Side 2 Back to Side 1

2 or 3 apartment houses that were on the tail end of that block they bought them and just kept them collecting their rent from them to pay the taxes on the property and all that and whenever they decided to expand and put additional sound stages they would just get rid of these buildings, which is what happened. But in the meantime, this guy being in charge, if any empties came up, he could say, "I got somebody important in here, don't look for somebody else because I have a manager for each apartment."

So we get this apartment, it's a one bedroom furnished. And here's what they considered a furnished apartment in '46 or '47. It had a built-in refrigerator, the living room was furnished with the furniture, they had dishes, forks and knives and everything in the kitchen, with a kitchen table and chairs, a swing away Murphy bed, not the one that was in the room, but it swung away - did you ever see that? I never had.

I've only seen pictures. I've got… go ahead, I'll think of it.
So anyway, with all that and maid service once a week, vacuumed the rugs and did some of the cleaning, the windows and all that for a husky monthly fee of $37.50.

Is that right?

So you talk about… that was right after the war when you couldn't get a place, so anyway we get this place and after I'm there awhile, there was a lady manager, an older gal, a nice gal - I could do anything and she wouldn't know what was happening. So the first thing I decided to do, when we used the kitchen, there wasn't a window in the kitchen. The kitchen was in the breakfast room area, so everything would smell up the room. So I said, "What we need is a fan right over the stove."

And this was the rear apartment, with the wall of the building just outside. So I find a 12 inch fan that just fits between the studs, I take a chisel and put a hole in the fuckin' thing, inside and outside, don't ask no questions. I get a couple of grills that go over it, this fan, because it's right over the stove, you boil water and you can see the steam go like this, right straight out. It worked terrifically.


The next thing I decided, I always had this distaste when you use the john and smell up the whole john, how the hell are you gonna get rid of that odor? I said, "There must be a way to get rid of that goddamn odor."
Okay, I got a plan. Get hold of all used stuff, cause there's tons of that shit. A small blower fan, like you use for the air conditioning in a car, because I had access to the machine shop and sheet metal shop in the place I was working, so I had them make me this thing which consists of a rectangular opening that fits between the two studs that holds the toilet seat on and I have two washers put onto that so you can drop this thing, take this thing out and two studs go right down so that it's mounted. Without doing anything except taking the thing off and putting the thing in-between. So now I got it anchored. Now how you gonna get rid of the odor? I drew a hole in the wall in the outlet of this squirrel cage thing, a hole right in the fuckin' wall. I put a cover on it like it was part of the house. Now the next thing is how do you get the thing to work. I don't want a switch and all that crap. So I get a microswitch. I put it underneath the toilet seat and I get a piece of thick sponge rubber, so that when you put your ass on it you activate the switch - when you get your ass off it goes off. Put that thing in there, it works like a charm. You don't have a bit of odor because when it goes through the studs it dissipates real fast. And it's working off 110 so I had to run a couple of wires and I channeled down low, just above the baseboard and then filled the thing in and painted it back over - you couldn't even tell it had wiring in it. It had an outlet that was there - it didn't have wires on the outside, so I could bury the wires inside - it looked like a factory job. And the whole thing cost me $3.00 for the motor. Then I happened to go to a couple of those home shows where they have all this shit for the house. You don't see it now for some reason because - and I'll give you the reason in a minute - where they were demonstrating these kind of devices, how to get rid of the odor and the idea was with some kind of motor and so forth. But the problem with the way they had it was you had to get an electrician to do the thing for the electrical because it had to be according to code and all this shit if you're gonna sell it and then there was a question of getting a hole in the floor to get the fumes out so it was so complicated that even if you got the thing for nothing, it's too much trouble. The idea is ok but it's too complicated and it looks too cheap. It's too involved. It would never have sold. Then I found out when asking for the patents there were about a half a dozen companies that tried all variations of the device. But then I discovered because of this 110 business and putting a hole in the wall, I realized that if you could build it so you didn't need a hole in the wall and you didn't need wires, now you've got something that would sell. I'm saying this to myself. I talk to myself. Ok, I finally found out how I can do it. Number one, there are a number of filters that will filter the kind of smell that you get from human waste, which is a sulphurous thing mostly. The battery part, you have the thing so that it can unplug and you plug it into your outlet, no wires involved, you plug it that way and you can tell when it's running down because it's starting to go slower and you make it so you do it once a week, because it's not used for very long when you're on the john, 10 to 15 minutes at a time. So there's the magic. No holes in the floor, no electrical hook up, it's all self-contained. I never got around to doing it. But that could sell to this day. Who doesn't want a non-stinky bathroom. And to this day not one son of a bitch has got it on the market. Not a one. You say, "it can't be possible, with the millions of patents, the millions of guys that are in the plumbing business? But nobody has that kind of a picture or outlook, but yet everybody would use it."

Nobody is going around saying, "Hey, you got something I can put in my bathroom so it doesn't stink?"

When are you going to see that? So it just doesn't get activated. But that can be done to this day. And that whole package can be made, I can say, without too much sweating, for probably $75. And the other beauty of it is you can do the same thing I did with the goddamn hem-marking machine. You get it on demonstration - if it don't work I take it back. First of all, you can't ruin it. There's nothing you can do - all you have to do is take 2 bolts out and put it on. There's nothing else you have to mess with. And once you use it you ain't giving that back.

Oh no, not if it works. Hell no.

Yeah. So another one of my kooky things.

My mother's brother had a mind like yours, only he followed through on stuff - he had several patents, very successful. Multi-millionaire.

So he must have sold them to companies.

He did. Automatic sprinklers. Automatic garage door openers. Those are both his inventions.

No shit.

Automatic fish feeder for aquariums. He liked timed things.
Yeah, cause that's the magic and half the problem. Who's gonna take care of it.

These things watched over themselves. He was involved with Wurlitzer on the original jukebox.

No shit. Did you ever see the collection of musical Wurlitzers they have in the museum in… belongs to that makeup guy?

San Sylmar.

Did you ever go up there?

I've only seen the cars.

Oh, you were on the other side, the new side. You get this on the old side.

What does he have?

