Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

by Quentin Tarantino

  “Can you open the 8-track case for me?”

  She involuntarily makes a face that tells Cliff she thinks these 8-track tapes are a pain in the ass, though Cliff doubts whoever owns this record store pays her to spruce up the community billboard.

  In her toneless voice, which seems to go hand in hand with this type of athletic sexy blond Californian beach girl, Susan tells him, “Ahh . . . yeah, sure thing. Let me go get the key.” She points over to where the 8-track glass case is. “Meet me by the 8-track tapes.”

  Cliff watches her tight white jean–covered ass disappear behind a bead curtain to fetch the key, which, since there’s only one and she’s in charge of it, should be in her pocket, not in a desk drawer in some back room behind a bead curtain.

  He can feel Shovel Face’s resentment of him as he moves over to the glass case in question. If asked, Cliff would tell Shovel Face that he probably had a chance with Susan four to five months ago. But if he hasn’t made his move by now, she probably chalks him up as a dickless wonder and it doesn’t matter how much pizza and beer they have after work. And, in Cliff’s opinion, his best bet would be to concentrate on good-looking customers.

  Cliff scans the 8-track selection through the locked glass, searching for Tom Jones’s Delilah amongst all the other names. Steppenwolf. The Fifth Dimension. Ian Whitcomb. Crosby, Stills and Nash. Hair Broadway soundtrack. Zorba the Greek original soundtrack. Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. Mama Cass’s solo record. Two Bill Cosby records. Some comedy team named Hudson and Landry that Cliff has never heard of.

  The beach bunny bounces back and unlocks the glass door, sliding it open with a noisy tug. Cliff bends over to better examine the titles. He can feel Susan watching him with her hand on her cocked-out hip. Cliff finds what he’s looking for and plucks out Tom Jones Greatest Hits. Susan does a slight but audible guffaw and covers her smile with her hand.

  His eyebrows rise. “What? Is my choosing Tom Jones funny?”

  She nods her golden-blond head as if to say, Yeah, a little.

  Cliff exits the record store (still a little pissed at Susan), and steps onto the sidewalk, holding a little burgundy bag with the Hot Waxx logo on it. He heads for the corner of Riverside Drive and Forman to cross the street and get back in his vehicle. Then, across traffic, he spots her again. The bushy-haired brunette pickle girl in the cutoff jeans, bare feet, and crochet halter top, apparently waiting for his return, by his cream-yellow Cadillac. When she sees him standing on the corner, ready to cross the street and return to his car, she jumps up and waves frantically at him. As Cliff gets the green light and crosses the busy street heading toward both his car and the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl, he notices something. This girl is younger than she looked through his dirty windshield. How young, he’s not sure. But as they converse, he’s going to try and examine that.

  Leaning against his Cadillac, the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl says, “Looks like third time’s the charm.”

  “I count you on Riverside Drive and Hollywood Way being our third time,” states the blond dude in the yellow Hawaiian shirt. “And it was definitely not charmed.”

  “Picky, picky, picky,” the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl teases. “Okay, Mr. Persnickety, have it your way.” Then she gives a very over-enunciated line reading on, “Fourth time’s the charm.”

  How fucking old is she? Cliff thinks.

  “How were those pickles?” Cliff asks.

  “Real good,” the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl says. “They were the fancy kind.”

  Cliff raises his eyebrows as if to say, Good for you.

  “Give me a ride?” she pleads in her cute-girl voice, then bites her bottom lip for effect.

  “What happened to Bernie?” he asks her.

  “Who?”

  “The guy in the Buick Skylark,” he says.

  She sighs. “Looks like he wasn’t goin’ my way.”

  “Which way is your way?” Cliff inquires.

  She’s definitely underage, Cliff has deduced, but how underage? She’s not fourteen or fifteen. So the question is, is she sixteen or seventeen? Or maybe, who knows, eighteen? And then she would officially not be underage, at least as far as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is concerned.

  “I’m going to Chatsworth,” she tells him.

  That makes him involuntarily giggle, “Chatsworth?”

  In her puppet body language, she nods her head yes.

