The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  He was dressed like the others, Levi’s rolled to a thin line above his shoes, striped orange-and-yellow socks (I had on a pair myself), huaraches that had been dyed from their natural pale yellowish brown to a dark cordovan with an inch and a half of extra sole and heel added by the shoemaker (I had on a pair myself), white dress shirt, only instead of the leather flight jacket like mine or the baseball warmup jacket that nearly every Berkeley High School student wore if he didn’t want to be accused of being a faggot, Jim and the other musicians were wearing either knee-length topcoats or sports jackets. Jim’s was baby blue, two-button roll but hanging open, and his hair was done in the standard pompadour-into-duck’s-ass that separated the pachucos from the goats (these are not racial terms, but social), and of course he and all the others in the combo were wearing the darkest sunglasses they could find.

  I stayed for the rest of the lunch period and then rushed out of the building and across the street for a cigarette before class. While I was standing there wondering where Chloe Melendrez would be later in the afternoon (underneath a football player, as it turned out), Jim came out the side door to the gymnasium building and lit a cigarette and crossed over to where I was. We stood about five feet apart, sucking on our cigarettes while the hotrods rumbled and crackled up and down the street, radios blaring, or other popular hits of the day. I thought it would be nice if I complimented him on his playing, so I said:

  Open the do’, Richard . . .

  Open the do’ and let me in . . .

  “You’re the trumpet player?”

  “Huh?” He was so cool . . .

  “That was great in there . . . the music . . .”

  “Hey, well, yeah . . .” Or something like that. Jim was definitely in his cool period. After he dropped and stomped his cigarette he looked over at me and his mouth curled into a small grin: “Thanks, man . . .”

  He scuffed across the street and reentered the gym.

  “Hey, well, Oh gee gosh wowie,” I murmured to myself, and the bell rang, so I ran across the slope and into the Academic Building for class.

  The next time I saw Jim was at a dance at the Tennis Club up by the Claremont Hotel. The dance was given by a couple of the high school fraternities, who sold bids to anybody who would buy them. I might as well describe the bids because I don’t think anybody uses them anymore, at least I haven’t seen any since I left Berkeley High; they are little dance cards on colored silken strings that you buy to get into the dance and then give to your girlfriend, several pages, a flocked front cover (they were all different in design) and spaces inside to put the names of the people you danced with, except that it wasn’t considered polite then to cut in or dance with somebody’s date. Girls would collect them and put them up around their mirrors like Christmas cards. You had to buy the girl a corsage, too, so the darkened ballroom full of dressed-up kids would smell like a gardenia factory.

  I had a date, Gloria Somerlade, who did not smell like gardenias because I had spent four dollars on an orchid for her, not because I had the four dollars to spare, but I thought it would show her a little class and make things easier toward the end of the evening. As a matter of fact, the orchid made her dance at a distance from me, to keep from crushing the flower. Jim was playing the dance, but like all the other musicians, working directly from the charts. He was not even the solo trumpet, that was a guy who sat next to Jim and who must have admired Harry James even more than I did, because he played just like him, at least so it sounded to me. I waved to Jim as I danced past once, but he didn’t see me, even though he wasn’t wearing his dark glasses.

  WE KEPT running into each other on the #7 streetcar after school, except on the days he had practice, and after he had hit me up for a Camel several times, we got to talking and joking around. The streetcar was always crowded with kids standing in the back, and that’s where we rode, sometimes getting on through the back door without paying, a dime was a dime, ⅕ of a drunk if you could get served. Another kid we knew named Bunky could work all the contraptions in the back of the car, which was just like the front, so that when the car got to the end of the line the driver just came back and set up and away we go. But with the thing packed and rolling along Grove Street, Bunky would take control and get us heading in the wrong direction. The driver would get up and fight his way through us kids with blood in his eye, while Bunky sneaked around outside and planted the track bombs he had stolen off the car in the first place, so that when the poor harassed driver finally got things calmed down, right away BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  Jim and I thought this was pretty funny stuff.

  Then we would spend weekend afternoons at his place, a tiny apartment in Cordenices Village, the housing project on San Pablo Avenue in West Berkeley, the worst part of town. He shared the apartment with his mother, but I never saw her. She was across the street at Knapp’s Bar when she wasn’t working, so we had the place to ourselves. Mostly we stayed in his room, drinking beer, smoking Camels, listening to Jim’s record collection, my first exposure to the crazy people of rebop. Jim would lie across the bed looking hypnotized, listening to Charlie Parker or Howard McGhee, or he would pick up his trumpet, always there, and play along for a few bars, change the record and sing or play along with the new one. Some afternoons he would just practice, sitting on a turned-around kitchen chair, his sheet music on its rack (stolen from Burbank School) while I would either listen, talk to him or go through his collection of Beauty Parade, Titter, Sunshine & Health, etc., the best collection of magazines I had run into yet, although I had a better collection of funnybooks, which Jim ate up by the yardful.

  Once while I was there somebody beat on the front wall of the building and yelled at Jim to shut up the goddamn trumpet noise and Jim leaped off the bed and smashed his hand against the wall and screamed like a maniac that if the bastard didn’t like the goddamn music he could blow it out his ass, all at top volume, Jim sounding berserk but grinning, his eyes wild, and the guy outside went away.

