Arnold McMunn:
CLASS OF 1972
John H. Francis Polytechnic High SchoolClass of 1972
Sun valley, CA
Arnold's Story
Back in 1959, in first grade, there was this kid named Dan, and after school one day Dan says to me that he has "a cave full of bats" in his back yard. I didn't believe him and told him so, but he insisted that he did, so I went along with his fanciful story and followed Dan back to his home, stopping every so often to again ask him if he was sure he was telling the truth, and every time I did, Dan swore it was true.
We arrived at Dan's house and I made sure to look over the fence into his
back yard, but I saw no cave, no entrance, and no bats. Dan then told me
that he had to go inside and that he would show me "his cave full of bats" on another day.
......
When I was in tenth grade, Burbank High 1970 before my family moved to Sun Valley, one morning on the way to school my buddy pulled out a joint and
we smoked it. Needless to say, I was a little late to my first period
English class. I practiced looking as straight as I could under the circumstances and what I would say to the teacher while making sure I could walk in "a convincing, sober straight line".
I opened the door to the classroom and walked straight to my desk, but when I looked around, I was horrified to see that the classroom was full of unfamiliar faces and that my English teacher was not at the front of the class. Instead, the teacher was totally unfamiliar. I immediately stood up and apologised to the teacher and the class for being in the wrong room, but the stranger repeatedly assured me that "no, this is the right room".
I thought about it for a moment and said aloud, "No! I'm in the wrong
class and I'm sorry!" The other students caught on to what I had been
doing and they started to giggle. I thought this was very unfair because I
was the one on pot at the time and I wasn't laughing at all.
The stranger then reminded me that it was "Career Day" and I then remembered it as being that which was why the classroom was full of people I had never seen before.
......
In 1971 I had Mr. Norton for commercial art class at Poly. One day we were
instructed to take a picture from a magazine and explode it, in other
words, cut it up and paste it on construction paper in a creative way. I
took a copy of Look Magazine which featured a picture of a Great White
Shark from the Cinerama documentary, "Blue Water, White Death (1971)" and
cut the body up into little strips and moved them about while leaving the
eye of the shark and its jaws intact. At the time, I thought this could
make one hell of a horror picture. I think Mr. Norton gave me a B+ on my
rendition.
......
Graduation night 1972. I was left on my own. No words, no goodbys and no
party invites. Totally snubbed and I didn't have much to offer anyhow, so
I ended up going to a pinball arcade with my brother, though in hindsight
it was probably the most affordable way to go.
...
My brother knew one of The Doobies through a drummer friend.
They were on the Warner Bros. label.
......
In February 1974 I had a nose job to correct for my asymetrical nose which
was due to being born with a cleft palate/hared lip. I mention this
because...
...
In October 1974 I contracted Hepetitis B before my 21st birthday, even though I was never a hype or a hard drug user and it wasn't from sex. I was still a virgin, so it was either a delayed infection from the surgery, else I don't know where I got it from.
...
In 1976 I was working as a temp laborer and was called to work at...Warner
Bros. Records/Creative Services. In those days they were located on
Vanowen St., N. Hollywood. Damn, I was proud to be there. The first day
in, MGR. hands me a (very bad aluminum) ladder (with a bent leg that was straightend out) and asked me to climb six feet off the concrete floor and
get a 50 lb. box of posters for the "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell" release.
Sure thing. I haden't noticed the straightened leg, trusting the integrity of the company instead. I got to the top of the ladder, picked up the box, the leg buckled, and I fell tearing my shoulder. Mgr. rushed me through the company clinic, did not file a report with OSHA, and instead kept me on for a year while promising "a permanent job". After a year, they let me go. On the last day in, Mgr. produced the damaged ladder that I thought had been gotten rid of a year before, and he suggested that I sue Warner Bros. Of course I didn't.
Now understand, as far as I knew, I had no connections to the business,
but at that time I for some crazy reason truly believed that I wanted to
work for them.
...
1978. One of the people at Warners was a "The Recycler" reader. Between
jobs I took to reading it myself and took a look at the "Personals"
section. I noticed there were many cryptic messages to be found there and I noticed that, week-
by-week the Presonals increasingly alluded to incidents I had recently
experienced, always obliquely and without direct reference or by name, and later began alluding to what seemed like a particular girl from Poly who I
had a tremendous crush on at the time (who didn't?). This went on for 8 months and I was pretty lonely by then, knew no one, lost sleep, and kept up reading that paper week-by-week until I was a wreck. It was about that time that a message in the Personals mentioned a name, a very unique nickname with a
peculiar spelling which also happened to be the same as the one used by my
upstairs neighbor. I started burning on the idea that this upstairs guy is
not a personal friend being that he a wanna be smart ass/tough guy who ran
with chain-wielding gangbangers and that he was pointing his messages at
me and running me ragged while all the while having a good laugh at my
misery. So my fault, I blew my composure and blasted my juciest records at the ceiling one Tuesday for a good hour or so.
The room above which was normally a clash of break dancing sounds in a
cheap apartment went quiet and stayed that way for the rest of the week.
