Falling From Horses (6 page)

Ray said the studios making all the cheap cowboy pictures had their offices clustered around Gower Street—Lily had been right about that—but he called it Gower Gulch, which was a slap at the fellows parading around the neighborhood in their cheap cowboy clothes. I guess Ray could see how green I was, because he made a point of saying I wouldn't spot any horses tied up along Gower Gulch. The pictures mostly got made elsewhere; he was just sending me to the studio offices. He fished out a piece of paper and wrote down a few names—casting directors he was friendly with and second-unit men who might hire me as a rider. And in case I didn't get on with any of them, he gave me a telephone number to call, a switchboard for people wanting day work as an extra. If I hit it lucky, they might be looking for riders, he said.

It was after four-thirty by then, too late in the day to hop on the streetcar and start looking for work. I should have been holding on to what money I had left—the Saint James, cheap by Hollywood standards, was still more than I'd counted on. Instead I went around the corner to a diner and spent four bits on a bowl of clam chowder. I must have figured I'd be on some studio's payroll by the next morning and shortly riding a horse alongside Buck Jones.

The day had been hot, and when the sun went down it didn't get any cooler. In my room I peeled off all my clothes and lay down naked on the bed. I could hear voices through the thin walls, toilets flushing and the rush of water in the pipes, cars going by and streetcars squealing their brakes, people calling to each other and banging the lids of trash cans, and every so often an ambulance or police siren or somebody laying on a car horn. I had learned over the last year to sleep in a room full of snorers, but I'd never had to sleep with all this racket of a big city at night; plus I was used to sleeping in the dark, not with neon signs flashing and street lamps pouring light through the paper shade on the window. I don't know if I ever did fall asleep completely. It seemed as if I was always in a half-dream, riding a Greyhound bus as it swayed up on two wheels, or lying on my back in a field of dry weeds, looking up into the broad faces of dairy cows.

I had saved a couple of oranges from the Grapevine fruit stand, which I ate for breakfast, but I was stale from lack of sleep, so I went back to the diner and paid for coffee in a thick china mug before I caught the streetcar. I was still thinking I'd have a day's pay in my pocket and be moving into a better hotel by nightfall, so I took my duffle with me.

It turned out Gower was ten or fifteen minutes straight down Santa Monica Boulevard, and if I'd stayed on the streetcar the day before I would have landed right at it. But as I watched the neighborhood get more expensive by the block, I began to realize it was lucky that Lily took us off the trolley where she did, because I didn't see anything west of there that looked as low-rent as the Saint James. What I did see was a cemetery so big the tombstones and crypts marched out of sight to the horizon, and big glossy pepper trees in front of a row of baroque office buildings, and every so often a two-story Spanish-style apartment building painted coral pink or pistachio green. I had only ever laid eyes on such things in the movies.

They used to call the part of Hollywood where the cheap studios had their offices “Poverty Row,” and when Ray Mullens was working in the business dozens of them were making movies on a shoestring with not much more than a camera and a truck and a rented vest-pocket office. The ones making westerns were strung out along Gower Street and one block over on Beachwood. They'd shoot for a few days at one of the small movie ranches close to town or up in Griffith Park, or in their own back lot if they had one, then rent a sound stage or an empty warehouse for the wrap-up, add gimmick effects and short ends, some canned music, and call it good. They could turn out an hour-long picture for the bottom half of a double feature in little more than a week, which is why people called them “eight-day outfits.” But when I looked up the addresses that Ray had sent me to, quite a few were vacant buildings sporting for-rent signs. A lot of the smaller places had been eaten up by Republic, which had moved its operation out to the valley. Most of the studios still doing business along Gower Gulch were making either three-day serials or singing-cowboy pictures, neither of which had any call for riding extras: they used songs in place of action and rented stock footage from film libraries for the chases and stunts. I did find a couple of studios from Ray's list that were still doing it the old way, but his leads were no help at all—nobody remembered Ray Mullens.