  And sometimes we would go around the project looking for the cheap girls who supposedly abounded in such places, but very seldom did we score, and once I got into a grappling contest with a girl bigger than me and was knocked over Jim’s bed and cut my eye and damned near bled to death before Jim could stop laughing, and of course the girl got away.

  One bad time I came over and Jim was practicing. He nodded and winked at me and I sat on the bed and lit up, but I could see he was having trouble. He would play a few notes, they sounded all right to me, and then play them again, interrupt himself, “Shit!” and then try again, playing the notes fast and high, getting more and more frustrated until finally he took the horn from his lips and stared at it with a look of dismay. “goddamn it!” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “It’s this fucking horn!”

  But it wasn’t the horn. The horn was beautiful, kept polished and the valves lovingly oiled, everything in its place in the bright green velvet case, the spare mouthpiece, the little silver attachable music rack, the silvered mute and all. What was dismaying Jim was that he could hear the notes so well, could imagine what they should sound like, but could not play them.

  But generally, a few bottles of beer, a few Camel cigarettes, sweet girlies in their underpants, and he could play like an angel. I got a real kick out of it, and never had so much fun in high school as over at Jim’s.

  WE HUNG around together for the rest of the school year and the summer, but then my family moved to the Pacific Northwest and naturally, I went with them, although the thought of leaving California for the backwoods made me sick. Late in the summer, not long before I left, Jim called me up one afternoon and said there was going to be a jam session in a barn up in the hills between Berkeley and Oakland, a real blowout with nobody trying to dance, just the music, and lots of musicians from all over the East Bay, and did I want to go, because nonplaying guests were going to be counted at the door. I was entering my own cool period at the time, so I probably s
aid something like, “Hey, man, sounds like a groove, sounds real hep!” We were already making fun of people who said hep for hip.

  To this day, Jim thinks of that night as the greatest evening of his life. It wasn’t mine. I could think of ten thousand evenings where I had more fun, but I have to grant Jim his point, because he was up with the musicians and I was out with the drunks and fistfighters and bottlethrowers, the vomiters and screamers, the girlstealers and facekickers.

  There were huge kid gangs in the East Bay at that time, and for all I know, still are—The Watchtrack Gang from Oakland, Jinio Reles and His Chinese Army (containing no Chinese), the beginnings of the Hell’s Angels, and a lot of tough hombres who didn’t belong to any particular gang, like Al deAlba or Billy Martin, but would stomp your ass if you looked at them funny. Once on an F train headed for downtown Berkeley, I didn’t keep my eyes to myself properly when three zootsuited Pachooks made their way down the aisle, and I was forced, in front of my friends, girls, old people, etc., to eat crow—the head Pachook stopped in front of me and said, “I don’t like your face.”

  It was a comment that invited response, and I suppose a bigger boy or one with braver friends might have said, “Yeah, well, fuck you, greaseball,” and let it go at that. But the situation being what it was, I merely said, “Neither do I!” and, I think, saved the face in question from getting stomped on, because the three young zootsuiters laughed and left us alone.

  My first job as a comedian.

  I arrived at the jam session in the trunk of a friend’s car, lying down in darkness for the entire ride up into the hills, but with consolation—Dotty McCarty was right next to me, my first date with her, and her reputation was that she would screw anybody who was halfway nice to her, so as the car rumbled and popped up and down and around the hills looking for the barn, Dotty and I got to know each other in the trunk, a few fond kisses, a certain amount of touching here and there, so that when we arrived and Forni, who was driving the car, opened the trunk and Dotty and I came out into the spotlights outside the barn, I was pretty jacked up, and ready for anything.

  That night I was wearing a wine-colored cardigan sports jacket, that is, with no collar, a white shirt with a Mr. B collar, snappy necktie and a pair of charcoal chalkstriped pants that came up to my breastbone and were thirty-six inches at the knee and sixteen at the cuffs.

  In the group milling around the entrance to the barn my clothes were a bit formal, but not unusual. There were other zootsuits, plenty, greasy Levi sets (Levi’s, Levi jackets and field boots), plenty of topcoats and hats and sunglasses (including mine), lots of motorcycles, lots of chopped and channeled cars, some chopped and red-primered pickup trucks, evidence of cases of beer and pints of whiskey, a couple of shoving matches over by the door, and the sound of that music flooding out of the barn and making everyone who wasn’t already inside with the insiders a little pissed off at the delays, the need for invitations (not on paper, just in the memory of the braincases at the door) so that the ozone was exploding with tension. My personal tension mounted pretty fast as I saw that Dotty was one of the few girls in sight, and that she was waving to quite a number of guys who were a lot older, tougher and drunker than I was.

  So of course the trick was to get inside before anything happened. I pushed Dotty in front of me and used her as a battering ram to push through to the door, getting a lot of “Hey-what-the-fuck-oh-scuse-me’s” from guys as they saw it was Dotty pushing them out of the way, but naturally Jim had forgotten to leave my name at the door, or the brilliant guys taking names had forgotten mine, but we got inside anyway because a couple of guys were trying to get in aboard their motorcycles, and this distracted the door-guards long enough for Dotty and me.

