The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter
Copyright © 2014 The Estate of Don Carpenter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carpenter, Don.
[Novels. Selections]
Hollywood trilogy : a Couple of comedians, The true [life] story of Jody McKeegan, and Turnaround / Don Carpenter.
pages cm
I. Carpenter, Don. Couple of comedians. II. Carpenter, Don. True life story of Jody McKeegan. III. Carpenter, Don. Turnaround. IV. Title. V. Title: Couple of comedians. VI. Title: True life story of Jody McKeegan. VII. Title: Turnaround.
PS3553.A76A6 2014
813’.54—dc232014022171
ISBN 978-1-61902-409-0
Cover design by Faceout Studio
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Neuwirth & Associates
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CONTENTS
A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS
THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF JODY MCKEEGAN
TURNAROUND
A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS
I LIVE on a mountain. My ranch sits a couple of ridges below the top, just north of Jack London State Park. A couple of hundred acres of scrub manzanita, madrone and oak, with red and white opalized rock seldom more than a couple of inches from the surface, the whole thing tilted up against the mountain, most of it useless for anything but looking at.
The house is old redwood with lots of windows and a big porch around three sides, all looking out over the valley and the rim of low mountains to the east. Within spitting distance of the south porch is an old swimming pool that has been let go and is full of plants, mosquito larvae and frogs. A newer swimming pool is up the hill and away from the house. You can tread water in the new pool and look out over the Valley of the Moon.
The place used to belong to a screenwriter with a bad case of macho, who bought it from his wife’s relatives, although he didn’t know this at the time. I used to visit them up there when I was living in San Francisco. The screenwriter is a lanky ugly friendly guy who had grown up in foster homes all over the state. He kept a Thompson submachine gun by his bed, because the ranch is pretty isolated, but the only time he actually used it, at least to tell me about, was one night when there had been a lot of drinking and drug-taking and babbling about crazed bands of longhaired freaks in the hills, and my screenwriter friend was lying in bed later, a couple of hours before dawn, little blue bubbles popping in front of his eyes, with his wife next to him and their five or six children sleeping all over the premises and a couple of drugged up and boozed out Hollywood types on the sleeping porch with God knows what nocturnal habits, and he heard unusual sounds out in the trees. After listening to the noises long enough to work himself into a froth, the screenwriter got up and took his Thompson out onto the back patio. He heard the noises again, coming from the general direction of the trail up through the trees toward the swimming pool, and without thinking to check on his guests or the whereabouts of anybody else, he let loose a burst into the night, blowing his wife’s cat into cat-heaven with an accuracy of fire that had to be seen to be believed. He always told the story on himself not I think to show how spooky it can get up here in the nights, or to demonstrate the need for caution when you have a loaded automatic weapon beside the bed, but for that accuracy of fire. “Just like pointing a finger,” he told me.
Marriage problems caused him to sell the place back to his wife’s family, and they leased it out to a woman psychiatrist who got herself mixed up with a real band of deurbanized crazies, and they pissed in the frog pond, drove nails into every wooden surface they could find, left dead animals and broken glass in the swimming pool and set fire to most of the rest of the place. Fortunately it was raining at the time and the house was saved. I picked it up from the screenwriter’s former uncle-in-law at greatly reduced prices.
It’s nice up here, even in the winter when it rains a lot. There isn’t any television, and radio reception is no good except for a station that plays only country-western or religious programs. Things are pretty quiet. The garage is full of old magazines and books with titles like Colonel Effingham’s Raid, Beach Red and The Complete Works of Will James, so there is plenty of stuff to read even without trips down to the general store in the valley where they have two racks of paperbacks and three of comic books.
After one full weather cycle things were getting back to normal. The neat rows of vegetables in the truck garden down in front of the house that had been the pride and passion of the screenwriter’s wife were all gone to seed, what was left of them, and the raccoons came around every night in family groups to see what was happening and raid the garbage cans, and there is plenty of other wildlife, deer, bobcats, snakes, black widow spiders under the house and scorpions in the shower, tarantulas the size of your hand, shadowy bands of dog coyotes who never quite come out into the open; mayflies, dragonflies, horseflies, fruit flies and house flies, and of course way back in the hills the very real moonshiners making their own brands of wine and beer just to keep the recipes active until the next wave of prohibition, or so they tell me.
But generally it’s quiet, very quiet, and when there’s haze on the valley or rainclouds hanging low over everything, you’d think you were the only human on earth. Which sometimes is just the way I like it.
When spring comes to Sonoma Mountain it comes with ten billion insects, followed by everything you can think of that eats insects. The birds fly in and the frogs pop up out of the mud by the thousand, lizards, bluebelly stripers, snakes, come slithering and sliding down out of the rocks, in the warm nights you can smell the sweet slightly acid smell of romantic skunks, and the deer make so much noise snapping through the underbrush that you wonder why every tree in sight isn’t peppered with bullet holes.
