Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (23 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 114
Nobody ever performed the jalapeno feat again. One guy tried. He barfed his guts out after about three peppers. He was miserable.
But I, in the meantime, was able to parlay my renowned cast-iron stomach into further handsome dividends.
Our base of operations for these capers was a hamburger joint named Alex's.
Alex's was on Pico Boulevard, about one block from Rancho Golf Course.
My buddy, Steve Wallace, as he often was, was the instigator in this scene. He'd wait till Alex's had a few patrons file in for lunch and then he'd start talking about me in the third person.
"I heard some guy say he could drink a whole bottle of tobasco sauce," Wallace would say in a loud voice so everyone could hear. "But my dad's a doctor. He said, hell, if anyone tried to drink a bottle of hot sauce, their insides would cave in."
Whatever it took to get some patron interested.
Next thing you know, some poor schlub would be betting Wallace that I couldn't drink a bottle of tobasco sauce.
We're not talking one of the tiny bottles they often have on diner tables with your scrambled eggs or something. I mean the next bottle up from that. A pretty-good sized one.
Well, of course, we did have people pay to watch me down the tobasco sauceand, of course, I could do it, no problem.
We'd win $10, $15, $20 a pop on the bet.
Which was pretty good money for kids in those days.
I won my buddies a lot of free lunches at Alex's.
Once again, it is I . . . Superbelly . . . defeating the forces of evil. Or at least some moron trucker who didn't believe I could do it.
Restaurants always seemed to inspire us.
One staple of every Knights' school year was to whip up a huge batch of oatmeal and then take pledges down to some of the nice eateries in Westwood.
What the pledges had to do was, cram their mouths full of oatmeal until it was running down their chins. Then they had to go up and look in the window until they'd gotten the attention of some people eating, point at their food and make faces like something was wrong with it, groan and hold their stomachsthen spew the oatmeal all over the windows.
Oatmeal: The Perfect Vomit Substitute to Blow Chow With.
Somehow I don't think Quaker Oats thought of the slogan.
But it worked for some morons like us.
The oatmeal routine was, I believe, one of the more inspired rites of pledge passage.
 
Page 115
I mean, we had some of the usual stuffguys had to go up and stand naked on this one billboard on Wilshire Boulevard.
OK, so it's a cliche. But we still thought it was pretty funny.
Besides, it's kinda like Moe bopping Curley with a ballpeen hammer and Curley doing the "Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk."
You gotta do it if you're the Stooges.
Us stoogeswe had to do the naked-billboard thing to pledges
It was expected.
When I say stooges, I mean it endearingly
We were lunatics, me and my Knights brothers. Mostly harmless although I guess not always.
But the thing about it, life was never dull.
Like Roseanne Rosannadanna used to put it, it was always somethin'.
Take the time Fingers Freeman walked out of J.W. Sloan with the grand piano.
Which he hadn't exactly paid for.
"Fingers" was actually Jimmy Freeman, and Fingers' old man was a millionaire.
I guess that's why Fingers didn't have anything else to do but dream up stunts. The more audacious, the better.
In this case, it was the bright idea of strolling into Sloan's, the hottest furniture store in L.A. at the time, dressed in coveralls, claiming to be "here to pick up the piano."
That, apparently, was all the credentials required for the good folks at Sloan's to help Fingers and Wallace, I believe, as his accomplice, to wheel the piano out of the store.
The store employees all but rolled out a red carpet for Fingers and Wallace to boost that baby. Opened doors for them. Helped hoist it into a truck.
It was a scene right out of Clouseau where Peter Sellers, playing a beat cop striding the sidewalk, holds the door for fleeing bankrobbers to pile into their getaway car.
In a way you have to lament the passing of such an innocent time when a store just naturally assumed some yokels dressed like moving guys were, in fact, there to legitimately cart the piano off.
In a way, I guess you have to blame jerks like us for pulling such shenanigans, destroying the trust we used to have in these situations.
You could say "shenanigans" was a convenient euphemism for "larceny" and probably be right.
But to us, it wasn't stealing.
It was hijinx.
 
