Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (21 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 104
come on out to L.A. I'll take you over to Ventura Boulevard or Sunset or to the beach or anywhere, and you're going to see the kind of car you want to see.
I talked to Big Daddy on a few occasions. Total shit-kicker. He's a Southern bo-ah. He had that heavy-duty accent. I was a local boy. So we were totally different.
Let's put it this way, I was always rooting for Don Prudhomme to beat his hind end. Prudhomme was a local boy. From Pasadena, I think.
He beat Big Daddy a lot. And Big Daddy lost to some other local guys, too. Big Daddy was a foreign guy, coming in to try and kick our butts and take our trophies.
We wanted to keep our trophies.
Territorial. Damn straight we were.
Big Daddy was good, though. He was tough. And he loved to win. And you know what, he did win a lot. He was great.
There is no question he's the big daddy of drag racing. His longevity is incredible. He's got to be the greatest who ever lived.
But we had some good ones. Mickey Thompson was a good one from Long Beach.
We'd always go down to the speed shops. We had speed shops all over L.A. You'd go get an Iskendarian Cam. The nickname is "Isky" cam after a guy named Ed Iskendarian. He invented the roller cam. And the roller cam was a faster way to get that engine moving. He was big-time stuff. General Motors had a guy named Duntov and everyone had Duntov cams. My car came from the factory with a Duntov cam, and it came with General Motors fuel injection.
B&M Automotive was cool. They made B & M transmissions. They were like auto-sticks. If you had a B & M transmission it was faster than a 4-speed. It shifted so fastit would cut time off your "ET." Your ET was your elapsed time.
See, these guys would say, "Oh, I went out to the drags and I turned a hundred."
That meant you went 100 miles an hour in the quarter-mile. That didn't mean squat.
Because you could go 100 miles an hour and have a 15.5-second ET. But if you went 100 miles an hour at a 13.4 ET, you beat the guy by 16 car lengths.
Every car length was 10 / 100ths of a second, I think.
I did 13.20 one time. Which was fast.
I mean, nowadays it's laughable. You know, some of these big dragsters do six seconds. You can't even open your mouth and they're down the quarter-mile.
 
Page 105
But back in those days, 13.20 was pretty damn good. I had no complaints.
I was making plenty of money from "Beaver" by now so I could afford the cars. This was about '62.
But I sorta outgrew it. It wasn't cool enough for me in '63 to '65.
I was busier and involved in classier events. I was hanging out in Beverly Hills, not Long Beach or Pomona.
But that didn't mean I was outgrowing my loveand crying needfor crazy people.
Far from it.
Along about this time came one of my all-time favorite days with Jimmy Winston and the Hell's Angels.
You have to first of all understand who and what Jimmy Winston was.
Jimmy Winston was a big, big kid. Barrel chest, I want to say 46 minimum, more like 48. About 6-2, 6-3, a 29-inch waist. Blond hair, blue eyes, a really good-lookin' guy. Jimmy was strong as an ox.
Of all my friends, my father loved Jimmy the best.
Because Jimmy was an eater.
He'd come over to our house and eat three or four steaks. And my dad couldn't wait to get the food on the barbecue to feed Jimmy. He'd see Jimmy walkin' through the door, he'd say, "Here comes Hollow Legs."
Jimmy once ate 19 pizzas to win a contest on TV. That's right, 19. Another time he ate an entire 23-pound turkey.
Channel 13 would hold these contests. Why? Why did you jam people in a phone booth? Why did you eat goldfish? People in the Midwest used to have pie-eating contests.
We had pizza and turkey-eating contests.
If you won, your prize was: You were cool.
Or else a pig.
You won the admiration of other devout guttersnipes, I guess.
We loved it.
Anyway, Jimmy was always winning these eating things. And I called him "Smiley' because Jimmy had this big old smile. He won the Smile of the Year contest when he was a young kid.
Sounds perfectly Southern California, doesn't it?
The L.A. school district used to have this contest, Smile of the Year, and Jimmy won it. You know, for having good teeth and all?
People used to accuse Jimmy of being a mooch. Which he was. But I loved Jimmy.
So anyhow, Jimmy calls me up one day and says, "My uncle is inviting us to Pine Flats Lake."
I said, "Where the hell is that?"
He says, "Up near Yosemite."
 
