During the time I worked for Domino's Pizza I went to Grateful Dead concert in the summer.
I left my acoustic classical guitar in the car and the temperature went over a hundred degrees. Inside the car it was much hotter with the windows rolled up. The bridge on the guitar popped off. It was just glued to the body and the glue failed. When I repaired the guitar later I used glue and molly-bolts to attach the bridge. I did not attach it in the exact correct place and forevermore the guitar was difficult to tune. I could put it in tune to a song in the key of G but when I switched to a song in the key of E it would need to be retuned. At the time of the repair I painted the guitar with a giant yin-yang on the back done in white graffiti pen and random blue and black nail polish on the front.
I was dating a woman named Betty Lou and she word Black and Blue nail polish... Go Figure. She ordered a lot of pizza and specifically asked the store manager to have me deliver it. Eventually I asked her out on a date and then she and her 3 year old daughter moved into the condo in Oxon Hill. The child was half black. This was the only time I had the experience of raising a child. We would go to the National Airport and watch the airplanes land or we would go to the bridge over the Potomac and go swimming. Simple things we could do without the child making noise and disturbing other people. Sometimes we would just drive all the way around the beltway... During this time I was evicted from the condo for failure to pay my Condo Association dues. I tried to sell the condo but no one wanted to buy. The neighborhood had turned into a dangerous ghetto due to the invention of crack cocaine.
When we moved in, it was a middle class half black/half white neighborhood in the suburbs of Washington DC but when I left it was a Crack-Crazy Disaster Zone. At this same time, a delivery driver was murdered at a Domino's Pizza on Capitol Hill. That made me move to a different Pizza Parlor in Mount Vernon Virginia. At the Oxon Hill pizza parlor most of the customers were black in the wealthy neighborhood of Fort Washington... Civil servants of the Federal Government and their children. The Mount Vernon store was mostly white rich people and soldiers at Fort Belvoir. Then a second delivery driver got murdered, the brakes wore out on my car and I left... I drove to my parent's house in Los Gatos, California in a Dodge Omni with no brakes. I used the hand brake to stop the car. I took the Southern Route thru Tennessee. It was snowing in Tennessee and the heater was broken in the car so I stopped briefly at rest stops and then kept on driving. I heated the car with votive candles. Then I drove thru Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and finally California.
Later, my second ex wife give me a roll of duct tape with a tie dye pattern on it and I covered the front entirely... Then I gave the guitar to a hitch hiker in Los Angeles... With the plan to buy a new acoustic guitar that I could put in tune... and I did that... a Yamaha six string classical... and an electronic tuner... However, I lost the miss piggy songbooks... so sad!
Read more of my Autobiography at:
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html
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