Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (19 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 97
But I would rather have gone to the Luau on Rodeo Drive and gotten a couple of whiskey sours, wearing slacks and a dress shirt, rather than go to some ratty place and stick something up my nose or whatever
But these peyote buttons were real interesting and they were kind of a hallucinogenic. This was in my Playboy intellectual days. I was maybe 20.
I was about the same age for all these adventures I'm talking about.
From 19 to 22 I was a real hell-raiser.
But Carlos, I bumped into at the student union at UCLA.
Everybody hung out there.
And somehow I knew who he was and he knew who I was.
Remember, back in the early-'60s, by now I was a pretty high-level person.
People knew who Frank Bank was. They knew because of "Leave It to Beaver"that was our zenith.
We went from '57 to '63, but from '60 to '63, we were like household names and I was going to UCLA.
I wasn't about to sneak up on somebody and say, "Hey, baby, let's jump in the sack." A lot 'em knew who I was. But a lot of 'em didn't.
I mean, I wasn't opposed to the fame thing working for me if it got me girls. OK by me. I mean, I was just such a casual guy, though. The word, "casual" was very big in my vocabulary.
So I didn't like forcing the name, Frank Bank, on anybody. If it helped me out, fine. If they thought I was a schmuck for the way I made money, so be it.
I heard remarks every now and then. Like, "Oh, that idiot thinks he's a hot movie star" or something like that. And I wanted to go, "I don't think that," but I didn't. I was a better listener than I was trying to fight back. I didn't have anything I had to worry about fighting for.
I knew I was cool.
I knew I was right.
I knew I was a good guy.
And I knew I was not stuck-up, conceited or any of those other weird things.
If there was some dork, I would never blow him off. I loved dorks. They just weren't with-it people. Because, see I started off in that area. Hey, I loved the movie, "The Revenge of the Nerds." I loved some of those nerds. Especially Booger, you know, the guy who was always sticking his finger in his nose? I loved him.
They were cool, man. They were funny They had their revenge, too.
And I had my transformation.
I was really what I was. I wasn't a nerd trying to be cool. I really was cool. And I knew that. I belonged. I now knew that I belonged with the sweet people, the higher end of the proletariat.
 
Page 98
And Carlos Castenada was one of those people I met that day at the student union.
We used to call the place Disneyland. Because it was this brand new student union. And it had a couple of bowling alleys downstairs, where we used to bowl for 10 cents a game. And you could eat in there burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, chips. And it had the bookshop. That's where Bear Wear started getting popular. All these school T-shirts and sweatshirtsall of the casual dress that you see around the world today started at UCLA with Bear Wear.
I don't know if you know this or not, but UCLA clothing was the most popular clothing in the world. If you went to Asia or if you went to Europe, the No. 1 sweatshirt or T-shirt that you were going to see wasn't going to say, ''USA." It was going to say "UCLA."
Sounds crazy, but it's the truth.
At our student union, people came from all over the world to buy clothing. They'd go in there and buy sweatshirts and T-shirts and all that stuff. We're talkin' 35 years ago, before you ever saw a Gucci T-shirt or before you ever saw a T-shirt that said "Eat at Joe's" or "Gates Barbecue" or anything like that. I do believe that we started that stuff before most colleges. I can't guarantee it, but it's a belief of mine and I think I'm right.
So now I'm in the Disneyland student union and there sits Carlos. He's just a heavy-duty Latin-American kind of guy. And he's kind of quiet.
And he goes, "You're the guy from 'Beaver.'"
And I went, "Yeah."
And he says, "I'm Carlos."
And I go, "Hi, Carlos."
And he went, "Uh, I wrote some books."
I went, "Are you the guy that wrote that 'Don Juan' stuff?"
And he goes, "Yeah, man."
He says, "I been there."
I remember him sayin', "I been there."
He meant to hell and back. Because, see, now we're into the drug-culture days. And those drug-culture days lasted a long time. A lot of people were talking about things. We used similes. We used the language.
It's like when I was young, we would say, "bitchin'." Meaning, something was really cool. Yet, when I was in my 30's "bitchin'" was a real stupid word and no one ever used that. Now I hear it's comin' back.
The verbiage of young America or the verbiage of a sect or a part of society was always different.
And "he had been there" was a big thing with drugs.
That was what Carlos was trying to say.

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