The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  He didn't help me out, didn't let me off the hook, he sat next to me, waiting for a reason. A good one.

  "Do you want coffee? Huh? I'll buy you a coffee."

  "I drank a ten gallon hat's worth of iced tea at your place," he said, "But I'll keep you company, friend."

  In my effort to rebel against the power, but still spend four dollars on what costs the store a nickel, I get my coffee at the Insomnia Cafe, a rustic and independent coffee place where my daughter works, the only worker there with no body art or piercings, but the same attitude about the tip jar , where the quarters from your change had better tinkle to the bottom, or your latte is going to take a long, long time to slide across the scarred oak table into your waiting hands. Katie was slapping a sandwich order together, her back to us.

  "Katie!" I said, and she turned, blew a strand of hair off her face, and waved with an elbow.

  We took our place at the end of the line, and I was becoming used to the stares we attracted whenever in public.

  "Oh no! Look at the line," a tall blonde said, squeezing a backpack and laptop through the door, "Shoot. Dag nab it."

  She didn't really say "Shoot" or "Dag nabbit," but what she did say was salty enough to make the Ranger turn to me with pained surprise. She turned to leave, caught the Ranger in the corner of her eye, and screamed "Yip!" dropping the laptop to the ground as her sunglasses flew off her head. A brunette swung open the door behind her, and saw the girl bending to rescue her Mac.

  "Marcy! Oh flip! Did it break?"

  She didn't say flip, and the Ranger looked at me as he bent down to help her, and the brunette noticed him for the first time.

  "What the hell are you?"

  "Ladies, I am the One Ranger, and Tom and I are at your service," he said.

  He picked up Marcy's sunglasses, and helped gather her laptop back into the backpack, until accidentally coming across a DVD cover featuring Marcy wearing a lacy bra, standing up quickly and blushing under the mask.

  "Friend, why don't we have our drinks a bit later, and these young ladies can go ahead of us?" he said, looking at me.

  "Why?" I said.

  "Tom, the ladies need to go first."

  "There's kind of a line here."

  "They just want some coffee, Tom."

  "I realize that, Ranger. I just want to say hi to my daughter."

  "They're ladies. A gentleman always--"

  "Fine. Okay. Go ahead, ladies."

  "No, that's okay, you were here first," Marcy said.

  He looked at the ladies silently and gave the hint of a shrug, thumbs in his belt, looking at the colored chalk drawings on the blackboard menu. He suddenly brightened.

  "Hey ladies, have you seen Back in the future?"

  "Ranger," I said.

  "Well, this man here played Biff in that!"

  "You did?!" Marcy squealed, elbowing her roommate, "I thought it was you. It's that guy, Tanya!"

  "You are not," Tanya said.

  The Ranger stepped toward them. "He doesn't want to talk about it, though, so please keep it to yourselves," he said.

  "What's that Michael J. Fox like?" Marcy said.

  "Uh…he's…a nice guy," I sighed, walking toward the front window and into the sun.

  "Are you in the movies, too?" Tanya asked the Ranger, "Is that why you wear that costume?"

  "Well, not really."

  "You're not in movies?"

  "Not anymore, no," he said, slowly heading for the door.

  "Then why are you wearing a mask?" she giggled.

  I leaned toward them, sharing a secret, "Ladies, have you seen Jesse James Rides Again?"

  They stared at him silently, until he kicked at the floor with his boot and mumbled "I played Jesse James in that picture" in the general direction of the blonde.

  "Daddy!" Katie said when we got to the counter.

  "Hello, P.J.!" I said, "Ranger, this is Katie, my oldest daughter."

  "Very nice to meet you…P.J.?"

  "Katie," she said.

  "I call her P.J. sometimes."

  "And what's that stand for?" he said.

  "Stands for precious jewel," I said.

  "Of course it does," he said, "and it fits!"

  "Thank you…uh…"

  "Honey, this is Ranger."

  "She finally took in his entire outfit, and whistled. "Are you working on a movie?" she asked.

  "No," he said, "Just a friend of your P.D."

  "Huh?"

  "Precious Dad?"

  "Oh…okay," she chuckled, "But the Insomnia Café is a violence free zone."

