Ted Avery O’Shea and the Mission Beach Ghetto Guerrillas

(Personal Conflict bassist Toby Gibson commemorates 8/8/08.)

Author’s note: My Ted O’Shea story has been floating around my desk through several houses, five dogs, a divorce and two kids over the past seventeen or so years.

Having the same birthday as someone close to you who has died tends to keep that feeling of loss pretty fresh in your memory at least once every year, and it’s funny how it will surface now and then on paper or on my computer and I stop for a second and relax, letting myself drift back to a time when life wasn’t lived from crisis to crisis and time was measured almost solely by the 90-odd days of summer.

At some point years ago my memories of Teddy changed from that painful ache that loss leaves you to memories of some great times and a little hope, which I suppose is how things should be. Anyhow — at this point in my life I could probably write something more about Teddy that might be a little more polished and maybe sum him up a little better, but I have come to like the early-20s version for the youthful perspective alone, if for nothing else — the lack of my latter-day cynicism and the fact that the loss wasn’t yet a distant memory — and so I think I’ll let things stay as they are. — T.G.

Teddy was already a man when I first met him, hanging around on the north side of the P.B. recreation center. He was riding circles on a black Schwinn Spitfire, his one leg doing double-duty at the pedals, the other in a cast straight out on the handlebars in front of him.

I was twelve or thirteen at the time, and Ted was a couple years older than I. I had been hanging around with his younger brother Tim who was a year or two younger than I. I hadn’t ever met Ted before, I think because he was in juvi or away with his dad in L.A., though I can’t recall clearly which. I think his dad was in the navy — I don’t remember for sure — but I vaguely remember a story about Ted being the victim of a hit-and-run while skateboarding up in L.A., so maybe that’s what it was.

Teddy was riding these lazy circles on the basketball court outside the P.B. rec, talking with Braden Frye and Whitney Costello, a Krakatoa cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, smoke drifting into his face and stinging his eyes while he concentrated on keeping the bike upright and moving forward. Teddy always had a Schwinn Spitfire, which was the standard vehicle for cruising the boardwalk in ’79. They were pretty indestructible, easy to work on, and kind of retro before retro was a thing. We used to steal bikes all the time back then, grind the serial numbers and mix up the parts with other frames so they were hard to identify. Me and this kid Ramin had a regular chop-shop going for a while in ninth grade, but had to quit when someone gave us up to the cops and I got sent off to my dad’s place out in the sticks for my tenth-grade year. Ramin got off pretty easy because he was an Iranian immigrant and it was a politically sensitive time in 1979- 444 days, Ayatollah Khomeini, the hostages and all that. Plus he was a master bullshitter — he pretended not to understand anything they said to him, and constantly made no sense speaking his Iranian surferese pidgen until the police and the school finally threw their hands up and let him go with his parents. He was a streetwise kid and got along okay, but I heard all that caught up with him later anyways — but that’s another story entirely.

Teddy once told me that he dropped out of seventh grade, and since I never saw him at school I took it as the truth. He was a typical beach kid in a lot of respects: parents split up, raised by a single mom in a rented beach cottage, worked at Fillippi’s Pizza on Garnet Avenue to get a little extra change- pretty much standard fare for P.B. Life goes on.

Over the years he and I spent some time together, hanging out enjoying our youth and getting into whatever trouble we could get into. After I got to know him he started revealing layers of himself, and I came to find he had a lot going on in his head and that the sum of him was way more than all of that extraneous surface stuff that’s visible at first glance.

Teddy was a romantic and an idealist, a fighter with his fists as well as a fighter for whatever rights he could discover or make up. As the most common ways for kids to make money in P.B. back then was to steal and to sell dope to the swabbies on navy payday, we were all of the time getting rousted by the cops for one thing or another. Over the years there became quite a bit of animosity between the local surfers and San Diego’s finest.

Teddy used to be the first to flash them the finger or throw his arm straight out in a mock-nazi salute and call them pigs or the Gestapo. At some point we always ran, and they always chased us, life imitating art in some parody of Porky Pig chasing the Roadrunner — them with their forty pounds of flashlights and keys and all that crap they keep jangling around strapped to their rotund asses. On the odd occasion that they did luck out and manage to catch us, they were already pissed off just for being such a neighborhood joke. Teddy would point at them, laughing and taunting, jeering at them until they finally pushed back and roughed him up, playing on cheap shots because they inevitably had nothing on him. Teddy would just get all fired up with his stereotypical Irish temper and offer to take them all on in one shot. More than a couple times they took him up on it, and Teddy always went down swinging.

