Category Archives: Culture

Movie Review: Trumbo

 

Disturbing parallels between the 1950s ‘Red Scare’ and now

by Dell Franklin

CULTURE.TRUMBO.imagesAs a small boy back in the 1950s, I remember my mother talking to my dad about Dalton Trumbo, the author of  the anti-war novel, “Johnny Got His Gun,” and the premier screenwriter in Hollywood. We lived in Compton, California, so the magical aura of filmdom was very near, and we were all movie fans, my father, as a pro baseball player, seeing every Western ever made on nights after day games, and afternoon matinees before night games. Only reason he never saw double features, he said, was because “a ball player’s got to save his eyes so he can see the goddamn ball when he’s at the plate.”

My parents were both educated, though dad was a jock who never resembled anything near an intellectual. Mother, who had read all the Russian and British masters and our greatest American writers, as well as history, was a closet intellectual who during quiet time listened, eyes closed, in the darkness to classical music.

“She’s emoting,” dad would say, winking at me, intimating mother was an egghead, like Adlai Stevenson, who’d lost badly to Ike in the Presidential election. But dad was keenly aware of the Red Scare, and people like McCarthy and Roy Cohen (an original pal of Donald Trump) and especially Richard Nixon, who’d destroyed Helen Douglas for a California senate seat in 1950 by implying she was a communist.

“I ran across Nixon in the Navy, just when I was getting out in 1945,” dad said. Dad had been in the South Pacific 20 months while Nixon never left the country. “He was the kind of weasel who had his nose up the brass’s ass and lorded every bit of authority he had over anybody below him, a real prick, he just looks like a prick, got the kind of face you wanna hit.”

Mom was totally engaged in the goings on in politics, and let me know early on that the people being persecuted by the petty ambitious politicians and phony patriots like Hedda Hopper were intellectuals, professors, scientists, actors, writers, our most valuable, brilliant and creative people, all of whom had the temerity to actually question our system of government, and for this were being forced to rat on their friends as to their stature as communists.

As a kid running in the streets with nothing on my mind but sports, I had no idea of the darkness settling in on our country, knew only that dad agreed with mother’s opinions as an Eleanor Roosevelt Democrat. We heard it at the dinner table. And we heard about it in government class. And we read about it, but we had no idea the suffering many people were experiencing, and especially Dalton Trumbo and the nine artists who made up the Ten who had once been members of the Communist Party and were going to jail for refusing to name names and made a folly of the power-hungry inquisitors at the congressional investigations.

Well, for all those who missed out on this sordid era, the movie, “Trumbo,” is a mesmerizing and moving history lesson as well as a mesmerizing and powerful performance by Brian Cranston as Trumbo. You watched formerly affluent families rendered penniless and beggarly. Old friends were pitted against each other, having to choose a side to merely survive, not to mention losing out in their ambitions as creative artists. Lofty men like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan (as president of the screen actor’s guild he turned people in) waved the flag and heaped scorn upon the so-called communist sympathizers. In a confrontation, the smaller Trumbo mentioned to a towering Mr. Wayne that he had been a war correspondent and pointed to fellow writers who had fought in World War II, and said, “While you were on the set making war movies.” John Wayne, who never wore the real uniform of an American soldier, and made sure he was always the blood and guts hero in his war movies, was unmoved.

When we moved from Compton, where I went to a huge integrated high school of blacks, Latinos and whites, to a sterile all-white suburb in Orange County, I experienced my first dealings with fanatical members of the John Birch Society. They were in school and they lived all around us. They hated and feared John F. Kennedy, a true war hero, and adored Nixon, who had become Vice President and was now running for the highest office only because he had trampled his political opponents with the Red Scare.

In classrooms I found myself arguing vehemently with students and even fellow jocks who were surprisingly engaged in politics and maintained startling venom toward Roosevelt’s safety net programs, bashed unions and claimed “white is right” when it came to desegregation. Some were on the warpath over gun rights. These were high school kids. I was confronted, told I was soft, sadly in the dark about threats boding everywhere, and especially in our own government.

Little did I realize this was all an extension of the Red Scare, the same super patriots who despised the so-called liberal elite, the egghead intellectuals and professors, the writers, the actors, our scientists, our most brilliant and valuable people, people with the capacity to think, to question, to criticize, to protest. They were part of a conspiracy by left-wing media that controlled all thought in the country and tried to brainwash the population into thinking we were safe when in fact there were threats everywhere.

In “Trumbo,” the blacklisted writers, led by the courageous Trumbo, surreptitiously, under the cover of darkness and bathed in paranoia, survived by writing screenplays under aliases and turning them in to movie studios, some of which were intimidated by people like Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and John Wayne, America’s biggest box office draw and hero, and one that wasn’t, a maverick company making B films called Kings. Even after serving time in prison they were scorned and harassed by neighbors and scarred for life.

And so, after seeing “Trumbo,” you ask yourself, what kind of country were we, and what kind of country are we today?

An entire Congress, with few exceptions, was bullied into starting a war that has turned out to be perhaps our greatest disaster because they were afraid to look weak. The film industry, so liberal, is disparaged by the right wing as super-rich dilettantes out of touch with the real America for believing in climate change. The scientists who have spent their lives proving there is climate change are a conspiracy group undermining the economy, and especially big coal and industries polluting the atmosphere, led by billionaires like the Koch brothers. Mexicans are depicted as sub-human parasites and criminals trying to sneak into our country to soak up our social gravy train while in truth they have become our hardest workers, stellar citizens and finest soldiers.

And now we have Donald Trump expertly stoking paranoia against all Muslims after terrorist attacks by the fanatical faction of ISIS, lumping them all together; divvying up the good guys and the bad guys, terrifying the hordes. Pretty soon it’s possible you might be deeply suspect as a Muslim sympathizer if you happen to have a friend who is Muslim, or if you are seen on the street talking to somebody who resembles an Arab, and there is any proof from emails or phone conversations or the observations of suspicious citizens that you might actually know a Muslim, or know of a Muslim….

Watching “Trumbo,” and then going home and thinking about it, is downright scary. I’m sure most folks on the right wing will want nothing to do with such a film and label it liberal propaganda written by those film industry sympathizers, or, better yet, charter members of un-American activities. §

Dell Franklin writes under several aliases but lobs his best salvos against hypocrites and liars under his real name. He lives in Cayucos, Calif., with his rescue dog Wilbur, who may actually have descended from the suspected Communist sympathizer, Lassie.

Open Letter to Pope Francis

From a Christian reprobate

Dear Pope Francis:

I’ve fallen from grace.

I don’t believe much religious bullshit anymore.

I used to believe the way Kim Davis does, loving the sinner and hating the sin, refusing full rights to those who don’t belong in the Kingdom of God.

Still, I loved those sinners. Enough to track them down and tell them about the Lord.

“Oh, you’re going to give me some of that Jesus crap?” a youthful homeless man with heavy beard, and bright scornful eyes, asked me on the beach where I’d taken to a little street evangelism.  He smiled at me, took a swig from a beer can in brown paper bag. “Listen, kid. Give it up! It’s a crock of shit.”

I knew somehow there was nothing I could say that would convince him otherwise. I left him alone. It took me a long time to realize just what he meant.

For years, I steeped myself in church doctrine, theology, fundamentalism, prayer, good works, and even considered full-time ministry as a young man. I started out with the extreme conservative Southern Baptists, got a good solid education in the Bible, then moved to the spirit-filled charismatic and Pentecostal family where I learned to whoop and shout, “Glory! Halleluja!” and speak in tongues, then switched to the more staid and even-tempered American Baptists, who enjoy family barbecues and picnics, until finally I settled with the Episcopal Church, where my faith journey as a Christian pretty much died.

It died in the midst of a dispute with a mean-spirited bishop, the dissolution of a small church through bitter infighting and petty squabbling, and a host of other church-related ills and bloodletting that’s common throughout the faith world, not just among Christians.

I mostly don’t have anything in common with the church or religion today. I avoid them whenever possible. Yet, I know there are fine and lovely people who believe.

I got tired of talking about Jesus years ago.

I don’t mind when people practice their religion, so long as they keep it to themselves. I don’t mind when they go to church, sing hallelujah, and don’t let their religion turn them into assholes or cause them to muddy the public square with self-serving screeds about gay marriage, going to war with Iran, and barring Muslims from participating in American politics.

I do mind when religious hucksters turn politics into a circus not unlike a Scopes monkey trial, where they subvert not only civil rights and the separation of church and state, and intelligent political dialog, but access to knowledge and information, and the freedoms of certain citizens.

I’ve always understood God wants everyone to be free, and love is the driving force, the compelling narrative, of that story, which ends with redemption. I don’t buy the damnation story, or that gays can’t be married; it’s sounds too much like ISIS.

So, I guess I’m a Christian reprobate, or as a good Calvinist would say, “a sinner who is not of the elect and is predestined to damnation.”

