Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (22 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 109
We take off and we don't even try to get back into the lanes with the traffic. We drive on the lip all the way to the summit, about a mile.
As soon as we got to the top, I put the car in neutral, leave my foot on the brake and start coasting downhill.
People are looking at us passing them. They're steamed.
But hey, you think a few scowls are gonna stop us now?
We were laughin' so hard, we rode the shoulder all the way to the bottom of the Grapevine.
We stop at this little gas station. We fill the radiator with water.
Everything was cool.
OK. So now we go on a little bit further and we're up on the other side of Bakersfield on the way to Modesto, which is where they shot "American Graffiti."
When you heard Wolfman Jack growlin' on the radio, "It's gon' be fo' hunded de-grees in de valleh today," that's the valley they were talking about.
The San Joaquin Valley.
Now after all this it's about 7 o'clock and we're really hungry. So we find this roadhouse restaurant.
Don't know the name of it.
It was a big old roadhouse between Bakersfield and Modesto on Highway 99.
We pull in and there's this old couple, right out of American Gothic, across the aisle from us. Jimmy and I sit down and we both order the standard California dinnerbig half-pound hamburger, French Fries and a Coke.
They had just started to serve us our dinner and we hear this humongous racket out front. It sounded like all hell breaking loose.
Which it literally was.
The next thing, the doors fly open and in comes all these smelly, grimy guys with the Hell's Angels. They were having a Labor Day outing.
I'm telling you, there were over 100 bikes out front of this restaurant.
They were the smelliest, roachiest-looking guys. Long scraggly hair. Unkempt beards. Ugly old tatoos. Levi jackets with "San Berdoo" on the back.
Meaning San Bernardino.
These girls looked like yesterday's latkes. That's Yiddish for yesterday's pancakes.
Boy, were they terrible.
Jeans. Leather. Lipstick from ear-to-ear. And they smelled and they were dirty. And they had their fat rumps hanging out of these chaps.
They had the chains out of their back pockets and the cycle boots.
And they had their stupid little sailor hats on.
 
Page 110
That's the pile of puke that walked through the door.
All of a sudden, 100 of them walk in and they start sittin' down anywhere and everywhere.
Two of them come over to Mr. and Mrs. American Gothic and wedge into their booth.
Next thing I know, these two big dudes come in, followed by four more right behind 'em.
Four of 'em sit behind us and the other two say, "Move over, boys."
They slide in with us.
Did we object?
No, we did not.
You think we're stupid or something?
We didn't do diddly.
We had looks on our faces like, "Yessir, Mr. Hell's Angels."
I mean, we didn't say a word.
Jimmy is a big boy and I'm not exactly a flyweight, but neither one of our mommas raised no fools, either.
We moved over, right?
Afraid? Yeah, my heart was bouncin' pretty good there.
Because, see it was just me and Smiley.
If it was two-on-two, we wouldn't have had any compunction against any two of those guys. I mean, believe me, I would have stood up with any of them.
But this was 50-to-1.
It was 100-to-2.
Our bodies would not have been found.
Understand, this was before today's new-and-improved Hell's Angels, sanitized for your protection, with a Surgeon General's warning on the label.
This is before Toys for Tots and other goodwill, public-relations stuff by the Angels.
This was when they were for real. This is when they put the actual Hell in the Angels.
They were known for messing people up. They could care less. They did what they wanted and nobody stopped 'em.
Just about the time they say to us, "Move over," the lady comes and slides the burger plate in front of Jimmy and a burger plate in front of me.
So Jimmy was sittin' there with this look on his face, which is the same thing I'm thinkin'. We have a split second to do something and as he's reaching down to pick up his hamburger, this one guy sticks his big old greasy, smelly mitt over on Jimmy's French Fries and says, "Pass the ketchup."
And he starts pouring ketchup all over the place.
 
Page 111
Jimmy takes one bite out of his hamburger and I go, "You know, Smiley, I think we're parked in a bad place."
He goes, "Yeah, I think you're right.
"I'll go with you to help you move it."
We turned to the guys and said, "Hey, would you watch our food for us?"
And they said, "Surrrrre" with these big grins on their faces.
As we got up, we walked real quickly. We were only three booths from the door. We looked back and they'd already scarfed the meals. Jimmy's whole burger went into this big beef's mouth.
But we didn't care.
We saw a little daylight to run to.
They thought they had a couple of geeks to play with.
They'd have squashed us like bugs on their windshields.
We'd have been roadkill.
We bailed into the Cadillac and peeled out of the parking lot.
We go half an hour or so up the road and duck into this market and grab something to eat and tear out again.
I was trying to be as cool as I possibly could be. Just get us out of the scene alive. It was something you'd see in a movie.
The Angels were famous for going up to Yosemite and Sequoia on holidays. We were going to Pine Flats Lake, which wasn't too far from there. Labor Day and Memorial Day were their two biggest days, but we weren't even thinking about that until they showed up at the roadhouse.
They were 100 percent USDA, Grade A scarier'n all-get-out.
You know if a major moose who had the size and appetite of Jimmy was willingly giving up his food without a whimper, you've run into something genuinely frightening.
If Smiley gives up food, life and limb are involved to a serious degree.
I don't blame Jimmy for one second. He was one brave hombre normally, but he wanted to cut and run, and so did I. I was scared out of my boots, too. And we should have been.
But I didn't have to go all the way to the national parks ordinarily to get my dose of crazy. I usually found it all too close to home. With my closest friends.
That calls to mind the time I faced another form of Hellthat being Hell Night when I was first pledging the Knights.
You know, this is where you have to clean stuff and go around quacking like a duck or clucking like a chicken or drink some kind of disgusting gunk or stand naked somewhere or do some kind of weird, demanding physical activity.
All that good stuff they're basically trying to outlaw nowadays in fraternities. Back then it was still fairly common.
 
