The Hollywood Trilogy (2 page)

JIM LARSON and I have a comedy act we put together in the 1960s. We used to play small clubs and do television, but for the last few years we make a picture every summer and do a month at the Golconda in Las Vegas. The movies never cost more than four or five million, most of that above the line, and if you can believe what you read in
Variety
, they usually return handy profits for all, so somebody out there must be having a good time. I can't bear to sit through them and Jim has a heart attack every time he passes a theater with Jim Larson and David Ogilvie on the marquee. We draw full houses most of the time at the Anaconda (as Jim likes to call it), so naturally what with all this popularity and money the little niggling problems of life manage to escape us, such as whether to order a hamburger or a cheeseburger and what kind of car to drive, where to sleep and what to do about holes in the socks, although both of us spent a certain amount of our lives wondering about just these very problems because in the wonderful language of the movie business, we couldn't get arrested.

After a couple of months in Hollywood getting up at six a.m. and hanging around the sound stages of the Burbank Studios, where there are four or five guys coming at you with problems for every minute you aren't actually out under the hot lights, playing the Anaconda is actually fun, because for one thing we are in front of a live audience and it is easier to make the jokes work, and when you're offstage you can tell people you are “exhausted”—although a couple hours on stage is far less exhausting than making movies.

Making movies is boring, and working Vegas is terrifying—that's the main difference. After nine or ten hours of boredom all I want to do is go home and watch television, but after a couple of hours of terror, the world seems like a wonderful place.

I'm talking about me, of course. Jim is entirely different, being neither bored nor terrified, to hear him tell it, and for that matter I believe him, because all
day on the lot while we're making movies and rehearsing our act, Jim is busy, running in and out with people, making deals to make deals, entertaining ladies in his trailer, laughing and joking with everybody in that easy way of his. And in Vegas, while I'm going through flopsweat before every performance, Jim doesn't even show up until we're fifteen minutes late, then he comes in through the backstage door, talking with a mob of people that he somehow manages to keep from following him, winks at me and takes me by the arm and we go out under the pinkies while the band is still playing the number before our introduction and the poor guy backstage at the mike who's supposed to introduce us over the PA system doesn't get to do it because we're already out there and Jim has started to fool with the musicians and the audience begins that roaring sizzling sound that is like nothing else, and I'm not afraid anymore.

ONE TIME making the run to Hollywood I found myself in Los Banos at four in the morning, hungry, tired, bearded from a nice winter's solitude, dirty and unkempt. I went into the big all-night truck-stop restaurant, I forget the name of the place, Hinky Dink's or the Big Balloon or something. Rows of trucks were parked out in back on a big asphalt lot with gas pumps, oil racks and all that stuff, and inside, a few truckers were over in their private section of the place where they wouldn't be disturbed by the ordinary citizens, or
assholes
, as we are called. A couple of CHP guys were in with the truckers, but nobody in the asshole section except me. I sat at the counter and looked through the big plastic-coated menu with color photographs of the various leaders, the BIG DELUXE QUARTER POUNDER, etc., which sounded fine with me, along with some fresh coffee, and I only hoped that the french fries were going to taste better than they looked.

There were two waitresses, cute and young, a blonde and a redhead, both wearing bright red satin hotpants and white satin blouses, black mesh pantyhose and red heels; but of course they were in the trucker's den, one sitting with the cops and the other with some truckers. I could see in through the order area one of the cooks with his long homely face and white greasecap, and he looked up and winked at me: “Girl be along in a minute,” he yelled, and I waved don't matter, no rush, and sat enjoying the quiet, the not driving, the different feel of the stool under my ass. I looked at the menu until the
blonde came back of the counter, one of the pearly buttons of her blouse undone and showing a nice little slice of Playtex, her nametag saying
DEBBIE
, how unusual, I thought, ordered my burger, coffee and apple pie, why be a deviate at this hour?

“Yessir,” she said nicely. I could see that she was tired of this night, her eyes a little glazed, her mouth pulled down at the corners. But polite to me, bringing my coffee right away and seeing to it that I had cream in my creamer, the order slapped up on the dolly, to be whirled and taken down by the frycook with another droll expression for me: “BIG DEE!” she yells at him going away, “BIG DEE!” he yells back at her and I hear the sizzle as my hunk of meat hits the griddle.