Oh well, I’ll do the best I can to live fully every moment of the time I have left here and won’t fret about whether I can marry my gay lover, or whether I’m going to heaven or hell. But I would, nonetheless, Holy Father, appreciate your blessing because I’m a rogue who needs love too. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. He can be reached at stacey.warde@yahoo.com.

Warmongers and warriors

‘I love war, let’s kill somebody’CULTURE.WARMONGER SAMURAI

by Stacey Warde

I’ve spent most of my adult life studying the ways of a warrior and unlearning the ways of war.

I grew up during the Vietnam war in the midst of air fighter squadrons, the roar of jets blasting and taking off from El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, and the whoop-whoop of Chinook helicopters from another base closer to home, all done in readiness for war.

My formative years were steeped in war talk.

I heard the nightly body counts from Walter Cronkite and wondered why that was so important.

I learned that the “good” guys don’t always win, that not everyone likes war.

Countless Marines, sailors, and soldiers from all over the country  patronized local bars and liquor stores, returning to their quarters drunk and happy. They looked strong and tough, if not a little weary.

They were boastful and rowdy and rash, belligerent and angry. More than once as a teenage boy I had to fast-talk my way out of a fight with one who always wanted me to know for some reason that Marines will kick your ass.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned the difference between a tough guy, or even a soldier or a Marine, and a genuine warrior.

By warrior, taken mostly from the Japanese samurai tradition, I mean one who has mastered himself. He has honed himself like his sword—sharp, swift, capable of delivering blows. His spirit is strong and generous. He rises above and prevents conflict. He doesn’t oppress others. He is kind and quick and steady. He is fierce and formidable.

My understanding of the best warrior is the one who stops conflict before it begins. He has the skills, training and heart to care enough to confront without rancor or bellicosity or violence. That way, few people get hurt and precious resources do not get squandered or destroyed or taken.

Fortunately, I’ve avoided combat and kept my fisticuffs to a minimum. I know plenty of guys who love to fight. I’m not one of them. I may be combative, but I try to avoid bloodletting as much as possible.

I began my fascination with war, as most American little boys do, growing up with war. I had barely started grade school in 1965 when a family friend shipped overseas to Vietnam, a jungle dangerous and dark, full of mud and men in black pajamas who wanted to kill you. He showed me black-and-white polaroids of him and his buddies camped out in the middle of the jungle, their army issue socks and skivvies hanging on a clothesline behind them. They stood together, arms around shoulders, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, crooked smiles. I stared at the photo, studying the detail of plants behind them, which I’d never seen before, and the spooky darkness between their massive leaves.

“Did you kill anyone?” I asked him earnestly, wondering what lay beyond the jungle darkness.

He took the polaroid from my hand, gave me a squinty look. “We don’t like to talk about that, son.”

"RAMBO" David Settino Scott (http://www.davidsettinoscott.com)

“RAMBO” David Settino Scott (http://www.davidsettinoscott.com)

A boy in this country discovers quickly that he’d better learn how to fight because, one way or another, there’s a bully or a commie or a terrorist who’s coming after you and you’re going to have to show him you’re not afraid, you won’t back down, and you’ll do what it takes to knock the bejesus out of him. You have to take a stand, or find someone who will take it for you.

I scrapped with most of the boys I grew up with. We argued, pushed, shoved and sometimes fought. As I grew older, the gaming and roughhousing got more risky, bloody and brawling, so I decided to pursue wrestling, organized and competitive, and learned quickly, as dad liked to say, “There’s always going to be someone who’s better than you, son.”

Still, it was as important as ever to develop a killer instinct, to go after blood if necessary, to make it on the mat against other wrestlers, and eventually to make it in the world. More than a killer’s instinct, I learned how to endure, how to give and take a beating, to experience pain. This has always made me think twice about getting into a fight, unlike many of our leaders.

My interest in the combat arts grew as much from curiosity as it did from environment, from growing up in the U.S., where militarism and warcraft permeate nearly every aspect of our culture. I wanted to know it as well as  anyone else. I didn’t want to just play but be a soldier, and I was encouraged by friends and family to do it.

Joining the Army at 17 made sense because, like so many other young men at the time, I had nothing else going for me, and I could reform myself, study a craft and improve my limited opportunities. It became a rite of passage, where boys become men who learn the art of warfare.

In 1976, the Soviet “threat” kept spreading across the globe and I signed for a three-year stint as an Army Ranger to contain it; we were a light infantry strike unit whose mission was to destroy enemy communications and supply lines. We trained for terrorism and kidnappings, and conducted rescue operations in the desert. We drilled and trained hard, preparing for any likely scenario involving terrorists, guerillas and regular combat troops. We were given plenty of opportunities for honing our killing capabilities.

I took a course in explosives from Sgt. “Boom Boom” Mattoon, Ranger demo expert, and an advisor in the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, to broaden my kill potential.

“I got da record for blowing up da most churches in Vietnam in one day,” he boasted.  “So listen up, and listen good!”

He demoed the explosive magic of C4, a putty-like substance kids would love. Roll it up in a little ball, or light it with a match and cook your meals and it won’t explode, but stick a blasting cap in a brick of it and you can take out a church.

“I love war, let’s kill somebody!” a newbie to the unit said after “Boom Boom” detonated a charge.

You could always count on at least one person, usually someone who’d never seen combat, someone who didn’t really know what they were talking about, to make these comments. They were usually the first to wash out of the Ranger unit.

Even my father, as I was preparing at 17 to go into active military service two days after my 18th birthday, advised me: “Son, you either kill or be killed.”

Not many days later at a seedy hotel in Los Angeles, dizzy from the realization that in the morning I’d get on a bus to the airport with dozens of other young recruits and fly to New Jersey for basic training, I found a pay phone on the street and in tears pleaded with my mother, “I don’t want to go!”

“It’s too late now, son. You made your decision.”

The military did not train me to be a warrior. I learned that much later. I learned instead how to be a tactician, how to plan an attack and kill. It takes so much more to be a warrior, to be a voice of reason in the heat of combat, to see the futility and stupidity and waste of war, to be diplomatic and prevent war from happening in the first place.

Unfortunately, we don’t have that in this country.

Rather, we have warmongers, not warriors, who love to talk about killing and war. They talk a big talk, men of dubious reason, lacking humility, pounding the war drums, who have no experience as warriors, and lead others into hell. Don’t listen to them. Listen to the ones who have mastered themselves, the true warriors, who know how to stop war before it starts. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.

The Oaxaca Express

Alfredo pointed to a side road running into the fields and inland hills near Cambria. Barns and ranch houses nestled among clusters of oaks. Cows and the occasional horses grazed. I had cut the meter at $40 and was saving them at least $25.

Alfredo pointed to a side road running into the fields and inland hills near Cambria. Barns and ranch houses nestled among clusters of oaks. Cows and the occasional horses grazed. I had cut the meter at $40 and was saving them at least $25. Photo by Stacey Warde

by Dell Franklin

Sitting in your cab when the buses roll in at the Greyhound station in San Luis Obispo, Calif., you pretty much know who your prospective rides are going to be: black women visiting inmates at the state prison, little old ladies afraid to fly, parolees in new issue shuttling down to L.A. from prisons north, tattooed white trash, the occasional student, and Mexican immigrants from the poorest provinces of that country. The very rock-bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in America.

Anybody who departs from a Greyhound bus after having been on it for days exudes an identifiable odor: a distinct blend of cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, sour, dead air, armpit sweat ands crotch rot—all accumulating over years and soaking into seats and clinging to the hair, skin and clothes of a passenger and rising from them like a fetid, septic vapor, a sensory bludgeoning.

I picked up these field hands, or campesinos, always immigrants. Six of them. Since a cab is by law only allowed five passengers, I tried to explain this to them in my broken Spanish, but they pretended not to understand and piled in, five squishing up in back. They were not about to separate and take another cab for the extra $60 or 70$ to transport them to the farm or ranch where they were to cultivate and harvest vegetables and fruit and tend cattle out by Cambria, thirty-five miles away. Besides, they were diminutive people compared to fat Americans, stick-like and black-eyed, no doubt from the farthest reaches south, 3,000 miles from home.

Each of them toted a flimsy satchel with their meager belongings, which I stuffed in the trunk. The five in back were young men, and the oldest, with grey flecks in his abundant hair and bushy mustache, sat shotgun in the bucket seat. He smiled at me hopefully, a sly, wise look on his face.

I was familiar with these people. As a college kid, I had worked part-time and saved enough money to travel to the interior of Mexico with three pals in an old jalopy we eventually blew up. We hit cantinas, beaches, whore houses, and although we were poor compared to most Americans, we must have seemed to these peasants to our south, rich and privileged.

These passengers were not street-wise, big city or border town Mexicans. This was possibly their first time in America. They seemed curious yet wary, like young kittens.

The man sitting shotgun smiled at me. “You geeve me good deal, amigo?”

I shrugged, looking helpless, pointed to the meter. “No po-see-blay, amigo.”

“We have leetle dinero, señor.”

I nodded. “I understand. But it will cost you around seventy dollars.” He winced, as if stabbed. He was possibly a few years younger than me but looked older, obviously having lived a harder life, as they all did.

