who beg their parents to “spank me and get it over with” have a point.
The anticipation of a weekend punishment when we were entirely innocent was worse. Remember, reports of misconduct that made their way to Mom’s radar sometimes were wrought by and fraught with misinformation, exaggeration, spite or guilt by association.
The one positive aspect of Punishment by Appointment was that the folks sometimes forgot. Once, a movie camera Dad had ordered came in on Punishment Saturday. So pre-occupied was he in setting it up that we escaped the punishment.
Another time my older sisters, Dorothy and Dolores, came home with straight-A report cards from I.C. School. That news distracted Dad enough to forego the punishment. I wonder whether in acts of charity the sisters held off their ebullience and showed their report cards Saturday morning.
At that parochial school, I did a lot of praying, not so much that I’d be an unlikely honor-roll student able to flash a perfect report card in front of my Dad; rather, I prayed that my oldest sisters would continue to pull down the A’s. Those odds were better.
The plan seemed to work. Except during the summer.
The cab driver never billed my parents. He later told one of our party guests that the hoax call actually came from a neighbor, who couldn’t stand watching the rest of us having fun.
My grandson and namesake, to whom I once told this story, asked, “Didn’t the driver have Caller I.D.?”
In the fifties? Not likely. But on the other hand, if the cabbie was high-tech enough to have a car phone . . .