Los Angeles Stories

by Ry Cooder

  I drank from the flask. It was raw and it burned, but it steadied me. Angel said, “Keep it, you don’t look so good.” We went inside. The noise and the smoke almost knocked me down, but I made it to the stage. “Only one cho, hermanito, we take it easy.” Angel helped me up. The microphone felt heavy as lead. “Señoras y señores, bienvenidos!” I announced. Angel passed me a note: Sra Morales requests, “Aquellos Ojos Verdes.” We began. From a corner table, she was watching. She was alone.

  It was during the second verse when I realized where I had seen her before — in the barbershop, on North Main Street. Nick Acosta cuts my hair the way I like it, he gives a nice close shave. Behind the chair hangs the calendar of the Mexican National Lottery, La Loteria National, with its glamorous painting of two Mexican girls. One is laughing, her head thrown back. The other regards the viewer with somber green eyes, her hands folded in her lap. I felt my self-confi­dence return. Why? What difference could it make? Sergeant Morales’s esposa, an artist’s model, so what? Do not imagine that I have any illusions when it comes to women. I know what they see when they look at me, I assure you. It was that suddenly my curiosity was working again, my interest in things!

  We finished the set. The Bebo Guerrero orchestra started their pounding, and the dancers began flinging themselves about like zombie wind­up toys gone mad. Baila, mi gente! I made my way to her table. “Buenas noches, Señora Morales, I am so very pleased to see you here. I trust the sergeant is quite well?”

  “Sergeant Morales is involved in police matters just now,” she said. I took a chair. She was drinking something green from a tiny glass. “Your drink, does it agree with you?” I inquired.

  “No. I hate this place, it is so vulgar, so recherché. I have an appointment, I can’t be late. I want you to escort me. I have a car.”

  We left by the side door. A very large Cadillac sedan appeared. The driver opened the rear door for us. He was wearing a long overcoat and a fedora with a large brim, in the Mexico City style. We sat back in the enormous cushioned seats, something I had never seen except in films. In front, there was a passenger, a woman. She turned to greet us. “Good evening, Arturo, and thank you for coming,” said Rose, my nurse.

  “Don’t thank me, thank madam,” I said.

  “My name is Florence.” She pronounced it Flor­awnce. My bar­baire will be happy to know, I thought.

  “Is it too much to ask to what place I am escorting you? A man likes to know.”

  “A man will know in due course.”

  “Some very important people want to thank you for your service, Arturo,” Rose put in.

  “Will I learn what service it is I have done?”

  “Presently.”

  I sat back, I observed streetlamps. We left downtown and proceeded west on Sunset Boulevard. Inside the big car, it was a private world, quite the opposite of the streetcars I ride every day. On and on we went. I realized I had never been this far west in all my life. We turned off Sunset and headed north along a narrow canyon road that climbed up and up, ending at a pair of tall iron gates. The driver sounded the horn and the gates opened. We drove into the courtyard of the strangest house I have ever seen. Two long cement platforms, top and bottom, separated by giant glowing panes of glass. Behind the glass, people could be seen walking around bathed in light, as in a film. The structure appeared to be unsupported and about to topple into the blackness of the canyon below, but once inside, one had a feeling of weightlessness, almost of flight. There was an aura, a tone of serenity I had never before experienced. “Somebody must have won the Mexican lottery,” I said, trying to take it all in. “At least try to be discreet,” La Morales hissed at me.

  Everyone was elegant, singular, in character. It was all new to me. Mexico City ­types in ascot ties, emaciated white women in peasant costumes laden with heavy gold jewelry, movie actor and actress ­types situated here and there. I walked by a very famous Hollywood leading man who had propped himself up behind a huge rubber plant. He was blind drunk, but his smile and dimpled chin were resplendent. “Good to see you again, amigo. Let’s go to Mexico and make a picture together,” he said, winking and leering at me. A portly Mexican with wavy hair and pencil mustache hurried over. “I saw you make the entrance with Florencia! I am Fernando Lazlo­-Porro!”

  “Arturo Manzano,” I answered.

