Los Angeles Stories (9 page)

“Where's my wife?” Morales asked.

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

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

“How did you know where to find me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He was shielded.”

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

“But you told me the man was incapacitated!”

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

“Qu
é
causa?”

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

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

Despu
é
s que una vive veinte desenga
ñ
os

Que importa uno m
á
s?

Despu
é
s de conocer la acci
ó
n de la vida

No debes llorar

Hay que darse cuenta que todo es mentira

Que nada es verdad

Hay que vivir el momento feliz

Hay que gozar lo que pueda gozar

Porque sacando la cuenta en total

La vida es un sue
ñ
o y todo se va

1952

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

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

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

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

“Thank you for what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I want pussy,” Smokey said.

“All it takes is cash,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The slats in the bed upstairs went blamety­blam, crash! and Berta screamed. Then the floor got to squeaking in rhythm. A radio played boleros. Somebody was smoking outside. I followed the smoke, and it was a little man sitting in a metal chair in the backyard, in the moonlight. “Buenas noches,” I said.

“Five to one, I know why you're here,” the man answered in a soft voice.

“My partner and I just hit town. We're musicians,” I said.

“I lose. Smoke?” He put his tin can ashtray down and held out the pack. I took one, and he lit it and used the light to study me. I got a look at him — older and scrawny the way a hobo looks, but with the watchful eyes of a smart man.

“Thanks. I'm Al Maphis. Gambling man?”

“Jim McGee. I have been, off and on. Ended up here, somehow. I like Mexicans, they don't push.”

“You were expecting somebody else?”

“Always, ever since my last bad hand. Up in Joplin, it was. I saw that Buick of yours out front. That's an interesting vehicle. You could go straight across the country without ever stopping.”

“We have, on occasion.”

“What's in the big box over top, if I may ask?”

“Water tank, and the instruments ride up there. String bass and drum set. I'm the drummer, Ray's the bass. We're appearing nightly here in town.” McGee seemed to relax a little. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the black sky streaked with clouds.

“I never saw a night sky like you get out here,” he said. “Ever been in Joplin?”

“Never worked up there. This is a crap town. Arizona is a crap state and very non­swinging unless you like to sit and watch clouds.”

“I can still get my kicks. All I need is a stake.”

I let the line out a little. “Berta tells me you're quite the mechanic.”

“Master machinist, first grade. I was head tool and dye maker at Martin-­Marietta in the war.”

“That a fact? I wonder if you could help me. I got a money­making idea, but I need expertise. See, Jim, music is a two-­bit racket. You can't get ahead unless you make records and the mob controls that, so what's a drummer supposed to do? But I been around out here in the West, and I found out one main thing. This road­ building and oil­ drilling and increased population since the war, it depends on housing. Housing is the key. You can't have workers on the job if they can't afford to live. Then they can spend the rest of their money on music and girls and booze.”

“On crooked cards and loaded dice and horses,” McGee said.

“I'd sure like to show you my ideas. I bet a trained man like you could figure everything out to the nickel.”

“Try me.”

“See you tomorrow.” I left him there in his chair with his smokes and his clouds.

I woke up smelling lard and thought I was back in Tulsa. Ask any Mexican about his earliest memory and you will get the same answer: frying lard. My daddy was a white man and a peace officer, but he couldn't control the situation at home and it broke him down. I saw it happen. Mamma was a Mexican firebrand. She was dark and different from Dad as day is from night. She lived for dancing. Cain's Ballroom was her real home, and she could be found there any night of the week, dancing with every man in the place. Blood was shed on a routine basis over who'd be next in line. One night, my dad walked in there and told her we were moving to California. A big man, probably some oil­ field roustabout, told Daddy to get out of Dodge. Dad was in uniform, and he drew his service revolver and told the man to step aside in the name of the law. The man grabbed the gun and beat my daddy over the head with it, and he beat him down to the floor while the crowd watched. That was the end of my parents' marriage and my dad's career in law enforcement. He drifted off and we never saw him again, only heard tell. Mamma died of a busted liver five years later. I got the news of her death in Catoosa, Oklahoma, while I was onstage. A man in the audience passed a note up. I played on, what else could I do? Mamma loved rhythm. One thing I learned in Tulsa was that things go better if you can front as a white man, daddy's example notwithstanding. Doesn't always work, but that's my theory. I told Smokey when we started traveling together: let me do the talking. “No problema, mi jefe,” he said.

I washed up and went downstairs. Smokey was there with his nose in a bowl of tripe soup, the Mexican cure for hangover. “Too much pussy,” he said.

“Forget it. We got a real chance here. It's going to fit together, it's going to work.”

“No tengo that much jam, jefecito.” Smokey ate his tripe soup with a worried look.

Harry Spivak said there was a group from the high school for the matinee and we had better act like gentlemen. Pianist Billy Tipton had just got into town. That was supposed to be hot, a personal appear­ance by a known celebrity in a hick burg like Kingman. I had worked a previous engagement with Billy in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, so we were acquainted. Billy had a career in show business that was unusual. She had been pulling it off working as a man for years. She wore her hair cut short and styled tailored gabardine suits with a bow ­tie, her trademark. A regular tie would stick out, you dig. Billy dug women — like who doesn't? — and the word was she got more ass than a toilet seat. She had the hicks fooled but good. So Billy says, “Ladies and gentlemen, especially you ladies! Right about now, for your dancing and listening pleasure, the Billy Tipton Orchestra is pleased to offer you a rendition of a little number titled, ‘I Didn't Know What Time It Was.' Take it away, Al Maphis!”