The Tear-Down Crew

Film actor Anthony Perkins

Chewy Vega's hair always looked greasy. It wasn't long, but it was stringy and wavy. His brown complexion was smoothed by a close razor shave and his flowery cologne hovered around him like burning incense.

His height reached about 5-ft 11-inches even with his rounded shoulders. He wore his collared shirt unbuttoned on top, a V-shaped patch of chest exposed. His most distinguishing feature was his tenor-pitched voice that could stretch a word for emphatic tone. There was no mistaking it. It made me flinch.

"WAKE UP, SLEEEEPING BEEYEW-TEE!”

He called me that because I tended to fall asleep in the backseat of his car, an early 50s 4-door Chrysler that occasionally would not start when we were about to drive to another job site. He would pump the gas pedal to get the car started, but if he pumped too many times the engine would flood and we'd have to sit and wait.

In those cases he swore like a drunken dock worker.

"I'm good."

"What time did you get home last night, Beauty?"

He knew that I visited my girlfriend, Linda, and stayed late. 

Two other guys, Sam and Ronnie, both high school students like me, made up the Tear-Down Crew. Chewy was an adult and our boss. 

"Oooooooh, look at those chunky legs!" he cackled one morning, spying a young woman in a short skirt walking across the bridge near the old Sears Building that towered on the east side of the L.A. River. "Yummm... chinga!"

We were heading east toward Roosevelt High School and Stevenson Junior High in East LA. Our mission was to find the typing classrooms -- where a manual typewriter sat on top of every desk like rows of mechanical soldiers. We carried screwdrivers that we used to take apart each machine, remove the carriage and platen, leaving a skeleton of a typewriter on each desk.

The following day the cleaning crew would arrive, set up an assembly line of tanks on the school lawn where the machines would be dunked and cleaned. The cleaning crew consisted of a dozen or so student workers like us.

We were employed by the Los Angeles City School District, the second largest school district in the U.S., behind New York. It was summer 1963. The District ran from San Fernando Valley through central Los Angeles all the way to San Pedro, Narbonne High School; from Pacific Palisades High School on the west side to East L.A.

Chewy loved East L.A. because that's where he had connections.

My father worked for the L.A. School District and was instrumental in getting me the job. I enjoyed meeting my fellow student workers from various areas of Los Angeles. My home was the city of Pomona, about 30 miles east of downtown L.A. and Central Maintenance on Santa Fe Avenue where we met every morning.

I've always been curious about what kids my age were doing, what schools they attended and what the cultures were like. Each work morning I would hang with a variety of kids -- Black, brown, white and Asian. We shared stories about our work days and our schools, talked sports and even surfing.

Ronnie, in our Tear-Down Crew, was a dancer, had been a child actor. He was a theater guy. All child actors in L.A. had to be accredited through the L.A. School District. Photos were taken with a bio of each young thespian/performing artist kept at the Administration Offices. I guess for legal purposes, child employment rules. His dark hair was always combed in a perfect pompadour and his smile accentuated by his straight white teeth.

"You look just like Tony Perkins," he told me.

Tony Perkins was the actor in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Psycho. He played the nervous Norman Bates, who turns out to be the schizophrenic murderer.

"Really? Do you know Tony Perkins?"

"I've seen him on sets. You look just like him."

As a somewhat reserved guy, concerned about acne and other teenage maladies, I thought I might pay attention to my lookalike, a movie star.

Perkins played the lead in the 1957 movie The Jimmy Piersall Story about the mentally troubled professional baseball player. I just happened to own a Jimmy Piersall signature baseball glove.

Was there a theme here? Perhaps, but not what I expected.

Sam was the oldest student of the Tear-Down Crew. Ronnie and I both looked up to him as a good guy, sort of a counter-balance to Chewy. Sam always wore a clean collared shirt and his posture defined his personality: not tall but firm and straight.

This particular day we were working at Stevenson Junior High in the Boyle Heights area of East L.A. Ronnie pointed out graffiti on the wall out front and took it as a warning.

"There's trouble here," he said. Ronnie was Mexican-American, the predominant culture here. He understood the Spanish references.

Neither Chewy or Sam seemed nervous. The morning went as planned. We found the typing room and had torn down the machines before we broke for lunch. Chewy said he had business to take care of and would be back in about an hour.

We had sandwiches with us and we found a shady spot on the empty campus to eat and relax.

When Chewy returned he had a wide grin on his face as though he had won the Daily Double at San Anita. He was whistling a tune.

"Did you find any trouble?" he said. "Are you girls ready to go?" 

"We're fine, Chewy. No problems," said Sam.

Which was true. Ronnie's anxiety had dropped. Nothing happened. Just another day.

But not for Chewy, as Sam explained later.

"Chewy got laid," he said. "He has a whore named Rosie that he sees. I heard him talking about it to one of the guys back at the shop."

For some reason, I knew that. It was all so obvious. I wasn't surprised or bothered by it. Every once in a while the memory comes back. I fantasize that Chewy sets me up with Rosie and what that would have been like? How would she have treated me? Would I have gone through with it? I envision her lighting candles, being seductive and kind. 

As for Tony Perkins, I didn't realize that he was gay until he died of AIDs in 1992. Then it all made sense. 

Ronnie was gay, too.