I remembered how, when our car stalled in little villages and big cities, everybody, even kids and women, came out of buildings or shacks to push us up hills, waving and smiling as we pulled away. I remember, deep in the interior, little dark men like those in my cab buying us beers and tequila when they could not afford it, because, evidently, they liked us, or were too proud to allow us to buy them drinks, or perhaps they were showing us the true nature of the Mexican people—warm and generous, money meaning little in the face of gratitude and goodness of spirit.

“I will try and make us a deal, amigo, but it is very difficult.” I again pointed to the meter, explaining to him that my supervisor kept close tabs on cab drivers. Then I picked up the phone, checked in with my dispatcher/supervisor, informed him I was going somewhere past Cambria and would be gone a while.

The car stunk. It was chilly outside, but I had my window open and the thin-blooded peasants huddled up and shivered in their faded denim jackets. Shotgun, who was named Alfredo, asked politely if I could roll up the window, so I cracked it a little, turned on the heat, but the stench increased and wafted to my nostrils, my gorge rising, like somebody died in my cab. They were, of course, immune from their own miserable smell and had probably been eating food they’d never eaten before, arousing their bowels, causing them to get diarrhea and even vomit. This happened to us in Mexico. These poor kids were used to nothing but beans and rice and tortillas and whatever they could kill.

They were incurious about the passing countryside, sat quietly, like mutes awaiting a sentencing. Alfredo kept an eye on me, occasionally producing his reassuring grin, his teeth white and clean.

Alfredo and I haggled amicably, bluffing, shrugging, throwing up our hands, and eventually arrived at a price.

Alfredo and I haggled amicably, bluffing, shrugging, throwing up our hands, and eventually arrived at a price.

I asked him where they were from. And he told me Oaxaca. I told him I’d been there, and it was pretty, and was about to comment on how poor it was, but knew this would humiliate him and place me at a disadvantage when we started haggling over the fare. I’d decided to give them some kind of deal. He knew this, sensed my willingness to compromise. I could tell the dispatcher I got lost from poor directions from non-English speaking Mexicans. Perhaps cut the meter at around $40 or $50. That was my limit.

So I relaxed just past Morro Bay, and Alfredo and I talked. My chopped up Spanish was as adequate as his English. He had a wife and five kids. Two of his boys were in back. They lived in a small village outside of Oaxaca. He was foreman at a ranch outside of Cambria. As we passed Cayucos and its glinting bay, my passengers did not bother to look. I studied the peasants in the rearview mirror; they looked exhausted, half asleep, like bags of ragged clothes. Urchin-like, they received little or no help from their government, I knew, forcing their survival on family alone. They possessed the high-cheek-boned, ridged faces of bantamweight boxers toiling in American arenas and on our sports channels on TV—men who could dish it out and take it and ignore blood and pain, never backing up until the final bell rang, bleeding, swollen about the eyes, yet still proud and game. They had perfect skin, were splendid looking people. Their women, in teenage years, before being burdened with multiple children, were breathtakingly beautiful. As a people they broke your heart, but you never let them know. Never.

Alfredo pointed to a side road running into the fields and inland hills near Cambria. Barns and ranch houses nestled among clusters of oaks. Cows and the occasional horses grazed. I had cut the meter at $40 and was saving them at least $25. At Alfredo’s direction, I turned onto a bumpy dirt road; rows of crops on either side. There were orchards and more cows. We arrived at a single trailer situated some fifty yards from a main house and barn and small corral.

When we pulled up, a door opened and five Mexicans who looked exactly like my passengers spilled out of the trailer. Their satchels and a few duffel bags were stacked by the steps. They looked fit and fuller than my crew. Everybody piled out of the cab and I opened the trunk and my peasants took out their satchels and everybody commenced to speak in Spanish at such a rapid pace I could not keep up with it. Alfredo talked to an older man who stepped out and could have been his brother. He glanced at me as they talked.

Occasionally, after a harvest, on a pay day, they’d go to a bar in Cambria and get drunk, shoot pool, become happy and sentimental, stare hungrily at big, healthy white girls, perhaps get angry.

I observed the crew I’d dropped off. They would be here for months, a year, probably longer, working all day, every day. Occasionally, after a harvest, on a pay day, they’d go to a bar in Cambria and get drunk, shoot pool, become happy and sentimental, stare hungrily at big, healthy white girls, perhaps get angry, maybe fight among themselves and be called “beaners” and “wetbacks” before being run out. This was to be part of their lot: Work, eat, drink, sleep, go without.

The two older men approached me. Any Mexican, be he a cab driver, pimp, or merchant involving any kind of exchange, liked to haggle. We learned to do it well in Mexico. They had no respect for you if you didn’t try and chisel them down or were a pushover when you tried.

“How much to San Luis?” asked Alfredo.

“The same, amigo—forty dollars.”

Again the pained look. “Too much, amigo.”

“Other cabbies, they charge you sixty-five, seventy on the way up, the same on the way back. They are not like me. They are not simpatico.”

Alfredo nodded, expressing his appreciation of my understanding and generosity. He turned to the man who looked like his brother and conversed rapidly while the peasants talked in the background. I heard the word “simpatico.” I’m sure they knew from previous rides that if I drove back alone I got paid nothing. Dead time. This was an excellent opportunity for all of us to come to a very pleasing compromise. Since they didn’t tip, which was fine with me, I could make some quick cash and be a true amigo at the same time.

Alfredo returned to barter. He shrugged helplessly. “We are not reech, senor. It is too much.”

Now they were all staring at me, a dozen bantamweights with calloused hands, wiry frames, sparkling teeth, deep leather tans. The departing kids would be returning home with pockets full of cash for their families, where they would be kings in their small village, almost heroes. They had no doubt already sent money home. I had seen their kind break hundred-dollar bills in the Cayucos Tavern to buy pitchers of beer. They spent their money on little else, lived free in the trailer, were fed, had few expenses. They became very generous when drunk, forgetting temporarily how poor they were as they bought local gringos and women shots and beers if they seemed halfway tolerant and interested in them as people. The drunker they became, the more foolish they became with their cash. They dropped it on the floor and left it on the bar and sometimes lost wallets. They requested their honking, tooting, oompah music on the jukebox, but no bar would hear it.

Alfredo and I haggled amicably, bluffing, shrugging, throwing up our hands, and eventually arrived at a price—$60 for a round-trip. I would make myself a $20 tip. For them, they were saving a fortune. Everybody was happy, satisfied. They paid me with a hundred-dollar bill. Alfredo and I shook hands. His brother, Eduardo, nodded at me, smiling. Everybody piled in.

On the drive back, I talked with Eduardo, who was from a family of fifteen. The kids in back were talkative and lively, behaving like jubilant school boys going away to summer camp. It was a quick, easy ride. I dropped them off at the Greyhound depot, where they hauled off their plump satchels and duffel bags. They wore new denim jackets and new leather boots and Levi’s and plaid flannel shirts and white straw hats.

They were freshly cleaned and laundered and smelled good. Such sweet people.

They would stink to high heaven when their bus pulled into Oaxaca. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog, Wilbur.

 

 

Trying to get laid in America, Part III

A ‘WOMAN-HATER’ PROWLS SAN FRANCISCO

CULTURE.TGLIAIII.vesuviocafeby Dell Franklin

October, 1968

I found a tiny, dark, subterranean garret for $125 a month on Vallejo near Webster on a hill in Pacific Heights. I was on the bottom of a four-story Victorian, whose landlady was Roselee, a Jewess married to a prominent Jewish lawyer—liberal Democrats involved in city politics and owners of 49er season tickets. They lived on the first and second floors above me, rented out the other two floors. Right off, Roselee, a tiny woman with big brown intense eyes, was pressing me to find a job, recommending sales since I evidently appeared clean-cut and impressed her as a normal young veteran on the right path to a future of structure and success.

My priorities were finding a good watering hole, a woman, and a job, in that order, since I did have what I assumed was a three-month nest egg.  Early on, I patrolled Pacific Heights, hitting the Bus Stop—its clientele consisted of smooth, elegant men from the financial section in vested suits and handsome women in pants suits; the Marina Lounge—an “IN” crowd of fluff and enamel, huddled together laughing joyously while sneaking looks at my shaggy ass; the Horse Shoe, a step below but almost as snotty as the Marina Lounge; and Danny’s, a hallway-sized, hole-in-the-wall, just dark enough, with a pool table; not a pickup bar, but a hive of friendly cab drivers, longshoremen, school teachers, mailmen, hardhats and a scattering of amiable, used women older than me. The owner, Danny, a small, balding man around 40, worked most nights and employed a chain-smoking, used-to-be-sexy barmaid working days and let me mooch off the free buffet on Sunday football as 49er fans yelled at the TV. I had no TV, radio, or phone.

