American Dreams (45 page)

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'Let me tell you' -- Carl grabbed the bar as his knees went rubber on him -- 'about your sweet, innocent wife.' Barney picked up the refilled glass and threw the liquor in Carl's face.

,'You say one word about her, I'll kill you, you son of a bitch.'

Carl cocked his fist, stepped away from the bar. He wound up to hit Barney, but before he could swing, the room tilted and he felt himself going down. The back of his head slammed the floor. One flying hand upset a bar spittoon, dumping foul brown water all over his sleeve. His other arm stretched out toward the door. Barney stomped on it.

'You bum. You miserable, lying bum. Call my wife a liar, will you?'

Barney kicked Carl's ribs. 'Ypu're through. You're fired.' He pulled out a silver money clip in the shape of a dollar sign and contemptuously

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dropped a couple of bills on Carl's shirt.

Conversation in the saloon had stopped. All Carl heard was a vast 280

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rushing in his ears. His eyesight dimmed despite his resolve to stay awake. He rolled his head from side to side, picking up sawdust. He hoped he wouldn't puke all over himself.

'Couple of you boys throw this bum in the alley,' Barney said. 'Then it's time to celebrate. The old exterminator just got rid of some vermin.

Barney Oldfield buys the next round.'

Rough hands seized Carl's wrists, wrenched his arms over his head, dragged him across the floor. That was all he remembered.

He left his seedy downtown hotel that night, all his worldly possessions packed in one leather grip with a broken clasp. Barney had paid him a whole three dollars to call it quits. Carl had four dollars of his own. He
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didn't need to waste money on Pacific Electric carfare. Besides, he didn't have a destination in mind.

He thought of his sister. Could she find him a spare bed for the night?

Pride canceled that thought almost at once. He'd sleep out in the country somewhere, free.

He turned up the collar of his coat and trudged out of the central city.

His head hurt. His mouth tasted like sewage, and he wondered if he could ever again put so much as a crust of bread in his aching gut. That bastard Barney. Couldn't deal with him man to man, had to trick him and get the upper hand before he threw him out.

He lugged his grip through residential neighborhoods where parlor lights shone. No one had left a lamp burning for him.

He heard oil derricks chugging in back yards. A steam car full of revelers ran him off the road. A train wailed its whistle in the night. He wondered if there'd ever be an end to that road. Around midnight, still hurting and retching occasionally, he lay down in the heady sweetness of an orange grove and slept.

Dusty and sweaty, Carl raised his arm in front of his eyes to hide the red sun. What he'd glimpsed from far down the road, distorted by wavy heat devils, took on clarity and detail.

The machine sat on its tail and two oversized, solid wheels, next to a red barn with a limp wind sock on its roof peak. The biplane's yellow wings were patched in many places. The pilot's seat was small, directly in front of the pusher motor. In front of the seat was a control rod with a wheel.

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Carl had read enough to know the plane resembled those built and flown by Glenn Curtiss, especially the 'Golden Flyer' that had won an upset victory at the 1909 Rheims air show. Early Wight planes had skids and no seat; the pilot lay on his stomach on the lower wing to - what was the word? Aviate.

A sign on the barn advertised

RIVERSIDE SCHOOL OF AERONAUTICS

-Professional Instruction A.

R. (Rtp) Ryan, Owner-Aeronaut

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From inside the barn came the sound of hammering. Carl walked to the doors, .tested them; a chain rattled when he tried to pull them apart.

Around the corner he discovered a regular door, open. He walked in, saw a man on his knees with a hammer. The hammer struck a spark from a big nail head, glanced off. The nail was bent into a curved L; the man swore. He was trying to drive the nail with a misshapen hand. His fingers were gnarled as old roots. „

Too hungry to be deterred by the man's anger, Carl stepped into a shaft of daylight falling through a crack in the barn siding. 'Hello,' he said.

'Got any work here?'

Rip Ryan of Riverside was bent as a hilltop sapling tormented by the wind. Time had carved gullies in his sun-browned cheek; worry had dug them across his forehead. Just over forty, he had a full head of white hair.

He laid his hammer down and took a good ten seconds to rise to a standing position.

'There might be some work,' he said after Carl introduced himself. 'I know there's some coffee. Leave your grip and come on.'

