SEVEN MEN
By Cecile Betts

My name is not Snow White but seven men have lived with me, not all at the same time. In order to be able to live on my limited income, I found it necessary to share my home. Several of my friends did it and there was that popular TV series titled Three’s A Crowd , the story about two women and a man who shared an apartment.
I advertised and interviewed and selected Zack. When I specified that I would not permit smoking, alcohol, pets, overnight guests. Zack said, “I like to have an occasional little glass of wine before dinner.” I thought about that and said, “Okay, I’ll write that into our agreement.”
Zack, a tall, heavy man, in his early seventies worked in an office nearby. He was neat, didn’t do much cooking, and spent a lot of time in his recliner in his room watching TV. I soon realized the occasional little glass of wine meant a quart carafe every night. But, since he didn’t disturb me, I didn’t say anything about it. However, he brought in a half gallon of vodka and in a drunken stupor fell out of his chair one night and could not get up from the floor. I called the paramedics who checked his condition and put him back in chair. A short time after that, my lease expired and I found a place I could afford to buy. Zack wanted to move into the new place with me, but I did not permit that. I lived with an alcoholic husband (who finally did quit drinking) and I did not wish to go through that sort of thing with Zack.
The next person who shared my home, Dick, a slender, balding man in his sixties, worked for an exterminating company. During our interview I explained, “There are two things I never discuss with the person who shares my home, one is religion, the other is politics.” Dick, a member of the Jehovah’s Witness church spent his spare time distributing pamphlets published by his church and in going door to door in other communities trying to make converts. He could not say a dozen words without quoting the bible or the brethren. He seemed obsessed about what he called “fornication.”
When he lost his job with the exterminating company he went door to door signing people up for delivery of dairy products. He also sold contracts for legal services and for direct TV. Divorced three times, he had seven children including one son in prison for drug related crimes. He complained that he thought he was paying too much for his room. I said, “Dick, if you are not happy, perhaps you should look for another place.”
Then, when he made an insulting comment, I told him I would give him 30 days notice.
He did not want to move at that time and told me he could stay three months without paying anything and I would have to go to court and get an eviction notice to get him out. He was wrong. There is a California law which states in a situation where there is one lodger and the owner also occupies the premises, if the lodger does not vacate the premises after a thirty day notice he can be arrested for trespassing. Thus it becomes a criminal matter rather than a civil matter.
He must have consulted the lawyers he worked for and he did vacate on time.
Lucky, the third man to share my home, worked as a driver for a limo company. Six feet tall and chubby, he displayed skinny knock-kneed legs below the shorts he wore when not working. He told me had been n officer in the Army, commissioned in the field but had left after serving twelve years. Divorced with no children, he admitted he went through bankruptcy after the divorce. He quit his job after several months and tried to promote several pie in the sky schemes on the internet and finally was unable to pay his share until I gave him a three day notice and then he did come up with the money. The next month I again had to give him a three day notice so I decided I’d be better off without him. He told me every story, a check was lost, it took time to get it replaced, then it was an out of state check and would take two weeks to clear. When I confronted him, he admitted there was no check and he was broke. I told him he’d have to move since I could not afford to provide him with free housing. I had to put new carpet in that room after Lucky left as he’d evidently spilled a lot of a red liquid.
Mick, an Iranian taxi driver moved in a few days after Lucky moved out. Mick, separated but not divorced from his wife, had a daughter and granddaughter nearby. He also had a nephew who owned a liquor store in Huntington Beach. He worked for his nephew for a while in addition to driving a cab. He left early in the morning and returned late at night. He was always polite and clean. But after seven months, he left to return to Iran to look after his business interests there.
Bob, number five, had been staying with his mother who only had a one bedroom unit. Retired from a career as food service manager for a national hotel chain, tall and painfully thin, he always had a glass of ice water in his hand. He complained of an ailment which required him to take large amounts of a potassium supplement which necessitated that he drink much water. After eight months, he decided to return to Arizona and asked me to give him part of his security deposit two weeks before he left. I did so, and a few weeks later found he’d put nearly $2000 in long distance calls on my phone.
Tim, another Iranian gentleman, in his early fifties, divorced with one child, seemed the perfect person to share my home. A self-employed mechanical engineer, he almost begged me to permit him to help me.
Meanwhile, my friend Nancy, who also had a very nice man for the second bedroom and bath in her unit, had a cat, so did the gentleman. The new cat absolutely terrorized Nancy’s cat. Nancy called me and suggested we swap. I thought about it and we talked it over with the guys. They were agreeable. We each benefited. Tim, despite our agreement had been smoking on the patio, I pointed out that if any of my neighbors complained he would not be able to smoke there. Nancy lived on the third floor of an elevator apartment and he could smoke on the balcony without disturbing anyone. Nancy gained a nice man who did not have a cat. I gained a nice person with a cat and I could enjoy the cat without having to pay vet bills or cleaning a litter box, and Gene, Number 7, had a place to stay where his cat would be welcomed.
Not exactly Doc, Dopey, Sneezy, Sleepy, but each of the seven men who shared my home proved to be very memorable. And lest you think I am prejudiced against females, I did have a woman share my home on two occasions, but that is a separate story and the name of this one is Seven Men.

