Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  This went right past me; she might as well have said it all in French. She picked up her suitcase and started off as if she knew where she was going, while I just stood there trying to work out whether I wanted to follow her. When she got to the sidewalk she looked back at me as if asking a question. I guess I must have made up my mind, because I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and caught up with her.

  We walked beside a street with four car lanes and two sets of trolley tracks, and when we got to the corner we had to wait for the electric signal, the first I’d ever seen. When it bonged, Lily took off across the street and led the way up Sixth Street four or five blocks, turned on Hill, and went right to the entrance of the Terminal Building as if she’d been living in the city all her life.

  I remember that building as something grand. We walked into a marble-floored arcade flanked with shops and down a sloping floor to a big vaulted lobby as ornate and elegant as the head office of a bank, and I just thought, Jesus.

  Crowds of people were walking in and out of the branching passageways, so Lily stopped to study the signboards and then said, “We could both take a Santa Monica car,” and led the way down a long, winding ramp to a lower mezzanine and a waiting room, and another sloping ramp to the huge cavern at track level.

  The banks had closed, and we were in a stream of people headed home at the end of the day. We waited on the platform while three or four red streetcars came and went, and the line of people waiting to get on a car shuffled slowly forward. Around us the men—it was mostly men in that crowd—were dressed for the office in gray or brown suits and fedora hats with narrow brims. If I expected them to take note of my wide-brimmed buckaroo hat and high-heeled boots and maybe mistake me for Ken Maynard, I was disappointed; they went on reading their newspapers and magazines without giving me a second look. The fact is, if you lived in Hollywood in those days you were used to seeing men like me hanging around on street corners hoping to get a day’s wages loafing on a movie set. And I guess if I were Ken Maynard I would’ve been riding around in a limousine, not waiting in line for a streetcar.

  When we finally got onto a Santa Monica car, a man gave up his seat to Lily. She had been full of energy when we walked over from the bus station, but now she slumped down, resting her chin on the suitcase standing in her lap and looking out the sooty window with a dull stare. I stood in the aisle, hugging my duffle to my chest to keep from bumping people with it. Standing was fine by me, after sitting in buses for close to thirty-six hours. When the car jerked and started rolling, we went out slowly through a subway tunnel black as night. The car was lit up inside, but the light made a mirror out of the window glass. I could see my face, a skull mask, looking back from the darkness.

  After a mile or so we came out in bright daylight, rattling right down the middle of a boulevard, past tough-looking palm trees, drugstores, movie theaters, a bank with a clock that stuck out over the sidewalk. The car stopped and started, squealed its brakes, jangled a harsh bell. A few people got off, but others got on, so it never came to the point of empty seats. After a while the tracks cut away from the busy street and up a short alley, past the back yards of stucco houses that looked parched and yellow in the afternoon light. Overalls and house dresses hung from slack wires in the side yards. Kids playing on the scraps of dried-out brown lawn hardly gave us a look; I guess at that time of day streetcars must have rattled past every five minutes, and the novelty had worn off.

  Lily, for all her tired staring, had been keeping track of where we were, and when the car rolled out onto another busy street, she looked up at me and gave my sleeve a yank. “This is Santa Monica Boulevard,” she said. “I think you ought to get off somewhere along here.”

  I didn’t see how that could be right. The street was clogged with four lanes of traffic and hemmed in on both sides by two-story buildings. We had already rolled by a J. C. Penney store, grocery fronts, cocktail bars with their neon signs lit up for the evening business. I wasn’t so ignorant as to think the town of Hollywood would be the open sagebrush land I’d seen in the cowboy pictures, but I sure hadn’t thought it would look like this, and I wondered where all the horses were kept. Every so often I saw a roof off in the distance that I took to be a barn roof, but even back then you wouldn’t have been able to see any of the stables from a streetcar on Santa Monica.

