Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (16 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 81
I think it was on from 9 to 11 on weeknights, maybe on KMPC.
The music, the lights, the feeling was right. I remember taking her panties off because I wasn't real slick about it and they were all rolled up. I was disappointed that I hadn't been more suave with the move.
I mean, you don't want the girl thinking this is the first time you've ever done this. You want to just sort of nonchalantly, but sensually, draw them down to her ankles . . . and then deftly flick them off with the right look in your eye.
Skillfully, the way James Bond might have done. Leaving her stirred, but not shaken. Ready for the next step in the drama.
She, I might add, had no trouble with my underpants. They came right off.
I didn't last much longer than my first time. About five strokes or so.
But we made out for a long time afterwards.
I wasn't smart enough to know whether she had a climax.
She said she really loved it, and that was that.
Somehow, I don't think she really loved it.
She wouldn't go out with me again.
I asked her out a couple of times and she said, "No."
No reason.
She just said, "Don't bother calling me again."
It kinda hurt my feelings a little bit.
You know how women use us.
All they want is sex.
We're only good for one thing.
I don't know if I didn't satisfy her or she got an attack of conscience. This was a chick who was hot to trot. But I don't think she wanted word to get around about her.
One reason I think she did it with me was because I was an eighth-grader and she was in the ninth and maybe she thought I was safe.
I wouldn't run up and start rumors about her
But the truth is, I did tell my friends about this one. I never told about Dianewell, I told a couple guys much later in life, but that was years after the fact.
But Paulette, I did talk about. You're really proud if you got laid in the eighth grade.
And Paulette was all I had to talk about for a long time. After my first two, it was a full year until I had sex again.
I was in the movies quite a bit by now. That did help get me girls, I imagine.
It didn't hurt, I'd have to say.
 
Page 82
That was OK with me.
Whatever worked.
After my year dry spell, things started to accelerate. Big time. By now I am cruising Hollywood Boulevard. I am meeting 50 jillion chicks a night. We're going up and parking on Mulholland Driveor Dick Lane, as we often called it.
There was this one dude, one of the biggest announcers on Los Angeles television at the timehe used to do wrestling, boxing; he used to sell cars and slap the fenders. . . "C'mon down!" That type of thing. His name was Dick Lane.
So the old joke around town was:
"What's another name for Mulholland Drive?"
"Dick Lane."
Any old part of Mulholland would do for making out. Anywhere you could park, look at the lights of the city and not have too many people around.
If we didn't go up to Dick Lane, we would cut off Hollywood Boulevard, go up Franklin Boulevard, up toward the "Hollywood" sign, up Beachwood or one of those other streets and park up there.
We would make love in residential neighborhoods overlooking the city. You never worried about rousting the neighbors. There were just lots of places we could go to do it in the car. We never went to motels. They cost money. The weather was always nice, we were always warm enough. As long as we had a towel or a sheet or a blanket or something, it was cool.
By now, I was beginning to feel, this was my city. I was getting famous. I was driving great-looking cars, in keeping with the reputation I had so carefully developed.
I wasn't looking too bad. I'm not saying I was Cary Grant or James Dean or anything. Heck, I wasn't Billy Byron. But I was about the best I was ever going to be.
Fairly well filled out from my football and baseball days at Hamilton High. Not fat yet, a little on the chunky side. But most people would have said "husky." There's a difference between fat and husky, and I was on the good side of the line.
I knew how to dress, as you know. I knew how to B.S. girls. I knew what was cool and, even more important, I had learned how to be cool.
I was ready to ride, daddy, ride, as they put it so well in the "Alley Oop" song.
It just all started falling into place.
I was in the 11th grade. I was 16.
I was perfecting my sexual repertoire.
 
Page 83
I learned the best cars to pick up in and the best cars to make out in. They weren't always the same.
The best pickup car ever invented was a Corvette. Any make. Any year. I owned several and loved every one of them. A '57 Chevy was good, or a '58 or '59 or '60 Chevy was good, too. They were all right up there. You had to customize or you weren't squat. You had chrome wheels, dual pipes, usually decked the hood, maybe with a tube grille, metallic paint job, definitely a great stereo system.
At the same time, the Corvette was by far the worst car to make love in. No. 1, you had to have the top down, which meant you needed someone with almost no inhibitions, or you had to hit it lucky with a really private parking spot. You had to get 'em up over the passenger side and arch their back over the rear of the Corvette, which sloped down. It was really difficult. Sometimes they banged their heads on the trunk and that was not cool.
I was better off taking them to the beach when I had a Corvette. I always carried blankets in the back of my trunk, stuff like that.
But the make-out limitations were the biggest reasons to get rid of the Corvette and get one of the '60 Impalas. I had a great '59 Olds 98 convertible. That was wonderful. Six-way power seats, real wide, real nice.
You could do it easily in the front seat because of the six-way power setup. You just get away from the steering wheel and go to the other side. Bingo. You were goin' at it.
However, obviously, the best sex-wagon ever created was the old Hudson Hornet, because the front seats used to fold all the way down. It was a great style car, too, in its own way. But the main thing was that it was a bed on wheels. So you had to try the Hudson Hornet, if for no other reason than just the experience alone.
As for the beach, we went wherever we wanted. But Knights Beach . . . our beach . . . the beach set aside for our club . . . was the best. It was dark. My club brothers were doing their thing, too. You felt comfortable. You felt right at home.
Still, a huge amount of our time was spent on Hollywood Boulevard, polishing our pickup strategies.
The Boulevard was an art form you honed over time.
Your paintbrushes were your clothes, your car, your conversation and your friends.
The easiest pick-up approach was striking up a conversation with a chick in a car with one of her girlfriends, dumping all the guys you were with, switching cars going the same direction and then going to make out.
Sometimes, you'd already know some of these girls' first names. Sometimes they'd get in and you'd introduce yourself: "Hi, Darlene, I'm Frank."
 