  With a smirk on his face, Cliff asks her, “So you just hitch up and down Riverside Drive till somebody with a lotta free time and a lotta gas agrees to drive you all the way to fucking Chatsworth?”

  She waves away his incredulous reaction. “Shows what you know. Tourists love to drive me. I’m the favorite part of their L.A. vacation. . . .”

  As she talks with her hands, he notices how big they are. My god, her fingers are so long, he thinks. They’d feel pretty good wrapped around my cock and squeezing, with that big giant thumb of hers mashing up the head.

  “. . . they’ll be telling stories about the Hollywood hippie girl . . .”

  As she continues to rattle on, he glances down at her feet. Oh shit, they’re huge too.

  “. . . gave a ride to the movie ranch to for the rest of their lives.”

  Beat one.

  Beat two.

  Beat three.

  Beat four.

  “Spahn Movie Ranch?” Cliff finally asks.

  Debra Jo’s face lights up. “Yeah!”

  Cliff shifts his weight from his right foot to his left foot and unconsciously shifts the little burgundy Hot Waxx bag with the 8-track tape in it from his left hand to his right hand as he clarifies, “So that’s where you’re goin’, Spahn Movie Ranch?”

  Again her bushy head nods in a puppet-like yes, accompanied by an “Uh-huh.”

  Cliff asks, genuinely curious, “Why you goin’ there?”

  “That’s where I live,” she answers.

  “Alone?” he asks.

  “No,” she assures him. “Me and my friends.”

  What? he thinks. At first, when she said Spahn Movie Ranch, Cliff just assumed she was George Spahn’s hippie granddaughter or his hippie caretaker. But when hippies say “friends,” they mean “other hippies.”

  “So,” he clarifies, “let me get this straight—you and a bunch of friends like you all live at Spahn Movie Ranch?”

  “Yep.”

  The stuntman rolls the information around in his brain, then opens the passenger-side car door for her. “Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.”

  “Great!” she hollers, as she folds herself up on the passenger-side front seat.

  Cliff slams the door behind her. He contemplates, as he walks around to the driver’s side of the Cadillac, the information that the bushy-haired brunette barefoot hippie pickle girl just gave him. If what she says is true, it does sound like something strange is going on at Spahn Ranch. He’s sure, ultimately, it’s probably nothing. Nevertheless, George Spahn is an old man, and it wouldn’t hurt to check up on ’em. All it’ll cost him is the drive to Chatsworth. He ain’t got anything else better to do this late afternoon. Might as well look in on an old friend. In the meantime, he intends to keep flirting with Elbows and Kneecaps and maybe find out more about these “friends” and where they came from.

  Soon they’re speeding down Riverside Drive. On the radio, the Real Don Steele is joking his way through a commercial for Tanya Tanning Butter. Debra Jo, who gets a lot of rides, immediately starts going into the directions of how to get to Spahn Ranch. “So you wanna get on the Hollywood Freeway—”

  Cliff cuts her off. “I know where it is.”

  She leans her fuzzy head back in the seat and gives the blond dude in the Hawaiian shirt a curious look.

  “Are you some old cowboy dude who used to make movies at the ranch?”

  “Whoa,” Cliff says, with such enthusiasm it surprises Debra Jo.


  “What?” she asks.

  He answers as he maneuvers the Cadillac around traffic, “I’m just surprised what an accurate description of me that was. Some old cowboy dude who useta make movies at Spahn Ranch.”

  Debra Jo laughs, “So you useta make westerns at the ranch?”

  He nods his head yes.

  “Back in the old-timey days?” she adds.

  “Well, if by old-timey days, you mean television eight years ago, yeah,” he says.

  Debra Jo puts her huge dirty feet up on the Cadillac dashboard, pushes her filthy soles into the smooth cold glass of the windshield, and asks, “Were you an actor?”

  “No,” he tells her. “I’m a stuntman.”

  “Stuntman?” she repeats excitedly. “That’s way better!”

  “Really?” he asks. “Why is that ‘way better’?”

  “Actors are phony,” she says with the air of authority. “They just say lines that other people write. They pretend to murder people on their stupid TV shows, while real people are being murdered every day in Vietnam.”