Page 116
Wrongheaded as that may be, the story had a happy ending in a way.
While the baby grand never was returned to Sloan's, Fingers delivered it to an old-folks home.
Some senior citizens are still tickling them ivories to their pace-makered hearts content today, thanks to Fingers and Wallace.
And they say crime doesn't pay.
The story also has a sad endingalthough with a zany twist.
Fingers was an outstanding athletehe could drive a golf ball 300 yards back in the days when everyone didn't have some space-age material in the shaft and clubheads bigger than a manhole cover, launching every ball like a Saturn rocket.
But Fingers one day got too energetic and broke his neck diving into the surf at our beloved Knights Beach.
It was an incredibly terrible incident.
Fingers was left paralyzed.
He later passed away in Mexico City while attending the 1968 Olympics.
And then Fingers achieved an eternal place in Knights lore.
He missed his own funeral.
That's right.
His loved ones had set such-and-such a day for the ceremony and all the details were set.
Only one problem.
Somehow Jimmy missed the plane ride home from Mexico.
Beats the hell out of me how it happened.
We never knew.
Somehow, someone boogered up loading his coffin on the flight.
Meanwhile, back home, no one knew that exactly until the ceremonies were about to begin.
We were all assembled there, ready to raise some serious lamentations.
Which a lot of people did.
But Wallace and I wound up sitting down in the front row and we heard the whispers that Jimmy was a no-show.
I believe that Wallace and I were about the only ones in the congregation who knew at the time:
They'd wheeled a box out there for the funeral.
The box was empty.
We went through all these gyrations for about an hour.
We all paid our last respects to Fingers.
Wherever he was.
Somehow, we could see Fingers somewhere with a satisfied smile on his face.
Not even the Knights could have plotted a better gag.
 
Page 117
When I think of it, a whole lot of our goofier pranks as Knights were aimed more at ourselves than at innocent bystanders.
We had what we called the "B.F"Buddy Fuck.
Sorry. There is no politer way to put it.
The best buddy-fucker of all time had to be Wallace.
And Las Vegas was the setting for two of his best B.F's.
In the first one, we're drivin' back from Vegas one night.
Wallace is at the wheel, goin' about a thousand miles an hour or so.
I'm sleepin' in the back and Dickie Schwartz is riding shotgun.
He shouldn't have been.
It turns out some of Nevada's finest notice our car and take exception to us going a thousand or so.
Wallace sees the red lights in his rear-view mirror when they are a speck on the horizon.
He has just enough time.
He pulls over to the shoulder.
Nudges Dickie.
Yawns.
"I'm . . . kinda . . . tired," Wallace goes, nonchalantly, stretching his arms up over his head, rubbing his neck.
"You drive for awhile, Dickie," he says.
I wake up in time to see Dickie slide over into the driver's seat and Wallace take Dickie's place.
Dickie Schwartz, still coming back from dreamland, is too groggy to see the troopers barreling down on him just as he pulls out onto the highway.
He drives about 29 feet.
The fuzz pull him over.
They hand Dickie the ticket.
Wallace sits there lookin' at the officers like:
These hot-rodders.
Whatta ya gonna do?
Wallace's second great Vegas B.F. came after I'd been holing up, as it were, all weekend with a girl named Mickey.
We're sleepin' up in our room when Wallace and someone elseI don't remember whoslipped in and stole Mickey away (with her complicity, I might add).
The boys spent a couple hours with Mickey and then drove off with her.
In my car.
I mean, hey, I didn't mind the Mickey part.
I'd had my fun.
I was always willing to share.
And Mickey obviously was going with the program.
 
Page 118
But my car.
That really hurt.
I had to make it back to L.A. on my own.
But then I guess there's supposed to be a "gotcha," at least a little one. Otherwise it wouldn't be an official B.F.
Thanks guys.
Speaking of thank-yous, I can't get out of this chapter without a note of appreciation to a couple of women in my past for providing some of my crazier moments.
The first one is Sarah.
I'm in this apartment on Cadillac. I'm single. I'm seeing all these fine looking young girls.
So I went after 'em.
Needless to say, they responded.
Arrogant, yes. True, also yes.
The best I met in the building was the girl in Apartment 311.
That was right upstairs from 211, which was my apartment number.
Now, the way these buildings were laid out, 311 was cleverly over 211 and that was over 111.
So the girl in 311 had a balcony and I had a balcony in 211.
Which, fortunately, would come into play later.
It turns out the girl in 311 was Miss Mississippi of 1962. She was probably one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life.
She was about three steps better than Farah Fawcett. With a better body, Blonde hair, delicate thin face, blue eyesjust incredible-lookin'.
Her name was Sarah.
I find this out when I run into Sarah one day on the elevator. She looks at me and I look at her. I never thought anything else of it.
A couple of days later, there was a knock on my door.
There she was in a trenchcoat. She had a cup in her hand.
OK, so it sounds like some fiction out of spy thriller or a Playboy fantasy, but I can't help that.
There Sarah was standing in my doorway, and she says, "Ah beg yo-ah pahdon, suh, but could ah borra a cuppa sugah?"
And I said, "Well, shet ma mouf. You surely can."
She had that Southern accent and I just melted like butter.
So I walk into the kitchen. I take the cup out of her hand. I turn my back to her.
Andthis is the God-honest truthI reach up into the cabinet to get the sugar, I turn around to hand her the cup and there she is.
In her birthday suit.
Totally buck-naked with her trenchcoat open.

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