My wife is the animal lover in our household. Now, I love animals too. With the right gravy on them…Once again, the family hits the road for a vacation without me. I have to work. I don’t mind. I can watch all the WW2 movies and westerns I want without all the whining and wringing of hands. So I get the big list for the feeding of all our little pals. Oh, and the ‘Special’ way they have to be fed. Horse’s have their bins and times. Snacks before bed. Huh? Chickens, ducks, pea cocks, etc, special grains and corn servings. Dogs have meals heated in the winter. What the? Koi, turtles, cats, even the wild Ravens, have long notes on their proper care. Hey, guess what? They eat the way I feed them. Fast and no sissy crap. Do I ever lose one? NO! Once again, I give them some hard love. As I toss some grain to the chickens and reach for the gate, an egg hits the gate top, just missing me. I turn. All are pecking at the ground…
My son Ty, was named after Tycho Brahe, the man who invented the first telescope. Tycho was an interesting man. He was also the King of Frances drinking buddy. The King built him a lab on an island in the middle of a river in France for them to party at away from the Queen. During one such drinking bout, Tycho puts a glove across the face of one of the best swordsmen in the Kings guard. The King lets the man know in no uncertain terms, nothing is to become of his pal. As they cross swords, the guard cuts off the tip of Tycho’s nose. The fight is over. The next day, Tycho shows up with a SILVER nose. When people would comment about his duel, he would stand errect and pronounce, “I only lost by a nose”!
In this same court was a jester that always made the King laugh. One night, he went a bit overboard insulting a part of the Queens anatomy and the King orders him put to death. The next morning, what to do? The King couldn’t go back on a royal edict. He tells the dwarf jester, the best he could do was let him choose his own death. The jester nodded. An hour later, he came back before the King under guard with a long rope. He informs the King he has chosen hanging as his way to go. The dwarf leads a procession to a tree in the courtyard of the Queen. He then puts the noose around his neck, then ties the other end to a two foot tall oak tree. The King and court stare at each other. The King then says, “This is your tree? I’ts too small”! The jester replied, I’ll wait for it to grow taller sire”! When the King laughed, he was off the hook…
I’m in line behind a lot of hungry people, waiting patiently to give their orders to the ‘roach coach’ cook. It’s one of the big, motor home sized coaches. Two order windows. It’s a hot day, but everyone is having a good time. I’m supposed to be working the zoo on phone repair, but, it was a slow day, so I was playing frisbee football with some Mexican guys. I can’t run, but WHAT AN ARM! Off to our left is the big Merry-go-round. Its music plays all the time. It just plays slower as kids get on and off. Coming down a footpath from an upper parking area is a bald headed black man. He’s blacker then Snipes. Blue black. He has just this weird thong, African deal around his loins. No shoes. Big sandals that wrapped his calves. He also had a big boom box on his shoulder. He looked to be about six five and three hundred pounds. Easy. He wasn’t the man he used to be, but still, he impressed me. That little gut isn’t what’s going to nail you…The big man also has a pleasant demeanor on his mug. His music is jazz. Not even blasting. He looks like a black Mr. Clean. He smiled at some kids then got into the line across from mine. Some gang guys of the Latino race quietly surround this guy and tell him to, “Turn that shit off bro!” My man doesn’t want trouble. There’s about fifty white people, seven blacks and six thousand Latino’s. Nope. He turns it down low. Nope. “OFF, M-FER!” My man now sets the big boom box on the ground and shakes his head in a slow no. Out of the crowd comes a champion. This guy is wider then he is tall. Has no shirt. Fifty years of tattoo’s all over his chest, arms and back. He has a red doo rag on his head and a wife beater shirt cut to show his abs. A Big Foot looking Man chu beard. He doesn’t waste any words. Twenty beers are doing his thinking any how. He comes right at My man with a flying left hook. Mean and vicious. It never lands. A big right hand comes in low and up, right into his chin. He never knew what hit him. He flew backwards like in a Popeye cartoon. He’s no Blutto though. This is the real world. His head hits the hard blacktop long before his ass did. A pool of blood starts forming around his head like a crimson halo. Everyone fades away. I see my man heading back up the dirt trail with his radio on his shoulder. I catch his eye. He looked really sad…