,Carl followed him to a tiny cottage near the barn. It was slow going, for the small, wiry man listed to the left at every other step. Crooked fingers clutched the knob of a polished stick. Arthritis,' he said when he caught Carl staring. 'Curse of my life.'

Ryan poured coffee from a blue enamel pot. They sat on opposite sides of a scarred table. To start conversation Carl said, 'Are you a native, Mr.

Ryan?'

Ryan snorted. 'Hell, do I look like some Spaniard with a land grant?

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Big city. Hated it. The smoke, the noise, the crowding. Lived in a tenement with bad air, no windows, a toilet pail in the corner. My old man swamped out the horsecar barns. Irishman, 282

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no education. Died of too much whiskey. My sainted mother followed him two years later. I was seventeen.'

He drank from his tin cup with a noisy sucking sound. Carl didn't say anything more; listen to someone attentively, they thought well of you.

'Put myself through business college,' Ryan went on. 'Read all the promotional books about southern California peddled by the railroads.

Beautiful scenery. Clear skies. Healthful air. Soon as 1 could, 1 came out here. Went to work over in Redlands. Been there?'

'No, only heard of it.'

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'Kept books for the biggest feed and grain dealer in the county. Hated that too. Office no bigger than a two-hole privy. Didn't see all these blue skies they brag about, except on Sunday. Married a local girl, name of Marie Morrison. Wanted to have children but somehow we couldn't. One Sunday when Marie was visiting her parents in Bakersfield, I blew two dollars on a ten-minute airplane ride at a fair. God A'mighty' - his whole demeanor changed, the air of sour complaint gone -- 'it was like ascending to heaven. It was like having a woman the first time.'

Ryan's beatific look faded quickly. He picked up his tin cup, barely able to fit his fingers around the handle. They were like hooks bending in different directions.

'Knew then and there I couldn't stay in Redlands. Couldn't tell Marie, though, she depended on me. Agonized for three months. Sleepless nights.

Stomach in knots, bowels tied up for days. Finally one Monday morning I just quit. When I came home and broke the news, Marie cursed me and locked herself in the bedroom. I knew that was the end, though she didn't leave for good until two months later.'

He tilted his head to a streaked and grimy window where Carl saw the tips of the biplane's doped wings. 'I had some savings. I put the Eagle together from drawings in magazines. That's what I christened her, the Eagle. Took me a year and three months to finish. I sorted oranges for the

growers' cooperative, picked lettuce and sugar beets, God damn miserable stoop labor, to pay for it. But I was happy.'

'Who taught you to fly?'

'Pilot who knew Glenn Curtiss back East. You know who Curtiss is?'

Carl nodded. Like the Wright brothers, young Curtiss had owned a bicycle shop, in upstate New York. Before he built and raced his own planes in competition with the Wrights, Curtiss was a familiar name in motorcycle racing - a chaser of land speed records, like Barney. One of his early patrons was the inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Curtiss adapted his No Laughing Matter 283

compact and well-regarded motorcycle engine for airplanes and tried to sell it to Wilbur and Orville Wight. They dismissed him. So he went into business to compete with them. He was most famous for winning the Coupe Internationale, Gordon Bennett's trophy for the fastest twenty kilometers around the pylons at the international air meet in Rheims, France, two years ago.

'The Curtiss method,' Ryan mused. 'It's peculiar, but it works. I soared like an angel. I was a new man. Forty-four years old and I felt life was just
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starting. Had a terrible accident one afternoon, flying near here. A freak lightning storm hit the Eagle. I crashed into telephone wires, an aviator's worst nightmare. The wires stopped the fall, and I walked off with a few scratches. I thought I had a charmed life. Then' - a twist of his mouth as he held.up his malformed hands - 'this. I'd felt it coming on for a while.

My old man suffered from it, one reason he drank. It hit me bad. I barely managed to rebuild the Eagle by myself. I can't fly her anymore, but I can teach others. The Curtiss method. I never touch the plane. You have any desire to fly?'

'I do, definitely.'

'Then I can teach you. No cost, but you'd have to help me build an addition to the barn. Been waiting for someone to come along who could do it.'

'I'm your man,' Carl said.

'Thought you might be when you walked in,' Ryan said.

54 No Laughing Matter

After B.B. hired her, Lily jumped into her new duties with enthusiasm.

