INDIAN HILL

     With the Amgen California Tour staging a quarter mile from my house and a swim meet at the Claremont Club behind my place, it was time to leave town.  Okay, maybe it was the rapture.  I try to avoid catastrophic events.  So I hit the road and wound up in Death Valley.  As good a place as any to minimize effects of the so-called 'rapture', whatever that means. Dropping into the south end of the Panamint Valley, looking east. Approaching Bad Water, -200 feet below sea level, Death Valley.        Coming into Death Valley from the west on California Highway 178 from the Panamint Valley, you cross Emigrant Pass, then drop 4000 feet into the Valley.  Stovepipe Wells is your first stop, then on down to Furnace Creek.  These rock formations take on a golden tint in the afternoon light.       Down at Furnace Creek I run into some speed.       The Ferrari roared like an Italian tenor and took off, while the motorcycle riders stopped to share a few moments with me.  T

     What’s haunting me today is the thought of the 10 year old boy in Riverside that shot his Nazi-father in the head while he was sleeping.  Grabs the ‘family’ Rossi .357 Magnum and pops the old man.  No, I don’t condone shooting one’s father.  The kid though, from the court-filed documents and newspaper reports, said his Nazi father routinely beat him, according to the testimony of the stepmother.  He also beat the ‘mother’, although it isn’t clear if this is the stepmother or his actual birth mother.  The boy was worried that his Dad was cheating on his Mom and worried about which one he’d be living with if they split up.       In recent days and weeks that we’ve had reports of Osama bin Laden’s shooting, Schwarzenegger’s love child, the saga of the Dodgers and the messy financial scams the McCourts have been running, yet this child killing his father has haunted me.  From the television show I produced for KTVU-2, to this day, I’ve struggled to come to grips with this hateful Cali

           Let’s call him Mario.  He’s the bartender at this classic on Hollywood Boulevard, between Highland and Las Palmas.  You’ve been there.  The Maitre ‘d, Manuel, had ushered me into the empty bar around 11:45 AM, and while outside the sun blazed with mid-spring spring heat, inside seemed frozen in time.       Mario was setting up the bar and had bottles of wine, some opened, some uncorked, cork trays full of highball glasses, wine glasses, Pilsner glasses, tumblers, large jars of green olives, stainless steel containers of white onions—the little kind used in gimlets or martinis if you like them that way—slices of lemon peel, lime, candied cherries, all across the bar, so much that the waiter who came by shoved clear a corner so I could sit.  Mario brought me a Heineken and a glass dripping with shaved ice.  Billie Holliday singing ‘It Had To Be You’, notes hanging around the wallpaper of hunting scenes, geese and duck blinds high above the bar, surrounding the room. Mario sa