We called him Cam. He didn’t use his given name. A slip of a man, with cheerful blue eyes that didn’t betray depression, suicide attempts, his dark stories or the fantasy life that kept him going until the end, just last week – 3 months before his 100th birthday. He was barely 5 feet tall. Boy size glasses, clothes and sandals fit him perfectly.

Life in a Nevada mining town in the early 1900’s with a saloon keeper father who called him a sissy didn’t keep him from wanting to make one last visit there. He insisted he was going alone – just last year. After all, he said, his car was reliable and he had a cell phone if he really needed anything. I wondered if he planned to stay there – since there was no there, there anymore. In spite of his description of himself as ‘perennially indecisive’ many of his life stories told of curiosity, intelligence and pluckiness.

His mother divorced his father -after taking a shot at him for continuous adultery -when he was about 9. She re-married, moving to Santa Barbara. Cam – he was actually a Junior, no wonder his father chided him – shared summers with his Father and new step family back in Seven Troughs and with his father’s sister, Aunt Charlotte in Sacramento.

The best story about Aunt Charlotte and her companion – corsetieres who made him their delivery boy - happened when he arrived the summer before he was 10. When they met him at the train station, he was visibly distraught and implored them to go back to the railroad car saying that he’d forgotten Elizabeth. He babbled on about Elizabeth until Charlotte stopped him demanding “Who the hell is Elizabeth?” He choked out “My do -uh- lly”, through his tears.

Pre-teen photos show him in a swim suit with a definite ‘come hither’ look. He recounted numbers of conquests he initiated in his teens. In retrospect, he said he felt fortunate that one of his early lovers took him aside and told him that since he was a man, he should act like it, as it would make his life much easier.

He finished high school and some college before mother and son set out with a traveling Chautauqua troupe – he as a dancer - sometimes an Indian – with dreams of making it to the silver screen. Eventually the Depression and tuberculosis resulted in them going on welfare. When he was able, he trained to be a hairdresser and supported his mother and her dogs until her death. He did take a year out to go around the world on a steamer with Cliff and later, Josephine, whom they found along the way.

So intrepid he became then that he and his mother held secret meetings in their Highland Park home for the outlawed Matachine Society. There was a cloak and dagger flavor to the events where members came to share their mostly hidden lifestyle and tell about police beatings and humiliation when they did dare to follow their unchosen paths.

One day he showed me a photo. It was a little girl with long blonde curls a short frilly dress, socks and Mary Janes - hugging a teddy bear half her size. I’d say she was about five. As I took in the picture, Cam said “I knew then I was Rosie Geyer – I was really a girl in a boy’s body. I never saw myself as homosexual. Back then there were no descriptions for what I felt. No one I met shared my feelings.” I felt sad for him until the next sentence reminded me of the daring streak his size camouflaged. “As a young transsexual now, I’d have definitely had a sex change operation.”
Kathleen Rubin

His coiled, six-foot frame burst full tilt from the LST’s bow onto the sandy beach of Mindoro Island in the Philippines—a jaunty pheasant feather flutters from the band of his Robin Hood felt hat; two twelve-inch, razor sharp knives are strapped to his legs and a fully loaded Thompson submachine gun is clutched lovingly in his powerful arms. He finds his prey—-two half-dead Japanese soldiers huddled in a concrete pillbox. He waves them out and methodically crushes their skulls with the butt of the submachine gun. He is Lt. Commander N. Burt Davis, the Silver Star commanding officer of Motor Torpedo Boat Task Unit 70.1.4, and he is quite mad.

The Silver Star? He gathered a small, volunteer group of enlisted PT boat crewmen, hopped on board PT75, roared full throttle to the stricken, burning PT boat tender, the U.S.S. Orestes, hit by a Japanese suicide plane and sitting about 400 yards off the beach in Mangarin Bay, ready to blow its load of aviation gasoline and several dozen torpedoes at any minute. He climbed on board with his crew, put out the fire, rescued several wounded officers and crewmen, hurried them back to our two waiting doctors, then searche for the Orestes’ commanding officer--one of the first to abandon the doomed ship--and tore his face to bloody ribbons with his bare fists.

