Nineteen-eighty begins as any other year,
on January 1st, Tuesday, nothing happens.
Until the 20th, when the Steelers defeat
the Rams, as expected by Vegas Insiders,
in Super Bowl XIV at Rose Bowl Stadium.
One year later, Reagan took the oath of office,
sworn in as President of the United States.
Two months later, in March, an assassination
attempt fails and Reagan recovers by the grace
of God, in his own mind, to serve a greater role.
My family had just moved. I started junior high
late in nineteen eighty, or nineteen eighty-one.
An eleven year old boy, born in India,
stood out from the other children, mostly white kids,
privileged and entitled to certain benefits,
simply by their parents also having fair skin.
I enjoyed watching them burn and their skin peel off
at the beach in summer, although their misery
paled in comparison to blacks in our hometown.
Huntington Beach melts flesh from bone as a desert
climate would anywhere, when ignored by locals
lovely English gardens and swimming pools arrive.
Black families chose to live in this community,
south of Los Angeles, in an attempt to fit
in and assimilate, along with the influx
of Asian families from Turkey to Japan,
but mostly from Iran and war-torn Vietnam.
But outside of LA, here in Orange County,
black families were less concentrated, outside
the state-sponsored public housing projects in Watts
and other areas with poverty and gangs.
Black children got a chance here in Huntington Beach
away from endemic drug use, unemployment,
and violent hate crimes, less seen in our hometown.
Being of neither black nor white descent left me
in the minority with other non-native
children of immigrant parents who settled here.
The next ten years would be my last to live so close
to the ocean, the beach, and its quirky culture
of anything we can get away with doing
in public or private becomes American
by our default status of being cutting edge.
Southern California is a trip on acid
whether or not you take a hit of LSD.
LSD today means Lake Shore Drive, Chicago,
not lysergic acid diethylamide, nope.
"Say nope to dope and ugh to drugs," a commercial
with Freddy, a dummy, and his ventriloquist,
Sheriff's Sgt. Aaron Williams saying the words
didn't keep our interest, nor did Nancy Reagan,
her anti-drug catchphrase campaign to "Just Say No"
became our whole reason to escape the real world,
our sole raison d'être was to oppose Reagan,
both Nancy and Ronald, both Hollywood actors
turned anti-communist conservative leaders
for the right-wing pundits to glorify their words,
Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall, now a meme
of high eighties culture, political events
would devolve with Gulf War Operations Desert
Shield and Desert Storm back in the early nineties.