Page 106
I said, "What's the story?"
He said, "He's gonna teach us how to water ski."
Says, "He's got this great big boat. Got this blown-Chrysler engine."
So here is his Uncle Dick up there with the Chrysler engine and the lake and Pine Flats is the destination.
OK. I said, "I tell you what, Smiley. You're supplying the boat and the cabin, so I'll drive."
We're going up to the Redwoods, the High Sierras. That's the area.
Now, back in these days, I don't even think the San Diego Freeway was finished that took you out of town, heading up to Highway 99.
But Highway 99, we used to call the Grapevine. And the reason it was the Grapevine, is you went up this huge mountain and came down into the valley by Bakersfield and that's where you got to Delano and all the farm country.
We went up 7,000 feet.
Anyhow. I had my Cadillac convertible, my '62 pale yellow, yellow leather and yellow top. Just beautiful. Me and Jimmy in there. It's Labor Day, 1963.
So Smiley and I go down to the Shell station on Robertson and Airdrome and fill up with gas. We pull into the station and there's this lox that takes car of my car. I tell the guy, "Make sure you check the water and the oil. We're takin' a trip."
He goes, "OK."
Oh, what is a "lox?"
A schmuck, a dullard, a dimwit.
Anyway, I'm sittin' there and, you know, gas is about a quarter a gallon or something like that. So it was about six bucks worth of gas to fill the tank.
I go to pay the guy and I say, "Is everything OK?"
He says, "Oh, yeah, everything's fine."
So we start driving out of town. It was Labor Day Weekend. It was hotter'n a son-of-a-gun. There was a heat wave goin' on.
But me and Smiley, we got the top down and we're lookin' good which, of course, is the main thing.
We're listenen' to some "Pipeline" by the Chantays and some "Wipeout" by the Surfaris. You know, some good surfin' music.
"G.T.O." by Ronny & the Daytonas. "California Sun" by the Rivieras.
Car songs. Girl songs. Sun songs.
Cool stuff like that.
Good tunes to climb the Grapevine by.
I guess what we should have been playing was some Commander Cody and the Lost Airmen. Because the Grapvine was the Commander's inspiration for his song, "Hot Rod Lincoln." You know the one "My daddy said,
 
Page 107
son, you're gonna drive me to drinkin' if you don't stop drivin' that hot-rod Lincoln."
Just a little factoid I like about the Grapevine.
Anyhow, now we're goin' up all these hills when, all of a sudden, I notice my heat guage.
It's like over to the side, almost all the way across.
We're not even up the mountain.
I'm goin', "What the hell is goin' on here?"
Now, we're in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Friday afternoon. Everyone is trying to get out of town.
And now I'm startin' to see a little steam comin' out of the old Cadillac hood and I'm goin', "Uh oh."
I'm prayin', "Just let us make the hill and we're OK." Because when we get to the top, you coast all the way down and there's a bunch of gas stations down there.
So, we're about one mile from the top of the hill and the car craps out.
It sounds like we're rollin' balls around an empty oil drum or something, and the engine stops.
We're still goin' enough that I pull out of the lane and get it over to the side of the highway. Jimmy and I push it just to get it straight and out of traffic.
And then we open the hood.
Damn.
That stupid moron did not put the water cap back on my radiator.
All the water'd boiled out.
I said, "When I see that guy . . ."
I was doin' the Moe Howard, "Why, I oughtta . . ."
I mean, we were beside ourselves.
But here was our problem.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic, like 4:30 or 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. And our car's just sittin' there doin' the boogie.
And there's no way.
We're hosed.
We can't find water anywhere. And we're sittin' there, like, signalling to people: Anybody have any water?
There are two lanes of bumper-to-bumper goin' by us. Nobody would stop for anything.
Jerk-offs.
So finally, I said to Jimmy, "I think I gotta go take a leak. If anyone's tank is filled up, it's mine."
So I stroll over farther along the side and Jimmy says to me:
"Uh, don't waste it."
 
Page 108
I go, "What do you mean?"
And Jimmy just looks down at me.
The realization suddenly comes to me.
Jimmy, you're a walkin', talkin' genius.
A regular Ein-freakin'-stein.
Hey, man. We got some radiator juice right here.
Mother Nature's very own Prestone.
I got some Frank Bank in the Tank.
So I stood up on the front bumper. Dragged the boy out. Got him lined up in the right direction.
Allowed for windage. Elevation. Trajectory.
Ready on the left.
Ready on the right.
Ready on the firing line.
Aim.
Pow.
Hey, man. I didn't waste a drop. Davey Freakin' Crockett couldn't have hit the bull's eye better than I did.
Talk about your Deadeye Dicks.
I'm totally unloading as people are drivin' by.
They're gawkin'.
Lookin'.
Cranin'.
Pointin'.
Laughin'.
A few hoots from the guys in the audience.
A few appreciative whistles from the ladies.
I heard a few, "That's disgusting" remarks.
But I also heard a few, "Hey, baby, save some of that for me."
And now it was Jimmy's turn.
I said, "Smiley, you gotta take a whiz, too?"
And he goes, "Well, maybe I can brew somethin' up."
Then he gets up there, jerks the old Johnson, and he does his bit.
We put the cap back on the radiator.
We crank the engine.
It starts.
One guy was staring at Jimmy and stopped and said, "Hey, give us a gallon."
I was thinking of bottling it and marketing it.
Drain-the-Lizard Radiator Lube.
So now we're done.

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