Book II. Chapter 2. 1973 - New Beginnings

At sixteen Nick Baker was approaching manhood after bouncing from the orphanage to foster homes… to another foster home… to another foster home… to Los Prietos Boys Camp on the inland side of the Santa Ynez Range that serves as a scenic backdrop to Santa Barbara on the coast. Harry would have his hands full de-institutionalizing his son. Hell, he owed it to Iniga… he’d promised her that much… and these were the few kinds of promises men, even men like Harry, are honor bound to keep.

Nick had been orphaned, or abandoned, before he was conscious enough to do anything but roll with the punches; and there were plenty of punches at that. Awkward from an early age, he expressed his disquiet with the universe in the form of violence. There were several years of foster homes that were hardly homes at all. He preferred the disciplined structure of Los Prietos Boy’s Camp to the fatherless transit center for discarded youth that was the last foster home he’d lived in from the time he was twelve until his hormones took over at sixteen years of age. The mother of that last house, Patsy, was a fifty-something matron who sat, all three-hundred pounds of her, chain-smoking in her Barcalounger in front of the TV with the volume full blast, tuned to whatever Televangelist occupied the airways that hour.

The old bat, Patsy, had caught Nick in the toilet with his pants down more than once from the time his hormones began dictating his pleasures around the age of twelve. Each time he was caught he was pulled by the hair into the kitchen, stripped naked while the house gathered, and forced to stand there while Patsy read from her Bible scriptures about seed falling to the ground. Then he was caned on his bare bottom (he preferred the caning to the Bible readings). Then he was sent back to the room he shared with six other boys. Out of a sense of duty to defiance he’d pull out a muscle mag from under the mattress of the bunk bed to stroke one more off for good measure. As he grew older he’d hold his load and wait for his younger bunkmate, Kim, to come back to the room where he forced the boy to finish the job orally and, once, even anally. It was only once because the little shit cried so loud, Nick had to shut him up! He beat the faggot until he lay on the floor unconscious, bleeding from his ears.

Juvenile courts put Nick in juvie on Hollister for that one. Joints like that are play grounds for institutionalized kids like Nick. He did so well that he was transferred to Los Prietos Boys Camp in the hills above Santa Barbara on Paradise Road. It was in places like these that Nick learned more about the rewards of brutality and his own peculiar form of newly discovered sexual expression. He had shrinks tell him that old Patsy’s canings led to the brutal rape of Kim, and thus caused his brain to equate sexual release with violence and guilt: guilt for the pleasure of ejaculation but not guilt for his acts of violence. Sometimes the two were intimately interwoven. He would have been hard pressed to distinguish one from the other: that is, only with sex with men. This was how his brain was wired: with women it was another story.

He thought he preferred sex with women, but he rarely achieved orgasm with them. Had he been capable of admitting to his innermost self, he was intimidated by them… even afraid… it was control. He never seriously asked himself that question, nor did he care to delve into the whys and what-for’s of things that made him anxious. He let the shrinks and counselors do all of that bullshit. He told himself he knew who was to blame for most of it… this or that circumstance, institutions or authority figures. It sure as hell wasn’t his fault.

It would have been easy enough to walk out of Los Prietos Boys Camp, and he could have done that. He didn’t stay put because he had nowhere to go but he actually liked it there. However, this institutionally friendly life changed one afternoon when, as he leaned against a rake in the yard, he watched a sedan with government plates pull up. An oddly familiar old man in a crew cut, coat and tie, unfolded long legs in chino trousers, and stepped out of the car. His eyes were fixed on the man as he shook hands with the Supervising Officer. The Supe, who is usually most confident around probation officers and staff, was most cordial. And, to Nick’s highly sensitive institutional radar, he saw that the Supe was downright submissive to this character. Nick’s intuition was confirmed when he was called into the visitor’s area … what the fuck, it wasn’t even visiting hours for the camp.

The Supe left them at one of the tables. The man’s hand closed on Nick’s in a firm clasp. This was one of the few hands, even adult hands, that diminished his own. He dared not get into a squeezing contest with this one. On top of that, they had the same gray-blue eyes, and the man’s features could have been Nick’s in twenty years.