After about a week of drinking beers every night and feasting on his cheap hot dogs, I notified Danny that I was in the market for a bartender job. He said he’d keep me in mind, but I’d have to join a union. If I wanted to drive a cab, I had to join a union. San Francisco was a union town. I realized right off that no woman would have a thing to do with me if I didn’t have a job, unless I hung out at Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park and passed myself off as a leftist panhandler with a line of bullshit. I ventured to a bar in this area one evening and several hippie/biker types surrounded me and accused me of being a narc while their women made persecuted faces and hissed at me and called me a pig! I left.

I began hunting jobs with serious intent, entering several over-crowded employment agencies in my newly polished Army low-quarters, Harrah’s Club black slacks, Harrah’s Club white shirt, and thrift-store, clip-on black tie. At one agency, a middle-aged woman behind a desk motioned me over.

“You look like a sales type,” she declared, looking me up and down. “You’re a fine looking lad. You a veteran?” When I nodded, she sat me down and asked did I have any college. I told her two years. She nodded. “I have to give you tests. Don’t worry about them.”

I took a test determining whether I was dim-witted, another determining whether I was a team player and psychologically sound, cheated on both, and was offered several jobs selling surgical instruments, insurance, appliances, cars, all of which were long drives to places like Burlingame and Petaluma. Finally, after turning down several jobs, I settled for a desk sales position at a national electrical supply company in the Market Street industrial area across town.

Roselee was all smiles, observing me in grown-up garb. “I knew you’d find a good job. You’re such a handsome clean-cut young man.” She unnerved me with her bulgy eyes and anxious smile. “Sidney and I hear your typewriter,” she went on. “Are you a writer?”

“I’m trying, Roselee.”

“What are you writing about?”

“I have a novel going, Roselee. I’d rather not divulge its content…it’s bad luck to do so.”

Her wiener dog, a male, began to mount my knee, and Roselee pulled him away. “Sebastian likes you. That means you’re a good person.” She continued smiling. “I bet you’ll find a nice girl soon enough. It’s too lonely trying to be a success without a good partner in life. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” How would she know this? I was a renegade Jew, a disgrace to the Jews, kicked out of Hebrew school, a heathen, hated by all Jews where I grew up.

I nodded.

“I bet you’d find the perfect girl at our synagogue.”

I had to break away from Roselee’s suffocating gaze and retire to my garret, where I put up a dart board above the fireplace so I could fire darts when my writing was so horrible it plunged me into despair and I started hating everything and everybody.

***

I lasted three days at Graybar Electric. I sat beside an ace desk salesman with a framed picture of his wife, kids and dog and stared at the secretaries as he attempted to “train me.” I could not imagine myself nailed down to a desk five days a week leafing through a telephone-size catalogue and talking to faceless beings all over America. At lunch the secretaries huddled and snuck looks at me and made sour faces and nodded emphatically. I got drunk two nights in a row and reported the third morning half an hour late, my face nicked badly from shaving with quivering fingers, my Harrah’s specials rumpled from passing out in them, and had a panic attack, a complete meltdown that had the supervisor ready to call the paramedics as I flung my snap-on tie at him and fled from the vast premises, tromped across the railroad tracks, took a bus to Danny’s, and got drunk.

I decided I needed to tend bar, but most of my nest egg would be sacrificed to a union, with no promise of a job, so I concentrated on writing, reading and hanging around Danny’s and rambling around town in hope of getting laid, regulars in Danny’s telling me there were so many homosexuals around that women “were drooling for straight men.”

Once, as I prepared to set off on my prowling,  which took me to all parts of the city—North Beach, Marina, Nob Hill, Downtown, Golden Gate Park, Fillmore—searching for the right bar with a prospective woman who might just talk to me, much less fuck me, Roselee, ambushed me outside my door.

“Did you lose your job?” she inquired, concerned, fretting, hands clenched together.

“I quit, Roselee. I’m not cut out for sales.”

“I see you’re growing a beard and haven’t got a haircut. You’re not going to be one of those awful hippies, are you?”

“No, Roselee, I hate hippies.”

“What kind of job are you looking for now, honey?”

I was really squirming. “I want to be a bartender, Roselee.”

She sighed, her face filled with suffering for me. “But…that’s a …dead-end job, honey. You’ll never find the right girl at such a…well…uh…questionable profession.”

“Excuse me, Roselee, I have a job interview.” I tried to scurry off as her wiener dog was about to ejaculate on my knee, for he’d been scratching on my door lately and sneaking into my garret and making himself at home, but Roselee snagged my arm.

“Lately, Dell, I’ve heard, well, this sound coming from your room, like something bouncing off the wall…”

“I have a dartboard, Roselee, throwing darts clears my mind for writing; relaxes me.”

She pulled Sebastian off my knee. “You’re not…destroying the walls, are you?”

“Absolutely not, Roselee. Bye.”

I concentrated on North Beach. In Vesuvio’s, next to City Lights Book Store, and supposedly once a hangout for Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, I sat nursing a beer, hoping to engage a literary conversation with a woman of intellect and appreciation of the arts. I’d been reading Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Instead, as I sat at the end of the bar farthest from the front, three girls on the opposite end, all looking like prime prospects to discuss Sartre and Knut Hamsun, sent the bartender over to request that I put out my cigar, as the smoke was bothering them. He seemed a decent sort, and I’d already tipped him a dollar a beer out of conscience as a bar person, even if I couldn’t afford it.

“That’s a pretty nasty cigar,” he said, trying to be reasonable. True, it was the cheapest cigar made, a big, nasty one. I gazed down at the girls. They had long hair parted down the middle, big billowy brightly colored sun dresses, multiple beads and bracelets, no bras, and a proprietary attitude, as if this was “Their” bar. I took a big puff and sent it in their direction, the people alongside me waving at the smoke.

“Tell them no,” I told the bartender. “I’ve got a right to enjoy my cigar.” 

“Come on, man, be cool, huh? They’re cool babes.”

I continued gazing in their direction. As my cigar started to go out, I re-lit it and sat staring forward, puffing, and one of them shouted, “ASSHOLE!”

I tried every bar in North Beach—Gino & Carlo’s, a cozy 1950s bar with Italian male bartenders and city girls smoking cigarettes and hobnobbing with men in white shirts and loosened ties or local blue-collar types shooting pool. I was ignored. The Saloon was overrun by hippies blathering, hugging; dancing to a rock band. A bar on the corner of Grant and Green had a jazzy blues band but the crowd was comatose to the point of paralysis as they danced in ultra slow motion, grins plastered across faces, heads bobbing slowly, the bartender so glazed he didn’t see me beckon for a beer. I was invisible. I tried the Golden Spike on Grant. Three men in berets, smoking cigarettes through long-stemmed holders, turned to watch me sip my beer a few stools down and broke out laughing. They repeatedly huddled, stared, guffawed. One waved with a limp wrist and beckoned me over. I left, finished with North Beach.

I ventured across the bridge to Zack’s down in the Marina in Sausalito, where the truly beautiful people cavorted so gracefully, and skulked out. I was shot down right and left, from the Richmond district to the Tenderloin, where hookers propositioned me. On Polk, I stumbled drunkenly into a gay bar and was accosted by a man who grabbed at my thigh. I stumbled out. Snoozing in Lafayette Park, another gay man propositioned me. I politely told him I was straight. He tried to convince me that I should explore new avenues since I couldn’t find a woman. “How do you know I can’t find a woman?” I asked. “I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”

Like a mole, I stayed in for a few days during a nonstop heavy rain, reading “Hunger,” by Hamsun, and “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” by Hubert Selby Jr. I tried to write but instead furiously hurled darts and ate canned pork and beans and petted poor lonely Sebastian. I emerged in the downpour like some bundled scarecrow and hustled down the hill to Danny’s, where the crowd welcomed me and began offering ideas on finding a job. Danny gave me free beers and hot dogs. I drank and farted and lost at pool. I was in no-man’s land. I wanted no job. I was ceasing to give a shit.

*** 

One rainy Saturday night I sifted like a ghost out of Danny’s and down a block to the Marina Lounge, with the intent of infusing my hatred of women with new ammunition so I could continue my stalled novel, “Woman Hater.” I was clad in soggy sneakers, torn Bermuda shorts, T-shirt, and my Army field jacket. The bar was packed, warm and steamy, the crowd broken up in gaggles of high hilarity as locals and city people joked and laughed with easy familiarity and an affectionate camaraderie, folks not afraid to show their true emotions, in the very prime of their social lives, getting laid, falling in love, doing things together, a nonstop surge of the mating ritual.

I stood scowling by the door as I eyed up a vivacious girl so cute and charming that several men were trying to impress her—an ex-cheerleader type—when I caught the gaze of a very large blonde in a black dress clinging to a thick solid body—all thighs and hips and buttocks and broad shoulders and small breasts, her blunt features and square chin lending her a jock aura. Her friends were hobnobbing with a group of black men in trench coats who sported Afros and muttonchops. Word was from the boys in Danny’s that these jive asses were down in the Marina to fuck classy white girls from the financial district who were dissatisfied with white stiffs and gays and sought a little forbidden fruit.

The big blonde and I continued a stare down. She disengaged from her crowd and I sauntered over, and without thinking, I sneered, “I hate this goddamn place.”