I wandered up and down the streets and saw a lot of fellows wearing cheap ten-gallon hats that wouldn't stand up to a light rain and shop-made footgear that hadn't ever toed a stirrup. I didn't want to ask any of them about picture work, and anyway they were lounging in front of bars or leaning on parked cars appearing to be out of work themselves.

The day had started warm, and by lunchtime the heat was shimmering off sidewalks and the roofs and hoods of cars. The duffle began to feel heavy against my shoulder, and my feet were sweating in boots never meant for walking. Finally I hunted up a telephone booth and called the number Ray had given me, and I told a girl who answered that I was looking for work riding horses. She asked me for a phone number so she could get in touch if a job came up, and when I said I didn't have one she wasn't interested in taking my name.

It's a funny thing: when a man is broke he's always hungry. The coffee and oranges I'd had for breakfast had worn off hours ago, and when I walked by an air-conditioned diner the question of money was the only thing that kept me from going inside. But I saw an Indian with long braids sitting at the lunch counter in there, eating a hamburger. He was hatless but otherwise not dressed much different from me, jeans and a button-up shirt, boots with stack heels worn down at the corners. I figured he must be an actor or at least a movie extra, because I'd only ever seen long-haired Indians in pictures; the ones I had met riding rodeo wore their hair cut short like anybody else. I circled the block, thinking it over, and when I came back around I went in and sat on the stool next to him. I studied the menu while I let the sweat cool, and then I ordered a bowl of chili and some saltine crackers. I ate slowly, eyeing blackberry pie under a glass cover on the counter and enjoying the cool air blowing down from a box on the wall. I had to sit there thinking for quite a while before I came up with something to say to him.

“My uncle Jim, he saw Jackson Sundown ride at the Round-Up the year he won the All-Around.”

What shames me now is that I thought my knowing about a famous Indian rodeo champion who had died before I was born was somehow a compliment to the whole Indian race.

Well, this fellow was polite about it. He looked over at me, nodded, and said, “Did he,” and drank some of his Coke. Then he said, “Your uncle Jim, he a bronc rider?”

My dad's brother had died before my parents ever met, but I had heard enough about him from my grandparents and my dad that I sometimes forgot I hadn't known him. I said, “No, he did some law work for the city of Pendleton and for the Round-Up, so he happened to be there that time Sundown got the silver-trimmed saddle.”

He nodded again and took another swig of his Coke. I could see his hands were callused from rope burns and three fingers were bent—maybe they'd been broken and healed crooked.

I was mulling over what else I could say to keep him talking—maybe something about Chiloquin, which was the last place I had rodeoed before heading south to Hollywood. It was the biggest town on the Klamath Indian Reservation, so I had met quite a few Indians there. I might have been preparing to ask if he knew any of them. But then he glanced down at my boots and said, “I guess maybe you're the bronc rider.”

I tried to hold on to a sober expression. “Yes sir, I've rode a few. But I'm looking for picture work right now.”

I don't suppose he was surprised, but he lifted his eyebrows like he was. “Is that right.”

“I thought there'd be a lot of work down here, but I haven't had much luck. You in pictures?”

He'd probably known from the first word I spoke that this was where I was headed—that I was new in town and hoping he might be able to give me a leg up in the movie business. He took a minute making up his mind how to answer, and then he passed me a dry smile and said, “I've shot up a few wagon trains.”

“Yeah? You ever been shot off a horse? I heard that's mostly what the work is.”

He gave me another look, another slight smile. “That there is called a saddle fall. You get on a picture, you'll be falling two, three times every day. That and just straight hard riding, that's what the work mostly is for the fellows in the posses and such.”