By Friday I was still wired thinking that maybe that girl was still
involved somehow, wishful thinking, anyway, I could not sleep for three
days, until the following Sunday morning. I had finally fallen asleep fo...Expand for more
r twenty minutes when I was suddenly blasted from sleep by a very loud radio
playing K-RTH FM which was odd since the upstairs always played soul or
disco, never K-RTH which in those days was a half-baked mix of pop and
recent oldies. I was a KMET/KWST FM listener and avoided K-RTH like the
plague. The DJ Brian Byrne made odd comments about "people who do not
appreciate what they have" and nonsense. I spent another 12 hours talking to the upstairs (they denied anything was wrong) and walking around the large 103 unit complex where I live looking for the party, the girl, or
whatever the hell it was about. A voice from behind one of the apartment
windows said, "He's still walking around" (Snicker). Duh!
The following week's "The Recycler" suddenly turned dark with personal
messages "In Memory of Billy Joel", In Memory of My Daughter", all very
grim and implying that someone had died. DJ Byrne was playing songs like
"Wildfire" and "Hopelessly Devoted to You" all the while continuing the
odd comments along with "added unusual dedications". Other radio stations
including KMET picked up the trend. The innuendos increased about "some girl" until they had me convinced there was someone looking for a date.
During this time I was taking six showers a day and was at the same time totally bloated from the four hours a day sleeps I 'was allowed' by the upstairs. There was a dead ringer for Crystal Gayle living upstairs going by another name and appearing to be "very pregnant" even though she was apparently not so in public appearances at the time, but the trick was that there was a frumpy lady who pretended to be the same person every other day. Crazy? Add to this the fact that I had made up a song on the piano that was very much similar to "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" some time before it appeared as a single. I had no knowlege or involvement in that recording. A K-RTH DJ alluded to this person exactly as she passed by my window, so wracked for sleep, I decided to rush her door upstairs. I knocked on her door. A guy in a Superman T-Shirt answered. The frumpy substitute was playing her that day. Not knowing what to do and in need of some heavy rest I tried charging past the guy. I was blocked, fell backwards, and broke my tailbone. Because I was wrecked and out of money living with my folks and because it was 'My Fault', I ended up sleeping it off with no doctor, very sore. Later when I returned to apologize for "my foolish behavior" (no, I am not that kind of guy who invades other people's privacy unlike certain Hollyweird-types), her Mother answered. She was a dead ringer for a very old friend of my parents, though she pretended not to be her, and she called the cops and I received a restraining order. Standing beside her was Jeff Lynne drinking a beer and saying nothing. The following week, the song "Don't Bring Me Down" was released as a single. The upstairs berated me for "bothering the neighbors". I spent some time at the local Red Castle Bar with the drummer friend who knew one of The Doobies. There was a guy there who looked exactly like Kirk Douglas and we talked, though he denied any association.
Miss You/Stones was released alongside Shattered and the nosy DJs were spinning it in sync with local occurances. Again it looked like a date
so on a Saturday night I cleaned up once again and went out to my car to find 5 gallons of human feces dumped on top of a pair of white laced panties on the trunk of my car. Well, I balled my eyes out, and when I returned to the car, someone had removed all of it. After this I gave up thinking it was about that girl, though I discovered that as far back as '72 Jim Croce, Elton and even Dylan had 'somehow' taken an interest in the situation, though as for the late Jim Croce, I never was a heavy drug user, so I never had to "overcome the blow" unless he meant cigarettes?
I only wish peace, but I do want some justice as for the local nonsense.
There were also many songs from them that were very similar to those I made up on guitar to myself, though I rarely write lyrics and am not musically-trained.
Songs come easily to me, but I never wrote them down and now I'm pretty much old school.
I did call the cops to complain of the upstairs disturbing the peace because they were dropping bowling balls from above EVERYWHERE I tried to sleep in my family's apartment below, but Foothill told me it was 'a civil matter'. No help at all.
I figured out it was some kind of Hazing stunt, but very cruel and it was violent. Without any provocation from me, I've been punched, shoved, denied sleep and food, and threatened with an ice pick in my face and a gun, oh, and one day, by a rabid dog that somehow showed up foaming at the mouth.
And of course they've made time on "being crazy" as well.
By '85 I suffered an ulcerative collapse and several heart attacks and the upstairs hazers who were always aware of things let me sleep it off without any ER. When I went to Olive View on my own, the ER said it 'was congestion' and prescribed codein cough syrup containing 25% alcohol, even though I was throwing up blood. I didn't take the cough syrup. It would have been fatal on involuntary fibrillations. All the while my tunes were showing up on the radio. Quarterflash/Harden My Heart appeared after my collapse, and later did Shot Through the Heart/Bon Jovi. Coincidence?
Every now and then they try to remind me that this is not my delusion by leaving Oscar screeners and empty boxes of Dove chocolates from The Emmys in the dumpster area and on Valentine's Day, 2005 I opened the front door to find Universal shooting an episode of Las Vegas in my apartment's parking lot. They just won't cop to it.
I got over the ulcer pretty much by myself albeit damaged, with wisecracks from upstairs all along, so I don't want to be there, but
there are just too many evil fake people in this place known as Hollywood. I'm not interested in anything this town has to offer given their attitudes towards outsiders whom they wish to own. Like, I can't talk about them without some kind of reprisal? Call me pariah instead.
So, where do the (real) children play?
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