She coolly looked me up and down. “Why is that?”

“It’s phony. The whole goddamn scene’s phony. I can’t play it.”

“Then why are you here if you hate it so?” She held a mixed drink.

“I’m desperate for a woman. I’m a forlorn basket case on an endless famine. It’s contributing to the downfall of my soul. I’m nearing a vortex.”

She sipped her drink. Her blonde hair was thick and plentiful and her complexion smooth and healthy. “Want another beer?”

“Of course.”

Her name was Hillary Marshall. She’d graduated from Sarah Lawrence. Her brother was a tackle on the Army football team at West Point. She was a broker at the stock exchange and roomed with a girl who’d inherited a Victorian home on a hilltop in Pacific Heights. I bought another round and continued a palaver of castigating everything—the so-called revolutions, hippies, fraternities, sororities, the establishment, music, sports…I didn’t dare flirt with her. Every shred of venom stored up in my starved, wrought-up soul spewed forth in a tirade that had her frowning quizzically and at times laughing. Finally, out of breath, I suggested we go to Danny’s, where I planned to show off the first girl to actually talk to me for more than thirty seconds since I’d moved to San Francisco.

“No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “Let’s go to my place.” She told the bartender to call a cab, and we stepped out under the awning in the rain. I didn’t try to touch her.

***

The front room of the Victorian was appointed with ornate furniture, framed oils, a wet bar and a spacious window with a panoramic view of the Marina, the Golden Gate bridge, and Coit Tower. The bay was dull under a driving rain. Hillary poured brandy into huge snifters and handed me one. I checked out the bookcase of handsome first editions and informed her I could NEVER live here because it was too nice.

“Why don’t you take off that odious jacket?”

I took off the jacket and flung it on a couch and began expounding on my nihilistic feelings. “KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN!” came a voice from another room.

“That’s my roommate,” Hillary explained. “You don’t want to meet her.” She watched me refill my snifter with Hennessy’s. “Why don’t you take off those hideous rags?”

I placed my snifter on the bar and began undressing. She watched, nodding her approval. Naked, I walked over and pulled her dress up over her head. She wore no panties or bra. She was all meat and every bit of it was firm. After one long kiss, I was on my knees, squeezing her enormous thighs, my face buried in her blonde muff. She lay back on the sofa and wrapped those thighs around my neck, squeezing my ears, cutting off all sound as I lapped and groveled and growled like a ravenous mongrel devouring a perfectly seasoned meaty bone donated by a soft-hearted butcher. Her groans came in shudders as she pulled me up and atop her and soon the roommate, a severe woman of around 30, was hovering near screaming at us to “take it to the goddamn bedroom!”

We fled to Hillary’s bedroom. In time, I was back for the bottle. We snuggled and wrestled and she rode me more than I rode her before we eventually passed out. I awakened to sun pouring through a dormer window. The bed was empty of Hillary. I heard the shower and minutes later she came in wrapped in a big fluffy white towel and suggested I take a shower and meet her in the kitchen. I wanted to shove my snoot between those rhino thighs one more time but she was in charge and I obeyed her wishes. In the kitchen, she fried eggs and bacon. I asked about the bitchy roommate.

“Church.”

“How’d you like to go to the Ram-49er game at Kezar Stadium?”

She perked right up. “I’d love to go. I love football.”

We took the bus to Kezar, where I managed to secure two cheap end zone tickets from a scalper. The end zone was where black folks from Oakland and the Fillmore sat. Wisely, I’d secured a pint of brandy for the chilly afternoon. Hillary wore a herringbone coat with elbow patches and tight, faded jeans and turtleneck sweater, the eyes of every brother feasting on her big-boned torso. These brothers nodded at me, approving and respectful of my trophy. I was “The Man” and felt I could fall for Hillary and forge a relationship of romping sex and snug companionship and even love. We sat surrounded by brothers in trench coats and fedoras and berets, and their women, who were decked out in tight-fitting garments and loopy hats. The goal posts were very near. Halfway through the first quarter the brother beside me offered up a flask. Hillary and I swigged. I passed my bottle around and they offered a joint and Hillary and I puffed (it was my first time), and I lapsed into a golden haze in which everything was rosy.

During the game, as the only Ram fan, I made comments that had the brothers and sisters guffawing and Hillary rested her hand on my thigh and smiled at my wit and soon the brothers were drawing hard looks from their women for talking to and paying too much attention to Hillary, a marvelous sport. Before I knew it, Ram quarterback Roman Gabriel was barking orders from the one-yard line below us in the final seconds and we were all on our feet. The Rams scored and the game ended in a tie and we all said our good-byes and soul shook. Hillary and I took a couple buses until we ended up at my garret. She took one look at it and announced she was exhausted and had to go home and would I please call a cab?

“I have no phone. I’ll drive you.”

I hadn’t driven in a while and the battery was dead so I pushed the VW downhill until it caught and jumped in. At the curb of the towering Victorian in the plushest area, I asked her out, only to discover she had an out-of-town boyfriend. “I like you, and you’re a lot of fun,” she said. “But I’m not sure many women can take you in anything but small doses at this stage of your life. Thanks for the game. I had a great time.”

“Get a hold of me when you’re ready for small doses,” I croaked, my voice barely audible.

***

As my money dwindled and the rains came down harder and harder, seemingly nonstop, day after day, I ceased trying to find a female who might take me in small doses and became a shut-in. I paced my room, typed angry, self-pitying, pious, pretentious, plagiarist garbage, tore it to shreds, read, tossed darts, ate pork and beans, drank Brown Derby beer, scurried down the hill sans umbrella when I became claustrophobic and nursed a lone beer in Danny’s, waiting for him to hire me, waiting to hear about job applications from the post office and recreation department.

I descended into a black vortex of morbid and bitter rage directed at myself and the world and its occupants. The vortex swallowed me whole as a whale swallows a minnow and I swam about blindly in the soggy stinking darkness until I was spewed out upon the wasteland of desolate America, a crippled crab isolated from the kingdom, unwelcome, wallowing in the self-imposed morass. I began hulking through the streets of San Francisco, anger and sorrow oozing from my every pore as people wielding umbrellas and brief cases dodged me, eyes averted. At Danny’s, I settled at the far end of the bar, a morose figure hunched over a warm beer, uncommunicative.

I raged in the garret, felt myself spinning downward into the vortex, seeking bottom. I considered walking around the world penniless until I expired. I kicked and tossed my worthless possessions and hurled darts at the board like a fire-balling baseball pitcher, ripping it into tatters and chipping away the painted brick wall when missing. I wept. Steinbeck, my idol, died, and I wept some more. I spent Christmas and New Year’s walking the streets, passing illuminated windows of homes and bars and restaurants out of which poured the bubbling party voices and rich laughter of those in harmony with the universe. One night I picked up my typewriter and surged into the street in a blinding rain and bashed it upon the asphalt, shattering it, kicking it down the hill. In the morning, Roselee banged on my door. I opened it and she jumped back in a state of fright. She gathered her courage and asked to see my room as Sebastian slithered in and jumped on my bed. I motioned her in and she gaped in awe at the tattered dartboard and massacred wall above the fireplace. She was speechless.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I told her. “I’ve got two weeks left on my rent. I HATE San Francisco, and it hates me. Take the damage out of my security deposit. I’m sorry, Roselee, I’ve become unhinged.”

I had a $103 to my name and decided to drive my VW back to LA, hit the open road with thumb out, head for New Orleans and Mardi Gras, try and find a job on a river boat, and forget about women. I no longer cared what happened to me. It was a feeling of mountainous relief. §

Dell Franklin writes from his upscale hovel in the beautiful seaside town of Cayucos, Calif., where he resides with his rescue dog, Wilbur. Dell is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice.

A nation of junk junkies

CULTURE.JUNK JUNKIESby Dell Franklin

As Americans, or perhaps humans on this planet, we have a fascination and obsession with junk. We are literally in love with junk and without it have no life and little else to live for—it is possibly more important than books or movies and sometimes friends and relatives, takes priority over almost everything and makes the world go around.

We love to shop for junk. We love to get good deals on junk. We love to walk away with a sly, smug grin after a transaction for some especially coveted and valuable junk and notify our friends that “Boy, did I get a deal on this latest piece of junk. I stole it!”

We are very sensitive and protective of our junk. If somebody does not notice our junk, or is not as impressed with it as we are, we feel offended, almost resentful, maybe depressed. We are baffled when nobody likes or cares about our junk; and even more disturbing is a person who despises all junk (especially state-of-the-art junk owners standing guard over their junk like grim sentries) and castigates it for what it really is—junk.

My own history of junk, and, worse, transporting it, is probably minimal compared to most citizens of the world. In the beginning, from 1967 until 1970, I lived a gypsy existence, bumming around the country, moving everything I owned either in a backpack as I hitchhiked, or in a sputtering VW bug. Then I settled in Hermosa Beach and lived in a studio garret from 1970 until 1978, and when I moved to a bigger studio in Manhattan Beach I needed only to borrow a station wagon and move all my junk in one trip. In 1980, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a friend, and this time I had a station wagon of my own and had accumulated some yard sale furniture, so it took me two trips to move further north in Manhattan Beach.