Page 84
Some girls would go, "I know who you are." And I didn't like that. I would have rather had a little anonymity in this case. I wasn't there for a social gathering, per se. I was there for a bodily function.
By and large, I went for more dark-haired girls than blondes. I went for bigger breasts than small, and bigger girls in general because I was a bigger guy.
And I really liked outgoing, wild girls, rather than quiet, shy girls.
There was a period where it was cool to just come right out with it: "Hey, baby, wanna screw?" But it was a very short-lived period, I want to say around 1964 or '65. Then it got uncool.
But before it got uncool, irreverence was very, very big. Cops were pigs. Parents were idiots. Institutions sucked. And you could say anything to any girl and get away with it. Not only get away with it, it was encouraged.
The great thing about the Boulevard was that it was safe. You're not gonna get mugged and you're not gonna get killed. A girl would always know you would bring her back to the Boulevard after sex. You would either let them out in front of the Vogue Theater, the Egyptian, Graumann's Chinese . . . somewhere they could hook up with friends again.
The law of the jungle on the Boulevard was: You don't do another guy's girlfriend.
Or if you do, she has to be receptive and you can't get caught.
You know, you could say to her, "Hey, baby, you got great boobs." And if she took offense, you have troubles. Most of the time they wouldn't be offended. These comments were more or less expected.
If she did take offense, a lot of times you could say, "Hey, don't get all bent out of shape, because I'm just schemin'."
Scheming, they understood, is when you're plotting and implementing your strategy on a chick. You're coming up with a way to play her, almost as if she were a fish. OK? That's scheming. Struttin' your stuff. Layin' out your line. Showin' her what you got.
Some of them will laugh and think you're cute. Some of them will look at you and think you're a jerk.
You've just got to go for it, take your cuts and whatever happens, happens.
I mean, the way I looked at it, Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. But he also hit 714 home runs. There are a lot of girls who'd just tell you to buzz off.
I'd tell them:
"Well, maybe I'll have to."
Or, "I was just tryin'."
Real witty stuff, huh? Amazingly clever.
Well, unbelievably it worked, or a version of it worked. What can I tell you?
 
Page 85
Besides, I didn't insult easily. There was no reason for animosity in the pickup game. You'd just throw enough stuff against the wall and assume something's gotta stick.
If they didn't go, you wanted to convey one thing: Your loss, baby.
Another way we played the Boulevard was called Shuckin' and Jivin'. You're drivin' down the street and you see these two girls in a car. One of them is all uptight. But the one in the passenger seat's having a good old time. So ditch the first girl. You're shuckin' and jivin' on the second one. You're calmly polite to the other one so she doesn't drive off with your quarry. She's a sacrificial lamb for your buddies. If the chick on the passenger side gets out of the car, your buddy gets in the car with the stuck-up driver. He goes and buys that girl a cup of coffee.
He's your blood brother, and blood brothers did that for other brothers.
The girls knew the game as well as we did. They were being shucked. They were being jived. And, actually, they were jiving us back.
If your shuck-and-jive didn't work, you hoped your sounds would. Your tunes. Your car stereo.
The best stereo was a Muntz. That was the first car system for awhile. You had a speaker in each front door, the biggest you could cram in there. Maybe 12-inch, maybe 8- or 10-inch speakers. FM radio was pretty much unheard of then. So you had AM radio and you had 8-track tapes.
Pretty prehistoric, eh?
But again, it was what was happening at the time. And it worked.
By far the best make-out music was Johnny Mathis. If you're with guys, you don't want Johnny Mathis. Cruising music is entirely different. But if you're doing it with a girl, you've got Johnny Mathisand only Johnny Mathison the stereo.
You could say, "Hey, look, wanna come into my car and listen to Johnny?"
You'd play, "When Sonny Gets Blue" or "Chances Are" or "Wonderful, Wonderful" or "12th of Never."
Any Johnny Mathis song, and you were halfway home. You ought to be able to make it the rest of the way and score.
Scoring.
It was the beginning and end of life through several of these years. It was your purpose for rising in the morning, and the only reason you ever went to bed was either to have sex or to rest up so you could go back to work on getting some more sex the next day.
Remember, I've said I always believed I was the luckiest man alive. And I feel like I was really lucky to come along at a time when sex was normal. It had changed from a taboo. It had switched from something only bad people or disturbed people did, or people who were somehow unbalanced or who

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