Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (20 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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Here was another guy, kinda like Chavez . . . nondescript. If I had to pick him out of a crowd today, I couldn't. I could get Cesar. But I couldn't get Carlos.

He was about five years older than I was. Other than that . . . he looked like your everyday Latino guy.

So how did we get from "You're on 'Beaver'" to popping peyote? It got to the point where he says, "Wanna do some buttons?" Something in that vein.

He says to me, "We're meeting somewhere."

We met over at someone's house one night. And it was on a school night.

It was in Beverly Hills. A major, heavy-duty Beverly Hills house. Pool. Tennis courts. Servants quarters. Theaters. You know. Crap like that.

Typical Beverly Hills house.

Whose? You never asked.

It was immodest to ask.

The house was in the Beverly Hills flats. Right near Sunset and Beverly Drive. Big estate, though.

I remember I was in the kitchen. Carlos was in there. And that was the first time I ever did any peyote. And it was really interesting because I got so damn dizzy. And I was just like . . . I'm not sure what I was like.

There were lots of good-lookin' chicks. And some very substantial-looking guys. And I'm saying, there were about 20 people there and only three or four of them were Latin. And the rest were all West L.A. types. They were just sitting there getting loaded.

For all I know maybe we were puppets set up for Carlos' next book or something. Remember, he wrote these "Don Juan" books really back a long time ago.

But he was a bright guy. I told you I got off on learning things. So I figured, OK, I'll try this . . . peyote. See if I can learn something.

I really didn't learn anything. Except I got loaded.

I was either with Wallace or Phil Kerbis, or one of those guys, one of my club brothers. And the next thing I knew I was in my bed. I was still living at home. I remember the experience of being lightheaded. I do not remember the experience of going anywhere.

After that I still saw Carlos around campus. I just didn't go to the parties. I think I did peyote twice, both scenes like that. That was all. It wasn't that big a deal because people were doing it every friggin' day.

I had more fun, when the word, "TGIF" was coined . . . Thank God It's Friday . . . where we would sit and drink and drink. And we would drink these two drinks.

One was called Skip and Run Naked. Because after you drank one, that's what you would do, skip and run naked. Skip and Run Naked was beer, vodka . . . you put the vodka in the shot glass and you drop it on top of the

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beer. There was a third ingredient, but I forget what it was.

If you were higher class, you would have what's called a French 76. In a French 76, you substituted champagne for the beer. Why was it a French 76? Beats the bell out of me. Probably "French" because it was champagne. I don't have a clue what the "76" meant.

But the most popular drink was Skip and Run Naked. You'd have a few of these and you would.

You'd go down to Julie's in Westwood. Or there were a few places down by USC. What was I doing down by the hated USC campus, when I was a UCLA Bruin, first, last and always?

The broads.

There were some good-lookin' chicks at USC.

We went wherever the action was.

One of our favorite hangouts was the Luau I mentioned before. The Luau was one of the fanciest, hippest restaurants on Rodeo Drive.

It was the place I drank 56 whiskey sours on a bet.

After I drank the 56 whiskey sours, I walked outside and the bet was that I had to walk the double-yellow line between the manhole covers. Now, on the corner was an old Atlantic-Richfield gas station. And I had to walk halfway down the block to the next manhole cover, and I wouldn't miss a beat.

I won the bet.

It was 2 in the morning. There was a little bit of traffic. Not much. They kinda steered clear.

And the Beverly Hills cops were there and they didn't bug us. Because we were "cool." We were "substantial."

I was wearing an alpaca sweaterwhite tennis shoes, no socks, Levis.

We belonged.

See, here's the deal.

If you belonged to the Beverly Hills neighborhood, the cops were cool. But if you looked like you were from the barrio, or you were from South Central, if you were there to cause trouble, those cops were brutal.

They were among the most violent officers you ever saw . . . they were not nice guys.

But they were really nice guys if they saw you were driving, say, a new Impala convertible, you had this nice-looking girl and you were really clean-cut. If you were clean-cut, they were your friends. If you were there to loot a house, they'd cut your freakin' heart out.

But, you ask, how I did 56 whiskey sours? I couldn't really do that many, could I?

Oh yes, I could.

In about three hours.

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They were regular-sized whiskey sours, four ounces, I believe, and you'd drink 'em half a dozen at a time.

The waiter was a guy named Alfred. Our favorite thing with Alfred, every time we saw Alfred, we would say to him, "Sip-sip?"

I think that is Polynesian. Or it's Filipino. It's something down in the South Pacific. But when you say "Sip-sip?" to someone, that means, "Do you eat it?'

The whole phrase was, "Sip-sip boogie?"

"Sip-sip" means "do you eat" and "boogie" means "it.''

Ask a Filipino about that.

But when you said that to Alfred, he would just laugh and you'd go, "Bring me another half-a-dozen, Alfred."

I did get up and whiz a couple times. I did do that.

I don't know why the bet was 56. I don't remember what was supposed to be magic about that number. But 56 was the number that came up.

Whereas I didn't drink a whole hell of a lot in high school, obviously I was making up for it in college. The bars were just too much fun.

The greatest women in the United States went to the Luau. I'm tellin' ya right now, the dreams of your life walked in the door of that place.

And we would walk out with them.

They would come in wearing short-shorts. They would come in wearing very tight jeans. That's just about the time bras were starting to get burned. You would see halters. You would see the "California Look," you know.

Bright colors. Silk blouses, so you could see the nipples underneath the silk.