“Harry, Harry Baker,” he offered, as they cased each other.

“Uh, same name… who are you?” He had the urge to take a leak… maybe to just get away. He wasn’t accustomed to being this nervous around anyone, including adults.

“Take a deep breath Nick. I have some news for you.”

It was over 95 degrees. The old man took off his coat, revealing sweat stains with an empty shoulder-holster, as he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of smokes.

“You can’t smoke here,” Nick objected, and at once felt awkward for this uncustomary reflex to enforce the rules adding, “Hey, are you a cop or something?”

Harry lit it regardless, “Or something…”

Nick was delighted. Even the Supe, standing off to the side in the shade, had nothing to say.

“You got some sand, eh?” Nick tried to sound cool.

Harry let out a puff of smoke from the corner of his mouth as he spoke, “Nick, I’m your father.”

Nick’s blood then boiled and his gut ached… the smoke… those three words… “Fuck you man, I got no dad,” but he kept a poker-face.

“I didn’t know where they had you tucked away…”

“How hard were you lookin’?”

“I confess, not much… but then I found your mother a few weeks ago.”

“Mom? Now I know you are bull-shittin’ me.” He got up to walk away but this Harry character just reached over the table, put a massive hand on Nick’s shoulder and sat him back down. He wanted badly to throw that hand off and follow through with a right hook but thought better of it. The guy was old, but he was huge, and emitted an aura about him that only a fool would fuck with.

“I found out she was in Boise Idaho a few years ago, but never got to her, well, I did see her before she passed away.”

Nick sensed this was a difficult subject for Harry Baker so he bore into the old fart, “Passed away?”

“Yeh, we had her put in the Hospital there,” flicking the coal off the end of his cigarette and putting the butt back in the pack, he continued, “Your mother, she had to give you up when you were born. It's a long story and I can tell you about it all … but we have more important things to take care of.”

Nick’s head was swimming, “You could’ve passed that butt to me, Dad.”

His sarcasm wasn’t missed. Harry was proud of him. Shit, how would he have taken such news under similar circumstances? “You know, Nick, she tried to get in touch with you but that bitch…”

“The bitch’s name was Patsy. What the hell do you expect me to do with this information, Pa?” Again, Nick wasn’t about to show any affection in the use of the hillbilly expression for paternity. 

Harry’s expression didn’t change. His poker face was as stoically unmoved as anything Nick could pull off. He hadn’t noticed the folder Harry had carried to the table until he opened it to several pictures. One was a yellowed newspaper clipping showing a young woman with dark curls flowing out from under a beret. She was holding an odd shaped blade upright in front of her face like she was going to kiss it. The caption was in Spanish but Nick could only read some of it. Words like “Basque bandeleros” were easy enough to figure out. “Detenida”, “Iniga”, “Alesandro”, “smatchet-daga”, “maquisard”, “guidari”, were words he wasn’t familiar with. Before he could get lost in that image, a few others were shown of what looked like the same woman… much older… gaunt… weary and frail. Another was a glossy eight by ten it with the same hair but snowy white though looking much healthier. It had red ink, Top Secret, stamped at an angle across the top. 

The two sat in silence as Nick flipped the pictures back and forth as though he were looking for a clue of some sort, “Your mother was infamous, depending on whose side…That knife is a smatchet, designed to drive through a NAZI helmet like butter.” Harry stood up.

“She was bad, eh, did she use it?” Nick felt a taste of pride welling up in the form of a lump in his throat.

“She did.”

“Shit!”

“You want to go home, son, or, do you like it here?”

Nick had secretly longed for what social workers would call, “a masculine role model.” He had an imaginary figure pictured… a superhero… no cape or anything, but there was this Bat Man and Robin relationship often in his dreams. He was eager to follow this man anywhere. He now had a mother and a father, even though they had abandoned him and his mom was dead. He now had something to go along with this surname that had been nothing more to him than a name attached onto a birth certificate... the mysterious Iniga Baker was his mother…. and so was this dead-beat dad his father, Harry Baker.