Every time I was dispatched there on phone repair, the real world seemed to stand still, until I drove back out the security gates into the sun again. Or moon. Sometimes I would be dispatched in the middle of the night. And why not. I was their ‘Dedicated Tech’ for years. A new concept thought up by some zipperhead who never took a case of trouble in his life…My first visit was almost my last job as a phone company employee. I’m past the three stages of security, standing outside the giant ‘Fish Tanks’ of women awaiting bail or processing. I have to replace a pay phone, and, repair a couple of handsets on two others. I stand behind a big linebacker sized female jailer. I’m not a very popular fellow. The deputy has to move all the women from the one holding tank, into the adjoining tank. After the last customer is jammed into the mass of pissed of women, I enter the now empty tank…The war of words began…”Hey, hurry it up pencil dick!” “You got a nice ass honey, too bad its on your shoulders!” “Figures they send a faggot!” “Bail me out honey, momma spank you real good!” “Lets see what ya got lover, I gots my glasses on!”…On and on it went. Naturally, the stinking pay phones armored door is jammed. I have to drill the bastard. It takes about thirty minutes, in the best of circumstances. More and more women are being jammed into the remaining holding tank. The abuse I took escalated into verbiage best not repeated. I finally get the door off. I have to pull the coin receptacle box to un bolt the phone back. Change floods out of the coin chute like a waterfall from a jammed return. Some of the coins roll towards the inhabitants of the long cell behind me. I tell the gals who grabbed the money to cough it up. Thus started the riot. Ok, so maybe I said a few other things besides that…I end up in front of the head of Administration…Twenty five years of stories began from that meeting…
The first hardbound book I ever bought, was at the age of nine. It was this guys book, ‘All About Dinosaurs’. I couldn’t understand all the large words, so, I asked my grandma, Jewel Gates, to help me out. She taught me how to use a dictionary. The best advice I ever got…Now, Roy was something else. Why, they have so many thousands of crates still unpacked at numerous museums all over the world, their not sure what the guy found. He was the first man to find dinosaurs eggs. Spielberg ripped him off for the Indiana Jones character…When he was a kid, he left home, hitchhiked to the closest museum, slept on the back steps until they finally hired him as a janitor. He hooks up with one of their marine biologists. He ends up in the field, helping secure a pilot whale off a nearby beach for an exhibit. This leads to his career as the numeral uno guy of all time for bringing back scientific anomalies…So, with this project under his belt, as a teenager, he’s sent by the museum to get a skeleton of a Sperm whale, to hang in the ceiling of a new exhibit hall the museum is building. Roy arrives at the huge rendering plant, bag of clothes and not much more in hand. He gets pointed towards the foreman of said plant. As Roy is waiting for the man to set him up on a ship, he starts a conversation with a man with a long flensing blade who’s cutting long strips of flesh off a whale, half pulled out of this enormous bay all the whaling ships are anchored in. Now, this bay is also FULL of HUGE sharks, feeding off all the whale entrails the men washed into it with high pressure hoses. There’s whales pulled up by winches, all around Roy, awaiting rendering. The man wonders if Roy would like to try flensing a whale. Roy drops his bag and takes the long blade. The man takes him over to another whale. As the man stands back, Roy pokes the blade into the carcass. The explosion blew Roy thirty feet out into the bay. The man had chosen that whale, just for that reason. It had filled with gas from decomposing. Roy struggles out of the shark filled bay, covered in whale guts. Roy then starts laughing. He knew he had been had. The men took him in and showed him the ropes on whaling for a year. Even letting him fire the harpoon cannon. It ‘made him’…but, those are other stories…