  He turned to his group of friends. “Arturo Manzano, a great friend of Covarrubias! Florencia was so very charming with Covarrubias, was she not? But she has, what do I want, evolved, I know you will say that she has, ha ha! This house is my homage to Los Angeles!” The group of friends applauded. I felt a strong hand on my arm, a strong voice behind me. “Señor Manzano is needed elsewhere.”

  “Of course! In these times, everything is understood.” The architect bowed, the friends withdrew. I looked around at my new han­dler. Could it be? A man appearing to be Miguel Inclán steered me through a door, perhaps the only door in the place. It was a library room with a low ceiling and soft light from lamps shaped like pink garden snails. In a large chair, in a gown of indigo ­colored silk, sat Marga López. “We are enchanted . . .” she began. I threw up my hands. “Stop! What is the meaning of all this? I am only a poor requinto player from East Los Angeles! I know nothing of architects and Cadillacs and movie actors who step off the screen and walk around in the glass houses of the rich! Somehow, there is a mistake!”

  “There is no mistake,” said a soft voice behind me. Carlos Bulosan coughed, a harsh, rattling sound.

  The dashboard clock said twelve midnight when they left me out in front of La Bamba, which was closed and dark. The Cadillac whispered off and joined the late-night traffic. I caught the last Red Car of the evening, the “U” line, for Chinatown and Lincoln Heights. The motorman greeted me. Only a man, not a vegetable, thank God. “Har yew! Where’s your guit­-tar? Never knowed you to be without it! This here’s my last run for the night, then I’m goin’ home to bed!” The trolley clanked and ground its way along. Bernard Street was quiet as the grave. The little houses on Tía Louisa’s side are six or eight steps up from the sidewalk and set back so that you may sit outside at night with privacy. Someone was there. Louisa retires at 8:00 p.m. sharp, and she doesn’t smoke Olvidados. No self-­respecting burglar would bother with the place, not on that street. I walked up. Sergeant Morales was asleep in the ancient wicker chair. He raised his head. “I need a drink,” he said in a thick sort of way. I passed him Angel’s flask. “Social or business?” I asked, a line from Cry Danger with Dick Powell.

  “Where’s my wife?” Morales asked.

  “I don’t know.” It had the advantage of being true.

  “Don’t hand me that, my romantic friend. I think you know a lot of things, and I’m the man to find out all about it. Ay la madre, this is terrible!” He made a face at the flask, then drank it down.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Estúpido! I’m Morales, sergeant over ­all! I know every taco-­bender and pachuco­punk and bolero-­jockey in East Los Angeles! And I got a message for one chiseling little sawed­-off yockey punk who thinks he’s gonna maniobrar pa’ conseguir una posición buena in particular, and I’m gonna tell you ex­ackly what it is, you want to hear what it is? Stay away from my wife! She’s too big for you.”

  “That’s a dirty crack, brother,” I replied, unable to resist quoting Elisha Cook from The Big Sleep, a personal favorite of mine.

  Morales hung his head. “Millones de perdones, you are entirely right. I’m a lousy cop. That’s what the watch commander told me. ‘Morales, you couldn’t catch flies in a Chinese butcher shop. You are back on the beat.’ ” He was close to tears.

  “I think my aunt has some cooking wine in the kitchen,” I offered.

  “You’re a good man, Manzano, and here I am giving you a hard time. You played it straight with me, and I pushed you around. My wife despises me. I am outré, I am déclassé. What does it mean?” The tears came. I brought out a bottle and glasses. I poure
d two, saying, “Here’s to plain speaking and good understanding.” Sydney Greenstreet, The Maltese Falcon.

  “I have some answers for you,” I began.

  “Doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. I’m off the case. There is no case.”

  “Salazar was a police informer. More than that, a spy for the FBI.”

  “Creo que sí. Everything he gave us was hygenic, I knew it,” said Morales.

  “He interfered. He dragged red herrings across police investigations.”

  “He was shielded.”

  “Claro. But he was assassinated, just as you said. An itinerant fruit ­picker, who shall remain nameless, stabbed him in the Million Dollar Theatre that Saturday.”

  “But you told me the man was incapacitated!”