Plenty of times we fought side by side on the boardwalk at night, taking on the meatheads and dirtbags who preyed on anyone outside of their social norms, seeing diversity as a sign of weakness. We always had fun doing that, finding our glory in the fashion of our black-and-white daytime television heroes — John Wayne, Bogart, Clint Eastwood, Bronson. But more like James Garner as Rockford, I always ended up having to pick glass from the alley floor out of my back while Teddy would come away clean because he could hold off two or three guys with that double-edged dagger he carried in a boot sheath and that kind of crazy iciness that radiated off of him when he was threatened. While that may sound like a lot to handle, at that time and place he was the best guy to have by your side, ready for anything and loyal to the bitter end. Mission Beach Ghetto Guerillas and fuck anyone that gets in our way.

Ted and Phil let me move in when my mom tried to send me back to Dad’s place the second time. The word was that I was too much for mom to handle. My dad and step-mom were having some infidelity issues that didn’t leave much time for problem teenagers like me and I was getting the ping-pong ball treatment between the parents, so Teddy just said, “Shine it!” and I moved in with him and Phil. Phil was supposed to be in San Diego going to college, but instead he was working at the Firehouse Deli by day and getting loaded with us by night while trying his best to stay out of our trouble. I would pretty much bum around all day, hanging with Bid when he was around and Ronnie Haig and the rest of the street dealers, drinking a beer or eating at Thousand Dogs, this little taco stand on Ventura (the bona fide name was Acapulco Number 13, but “Thousand Dogs” just fit — no explanation necessary.) At sixteen I was spending my days deteriorating in the shadow of the Belmont Park Roller Coaster; at night I would damage myself alongside the rest of the crumbling city.

We had an upstairs studio apartment on an alley two minutes off of Ventura, where the action was. It had two beds and a table with chairs. When I slept, I slept on the floor. At 5 a.m. the guys left for work and I would scam one of their beds and sleep until nine or noon. We didn’t have a T.V. because one afternoon Phil got fed up with the bullshit and plucked it up and marched down the alley and threw it into Mission Bay, a look of grim determination and satisfaction on his face. We all sat there in the sand for a couple hours and smoked reefer and drank beer and I gave the TV a proper eulogy.

So after that at night we were without television, free. We’d get stoned and listen to local television audio on the far left of the radio dial — Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Bonanza, My Favorite Martian and maybe a couple game shows — abstract shit like that. Back then I was always drawing (which seemed to flat-out amaze Teddy, a lifelong product of San Diego City Schools, which as far as I could tell had never encouraged him to express himself in any artistic manner at all) and so I made us a T.V. out of an empty cardboard box. I think I even made various pictures to make up the different channels. I remember Teddy admiring my craftiness and letting out a quiet laugh at the whole thing. Philthy concentrated on it for nearly an hour in homage of my efforts, looking away only long enough to pack another bowl.

We used to listen to Phil’s tape of Firesign Theater a lot, Phil and Ted quoting it verbatim as if they were performing it on stage, and we’d stomp down the back alleys of Mission Beach in engineer boots on our way to vague destinations or nowhere in particular. We always traveled the alleys — both to avoid the cops as well as enjoy the urban scenery while seeking out waylaid spitfires.

Those guys had a lot of names for me. I was younger than them both (Phil, who at the time went by the nom de plume “Philthy Riggs,” was 22 to my 15) and I was kind of under their supervision and protection- in retrospect not too unlike a younger brother. I was “Toby” first, from way back. Then it was “Tobus McBobus” one night when we were shrooming, and I have no Idea where that came from. Then it was Just “Mac’B” For a bit. After a couple impulsive cat-driven episodes it was “Toby the Cat Hater,” but that never took.

