Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (17 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 86
weren't taught right. No longer were these the only people who engaged in sexual intercourse outside of marriage.
Now that may be bad to some people. But in a way, it probably was good we went through this transition. We may be less repressive. Women may get to enjoy sex as recreation, not just procreation, the same way men pretty much always have looked at it. Perhaps that's better for everyone involved. Maybe more of us are more comfortable with our sexuality and therefore mentally healthier as a whole.
All I know is I had one hell of a good time.
I had the best time you could possibly have.
But just up to a point.
I also had the worst time you could possibly have.
I can't say it was all fun.
I can't say it was all good.
Because it wasn't.
In fact, all you can say is that some of it was the opposite of good.
It was crap.
There is a price for over indulgence. One I never expected, not in 60 jillion years.
If you had told me this would happen, I would have looked at you like you just landed from outer space and would never understand our planet, and there was no way I could communicate how wrong you were.
But you, the space alien, would have been right.
I would have been wrong.
I got tired of sex.
After awhile, the thing on Cadillac Street, all the women, all the girls, all the faces that became the same, all the names you never knewit all got to me in the end.
I remember coming home some nights and the towel-party note would be there and I thought, ''Oh, no. There goes tonight. I was looking for some sleep. And we're 'entertaining."'
Trooper in the sexual revolution that I was, I went and dived right in.
In the end, though, sex was not fun anymore. It was a chore. An obligation. It was something to live up to. It was a bog you sank down into.
Me. Frank Bank. I got tired of meaningless sex.
It drove me to my first wife. She wasn't ultra-hip. She wasn't flashy. She was a good personstill is. She wasn't real easy. She meant something to me as a person.
For the first time I saw the happiness that opened up to you from being with one person.
It only took me 1,000 or so women to get there.
 
Page 87
I'll always be glad I took the One Grand route.
I'll always be glad the route ended.
 
Page 88
Chapter Five
The Idiot Magnet
I am an idiot magnet.
They are drawn to me.
I am drawn to them.
I have spent my entire life away from the norm.
(Well, except for the most normal people in America, the Cleavers, but that was make-believe normal and doesn't count, even though, like I said, Hugh and Barbara were a very real-life Ward and June, so, in a way, they do count as normal. But they would be two of the very few I know.)
Clear?
Mostly, when you're talking about your normal, whitebread, 9-to-5 guys . . . I am not that.
I am the antithesis in every way, shape or form.
So are the people I have hung around with the majority of the time.
This is why I wound up bumping into guys like Jack Kerouac, the Father of the Beat Generation. This is how I dropped peyote with the famous author, Carlos Castenada. How I wound up rappin' with Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael, the black activists.
This is how I wound up getting arrested with Cesar Chavez, the grape guy.
This is why I hung around Don "Big Daddy" Garlits and another Don of drag-racing, Don "The Snake" Prudhomme.
My thirst for crazies led me to that time me and my friend Jimmy peed in the radiator of my Cadillac and had the run-in with the Hell's Angels on the way to Yosemite.
And it led me to Marlene, Marlene, the Six-Day Queen, the woman I was married to for almost a week.
In recollecting these things, I kinda wish I could palm it all off on Leonard, the head cluck in the cuckoo's nest we sometimes called my home.
My Pop, most definitely, was completely nutty in every best sense of the word.
 
Page 89
I loved the Old Man for his zany ways.
They inspired me. Uplifted and guided me.
But I don't really think I can dive into the gene pool on this one.
I am just naturally wacked-out in my own right and I seemed to seek other certifiably insane individuals from the lunatic fringes of society.
Sort of like wandering baboons finding each other, bonding and forming a pack together, scratching and picking fleas off each other's backs.
I liked the intensity and the unpredictability and the energy these crazy people projected.
I liked the action.
I liked the scene.
Any scene.
As long as it was what's happenin' or might even possibly happen, I wanted to be there.
Especially if girls were involved. Which they usually were.
Maybe it goes back to Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac was a guy we ran into in high school down at a place called Pandora's Box on the Sunset Strip. At the time we didn't know he was the father of all beatniks.
He was just a cool guy we'd see at this hot club where we liked to think we could nail a few women.
Pandora's Box was on a traffic island on Sunset and Crescent Heights. This was back in the days of The Troubador and Terrea Lea and the Garrett and Joanie Baez and all the folk singing.
Pandora's Box was a mainstay.
You would go in there and you would get your hot apple cider with a stick of cinnamon. Oh, man, it had all this stuff. It was cool. We would sit there and read poetry. It was dark and the fire was going and the bongos were going.
And if you happened to have a joint, well . . . I mean, that was my first experience of seeing people get loaded. I didn't do it at the time, although I did try marijuana a few times later.
I mean I'm not gonna be Bill Clinton here. Everybody smoked grass a few times in his life, me included. But I didn't really like drugs and basically avoided them.
This was about '58, '59, and Kerouac was in there in Pandora's and he was a very strange man. He definitely marched to a different drummer.
Quiet.
Very suspicious.
He sat in a corner of Pandora's Box and he had two drums near him. Bongos and a conga. And he had some coffee and some cigarettes.
He dressed like a bum.
 