He has, what were we talking about?

We were talking about patents and Wurlitzer and stuff.

Yeah, Wurlitzer… He's got a combination piano and violin Wurlitzer.

Wow.

To show you how weird it is, in a different slice of that same thing I'm trying to cover all kinds of crazy ground… Now you sell these things all over South America, which they did. How are you gonna service them? There ain't a son of a bitch down there that knows how to do it. They have a guy come from Chicago, a factory man, he had a standard route and he went all over South America and back on some time cycle and he would take care of everything - he'd have all the parts in his box and all this kind of stuff.

I bet he was busy, too. If they sold enough units.

Oh, thousands.

Because that thing is so intricate, it's got to have problems.

And everything he has up there works. You hear it play. You don't just look at it.

That's at Merle Norman's?

Yeah, across the street from the cars.

Okay.

So what you do there is you have to have a reservation - you go in groups. You wait for the group to come - nobody knows you from shit - you just join the fuckin' group and you're in. That's what I did more than once. Because nobody's gonna say, "Hey, where did you come from?" One guy don't know who the third guy is, he's just part of that group. But that part there is fantastic to see.

That's good to know because I'll do that.

Oh yeah, you'll love it. They've got an organ in there - 35 racks - just a fuckin' wall of pipes. Then they've got the thing digitized so that when they take down the input of a recognized organ player, it's on that thing and you can tell he's playing it - the technique of that guy comes through. Then he's got the first form of a player piano, not with rolls, it's called a suzetzer, which means a move up to, su, which is the act of and zetz is to bring to - and what it consisted of is a thing that looked like a player piano bench but high enough so that the fingers that were mechanical stuck out over the keys and this goddamn thing played the piano from this box. So you didn't do anything to you piano. You just added this thing by putting it up front and then you can roll it out of the way when you weren't using it. It was on casters. It's up there in that place. I mean he's got a collection of shit that's mind-blowing. A banjo that I never saw anyplace else - a mechanical banjo

I never heard of such a thing.

I know. What else has he got up there? Oh yeah, this one. You can't believe it, also German, somebody decided to make a device that had 6 violins in it and it plays all 6 violins. And you say, "How the hell do you do that?"

Now a violin is a lot harder… And they wanted it to play with horsehair, not with those little round wheels like they got on the Wurlitzer. They had a circular thing that was on the outside of the violins and the whole thing was about 4 feet in diameter. It was about 6 feet tall. And the bows were put in such a position that they made a circle and the violins were mechanically arranged so it could be pushed into the goddamn bows while the bows were going around. A mindblower type of arrangement.

That's a lot of work.

And to make it work so that it makes music. That's the kind of shit he's got on that floor. Unbelieveable. And on the main floor he's got some choice one-of-a-kind cars including one that belonged to Rudolph Valentino, an Italian car, a Duesenberg and a complete Dusenberg engine on 4 casters, a display engine on Wilshire Blvd. when they had a Dusenberg Agency. That's the one that I got to ride in.

Saul, I've told that story to half a dozen people and they just laugh the whole time. They said, "This guy has balls."

And the whole magic was I had a couple of cars that would be acceptable…

Unbelievable. My mom has a doll, Saul, in '34 she was at the movie theater and they had a drawing.

I'll tell you one after that.

Anyhow, they had a drawing and she wins this doll. And I have pictures of her up on stage. They took pictures of her when they awarded it to her. She was in the newspaper. And it's a talking doll with…

The very earliest ones.

Yes, with a cone… like a player piano, what do you call, the rolls, what do you call that?

Player rolls…
Yeah, they're about the size of a toilet paper roll and they're about that long.

That's a rare dog.

Ten years ago Mom says, "Hey, you interested in this doll?"

And I said, "Not at all because I know it's a very valuable piece, Mom. Let me get it restored for you."

Because it was deteriorating.

It wasn't taken care of.

You didn't think about taking care of it. So I take it to a couple of doll shops and they go, "We don't even want it here. We don't even want you to leave it here - we don't want any part of it."

So I take it to a gal in Riverside. And she's got one. She sees this, she flips. Big doll place, big huge restoration shop, so I call a couple of references that she gives me about dolls and restorations. I look at her doll collection and stuff and say, "Yeah, I'll trust you with this."

Because I wanted the hair redone. I wanted the face redone, because it cracked and time period correct clothing. The clothing had deteriorated also.

She said, "I'd love to - I've never worked on one other than my own."

So I brought original pictures of the doll with my mom as a little girl, holding the doll.

So she had something to go by.

And she has given it to my oldest daughter, the doll. It's treasured in the family. What a neat piece. Just goofy stuff. I'd never seen one with a cartridge for talking. Really unusual.

Really unusual. And you're talking about winning it in a theater. In Boyle Heights, when we lived on that side, and they had a lot of this crap - once a week they'd give away dishes and furniture and anything to get you into the theater. So we were there that night, my two brothers and myself and we're sitting about 2/3 of the way back and the guy is up there calling this number and nobody's responding and that's when you want to make goddamn sure that that number is dead because when two people come up to claim it, there are a lot of sparks. So he keeps calling this number and looking out there like this, for somebody to respond. And just out of the blue I say to my smallest brother, "Here's what I want you to do - go up the aisle, slowly walk all the way down to the front aisle and then turn left and take a seat."

So he does that and that's when adults only got the tickets. And here's this kid - the guy on the stage goes, "How did that kid have the ticket?"

And he's trying to figure out what he's going to do with this kid with the ticket and everybody's watching this kid walking down and when he gets all the way down there and sits down, the joint went bananas.

Just to see the response.

The kooky things you can come up with, you know. What's it gonna hurt? It's not gonna hurt anybody.

Get a good laugh.

Yeah, get a good laugh.

There was another one that was a kick in the ass, along the same lines. We go to Venice Pier, way back in the 30's and 40's and everything was a nickel. Hot dog was a nickel; root beer was a nickel. Ice cream was a nickel and it had just changed that following year that everything was a dime. Everything was moving up - they couldn't make it 7 cents and 8 cents, it would be a mess. So they'd had to take the bite and raise everything to ten and maybe give a little larger portion, but that's the only way we're gonna survive. So they do that. And I find out that my dad has only given us a quarter apiece. A quarter a piece when everything was a nickel, that wasn't too bad - you get 5 things - but now that everything went up you only get 2 things cause the third nickel you can't do anything with.

