Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (14 page)

Al Matthews owned a sea-green Cadillac convertible. It
was the first year with the trademark tail fins. It was beautiful, and the
first Cadillac in which I'd ridden. Cadillac's only competition was Packard.
Mercedes was still a pile of bombed-out ruins, Mitsubishi was the Japanese junk
plane that our Corsairs shot down by the bushel. In 1950 the United States made
80 percent of all the cars in the world, and Cadillac reigned supreme.

The
Hollywood Freeway was still a long ditch with exposed steel rods and concrete
being poured. The route to the San Fernando Valley was either along Riverside
Drive around Griffith Park, or through Hollywood's Cahuenga Pass. Geffy took
the latter route. The city already had memories for me. We passed a movie
theater where I used to sneak in and sleep while a fugitive from reform school
living on the streets. The men's room was behind the screen next to the
emergency exit into an alley. When Joe Gambos and I knocked on the door in the
alley, one of the winos that frequented the theater would let us in. One night,
however, I knocked, the door opened and a policeman charged out swinging his
nightstick. Joe was standing behind me, so when I turned to run, I bumped into
him. The cop caught me across the backbone with the nightstick. The blow
knocked me down and the bolt of pain made me scream. I was writhing on the
ground and the cop kicked me a few times before telling me to get going. I
went. The next morning my entire back was black and blue. It was numb for
weeks. I've never hated cops, but I knew then that they were frequently not
what Norman Rockwell painted for
Saturday Evening
Post
covers.

Geffy turned up Cahuenga Boulevard, passing the
Hollywood Howl. Across from the Bowl was an outdoor theater where the Life of
Christ was put on every summer. My father had worked there for several years.

The San Fernando Valley's orange groves were falling
quickly 10 the developers' bulldozers. Tract homes were rising to house the
greatest immigration in human history, which was then in full swing. Never
before had so many people moved to one place in so short a time.

Geffy knew very little about Mrs Wallis except that
she had been a silent film comic in Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies.

Her name was Louise Fazenda. I remember her when I was
a kid. She wore pigtails like a trademark. She was funny. I haven't heard
anything about her for . . . twenty years, I guess."

We turned off Riverside Drive onto Woodman. The area
was still all orange groves and alfalfa. Half a mile north of Riverside, at
Magnolia, there was a ten-foot wall, whitewashed to resemble adobe. It was a
long wall. Geffy turned into a short driveway and slopped at a solid green gate.
The address was 5100 Woodman.

Geffy pressed a button and the intercom in the gate
crackled. "Who is it?"

"We're from Al Matthews's office."

The gate swung open, controlled from the house. We
drove in and the gate closed behind us. Flowers bordered the road, agapanthus
and trellised roses on the right and a huge lawn on the left. The lawn sloped
from the Monterey Colonial house, with trees dose around it, to a swimming pool
and bathhouse. Behind the bathhouse was a tennis court. The house itself was
smaller than the mansions on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, hut the grounds
were far better maintained. They radiated the serenity of a cloister.

The road kept going toward the rear, but a circular
drive around a fountain ended at the front door. It opened as we arrived. Mrs
Hal Wallis was in her fifties and clad entirely in white. She hurried to greet
us. She had very blond hair and a big mouth with a huge smile. She was one of
those persons that you warm to the moment you meet them. She told us to come
in, but Geffy said he had to get back and take Al to court in Pomona that
afternoon.

"Give him and Emily my love," she said, and
turned to me. "Come on. Follow me." She took my hand and led me
inside.

The hallway was dim after the bright sunlight. She led
me past a very formal living room, then through another room with blue chintz
upholstered chairs, and down a hallway with Chippendale and polished brassware
into the kitchen, which was sunny. There she introduced me to a snowy-haired
woman named Minnie, who had been with the Wallises for a long time.