It no longer exists. Was the best damn book store in the ENTIRE world. I put in Big Al’s phones when he moved in. Took them out for his son when the closed down about thirty years later. The new subway to Universal Studios did them in. Changed the entire neighborhood on Hollywood Blvd…Across the street is Hollywood toy. It’s where the mask makers gave me the tubes of fake bloody boogers I would stick in my mustache before going into gay bars on phone repair. Naturally, all the phone equipment is always installed in the ceiling of the bathroom, accessed by the folding drop ladder. Why not in the ladies side? Huh? Their is no ‘ladies’ side in these establishments…Anyhow, Book City ruled its side of Hollywood Blvd. Mainly because of Big Al’s odd ways. He would stand in front of his store and toss his coffee at the street punks hassling him while associates tried to steal books off his rolling cart next to the front doors…He once threw Roseanne Barr out of his store while screaming his legendary, “This is NOT the library, fatso!”…A real glimpse into a different dimension was to go into his basement. Many a strong man came up those stairs a changed man. OH YEAH. Scary my friends. Al’s store was not far from Vine, the oldest, craziest part of Hollywood. Even L.A. itself. Once you lifted the huge slightly horizontal steel door that covered the concrete stairs, you we’re in a different dimension. You we’re in the land of lost books. Hitting the light switch, its pathetic glow was only just better then a match. Why? Because it was the first of a ONE MILE, illegal string of lights, put together by lost souls, trying to clean up a sinking Titanic of books. The ceiling was only about six foot high. Books in stacks vertically actually went from the floor, to the ceiling, FOREVER. Yep. You see, Al owned the entire block over time. He then jack hammered apertures through the basements of each new acquisition, then, FILLED THEM WITH MORE BOOKS. Their was no way to climb out once you we’re in this maze. All the upper access stairs had been nailed shut. You don’t even think about ripping off Big Al. Why would I be down there? Because of the 150 year old cables that fed all the business’s ABOVE MY HEAD. Big Al had me as his BOY since I loved books. One day, while about five stores away from the stairwell, the entire end of town loses power. I’m in stygean black. Literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. In five seconds, I can hear the rats. Hundreds of them. No. Thousands maybe. They lived quite well on all the restaurants that occupied the stores above. You think water pipes that old don’t leak? I would find entire stacks of hard bound books, molding into a lump to step over from a pipe leaking onto them for TWENTY years. The smells could knock a vulture off a gut wagon in some of those passage ways. I pull out my flashlight. Dead batteries. I go to my back up, my pen light in my repair folder. It works…There’s no way I could tell all the stories I have of BOOK CITY in one sitting. NO WAY…Oh, the star in front of his entrance from the walk of fame?…JIMI HENDRIX…
My dad was killed in the Korean war. Never met him. I was eight months old, sucking up whisky from my mom’s legendary partying after shifts at Lockheed, building P-38’s. My placenta had a cherry stuck it in when I was delivered….Speaking of P-38’s…Have to tell my Dick Bong story in memory of all the vets….Bong was an all American boy. Flew the P-38 in the Pacific theatre against the Japanese Zero’s. He recieved the medal of honor. Had 40 kills in dogfights. He had his girlfriends, later wifes, name, Marge, on the nose of his various planes. Usually old planes shot full of holes. He comes home to become a test pilot for Lockheed in Burbank. My grandma is hanging laundry on Witnall hwy. She hears a jets motor cut out. She looks up to see a smoking jet clear some trees. It was Bong testing a new jet…The tower told Bong to ‘punch out’. Bong’s last words? “Can’t do it, kids in a school yard”! He did his duty…A REAL hero…
Most people don’t know a damn thing about heavy equipment. If your in this lucky group of folks, try and stay there…Now, when building a 25,000 square foot, illegal, tree house, you will need some heavy equipment, sooner or later. If in doubt, find an empty lot with a forty foot long steel ‘I’ beam laying in the dirt, and try and move it ONE INCH. Hope you brought your lunch…Just a couple of months ago, I wonder if a pal, Hawk Stone, can move some boulders for me. Its what he does. Moves heavy stuff. I’m told I should maybe roll by his yard and check out his almost new fifty foot equipment trailer. Hmm. I take a ride to downtown Acton ( Acton means, ‘town of backstabbing assholes’, in Comanche ) I spot the trailer instantly. Its the one with the MELTED TIRES AND RIMS. Not one or two of the 18. ALL OF THEM. An eight buck an hour flagman has him dump in a new spot. Right under some 100,000 volt high power lines. Driver jumped in time.