Keep it cold - as soon as that gets hot…

It's gonna go away…

It'll melt, I think. I might be wrong but I think it will. If I were going to do something I'd just use some… like some vacuum tubing or something. That you know holds up to temperature. But I don't think I'd use that… And then it would be my fault.

I know you don't like doing stuff like that but you know what…

Randy - did Dick go out?

He went to the bank for a moment.

Okay, I'm going to go out and then I'm coming back.

I'll tell him for you.

Don't rush.

Yeah…

I'll miss you.

Get off of my table.

Don't put that on there. I know you don't, but you know what…

I've been through so much the last month and a half - my back is… it's a wonder I can stand up at all.

Now you're in trouble - she's gonna do a nose to nose.

How are you tonight?

Fine.

Good.

I'm going to the beauty supply house.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

Why, are we out of stuff?

It's a good thing people in Westlake don't see this.

So we went out to the beach and we all got our quarter and I'm trying to figure out how we're gonna make this quarter work like it did before. So I say, "Okay, let's take the quarters and get them changed to nickels so we all had the nickels again."

And I get my youngest brother and I say, "Here's what you do - you go up to get an ice cream and you hold the nickel in your left hand, you reach for the cone, you stick it in your face and then you hand him the nickel and he'll scream like crazy but he can't take it back."

So that worked.

So then we go over to a place where they got hamburgers. The hamburgers were a nickel and I say, "Here's what you do - you hold the money in your hand - when he hands you the hamburger, you bite into the goddamn thing, then you hand him the nickel."

The same thing when he screams, you already got a hole in the hamburger and he can't take it back. So we got away that time too.

The whole summer it worked?

We went to different places.

That'd be a hell of a poster of you guys up in the park.

We did the same thing with the soft drinks. We'd start drinking and hand him the nickel…

All these people were around…
Did you ever go to P.O.P? Pacific Ocean Park. That was already when it was rehashed.

Okay.

The pier in the 40's and it was a whole different pier.

Now you went to Venice.

Yeah, both places. There was a little tram that went back and forth. They had a goddamn Model A motor in that thing, pulling it.

Run forever.

Yeah. 4 cylinder Model A. Low speed, because they're going slow anyway, so the thing's doing about 1,000 rpms, quiet as a mouse.

Chug, chug, chug, chug….

It worked beautifully.

I'll be darned.

And in Venice they had a salt-water plunge. You probably never even saw it because it was long gone. 500 people could get in there. It was all tiled with white tile - those little squares, with an enormous fountain in the center with 2 or 3 tiers, with water pouring over it and it was salt water that was heated.

Was it from the ocean? Or man made?

No, from the ocean.

Really?

Fantastic. Ten cents to get in.

Heated. So that was a plunge.

Yeah, that was what you call a plunge.
Yes.

Because you don't hear people calling a plunge anymore.

There was only one plunge in existence when I was kid.

There? What city?

Pasadena.

Oh, Pasadena.

Pasadena, or Sierra Madre - there was a plunge. Arcadia, Pasadena, Sierra Madre. It was dime or fifteen cents. And you brought your own towel and all that junk. They had a lifeguard there. They sprayed some water. But it wasn't heated. In the winter, you froze your ass off.

This was all glass panels all over so that when you're walking on the boardwalk, you could look into it. It was a hell of a thing.

Right in Venice?

Right in Venice, parallel to the boardwalk.

See, I know Venice. I worked in Venice for a couple, three years, so I'm trying to picture where it was.

You know where the pier that they had for dancing that was on, if you looked toward the ocean; it was on the left-hand side? Right next to that. To the right was where this thing was.

Boy.

Big, big plunge. 500 people could go in there. Boy, that was big.

I wonder when that went away.

I never had any reason to ask. Yet I never saw it come up in some kind of an article or something that crazy guy that does TV programs, Hull Howser, I thought he might have picked up on it but maybe it was before his time too.

I mean, do you think it made it to the 40's or 50's?

No. It was already being changed. Even that dance thing went away fairly early on that… Do you remember that ballroom that was on the pier?

I've just seen pictures of it. No. I'm sure my parents were there because my parents were big dancers.

I can remember Ocean Park, which was bigger in some ways when Jimmy and what's his name…

He's laughing because I haven't left yet.

The Dorsey Brothers. They had their band and they were playing there and I was listening to them.

My mom and her two sisters were singers on the radio and they competed and they went with the Lennon Sisters. They were called the Three Is. Iona, Ilene and Imogene. And they had great stories, just like you. I can listen to my parents forever. I love it. That's funny.

On the Ocean Park Pier they had the shoot the shoots that was really like a gondola, went down on a track with water bubbling all the way down, into a pond.

Really?

What a ride that was. On the very end of the pier.

And you got wet.

Yeah, because it would wash you all over.

And they had motorcycles that went around a barrel that was this way. The sides of this thing would rock back and forth as these guys were racing around this goddamn thing. From centrifugal force you were nailed up against that thing. And then of all things they had, I don't even know how the hell they got them up there, but they have a horse, way up on a platform and he dove into a tank that was six feet deep. A fuckin' horse.
Unbelievable shit that was on that pier. That's long gone. Ossified Roy.

Ossified Roy - what in the fuck was Ossified Roy?

This guy here had a disease where all your joints got frozen. For years. He would demonstrate by taking his two hands out this way, pull them apart like that and they'd go like that, like a rubber band. The only thing that moved was his lungs and his chest. Otherwise he would be absolutely rigid.

And you believe that?

Yeah. For ten cents you could see him.

For ten cents…

And then they had the dragon slide that was interesting. The device… the idea was terrific. There was a rectangular pylon that was probably 50 feet tall and wrapped on the outside was a dragon with scales and the whole thing on his feet and inside it was big enough that you could get into it and sit and so you took the elevator up in the middle and you got on a pad and the whole inside was lined with bamboo and you went down like a snake all the way down on that bamboo line.