Mrs Wallis looked me up and down. I was too dressy to
do the work she had in mind. She asked Minnie if Brent had any old jeans that I
could use. Minnie wiped her hands and went to look. While Minnie was gone Mrs
Wallis explained that her property included a back street where there was an
old house that nobody lived in. A mound of trash had accumulated over the
years. She wanted it moved and dumped in a large pit. Did I know how to drive a
truck, she asked.

"Depends on how big it is."

Minnie returned with a pair of Levi's and a T-shirt.
Mrs Wallis held the jeans to my waist. "He's a little heftier than you,
but they'll probably fit."

The fit was adequate for the situation, although I
wouldn't have worn them in public. My vanity was substantially greater at
sixteen than it is at sixty. Indeed, the whole society put greater premium on
appearance in 1950.

"Follow me," she said, leading me out the
back door toward the rear of her property. Under a weather shed was an old
stagecoach. Nearby was a row of horse stalls, although there were no horses.
There were a couple of small cottages, one used by her gardener who came around
the corner, saw us and quickly ducked out of sight. "Who was that?" I
asked.

"He doesn't know you. He's the gardener, poor
man. He was in a car accident and his wife and daughter were killed. He went
out of his mind. He was in Camarillo. He needed a special environment . . .
privacy . . . seclusion. I was glad I could give him a job."

We came upon an area that looked like the storage yard
of a farm. I'd noticed a large field behind the cottages. Mrs Wallis said it
had been a walnut orchard until a few years before. As I recall, some kind of
flood had killed the trees. The property was still called Wallis Farms, which
was printed on the many checks she would give me over time.

In a building that resembled a cross between a barn
and an open-faced garage was an old stake bed truck. It was bigger than
anything I'd ever driven, which was actually limited to a few stolen cars.
"Can you handle it?" she asked.

"Sure." Why not? It wasn't as if I was
driving it to Oklahoma City on Route 66.

We both got in and I got the motor running. She was
going to show me the route. We started off, bouncing along a dirt road toward a
paved street. It was Magnolia, which ran at right angles to Woodman.

"Turn here," she said. She meant the street.
I thought she meant the space between rows of orange trees. The truck turned,
but the bounce got worse, and the sides of the truck bed began snapping tree
limbs.

"Oh my God!" she said; then dissolved into
laughter as the truck hit a tree and stopped.

"Nobody's perfect," I said.

"My attitude precisely. Back up and try
again."

I reached Magnolia and went around the block. The
Wallises owned all the property in between, including several newer garden
apartment buddings.

We turned into a driveway beside a house quite old by
Southern California standards. In the overgrown back yard was a mound of the
standard effluvia of a wealthy society: a mattress and bed springs, boxes of
trash and a refrigerator with the door torn off, boxes of discarded clothes and
scraps of lumber.

Mrs Wallis told me where to dump what I loaded.
"I'll walk hack," she said, cutting straight across her property
instead of going out to the street and walking around the block.

I began throwing things on the truck. It was late
morning and the marine layer of clouds common to Southern California was
rapidly burning away under the bright sun. The hard labor common to reform
school and the county farm had instilled resentment in me. It was hot, dirty
work. Sweat was running into my eyes. Then I got a sliver of wood under a
fingernail. By the time I'd finished with filling the truck the first time, I
was telling myself that I wasn't coming back tomorrow. Many men take pride in
hard labor, swinging a pick or wrestling a jackhammer. That attitude is planted
in adolescence by family and culture and has myriad names: Protestant work
ethic, the macho manhood of Hispanic societies, the competition of Japanese
bushido transformed to the mercantile world. I still recalled Whittier when I
had to do hard labor and I hated it. I was not alone in that view. It was a
group attitude, perhaps akin to what slaves feel. Repartee expressed the
subcultural view: "Manual labor sounds like some kind of Mexican to
me." "Work is for fools and mules, and you don't see long ears on
me."

I drove the truck to the dump and pushed the trash off
in a cloud of dust. On the way back for another load, I found Minnie waiting on
the road. "Mrs Wallis says to come in to lunch. Take the truck back to the
garage."

