The Importance of Being Ernie: (15 page)
CHAPTER 28
Life Beyond the Camera
My financial independence was a blessing in two ways. I could afford an apartment, allowing me to escape the problems at home, and it funded my youthful adventures. Gene and I started to venture onto the Hollywood club scene looking for fun and chicks. One of our newest discoveries was Rodney Bingenheimer’s English disco on the Sunset Strip, a place where I got into the only fistfight of my life.Rodney’s was a hangout for the burgeoning glam-rock scene in the early 1970s. Boys and girls would camp it up wearing makeup, sequined halter tops, and enormous platform shoes. The fashion was modeled after David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust unisex character. I wasn’t keen on eyeliner, sequins, or shirts exposing my belly button. I was very pleased about platform boots, though. They had soles that were three inches thick or more, depending on how high you wanted to go. I opted for the max since I was height challenged at five foot five. These new elevator shoes were the greatest development in footwear since Beatle boots, unless you got into a scuffle.
My brawl began innocently enough. I noticed John Barrymore Jr. (of all people) entering the club. Being a huge fan of his father, I pointed Junior out to my wingman, Gene. A teenage Glam Boy in skin-tight pants, skimpy T-shirt, and platform shoes overheard me and butted in.
“That’s not John Barrymore Junior!” said Glam Boy. His words were slurred, probably from the quaalude he’d taken.
“Hell, yes! I’ve seen pictures of him. That is Barrymore, Junior,” I insisted. I was an authority on all things Barrymore. I was also drunk from slugging vodka from my flask.
The gauntlet had been thrown down. A nose-to-nose stare-down ensued, like boxers before a championship fight. I was smoking a cigarette for added tough-guy effect. When I exhaled, I made sure a little extra smoke went into Glam Boy’s face.
“Don’t blow smoke in my face,” he growled.
I did it again. The vodka made me do it.
Suddenly, I had a moment of fuzzy clarity through the mix of booze and raging testosterone: I really didn’t want a fight. Hoping to
ignore
my opponent away, I looked at Gene who was standing next to me. Bad move. Glam Boy’s fist clobbered me on the side of the face. It was a sucker punch that I deserved, for looking away if nothing else.
ignore
my opponent away, I looked at Gene who was standing next to me. Bad move. Glam Boy’s fist clobbered me on the side of the face. It was a sucker punch that I deserved, for looking away if nothing else.
I reeled backward, skidding on the heels of my three-inch platform shoes. It was an amazing feat of skill to stay upright for as long as I did. My luck ended when my ass hit a table, and I flipped over it like Festus in Miss Kitty’s saloon.
In an instant, I wobbled back up onto my platform shoes with the crowd screaming and cheering as if in an echo chamber. My new brown suede jacket was soaked in Tequila sunrises. Now I was really pissed. I zeroed in on Glam Boy who had retreated onto the crowded, swirling dance floor. Elton John’s song, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” started to blare over the club’s sound system. I took my cue and I charged like a bull out for blood.
I caught up to my assailant right under the flashing mirrored disco ball and threw my best wild punch. Glam Boy ducked, and I accidentally punched some innocent schnook dancing the Bump with his girlfriend. The poor unsuspecting kid went tumbling, and Glam Boy ran from the dance floor.
Before I could give chase, a human baboon leaped onto my back, and I fell to the ground under his weight. It may have been an ally of Glam Boy or a pal of the guy I’d punched or just some crazy ape leaping into the fray for the fun of it. One way or the other, the guy pinned my shoulders to the floor with his knees and proceeded to tenderize my face with his fists. Amazingly, I didn’t feel a thing. My head absorbed the blows like a hollow coconut.
Somehow I pushed the ape off of me and crawled across the dance floor on all fours, weaving between the flailing, kicking legs.
I reached a wall and got to my feet. Out on the dance floor, everyone was throwing punches. It was a real barroom brawl. Gene ran up to me, unscathed, not a hair mussed.
