Summer at Spahn

In the summer of 1969 I was twelve years old, living in a small two-bedroom house my mom rented in Canoga Park, in the far northwest part of the San Fernando Valley just outside of Los Angeles.

The house was pretty much a dump, in not the best part of town. We lived right off of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, the long stretch of highway that connected the valley to the Pacific Ocean, on the other side of the Santa Monica mountains near Malibu. Only where we lived was nothing like Malibu — mostly run-down apartments and low rent houses, strip malls with liquor stores on nearly every street corner, the kind of place dreams go to die.

But it was all my mom could afford, when she could pay. My dad had left us a few years back and we’d been on our own ever since, my mom taking all kinds of crappy jobs to make ends meet. Fortunately for us the landlord took a liking to her, or maybe it was pity, but either way he let it slide when she couldn’t pay the rent on time, or at all, so we never had to worry about having a roof over our heads.

Food was another thing, and I ate more mac and cheese than I care to remember. But we did what we could and for the most part, we got by.

I was pretty much an outcast back then. I didn’t play baseball like the rest of the kids my age, and the few friends I had were at or below the same level as me in the social pecking order at school. Worst of all, I’d be entering 6th grade that fall, which meant junior high, a scary place for an undersized kid without much of an identity.

But I had my bike, and I rode it everywhere — mostly to the store or around the campus of the high school near my house, but sometimes I’d get an itch to be extra adventurous and would ride places far beyond the confines of my neighborhood square mile.

It was probably late June or early July when I first went up to Santa Susana Pass. It must have been July because I remember my mom taking me to see fireworks a few nights earlier at a park not far from our house. Santa Susana Pass was the highway that connected our part of the valley with Simi Valley, and was basically on the border of where Canoga Park turned into Chatsworth. I’d been up there before, seen the big boulders stacked on top of each other that make up the landscape, and always wondered what lay beyond the sagebrush hills on both sides of the highway.

That day, I decided to turn left at the corner of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Santa Susana Pass and see what I could find. There were cars driving pretty fast in both directions through the pass so I was careful to hug the shoulder. As soon as I was a few hundred yards into the canyon, I felt like I was in a different world. Gone were the sounds of the city; here all I could hear were birds chirping, the breeze blowing through the eucalyptus trees dotting the creekbed at the floor of the canyon, and the sound of car engines bouncing off of the boulder-strewn hills.

As I came around a turn, I noticed what looked like a big parking lot on the left (west) side of the road. As I get closer, I could see that it was much more than that. I immediately noticed the buildings that looked like an Old West movie set. They even had signs on them with names like “Longhorn Saloon” and “Rock City Cafe.” I’d never seen anything like it, except on TV, in shows like “Bonanza,” which I learned later they filmed there.

Near the road was an old wagon, the kind you see them riding through the desert in all of those old Western movies. Painted in red on the side of the white cover it read: “Spahn’s Movie Ranch”, so I figured that must be the name of the place, and it made sense — the buildings were probably used as sets in movies. Growing up not far from Hollywood, it isn’t all that surprising to learn that they filmed movies down the street from where you live, but not yet the kind Chatsworth would become infamous for a decade or two later.

Not far from the buildings there was a fully functional horse stable, with a handful of ranchers moving the horses around. They looked like real cowboys, and with the Old West movie set behind them, it was quite a sight to see.

In the parking lot where a bunch of cars and old car parts, engines and whatnot. The place was kind of a mess to be honest, it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or organized in years. Pretty much a big dumping ground.

But what really caught my attention that day as I slowed my bike to a stop in front of the ranch was the dune buggie I saw coming up the road and turning into the parking lot. I’d seen dune buggies before but this wasn’t one you could buy at a store, it looked homemade, and the engine was loud, like what you’d expect to hear from a truck.

The dune buggie came to a stop and three guys got out. Two of them looked like bikers and the other, the driver, was tall and younger, maybe twenty. The bikers were in their thirties and wore leather jackets that said “Straight Satans” on the bike. The guy didn’t look like a biker, but he had long hair and seemed to be friends with them.

