Long Beach

 As I started the sixth grade, my family sold their home in Compton and moved to the Victoria Apartments in Long Beach. It was closer to where my father worked as a machinist at the Union Oil refinery in Wilmington. Gasoline was rationed—in World War II—and he had to get to work. 

The apartment house sat on the beach. We all ran around in bathing suits. My mother acquired a local nickname. She was known as “the body.”  Her best friend there, Delma, a blonde young woman from Oklahoma, was known as "the face."

Three or four sex workers lived in the shabby apartment house. For them time passed slowly in the afternoons, so they asked my mother to teach them how to knit. As my brother and I (and Delma's son Raymond) ran through the lobby, we’d pass the women and our mother sitting on couches and knitting away, talking about whatever.