  I didn’t make a move to get off the car—I was sure she was wrong about where we were. After a few blocks Lily picked up her suitcase and stood. “I’ll get off with you. I can catch the next car.”

  I started to argue, but she pushed past me, yanked on the bell rope, and as soon as the car stopped she hopped out onto the street. I felt like I had to follow her. The tracks ran right down the middle of the boulevard, so the trolley stop was just an island between the lanes of traffic barreling by on either side. We stood there a minute, but I was irritated with her and I guess embarrassed that I had let myself be bullied into getting off, so as soon as I saw a break in the traffic I took off without saying anything to her, just bolted across the car lanes to the sidewalk and started walking along like I knew where I was going, which I sure as hell didn’t. She didn’t try very hard to catch up, but I could hear her shoes on the sidewalk behind me.

  That particular stretch of the boulevard was lined with bars and pawnshops. Several of the bars had opened their doors to the warm afternoon, and the smell when I walked by was familiar, a stale, concentrated perfume of beer and cigarettes and men’s sweat. A few men were hanging around in doorways or going in and out of the saloons. Some of them looked past me to Lily trailing behind, a brief look before moving their eyes along to something more interesting; she wasn’t a head-turning beauty on a good day, and this was at the end of a long ride on an interstate bus. But every so often a fellow would give her a harder stare, which put me on edge. A guy leaning against a parked car smiled in her direction and muttered something under his breath, and if I’d heard what he said I might have started something with him—I had the idea that Hollywood was a dangerous place compared to the towns I’d come from, and I was operating on a fairly short fuse. I gave him a look, and he looked back and smirked slightly and went on leaning there.

  So then I stopped at the corner to let Lily catch up to me. She had grown up in Seattle, which was closer to a big city than anywhere I’d ever lived, and in any case, Lily being Lily, she had this way about her, like nothing could throw her for a loop. She was walking along, looking at the storefronts and the street signs like it was all run-of-the-mill, and when she passed the man leaning against the car she gave him a brief look without any interest, and something in her manner must have shut him down, because he turned his head to look up the street like what was happening there was deeply interesting.

  When she got to the corner, Lily tipped her head back to look up at me and said, “What’s the matter?” I must have been scowling.

  It didn’t sound like a real question to me, so I didn’t bother to answer. I turned and looked down the block and said, “I don’t see any hotels.”

  “Maybe we should go into one of these shops and ask whether there’s a hotel or a rooming house anywhere close by. And make sure Gower Street is somewhere around here.” The signal light at the intersection glittered in her glasses.

  We were standing in front of a window with the words THOR’S NEEDLE painted on it in fancy script. A fat man with his sleeves rolled above his elbows sat behind the dusty glass reading a newspaper. His fleshy forearms were dark with inked designs. He gave us a look and then went back to his newspaper.

  I had gotten over being sore at Lily by then, but I sure wouldn’t have let her push me into a tattoo parlor to ask about hotels. I said, “There might be something further along. We ought to walk another block or two.”

  She didn’t argue. We walked on up the street, and at the next corner she said, “What’s that?” and pointed across the lanes of traffic and halfway down the next block, to a neon sign in looping letters, SAINT JAMES. Under the sign a dir
ty glass door was propped open, and a couple of men sat on chairs along the front wall, taking in the afternoon sun or the passersby. We crossed the street and walked down to the building, and Lily went right up to the men sitting outside and asked, “Is this a hotel?” Both of them straightened up and said yes it was.

  We stepped just inside. There was a stairway at the back of the lobby and a desk to one side of it under a shadeless floor lamp. The man sitting behind the desk was studying a magazine spread out on the desk. He sat with his elbows propped and his chin resting on his upturned palms; he glanced at us briefly and then returned to his reading. The rose design in the flat-grained carpet was faded and worn through in a broad track from the front door to the stairs.

  Lily turned to me and said quietly, “It’s not very clean,” lifting her eyebrows as if she’d asked me a question.