Just below the house is an old abandoned apple orchard with a couple of cherry and pear trees on the uphill edge, and these all come into bloom at the same time, the apple trees white and the others a pink soft enough to make you cry, and pretty soon the air is full of their smell and the night is full of peeping frogs and the messengers start clogging the road up the mountain with their telegrams, and I have to go back to Hollywood, to work.
Every year now I think about quitting, breaking up the act, just staying on the mountain and finishing the works of Will James, or maybe even getting that vegetable garden into shape—few rows of corn, nothing like fresh corn, some peas, mmmm, string beans, a couple rows of beets and carrots, pick ‘em when they’re babies and smother in butter, yum yum, and maybe a few of the artichoke bushes could be brought back to life (there were a dozen fine old artichoke bushes on the property, but the screenwriter with the bad case of macho imported a Mexican couple one year to take care of the place, and the man had sweated out in the hot summer sun chopping them down, and got most of them before the screenwriter could find the Spanish to make him stop) and I would plow and fence the orchard, and then would start thinking about the deer and the rabbits and the gophers, the bugs and birds that ate everything not under lock and key, and the messengers would start piling up in the mudslides, and so it woul
By that time of year, mid-spring, my own relatives would be filling the guestrooms and the kitchen, Buicks and Toyotas and white Chevy pickups sprawled in the gravel below the house, and they would tsk-tsk about me having to leave just as the good weather and all was coming, and so the morning would finally arrive. Six a.m. Six a.m. is the only time to leave this place.
The birds are just starting up and Grandpa is in the kitchen making oatmeal pancakes. It is bitter cold everywhere but in the kitchen. I try to get out of the house with just a cup of coffee, but Grandpa won’t say goodbye if I don’t cram a stack of his oatmeal pancakes into my face and grin and nod my head while he tells me how damned good they are, so, still chewing on the damned good but somewhat dry and tasteless pancakes, I come out of the house just as the sun is cracking the ridge across the valley, climb into the little Alfa that hasn’t been down the mountain twenty times in the last three months and head for the Golden Anus of the California Dream.
JIM LARSON and I have a comedy act we put together in the 1960s. We used to play small clubs and do television, but for the last few years we make a picture every summer and do a month at the Golconda in Las Vegas. The movies never cost more than four or five million, most of that above the line, and if you can believe what you read in Variety, they usually return handy profits for all, so somebody out there must be having a good time. I can’t bear to sit through them and Jim has a heart attack every time he passes a theater with Jim Larson and David Ogilvie on the marquee. We draw full houses most of the time at the Anaconda (as Jim likes to call it), so naturally what with all this popularity and money the little niggling problems of life manage to escape us, such as whether to order a hamburger or a cheeseburger and what kind of car to drive, where to sleep and what to do about holes in the socks, although both of us spent a certain amount of our lives wondering about just these very problems because in the wonderful language of the movie business, we couldn’t get arrested.
After a couple of months in Hollywood getting up at six a.m. and hanging around the sound stages of the Burbank Studios, where there are four or five guys coming at you with problems for every minute you aren’t actually out under the hot lights, playing the Anaconda is actually fun, because for one thing we are in front of a live audience and it is easier to make the jokes work, and when you’re offstage you can tell people you are “exhausted”—although a couple hours on stage is far less exhausting than making movies.
Making movies is boring, and working Vegas is terrifying—that’s the main difference. After nine or ten hours of boredom all I want to do is go home and watch television, but after a couple of hours of terror, the world seems like a wonderful place.
I’m talking about me, of course. Jim is entirely different, being neither bored nor terrified, to hear him tell it, and for that matter I believe him, because all day on the lot while we’re making movies and rehearsing our act, Jim is busy, running in and out with people, making deals to make deals, entertaining ladies in his trailer, laughing and joking with everybody in that easy way of his. And in Vegas, while I’m going through flopsweat before every performance, Jim doesn’t even show up until we’re fifteen minutes late, then he comes in through the backstage door, talking with a mob of people that he somehow manages to keep from following him, winks at me and takes me by the arm and we go out under the pinkies while the band is still playing the number before our introduction and the poor guy backstage at the mike who’s supposed to introduce us over the PA system doesn’t get to do it because we’re already out there and Jim has started to fool with the musicians and the audience begins that roaring sizzling sound that is like nothing else, and I’m not afraid anymore.
ONE TIME making the run to Hollywood I found myself in Los Banos at four in the morning, hungry, tired, bearded from a nice winter’s solitude, dirty and unkempt. I went into the big all-night truck-stop restaurant, I forget the name of the place, Hinky Dink’s or the Big Balloon or something. Rows of trucks were parked out in back on a big asphalt lot with gas pumps, oil racks and all that stuff, and inside, a few truckers were over in their private section of the place where they wouldn’t be disturbed by the ordinary citizens, or assholes, as we are called. A couple of CHP guys were in with the truckers, but nobody in the asshole section except me. I sat at the counter and looked through the big plastic-coated menu with color photographs of the various leaders, the BIG DELUXE QUARTER POUNDER, etc., which sounded fine with me, along with some fresh coffee, and I only hoped that the french fries were going to taste better than they looked.