  Well, that’s one way to think about it, Cliff thinks.

  She continues, “But stuntmen? You guys are different. You jump off fuckin’ buildings. You set yourselves on fire. You embrace fear.” Then, going into the philosophy she learned from Charlie, “It’s only by embracing fear that one conquers one’s self. To conquer fear is to render one unconquerable,” she says with a satisfied smile on her pretty face.

  Whatever the fuck that means, is what Cliff thinks but doesn’t say as he takes the ramp to the northbound Hollywood Freeway.

  On KHJ’s Big 93, the Box Tops’ new song, Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March, comes out of the speakers.

  After he successfully merges into traffic, Cliff decides to ask, “What’s your name?”

  “My friends call me Pussycat.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “You don’t want to be my friend?”

  “Of course I want to be your friend.”

  “Then I told you, my friends call me Pussycat.”

  “Fair enough. Pleased to meetcha, Pussycat.”

  “Aloha. Did you know ‘aloha’ means hello and goodbye?”

  “Actually, I did know that.”

  Touching the shoulder of his yellow shirt: “Are you Hawaiian?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s your name, Mr. Blond?”

  “Cliff.”

  “Cliff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Clifford or just Cliff?”

  “Just Cliff.”

  “Clifton?”

  “Just Cliff.”

  “You don’t like Clifton?”

  “It’s not my name.”

  She lowers her legs from the dash and snatches up the little burgundy Hot Waxx bag off the front seat. “What’d ya get?”

  Cliff protests, “Hey, wait a minute, Miss Rude. Ask.”

  She sticks her big hand in the little bag and pulls out the Tom Jones Greatest Hits 8-track tape and bursts out laughing.

  As opposed to his reaction to the smirking Susan, Cliff smiles at Pussycat’s ridicule. “Look, fuck you, you stuck-up hippie bitch. I like the song Delilah. You got a problem with that?”

  Holding up the 8-track tape with Tom Jones’s picture on it, she sarcastically asks, “Whatsamatter, they all outta Engelbert Humperdinck?”

  Leaning in close to her: “I like him too, smartass.”

  She waves her big hands at the end of her long arms to indicate, No problem. “Hey, Mark Twain said, ‘If people didn’t have different opinions, there’d be no such thing as horse races.’”

  He asks, “Is that what Mark Twain said?”

  She shrugs. “Somethin’ like that.”

  Her long fingers tear at the cellophane that covers the 8-track till she rips it off. She removes the cardboard border that the chunky plastic tape sits in, then reaches over and switches the Cadillac’s music system from radio to tape player.

  The Box Tops shut off.

  While Cliff keeps one eye on her and the other on the Hollywood Freeway, Pussycat shoves the 8-track into the car’s tape player. It makes a loud ca-chunk sound, then for a moment or two they just hear tape hiss emitting from the car-stereo speakers, then Tom Jones’s bombastic What’s New Pussycat? blares out in full stereo.

  “Okay,” Pussycat admits. “I do like this song.”

  She reaches out and twists the volume knob louder, as she begins moving her shoulders to the music and performing a sexy little dance for Cliff’s pleasure on the passenger-side seat of Rick’s Cadillac. She brings her bare legs out from under the floorboards and tucks them under her fanny. Then, as she rises to her knees, she unbuttons the metal button on her Levi’s cutoffs.

  Cliff, who has still not uttered a word, raises his eyebrows.

  Okay, maybe this is worth the gas to Chatsworth, he thinks.

  In response to his reaction, the brunette raises her two brown caterpillar eyebrows as she unzips the fly of her cutoffs. Then slides them off her ass and down her legs, till she’s holding them in her hand, revealing soiled pink panties with little cherries printed on them. She twirls the short-short Levi’s on her finger in time to the calliope-like piano of What’s New Pussycat? till she tosses them down on the floorboard.

  As she shimmies her ass left to right in time with Tom’s vocals, Pussycat hooks a thumb under the underwear and slowly slides the dirty pink cherry panties down her legs and off her person. Then she lies back against the passenger-side car door and spreads her legs open, revealing to the driver the mountainous mound of dark pubic hair between her legs. The hair between her legs is as wild and bushy as the hair on her head.