Six years later I moved to California’s Central Coast and it took a caravan of two pickups and my station wagon to move my junk to a one-bedroom bungalow in Shell Beach. After 2 1/2 years there I had to make several trips over several days with the aid of a friend to move all my junk further north to Cayucos—my first real ordeal.

In Cayucos, I lived in a one-bedroom cottage for over four years. Moving my junk four blocks north to my next one-bedroom cottage on the luxurious “Riviera of Cayucos” of Pacific Avenue proved to be one of the most brutalizing experiences in my life. It took me a week! I filled an entire dumpster behind the local market with junk. I was seething and raging at myself for amassing the mountain of junk I had to deal with. I hurled it angrily out the door onto my lawn, cursed it, kicked it; tossed it in my old pickup, muttering to myself like a madman. There was no end to my junk. I had a yard sale and my girlfriend laughed at me along with those weekend junk scavengers who shook their heads and motored off, not one of them offering me as much as a dime for my junk! I tried finally to give it away, but nobody wanted it. People shrank from my junk as if it were a putrefying, lethal disease, for it was some of the most worthless, useless, ugly junk I’d ever laid my eyes on. How had I allowed this to happen to me?

Five years later, I moved further north near downtown Cayucos and it took two friends and me only a couple hours to move. I no longer collected junk. I drove by all yard sales and thrift stores with blinders. I bought only what I needed. I found myself jettisoning junk as soon as I inspected a smidgen of clutter and felt instant relief and gratification upon its extraction. Nowadays, I sometimes find myself refusing to buy junk my girlfriend insists I need, for I am still shell-shocked from my ordeal ten years ago.

Recently, I watched people move out of the two residences across the street. They were ‘60s people, meaning ancient non-operational motor homes in driveways used exclusively for storage of junk or occasional guest lodging. There were always a few old VW buses, usually non-operational, clogging the streets and driveways and yards. One neighbor had a shed, the other, in a two story abode, a garage. I anticipated their possessing a lot of junk, but was thoroughly flabbergasted when both parties moved within a month of each other.

The couple with the garage moved first, began extracting junk and piling it in the driveway, yard and along the street—a literal mountain of junk such as I’d never observed in my life. They held several yard sales after sorting through their junk, over which the expert junk junkies sniffed and bartered, hauling off the more serviceable items early; then returning later for passable freebies. These friendly neighbors tried to give me some of their junk as I perched on a chair watching them, but I refused to go near the place and was content to watch the parade for days. Every time I thought they might run out of junk, they managed to extract more and build a new pile and have a new sale. Eventually, the sight of this spectacle caused me to further downsize, especially when the entire family pitched in to load up the largest moving van rentable, filled it up, and then filled the last VW bus that would be towed by the rental to Oregon, where they were going to rent many acres and a barn in the wilderness to stash their junk.

My other neighbor, a single female artist, took a month to move, and managed to give me a chair, typing paper, and a cat. I got off easy. With the help of a huge cadre of friends, she extracted junk from the shed, the motor home and created a pile to rival that of the ex-neighbors, who were replaced by folks with a reasonable amount of state-of-the-art junk now that the neighborhood had been gentrified by the influx of wealthy city people from LA and San Francisco. The artist’s yard sale drew the usual junk junkies who swooped early to haul off the good stuff and then returned later for freebies, and finally, when she could no longer give any of it away, she paid a real junkman to haul the rest to the dump.

The moral of the story, and my final contention, is that junk will eventually be the end of us. It won’t be the population explosion, global warming, plague, pollution, famine, nuclear war or terrorist attacks that will end our existence—it’ll be all this goddamn junk! Where the hell is it going to go? How deep are our landfills? How vast our oceans? Sooner or later we’re all going to be smothered under a massive slag heap of junk.

And if this doesn’t kill us, well, fighting over the junk will. Crime is up because we steal and even kill for it. Countries hate us because we’ve got too much of it as well as the most sophisticated junk ever manufactured by man. Divorcees squabble, war and sue over junk. People are jealous and bitter because the other person has superior junk, so it breeds malevolent feelings toward fellow man. Worst of all, a person often can’t die in peace without worrying about how much damage his children are going to wreak upon one another over divvying up their junk.

When all is said and done, we are no match for the junk, and when the world is finally rid of humans and animals, and junk prevails, a perturbed and confused God might view the earth as a testimony to the destructive nature and soullessness of junk, as well as man’s pathological desire to possess it, and either laugh or cry at His experiment. §

Dell Franklin, founding publisher of The Rogue Voice, composed this essay on a junky computer.

 

TRYING TO GET LAID IN AMERICA, PART II

CULTURE.GETTING LAID, PART II

“I don’t need friends. Fuck friends. I need pussy!”

The latest red-hot lover hits Lake Tahoe

1968 April

by Dell Franklin

I found a one-bedroom apartment in a triplex on the California side of Highway 50, a few miles from the south shore ensemble of casinos and hotels—a gorgeous spot among the pines, 50 yards from the lake. My landlord was JC Breedlove, who lived in an apartment on the other side of the one beside me, which was inhabited by truck driver Joe Lebeau and his wife and black Lab. Everything I owned was moved north in a VW I bought at a police auction after selling my Chevy to a man in Watts for $50.

Right off I was hired as a bar boy at Harrah’s Club casino. I was issued black slacks, two white shirts and a black tie. I was assigned to the large, rectangular Keno bar, the busiest bar in the house, and my job was to stock, wash glasses, replace empty bottles and canisters, empty ash trays, cut fruit, change water, keep the bar spotless. In short, I was a flunky never allowed to mix a drink, a gofer learning the business from the bottom up.

I was given the 3 to 11 evening shifts, worked hard and got on well with the bartenders, who were top pros, and heeded their advice and tutoring when they realized I wanted to be one of them as I scoped the cocktail waitresses in outfits revealing the most luscious breasts and asses and legs I’d yet glimpsed in person. One of the bartenders, Bob Brown, a blond matinee idol type around 30, decided to become by mentor. He had a wife and two kids, the wife a former cocktail waitress now working as an office person at Harrah’s after being demoted for growing fat. All the younger cocktail waitresses were after Bob and he was banging them steadily. His wife had wised up and wanted a divorce. He confided in me that he no longer desired his wife and that most of the older cocktail waitresses were ruthless money-grubbers disillusioned with men and there wasn’t “hardly one who wasn’t a can of worms when you opened them up, but they all wanna fuck, and the best way to make in-roads with them is in the employees’ cafeteria and lounge.”

I was so far biding my time, observing some of the lower level Keno-runners and change girls, wondering how I could casually move in on these gals in the cafeteria. Once, when Bob and I sat together on a break, he introduced me to Megan, a divorced cocktail waitress around 30 who issued me a fleeting smile and turned immediately to a bartender from the casino bar. It was obvious these women were not interested in callow bar boys gazing at their endowments in a drooling trance.

One afternoon on my day off, as I read the LA Times in the sun in front of my new digs, a huge Husky named Duke, who lived with a large family down the street, shoved his cold nose on my arm and peered up at me with piercing gray eyes. Joe Lebeau came over and said, “He doesn’t warm up to many folks, looks like he’s partial to you. That family of his don’t pay him the time of day. He goes off for a week at a time and scavenges, raids chicken coops…he’s been shot at and got buckshot in his ass. He ain’t a pet. He’s got that Alaskan wolf in him.”

No animal or human had ever looked at me like Duke did, and he was my immediate best friend, waiting for me to get off work, going for walks with me, sleeping on my porch. JC Breedlove, who had no dog, came by one morning. He drove a dusty jeep and spotless red Porsche and was tall and sandy-haired and very relaxed, almost insouciant, and Joe LeBeau, who’d rented from him for years, said he was a world-class skier who’d been an alternate on the Olympic team 15 years back, didn’t work, owned this triplex and other properties and investments, spent summers playing tennis and fishing, and skied all over the hot spots like Aspen in winter, and had literally fucked every show girl, dancer and cocktail waitress worth fucking in Lake Tahoe.

JC grinned at me, observing my rusty old VW. “So how’s the latest red-hot lover in Lake Tahoe doing?” he asked. “Making out?” He had to know that so far I’d spent every night home by myself. I’d seen him walk a new beauty to her or his car nearly every morning, kiss them and watch them drive off, or drive them home, and he always made it a point to wave at me as I read my paper.

“I’m workin’ on things, JC. Got a few skillets in the fire.”

“I see that tennis racket in your car. You any good?”

“I’m not very athletic, JC. Probably wouldn’t have a chance against a stud like you.” He was about six-foot-four, Hollywood handsome and oozed self-confidence. “But I’m probably a better tennis player than a red-hot lover.”

He laughed. “Hey, it’s only a matter of time before a good looking kid like yourself starts reelin’ ‘em in. I mean, if you can’t land ‘em here, yah can’t land ‘em anywhere.”

