In 1993 my youngest son Benjamin graduated from high school. For twenty years I'd been dreaming of quitting my job when I didn't need to earn good money. I wasn't quite ready, I needed a little more time to think about it but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. There were parts of banking I enjoyed and a lot I didn't. I liked working with the customers, doing a service, I liked analysis, but the most of it was a pain. It's what I did to make a living. It was how I payed the bills.
About this time I was learning to speak Spanish. I was speaking Spanish in LA, listening to tapes, and doing weekends once a month in Tijuana and then I did a two week immersion in Cuernavaca. I returned with a head full of Spanish dreaming of speaking it one day. Back at work I got a call from an attorney. I was reputed to be a CRA expert, a Federal regulation called the Community Reinvestment Act. There was a bank in CRA trouble. Could I recommend somebody? Everyone knew BanaMex, the big Mexican bank, and their California subsidiary California Commerce Bank were having a hard time with the Feds over CRA.
I recommended me. I met with the President of the bank, Salvador Villar, and we argued for an hour. After that personnel called, could I come to work for them? I figured if I stayed at Dai Ichi Kangyo Bank I’d have a bad year trying to appear enthusiastic but at BanaMex I might have a bad year and learn to speak Spanish. I started there January, 1994. One great advantage of a Mexican Bank, during the World Cup, that summer we had extended management meetings in the conference room with a wide screen TV.
I met Suzanne in August of 1994, 8 months after going to work for CCB. In that short period CCB’s CRA problem had been mostly solved. In February I was going to move to the Bay Area. I told Salvador I was quitting. He said, “You can’t quit. Work up there or something, go to the San Jose Office. But you can’t quit.”
So I moved up there and made do. At first I went to the office in San Jose, three days a week, a two hour commute, but that didn’t work very well. Then the San Jose office was closed. I worked at home in Mill Valley. I went down to LA when I needed to. I took care of CRA. I did the job. That did not require 40 hours a week and I didn’t work 40 hours. In Marin I became a regular kayaker. I enjoyed life.
The Mexican nationals at California Commerce Bank were all bilingual and the gringo credit officers were fluent in Spanish. The rest of us, mostly admin, wanted to learn to speak Spanish and two of us were serious, Tom, the bank’s in-house attorney and myself. Salvador hired a private teacher, who came in once a week and tutored us, mostly Tom and me, in Spanish for a couple of hours.
Eventually at California Commerce Bank I felt I’d worn out my welcome. I had been good insurance for five years, but they didn’t need me after the first couple of years. They were doing just fine. It had been good for them and good for me but it was time to go.
So in October, 1999 I quit. Ironically five years later Suzanne, my wife, got a job with Citibank doing PR and CRA in Southern California. Citibank bought BanaMex and CCB’s CRA officer worked for Susan. Not too long after that Citibank shut CCB down, they didn’t need an in-house competitor for offshore Mexican dollars in the US . In the process they slandered Salvador and the Mexicans for questionable banking practices. Citibank should ever be as professional as CCB was.
In November I started “my year off.” I packed my Honda CRV with supplies, a laptop computer and a bicycle and started a road trip. I would have liked a year to wander but I had a new wife and a month would have to be enough. I got on Interstate 80 and headed East.
My first night camping was at Pollock Pines in the Sierras. I camped on a dirt road deep in the woods well away from the highway. The next morning I started writing. I had recently started working with the book, The Artist’s Way. It was an enhancement of my journaling practice. I can’t remember what I was writing but I do remember from that day on I began to think of myself as a writer. It wasn’t planned or anticipated, I just began to relax and let it be.
In Reno the newspaper had a short article about Shoshone Mike and the Last Indian Massacre near Winnemucca in 1911. The story seemed incomplete and it started me d reading old newspaper accounts at the Winnemucca library. Camping near Great Basin National Park I had this daydream, the full moon, the desert, the mountains and Shoshone Mike and his renegade band. I began writing a story. I don’t think I had written any real short stories since my college days and certainly never finished anything.
The rest of the trip was dreamlike. Years before I had met someone from Nebraska, a place I had never been so that became more or less my destination. What's Nebraska like? I spent a week or more in Nevada and then continued East. I passed through Nicodemus Kansas, a Black pre-Civil War farming settlement, where Suzanne’s mother was from and eventually Lincoln, Nebraska. The West ends at the 100th parallel and as I traveled further East I felt out of place. There were fewer open spaces. At Lincoln I turned around.
I stopped for a few days at a cheap no name motel and spent my days writing. I had begun the writer’s life and I enjoyed it.
North of Scott’s Bluff I detoured to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Now that I think of it the whole trip was detour. At the National Monument I saw a painted deerskin, the History of the World by the rangers and local Lakota artists. It began at creation and spiraled through time to the present, battles, births, horse raids, barn burnings, the Dawes Act, World War I; it was personal and rooted where it was and universal at the same time.
Later I had the same experience reading Norman Davies Europe, A History. No matter how objective the historian tries to be, it always is like the Agate Fossil Beds history, told from the place where the historian is. For Davies it was the edge of Europe. For the Lakota it was Nebraska.
I finally made it home after a very magical journey and continued to write. I wrote a Shoshone Mike Story. I joined Zoetrope, a writers’ workshop online. Zoetrope is this wonderful mix of new and experienced writers. My first attempt, which I published on Zoetrope was a real lesson for me. Voice, tenses and point of view as badly set as jello, wiggly and all over the place. I kept writing and workshopping. I did it for a year and the stories got better, much better.
I had a regular routine and I worked every day. I was a writer. Like all of my writing, when I’m good I’m pretty good, but never quite good enough. I have these flashes. My last short story on Zoetrope I really liked. I had learned some things. I told myself, this life I'm learning, if I keep at it in my next life I might be a Nobel Laureate.
At 54 people would say to me, “Oh, you’re retired.” My answer was “No, I’m unemployed.” I didn’t feel like I retired, I had just quit banking and was clearing my palate before I looked for work again. I didn’t want to be a banker anymore or anything like it.
Who knew about age discrimination? In Los Angeles I had a reputation and credibility. In the Bay Area I had none. What I thought would be an easy task turned out to be damned hard. I started working temp jobs just to get back into the swing of it. They were interesting, sometimes very hard work. My idea was to get into fund raising. I wanted to start at a low level job working with an experienced fundraiser. Learning the trade did not fit anyone else’s idea of what a man my age should be doing. What was wrong with me? To myself it felt like I was disabled. I had a serious lack of ambition and they knew it. I just wanted a decent job.
After a year and a half I needed to earn money with benefits. I got a job at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco. Back in LA in the 70s I had met CCC and admired the manager and the work he did. CCCSF was an affiliate. It was banking related but god’s work and I needed the paycheck. We did a lot of phone appointments. I hate talking on the phone. The salary was half of what I had been making as a banker. Less was OK, half was not good. At the same time I had applied to CCCSF I started the paperwork for San Francisco Juvenile Hall. Six months after I started at Consumer Credit Counselors I got a call to be a substitute or on call at San Francisco Juvenile Hall .
I worked weekends at Juvy, weekdays at Consumer Credit Counselors. And when I was sure I liked Juvy and might last I quit CCCSF.
I did the on call with San Francisco Juvenile Hall and then went full time in December, 2002, three years after I left banking. A year of wandering, a year of looking for work, and then a year of getting work. It was a long time. The pay at Juvy was not great but it was OK, a good job, and I enjoyed it. Now I wasn’t unemployed I’m a juvenile hall counselor.