Is this a corkscrew?

Yeah. Vertical. All the way down. They had a lot of shit there. And they were the first ones to pull this gag - they had the fun house. So they had the usual kind of stuff, but as you went out of the place, the hawker of the tickets had a valve that he could step on and when the nice young thing would come by he'd hit that valve and her dress would totally blow over her head - she couldn't get the goddamn thing down and she was so petrified, instead of moving off of this thing, she is frightened, trying to get this dress pulled down and at the same time everybody walking on the pier is all around that thing, having a picnic while this poor girl was petrified. Finally when he cuts the air off she runs through that crowd 100 miles an hour trying to get away from everybody.

That's cute.

They had some things in the old days that were really original. And funny.
In the late 60's a buddy of mine on leave from the Navy comes home - we were pretty inseparable in school, named Frank and he said, "Hey, what do you want to do tonight?"

And I said, "Let's go down to Pacific Ocean Park."

He says, "I'll tell you what, let's get into a couple of my Navy uniforms and we'll have as many girls as you can imagine."

So I go, "Great, we're pretty much the same size."

So we throw on a set of his dress Navy shit and we get down there and little did we know but the whole goddamn Navy's on leave. And I don't know military etiquette from shinola and if you pass by an officer, even if you're on leave, if you're in uniform, you have proper things you do. We get into a place and the guys are in a fight and the MPs are kicking ass and taking names and I don't even know what to say to them and they're questioning us about shit. I don't know rank from anything. How to answer or anything. Come to find out when we get back I could have gone to prison for wearing that uniform. Somebody said, "What did you guys do the other night?"

I said, "We went to Pacific Ocean Park dressed up like a couple of sailors, had a great time."

He said, "You asshole, you could have gone to jail for a long time."

When you're young you can do a lot of shit.

It doesn't matter.

You get us some money, Vdub.

As much as I had in there.

You didn't take some out? Goddamn it. Saul, you really got me in trouble. I've got to get home. You guys pay attention to these stories - take notes.

Let me show you that box on the way out.

SIDE 13


In Syracuse, New York…

And the next door neighbor is a peddler and he's got various things going on and he had a couple of boxes of apples that were spoiled enough so he couldn't sell them so he parked them at the curb for the garbage man to pick up and I get the bright idea, I'd seen pictures of guys feeding apples to horses because they like apples. So I take a lug box of those apples into a barn and I feed this horse a whole lug box of apples. Unbeknownst to me is those apples were terrible. This horse shit all over and the owner was cussing his head off. I could hear him.

You've always been a barrel of fun at other's expense.

I don't know where the hell I come up with these things. Another time in this same place we lived a bunch of other roughneck kids there, we decided we're going to go where the train runs in sort of a grade in that area so we had to run fast. And this guy knew I would set the brakes off of cars. So we're running along the track and we're setting the brakes and the engine is starting to pull harder and slower and this guy… the engineer doesn't know what the hell is happening to the wheels as they started to slip.

How many of them did you set?

Four.

Wow.

And then we'd get off on the side and watch this guy get off and try to figure out what the hell's wrong with this string of empty cars. I'm telling you, talk about insanity. We were just champs. That was the same city in which I decided one day - don't forget in the 20's 90 percent of the cars were old touring cars. What's a touring car? It's a sedan with no windows. An all open car. Why? Because that was the cheapest body style you could buy. And since most people use the car in decent weather you didn't go out of your way to go driving in the snow, you used it on the weekends to take your family to a park or do shopping but you wouldn't necessarily out of your way to use the car in the middle of a snow clogged road, no snow plough, nothing. It was just insanity to use the car. So you just left it in the garage until the weather cleared. Rain, that's something different. You can handle that. So here it is in the middle of the summer. I'm on the main drag, just like Ventura Blvd. would be down here, and the cars are parked the full length of the block and I said to myself, "I wonder what would happen if I got into the second car from the corner."

In those days you had a push button starter which you could put in gear, step on the starter and drag the car forward. And I looked at every car on the whole block bumper to bumper. And I stood at the curb…

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Hello? Hello?

And I lean against the building and I'm waiting to see what's gonna happen when somebody comes out and tries to leave. So I wait about 10 minutes…

Dogs barking

Two screws for the rocker panel for the Gremlin, so you can slip that thing back under it. And two screws are right underneath where the seatbelt thing comes out - in the little thing where it all rolls up. Two screws are right underneath that.

Okay, thanks.

Yes sir. Hello? Hello? Yes sir. I can hear you.

Car number 4 - he jumps into the car. And starts the motor up and he sees it's sort of close in front so he decides to back up. He puts it in reverse, but the car doesn't go anywhere. What the hell's with this? He drives it forward and it doesn't go forward. So he gets out of the car and he looks at that car and this car and he looks at the next car and the next car and he's really beside himself. Out comes another guy to another car and he says to him, "How did you park your car?"

He says, "What do you mean, how did I park it?"

He says, "These cars are bumper to bumper."

He says, "What are you talking about?"

The other one says, "Son of a bitch - how did they get all these cars together? How are we gonna get out of here?"

The other one says, "We're gonna have to push those cars up front far enough so we can get out."

So they spent 15 minutes putting the cars in neutral - no locks on the steering wheel lug bolts. They pushed the cars so they can get out. And I'm watching these guys go crazy. Why the hell would I think of that? Don't ask me.

You decided to see if a cat could swim.

Yeah. There was a canal that ran through the main drag. And I picked up this cat and walked over to the little bridge and threw the cat in. The cat went to the bottom and walked his way up the slope. I was six years old when I did that. He just went like 60 to the bottom. Because of the width of the whole thing - from the middle where the water was to where he got out was maybe ten feet. So he swam up a slope about ten feet.

Scared the crap out of him.

Yeah. Oh, God. Why would I do that? The hell if I know.

You're just a nasty son of a bitch.

I didn't do it to be nasty. I was just inquisitive. To see if that dumb cat could swim.