As they got out of the dune buggie and started walking towards the Old West building, the young guy looked over at me, like he already knew I was there. Maybe he’d seen me from the road when they were turning in. He looked at me, almost stared at me, for what felt like a long time. Then, and I’ll never forget it, he smiled, but not like a normal smile, like a forced smile, or like he was trying to over-smile, if there’s such a thing. It was kind of weird but then he waved at me, and I waved back, before turning my bike south and riding back towards my neighborhood. Enough action for one day.

That night I waited for my mom to come home from work, she was working as a checkout person at the Alpha Beta grocery store near our house. While I waited for her, I sketched out a picture of the ranch I’d seen earlier that day so I wouldn’t forget it. The vision of it was still clear in my mind, and I think I got it pretty accurate on paper, if memory serves. I’d love to find that drawing but I know it’s long gone, living only as an image in the back corner of my mind now.

Mom finally came home around 10:30 and she was mad that I was still up. She got over it pretty quick though, given that it was summer, and I showed her the picture I’d drawn and told her about the ranch. “You don’t want to go up there,” she said. “There’s weird people living there. Stay away.”

Now, any normal kid probably would have headed their mom’s advice, but I was anything but normal. So the next day, probably out of burning curiosity or boredom, or both, I rode my bike back up to Santa Susan Pass almost as son as my mom left the house for her shift.

When I got there, this time rather than just look at the place, I decided to park my bike and see if I could get onto the property on foot. I set my bike down near the wagon, and no sooner did I start walking towards the horse stable then did I hear a man’s voice call out to me, “hey, where you goin’?” Nervous, I turned around and saw the tall guy with long hair from the day before walking towards me.

“Nowhere,” I said as I stiffened up.

Now the tall guy was standing only a few feet in front of me, looking down at me. “It’s no big deal. People come up here all the time.” He smiled, not in the weird way he had the day before, but in a way that made me feel comfortable and safe.

“I saw you yesterday. You live around here?”

I thought about whether or not to lie, but decided he probably wasn’t much of a threat to me, at least not yet. “Yeah, in Canoga Park,” I said.

“We had a place down there. The Yellow Submarine. Yellow house right off the main road, looks like a farm. You seen it?”

“Yeah,” I said. I had.

He held out his hand towards me. “I’m Charles, but people call me Tex,” he said, and I could see why. He had an obvious Texas drawl to the way he spoke that I noticed immediately, so the nickname made sense.

“Billy,” I said as I awkwardly shook his hand.

“Let me guess, fourth grade?” he asked.

“Fifth, but I’m going into sixth,” I said. It wasn’t unusual for people to think I was younger given my small stature and remenant baby fat.

“Right on,” he said. “See ‘ya around.” He turned and started off.

“Yeah, see ya,” I said. Then, he stopped and turned back towards me. “You wanna see something cool?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Okay, follow me.”

I’ll admit, I was nervous, but I followed after him, figuring that if he tried anything weird, there were plenty of places to run and hide, plus there were the cowboys in the horse stable and the people I’d started noticing coming and going from the buildings we were walking towards.

As we got closer to the “Longhorn Saloon” building (really just a facade, as I’d later learn) a few people approached us. They were scruffy-looking, similar to Tex but even more so. I’d seen their type before, the media called them “hippies” but they looked more like runaways to me, desperately in need of a shower. They were young, probably eighteen, maybe even younger. One of them, a guy with shaggy redish/blond hair and a beard, gave me a really odd look, then turned to Tex. “Where’d you find him?” he asked.

“This is Billy,” Tex said, introducing me. “This is Clem. We call him Scramblehead.”

“Yeah, because my brain’s just like scrambled eggs,” said Clem, grinning devilishly, cackling like hyenia. “You live around here, Billy?”

“Yeah, just down in Canoga Park,” I said. Clem had two girls with him, teenagers, probably high school aged. Both very attractive, though at the time I probably didn’t notice it as much.

