The Day Sally Became The Bad Guy

The following is an excerpt from my in-progress autobiography, Memoirs of A Music Addict

Donnie, Jimmy and I, the three California Avenue buckaroos, were about to saddle up our three horses behind the apartments and ride after the bad guys. We had no idea that in a few seconds Sally would become an actual bad guy, or somehow  worse yet, bad girl, before our very eyes. That was the day she chased Gordon with a butcher knife.

I should explain that the three horses I referred to weren’t really horses, they were big black oil drums resting on concrete forms near the back wall of the apartment. They were used for fuel oil for the wall heaters in the apartments and had a vaguely oily odor that I sort of liked even though it smelled nothing like horses. 

We transformed those pungent drums into horses fairly often, especially after coming home from seeing two “B” western movies, 10 cartoons and an installment of a Flash Gordon serial at the Nu-Bell Theatre on Gage Avenue on a Saturday. Inspired by the films, we’d spend hours making up our own cowboy adventures and would straddle the barrels and ride like the wind, albeit a petroleum-scented wind. We couldn’t stay aboard those broncos long, not because they bucked us off but because they were a little too big for comfortable straddling. We’d soon dismount and ride our own invisible, imaginary horses, hands slapping the sides of our jeans to make a clip-clop-like sound. We were around 10 years old.

The day Sally chased Gordon with the knife we had just dismounted and were  plotting our next adventure and checking our six-guns to make sure they were loaded and ready for action. Suddenly Gordon came racing around the corner of building with Sally in hot pursuit. To our stunned amazement, she was brandishing a butcher knife. We had never seen anyone chase anyone with a butcher knife before, not even in the movies. Gordon was laughing, but there was a slight note of fear in his laughter.

It was a hot, sunny, Southern California day and we boys were all in jeans and T-shirts, including Gordon. Both he and Sally were barefoot and she was wearing a pink summer frock that let us see her tan legs as she ran. Sally was around 14 and I had a crush on her so at first I was envious of Gordon for attracting that much attention from her. 

Gordon was a good-looking guy, maybe 16 or 17, who lived with his parents in the upstairs front apartment above my Mom and I. Sally lived with her parents in the upper rear unit across the landing from Gordon’s. Donnie and his family, his mother, father and sister, lived in the lower rear unit, across the front porch from ours. Jimmy lived just up the street. The apartments were built next door to my Grandma’s house not long after World War II when it seemed that everyone who’d visited California while in the service wanted to move there, causing a severe housing shortage. 

Before we could do more than gape at the chase, Gordon dashed up the back stairs two and three steps at a clip, rapidly pulling away from Sally so that as she reached the bottom of the stairs, she realized she had no chance of catching him before he got to his apartment and safety.

She stopped abruptly and hurled the knife. It flashed through the summer sun with deadly speed, but fortunately took a less-than-lethal arc and caught Gordon on the back of his right heel, inflicting a bloody gash. Gordon stopped, turned and and yelled “Look what you did!”  Sally’s smile had turned to a look of horrorified surprise by then. We boys stood transfixed. Sally rushed to help Gordon,  and a couple of adults — I don’t recall who — arrived and wrapped a dishtowel around Gordon’s foot then took him into one of the apartments for first aid. 

Sally disappeared with them, and we boys stood rehashing the whole thing for quite a while, looking at the blood splatters on the stairs and wondering what could  have made Sally go after Gordon with a knife. We wondered what the fallout was going to be for her. To our disappointment, no police were called, but we were pretty sure Sally was in Big Trouble.

The aftermath was anticlimactic. We never found out what caused the chase or what the fallout was for Sally. Both she and her parents and Gordon and his family moved away very shortly after. They hadn’t lived there long enough to form close enough ties with anyone for an opportunity to get more details. Did they move because of the knife incident? The knife had not only sliced Gordon’s heel but severed all connections between us and principal actors in the incident. What became of Sally and Gordon? Did they later marry and live happily ever after? Did they go off to separate lives and never see each other again? Did Sally become a serial slasher?

It was all a mystery that I, Donnie and Jimmy simply had to live with. It was as though we’d only glimpsed the whole thing from a passing train, or maybe from a passing barrel-horse. All we could do was go back to playing cowboys and soldiers and reading comic books on the landing above the stairs where Sally’s knife caught up with Gordon.

That knife had sliced a hole in our picture of the world, provided a new perspective on the world’s unpredictability. From then on, we would see life through a different lense, with a view a bit more unpredictable and less secure than the cowboy movies we were used to.