§§§

The cocktail waitresses were all on intimate terms with the bartenders, and ignored me as much at the bar as in the cafeteria, except for Ginger, a tall, long-legged blonde with a substantial high-shelved rack. She wore glistening ruby red lipstick and caked-on make-up and black fishnet hose, talked in a slow Southern drawl and, unlike the other waitresses, who would literally fight over a big tipper at craps and blackjack tables, was genuinely sweet and the most generous tipper to bartenders. She was the only one to smile at me and hold that smile when I hovered near the service station when a bartender mixed her a drink.

Bob Brown informed me she was “sucking off” fellow bartenders, including him once, a pit boss, dealers, and a security guard. He saw my jaw drop. “She likes to give blowjobs. She won’t fuck. Maybe she’s afraid to get knocked up. But she gives world-class head. You should go after her. She’s not a bitch like the rest of ‘em. Dell, you buy her a couple gin-and-tonics and she’ll give you hellacious head all night long.”

I wanted more than head all night long. I liked Ginger. I wanted to nuzzle her, suck those magnificent creamy tits, lather her pussy with my drippy tongue, and fuck her with triumphant passion and tenderness. I considered asking her to join me in the wee hours at the lounge show at the Sahara casino down the street, where Louie Prima and Keely Smith entertained in the wee hours. I savored the thought of us hanging out together and forging a relationship. So I bided my time, anticipating the perfect opportunity in asking her out, and hung out every night after work at the Keno bar with free drink tickets and talked to a chunky but pretty 22-year-old blonde Keno runner from Portland, Oregon, Gwen, who’d just graduated from Oregon State and was going to be a high school English teacher. She lived in a nearby cabin with her best friend, was pleasant, loved talking about literature and traveling. I confided in her I was a writer, and she wanted to see my work, but I could hardly show her a manuscript titled, “The Woman Hater,” which was filled with misogynist vitriol.

I bought her drinks with my tickets. I lit her cigarettes. One night I asked her to drive around the lake with me, since there was a full moon. She said she’d love to. We drove a while and stopped alongside the lake and sat on some rocks to watch the moonlight shimmer on the lake. When I put my arm around her waist, she stiffened. At the end of the drive I walked her to the door of her cabin and tried to filch a kiss but she held me at bay.

“Please don’t,” she pled. “”Can’t we just be friends?”

“I wanna be more than friends,” I croaked. “You’re a beautiful woman.”

“Oh I am not. I’m a plain Jane. You just want to sleep with me, because you’re horny. I just like being your friend, because you’re such a nice guy, and our talks are so interesting. You’re the only guy around who’s not about money, and gambling, and drugs….” She offered me a winsome smile, pecked me on the cheek and dashed into her cabin.

The following night at the Keno bar she sat down beside me and for the first time I did not buy her a drink or light her cigarette. She asked was I mad at her because she wouldn’t sleep with me, and I said yes, and downed a shooter of bourbon. She started to cry and I got up and walked over to a blackjack table, after being warned by Brown that the casino got back 60 percent of their employees’ earnings on the tables, and won $500 after spending four hours counting cards and felt much better after returning home at 6 in the morning.

Later on, perched in my chair drinking coffee, JC walked another dazzling beauty to her car. When she was gone, I waved him over and handed him $400, which covered my rent through August. Standing over me, he said, “Looks like Tahoe’s latest red-hot lover’s the hottest red-hot gambler, ey? Well, be careful, kiddo—sometimes winning right off’s the worst thing to happen to a guy. And hey,” he grinned conspiratorially, “ready to gamble some of that lucre on the tennis courts, stud? Say…twenty bucks a set?”

“Catch me when I get some sleep, dude.” I said. He gave me a long disappointing look and took off on his daily two-mile run through the woods, an accomplished man’s man in his prime, a near-perfect specimen in perfect shape—local legend.

§§§

June arrived and I still hadn’t gotten laid, though I was becoming chummier with Ginger, making her laugh, thrilled when she sat down beside me with her tray in the cafeteria and not fellow cocktail waitresses who did everything to sabotage her shifts and tables so as to squeeze her out of the big money and talked disparagingly about her drawl, her alluring shake of a walk, her make-up—a gaggle of vicious hens pecking away at a sweet, ripe chicken. She was from Memphis, and had come to Lake Tahoe to “get away from home and seek a little adventure.”  I told her of my desire to hitch-hike around the country and maybe the world, and work on a riverboat on the Mississippi River, like Mark Twain. She told me, “Ah jes’ luuuuve lis’nin t’ yawl, honey. Yawl’s so funny, just a doll.”

One night Bob and I ran into Ginger and the three of us went to the Sahara lounge show. When Bob excused himself early, winking at me, I asked Ginger out. She said she liked steak and I invited her for a barbecue at my place, and afterwards, “We could hit the cabarets.”

“Yawl sooooo gallant. A jes’ love that in a man.”

I bought two steaks, red potatoes, a bottle of gin, and picked Ginger up at the casino bar in Harrah’s. She wore heels, a red mini-skirt with black fishnet hose, and a red sweater. On a gorgeous evening, I started the barbecue around 7. Duke was there, and he nosed right up to Ginger, courtly, sweet. We sat in sun chairs, sipping gin and tonics. JC, heading for his Porsche, spotted us, ambled over, grinning. “You devil,” he said, beaming. “Looks like you’re entertaining the best looking gal in town.” After I introduced them, JC, like a fond uncle, said, “You take care of my boy now. He’s a fine lad.” We watched him zoom off in a cloud of dust.

The steaks and potatoes turned out perfect, and we shared them with Duke. Ginger raved about how beautiful it was and how lucky I was to live here and I asked her what she wanted to do with her life, and she said she eventually wanted marriage and a family after she sewed her wild oats, and when I told her of my desire to write novels she said, “Yawl still gonna be Ginger’s friend when yawl famous and they make movies from yawl’s books?”

“I’d like to be more than your friend, Ginger.”

“Yawl so sweet.”

We had several drinks. When it cooled, we sat on the furnished davenport and I kissed her. She kissed back, touching the back of my neck, and I nibbled her cheeks and neck, touched her breast, felt her shudder. I found myself lifting her skirt and tried to slide my finger into her pussy and she jumped up as if electrocuted.

“What yawl DO’in, Day’uhl? What kind-a girl yawl thank ah am?” She straightened her skirt. “Ah’m a propah suth’un lady.”

“That’s not what I heard. I heard you’ve fucked just about every guy at Harrah’s.”

She broke into tears. I sat quivering. “That is an awful lie…who told yawl them horrible lies?”

“Everybody gets it from Ginger, is what I heard, except me.”

“Oh God,” she sobbed. “A thought yawl was my friend.”

“I don’t need friends. Fuck friends. I need pussy!”

She stormed outside, a broken giraffe. I followed her. She got into my VW and demanded a ride home. Duke stared at me with concern. I took the bottle of gin to my sun chair and guzzled from it. Ginger held her face and cried in chest-quaking spasms, then jumped out and took off in her high heels.

“Nogood rotten bastard!” she screamed.

I finished off the gin and passed out on the couch and woke up with a head that felt like it had been clubbed. It was noon before I was in my sun chair, in the shade, Duke beside me. JC walked Ginger to his Porsche. While opening the door, he spotted me and shook his head slowly. I went into the house and tried to write, but all I could do was cry, and after I finished crying I went back out to sit with Duke until JC returned and ambled over.

“How yah feelin,’ stud?”

“Wonderful,” I sneered.

“Gotta watch the booze, kiddo—leads to bad decisions and foul behavior. Myself, I only have a few, keeps me in control.” He issued me his favorite fond uncle grin. “Ready for some tennis—say twenty bucks?”

I went for my racket. I was in sneakers, without socks. We drove to the local clay courts in his jeep and began warming up. It was a very hot day, the sun at its zenith, and sweat gushed out of me. Joe had fine strokes, as if he’d taken lessons, but he was not agile nor a scrambler. I had quick feet and good hands from being a baseball infielder and won the first few games by leaping and diving all over the courts. I sensed his frustration as he dashed back and forth and lunged at the net, swiped futilely at passing shots or galloped backwards awkwardly after lobs. Tennis was more my game, not his, and I let him get close; then closed him out in two sets, shaking hands at the net. He was not happy.

“I’ll get you back next time,” he said. “My serve wasn’t on today.”

“Hey, I gotta win at something, huh?”

He put his arm around me as we walked off. “I’ve watched you for months now, and you’re a mess, kiddo. I fear for you.”

“Guess I got a lot to learn.”

“Well, you don’t need to be doing it the hard way.”

“Guess things come kind of easy for you, huh?”

“Always have, good buddy.”

“Except in tennis, ey?”

He flashed me a hard look as we sat in his jeep, then peeled two twenties from a wad and handed it over. The drive back was silent.