  I said, “It’s all right, the rooms are probably okay.” But I didn’t want to go in and pay for the room with Lily standing at my elbow; I didn’t want the desk clerk or the men in front of the hotel to get the wrong idea. For that matter, I didn’t want Lily standing there while I figured out if I had enough money for the room. So I said, “I’ll walk you to the streetcar stop and then I’ll come back here and get settled in.”

  I thought she might argue. But she looked around the lobby once, then up and down the street, and after a little silence she said, “Okay. Thanks.”

  I walked her up the street to the next streetcar island and stood there with cars whizzing by within a couple of feet of us. We didn’t talk much. I asked if she knew where she needed to get off, and she said, “I’ll get off at Vine. They said the club is only a couple of blocks from there.” We were the only ones waiting, but there were people on the sidewalks, men and women going in and out of grocery stores and laundries. It looked safe enough, now that we were away from all those bars, but at this moment I was the only person Lily knew in Los Angeles, which you will notice works the other way too. So I said, “Listen, I don’t know if you should be walking by yourself. Maybe I should walk you to that place where you’re staying.”

  She tipped her head back to look at me. “It’s only a couple of blocks from the streetcar stop. Those other girls walk it all the time.” She looked up the street. “But thanks anyway.”

  I might have tried harder to persuade her—maybe she would have been persuadable—but when we saw the streetcar coming she picked up her suitcase and said, “Well, good luck,” and reached out to shake my hand.

  “Same to you,” I said. We were suddenly a little shy, both of us, and that’s what comes back to me—our sudden shyness with each other and how neither of us said anything about staying in touch.

  5

  I’VE HAD A FEW BROKEN BONES over the years, from horses that fell on me and horses I fell from, one of which you’ll hear about, and at the tail end of the war I broke my leg when a transport truck I was riding in was hit by a mortar, which is not part of this book except to say that my body gave me enough trouble in later years that I had to give up riding horses by the time I turned fifty. There’s something to be said for ruminating with an animal eye to eye, which I’ve done more of since I quit climbing onto a saddle, but here I am now, getting up from this desk every half hour to keep my hips from stiffening, and every little while limping into the kitchen to pop an ibuprofen. If I had known I would live to be this old and still be using the original equipment, I wonder if I’d have steered clear of stunt riding when I was nineteen and twenty years old.

  Although I guess I already know the answer, because I sure as hell had plenty of warning.

  The Saint James turned out to be crowded with men trying to break into the movies and scraping by on what they could make as extras. A few others were retired bit players, old men who had always put their earnings in a sock instead of a bank, and after the Crash still had enough to cover the rent in a cheap place like the Saint James. One of the old guys I talked with that day was Ray Mullens. He was not anybody whose name you would recognize, but he’d ridden in a bunch of cowboy movies, mostly in the silents, and fallen off plenty of horses before he got too stove up to keep doing it.

  Now that I’m looking back, I have to wonder why Ray didn’t try to talk me out of getting into the business. He’d shattered both his ankles when a horse fell over backward on top of him, and when I met him he was gimping along with a pained grimace, it hurt him that much to walk. But he was happy to talk to me about every gag he’d ever done, some so dangerous and wild he might have been making them up. He bragged about every wreck too—he’d broken an arm and four ribs, had his lung punctured, two or three concussions. When he broke his ankles, he was on location up at Lone Pine and had to be driven a hundred miles to a hospital, loaded into the back of a station wagon. Somebody gave him a quart of Old Crow to kill the pain—he was grinning as he told me this. Now he was coming up on seventy years old and he couldn’t stand straight to piss, but he was tickled pink to send me down that same road. And the truth is, I had come to Hollywood looking for some danger, so I was happy to follow his lead. You could get busted up doing almost anything on a ranch—hell, you could die while you were rounding up cattle. But I had the idea that if I was killed making movies, maybe I’d go out in a blaze of glory trying to stop a runaway stagecoach.