  “I believed he was. Tonight, I learned he can operate for brief periods with the help of esoteric Chinese drugs. He is dying, that’s the truth. A martyr to la causa.”

  “Qué causa?”

  “I understand Salazar informed on the labor movement here and its ties to the Mexican Communist Party. He identified labor leaders to the FBI, he invented suspects, he falsely accused even the most harmless and innocent. He was a vile man, a coward — but a pawn in the game, nada más. Mexican artists and writers are trying to build sympathy, but men like Salazar are a threat because they love power and will stop at nothing to hold onto it. You may say it’s the cause of poor people who will never ride in a Cadillac or eat crab tacos in glass houses.”

  “This wine is not so bad,” Morales said. Poor Morales, a tiny cog in the big wheel, like me. Somewhere up the street, music began to play softly and drift toward us. I knew it at once. “La Vida Es Un Sueño,” the most extraordinarily moving of bolero songs. “Life Is a Dream,” written by the great Cuban poet Arsenio Rodríguez, upon learning that his blindness could not be reversed. Morales and I sat there and listened. At three in the morning, the consolation of a Cuban song, floating by on a Chinese street in downtown Los Angeles. I felt relaxed and at ease knowing there was nothing more to fear from the police. Finally, everything had arranged itself.

  Después que una vive veinte desengaños

  Que importa uno más?

  Después de conocer la acción de la vida

  No debes llorar

  Hay que darse cuenta que todo es mentira

  Que nada es verdad

  Hay que vivir el momento feliz

  Hay que gozar lo que pueda gozar

  Porque sacando la cuenta en total

  La vida es un sueño y todo se va

  Kill me, por favor

  1952

  WE HAD THREE weeks’ work at a combination bowling alley and cocktail lounge in downtown Kingman, Arizona. Harry Spivak was the contractor and also the manager. That’s technically in violation, since contractors are supposed to be players, not managers. It’s a conflict of interest, but you got to put beans in the pot. Our previous engagement didn’t pan out so well. I had to leave a good overcoat behind, and a good overcoat is sometimes hard to find, particularly if the salesman’s got a suspicious attitude. So, there we were, in Kingman, not a very fast-­stepping town. My partner’s name was Ramon Sanchez, but he called himself Smokey Ray Saunders on these dance-­band jobs. I go by the name of Al Maphis, but I use my given name, Alphonso Mephisto, if we work jobs on the Mexican side of town. Smokey is a bass player and I’m a drummer, so we find it convenient to contract out as a unit. I don’t like to say two for the price of one, which is a violation, but you got to eat.

  We found the last room in town, plunked down twenty dollars apiece for the week, and climbed the well­-worn stairs to wash up before going to work.

  Hanging alongside the rusty bowl was a single towel — one towel and two guys to share it. I grabbed it, ran downstairs, waved it in the landlady’s face, and demanded, “How come?”

  “One towel to a room,” she replied. “That’s all my boarders get and you ain’t no better. You ought to mind your manners and thank me.”

  “Thank you for what?” I asked.

  “You behave or I’ll have my husband throw you out. He won’t like it that a Mex tried to pass, I run a clean place.”

  It’s true. I have Spanish blood on my mother’s side. So do half the people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I smiled my best musician’s smile and said, “Ma’am, you are entirely right. Being half­ Mexican myself, I know what it is you are afraid of. It’s easy for a Mexican to take a life, I’ve heard them say they enjoy it, and that’s why they like the knife; it gives pleasure. I have tried to better myself, but the urge to kill is strong, and one never knows. ‘Que será, será,’ as my mother used to say. Ramon, he’s never even seen a toilet before. Pobrecito!”

  If you get a job call at a bowling alley, take my advice and skip town. The noise is going to mess up your rhythm and concentration worse than plain drunks. But three weeks is three weeks. We set up and got going around six in the evening. Two trumpets, two trombones, tenor and alto, guitar, Smokey, and myself. All good union men and very copasetic.