In all seriousness, the other guys we hung with were pretty much too far gone to have any kind of close friendship like we had, though they were all our brothers and they also watched out for us when things got rough. There was just no way they could do the stuff we did — like the T.V. thing or catching snakes at Robb field, or the time we rented mopeds and rode all over the city, or the time Ted and I went to the zoo (He was eighteen and raised in San Diego and had never been to the zoo? What the fuck?!), and fishing off of Bud’s dock for sand-sharks, and the spur-of-the-moment sunset cruises on the Seaforth fishing charter with a twelve-pack of beer and a couple packs of smokes.

We could do all that stuff because we were still hanging onto our humanity, but the real bad guys — street dealers like Woods and Bean and Wally — they were all about dealing and doing dope. The stuff we did, they would laugh at and give me a hard time. They were hard guys, and I suppose you give up some of the good stuff in order to have the security of being a hard guy. I have no idea where they are now, but I hope they all eventually came around and got to at least do the zoo and that stuff — love a woman, cry when their dog dies, care about something — even if they are still into heavy stuff. It’s not like there are too many guys tough enough to give them a hard time for it.

One time Phil got a car — or maybe it was Bid. We didn’t have much use for cars as we rarely left our neighborhood except to go to the occasional show downtown — and then whenever we did go out of Mission Beach we usually traveled in a group and got girls to drive us around. Anyway — We had this car — a primer-gray ’69 Malibu. It was the Monday after swabby payday, and Woods and Wally came over with a bunch of money and beer and said let’s all go to the drive-in over on Rosecrans.

I guess we were all for it because pretty soon Phil was driving us across the bridge towards Rosecrans (Phil was the only one with a drivers license that didn’t have some sort of leverage against it, and damn near the only one who could give his real name if we got pulled over.) Woods and Wally were riding shotgun; Ronny Haig, Teddy, Bid and myself occupied the back seat. It’s pretty much a matter of course that we’re all drinking heavily. When we get there Wally, Ronnie and myself commit the ultimate act of trust and let them close the trunk on us while Woods and Bid hop the fence and meet us inside.

To tell you the truth, I have no idea what the movie was, and am in fact dead-certain that we didn’t know what was playing until we got there as that would have taken possessing and reading a current newspaper, something I just don’t recollect this bunch doing much. Current events were what was happening on the boardwalk, the current price by weight, and when did the next carrier come in from the West-Pacific Fleet- all information which was readily available on the sidewalk in front of Hamel’s Skate Shop or the plunge, anytime — day or night.

Anyhow — we’re barely into the opening scene and already running short on beer. Woods and Wally have been drinking, snorting and smoking copious quantities all day and are now holding out on us for the last of the beer, which they’ve stashed in the pockets of their flannels and leather jackets before we realized the shortage was upon us. As if this didn’t bum us out enough, Woods is becoming flat out belligerent with a couple carloads of swabbys behind and to the right of us, and they’re telling him to “shut up or else” — which we all already know delights Woodsy when he’s looking for trouble. Ted and Phil are lying on the hood of the Malibu and I’m on the ground with my back against the bumper when Woods shoves everyone out of the back seat and yanks it out, holding it over his head and reveling in the situation for two clicks before he stuffs it through the front windshield of some swabby’s Trans Am.

We’re all still by the car (except Wallace, who’s dutifully backing up his partner) and Woods is jerking these swabbys out of their car one after the next and cold-cocking them, letting them pile up at his feet. Bid has to back up Woods — there’s the spirit of free-trade, and he owes Woods a couple — and poor Ronnie Haig is so blazed that he’s just lying there on the pavement where Woodsy dumped him when he jerked out the back seat. Ted and Phil want no part of this (both because the odds were pretty good for taking a beating from about six dozen swabs and doubly so for going to jail) and so they give me the nod and off we three trot into the night, on a long walk home on some lonely and unfriendly avenues.

That’s about what it was like with those guys, and I guess that’s probably that’s why we didn’t venture out of Mission Beach too often. We would stay around the relative safety of the neighborhood until enough time had passed that either our assailants/victims had forgotten or we had, and then we’d venture across town for another misadventure.

There were lots of times, though, when people came around M.B. looking for trouble, and then it was pretty much all in good sport because it was pretty much their prerogative whether they stayed or left, and it was pretty much their funerals.