  Ray said the studios making all the cheap cowboy pictures had their offices clustered around Gower Street—Lily had been right about that—but he called it Gower Gulch, which was a slap at the fellows parading around the neighborhood in their cheap cowboy clothes. I guess Ray could see how green I was, because he made a point of saying I wouldn’t spot any horses tied up along Gower Gulch. The pictures mostly got made elsewhere; he was just sending me to the studio offices. He fished out a piece of paper and wrote down a few names—casting directors he was friendly with and second-unit men who might hire me as a rider. And in case I didn’t get on with any of them, he gave me a telephone number to call, a switchboard for people wanting day work as an extra. If I hit it lucky, they might be looking for riders, he said.

  It was after four-thirty by then, too late in the day to hop on the streetcar and start looking for work. I should have been holding on to what money I had left—the Saint James, cheap by Hollywood standards, was still more than I’d counted on. Instead I went around the corner to a diner and spent four bits on a bowl of clam chowder. I must have figured I’d be on some studio’s payroll by the next morning and shortly riding a horse alongside Buck Jones.

  The day had been hot, and when the sun went down it didn’t get any cooler. In my room I peeled off all my clothes and lay down naked on the bed. I could hear voices through the thin walls, toilets flushing and the rush of water in the pipes, cars going by and streetcars squealing their brakes, people calling to each other and banging the lids of trash cans, and every so often an ambulance or police siren or somebody laying on a car horn. I had learned over the last year to sleep in a room full of snorers, but I’d never had to sleep with all this racket of a big city at night; plus I was used to sleeping in the dark, not with neon signs flashing and street lamps pouring light through the paper shade on the window. I don’t know if I ever did fall asleep completely. It seemed as if I was always in a half-dream, riding a Greyhound bus as it swayed up on two wheels, or lying on my back in a field of dry weeds, looking up into the broad faces of dairy cows.

  I had saved a couple of oranges from the Grapevine fruit stand, which I ate for breakfast, but I was stale from lack of sleep, so I went back to the diner and paid for coffee in a thick china mug before I caught the streetcar. I was still thinking I’d have a day’s pay in my pocket and be moving into a better hotel by nightfall, so I took my duffle with me.

  It turned out Gower was ten or fifteen minutes straight down Santa Monica Boulevard, and if I’d stayed on the streetcar the day before I would have landed right at it. But as I watched the neighborhood get more expensive by the block, I began to realize it was lucky that Lily took us off the trolley where she did, beca
use I didn’t see anything west of there that looked as low-rent as the Saint James. What I did see was a cemetery so big the tombstones and crypts marched out of sight to the horizon, and big glossy pepper trees in front of a row of baroque office buildings, and every so often a two-story Spanish-style apartment building painted coral pink or pistachio green. I had only ever laid eyes on such things in the movies.

  They used to call the part of Hollywood where the cheap studios had their offices “Poverty Row,” and when Ray Mullens was working in the business dozens of them were making movies on a shoestring with not much more than a camera and a truck and a rented vest-pocket office. The ones making westerns were strung out along Gower Street and one block over on Beachwood. They’d shoot for a few days at one of the small movie ranches close to town or up in Griffith Park, or in their own back lot if they had one, then rent a sound stage or an empty warehouse for the wrap-up, add gimmick effects and short ends, some canned music, and call it good. They could turn out an hour-long picture for the bottom half of a double feature in little more than a week, which is why people called them “eight-day outfits.” But when I looked up the addresses that Ray had sent me to, quite a few were vacant buildings sporting for-rent signs. A lot of the smaller places had been eaten up by Republic, which had moved its operation out to the valley. Most of the studios still doing business along Gower Gulch were making either three-day serials or singing-cowboy pictures, neither of which had any call for riding extras: they used songs in place of action and rented stock footage from film libraries for the chases and stunts. I did find a couple of studios from Ray’s list that were still doing it the old way, but his leads were no help at all—nobody remembered Ray Mullens.