There was a murmur of conversation from the truckers' section, but that was all, no music. I took that first hot sip of coffee and swiveled on my stool to look for the jukebox. There it was, right between
MEN
and
WOMEN
.

A young couple came in through the door before I got up, early twenties, with a little baby in blue Dr. Dentons. They looked tired and worn from the road, and the baby was red-faced and irritated, making little noises of disgust. The couple settled themselves in a booth right behind me, and I turned to watch them, with their baby-bag, blanket, rattle toy, purse, coats, etc., murmuring to each other, “Can you get me the . . . ?” “Where's the lid?” “Hold him upright,” and Debbie was right there helping them get all fixed up, Dad slipping out to go to the toilet while Mom gets the baby settled down and looks over the menu at the same time. Debbie lowered herself into the booth and took the baby, talking to Mom in a low voice, and then Mom went to the toilet, too. Debbie played with the kid and cooed and tried to get him to stop fussing, but nothing worked.

I turned away, realizing I had been sticking my nose too far into their lives, and bent over my coffee. I heard the couple coming back from the toilets and the waitress's laugh, and saw her come around the counter and slap their order up, although this time there was no yelling, so that must have been a little joke between the frycook and Debbie. I got up and went over to the jukebox. The truckers could see me better now, and I noticed a couple of them giving me the eye, seeing the beard and the shabby jeans, probably wondering what kind of hippie crap I was going to punch up.

Jim was all over the jukebox like a rash and just for the hell of it I played one of his older songs, “Let It Happen.” The vamp started while I was still
walking back to my stool, and I happened to be looking at the couple as the first strong notes of the bass began.

Their eyes lit up. They looked at each other as if they couldn't believe what they were hearing, and as Jim's voice hit loud and strong, full of all that romantic bullshit, the husband reached out for his wife's hands. God, I had accidentally played their song, and the fatigue was gone from their faces. They didn't get up and dance or anything, but it was worth a million dollars to see the way they looked at each other.

Debbie put my Big Dee down in front of me with a smile, and the frycook loudly sang along with Jim for a few bars, and even I was tapping my foot as I watched the redhead's hotpants cross the room and wag into the toilet.

Recognition, when it came, didn't spoil things. Debbie leaned over the counter and said to me in a low voice, “Aren't you David Ogilvie?”

“Yes, Ma'm,” I said.

“You must love his music, too. That's wonderful,” she said, and went to take food to the couple. They were having a merry old time, now that some coffee was inside them and the baby asleep, and after a while Mom got up and went to the jukebox and played a couple more of Jim's tunes. She smiled at me on her way back, shyly, and didn't say anything. The smile thanked me for rescuing them from the hell of four a.m. on the road.

Debbie thanked me, too, in her own wonderful way, out in the parking lot, and I guess now you know why I chose a career in show business.

THE FIRST time I saw Jim Larson he was on the bandstand in the Berkeley High School gymnasium playing for a noontime dance, only nobody was dancing much, because the band had gone, mostly, for a break and left a small combo—rhythm, a couple of saxophone players, and Jim with his silver-chased B-flat cornet. They were blowing their heads off. This was a while ago, and while swing was what the big dance band played, this little combo with no name was inspired by Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and those. I don't know whether it was the music or the performance that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but instead of continuing with what had brought me into the gym, which was the search for a girl named Chloe Melendrez, I joined the big bunch of kids gathered below the band and kept listening.

My musical tastes haven't changed much since then, my idea of a major trumpet player is Harry James, but even I could tell that these kids were just really very damned good. And they were so cool. One would take a solo and the others, instead of listening to him, would gather around the piano and talk to each other, tell jokes, paying no attention at all to the kid blowing his brains out, and then casually without any signal that I could see or hear, the whole combo would take up with the soloist and they would rant along like that for a while and then, say, Jim would take the solo and the others would leave him alone with the music (except the drums and bass, of course) and Jim would wander all over the stage in front of the empty folding wooden chairs and all the music racks from the full band, wandering with his head down and his trumpet held so that the bell was almost pointed at the floor.

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 . . .