There were two waitresses, cute and young, a blonde and a redhead, both wearing bright red satin hotpants and white satin blouses, black mesh pantyhose and red heels; but of course they were in the trucker’s den, one sitting with the cops and the other with some truckers. I could see in through the order area one of the cooks with his long homely face and white greasecap, and he looked up and winked at me: “Girl be along in a minute,” he yelled, and I waved don’t matter, no rush, and sat enjoying the quiet, the not driving, the different feel of the stool under my ass. I looked at the menu until the blonde came back of the counter, one of the pearly buttons of her blouse undone and showing a nice little slice of Playtex, her nametag saying DEBBIE, how unusual, I thought, ordered my burger, coffee and apple pie, why be a deviate at this hour?
“Yessir,” she said nicely. I could see that she was tired of this night, her eyes a little glazed, her mouth pulled down at the corners. But polite to me, bringing my coffee right away and seeing to it that I had cream in my creamer, the order slapped up on the dolly, to be whirled and taken down by the frycook with another droll expression for me: “BIG DEE!” she yells at him going away, “BIG DEE!” he yells back at her and I hear the sizzle as my hunk of meat hits the griddle.
There was a murmur of conversation from the truckers’ section, but that was all, no music. I took that first hot sip of coffee and swiveled on my stool to look for the jukebox. There it was, right between MEN and WOMEN.
A young couple came in through the door before I got up, early twenties, with a little baby in blue Dr. Dentons. They looked tired and worn from the road, and the baby was red-faced and irritated, making little noises of disgust. The couple settled themselves in a booth right behind me, and I turned to watch them, with their baby-bag, blanket, rattle toy, purse, coats, etc., murmuring to each other, “Can you get me the . . . ?” “Where’s the lid?” “Hold him upright,” and Debbie was right there helping them get all fixed up, Dad slipping out to go to the toilet while Mom gets the baby settled down and looks over the menu at the same time. Debbie lowered herself into the booth and took the baby, talking to Mom in a low voice, and then Mom went to the toilet, too. Debbie played with the kid and cooed and tried to get him to stop fussing, but nothing worked.
I turned away, realizing I had been sticking my nose too far into their lives, and bent over my coffee. I heard the couple coming back from the toilets and the waitress’s laugh, and saw her come around the counter and slap their order up, although this time there was no yelling, so that must have been a little joke between the frycook and Debbie. I got up and went over to the jukebox. The truckers could see me better now, and I noticed a couple of them giving me the eye, seeing the beard and the shabby jeans, probably wondering what kind of hippie crap I was going to punch up.
Jim was all over the jukebox like a rash and just for the hell of it I played one of his older songs, “Let It Happen.” The vamp started while I was still walking back to my stool, and I happened to be looking at the couple as the first strong notes of the bass began.
Their eyes lit up. They looked at each other as if they couldn’t believe what they were hearing, and as Jim’s voice hit loud and strong, full of all that romantic bullshit, the husband reached out for his wife’s hands. God, I had accidentally played their song, and the fatigue was gone from their fac
Debbie put my Big Dee down in front of me with a smile, and the frycook loudly sang along with Jim for a few bars, and even I was tapping my foot as I watched the redhead’s hotpants cross the room and wag into the toilet.
Recognition, when it came, didn’t spoil things. Debbie leaned over the counter and said to me in a low voice, “Aren’t you David Ogilvie?”
“Yes, Ma’m,” I said.
“You must love his music, too. That’s wonderful,” she said, and went to take food to the couple. They were having a merry old time, now that some coffee was inside them and the baby asleep, and after a while Mom got up and went to the jukebox and played a couple more of Jim’s tunes. She smiled at me on her way back, shyly, and didn’t say anything. The smile thanked me for rescuing them from the hell of four a.m. on the road.
Debbie thanked me, too, in her own wonderful way, out in the parking lot, and I guess now you know why I chose a career in show business.
THE FIRST time I saw Jim Larson he was on the bandstand in the Berkeley High School gymnasium playing for a noontime dance, only nobody was dancing much, because the band had gone, mostly, for a break and left a small combo—rhythm, a couple of saxophone players, and Jim with his silver-chased B-flat cornet. They were blowing their heads off. This was a while ago, and while swing was what the big dance band played, this little combo with no name was inspired by Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and those. I don’t know whether it was the music or the performance that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but instead of continuing with what had brought me into the gym, which was the search for a girl named Chloe Melendrez, I joined the big bunch of kids gathered below the band and kept listening.
My musical tastes haven’t changed much since then, my idea of a major trumpet player is Harry James, but even I could tell that these kids were just really very damned good. And they were so cool. One would take a solo and the others, instead of listening to him, would gather around the piano and talk to each other, tell jokes, paying no attention at all to the kid blowing his brains out, and then casually without any signal that I could see or hear, the whole combo would take up with the soloist and they would rant along like that for a while and then, say, Jim would take the solo and the others would leave him alone with the music (except the drums and bass, of course) and Jim would wander all over the stage in front of the empty folding wooden chairs and all the music racks from the full band, wandering with his head down and his trumpet held so that the bell was almost pointed at the floor.