How did Burt Davis become the commanding officer of a 26-boat PT task unit? A mystery without clues. He wanted to be a submariner and once had command of a submarine and was in his glory; but, so the story goes, he barked the wrong commands and sank his sub at a New London dock when the wrong valves were opened. The Navy promptly transferred him to Motor Torpedo boats, an ignominious fate. He never forgave himself and acted out his frustrations by adopting a devil-may-care attitude and irrational behavior.

“I’ll pay sixty-five cents for every Jap ear,” he announced after we landed on Mindoro. One of my storekeepers collected $1.30 when he found a dying enemy pilot who had crashed in the swamps behind our encampment. Davis didn’t place much more value on his own life.

Certifiably insane, he loved to go ashore as we worked our way up the New Guinea coast to “get in a little hand-to-hand combat” with the remnants of the Japanese army. He walked the blacked out, night beach on Mindoro with a brilliant flashlight guiding his path--much to our consternation and dismay, but he was a true warrior and the most colorful character I encountered in World War II.

Dave Blodgett

DREAMING AGAIN

Walking into the church office, I said, “I’ll be happy to help the children with their craft projects. When do I start?”

Looking up from her cluttered desk, the stout curly-head brunette asked, “Could you start today?”

“I guess so, but I’ll need materials.”

“No problem. There are always craft materials for the children.”

Indeed there were: colored yarn, scraps of old rugs, and many shapes of colored paper of different sizes. But where were the children? Then I heard them scampering down the hall, squealing and giggling. Mothers’ admonishing voices too.

A little blonde, tousle- headed boy stormed in to the room and scrambled to find his favorite little blue chair at the long paper-covered table. Then he chose an eight by ten inch rectangular sheet of royal blue paper and immediately started to work on his composition. I leaned over him to help him with his design when a tall shaggy-headed man whom I recognized as a famous New York artist stopped me.

“It must all be his work, not yours.”

I stepped back, “ Of course. You’re quite right.”

It was a delight to see what the children created with the materials at hand: clowns, colorful cats and dogs, kids with soccer balls, wide-eyed dolls in polka-dotted dresses and many-colored balloons.

Suddenly I found myself readying my bicycle for a cross country trip. Husband Fred was all set to go. I still had to get my bag of equipment on the bike rack. “Fred I was supposed to be helping the children with their craft projects. I must call the church secretary. Oh no!! I can’t find my cell phone. She’ll never forgive me!”

Then I was bicycling over muddy ruts in a rain forest. “How did I get here?” Gorgeous green, yellow and red parrots dipped and soared overhead. Ahead of me an elegant lady in a flowing blue and green chiffon dress screamed as a black blob landed on her shoulder.

“Served her right for wearing that outfit on a bike ride,” I muttered to myself.

Georgialee Granger

Peculiar, he was.
Unkempt as a street beggar, pesty as an 'itch', rich as a Rockefeller.
The gaggle of hairs in Stan's nose were enough to make you want to sneeze.
But Stan The Man as everyone called him, owned a big chunk of the city and a sizable heap of Blue Chip Stocks that insured his visibility among social circles. (that kind of profile is hard to hide.)
Few excaped his serendipitous telephone calls. "I wonder what that was all about," was a common comment when HE decided the conversation was over. "What conversation?" That's hard to say, because they were
never about anything. Stan would start out by saying, "Hey, what's up" That was easy enough to understand, but what was certain to follow was a random, disconnected string of statements or questions, after which he did not wait for a reply. "Great talkin' to ya'," and he was gone.
Stan was a member of our church,but seldom attended, rarely put anything in the offering plate, if he did.
One night he showed up at an outdoor concert. A sudden chill sent those not prepared scurrying off early. I guess Stan must have been one of them, because what happened next was as typical as it was unexpected.
A couple of weeks later, up the hill came a U.P.S. truck. The delivery man presented the office manager with an invoice for 500
sweat shirts.
"As far as I know, we didn't order any sweat shirts. There must be some mistake."
But the order clearly stated. Five hundred gray sweat shirts and they were being delivered to the address clearly shown thereon. No explanation accompanied them. Where they came from, and what was supposed to be done with them, was a mystery. But not for long.
Stan called one of the parishioners, and said, "Well, I finally found
somone at home. Say, about those sweat shirts. Figured you could sell them for $20.00 apiece. Make a little money for the church. Well, gotts go now. Nice talkin' to ya.Great day in paradise." (the shirts had a picture and name of the sanctuary as well as the words, San Clemente, a share and care community. Across the bottom was the word Paraiso. (paradise)
Mysery solved. Now almost everyone who attends a concert on our hill brings along a gray sweat shirt.
It wasn't until his wife's memorial service, held under a tree in their front yard, did it become apparent to all who attended, that the families living in Stan's apartments paid a fraction of what he
could have charged. He catered to those with low incomes and treated them like family.
He had a large loving group of people sharing his loss that afternoon.

Yep, Stan the Man was peculiar, but he was a real share and care kind of guy.