20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  “Hey, Pops! No paper today?” Sid asked.

  “None was delivered.”

  “Cheez. This joint is goin’ downhill every day,” Sid declared.

  “I’ll get one. I want to see something anyway,” I said.

  “Who cares? I got no horse at Santa Anita Park,” Sid said and rang for the elevator.

  I stepped out anyway and around two corners to the little place I’d found on Selma, right off Vine, that sold newspapers and magazines.

  A few nights before, at the Haines-Shields party, I’d overheard Randolph Scott saying that he liked having breakfast at the Derby there, if he was in Hollywood. Good-looking and healthy as my Alsop House pals were, none of them had turned me on as totally or as instantly as Scott in person had. I’d nosed around a little at the party and gotten these facts about him: he came from a wealthy Virginia family; he’d been a football star in college; he’d recently married a woman named Marion Dupont, yes, those Duponts! A woman who lived most of the time in New York and the rest of the time on the Riviera, while Scott shared a beach house in Malibu with Archie Leach, i.e., Cary Grant.

  In other words, all of it was “suggestive” that Scott was gay, or if not gay then bi. So I was going to see if he was breakfasting in the Vine Street Brown Derby, which he’d mentioned he liked, while I was collecting an L.A. Times and a few magazines, and if Scott happened to be there, I’d drop in too.

  He wasn’t, and I’d gotten a paper and was wondering whether to go back to the flat or into the Derby to sit at the counter and wait around, when I spotted Jonah up on Hollywood Blvd. getting onto a streetcar headed south on Vine, i.e., toward me.

  Sue-Anne and I had a late “call” for shooting that day, some time after lunch, so I held the newspaper up in front of my face and hopped on the back of the streetcar at Selma when it stopped and I stood in such a way that I hoped Jonah would not see me.

  After fifteen minutes, the streetcar turned off Vine onto Wilshire to go east, and Jonah stayed on. For one minute he and I were the only passengers and I hid. Then it loaded up with passengers and I was hidden from him again.

  I wondered how far this trolley went and at one stop popped off to look at the sign on the back of it: Franklin to Hoover.

  Fifteen minutes later Jonah dropped off just as it went into a final stop and turnaround at Hoover and I dropped off behind him.

  There was a row of shops along Wilshire, with Westlake Park on the other side, so I kept behind him a bit. Maybe Jonah had a job he wasn’t telling us about? He always had money. Not a lot, but enough for most of our simple and inexpensive activities, though he seldom got film work like the others. Where did he earn the money?

  He walked alongside the park and then up the next block. I lost him temporarily when he turned a corner and I had to hurry to catch up. A couple of bigger buildings here amid the two-story shop fronts and restaurants and I almost walked into the huge lobby of an office building, thinking he’d gone inside there, when I spotted Jonah hurrying across the street and then on the other side. He walked up another two blocks and turned into what looked like the boarded-up doorway of an old wood-sided, three-story house with third-floor dormers and with no glass windows, only paper and boards across the window frames.

  I walked past it, and then seeing no one coming out, I moved the piece of barely attached wooden door hanging off one hinge that he’d moved and I went in too. The powerful smell of dried urine and a few pieces of rags and several newspaper nests with clear imprints of people who had slept in them showed me that it was a nighttime hangout for the homeless.

  It was an old building from the first boom hereabouts in 1900—or even earlier. Maybe even an old farmhouse, surrounded by city later on. All the doors to rooms down on the ground floor were locked and padlocked and the locks looked rusted over, and thus not opened in a while.

  A long wooden stairway going up one interior side of the house rose two times with two well-defined landings, and that smelled bad too, so I held my nose as I went up. I’d tightly rolled the newspaper as a potential weapon, but I encountered no one.

  Empty rooms with maybe one small piece of built-in shelving or bookcases on the second floor. I thought I heard the shuffling of feet above.

  I was more cautious ascending there, but like the second floor, at first all I encountered was a hallway with closets and even an old sink room, and then I heard shouting ahead, and I sidled along the wall.