Page 112
Didn't strike me as something I wanted to participate in.
But I wanted in the Knights real bad.
An opportunity presented itself for me to sidestep the bullcrap of Hell Night and get what I wanted . . . membership.
This one guy gets up in front of the group and he's got a mayonnaise jar. A small mayonnaise jar. And it's filled with jalapeno peppers.
This was 1957 and jalapenos weren't real popular in West L.A. People thought of them as gut bombs.
So they're laughing, all these guys, and there are two guys pledging at this moment, me and another guy named Marty Hochberg.
So the head guy says, "Well, tell you what. We're going to give you guys a choice. Taking Hell Night or eating this entire jar of peppers. With no water. And you have to stand here for 10 minutes after you eat the jar of peppers."
Marty didn't even think twice. He says, "I'll take the Hell Night."
Me, I'm standing there like I'm really mulling the whole thing over.
Marty goes, "You crazy? Are you actually thinking of eating the jalapenos?"
Well, remember that I was an actor.
I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I say to the guy with the jar, "Boy, you guys are somethin'. How about I eat a quarter of the jar?"
"No," he says. "You gotta eat the whole jar."
"How about half a jar," I say. "And I'll take 50 swats."
"Nope. The whole jar or nothin'."
"But what if I only get halfway through and I faint or get sick?"
They said, "If you get sick, we'll beat the crap outta you. And if you faint, you're on your own. And you gotta take Hell Night."
I said, "Boy, that doesn't sound very fair to me."
They said, "Make up your mind."
"Well," I said, uncertainly, kind of stammering. "L-l-let me try it."
I pick up the first pepper.
I take a bite.
"Omigod!" I cry. I'm rollin' my eyes and stuff, kinda clutching at my throat and carrying on.
These guys are falling all over themselves, laughing their butts off. They're on the floor. Whacking themselves on the back.
They're lookin' at me, like: This is even better than we hoped.
I reach in. I take a second pepper.
And I go, "Maybe I'm gettin' used to this. Well, I'm gonna try not to faint."
I take the whole second pepper, stick it in my mouth. I chew it.
I say, "You know what, guys? I might be gettin' used to it by now." Their laughing fades to a little chuckling now.
 
Page 113
I proceed to pick up the jar and hold it out in front of me. I pause for dramatic effect. Then I suck out all the juice.
They had some carrots and onions in there.
I ate those.
I look in. There's, oh, maybe 15 more peppers in there.
I tip 'em over into two hands. I start shoveling 'em in, one after another.
I'm popping 'em like gumdrops. I've got my cheeks full like a chipmunk. They stood there with blank looks on their faces.
The room is dead silent.
Finally, I'm chewing all these peppers at once and the place goes nuts.
I swallow the last pepper.
They say, ''You gotta stand there for 10 minutes. If you pass out, you gotta take Hell Night."
I went, "Wel-l-l-l, I'll try not to pass out."
But they knew it was ovah . . . it was all ovah, as Howard Cosell would have put it.
Clock winds down.
Bank wins. Bank wins.
They all gave me a huge round of applause.
I say, "Hey, look, for a hundred bucks, I'll eat another 50 of 'em."
They went muttering away.
My private triumphant moment was complete.
See, what they didn't know . . . what I had to hide with my superior acting talents . . . well, by now you know . . .
I love jalapenos.
Have ever since I was a little kid.
What my brothers-to-be didn't know was that my mom and dad used to take me down to Tiajuana. Never the bullfights. Usually to the jai alai. Before the matches, we'd go down and eat tacos at Tiajauna Tilly's, this great, great Mexican restaurant.
My dad used to buy these big one-gallon jugs of jalapenos whenever we went down there, which was pretty often.
And what my fellow Knights-to-be didn't know was that on the Bank table, every night of the year, there was a big jar of jalapeno peppers.
I'd always eat at least one or two with dinner.
Cleans your sinuses out wonderfully. Really good.
I couldn't get enough jalapenos.
Hey, Br'er Rabbit never fooled Br'er Fox with the briar patch any better than I duped my bros in the Knights.
Not only did I duck the Hell Night bullet with the help of my jar of gut-bombs, I had become a living legend in my club.

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