Then this fellow—his name was Lee Waters—must have decided I was worth a little bit of coaching. I was to learn over the next few months that stunt riders were naturally proud of the work they did, and most any of them would open up and talk about it if you looked interested and gave them half an opening. If they had a specialty, they might not tell you their secrets, but they'd be happy to let you in on the ordinary tricks and tell you the story of how they got started working in pictures. Lee told me he'd been riding for a wild west show, and after the outfit went broke in the Depression he came down to Gower Gulch. This was when things were still booming along Poverty Row, and he picked up work pretty much every day just by showing up at the cheap studios wearing his own moccasins and buckskin leggings, with a crow feather stuck in his long braids. In the wild west show he had learned the trick of hanging off the far side of a horse, shooting a bow and arrow from under the horse's neck, and when word of this got around to the second-unit ramrods, they took to calling him whenever they needed somebody to ride that gag. For the last few years he'd been working regularly for Republic and Monogram, the studios Ray Mullens had called “the big guns.”

Ray had told me it wasn't worth my time to try those outfits. The Monogram office was quite a few miles to the east along Sunset Boulevard, and Republic was a long streetcar ride up Cahuenga to the valley. “You'd waste half your day getting out to one of them and back, and I just wouldn't do it if I was you. For them places, you got to know somebody or been around the business a while.”

When I said this to Lee Waters, he nodded. “Ray Mullens told you that? Hell, I know Ray, I rode with him a time or two. Yeah, you got to fall off a few saddles for the eight-day outfits, pay your dues, so to speak, before them guys at Republic will give you a ride.” He leaned back and lit a ready-made cigarette and took a couple of drags before he said, “Ray got busted up, I heard, and had to quit the business.”

“He's pretty stove in.”

“Where's this list he give you?”

I pulled out the list and handed it to him, and he smoked quietly as he studied it a couple of minutes. “A lot of these places been bought out or gone broke,” he said.

“That's what I'm finding. I guess Ray didn't know it.”

Lee took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and wrote down a couple of places he knew about that had their offices in some other part of town. “I ain't sure of the addresses, but I'm writing down the cross streets as I remember, and you can ask around and maybe get yourself there.”

Then he said, “You sleeping in the park?” He meant Griffith Park, although I didn't know it at the time. “I slept a few nights up there myself when I first come to town. At least you're out of some heat, being under the trees.” It didn't occur to me at the time, but now that I'm thinking back I imagine he meant this as mild advice. He said it as if money wasn't the consideration at all, but he must have known I was flat broke—that if I wasn't already sleeping behind trash cans in an alley I would be before long.

The last year or so following rodeos and picking up itinerant ranch work, there'd been plenty of days and weeks when I had been stone broke, but I could almost always count on some winner buying me a sandwich and some rancher who didn't care if I bedded down in an empty stall in his dry barn. Here in Hollywood it was just starting to sink in that this was a different sort of place.

I nodded. “Well, the room I had last night was hot as hell. Maybe I'll try sleeping out.”

I asked him where the park was, and he told me the bus that would get me up there. Then he took back Ray's list and wrote down where to find Diamond Barns, which he said was a stable that supplied horses to the cowboy movies. “It's right up there in the park, so if you're already in the neighborhood you might see if Harold is doing any hiring. That's if you're not too high-hat to go to work pitching hay and mucking out stalls. Wrangling might get you started in the business anyway, get you onto some movie sets where you might meet a few ramrods, get yourself an opening to ride.”

We walked out of the cafe together and shook hands, and he said, “See you around,” before climbing into a Model A and driving off. I never did see him again, though at the end of 1942 I happened to catch a glimpse of him in a motion picture. That was after I had joined the army and finished up training and was waiting to ship out from New York. It was all over the papers that the cowboy star Buck Jones had died a hero trying to save people in the Cocoanut Grove fire, and a bunch of men from the barracks decided to go see a Buck Jones picture playing at a theater in town. I had stayed away from westerns after leaving Hollywood, but Buck was one of the cowboy stars I'd admired when I was working there; before getting started in the movies he'd been a horse breaker for the French during the Great War, and I knew he was a real horseman. So I went along with the others to see his last picture. When Lee Waters came up on the screen, I recognized him right away. He had a small speaking part, delivering his lines in that clipped “Injun” style that the movies always used back then—not a bit like when I'd met him at Gower Gulch. I waited through the credits at the end to see if I could spot him. Well, there wasn't any Lee Waters, just “Injun Lee.”