  A man’s voice shouting, and then a woman’s pleading, and then—wasn’t that Jonah’s voice saying, “Well, I’m here now. So let’s get started!”

  The man said something and then there was the noise of things being moved about and suddenly an area in front of me where the corridor opened up was very brightly lighted from the left.

  Slowly I crept forward toward that light. So slowly that I’d only gotten halfway when I saw Jonah stepping into my line of sight and I flattened myself against the wall, even turning my head with its light-reflecting eyes away. When I slowly turned my head again, with a hand visoring my eyes, I saw the following:

  Jonah stripping off his clothing, one piece at a time, and placing each piece upon a different rung of a tall, old-fashioned, wooden clothes tree nearby. He didn’t stop when he’d gotten to his singlet, which he slipped over his head easily, and then he dropped his rather gray-looking shorts and he began to play with his penis while staring straight ahead. His shoes and socks were still on, however, which added a rather Rene Magritte touch to it all—what? No hat?

  I thought for a moment he was going to turn and stare directly at me, and what, I mean, but what would I think to say in that moment? “Hello, sailor”? But instead, he said, “Ready” in a loud voice, and Jonah was rock hard and bouncing as he moved forward out of my view.

  For a few moments I heard the other male voice saying stuff I couldn’t make out, and then the woman’s voice either complaining or explaining. I thought: Is this what I think it is? If so, this I have to see!

  I slid forward and then back into the corner of the big room, but still hidden from view from the others, and edged along it until I could see Jonah from behind, and he was clearly butt-naked, standing and having intercourse with the woman bent over in front of him on the edge of the bed. The lights were bright, but the photographer-director was hidden from me, and so I could move quite forward until I could make out not him, but instead the “set.” This was of a portion of a bedroom, with a sink cabinet topped by a tall, gold-framed, wasp-waisted mirror, and bureau with tasseled drawer handles and a very ornate iron-work bed with several mattresses propped with pillows.

  There were no periodically popping flashes, so it was a film, not snapshots. Jonah looked good from three angles and he had a good profile and his manhood looked the right size, or at least a good size as he took the woman. Then the director barked out something, and Jonah pulled back out of her, and I slid back along the wall. But then evidently she changed her position, and this time, Jonah leaned way forward over her in the missionary position and thus completely out of my view except for those black socks and dark shoes.

  I thought I heard a door below us make a noise or thought I heard feet on the stairs, so I decided on discretion and backed away and slid back along the corridor walls.

  Just as someone came up the last stairway and into the third-floor corridor, I brushed past him with the newspaper up, blocking half my face, and he said something I couldn’t make out and I said, “No. I’m just leaving.” I sped down the stairs and out onto the street and down the street and into the doorway of the Bradbury Building, from which at last I did peek out.

  But no one had followed me or looked outside for me and I thought, “Well, Jonah, sweetie, honey pie. I know your secret. It may be only be ’35, but you, my buddy, is a porn star!”

  At the studio that afternoon, I got my second surprise of the day. As I sauntered in, Seiter came up to me and said I had to go to the studio doctor.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I
know, Christopher. But we need a full health exam for the insurance people. All”—he whispered—“featured players need to have the exam. Sue-Anne will go later today, once the nurse comes in.” So he was confirming what Thom Rafferty had said to me earlier. Sue-Anne and I had been bumped up in the credits.

  One of the fellows on the set took me there in his open jalopy: it was at the northern edge of the studio lot—a little cottage-like extension of the larger building, with a plaque outside.

  “I half expected Lew Ayres to welcome me,” I said to the thirty-year-old tanned, casually dressed physician, who was relaxing in an armchair reading a movie magazine.

  He didn’t catch my reference to the actor who’d made famous Young Dr. Kildare the famed movie doctor, and I wondered if I had the year right for it. Probably not.

  “Give me a minute and I’ll do a quick change,” he suggested.

  “Never mind. I’ll take you as you are.”