  "Excellent! May I have a coffee?" he said.

  "You're not allowed to have tools of violence here."

  "Nor would I! I think I'll have a medium."

  "I mean you can't be here with those," she said, pointing at his pistols.

  "Honey," I said, "He's okay, he's with me."

  The tall white kid with blonde dreadlocks who manages the place walked up behind the counter next to her.

  "Hey, guys, here's the thing, the Insomnia Café is a violence free zone."

  "We heard that from Katie here," I said, "My friend is a visitor here—"

  "Hey," the kid said, staring at me "Are you Biff?"

  "Yes!" the Ranger said, clapping his hands, "He knows you! See?"

  "Hey, P.D., love ya," Katie said, "But why don't you get these to go?"

  "First of all, it's called Back To The Future, not Back In The Future, and I don't talk about it, and I don't understand why you don't get it," I said, taking a chair on the patio outside the place.

  "What did I call it?" he asked, unbuckling his guns.

  "Back In The Future."

  "That's not the name of it?"

  "No, it's Back To The Future, but don't say it anymore either way, okay?"

  "I just don't understand why," he said.

  "It has nothing to do with me! It was twenty-some years ago! Get off it!" I yelled at him, as one of the girls waved to us from inside.

  "Fair enough. You asked me not to and I did mention it and that was against your wishes. But let me tell you, it has everything to do with you! It's a great movie, and you're a major part of it."

  "No I'm not," I said.

  "People love that picture, so why do you run away from it?"

  "I don't run away from it," I said, wiping a few leftover crumbs off the table to a couple of chirping sparrows, "I keep it in perspective."

  "I'll tell you something," he said, "If this coffee had legs, it would jump off the table and walk out of here. It's strong stuff."

  "Clayton," I said.

  "Your daughter is a precious jewel, you're right!"

  "Clayton!"

  "Call me Rang--"

  "Yes, fine, I'll call you whatever, but you have to admit to me that you're an actor. I know you're an actor, and you know you're an actor. Or were an actor, or whatever. Clayton Moore."

  "Yes, that's true," he said.

  "And you were great as the Lone Ranger."

  "The One Ranger."

  "YOU WERE THE LONE RANGER!!! YOU'RE THE ACTOR WHO PLAYED THE LONE RANGER!!"

  "Yes."

  "You were great at it."

  "Thank you."

  "But you don't have to be him. You don't embody him. You just decided to be him."

  There was a long silence, as he looked at the sky, examining every cloud.

  "Why do you wear that mask?" I asked.

  "It's the outfit of the One Ranger," he said quickly.

  "You don't know that! You could change the outfit right now! It's just a role you're playing, a role that you want to play! Maybe I don't want to play it!"

  He stood up and pointed at me. "Listen, I'm not sure what in Sam Hill you're talking about with this, but you're some kind of actor, and you've got to get out there and tell them about it. You're great in that picture, I saw it myself!"

  I collapsed in my chair, placing my cup on top of abstract coffee stains.

  "It's not w
ho I am," I said.

  He counted clouds for a while, and tried again. "But they just want to talk to you about it. What's wrong with that?"

  "Nothing is wrong with it except I don't want to do it."

  "Why? Come on, it'll help your career!" he said.

  "My career?" I shouted, smacking the table hard enough that my cup almost tipped over and the pile of newspaper somebody left fell on the ground. The people outside looked at me, so I lowered me voice and leaned toward him. "What career? They think that that's who I am! Now you come around here out of nowhere on a horse and you think that's who I am! They think I'm the guy who beat up Michael J. Fox! The thing is I didn't beat up Michael J. Fox, I only pretended to beat up Michael J. Fox, and he wasn't even on the set most of the time, he was working on his T.V. show every day! What really happened was I pretended to beat up Michael J. Fox's stand-in! That's Back To The Future right there! What's there to talk about? I pretended to beat up Michael J. Fox's stand-in! I just don't have anything to say about it!"

  He sat down next to me and we silently watched beads of water condense on my cup and run into a tiny stream, meandering toward the edge of the table until I wiped it with my palm, exploding drops onto the cement.

  "It's a crime," he said.