Page 90
Like a cutoff sweatshirt, torn Levishe dressed like today's Valley fashion plate who would go spend hundreds of dollars for the look.
But in those days, you know, it was unacceptable, so that's why Kerouac did it.
His hair was fairly long, but not very full. He was somewhat balding. A grayish beard scraggle. No berets or baseball caps, but one time I saw him in almost like an Indiana Jones hat.
We talked about people and love, and he was one of the earlier flower children. His basic point of view, as I got it, was that we should all love everyone, but we're so distrustful of each other that we're blowin' up the world.
Which was fine.
I could dig it.
The only thing was, in the name of preaching trust, here was this guy sitting over in a corner, man, got a weird eye out for everybody.
Kerouac didn't want to be up front in Pandora's because he didn't want anyone bugging him. So a lot of people didn't even know who he was.
But Pandora's Box was this big, huge meat market and it was hard to stay hidden.
Everything was, "Heyyyy, man. Like, uh, you know the Kingston Trio, man. They're cool."
Berets, goatees and sunglasses were very, very big. Sandals.
Very much pre-Maynard G. Krebs.
Maynard G. Krebsthe beatnik sidekick of Dobie on "The Dobie Gillis Show"was patterned after all these people at Pandora's Box. It's the first place where people started all this, "Hey, man" stuff.
And Gilligan was patterned after Maynard G. Krebs and all the people at Pandora's.
So, how, you are asking, did me and my preppy Knights crew fit into this scene? Here we were, walking in with our penny loafers and Levis, white socks, a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up twice and the collar open.
They must have thought we were very strange. They knew we were like high school guys. This wasn't a place that served alcohol. They were coffee houses. They were pre-Starbucks.
But these were the great meat racks of the '50s. And we didn't care whether we fit in or not. Or we tried to blend the best we could in spite of all the berets we were walking into.
Mainly, that's because, well, some of these flower children had nice bods.
It was a great place to go to score, man.
We would walk in, "Hey, man, what's happenin'? Let's go get lost in the stars."
 
Page 91
Anything to score.
That's actually how we met Kerouac.
One night this guy was sitting there reading poetry. I didn't think it was real good poetry, to tell the truth.
I mean, I loved the whole poetry thing in the coffee houses, but I'm saying, Kerouac . . . his poetry was just average at best.
So I made this comment, something to the effect, "Man, I've heard better than this crud." You know?
And this real scraggly looking chick that did not shave under her arms, raises one arm and I saw all this hair and I went, "Omigod."
And she's telling me, "Why don't you give a little respect?"
She was like, "Shut up. That's Kerouac."
That's how I realized who it was.
I'm . . . I wouldn't say forward . . . but I love talking to people. And the bigger the better. I walked up to Kerouac and I wanted to resolve all the problems at Walden Pond and be a little Thoreau-ish with the guy.
I'm never feeling 100 percent comfortable with him. And, I'm sure, I'm making next-to-zero impression on him, too. But the main thing was, there was always a good-lookin' broad near him. So it was a place for me to go to sidle up to something with very ample breasts.
We wanted to fake, at least, being interested in finding our Inner Flower Child, so to speak.
If it got us women, that's all we asked.
The dude would be reading his poetry and we would slip up next to some chick hanging around Kerouac and go, "Hey, man, Jack is doin' this, but why don't we go somewhere?"
Remember, all we had to do was drive up the other side of Sunset, the other side of Hollywood Boulevard, and park and talk about the world and our moons into their seventh houses, if you know what I mean.
But if they didn't want to make love, all right, we could just dump 'em off at Pandora's and we would go over to DL's, our club hangout. And we would change like chameleons. We would go from hippies back into soc's.
But hippie chicks were still some of the most fertile ground for scoring in the early '60s. And that led me into meeting Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael, two of the major black activists of the '60s.
Angela was a very nice, quiet chick who truly believed in Communism. Out of all the black activists, she was the most real.
Stokely was only interested in white women. Stokely was an ass. He wasn't nice. He was nice when you first got to know him, but he just loved blondes.
You'd run into Angela and Stokely and the rest at UCLA and also on the weekends in Berkley, where they'd be holding protests and stuff.

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