In the kitchen, a place mat, silverware and a napkin
in a ring awaited me. Minnie had corn chowder and a ham and cheese sandwich
with lots of mayonnaise waiting for me. It's strange how clearly I remember
such details after so many decades.

As I finished, Mrs Wallis entered. By now the San
Fernando Valley, which would have been a desert if not for the Northern
California water (what a wonderful story of chicanery
that
is) was a full midday blast furnace.
"It's too hot to work," she said. "Why don't you take a swim?
There's lots of bathing trunks in the pool house."

"That's a great idea," I said.

"I thought you'd agree. One thing, though. If
some men in collars show up, don't pay any attention to them. I let the
brothers from Notre Dame High School swim in our pool. They almost never come
until late afternoon, but . . . just don't be surprised."

"Okay."

I went out the kitchen door and around the back of the
house,
en route
passing a large rose garden
in full spring bloom. Mrs Wallis would tell me later that Hal had a special
affection for roses.

As I crossed the vast lawn dotted with shady maples
and an occasional tall pine, birds sang. No wonder the Catholic brothers came
here. It was as bucolic and peaceful as a seminary garden. Off to the side a
whirling sprinkler cast sparkling drops through the sunlight. I went around the
swimming pool to the bathhouse and found some swimming trunks that fit.

I walked out and dove into the pool. It was the first
rime I'd been in a private swimming pool, or in any pool by myself and it was
great. I dove and swam until I was tired, and then lay on the hot cement and
let the sun dry me. Lying on the warm cement beside a swimming pool is one of
the most pleasurable sensations I've ever experienced.

Soon I saw Mrs Wallis coming across the lawn. She'd
changed clothes, but it was still all white. She always wore white; I never
discovered why. She strutted in a parody of a zoot suiter, leaning backward,
exaggerating her arm swing, a haughty expression on her face. She carried a
tray with two ice-filled glasses and a pitcher. "Lemonade?" she
asked.

"Sounds good."

She put the glasses on a wrought-iron table and poured
the lemonade. As she handed me one, she said: "You've got a pretty good
tan ... at least from the waist up. I thought everybody in jail was pale . . .
unless they're colored or Chicano."

"They let us take off our shirts to work out at
Wayside."

"I used to be on the county parole board."

"I didn't even know the county
had
a parole board."

"They do ... or at least they did .. . once upon
a time."

She was a most likeable woman, radiating a
good-natured garrulousness. She was also curious about me and asked me a lot of
questions. My replies were more wary than candid. Why should she be concerned
about me? It was obvious that she had wealth surpassing the dreams of the
average person. What did she want from me? She could sure do better than me for
a gigolo. Nonetheless, I found myself grinning and laughing. She was warm and
funny.

A young woman in shorts and an immense straw hat, with
two children ambling around her, appeared coming across the lawn. While they
were still some distance away, Mrs Wallis said that she was a neighbor,
"who used to be my son's girlfriend even though she's four years older
.... Is that strange?" Over time I would learn that she often asked
questions like that, in a deliberately conspiratorial manner of speech. It was
not malicious. It was her way to draw you closer to her. "Her husband's
directing a movie at Warner Brothers. If
they
knew she was coming
here . . . oi vay
they'd
be displeased."

They!
What
they
was she
talking about?

The children blew by and hit the water like two small
bombs, and the young woman extended her hand as Mrs Wallis made the
introductions. I can't even remember her name, or who she was, except that she
was about twenty-five and quite pretty, with a full mouth of teeth showing as
she smiled during the introduction. The best part was that it saved me from the
velvet interrogation. When she was seated and they started to talk, I went into
the water to play with the children, a boy and a girl — older than six, younger
than ten. I was (and continue to be) poor at determining the ages of children,
except for my own child, who hasn't gotten that far yet. We threw a big, light
rubber ball around the water. They swam like seals. Why not? They were Southern
California children of the upper middle class. Swimming was in their genes.