I said, “Cut the comedy, cuties.” I framed the line a la Frigidaire Frank at his frostbitten best.
Dot pulled a packet of pix from her purse and popped them my way. I snared the snapshots out of the air and snagged myself in a snafu.
Danny Getchell–film-fucked forever.
I’m humping the Hush-Hush–hated Helen Gahagan Douglas– the Lewd Lady of the L.A. Left. I’m jabbing some jailbait in the gym at Hollywood High. I’m ecstatically entwined with Ethel Rosenberg–somewhere in Sedition City. I’m holed up with Hattie McDaniel at the height of my fatty phase. I’m liquored up and looking longingly at Lassie and her luscious littermate. I’m skunk drunk in a skid-row dive. I’m passed out on a putrid pallet. A filthy filly is fellating me. FUCK–it’s a dreg-like drag queen draped dramatically!
Dot dunked her doughnut and doused me with John Donne:
“Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
I hit my knees hard. I concentrated on a karmic counterattack. I couldn’t cough one up.
I whimpered. I wailed. I keened and keeled over. I cried and cringed, and crawled into an abyss of abasement.
White light wafted in. I shot to my feet on a shimmering shaft. His voice vibrated off an old Victrola vaulted in my head. It yipped through me victoriously.
I vowed to roll with the punch and reign on ring-a-ding.
February, March 1999
OUT OF THE PAST
Half-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed: L.A., my hometown, in the ‘sos. Most are just brief synaptic blips, soon mentally discarded. A few transmogrify into fiction: I sense their dramatic potential and exploit it in my novels, memory to moonshine in a hot second.
Memory: a symbiotic melding of then and now. For me, the spark-point of harrowing curiosities.
A man gyrating with an accordion–pumping his “stomach Steinway” for all it’s worth.
My father pointing to the TV. “That guy’s no good. He’s a draft dodger.”
The accordion man in a grade-Z movie, clinching with the blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads.
The accordion man is named Dick Contino.
“Draft dodger” is a bum rap–he served honorably during the Korean War.
The grade-Z flick is Daddy-O–a music/hot-rod/romance stinkeroo.
Memory: the juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutiae.
In June 1958, my mother was murdered; the killing went unsolved. I saw Dick Contino belt “Bumble Boogie” on TV noted my father’s opinion of him, and caught Daddy-O at the Admiral Theater a year or so later. Synapses snapped: A memory was formed and placed in context. Its historical perspective loomed dark: Women were strangled and spent eternity unavenged.
I was 10 and 11 years old then; literary instincts simmered inchoately in me. My curiosities centered on crime: I wanted to know the WHY? behind hellish events. As time passed, contemporaneous malfeasance left me bored–the sanguinary ‘6os and ’70s passed in a blur of hectic self-destruction.
I drank, used drugs, and did a slew of ten-, twenty-, and thirtyday county-jail stints for preposterous and pathetic misdemeanors. I shoplifted, broke into houses, and sniffed women’s undergarments. I jimmied hinges off Laundromat washers and stole the coins inside. I holed up in cheap pads and read hundreds of crime novels. My life was chaos, but my intellectual focus never wavered: L.A. in the ’50s/corruption/crime. A ’50s sound track accompanied my musings: golden oldies, Dick Contino on the accordion.
In 1977, I got sober and segued into hyper-focus: writing crime novels. Dick Contino back-burner brain boogied as I attempted to replicate Los Angeles in the 1950s.
In 1980, I wrote Clandestine–a thinly disguised, chronologically altered account of my mother’s murder. The novel is set in 1951; the hero is a draft dodger whose life is derailed by the Red Scare.
In 1987, I wrote The Big Nowhere. Set in 1950, the book details an anticommunist pogrom leveled at the entertainment biz.
In 1990, I wrote White Jazz. A major subplot features a grade-Z movie being filmed in the same Griffith Park locales as Daddy-O.
Jung wrote: “What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.”
I should have seen Dick Contino coming a long time ago.
I didn’t. Fate intervened, via photograph and black-and-white videocassette.