You never gave thought to consequence; you only wanted to know…

What's he going to do? I remember one time - this was all in the same time span and on the same trip - the same street - in Syracuse, New York, because we lived there… The only reason we were in Syracuse, New York, my dad was a baker…

Yes, sir, looking for some 3x10 or 12 foot corrugated steel panels…

Corrugated steel panels? They gave you the wrong department.
Thank you. So you're in Syracuse because…

My dad was a baker and he got acquainted with somebody who wanted to sell a bakery in Syracuse, New York, and being that he was a worker he wanted to elevate himself to owning a bakery and had saved up enough to buy it - probably a down payment thing, and you pay it off as you own it. So that's why we were in Syracuse. So the thing that happened also in the same time period was, beside drowning the cat and making this business with the parked cars, I went into a five and ten, and they had on display a circle about that big where they took the five pack chewing gum and they make a sort of a touring thing out of it and they made a display and I was a little short on height and I decided to swipe the ones in the middle of that pile and the whole thing fell on the ground and scared the hell out of me. And I ran out of that place…

You're a bad man.

And he was telling me he was so poor, his family, that he would wait for the grocer on Saturday night just before he closes the store some of the bananas that were left were so over ripe they couldn't sell them - they were just totally like a jelly and they would sell that for some fractional amount of money, then they would take the bananas home, peel the skin and spread the banana on a piece of bread and that was something better than plain bread to have in Germany. That's pretty poor. A spread banana on a piece of bread. That's a guy that was my boss, telling me this. And then when he came to America he couldn't get in here so he came to Canada. A lot of guys got easier access to Canada first, then they would get other papers and get into the U.S. at a later date. And here he comes to Canada and he has no real trade - they'll take anything just to keep a roof over his head because he doesn't know anybody in Canada. He gets a job in a foundry that takes old engine blocks, melts them down and they make manhole covers. Because I'm sure you've seen a manhole cover out of the hole - it's a big slab of cast iron with a few ribs in it. Sometimes it has a design in it if a certain city wants to identify, you know, the water company, or whatever, so some of them are marked. Sometimes they just have a grid mark in both directions. They create a grid for a little better appearance than just a slab and that was his first job. Stomach pains? Yeah. That can happen. And then you gotta say, "Why me?"

Oh, man.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy how those things happen. It's just as weird how they come and how they go. So this guy is a young kid…

Just a moment.

And this guy went to Canada. He left right after the war. He left for Canada to get out of Germany. He was a young man and he saw everybody was in miserable shape. He was single, didn't have a wife to worry about so he could make a move. And the background he had - he was always crazy about radio so he had a little bit of an electrical background for fooling around with radio and after he was working in the foundry he had a little more time to look around, he finally located a shop that repaired radios, televisions and phonographs. Well, the guy said he didn't need a radio man and he didn't know anything about tv, but he said that he needed a guy who could fix phonographs - he got a lot of calls for phonographs and there was nobody there… that was mechanical - you either know or you don't know - if you're a radio man it doesn't mean a damn about what you can do with a phonograph. And in that era there were still a lot of them around. So he says, yeah he can fix that. He never fixed one in his life but he was desperate to get out of the foundry. So he takes the job and again he has, like me, a little balls, he says, "I'll worry about it when I get the job. I'm not going to put a thing in the way like I never worked on them so I'm not even going to say yes."

So he gets the job and sure enough he's able to handle it and he turns around the fixes in short order so the small salary he was getting he was earning his pay for the boss and that made him happy. And he said that after awhile he saw the new thing is TV. You gotta be able to fix TVs. So he said to him, "Look, you don't have to pay me anything - I'll work on the TVs just to get the experience."

Because to do anything you've got to be inventive when there's no job. He had enough guys to do the TVs. He just wasn't going to stick you in because you need a job. You've got to do something that he's gonna have incentive to say, "Okay, you go fix this up for nothing, all right you can be part of the group."

So that's how he worked himself in. Because he had a certain amount of knowledge from radios and after all this is all electronic gear, the only thing that's different is the thing is working a picture tube. The other basic part of the power supply and all that is not much different than it is in the radio. So he slowly angled himself in and got a pretty good position in the end where he let one of the other guys go and kept him because he could do more quicker than one of the other guys could. In this world it's built on what can you do for me lately, and he was given the job. So after he was there awhile, through, I don't remember what the chain of events was, but there was an opening in of all places, in Chicago. Chicago, Illinois, for working on solar cells, because this was the space thing that was coming up now and every space thing you send up you gotta have solar cells because that's the only device that can generate electricity in space. There's no way to hang a cord on it to plug it in. So I don't know whether you read about it or whatever, but the point being he was offered a job there and again, being single, he was very frugal with his money, he had a VW - he piled into that car and drove to Chicago. A VW. From Canada. Eastern seaboard. And from that the next job he wound up getting was at TRW where I was working. And it was just a fluke that I was assigned to do a layout on one of the panels that's used on the spacecraft that surrounds the whole spacecraft. You have segments that you can bolt on that goes around the whole space craft and these panels are about 4 feet wide and about 8 feet tall so they hold quite a few cells and they have to be interconnected in such a way that you combine the voltages until you get the voltage you want and all this kind of stuff and you have to have diodes in the system for some safety and so that's how far back I saw him working - I didn't know him then - I only knew him when we were finally switched over to the main part of the company which was located. Who's at the door, can you show?

What?

Saul got a parking ticket.

He knows.

Go see who's at the front door. I don't see anybody there.

Anyway, so he's working with you on this satellite.

I'm assigned the panel but I don't know him because he's at a different level than I am. He's in the electronic design, not the mechanical design. I'm literally doing the mechanical. Take cells, put them on a panel, put a connector on, interconnect each individual cell with special kinds of connectors, which, by the way, I got attacked on a few things that had to do with solar rays.

In your name or TRW?

My name. But TRW got the thing. You know how that works. You have to sign that over. Which I didn't give a crap. What am I going to do with it? You know what I mean? Especially something as specialized as solar cells. I'd have to be in that business to take advantage of that. And at that time, hey, you had a job that's all you were concerned with anyway. So I still have those certificates that I got from the company which employed your ass. It's just the idea that I was above average on, what shall I say, being alert. So wherever was the thing that was a challenge, I didn't have to go ask my boss, I made it my own challenge. If I got something that worked, then I took it to him. I didn't say, "You know, we need a connector, do you think I should spend some company time on it?"