She worked late with her bedroom door shut and Fritzi admonished to stay out. Lily's boudoir table, once cluttered with perfumes and cosmetic jars, overflowed with books and newspapers she combed for ideas.

Her first story before the camera, one reel, was Madolyns March. Lily had picked up on Sophie Pelzer's passion for the suffrage cause when she met B.B.'s wife. Kelly complained that the subject was too controversial, but he was overruled.

The heroine of Lily's scenario was a small-town girl who went to a 284

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nickelodeon where she saw the famous, often jailed English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, on her 1909 visit to New York. Without actually showing a theater screen, Eddie cleverly cut in actuality footage of Mrs.

Pankhurst coming down the gangplank of a White Star liner, to a tumultuous welcome, then parading in front of Carnegie Hall with her American sisters. Instantly converted, Madolyn staged a one-girl march in her town, represented by a Hollywood residential street. A nasty sheriff jailed Madolyn, but her lawyer fiance, after a largely unmotivated epiphany, won her freedom and swore to love, honor, and support a suffrage amendment
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after they were married.

Lily's quixotic spelling of the heroine's name charmed B.B. Amused, she said to Fritzi, 'Hell, you think I know the right way to spell anything? 1 just wrote it down the way it sounded. I don't guess I'll ever tell him that!'

When Eddie finished Madolyn s March, with Madge Singleton, a New York actress who'd appeared in several Pal pictures, he cast Fritzi in A Merry Mix-Up^ a silly comedy he concocted in an afternoon. Fritzi objected to another comedy part, to no avail. She played twin sisters, Tess and Bess. Each had a suitor, brothers. The actor hired as one of them was a pie-faced young man named Roscoe Arbuckle. He was sweetnatured and round as a tub. Like most actors he was sociable and garrulous. He told Fritzi he'd been a scene shifter in vaudeville, a black face monologist, and a tenor in musicals before he began working as a movie extra. He went by the name Fatty.

In the story, much confusion ensued because Fatty and the other suitor, Pete, couldn't tell the twins apart until the penultimate scene, in which a rowboat tipped, dumping Tess into Echo Park Lake, near downtown Los Angeles. Since Tess was the twin who couldn't swim, Fatty recognized his brother's sweetheart when he rescued her. This prepared everyone for the ending, a double wedding at the altar, shot double exposure, two Fritzis.

Because Fritzi made a mild fuss about the slapstick, Eddie hired a utility player to handle the fall from the rowboat. He was an odd little man named Windy White. About five feet five, he had a wrinkled brown face, a sunburned bald head, and legs like parentheses. He said hardly a word to anyone.

For the shot he donned bloomers, a dress, and a wig. He tumbled out of the rowboat on cue, using a lot of hammy gestures, the acting style No Laughing Matter 285

inherited from nineteenth-century stage melodrama. A more restrained technique suitable to the camera was coming in, but not for this picture.

After a second take, Windy trudged out of the lake and doffed his dripping wig to Fritzi. She noticed he was trailing a cloud of whiskey fumes.

His eyes didn't quite focus. He'd stood in for her drunk, she realized with a start. What a foolish, risky way to make five dollars.

For a close-up, Eddie placed her in the lake about six feet from the bank. A prop man dumped two buckets of water over her, then adorned her head with smelly strands of seaweed. After the shot the water continued to drip off her nose and chin and elbows. Her makeup melted and
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ran. Ellen Terry chose to keep quiet, which was a blessing.

Sometime before, B.B. had bought the promised automobile. Though he could have chosen a cheap and efficient Model T, Reo, or Brush that cost under $700, his nature impelled him to a long, sleek top-of-the-line Packard with bucket seats, large brass acetylene lamps, and a gleaming brass side horn. Sophie Pelzer chose the color, royal blue. Rumored price, $2,700. Kelly fumed.

B.B. garaged the Packard in the barn on the lot. 'It's beautiful,' Fritzi said when he showed it to her. 'I'm afraid it'll take me a year to learn to operate it.'

'Your papa never taught you?'

'No, he said a girl would always have a husband or chauffeur.'

B.B. rolled his eyes. He promised to find a good driving instructor.

'When there's time,' she said with a little sigh.

Suddenly an answer to her problem walked in. An actor with a monocle came to the lot looking for work. Though in his late twenties, he was already bald as an egg, with a severe, not to say malevolent face.