‘Gower Gulch’, on Sunset and Gower. It’s called that because in the days of silent movies, most had horses in them, so, the casting people held all their stock hiring there. Now-a-days, its a Denny’s coffee shop and parking lot, surrounded by studios and talent agencies. Its also prime turf for tow truck drivers. On a repair case for Thrifty drug, right next to Denny’s, I have to go up on the roof to check the dial tones in a fifty pair can. Am I surprised to find about ten guys up there already. Some are holding those gigantic NASA sized binoculars. In between the huge THRIFTY letters on the building, you can’t spot them from the parking lot below. The Denny’s parking lot with signs every six inch, two foot high saying, ‘PARKING FOR DENNY’S CUSTOMERS ONLY’. I also see that some of them have two way radios. What the? Turns out, their all working for various tow truck companies. They glance at my tools, then ignore me…The fishing was so good, there was plenty of work for all. They even had a poker game they would play with license plate numbers. Or, ‘BIG FISH’. This was a vehicle that was worth over fifty grand. They just loved towing those. Just around the corner a block away. Tow trucks sat in a long row. Drivers listening to their spoters. I soon got into the spirit of it and started joking around and looking through the big binoculars too. I never had such good times in my life, goofing with these guys. Some we’re Russian. Some Armenian. Others, who knew. All got along. Sometimes they had so many cars to tow, they parked them along side streets, alarms blaring, to go grab a couple more. Another truck from the tow yard would zoom in, hook up in ten seconds, jam to the yard. I started riding with them after awhile. There’s nothing sweeter then a guy in a three piece suit, screaming “STOP YOU BASTARDS”! as you stay just ahead of them in low gear, laughing like hyena’s. I got so good at doing a Howard Cosell blow by blow, they would put me on speaker to dispatch so everyone in the office could hear…One night, we hooked a great white shark. Arnold Swarznegger’s Humvie! I rode in it once, but, that’s another story. Anyhow, Arnold’s with a non wife, hot babe. He had one of those original military Hummers before they were plastic. Everyone on the roof was holding their breaths. Arnold fakes to go inside Denny’s, then, runs across Sunset holding hands with his squeeze. A tow truck is on it before the talent agencies door has closed all the way. His alarms go off. Arnold is back on the sidewalk. Traffic on Sunset has him check mated. He sprints for the cross walk and the up coming red light. His chick is left behind. Instead of taking a right down Gower, the tow truck heads down Sunset. He played Arnold like a Marlin, as far as we could see. Slowing, then speeding up. Sometimes, life can be good…
Moving sure brings out long forgotten times….Read some of my notes from conversations with my Uncle Melvin Koontz, the MGM lion man. In a nutshell, he loved big cats, giraffes and elephants the best. His least favorites were bears and primates. He would travel all over looking for animals to fill his acts when he went on tour with circusess. He told me about a really odd attraction he once tried to obtain from a private collection in Florida. He had heard about it from a former circus clown, turned promoter. While having coffee in the owners kitchen, the ‘animal’ strolled into the room. It was a large, erect walking chimp. My Uncle told me at first glance he was ticked off for wasting his time on an ape. Then, it did something quite odd. ‘It’, pulled out a chair, hitched up the pants it was wearing, then, crossed his legs and started looking through a magazine that was laying on the kitchen table. My Uncle said it was no act…Not only did the mannerisms catch my Uncles attention, it was the way the ‘ape’ looked at you if you addressed it. My Uncle saw intelligence in its eyes. Even more then that. Contempt. It knew my Uncle was there to purchase him and had already classified my Uncle as a worthless soul….My Uncle couldn’t meet the man’s price, so, he went on his way. Mel told me that in all his years training, caring for and spending countless hours with animals of all sorts, this incident made him question not only his entire career, but also his own humanity….I asked him if it was just a smart chimp. He said no. He said he had the feeling it was a hybrid human/chimp. That’s what he told me anyways..