The hell with that shit. You just do it whether it's company time or your own time or whatever. Because it was just the pleasure you created something that didn't exist. And that works better than what's on the market or what they're doing it with. So that's what always put me in good stead because I had that attitude. I didn't say, "If I don't get any benefit, I don't get a money pay off with this, why should I give a damn - they didn't assign me this job, so why should I work on it."

That kind of stupid attitude. Don't make yourself better, just worry about you can do less and get paid. And for too many people, that's the way they work. 8 to 5 - I wasn't assigned anything extra. You don't get anything extra. So stay there and be a goddamn dummy. And when it comes time to get laid off you can be sure you'll be one of the ones laid off. And the people can't see that. I'm talking as a group. So nobody had to tell me and I didn't have to go into a whole mental gyration to figure out, how should you handle yourself with regard to that? If you're better they're gonna notice it. And I made sure they noticed. And it cost me very little effort to do that. So anyway, where in the hell was I with this guy? This boss of mine. Oh, the fact that… what the hell what was that about? I was going to bring out something of the fact of Germany… The banana thing. Oh, this was a cute thing. I'd be in his office sometimes and he'd call his wife and he'd talk to her in German. And he called her Zise Moose. Sweet Mouse. That's pretty comical - a grown man calling his wife Sweet Mouse. I picked up on the mouse part and I stuck the word flater in front of it. And I said "Are you gonna talk to the flater mouse?"

And that in German… Are you familiar with some of those words?

I don't know what flater mouse means.

That means bat. The flying bat. Flater - a flying mouse is what the Germans call a bat. So the next time I was there and he got through talking to his wife and I said in a joke to him, "Have you been talking to the flater mouse?"

He cracked up. He thought it was so funny he couldn't wait until the next time that she called the next day and tell her what one of his workers called his wife. And to this day when I call him in Arizona, I refer to her as the flater mouse and sometimes she gets on the phone and I call her flater mouse and they think it's funny. Because obviously it's said in jest. But you wouldn't think you could be friendly enough that the other party wouldn't think, whatever, you're gonna call me a bat?

Hi Jerome.

Look, he finally made it. I almost ran out of things to tell you.

No.

Never happen.

If you want him to talk all you have to do is ask him about how he went to Palm Springs. That's about 30 minutes and your ears will be smoking. The cartilage will be melting.

I was just telling him about my boss. And the funny thing he was talking about…

In that period… and so you hang up the stockings to be filled with gifts and what have you, so the night before Christmas I take a piece of string and look at where to put it and we had a cast iron stove in the kitchen, so there was a place to anchor that and cross over to the edge of the door or something and somewhere to hide those knicker length socks and I hang those things over the stove and the next morning I get up and I go into the kitchen and the stockings are gone and I look around for where the presents are and my mother says, "Why did you hang the stocking over the stove - they could have gotten burned."

I said, "I hung them there because they were wet and I was gonna dry them."

It just crushed my whole idea of Christmas. She didn't know anything about what's going on with Christmas because she was from the old country. All of that was not in her deal. I never forgot that crushing blow with those poor stockings. With nothing in them. So you know what happened out in California because of all of that? The same thing that's going on here. There are a bigger percentage of Jewish kids going to school and they're saying to their parents, talking Christmas and all that, and they're saying, "What are we going to do? We don't celebrate that holiday and if you just say we don't celebrate it, that don't sell."

It's like everybody else is celebrating it, how come we don't? So they're thinking how are we going to get around this thing here without getting involved. Finally one guy, this actually happened… And it's being done to this day. He buys a small Christmas tree - it's about that big. He puts it in the living room and they hang a Hanukah, another Jewish holiday that happens at the same time, that you could actually have some presents - candy money, chocolate and gold foil on the outside, nothing elaborate because at that point they weren't trying to compete, you were just trying to get into the festivity idea of it. So in walks a couple that they know and says, "what's with the Christmas Tree."

He says, "That's not a Christmas Tree."

They say, "What is it?"

He says, "It's a Hanukah Bush."

It started as a joke and the thing caught on and the other people found we got a way out - you buy a small tree and you call it a Hanukah Bush and you hang that stuff on it - there was a dreidel, it's a little thing that you spin like a top - and it has different things on it for how much money you would get or lose when you're playing the game kind of thing.

A lot of people have thought of that over the years.

Do you know how long this goes back? The 30's.

That's funny.

Now there was another problem. You're living on a block that's 3/4 non-Jews. Post Christmas you've got the red and green bulbs over the outside. Every time you pass a Jewish house the guy's a little uncomfortable, but what's he gonna do? He says, "I'm not going to join another religion just because everybody else has those lights out."

Finally the one the one guy…like they did with the Hanukah Bush, we got a way out. What are you gonna do? You put up blue and white lights, which are the color of the Jewish flag, and now you can decorate the house and it's not a problem. So you go down the street and wherever you see blue and white lights, you know a Jew is living there and he doesn't make the kids feel, "How come we don't have lights."

Because you can never tell a 6, 7, 8 year old kid why we don't. It isn't gonna make sense. So the best way is to find a way you can live with it. And I thought that was really funny.

Pretty creative.

We're going next door.

If you hear a click turn it off.

I'm going to switch to the submarine one first, it's funnier. I'm in New York, it's the war years, in the beginning when we weren't in it yet, just Britain was having a hell of a job. They have ads in the New York paper wanting Americans to apply for submarine duty and since, if I went into the American Army I'd have to be in the Army - I knew that was going to be miserable. But submarine duty - that sounded really exciting like you're in something that's really a bitchen thing to be part of. I go down to the office to apply. I fill out the form and everything is going okay until the guy says to me, because he's busy with other stuff and he looks mine over and he says, "How tall are you?"

I say, "Six one."

"Oh," he says, "Shit. Everything else looks okay - we can't take anybody over 5'8"."

I say, "How come?"