“Where the hell were you?” I asked. “Why didn’t you help?”
“I couldn’t find you! The place went nuts!” he said. “Let’s get out of here!”
Duh!
Seconds later, Gene and I exited the club and were out on Sunset Boulevard, happy to have escaped the melee with teeth intact. As we walked to my parked car, I heard a voice yell at us.
“Hey! Come back here!” Glam Boy had just come out of the club with a posse of buddies sporting halter tops and orange hair. “You’re a dead man, asshole!”
The mob sprinted toward us, and the race to my car was on.
Gene and I were running about twenty feet in front of a herd of galloping glam boys. Thank god they were all wearing tall platform shoes, too, or they would have caught us easily.
I arrived at the driver’s door of my Camaro, unlocked it, and leaped inside. I was safe, but not Gene. He was still outside the car, pounding on the passenger-side window and yanking on his locked door handle. There was no such thing as automatic door locks in those days. I had to reach over and unlock it manually. This was eating up precious seconds as the glam boys were closing in for the kill. Gene screamed,
“Barry! Hurry! Open the dooorr!”
“Barry! Hurry! Open the dooorr!”
I finally flicked the lock, and Gene dove inside, relocking the door with mind-boggling speed. I fired up the Camaro’s engine and stomped on the car’s accelerator just as the spitting, cursing herd arrived. Unfortunately, we couldn’t escape fast enough to avoid a few shoe kicks that left some serious dents in my car’s rear end.
I went to an auto body shop a few days later to get a quote on the cost of repairing my Camaro. When the body shop man asked what happened, I lied. I said that baldheaded thugs wielding baseball bats did the damage, not hard-kicking glam boys wearing massive sequined platform shoes.
Hollywood clubs seemed a bit too dangerous, so I looked to the great outdoors for my next adventure, and nearly got killed there, too.
My friend, Brad Huber, and I hatched a plan to shoot the rapids of the Kern River. Of course, we had no experience whatsoever in river rafting. It just seemed like a fun, wild thing to do. I was in the Iron John stage of my young manhood, a time of testing my macho, where every crazy adventure had to have a brush with death. Dumb, but necessary, I guess.
We borrowed a sturdy rubber raft from a friend and set off at four in the morning for the river, accompanied by my new girlfriend, Tess. As daylight broke, we drove down a narrow pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains and saw the Kern River casually snaking its way alongside the road. It gave me butterflies, especially since we had just passed a roadside billboard that said:
BE CAREFUL AT THE RIVER
.
FIVE PEOPLE HAVE LOST THEIR LIVES THIS YEAR
! It was only March, too, pretty early in the year for such a high casualty rate. We joked about how the number
five
on the sign was interchangeable, like the squares used on old baseball scoreboards. Whoever managed the billboard wasn’t stupid; he knew that number needed changing on a regular basis.
BE CAREFUL AT THE RIVER
.
FIVE PEOPLE HAVE LOST THEIR LIVES THIS YEAR
! It was only March, too, pretty early in the year for such a high casualty rate. We joked about how the number
five
on the sign was interchangeable, like the squares used on old baseball scoreboards. Whoever managed the billboard wasn’t stupid; he knew that number needed changing on a regular basis.
I drove until we found a calm pond in the river where we could launch our rubber raft. The plan was for Tess to drive my car to a riverside campground we had passed; Brad and I would follow the river’s course, and we’d all meet up there.
I inflated our spongy yellow vessel with a foot pump and then we shoved off from the riverbank. The lazy river gently guided us away just like Lewis and Clark. Our confidence was high, cocky, in fact. So cocky that we kept our wallets in our pockets and neglected to put on our puffy orange life preservers. This is called tempting fate. We were asking for it.
The first run of whitewater loomed ahead. I was upfront in the raft using my paddle to chart a course between the river rocks; Brad was seated behind me and kept his paddle in the water like a rudder. We were copying the method we’d seen Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer employ on the old
Mickey Mouse Club
show. Not exactly the best tutorial in river rafting, but it worked.