  He put on a lightweight white jacket and we went into the bright little examining room, which looked totally official. Diplomas from medical schools decorated one wall. Harold S. Weissman. Once we were there, he asked me to sit on a stool in front of a rose-vine-covered cottage window, picked up a stethoscope, and asked me to take off my shirt.

  In between putting that cold little metal cup upon me all over, front and back, and asking me to breathe deeply, Weissman touched my collarbones, the back of my neck, my upper arms, and then at one point, he had me stand up, and he pulled my trousers and shorts down an inch or two and touched my hip bones. He took my blood pressure twice and counted my pulse. With a little flashlight device, he checked my eyes, the inside of my ears, the interior of my mouth, my scalp, and then he palpated my lymph glands around my jaw and under my armpits.

  When he was done and went to his desk to begin writing, I joshed, “Will I live, Doc?”

  “For a long time. You know, Christopher, your papers say that you are eighteen years old and I know you were in the Merchant Marines for two years. Did you show them a birth certificate when you joined up?”

  “No.”

  “Do you even have a birth certificate?” he asked. He wasn’t being unfriendly.

  I thought, well here it is.

  “I didn’t show them one and no, I don’t have one.”

  “How old are you?” he asked, “Really?”

  Really? I’m sixty-five!

  “I have no idea, Doc!”

  “What do your folks say?”

  “What folks? If I had parents, I never saw them. Or they’re long dead. Or they left me for dead. All I know is that it was somewhere on the East Coast. I sort of found my way here,” I added, “after a long, long while.”

  He took a deep breath. “You know, I hear about this from my colleagues all the time. From doctors at downtown hospitals. Hell! Even at West Side hospitals. But you’re my first. I studied anatomy in med school, and you are slight for your age. Or perhaps maybe…you were underfed, growing up?”

  I decided to play up that angle. “You can say that again, Doc!”

  “You’re what? A runaway? From some home? Some orphanage? Or what?”

  Now, I’d read enough books of the period before coming and I’d screened several documentary films about the Great Depression years in America, and so I’d already cobbled together what I hoped was a maudlin yet pretty sturdy tale.

  “You know, Doc, all that happened such a very long time ago, I no longer remember where I started out from. What I do know is that I’ve been on my own for a long time. I’ve lived by my wits. I got people to feed me, and to put me up, sometimes as long as a few months at time, and then…well, then I just moved on.”

  He looked at me with narrowed eyes and I realized in that moment that this doctor—this stranger—held enormous power over me. I don’t know what he had found in even his simple physical exam. Was my blood pressure too high? Or what? In my sixty-five years of life I’d had measles, German measles, mumps, chickenpox, mononucleosis, hepatitis B, gonorrhea, syphilis, and amoebic dysentery, most of them by the time I was forty. And he must have seen the result of one or another. Which ones? I did suddenly understand that if he didn’t give me a full certificate of good health as a featured actor, that MGM wouldn’t be able to get insurance on me. And if they couldn’t, neither could any other studio in town. And so my sweet new life as an actor would be over. Suddenly, this was a crucial moment in my new life. I decided to handle it the only way I knew how—straight on.

  “Doc, this movie deal is going to be my big break,” I said, making my eyes as big as I could and even managing to bring up some water around them. “This will be the first time in my life I have a real job. The first time in my life that I’ll have any security. Or a speck of dignity. It’ll be the first time that I have a family too. They treat me like I’m a kid in their family out there, you know! They don’t know anything of what happened to me all these years. They don’t know what I’ve been through. They don’t know about all the cheats and the liars and the heavy-handed louses that I had to put up with to get a crappy meal, or the ones who did whatever they wanted with me. And I’ll never tell them, Doc. I won’t! But please don’t make me go back to that kind of life! Please let me have this one break, Doc! Please don’t tell them I’m in bad health, Doc! Please! I’m begging you! I’m begging you! Doc!”

  I was in tears at this point and I had dropped to the floor onto my knees and I was clasping him about the lower torso, sobbing into his trousers and thinking holy cow, where did this come from?