“Canoga Park. That place is a dump,” said Clem, and the girls giggled in the same way he had. I found it ironic he’d label my neighborhood a dump, considering the ranch they appeared to be living at looked like a shanty town, or a homeless encampment. “What are you doin’ up here?” he asked.

“Just riding my bike,” I said.

“You like cars?” he asked. I nodded. “Hey Tex, we should show him one of the dune buggies.” I knew immediately he meant the off-roading vehicle I’d seen Tex drive in on the day before. “We build ’em ourselves,” he said. I grew curious.

“What for?” I asked him.

“We’re gonna use ’em to get to the desert. We’re gonna have a whole fuckin’ battalion of ’em, so when the pigs come, we can outrun ‘em.” I’d heard the term “pig” used to describe members of law enforcement before, so I could only figure that’s what he meant. But why would they need to outrun them?And what was happening in the desert?

“You want to check it out?” Tex asked me.

“Sure,” I said, and we started off. Tex nodded to Clem, sort of an unspoken goodbye between the two of them, and we started towards the edge of the Western-themed buildings. “Be careful around Clem,” Tex said to me. “His head’s not right.” Dually noted, I thought to myself.

We walked past another small group of people that looked similar to Clem, Tex and the girls. It looked like they were passing a cigarette between them but I realize now it was definitely a joint, and I’d be seeing a lot more of that in the weeks to come. “Who are all these people?” I asked.

“Runaways, mostly,” Tex said as he lead me towards the back of the buildings.

“From where?”

“All over. California, mostly. Charlie says that everybody’s welcome; anyone has a place here if they want one. Of course, he decides who gets to stay, and who has to leave.”

“Who’s Charlie?” I asked. Tex looked at me and smiled, that same toothy grin he gave me when he first saw me on my bike, but said nothing.

Soon we were in an area of the ranch that had been fashioned as a sort of auto-repair shop. There were car parts everywhere — radiators, engines, batteries, tires, you name it. I noticed a couple of VW bugs that had been stripped of some of their parts, and at least three dune buggies like the one I’d seen Tex ride in on. Nearby, a handful of biker types were sitting around drinking beer and chatting. I knew they were bikers because they had those telltale leather jackets on, sunglasses, and looked like people you didn’t want to mess around with. One of them called out to Tex.

“Hey Tex, I didn’t know you had a son!” he laughed. “Where’s his momma?”

Another biker chimed in: “She ain’t gonna be too happy when she finds out you brought him up here.”

The smallest member of the group of bikers, a short, stocky guy with a big black moustache that curled up on both ends, walked towards us. He seemed about ten years older than Tex, and as he approached, he looked me up and down. “Nah, he ain’t yours. He’s too pretty to be your son.”

“Fuck you, Danny,” Tex said, and Danny chuckled.

“I’m just messin’ with you,” he said, then looked down at me. “What’s your name, kid?” he asked.

“Billy,” I said.

“I’m Danny, it’s good to meet you.” He put his hand out and I shook it, something I’d never really done before, and it made me feel a few years older than I was.

“I was just about to show him one of the buggies,” Tex said, and led me towards one of them. Danny followed.

“I think I finally got the issue with the engine figured out, there was a wire loose so it wasn’t getting the full thrust from the gas line,” Danny said. “Try it now, it’s kicking like a fuckin’ bronco.”

Tex climbed into the dune buggie and set himself up behind the steering wheel. The keys must have been in the ignition because I immediately heard the engine rumble, and it was loud. Real loud, like one of the commercial jets I’d often hear flying over our house on the way to the Burbank airport. The noise became unbearable, and I almost put my hands over my ears to block it out, but then thought better of it, lest Tex and Danny see me as some kind of weakling. Tex pumped the gas peddle with his foot and the engine started rumbling. Danny seemed to love the noise, and the louder it got, the more excited he seemed to be. He even started making this high pitch “yee haw” type sound in between sips from his bottle of beer. Clearly this was a man who loved the fast life.

TO BE CONTINUED…