Big blonde hair. Bouffants and all that were really popular. Bubble-flips, they called them. It was like the one Nancy Sinatra used to wear when she sang, "These Boots Were Made for Walkin.'" Kinda like a matchhead.

It was the "That Girl" look.

Mary Tyler Moore.

When we weren't prowling Rodeo Drive, we were driving through another major Los Angeles scene, looking for action and finding crazy people.

We got into drag racing.

And we met "Big Daddy" Garlits. We met Don "The Snake" Prudhomme. Tommy Ivo was a young Hollywood movie star when he started racing. He was the king of the dragsters there for a couple of years with his Buick.

Me and Wallace and Dickie Schwartz would go out to the drags all the time and I had my Corvettes. We used to hang out in a place . . . nowadays you wouldn't go down there because it's too dangerous. It's in the heart of deep do-do . . . Crenshaw and Slauson. It was in "Boyz 'n' the Hood." That corner, that's where the kid got shot in the movie.

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Slauson is also where Johnny Carson used to talk about on "Tea Time Movies" in the old bit on his show: "You take the Slauson Cutoff and cut off your Slauson."

But at Crenshaw and Slauson back then, there was a place called Harry Mann Chevrolet.

It was the largest Corvette dealer in the United States. Your Corvette was not a Corvette unless it came from Harry Mann Chevrolet.

If you went to Beverly Hills and bought your Corvette, you were a complete and total wuss.

You had to go to Harry Mann because first of all you were going to get an injection. A fuel injection was a big deal. He had this mechanic down there named Jimmy Viedenoff. Jimmy could make fuel injection sing. He was the best mechanic in the United States.

There would always be one or two Knights down at Harry Mann Chevrolet getting their Chevys tuned or their Corvettes tuned. Then we'd go race them at these drag strips around L.A.

There was the Lions Drag Strip which was down in Long Beach, just off the newly named San Diego Freeway. It was below Gardena. Then there was San Fernando which was out in the San Fernando Valley. And we had Pomona, where the L.A. County Fair is. And then Fontana was a big drag strip.

This was where drag racing got popular.

I raced with them. You bet I did.

I raced in my Vette and I had a '60 Impala, 360, 4-speed, a honkin' Chevy that really was cool. My '57 Chevy was good. My fastest car was my Corvette, though.

I won a lot of trophies with that sucker.

This Corvette was painted regal turquoise, which was like a metallic turquoise. It had black leather interior. It was a '58 and it was fuel-injected.

We did some minor modifications. Like we "polished the ports." We "tuliped" the valves. That means the valves can move faster. It's called "legal cheating.'' You're doing everything you can to make your car the fastest in your classification.

Every drag strip had a different classification like dragster or a funny car. Matter of fact, funny cars were invented, I believe, in Lions. The girl dragster that became real famous, Cha Cha Muldowney, started in Lions, I think.

But Garlits is from Florida. Garlits would come out West. Our guys out here that were the fast ones were Don "The Snake" Prudhomme, and Ivo was pretty fast, too. The Snake was probably the most high profile, although we also had a guy named Tom "The Mongoose" McEwen who was very fast.

I was there one night when The Mongoose ate The Snake.

My buddies and I were chump-change guys. We drove what were called

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"stockers." You had stockers and you had dragsters and you had funny cars. Stockers was "A Class," "B Class," ''C Class." Then when you got up into high-stockers, that was Corvettes and Cobras and stuff like that. There was A-Gas, B-Gas, C-Gas. And then you had the old Model-T's. They'd put engines in that were 25 times bigger than the cars. Those also were gas-classes.

I used to race in A-gas and B-gas and Supersport.

The A and B stood for the size of the engines and the Supersport was for the Corvettes. And T-Birds . . . ha-ha-ha. I don't think a T-Bird ever won a trophy at a dragstrip. It was always either a Chevy or a Corvette or once in awhile a Cobra. And then, for awhile, the Dodges and Hemis and some of the Chrysler Corporation products,

They were screamin'.

But Corvettes ruled. That's why there were so many songs about them. Ask the Beach Boys. Ask Jan and Dean. Everything was Corvettes. The Ripcords and all those guys. They sang about them.

I won some trophies. Not all of the time. But I would be competitive.

There were different degrees of idiots and cool. There were some icky guys that hung out at the drag strip. There were some greasers. And then there were cool guys that hung out at the drag strip.

You could always tell who was cool. Let's say a guy goes out and buys the right car . . . obviously a '57 Chevy was a right car. But it was only a right car if you bought it the right way and in the right color. If you bought an automatic four-door with a center-post that was copper-colored, you might as well have had your pencil pocket-protector on. Your hornrimmed glasses and your braces. You're an absolute geek.

But if you bought a two-door hardtop, all black, or if you bought one that was red with a black interior or if you bought a convertible that was white, red, black, turquoise . . . something like that . . . cool.

If you went out and bought a convertible that was beige . . . c'mon, man. You're a friggin' toad. You don't buy a friggin' beige convertible. Or mint green.

I shouldn't have to explain this to anyone. You wasted your money there, man. These guys are losers.

But the best of the best, guys like Big Daddy and The Snake, were out there at the strip . . . they were professionals.

We were just there for the scene.

This was a very rare scene.

It was not for chicks. It was for having a good time with the boys.

Our avocations, aside from girls, were hot cars and hot poker games.

It was what Southern California was famous for. Still to this day, if you want to see more Vipers, more Ferraris, more of every hot car in the world,