Steve's Boots

Steve Enero was this guy I knew when I was working at the lumberyard on Sepulveda, just south of Victory Anyway, he ordered some boots, they didn't fit him because they were too large but they fit me just fine, so he gave them to me. We made a makeshift benchpress device from lumber on our downtime, and we would lift. I guess I was 19, he was 21. He shot a guy in the mouth, initiation, you know, when he was younger, turned the poor fool into a vegetable, so he was sent to the San Joaquin Valley and rode a tractor for a while.



His

girlfriend was really cute. I couldn't get laid; didn't know how yet. We had fun working there, but he had a thing for the love boat, PCP, and one day it did him in. He didn't work there anymore. I kept working there. We had had plans to make a really cool coffee table out of clear redwood, and I made it. I sanded it and everything, it was nice. He lived in Arleta and one day his Dad came around and said he had been shot, he took the coffee table. His friends shot him, many times, in the truck I used to ride around with him, in that truck. He cursed at me sometimes because I slammed the door. "Gabacho, don't slam the fuckin' door!" I wore those boots for a long time, to Ireland, to the East Coast, everywhere. He was gone, then. In 1982. He had a short life.