Nick was jazzed as they rode away, father and son, cruising from the camp in a sedan… even if it was a funky government car.  He had arrived at the camp in a County Sheriff’s van with a half-dozen other juvenile delinquents. This car was a step up from that and he knew that all the other campers were watching them pull away.

“So, are you going to tell me more about my mom?” He hesitantly probed this strange giant of a man.

“Your mom had been given Baker as a surname. I managed to do that for her… I owed her that much.”

“What do you mean, ‘owed her’?”

“It is too complex to tell you all of it… maybe later. We have more important things to take care of for now.”

“Like?”

“Your education…” He passed a cigarette to Nick. “You wanted that pretty bad too, eh?”

Nick muttered, “They have a school at the camp.”

“No, I meant a cigarette,” coughing, Harry let it soak in that Nick, who had nothing but adversaries up to now, had a friend in his father (even if not such a good father)… perhaps nothing more than a friendly hand. “You’ll have to do something about smoking or you’ll end up like me.”

“What, a dead-beat dad?”

“The camp has a pretty good school but it won’t look so good on your resume.”

“True, I guess so.”

It was a few more miles, headed for Lompoc, before Harry spoke, “I haven’t been much of a father and I know it. I’m not even going to try to make it up to you; there's nothing I can do for the past, but I owe you this much, your future.”

Nick had never heard an adult talk to him this honestly. He half-assed expected his dad to say something like, “I will be there for you always.” The events of the day were overwhelming and this Harry-dude’s tone put Nick in the mood to listen. He wasn’t speaking down to him and making promises that couldn’t ever be kept the way most foster parents did.

“About your mother, we married when I found out she was pregnant. You were born in a place called la Ventas woman’s prison in Madrid…” He pulled the car into a convenience store in Buellton, “Need a sandwich or anything?”

“I’d just as soon you tell me how you got me outa Los Prietos?” this question had bothered Nick ever since … “You don’t get cut loose that easy. I was sentenced to rot in juvie ‘til I turned eighteen.”

“Let’s just say, I have ‘sand’,” and they both laughed at Harry’s awkward use of the jailhouse term for influence.

Promises aside, Nick had very little contact with his dad after he was set-up in Charleston South Carolina with a new step-mom, Marilynn. Marilyn and Harry, though still married, were separated and Harry was out of the picture for the most part. Harry was out of the picture because he’d only married Marilyn for Nick’s sake. He had, in spite of his absence, kept his promise to Iniga by trying to assure that Nick would not go wanting. After all, he told himself, when the vision of Iniga’s scowl would appear to him late at night; Marilyn’s house was a whole lot better than the way Nick had been left on the orphanage’s porch.

Nick had to study under a tutor he’d been assigned and even he managed to complete prep-school at Bishop England Catholic High School in South Carolina before Harry used his connections to get Nick into The Citadel. Noting his physique and size, Harry hoped Nick would adapt, choose a military career and be primed for life there… better than as a civilian in Ivy League colleges.

Nick liked the discipline at The Citadel and excelled at karate and was on the boxing and wrestling teams. The gymnasium and ring were more interesting to him than academic studies and, because he was possibly the most physically intimidating “knob” on campus, he wasn’t hazed as much as other, Fourth Class, Cadets there. Engineering, mathematics, military history and instruction weren’t for him but, hell, he’d already been institutionalized and anything, even the rigors of a Catholic prep school and the military academy, were a good deal better than the dumbed-down kindergarten of Los Prietos. He made up his mind, after the third year at the Citadel, he had no desire for a military career, nor did he have any academic aspirations. He discovered that his gift for gab opened doors for him that even the best colleges couldn’t. By this time, he’d taken to the newly discovered privileges of wealth and the prestige that wearing the right clothes, driving the right car, and living in the best neighborhoods, could avail. He felt he was wasting time sitting in classrooms when there was so much money to be made in the world beyond the walls of the Citadel.