Those quarters are so fuckin' tight you can't walk around… I'd be bent over the whole time I'd be in the submarine. So I got out of being a submarine volunteer. Can you imagine? But that's what I thought. I always like the weird stuff. I probably wouldn't be alive today because the percentage of subs on both sides that didn't make it were very few. Those bastards eventually got shot down. But that was my idea if you're gonna have to serve Army duty a sub is the way to go. And the next thing that appealed to me was the machinery. The fuckin' motors going. And remember the early subs you could see the rocker arms. Everything was exposed. And you were in a hammock hung over the goddamn engines. It was so tight for sleeping quarters. Unbelievable. Yeah, so that was a kick in the ass that I missed out on a good deal. Battery acid.

Sulfur. Oil. Atomized oil.

That was the thing. The atomized… oil was different than when it was atomized it's really filling your lungs. And you hear very little of that unless you were connected with it. The average citizen, how would he know what the problem was being in a submarine.

My dad's best friend was in a submarine.

Oh, so you had a close association, knowing what the story was.

Still real close friends.

So that's how machinery got me. I love that. So where the hell was I before we went to the submarine?

We finished the other story. You just finished the submarine story. You were headed to another story - I don't know what it was… Well, it'll come to me. I can't believe the shit I got into starting at age 5 - it's almost like Marco Polo shit - I just went all over the 48.

It sounds more like Groucho Marx. You should have an opportunity to tell about Alcatraz.

But it was the time that made me get away with all that shit. The time. Fantastic. And then again it wasn't that I was a bad kid just looking to ruin things…









TAPE 14

It was the thing that the parents were never on your ass - they never asked you, "What did you do today?"

You came home to eat and went to sleep. That was the size of the involvement. They had all they could do to make a living and provide food and clothing. Not like, "Did you have a nice day today? What did you do?"

I don't remember my parents ever asking me once if I had a nice day today or where did I go. I mean, you were alive, you made it back to the house. You weren't cut up. You're doing fine. Yeah.

Okay, so you were headed somewhere in your story.

Yeah.

When Dick stopped you.

Goddamn, I can't remember what that was. About what age area that was in.

This is recountus interruptus.

What's that?

Recountus interruptus.

Oh yeah. I thought you were telling me where I was going. This one was interesting and I just lost my train of thought on that goddamn thing. Things you can do as a kid. Crazy in a different way.

You got exhaust gaskets?

Yes, half of them.

Right.

Oh, okay. Now, you're not getting… Are the new flanges being welded to your existing ones or are you going to bolt onto them? Oh. What's the benefit of that, because I got to have 2 inch spacing to get into the heads? Got to go underneath and the other one's got to on top.

I did one thing that…

Mark…

Hi Randy.

I see it right…

And it's the oldest one I ever saw - this goes back to the 50's.

The musical.

Gaslight.

Yeah. I never saw that.

Remember Gaslight? They made a picture later too. It's all about this guy - it's probably too crazy even to explain. I won't even bother getting into it. But the story line was so good and the tension that was happening on the stage was so good you were really into it, like you wanted to be like that but it really is. You were absorbed in the story, you forgot about the people sitting around you - it was just like you were in a live performance.

Now this is the stage play, not a musical.

Yes, stage play - not a musical. Like I said, I didn't like musicals as a rule. Especially when they have just dancing and singing only and there's nothing else involved with the barest thread of dialogue in there. Those turn me off.

There was a musical called Company in the 60's, late 60's - nauseating in my view - I mean, the songs were just like you couldn't remember…

What was the name?

Company.

Company? Never heard of it.

I know. And it was just to me it was the thesis of unenjoyability. There was not one thing that had a memorable…

Tune.

You couldn't remember - years ago, the musicals of the 30's and 40's…

You could pick out every now and then…

Great songs…

It became a national thing.

Even like the Unsinkable Molly Brown - I mean the song out of that sung Debbie Reynolds was a number one thing.

I remember others were - I was going to mention - the musical I didn't care for there would be a song here and there that would last all through the years.

But it's a heavy price…

To pay for that…

So I never really liked that at all. We did go to quite a few of those off-Broadway shows. That were good, serious plays of some sort. A lot of them would be a one woman or one-man thing that did a hell of a job. If the story line was good.

It's always been so expensive for me - it's just like god almighty - $50 - $60 for that…

Crazy.

Yeah, I know. Crazy.

You know, you say, who's going there? New York has got so many fuckin' levels of people who make money and they only hold, what, 300 - 400 people - 500 at the most. It's just like than one percent of the population. Yeah, they can afford to go. Joe Blow can't.

It's a culture. It's interesting. Audiences in different, like a tennis audience versus a movie audience, versus a stage play audience, they're totally different people.

Exactly.

Dancers - you go to see the ballet - the audience is totally different people.

Like ballet - my wife liked that. Occasionally there would be, I don't know what the story line would be - that goddamn ballet was interesting. But not like a steady diet I'm going to go to see a season of ballet.

I'll tell you a story sometime of my involvement with the Bolshoi Ballet. Pretty interesting. Very interesting.

With people from Russia?

I'll tell you. In the mid 60's - around '64 or '65, Saul Yurok, who was the impresario, he worked with my dad…

Jewish guy.

Right. Used to bring the Bolshoi in. The very first time they were ever brought and not basically held under house arrest everywhere they went was about '64, '65. And they came here and for the first time they were allowed to mingle with people and get out, you know, instead of just being under lock and key from the theater to the hotel.

And that Yurok was the one who made that happen.

Exactly. He did. So we were invited, because we were Yurok artists, we were invited by George Fowler and Saul Yurok to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel for the kind of coming out party, if you will, the very first time that these people were ever given freedom. So we go to the hotel and my cousin was this gorgeous guy who ended up being killed the following year just outside of Vietnam in the Philippines. But he was this wonderful, charismatic, just a great guy. He would just light up a room. He and I would just always have a lot of fun. So we went to this - I invited him. And he and I picked up on two of the girls. Dancers. Now, nobody spoke any English on their side. We didn't speak any Russian and there was another guy named Igor that was one of the dancers and so he was with one girl, I was with the other. He ended up having a very nice affair with her. I did not because she was the pet of one of the other lead dancers and he wouldn't let her get with me.

