Hollywood Nocturnes

Hollywood Nocturnes

Hollywood Nocturnes

OUT OF THE PAST

A man gyrating with an accordion–pumping his “Stomach Steinway” for all its 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.

* * *

Half-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed: L.A., my hometown, in the ’50s. 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: that place where personal recollections collide with history.

Memory: a symbiotic melding of THEN and NOW. For me, the spark point of harrowing curiosities.

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 is contextual: the juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutae.

In June of 1958 my mother was murdered. The killing went unsolved; I went to live with my father. I saw Dick Contino belt “Bumble Boogie” on TV, noted my father’s opinion of him and caught _Daddy-O_ at the Admiral Theatre a year or so later. Synapses snapped, crackled, popped; a memory was formed and placed in context. Its historical perspective loomed dark: women were strangled and spent eternity unavenged.

I was ten and eleven 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 ’60s and ’70s passed in a blur. My imagination zoomed back to the decade preceeding them, accompanied by a period soundtrack: golden oldies, Dick Contino slamming the accordion on the “Ed Sullivan Show”

In 1965 I got kicked out of high school and joined the Army. Everything about the Army scared me shitless–I faked a nervous breakdown and glommed an unsuitability discharge.

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 young cop–and draft dodger–whose life is derailed by the Red Scare.

In 1987 I wrote _The Big Nowhere_. Set in 1950, the book details an Anti-Communist pogrom levelled at the entertainment biz.

In 1990 I wrote _White Jazz_. A major sub-plot features a grade Z movie being filmed on 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 video cassette.

A friend shot me the photo. Dig: it’s me, age ten, on June 22, 1958. An L.A. Times photographer snapped the pic five minutes after a police detective told me that my mother had been murdered. I’m in minor-league shock: my eyes are wide, but my gaze is blank. My fly is at half mast; my hands look shaky. The day was hot: the melting Brylcream in my hair picks up flashbulb light.

The photo held me transfixed; its force transcended my many attempts to exploit my past for book sales. An underlying truth zapped me: my bereavement, even in that moment, was ambiguous. I’m already calculating potential advantages, regrouping as the officious men surrounding me defer to the perceived grief of a little boy.

I had the photograph framed, and spent a good deal of time staring at it. Spark point: late ’50s memories re-ignited. I saw _Daddy-O_ listed in a video catalog and ordered it. It arrived a week later; I popped it in the VCR.

Fuel-injected zoooom–

The story revolves around truck driver/drag racer/singer Phil “Daddy-O” Sandifer’s attempts to solve the murder of his best friend, while laboring under the weight of a suspended driver’s license. Phil’s pals “Peg” and “Duke” want to help, but they’re ineffectual–addled by too many late nights at the Rainbow Gardens– a post-teen-age doo wop spot where Phil croons for gratis on request. No matter: Daddy-O meets slinky Jana Ryan, a rich girl with a valid driver’s license and a ’57 T-Bird ragtop. Mutual resentment segues into a sex vibe; Phil and Jana team up and infiltrate a nightclub owned by sinister fat man Sidney Chillis. Singer Daddy-O, cigarette girl Jana: a comely and unstoppable duo. They quickly surmise that Chill is is pushing Big ‘H’, entrap him and nail the ectomorph for the murder of Phil’s best friend. A hot rod finale; a burning question left unanswered: will Daddy-O’s derring-do get him his driver’s license back?

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