I remember a bunch of times that the boys sent me in to college parties around Mission beach because they knew I was small enough that some dipshit meatheads would try to fuck around with me, and they knew that I had this endless well of intellectual anger and this permanent sneer on my face and I’d tell them to fuck off and go die. So in I’d go looking for the keg and this would lead to that and some big dumb jock morons would be about to throw me down the stairs or toss me through the picture window and here comes the cavalry for a free for all punch-fest and to trash the house, rape and pillage, take anything of value and dash after the fun’s over to lick our wounds and drink their shitty keg beer.

Those people had no business there anyway — they were just transplants — frat boys pretending to live dangerously or slumming it or something, and I guess for them we were just one of life’s lessons. Probably not that big of a deal in retrospect. But there was never a dull moment, and I must admit it was a lot of fun sometimes.

“When we grew up.” That sounds a little strange in light of the fact that Teddy died when I was twenty-two, now twenty-one years ago. But we really did grow up in that time — more so for Ted because he started growing up so young. In a lot of ways I still haven’t grown up today.

We grew up and I moved on. Teddy stayed right where he was. I moved on because in my gut I always knew there was no future for me in staying there — I didn’t belong. The only reason I was there was to see what all the fuss was about, why I was supposed to be good and why I should do what I’m told and be like everyone else- to find out what exactly was going to happen if I did just the opposite of what my parents told me.

In hindsight — it’s all the same anyhow — you either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. Whatever it is, I doubt it matters when you’re gone, and we pretty much all look the same after were gone.

So I moved around, I played in bands, went to San Francisco and then came back. I blew it some more but eventually came around some little by little and managed to defy the percentages and survived my own adolescence.

Teddy did good, too. He still sold a little weed here and there — but who’s to blame him when there are bills to pay and money to be made, and everyone around there is either using or selling or both? So Teddy’s working somewhere and I’m doing construction up the coast in Encinitas and I had made plans to go to Ensenada with Mike McCarthy but on the “morning of” he tells me he can’t go and backs out, leaving me high and dry.

I’m dead set on a surf trip so I call Teddy and spur of the moment he tells his live in might as well be wife that we’re off and away we go with her cackling her disapproval in the distance behind us. Seriously — like thirty minutes notice. That’s something.

Only there’s no surf, so we just hang with the locals and eat fish tacos, camping on the beach drinking Mexican beer and margaritas. Teddy looks absolutely, positively like he is where he belongs, standing on the beach in the dirty weedy sand of La Salinas — grinning and mellowing out, safe and sound.

Over the years I’ve chewed on this like a dog gnaws a bone. I’ve worked at it and wondered at the particulars. Why Teddy? Why not me? Who knows? Not us. I think over time I’ve gotten a handhold on the topic — not a mastery but maybe a start. I finally have recognized that the urban environment we grew up in — it grew up around us, and maybe some of those guys we lost would have fit in a little better twenty years earlier, forty years earlier, or in the Wild West days. Mexico suited Teddy just fine, and he wore it well. It looked good on him, and he looked good in it. But we had to go home, and so we did.

The Ending.

So I guess there couldn’t have been a middle-aged Ted O’Shea, any more than there could have been an old Bruce Lee or an old Bob Marley or an old Sid Vicious — that just wasn’t meant to be. Early one morning I got a message just like many times before, and many times since, the message that another good friend is gone forever. After all the shit we’d been and done it was more than a little ironic that Teddy would fall prey to something as mundane as riding his motorcycle in the rain. I thought about it a lot that day and many days after, that at least he went with his head up and his back straight, eyes alive, not like a lot of others who went after years of suffering, dead in the gutter from a lethal injection or a serious bit of come-uppance.

We have the same Birthday, Teddy and I — serious, that. Twenty something years ago we used to go drinking together on August eighth or thereabouts, celebrating our good fortune of being young and alive and invincible, and beyond that born on the same day.

And so it is that I remember every birthday, as well as a lot of other days when the morning’s right or the surf is just so, and I think to myself that Teddy would have really dug this, if only he could see where we can go and what we can do. And in light of all that I can only hope he burned as brightly as he possibly could and that he knows he’s still with me.

At some point on every birthday I can’t help but think: Happy Birthday, brother — I still miss you.

— Toby Gibson