§§§

I gave up trying to get laid and upped my drinking and hit the blackjack tables. Free drinks arrived at the tables after drinking several tickets at the bar and sometimes I didn’t return to my apartment until dawn or late morning. I was usually sleep-deprived and hungover behind the bar and found myself giddy and became a cut-up, life of the party, keeping the bartenders amused and often laughing throughout my shifts. The bartenders sometimes paused to gaze at me with expressions I took as questioning my sanity.

My after-work drinking/gambling became a sort of siege of the body and soul. In the employees’ lounge, I ignored wholesome white college sorority girls from the Midwest who were summer recruits to cocktail or run Keno or host or make change for slot machine players and were hit on in the ongoing and exploding sexual grab-bag by white All-American college fraternity boys from the Midwest who were recruited as bar boys and bus boys and Keno runners who partied and got laid while I sulked over Robert Kennedy’s assassination and drove around the Lake with Duke on that hellish night and stalled on my novel and felt the sting of Ginger stiffening in my presence and gritting her teeth.

I became a slave to the tables and ate deep into my bank account. Brown warned me to cease gambling. I had so little money that I used my tips to eat in the cafeteria and had hot dogs at home, if I ate at all. One night after work I hit the blackjack table with about $40 and within an hour had a grand. I’d been betting rashly when on a cold streak, and cowardly when I was hot, a loser. This time, when I got hot I ran with it, and no feeling in life compared to being so torrid you knew which card was coming, the heat escalating to blinding white fever, turning me momentarily bullet-proof and immune from the continual impression I had of myself as repulsive to women and waking up each morning with a painful hard-on and an empty bed.

I kept gambling, built my stack up to $1,500. I lost two hands and quit and had a drink at the Keno bar where the graveyard bartender, Wilkie, told me to “get my butt home.” Instead I went down to the Sahara and spent the morning losing it. I went back to Harrah’s and cashed my paycheck and lost it and borrowed $20 from a bartender at the Keno bar and lost it and later found myself waiting for the bank to open, only to realize I’d drained my account. So I drove to the electric company and withdrew my deposit and returned to Harrah’s and built it up to around $500 and lost it, hurried home, showered, dressed, went to work, made $35 in tips, lost it, went to the parking lot to discover my car wouldn’t start and, in front of beautiful college couples, arms around each other, kicked the car, jumped upon and crushed the hood in a cursing rage, returned to the Keno bar and tried to borrow from Brown and Fordyke and Holliday, who refused to loan me anything, so I hitchhiked home and collapsed.

Woke up on my day off and borrowed $5 from Joe Lebeau and walked a mile to the market for hot dogs, shared them with Duke and was about to doze off in my sun chair when I discovered a show-stopping statuesque redhead dancer from the Sahara sunning herself in a string bikini in front of JC’s apartment. JC came out, spotted me, grinned.

“Hey, you red-hot lover, ready to let me get my money back in tennis?”

I went for my racket. We drove to the tennis courts in JC’s jeep, the redhead sitting up front, the scent of her perfume having a delirious affect on me. The day was blazing hot. While we warmed up, the redhead sat on a chair holding a parasol. The match started and I attacked the net and ran Joe like a frothing dog. I gasped for breath and didn’t care if I died. I beat him the first set and gave him a vicious thrashing the second, at one point coming to the net when he made a weak backhand lob and slamming the ball into his chest. He gulped for breath as his redhead held both hands to her breasts in dramatic fashion. On one knee, he rose and nodded slowly in recognition of retaliation and revenge from a desperate man with nothing to lose.

After I polished him off, we shook hands at the net and he paid me off on the ride back, the redhead doting on JC, who was irksome. I walked to the local market for a case of Brown Derby beer and two sirloins to share with Duke, who now followed me everywhere, even to the market.

 §§§

My regimen now consisted of working, drinking afterwards and blowing my tips on the tables, hitchhiking home, walking Duke down to and along the lake, and crashing. Fellow employees regarded me furtively. I hung with no one. I was warned by a senior bar boy to get a haircut and clean the crud off my tie. I threatened to strangle him and he scurried away.

One morning, around 2, I was hitchhiking home along Highway 50 when a car pulled alongside me and stopped. Inside was my father. He was 54, and owned a thick neck and meaty face with a thrice broken nose and eyes that were savvy, tough and missed nothing. Driving me home, he almost growled, “Your eyes look like piss-holes in the snow. You’ve lost at least twenty pounds. You look like a goddamn scarecrow. What the hell’ve you been doing to yourself? You haven’t turned to drugs, like the rest of these pussies, have you?”

“Of course not. I’m still your son.”

He heaved a huge sigh of relief. “I’m here because I checked your bank account after not hearing from you for months and saw that it was empty. I had a bad feeling. Looks to me like you’ve been on a drinking/gambling crusade.”

I nodded.

“Took me an hour to find your place. The damndest thing happened—I’m trying to look in the window, and I feel a big nose up my ass. I thought a bear had me. I turn around and it’s the biggest goddamn dog I’ve ever seen. He must be your friend, because he liked my smell. Helluva a dog. We had a nice visit.”

I explained that Duke was my devoted pal. Back at the apartment dad hauled in his overnight bag and howled, “Jesus Christ, this place stinks, and where’s the goddamn lights?” He worked a switch.

I lit a couple candles in the kitchen. “Gambled away the deposit.”

“What about water? You can’t live without water!”

“I got cold water, Dad. I’ve adjusted, like the Army.”

“This place is like the black hole of Calcutta.” He sat at the kitchenette which was littered with paper cups, paper plates, newspapers, napkins, wrappers, etc., and watched me plunk down on the sofa and remove my chewed-up low quarters. “I didn’t raise you to live like this.” He was getting emotional.

“I live as I choose, dad. It’s my life.”

“You won’t last long in life going on like this.”

I got up and walked into my bedroom and collapsed into a deep sleep. I awoke before noon and entered the living room, which was spotless, the lights on, coffee on the gas range, dad at the kitchenette, petting Duke. I sat down across from them with coffee.

“You didn’t have to do this, dad.”

“Finish your coffee and then let’s get some food in you, boy.”

We drove to a nearby diner and dad bought bunkhouse breakfasts and afterwards we went to the Harrah’s parking lot where my car had accumulated a month of dust, tree sap and bird shit. Dad was aghast at the crushed hood. “Looks like I raised a goddamn psycho.”

He had the car towed and mechanics put in a new battery and alternator. He followed me back to the triplex. We sat in the kitchen. Duke sat beside me. Dad gazed at me. I was his only son and he staked his life on me. His eyes grew moist and his face was etched with pain.

“I guess I don’t understand a lot of things,” he said. “Here you were a great prospect headed to the major leagues, and you fuck that up, and now you wanna be a writer? It doesn’t make sense. But it’s your life, and Dell, I got faith in you. Truth is, I’m proud of you for going against the grain. It takes guts to do what you’re doing. Thing is, I don’t want it to drive you to where you are now any more than baseball did.” He pushed a tear from his cheek. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, son. I know your heart, and you’re gonna pull out of this mess…by God, you’re my blood.”

It had been so long since we’d embraced, an act I’d always shunned as the tough son of a tough father, but we hugged. Then I walked him out to his rental. He had a long drive to Reno and the plane to LA. He petted Duke, grinned at me. “You made a good friend here. I’m thankful for that.”

We watched him drive off. He’d given me a $20 bill and warned me not to blow it on booze or gambling, but to eat. I went to my supervisor and asked for as much work as possible and since it was the height of the tourist season he gave me seven shifts a week and 12-hour shifts on weekends. I worked 35 straight nights and after each one I walked past the bar and the gaming tables and drove home to walk Duke and afterwards plunged into deep, dreamless sleep. I saved every penny until I paid off my debts and amassed a sizable nest-egg and informed my supervisor I was finished in October. I was headed to San Francisco, where the odds of getting laid were much better due to the high gay population, so I thought.

Before leaving, I cornered Ginger. “I want to apologize,” I said. “You are the nicest person in this damn snake pit, Ginger. I had you all wrong. I can’t bear to hurt you, and have you hate me. Please forgive me, you beautiful, sweet Southern belle. I’m sorry.”

“Oh Day’uhl,” she said, and actually touched my cheek “Yawl was the only boy ah wanted all along. But yawl’s so hungry…a man so hungry scares a girl.”

Back at the triplex, my car packed, Joe Lebeau and  JC and I shook hands. JC put his arm around my shoulders and walked me to the car.

“Gonna miss yah, kid. One of these days I expect to walk through an airport and see a best-seller by the greatest red-hot lover ever to hit Lake Tahoe.” He grinned and winked, and I laughed, and said, “Thanks for the tough love, JC.”

Duke had watched me nervously all morning. I knelt down beside my car and hugged him and he emitted a sound I’d never heard before, a deep, brief moan, and a shudder, and he snatched my forearm in his jaws and bit down hard, just hard enough to let me know how he felt.

I jumped into my car and took off. JC and Joe waved. Duke followed me half a block at a trot, then stopped when I turned the corner. Halfway to San Francisco, I still saw him in my rearview mirror—imperious lone wolf, eyes piercing, my best friend. §

Dell Franklin is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice and writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where getting laid happens almost every day.