  “Like what you see, Cliff?” she asks.

  “You bet,” Cliff truthfully tells her.

  She lies down onto her back on the passenger-side seat of Rick’s Coupe de Ville, putting her bushy brown head against the door. She raises her left leg and presses the heel of her foot against the driver’s seat headrest and raises her right leg and wedges her other foot between the dashboard and the windshield on Cliff’s side, presenting herself spread-eagle to the amused driver.

  Then, in time to Tom Jones’s song about a pussycat, she licks two of her fingers and begins running them up and down against her clit.

  Cliff continues driving down the Hollywood Freeway, keeping one eye on the road and the other eye on Pussycat’s dark bushy pussy.

  Pussycat closes her eyelids and says in a voice affected by her arousal, “Stick your fingers in me.”

  “How old are you?” Cliff asks.

  Pussycat’s eyelids pop open.

  It’s been so long since anybody cared about that, she wasn’t even sure she heard him right. “What?”

  “How old are you?” Cliff repeats.

  She laughs incredulously as she says, “Wow, man, that’s the first time anybody’s asked that in a long time.”

  “What’s the answer?” he asks again.

  She props herself up on her elbows but keeps her legs spread wide as she tells him sarcastically, “Okay, we’re gonna play kiddie games? Eighteen. Feel better?”

  Cliff asks her, “Do you got some kinda ID? You know, like a driver’s license or something?”

  “Are you joking?” her surprised face blurts out.

  “No, I’m not,” he assures her. “I need to see something official that verifies you’re eighteen. Which you don’t have, ’cause you’re not.”

  With that, Pussycat closes her legs and rises up into a sitting position, shaking her bushy head in disbelief. “Talk about a bring-down bummer, dude, that’s you.”

  With her pants still off, she stretches out her long legs again and plops her huge feet back on the dashboard, placing her hands behind her head in the full recline position.

  “Obviously I’m not too young to fuck you, but obviously you are too old to fuck me.”

  Cliff sees this from a different perspective and imparts that perspective to Pussycat.

/>   “What I’m too old to do is go to jail for poontang. Prison has tried to get me my whole life. But it ain’t ever got me yet. But the day it does get me, it ain’t gonna be because of you. No offense.”

  So with finger fucking off the table, the young gal that calls herself Pussycat puts her pants back on, and the two chat together on the drive to Chatsworth, Cliff never revealing to his passenger he knows George Spahn personally or his real intention in giving her a ride.

  He fishes for more information about these “friends” of hers that live at George’s ranch.

  And she is only too happy to talk his ear off about them. Especially this dude named Charlie, who she is sure will dig Cliff.

  “I can see Charlie really digging you,” are her exact words.

  At first, Cliff is more interested in this gaggle of chicks in their twenties who believe in and practice free love. But the more she speaks of this Charlie character and the more she recounts his teachings, the less he sounds like a peace-and-love guru and the more he sounds like a pimp.

  Yes, it looks like this Charlie fella took the pimpin’ playbook and ingeniously rewrote it for a generation of girls pissed off at their folks. As he watches Pussycat sincerely spew this fella’s horseshit, Cliff tries to imagine where she came from. If in the fifties he’d followed through with his intentions to give the pimping game a whirl, he never would have gotten close to a pretty, obviously educated gal like this one. But this whole hippie shit put the whole world outta whack. Now she’s offering up her snatch for a lift to Chatsworth.

  Girls who, before, maybe gave you a hand job at the drive-in will now fuck you and your friend.

  Where those French dudes supplied their girls with champagne, lipstick, pantyhose, and Max Factor, this Charlie dude supplies his with acid and free love and a philosophy that ties it all together.

  It’s kinda brilliant, Cliff thinks. I’m kinda lookin’ forward to meeting this Charlie fella.

  “So how’d you meet this guy?” Cliff asks.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah, Charlie.”

  “I first met Charlie when I was fourteen,” Pussycat tells him. “I was living in Los Gatos, California, when my father picked him up hitchhiking.”