  After a while he lifted me up and he clasped me close, chest to chest. When we separated, his eyes were wet too.

  “Don’t worry, son,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Don’t worry. None of it is your fault. None of it! I won’t ever say a thing to anyone.”

  “Really, Doc?”

  “I swear it. I do. C’mon, now. Dry your face! There! Now get dressed. I’ll be in the office outside waiting for you.”

  As I was turning to put my shirt on I heard him say, “This goddamned country! How responsible people could allow this to happen to all you young…Why am I telling you all this? You know it firsthand!” He stormed out of the room.

  When I was dressed and put back together again, I looked in the mirror where I was straightening my tie and I said to my reflection, “Christopher Hall! He bought that act hook, line, and sinker. He totally bit! And you, my lad, seem to have a gift for acting!”

  Where had that come from? Sixty-five years of being alive? Of having to act at times? Or was it sheer necessity of the moment? Who knew? But it was another asset: a definite asset.

  Weissman gave me a soda pop, cherry, my favorite flavor, and I kept my eyes cast down as I sat there sipping and he wrote up my health report.

  “I said you’d live a long time and you will, Christopher. But your life of wandering and of—well, of homelessness and poor diet and all the associated trauma and turmoil—has actually taken a toll on your body, I’m afraid.” He sounded quite serious now. “I’m frankly surprised you’re as grown-up and healthy as you are, given what you had to go through for so long. It’s proof of your basically solid constitution. But the fact is, Christopher, I spotted a flutter around your heart, in one ventricle. It’s nothing serious yet, nothing dangerous…not yet! It’s just—I couldn’t approve you for any real heavy ‘action’ on the set, you understand? I can’t approve you for any crazy stunts or anything like that. Horse riding is fine. Some running is okay. But not for fighting or wrestling with guys larger than you on the set. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t plan to do any of that. But a flutter, Doc?” I continued my innocent act, but I was also curious. “Is that like a heart murmur? I’ve heard of a heart murmur.”

  “It’s not that bad. I think you contracted some kind of disease, a bad flu or a streptococcus virus along the way or, I don’t know, maybe even rheumatic fever. Who knows what? It went untreated and you managed to throw it off, but it did leave a mark on your he
art. In general I think you’ll be fine. Keep dancing, maybe do more swimming. All that’s good for the heart. But the truth is, if you tried to enlist in the real Navy with their more stringent health requirements, or any of the other armed services, I’m afraid they would be forced to turn you away.”

  I wondered which of the diseases I’d had before could have caused that. Or maybe it was all of them and then just simple wear and tear. Dr. Weissman had said whichever disease it was that I’d had, it had left a scar. I had to admit that was kind of unsettling. If I thought I had a free ride here, I’d just gotten notice that limits were being set.

  He signed my health certification papers, and as I was getting up to leave I shook his hand hard.

  “You know, son, if you do well, maybe someday you’ll feel strongly enough to tell your story. People ought to know what kids like you have had to go through. Maybe if they knew, they’d support Roosevelt’s programs more.”

  “I’ll seriously think about that, Doc. I will. But not yet. I’m just a kid in a teenager movie.”

  “Sure. Of course!” and I was halfway out the cottage door when he called me back, and I wondered until he slid a little box of condoms into my hand. “Given all of what you’ve been through, I’m guessing you already know what these are for.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” I said, pocketing them.

  “Any girl or woman you’re with? You use one of these. You don’t want to get ‘caught,’ now, do you, Christopher?”

  I couldn’t tell whether he meant caught with venereal disease or caught knocking up a girl. Nor did I ask him for particulars.

  13

  The next morning, when we were done breakfasting at the diner and the others went up to their rooms, I stopped Jonah Wolff. “Got a minute?”

  He said he did and I slid most of those condoms into his open hand.

  “What this for?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I can afford these now.”

  “You plan on using them anytime soon?” he asked, giving away nothing.

  “I don’t know. But I’ll bet you could use one soon.”