Mickey Mouse Club
show. Not exactly the best tutorial in river rafting, but it worked.
Our tiny raft accelerated, bobbed, and weaved in the surging current as we whooped and yelled from the adrenaline rush. Then ... we entered another calm patch of water in the river.
“Whooaaa! We did it!” I said.
The raft took on a little chilly water. Other than that, we figured we could handle this river, nothing to it. Then I noticed something odd about our boat.
“Hey, Brad, am I crazy or is our raft getting smaller?” I asked.
Brad squeezed the rubber tubing. “Feels like it’s lost a little air. Maybe we hit a submerged rock.”
“Or it had a hole to begin with,” I said. “Let’s head to shore and check it out.”
We aimed our raft toward riverbank and paddled hard. The nose of our craft suddenly had a mind of its own and turned back downstream. Another set of rapids downstream was pulling us away from shore and back into the middle of the river. We picked up speed, and before you could yell
Help!
we were on another roller-coaster ride.
Help!
we were on another roller-coaster ride.
Forget paddling anymore, we were at the mercy and whims of the Kern, going whichever way she wanted to toss us. Our raft bounced high and low. Large rocks appeared midstream and then disappeared under the swirling water. Waterspouts danced in the air, splashing our faces with frigid water. The river seemed to be in a rage, determined to teach a couple of teenage goofballs a lesson. We raced around a bend in the river, and the turbulent water calmed back down, again, into another large open pool.
“Holy shit! Look how small our raft is!” I said. When we began our journey, the rubber boat was fully inflated, firm and oval shaped. Now it looked like we were sitting in a flaccid rubber donut.
We glided through the pond and saw a campground come into view; it was the designated meeting place with Tess. She was standing on a rock that jutted out into the river, waving her arms wildly, urging us to paddle to shore. Once again, the river had other plans for us.
The current accelerated and pulled our raft back into the middle of the river. We were now heading for a large rock that divided the rushing water into two streams. Beyond the rock was a ten-foot drop, a roaring waterfall. Beyond that, assuming we’d survive the fall, was more churning whitewater running through a narrow canyon, bigger and faster than anything we’d seen yet.
The front of the raft crashed into the big rock and the back end of our little boat swung around with the rushing current. The raft tipped downward, teetering at the top of the falls, and Brad was ejected from his seat, thrown into the waterfall.
Then my end of the raft took the plunge; I grabbed the rubber dingy with one hand, a paddle with my other. For a brief exhilarating moment I was flying in midair.
The “fun” ended as I splashed down into the water with a painful crash. Somehow I held on to the raft and paddle, kept my head above water, and was swept away. Brad was nowhere to be seen. He was somewhere under the waves.
Clinging to my raft, I took whatever the river threw at me. First obstacle: a massive jagged block of granite. I braced for impact, keeping my squishy raft in front of me. Just as I’d hoped, the rubber boat bounced off the rock, and I avoided a crushing blow. That was the good news. The bad news: I ricocheted back into the raging current and the whirlpools.
I was fully engulfed in the river’s fury, but thanks to that beautiful, flimsy raft I was able to keep my head above the rapids.
Brad was not so lucky. I scanned the whitewater but didn’t see him anywhere. I feared he fell victim to the infamous Kern whirlpools. If you get sucked into one of those, it’s impossible to escape, and you are certain to drown.
Suddenly, a pair of flailing arms broke through the waves ahead of me, and Brad’s sopping wet head emerged. Panic was in his eyes as he gasped for air and then was pulled under again. That odd, terrifying picture of my friend repeated itself a few more times, but there was nothing I could do to help him. The river was our master. I was just happy to know he was still alive.
As quickly as the river raged it settled down, and I floated into a calm pool. I looked around for Brad, and he was behind me now with his head above water and dog-paddling to the shore. Tess had been running along the riverbank and was there to greet us when we crawled up onto a sandy beach.
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