  "What's a crime?"

  "You should be in every picture going on out there," he said.

  "My daughter should manage the Insomnia Cafe," I said, wiping my wet hand on a pant leg, "So what?"

  "Who's your agent?" the Ranger asked.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm going to make it my business to see that you get in more pictures," he said, standing up. He picked his belt off the table, wrapping it around his taut waist.

  "Who's your agent?" he repeated.

  "Nobody. I don't have an agent," I said.

  He squinted into my eyes. "I'm going to talk to your agent."

  "You're not talking to anybody."

  "I'll talk some sense into these people."

  "Are you insane? Talk some sense into those people?"

  "I'm going to give it my best."

  I stepped in front of him as he headed away from me.

  "Let's talk about Back To The Future! Do you have any questions about it? What Michael J. Fox is like?" I said, my hands outstretched.

  He brought a black, leather index finger to his temple. "I know who it is."

  "You're wrong," I said, "That's not who it is."

  "Mark Ten Artists."

  "How did you know that?"

  He took a step toward me and I thought he might grab my shoulders and fill the blue sky with thunderbolts, proving that he had some cosmic knowledge.

  "You wrote it down at the audition for the car battery. Mark Ten Artists, right?"

  "No," I blurted.

  "That was it, wasn't it?" he said, looking into the street.

  "I fired them."

  "Today? You fired them today?"

  "Please don't talk to them," I said.

  "Hmm?" he asked, looking at my cup, "that was strong coffee, wasn't it?"

  "Do not contact my agents in any way."

  "I would never make you look bad."

  "I do not want you to talk to my agents," I said.

  "Hey!" he said, spinning slowly in place, "Don't be a worry-wart! I'm an actor, remember?"

  FOURTEEN

  The first house I moved into in L.A. was no different than most houses in the Hollywood Hills on the outside. A Spanish style mailbox stood in front of a garage door, with the rest of the place hidden by a wall. Fancy architecture isn't a big priority in a hillside neighborhood that could rush down the hill in a pile of Jaguars and trendy art during one of the frequent earthquakes that throw the place around, but the house I moved into was a bit different than the others in the neighborhood, since mine housed a few beaten up chairs, old beds, and groggy comedians.

  "Cresthill," as the house was known by the comics who lived there, was owned by the Comedy Store, and welcomed the visitor with an oak door three inches thick, a throwback to the days it was a party house run by "Ciro's," the Hollywood nightclub that preceded the Comedy Store in the forties and fifties and used for high stakes poker games and star-studded, gin soaked debauchery. Used by the Comedy Store to house an endless stream of desperate comedians needing shelter, it was still an infamous refuge full of low stakes poker games, and as much debauchery as a bunch of comedians could come up with, which was not an insignificant amount.

  The front door opened easily with a wiggling pinky finger in a hole next to the lock, since nobody knew anyone who had a key to the place, and I passed the admissions test, since I worked at the Comedy Store and wasn't a heroin junkie. I moved my guitar, notebook and T-shirt collection into the place, settling in with my new roommates, Andrew "Dice" Clay, fresh from the streets of Brooklyn, and Yakov Smirnoff, fresh from a narrow escape from the Soviet Union.

  Andrew hadn't come up with the "Dice" character yet, but was opening his act with a spectacled and bumbling Jerry Lewis impression from "The Nutty Professor," followed by an onstage transformation - accomplished simply by taking off the warm up pants he wore over his slacks - into a greaser named "Tony Schlongini," singing songs over cassette tapes and wooing girls with an impression of John Travolta in "Welcome Back Kotter." After a while, he got tired of the warm up pants, changed his nickname to "Dice," and ignited like a rocket launch, selling out Madison Square Garden to cheering throngs and quickly bursting into a confused flame out, unable to understand how people could possibly be insulted by a joke like "Yeah, I'm from Brooklyn. We got a sign there. It says "Welcome to Brooklyn." …Wid' a dead fag hangin' off de end of it!" How could people possibly be offended by that? After all, he didn't mean nothin' by it.

  Yakov Smirnoff was a Russian immigrant raised in the rationing and fear of the Soviet communists, with the soul of a joyous, capitalist pig, working comedy gigs every night of the week, and working business schemes every moment in between. "You Americans are so lazy!" he told me, while making a deal to get himself a Mercedes Benz by buying a Benz and a Rolls Royce in Europe, shipping them both back to California and selling the Rolls to pay off the Benz. "This country is easy! All you have to do is work hard!" he said, as we motored through Hollywood in his new yellow sports car.

  "Isn't all the import paperwork a hassle?" I asked, lazy, sports car-less American kid that I was.

  "In Russia you do that much paperwork to get a chicken!" he answered, laughing as he shifted gears and raced into the Hollywood Hills.

  I moved into the master bedroom of the house, since Andy and Yakov didn't want anything to do with it, giving me all sorts of excuses. They didn't need the hassle of moving, or they liked their room location, or maybe it was the real reason, which I discovered the first day I moved in - that the previous comic who lived there had filled the room with bad vibes and vomit, leaving the large room with a panoramic view of Los Angeles so disgusting that nobody wanted to enter through the closed door. I conquered the place with buckets of disinfectant, elbow grease, and prayers of excorcism and became a guy who worked at the hippest place in Hollywood with a room in the Hills and a balcony overlooking a blanket of glittering lights.

  The glittering lights dimmed very early in my time there, when it became an issue in the house over who would be the guy to confront a simmering cauldron of trouble, and finally kick Sam Kinison out of the house.

  The competition for being the "black sheep" was intense at the Comedy Store, since comics fight each other for spots on the black sheep Olympic team, amusing each other by shocking the audience with jokes far beyond the boundaries of taste and conscience. Though there was a wiseguy camraderie backstage, as soon as Cable T.V. specials and Las Vegas gigs separated wheat from chaff, there was a major chaff war, with Kinison venting hatred at his former friend Andrew Dice Clay, insisting that he, and not "The Dice Man" invented the clever innovation of screaming profanity into the microphone, not just saying it in a normal tone of voice like Re
d Foxx or Buddy Hackett.

  A pink sphere of clammy skin, Sam Kinison always looked like a man about to pop. Wearing an ever present black overcoat and a beret, or baseball cap, or pirate bandana covered with skulls to hide his bald, pulsing dome, he paced backstage, cooed hypnotic suggestions to the druggie strippers and porn hopefuls that came to his shows, and spent lots of energy establishing his personal space. With the ego of three comics and the width of two, his personal space could be an expanse that included the entire Comedy Store building, which he seemed to see as a personal fiefdom. Once onstage, he performed his unique, screaming harangues, usually featuring his dramatization of the crucifixion of Christ, using the microphone as the hammer driving nails into his hands under maniacal laughter, screaming and pounding long after the insulted audience had stood up and left and the performers scheduled to go on after him stood against the back wall, staring at each other in disbelief.

  "Tom," a grizzled, drunken comic said to me once at the back wall, "I'm not even close to being a good Christian or anything."

  "Is that right, Ronny?"

  "Yeah, but …I'll tell you…" he said, staring at the quaking sphere of Kinison screaming in the spotlight, "If Jesus does come back, I don't want to be in this building while that guy is onstage."

  Sam swaggered through the hallways, and beat up the occasional comic in the parking lot, as long as he was small and weak enough to take, with the insurance of a few thug junkies who, when supplied with enough drugs, could keep other comics from jumping in and protecting the poor kid from getting clocked by the rotund zombie.

  Then Sam created an improv group from the pool of his lost followers and began performing long, evil sketches on the main stage of the Comedy Store. A sweet, innocent child goes to bed in a dim light on the black stage, calling out love and kisses to mommy and daddy and falling fast asleep. The lights clicked to blackness and a match struck, lighting a cigarette hanging from the sneering lips of Kinison, as satan himself. He flicked the spent match onto the sleeping boy, woke him up, screamed threats and hatred into the little boy's quivering disbelief, and dragged his screaming, twisting body, offstage and into hell.

  No kidding, that was the sketch. A comedy sketch, met with shocked silence by the audience who stared at the stage, wondering what the joke was. It was Monday night, the night that improv groups ran the place, and Sam was making a play to expand his kingdom.