  I counted three couples on the dance floor and five people over at the bowling lanes. The dancers were on their way to being drunk, and the bowlers were already drunk, whooping and hollering every time they hit a pin. Harry Spivak passed out charts, and it was all standards, so I could get some sleep on the stand. The trick is to keep smiling. A girl wanted to hear “Sweet Lorraine,” since her name was Lorraine, so we obliged. After three renditions, a man started a fracas on the dance floor, complaining that he was sick and tired of the same damn song, and play something else. Lorraine’s boyfriend invited him to step outside and say that again, which he did. Spivak called intermission.

  Smokey and I sat in the car and had a little drink and a smoke. “This dirty towel business has got me thinking,” I said. “Suppose there was a trailer, a big trailer, but made specially for traveling men like ourselves. We could operate the thing and rent bunk space out to the guys we were working with and have a nice place to sleep and all the clean towels we want.”

  “I want pussy,” Smokey said.

  “All it takes is cash,” I said.

  The next day I found a trailer dealer in town. I asked him some questions, and at first he scoffed at the idea of a roving boardinghouse. Finally he said I should draw up my plans, submit them to a trailer manufacturer in Chicago, and sit back and wait. I’d either get a horse­laugh for a reply or maybe one of the most unusual stables on wheels.

  Next, I visited a local banker who luckily was sympathetic to trailers. He said he didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t get a loan, pro­vided I could show good credit, a permanent address, reputable job, and good references — that being a white man to sign for the collateral.

  Out on the main drag, I thought, now what? The trailer idea had a hold of my mind, and I couldn’t let a little thing like money hold me back. “One monkey don’t stop my show,” I told Smokey.

  Our landlady’s husband had notified us that we weren’t welcome around there. I made the point that these older wooden structures like his were highly combustible, which brought his way of thinking around to refunding us the whole forty dollars plus a little extra for good fellowship.

  The Buick had been our home often enough. I bought it from the wife of an evangelist, a professional man on his way to the Texas State Penitentiary. It was a 1938 seven-­passenger with the backseats removed. The blessed reverend had it equipped with a bed, a collapsible ironing board and electric iron, a marine toilet and sink, and an exterior shower nozzle supplied from a forty-­gallon water tank mounted on the roof. As you might know, a musician often finds himself compelled to go straight from the street to the stage with no access to facilities, and a man looking at a matinee and two evening shows needs a place to take a crap, wash up, and press his pants. Some of these dance joints don’t have a backstage, let alone backstage plumbing, and oftentimes the management doesn’t like the help to mix with the customers, as if it lowers the tone to have to piss alongside a drummer.

 
; All the towns along Highway 66 are laid out identically. Whites on the north side, coloreds to the south, the highway up the middle. We found a little tamale joint on the dark side of town called Berta’s Pollo Encantado. Smokey dug Berta; she was fat and soft like yesterday’s bacon sandwich. Not my favorite dish, but I’ll take it as I find it.

  We ordered tamales and beers and sat down at one of the three tables. Smokey started right up talking to Berta in Spanish, asking her about lodging in the area. She allowed there was a room upstairs if we didn’t mind sharing the outhouse with a white man. What’s a white man doing down here? I asked. Berta sat down and told us all about him, a fellow named Jim, who was hiding out from some bad hombres, but a polite man, and handy too. Handy with what, I asked. “Todo!” she said. “He fix la estufa, el eléctrico, el baño! El baño es muy bueno.” I made an arrangement with Berta and we moved upstairs. By then it was show­time. Smokey invited Berta to the Lanes, but she said they didn’t allow Mexicans where dancing and bowling was going on simultaneously.

  I couldn’t keep my mind off the boardinghouse trailer idea. After work, I tried to sketch it out. I could hear the bedsprings squeaking and creaking upstairs, but it didn’t bother me. The trailer dealer had told me a custom job as I described it would probably cost five thousand dollars. I decided to keep the cost down to under four thousand dollars if possible. I’d have to sleep and feed enough boarders to make payments plus a profit. Eight boarders at sixteen to twenty-five dollars a week would pay the bills and fatten my bank account. Each boarder would need a bunk, a locker, and there’d have to be enough room so guys wouldn’t be falling over one another. Two washbasins. What had seemed like a simple job at first was becoming a matter of logistics.