  Inside was a different party.

  It was a barn that had been turned into a theater, a stage at one end and lights on the performers. I had never seen so many guys carrying musical instruments as there were at the stage end of the room. The audience was lit up by a string of red and blue lights around the room, but it was pretty dark anyway, people packed into the place all bouncing to the music, smoking cigarettes and passing pints of whiskey around. Dotty and I got as comfortable as possible against the wall pretty near the stage, and I pulled out my own pint, which Dotty and I finished before long, since we had been nipping at it in the trunk of the car.

  Even then the thought of going up onstage scared the shit out of me, but Jim was up there in front of the mob, loving it, bright-eyed, holding his beautiful silver-chased B-flat cornet with its glowing brass bell, onstage all the time I was there, through fistfights, guys yelling and vomiting, musicians coming and going. Later, when Jim’s group was finished with their part of it, he saw me from the stage, shading his eyes, and waved for me to come on up, and then laughed because he knew I’d be scared, and started to leave the stage himself, but the leader of the new guys, a tall skinny black kid with a glowing saxophone, said into the mike, “Hey, Doctor Jim, may we detain you?” and to a hell of a lot of applause—every bit of it deserved—Jim came back onstage, waved his trumpet over his head as a kind of thank-you and they all took off into a version of “How High the Moon”—five or six black guys and Jim—that lasted at least twenty minutes and had everybody in the place screaming like banshees.

  That’s the way it was, and I can understand how Jim thinks of it as the best night of his life, although at some point during the early morning hours Dotty McCarty slipped off (or was kidnapped, what did I care?) and I saw her no more, not that I gave a damn about her, but Forni was pretty sarcastic all the way back to my neighborhood, and for that matter it wasn’t pleasant to have on all those fine duds and end up alone. But hell.

  I DROVE from Sonoma Mountain to Hollywood on a Monday, eating my way south as usual, pancakes with raspberry syrup, fried eggs O.M. with fried potatoes and bacon, rye toast with apple butter, always an eightpack of Coca-Cola on the floor of the car for me to uncork, draw off about half and put the bottle between my legs, five or six handrolled joints in my shirt pocket, a little bottle of cocaine underneath the rug next to the eightpack just in case I got sleepy; B.L.T. on toasted white bread with tall glasses of milk and french fries, lots of french fries, sometimes stopping at a McDonald’s for a couple of big orders of french fries because McDonald’s makes the best, but not ordering anything else because nothing else measures up to the fries; vanilla milkshakes, orders of fried clams, and when I stop at the gas stations to fill the tank I have to spend a little time getting the grease off the steering wheel, a little coke on my lip and away we go, up through the long hot run of the San Fernando Valley with the floor of the car awash in Coke bottles clinking against the unused seatbelts, hot, sick, stoned and tired, sticky and smelly, glad to make the turnoff at LAUREL CYN and whip up over the hill to Hollywood, the hotel, a quick checkin and up to my apartment and the icecold shower I had been dreaming about for the last couple of hours, with the window open in the bathroom so I could look down Sunset Boulevard toward downtown L.A. in the reddish twilight as I soaped the trip off my body.

  But it was all a waste of time. I was sitting in the living room with a big white hotel towel around my middle, watching “I Love Lucy” on the color television set when the phone rang. It was Karl, our producer, and as usual he was in a state of panic, although he never liked anybody to know he was in a state of panic. We talked about this and that for a while, and then he said, “Jim’s not here.”

  “He’ll show up,” I said.

  “This is not the same,” Karl said, making reference to the fact that Jim is never on time anywhere. But he wasn’t exactly late. I always show up a few days early to get some of the garbage out of the way before we really start shooting the picture, like reading the script, going for fittings, etc., but Jim would just show up finally one day, take a look at his pages and step into the lights. This drove nearly everybody crazy, especially Karl. Right now he was telling me in his soft, well-mannered Ivy League voice that this time was different, Jim wasn’
t any of the places he usually was, he was really missing, and Karl wondered if I had heard from him or knew where he might be.

  I had made it clear a long time ago that I would not be responsible for Jim, and he would not be responsible to me, and so I said no and told Karl not to worry. Then he wanted to take me to dinner at Ray Stark’s house, and I begged off because I was tired, and then he offered to introduce me to a girl, an actress friend of his who happened to be staying at the hotel, and I begged off that, too, although I wouldn’t have minded, but I tried not to take favors from Karl, and again I told him I was very tired and would see him on the lot tomorrow, and finally got off the phone. “I Love Lucy” was just getting rolling when the phone rang again, this time Karl’s gopher, telling me that my appointment with Karl would be at ten-fifteen at his office, if that suited my convenience, and I said it did, and hung up the phone, walked down to the lobby to the Coke machine and got a couple of Cokes, passed a little time with the desk clerk, when he said, “You got a call, why don’t you take it over in the booth,” and I said, “Maybe I’m not here,” and he said, “I think you want this one,” so I went to the little phone booth across the lobby and picked up the phone: