If he came along, out on the street we would go one way; then I would change my mind. "No, this way. C'mon." The idea was to ensure dominance and leadership. After half a block, Charley Baker would appear. "Hey, man," he would say to me. "I was lookin' for you. Those chicks are waitin'. C'mon." So three of us would be walking along the crowded sidewalk. On the next block, Piz the Whiz would cut into us, usually using either an Irish brogue, an Australian or country boy accent. He would claim to be lost. Then he would confide in us that he was in LA to settle his brother-in-law's estate for his sister. "Did pretty good for myself, too. Got an extra eight thousand she don't know about." He would give a long wink, and the inside man would whisper to the sucker, "That guy just beat his sister outta eight thousand dollars."
The conversation that ensued was essentially scripted dialogue between the inside and outside man, with an occasional nudge or whisper to the mooch by the inside man. The outside man would be loud and gross and often pretend to be half drunk. He would want to gamble.
"We'll match coins. Odd man wins."
To the mooch, the inside man whispers, "Let's take this sonofabitch that stole from his sister. You take heads. I'll take tails. One of us gotta win. We'll split what we get."
As the coin match gets ready, the inside man says: "This is for three hundred dollars—" They all flip. "And I win!"
The outside man says, "Goddamn . . . you sure did." He would pull out a fat bankroll, usually a Philadelphia bankroll of $1 bills with a $20 on the outside, and sometimes even paper. "Here you go." He would pay the inside man, who pulls out a wallet that has a zipper all the way around three sides. He unzips it and puts the money in. "C'mon, let's go," he tells the mooch. "We just made a hundred and a half apiece."
When they have gone about twenty yards, Piz the Whiz would hurry after. "Hey, wait a minute. How do I know I woulda got paid if I'd won. You got three hundred?"
"Hell yes. You know I got it."
"I don't know that he's got it."
"You've got it, don't you?"
The mooch nods.
"You say it, but I didn't see you pay off. Are you guys in cahoots against me? Maybe I better call a cop." And Piz starts looking around, as if for a police car.
"Show it to him," says Charley, playing the inside, whispering. "Jeez, we don't wanna see no cops."
As the mooch gets out his money, Piz demands that he pay off. If the mooch has it in a wallet, he can only open the wallet to the money compartment by using two hands. As he does that, the inside man plucks it out. "How much is here?"
If the mooch says an amount less than the amount of the wager, the inside man says, "I owe him the difference and starts to hand it back. Piz yells, "You guys are in cahoots. I want a cop."
"No, no. We're not in cahoots."
"You're givin' him his money back."
"No I'm not." He pulls out the zippered billfold, unzips it and puts the money in. (He actually has two identical billfolds, one of which has a zipper that won't unzip.)
"C'mon, let's go." He starts leaving with the mooch. "Boy, we almost got in trouble with the cops. Don't worry. I got your money. We still made a hundred and fifty apiece."
Piz chases them again, now loudly proclaiming that he knows they are going off to split his money. "Stop! I want a policeman!"
Charley, the inside man, stirs the pot of fear in the mooch: Jesus, if he gets a cop, we're in trouble. Stop!" He turns on Piz. "Get away from us. We're not together."
"Then you go one way . . . and you go the other way."
This last move is the split out. Ideally, it happens at a corner. The inside man whispers to the mooch: "I'll see you at the bus depot." He goes one way, the mooch goes the other, and Piz stands at the corner looking both ways. If the mooch is going off, lie gives the standard signal that things are all right: he rubs his stomach. In fact throughout the con game, there are hand signals for when to make the next move in the script. Sometimes at this last moment the mooch bucks; he won't let his money get out of sight. If he cannot be split out, Charley says, "Here, you take the money and meet me at the bus station." He then gives the billfold with the fixed zipper to the mooch, who won't be able to get it open. That, however, is a last resort. The con game unfolds in such a way that the victim never senses danger until the trap closes. Until then he has risked nothing and believes that he has made a couple of hundred dollars off a dirty sonofabitch who has stolen from his own sister.
The strap is virtually the same con game, except the gimmick is not matched coins, but an ability to stick a pencil in the center of a rolled-up belt. Laying the note is a short change hustle where you buy something, hand over a bill; then decide to pay for it with another bill, and then the con is in the count. I know con men who try it at every cashier. It doesn't work with wizened cashiers, but young girls behind cash registers are raw steak to a lion for con men.
I'd been told about all these games in the County Jail and Honor Rancho. Also the various signals that con men, boosters and card mechanics use. Actually, most who play one game can play the others, too. To pat your stomach means "Okay, everything is cool." Tugging your ear means "Get outta here." Tugging your sleeve means, "Get me outta here." Rubbing your nose means, "Come back in for the next step of the game."
I absorbed everything indiscriminately. The lingo, too, the rhyming lingua franca passed down from seventeenth-century London. The rhyme was the key. A "bottle and stopper on the hammer and tack," means there's a copper on your back. "Oscar Hocks" are socks. "Roses and reds" is the bed, "plates of meat" are the feet. Mix the rhyme with carney talk "Beazottle steazopper iazon the heazammer," and the statement is plain as day in the thief underworld. Only those at home among thieves could handle it with any facility.
One night I was hanging out at the Traveler's Cafe on Temple Street between Figueroa and Beaudry. An archway went from the cafe to the adjacent pool hall. Most of the habitues of both were Chicano or Filipino, with lots of dyed blonde whores coming and going. They told me they liked Filipino tricks because they weren't mules. They were quick and they liked head, which was the quickest and easiest for a whore. I liked watching the action, and I never knew what adventure would happen next.
Wedo Gambos, who would later be called "Wedo Karate" in prison, came in to the Traveler's that night wild-eyed. He was already a junkie and sometimes dealer. He was looking frantically for someone. Spotting me, he came down the counter. I expected him to hit on me for enough to buy a fix, but he had other business in mind. Outside, around the corner, he had two "wetbacks" from Mexico who had two gunnysacks full of pot. "Damn near a hundred pounds," he said. "They want a hundred dollars for both sacks. I only got thirty bucks, man. If you got the rest, we'll go in partners on it."
It was worth looking at, so I went outside and around the corner. Sure enough, waiting in Wedo's battered car (the left back door was held shut with wire) were two non-English-speaking Mexicans in straw hats. On the floorboards at their feet were two big gunnysacks of jute that were stuffed like huge sausages. The smell was pot.
"Where can we go to check it out?" Wedo asked.
"Your place," I said.
"No, no. I got an old lady and a baby. She'll go ape shit. Let's go to your room."
That was where we went. We parked in the alley and went up me back stairs, the Mexicans lugging the big fat sacks on their shoulders.
In my room, I stripped the sheets off my bed and spread them on the floor. The Mexicans dumped one of the sacks on the sheets. It was a big pile of marijuana. It wasn't the high potency seedless buds of fancy Humboldt County horticulture. It was "weed" in the truest sense, full of stems and seeds, but it was the marijuana of the era, what everyone bought for a $1 dollar a joint, three joints for $2, or a can (a Prince Albert can at that) for $10, and there was a lot of it. It had been crushed into bricks, but they were shedding needs and falling apart. Maybe it was a hundred pounds, maybe it was only sixty or seventy, but it had at least a couple hundred $10 cans. I couldn't
go wrong. Mrs Wallis usually gave me $20 a day, but on Friday she gave me $60 for the weekend, and I had about ten more.
Wedo Gambos was half Chicano, and spoke Spanish. They wanted $100 US. He offered them $80 and promised them mother $20 later. They took it. I was in the pot business. I drove Mrs Wallis during weekdays, and sold pot at night and on weekends. It was pretty good pot, too, at least for the time. In a few weeks I would be able to buy my fondest desire: a car. Wedo and I used to look at them in car lots with the yearning of the poor.
I need to drive up the coast to San Francisco," Mrs Wallis said.
I'm going to look at some locations for Hal. Want to come, or should I get someone from McKinley?"
"Oh no. I'll be glad to drive you. I've never seen San Francisco."
"We'll have a nice trip. We do have a good time together, don't we?"
It was true. I enjoyed her company as much as if not more than any nubile sixteen-year-old female I knew. Some of them were high breasted and had round asses; they could arouse desire almost blinding in its ferocity, but they were invariably ignorant of anything beyond their truncated world of the street. I cannot recall any who had ever read a book. They blossomed in the cracks of the mean streets, full bosomed and empty headed, and of course they simply reflected the world where they had grown up. I had never met the daughters of doctors and lawyers. Louise Fazenda Wallis had wit and wisdom and many interests. She had great stories to tell, of Capone sending emissaries to the train when she arrived in Chicago, of Hollywood in the heyday of silent films. Mabel Normand, Desmond Taylor, Louise Brooks had been her close friends. She introduced me to a world I'd never imagined seeing first-hand. My image of success was to own a cocktail lounge, wear Hickey-Freeman suits, drive a Cadillac and sport a blonde in a mink stole. She planted the seed in me of greater dreams.
There was no freeway to San Francisco back then. Ventura Boulevard was US 101. Beyond Sepulveda Boulevard it was mostly desert with some citrus groves. The towns of Encino, Woodland Hills and Tarzana were tiny hamlets. We passed children riding bareback and barefoot on the shoulder of the highway, which was just two lanes along the base of the Santa Monica mountains. Somewhere between Tarzana (so named because Tarzan's creator lived there) and Thousand Oaks we stopped at a wild animal compound in a stand of eucalyptus. Here were lions and tigers and elephants rented out to the movies. She knew someone in Tarzana from the "old days."
The big heavy station wagon we drove ate up the road. When we came down from a pass through the half mountains into a broad valley and Ventura County, the landscape was all lush farmland. The sun was hot and the fields were full of pickers bent low.
"Strawberries," Mrs Wallis said.
As if confirming her words, a truck stand beside the road had a sign: fresh strawberries. Farther on were vast alfalfa fields growing lush under the whirling sprinklers that threw glittering water through the air. Then there were ranks of trees I did not recognize. "What are those?"
"Walnuts."
"Everything grows in California."
"Yes it does."
Beyond the town of Ventura the highway followed the shore-line. The big station wagon seemed to race the rolling surf for miles. Traffic was light and I was going fast when I saw my first sports car, an XK120 Jaguar roadster. It was silver and fast and it first appeared in the rearview mirror then blew by me. "Buy me one of those," I said.
It made her laugh. "You like that, huh?"
"Oh yeah." At the time I had no idea what kind of car it was, only what it looked like and how fast it was.
"I don't know about buying it for you . . . but you could have that . . . you could have anything you want if you want it bad enough." She laughed. "I'm a believer in perseverance. It is the number one ingredient of success."
Following lunch in Santa Barbara, we drove to Pismo Beach where Mrs Wallis was met by a town official. He had been told what she sought and had a list of possibilities. Mrs Wallis produced a camera and took pictures. It was mid-afternoon when we finished in Pismo Beach.
"We won't make Monterey today," she said when we were underway again. "Stop and let me make a phone call."
At the Madonna Inn just south of tiny San Luis Obispo, I waited while she went inside to use the telephone. She was grinning when she came out. "I called Marion and we're spending the night at San Simeon." She was excited, but I had no frame of reference so I didn't react, so she added: "In Citizen Kane, remember Xanadu . . . 'the stately pleasure palace,' or something like that."
I did remember, vaguely, about Xanadu, but I rejected that film fantasy as exaggeration. Nothing could be like that. I was wrong, of course.
Above San Luis Obispo we turned from US 101 to California Highway 1. From Morro Bay north, the narrow highway hugged the cliffs, below which the Pacific slammed into jagged rocks. The trees were twisted by perpetual wind; their roots seemed to penetrate the rocks themselves. Seagulls soared and screeched. There was almost no traffic. On the rocks below, seals basked.
"The first time I came here," she said, "most of this road wasn't paved yet. Let's see, Hal and I were in a car with Marie Dressier. Do you remember her?"
I shook my head.
"Ah, how transitory is fame," Louise said. "She was a big star in the '30s."
"I've probably seen her. I just don't remember the name."
"Everybody calls San Simeon the Hearst castle. He called it 'the ranch.' Believe me, it's more castle than ranch . . . although it's two or three hundred thousand acres."
". . . hundred thousand?"
"Something like that. I guess most of it is pretty worthless. The big thing used to be long horseback rides on Saturday. He had giraffes and herds of zebras running wild. We'd be out in the middle of nowhere and, come lunchtime, lo and behold, there were the servants with linen-covered tables under wild oaks with some wildebeests or something looking on. You'd think you were on the Serengeti." She brayed her big laugh that always made people smile. She manifestly took great pleasure in telling me about W.R. bringing the ceiling from tenth-century abbeys and making a guest house fit under it. "There's two swimming pools. The indoor pool cost two million dollars and nobody ever used it except the servants. Imagine that."
It was hard to imagine. Two million dollars for a swimming pool!
When we passed through the tiny hamlet of Cambria, she was excitedly telling me one anecdote after another. As we got close proximity refreshed her memory. "I'll never forget the girl Chaplin brought one time. She was . . . maybe sixteen . . . and that's giving him the benefit of the doubt. Boy, he did like them young. She didn't know if she was a temptress or entrapped by a child molester.
"The servants used to go through your luggage when you arrived and when you left."
"You mean they searched your suitcases?"
"They didn't do it in front of you. They did it when they took your bags to one of the guest houses ... or to the cars on the way out."
"Why would they search when you came in?"
"Booze. W.R. allowed one drink before dinner. It was a boozy nine, and lots of Marion's friends had hollow legs . . . except for a lew who did dope. One time we were getting ready for dinner, waiting for W.R. and Marion to come down. Mabel Normand came in the door, mad as hell, and yelled, 'Some sonofabitch stole my morphine.' I think Mabel got it back, but I don't think she ever visited again.
"Did I tell you that the way I set my table, with mustard and ketchup and all the condiments in their jars in the center is a copy <>f San Simeon's table?"
A minute or so later she said, "Look, look, over there to the right.. . up . . . up .. ."
Miles away, crowning the hills several miles from the shore, was a flash of white towers. The view was suddenly blocked by a line of eucalyptus along the roadside.
"Watch for the entrance on the right." She paused. "The last time I was here was in '36. Good God, how time flies. I remember the big concern that weekend was the Spanish Civil War. W.R. was getting dispatches upstairs. We were asking each othe
r where W.R. stood. All of us movie people were for the Republican side, but we didn't want to make any gaffes if W.R. was for Franco."
"How did he stand?"
"You know ... I can't remember."
The castle was several miles from the highway. The private road zigzagged through the hills. The castle appeared and disappeared, growing larger each time we saw it. The twin spires reminded me of an old Mexican cathedral I'd seen in National Geographic. To me it looked more like a palace than a castle.
Down on the highway, the ocean had kept the air cool, but a mile or two away from the sea breeze the air was heated from the sun pounding down on desert mountains. We finally reached some green landscaping. The main buddings were still I some distance away.
"Keep going," Louise said when we reached the Casa Grande, as it was called. She had me go around it to some steps. They were few, but very wide. Looming above us, seeming bigger because it sat atop the "enchanted hill," as Hearst called it, was Casa Grande. I looked up at the top and had to crane my neck.
"Close your mouth," she said. "You'll catch a fly."
It was true. I was standing with my mouth agape.
A housekeeper was descending the steps. Behind her were servants. I had already seen and experienced many things in my sixteen years, but not until Louise Wallis had I had a servant to do my bidding. I unlocked the rear of the station wagon, intending to pull out our two bags. Mrs Wallis was talking to the housekeeper but when she saw what I was doing she gestured for me to stop "Leave those. They'll take care of it."
The housekeeper led us up the steps. I was looking around in awe so I faded to notice Mrs Wallis's dissatisfaction until I heard her mutter "shit." It was her favorite bad word, she once told me. |
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 13