You could talk but you couldn't…

We spent a lot of time but she just wouldn't do it. Anyway, we spent a week with them and I will tell you that we didn't speak one word in common - we had to try so hard…

The simplest things…

Right, and it was so endearing. And after a week, there was such love and we were able to take them to the beach and Bel Air and we had a beautiful house and it was just a monumental mindblower for them plus it was beautiful for us to take them out.

The deaf and dumb thing again.

Exactly.

You could see each other but that's all.

That's right. So you couldn't use cliches, you had to use your heart and your soul and your mind to communicate. And it was great.

You had to be almost. What are those things called that jump around?

A marionette.

Yeah, a marionette. But we had to be like pantomime artists. But it was wonderful. It was really great. It was really great. And I got to get up close and personal with the dancers and henceforth I was able to go to these performances and I was present at one of the most famous ballet performances of the century - Margot Fontaine and Rudolf Nuryev doing Swan Lake and I'm in like the 12th row - 15th row at the Shrine Auditorium - my back never hit my seat. I was fixated because that was the peak of both of them - Margot Fontaine was much older but she was this forever young-looking woman and she had such expression and such demonstrative… And the magic - I'm getting goosebumps just telling you. Seriously.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

It was unbelievable. And I just happened to have been there for that and it was like amazing so you don't watch from the back row. You have to watch it up close and personal.

Okay.

When my mother was pregnant with the third kid - 3 boys - and she sent me downstairs to get her a vanilla ice cream and I got it screwed up and I was trying to get her a vanilla soda water, like you get cherry soda - there's no such thing as a vanilla soda. So what's the word I wanted to use?

Soda jerk?

Candy store. They were trying to find out every kind of which way to find out what the hell did I really want and he finally figured out something - I don't know what it was and it was a tall glass and I brought it up to her on the 4th floor of this place and she had a fit because it wasn't an ice cream cone - she didn't want that liquid, she wanted an ice cream. You know when you're having a kid you're going nuts. You can't accept what they bring them if it's not what they want.

Right.

And I can remember that to this day - what did she really want? It took me years to figure out that's that how I goofed up. It was never mentioned again as a thing - family lore.

That's funny.

And so how many kids were there?


All together - 5. 3 boys and 2 girls. The 2 girls came last.

So how old was your mother when she had the last kid?

Oh, I think in California - I think the last one was born here - no, both girls were born here. We moved here in '23.

The family was complete at that point?

No. In '23 there were just the 3 boys - then we moved to California and she had the 2 girls while we were in California. Beyond '23.

So about '25 or so?

I don't remember the spread now. Oh, between the 2 girls was 3 or 4 years. I don't know how much it was between the girls and the last boy.

You're pushing almost '30 - 1930.

No, in '23 I was born in '16, so how old was I then?

7.

7. So what do you mean pushing '30?

No, I mean it was pushing 1930 by the time the last child was born.

Yeah.

And none of us had any serious childhood diseases and all that crap - not one kid.

That's unbelievable.

And they were all healthy kids and stayed healthy. We had a cold occasionally - that kind of crap - but none of the kids, in fact my 2 brothers - the youngest one that was killed in a car accident and then the middle one died of cancer when he was 82.

And you're the…
I'm the oldest.

And the 2 girls are still alive - they're both still here - they live in the Valley.

Oh really?

Yeah.

How often do you talk to them?

How far are they from each other?

No, I mean how often do you speak?

I see the youngest one or call at least once a week and the older one… we got into a tiff a number of years back and I haven't talked to her or seen her since. And you know where she lives?

No.

On the next block. Isn't that crazy?

Don't you think you ought to go over and knock on the door?

You're saying that…

No… I mean, I don't know.

The normal reaction when you're not involved is why do you want to do something like that?

Nobody's living forever. Wouldn't you feel bad if she died tomorrow and you didn't say anything?

Probably not. Because we never have really - with that one I never had much of a relation.

Wouldn't it be kind of fun to go and knock on her door - freak her out and see what she does?
It would shock the shit out of her.

Wouldn't that be kind of fun? I mean, it can't be worse than this? Could it?

It's not a question of worse - the worse she could do is slam the door in my face.

So why don't you go over just for the hell of it? Live on the wild side. Why don't you go give her a shot.

That's pretty wild. On the next block and let's see how long has it been I haven't talked to her? Probably, shit, maybe 15 years.

Wow. Go knock on the door. How do you know she's alive?

Oh, I know she's alive because of my other sister. She knows what's going on.

Oh.

And when I do my walk up to Woodley Hill I go down that street she lives on and she has the lawn very nicely manicured. She has a guy that takes care of that. House always painted. And her husband died from cancer a number of years back so she's living there alone too for a number of years.

How old?

Oh, she'd be, she would probably 15 or so years younger than me.

So she's 72 or 73 - she's just a kid.

Yeah.

Oh, so it'd be meaningful. It'd be very meaningful.

On a riverboat. You've got to go over rocks and things in the riverboat to crush it up. And just see what the hell it would feel like to go down.

Starting work.

Starting as close to the Sierras as the snow melts off the mountain and makes a river.

And how far would you try to go?

To the ocean.

You think you could actually get from the Sierras to the ocean?

According to a map. It shows rivers that run east and west for that area.

I guess you'd want the ones that are going west, huh?

Um-hm.

That'd be interesting.

The current would be interesting.

People do stuff like that starting at the Delta. Sacramento Delta? Hundreds of miles. Where is the Rogue River? Is that in Oregon?

Yeah.

That's a very popular…

I'll have a piece of that.

You brought a tape recorder, did you? Indeed. You're the best. You moved into your new house.

Yeah, I posed a question to the instructor, I said, "What would happen if they drove a hole right straight through the earth where the ocean was would the water run out the other side into the sky?"

That's a great question.

And he thought about that for awhile, because he never had that come up. And I don't know how that got into my head. And he said, "No it wouldn't come out on the other side. What would happen is the water would go down and the center of gravity would allow it to go a certain amount beyond the center to the weight that it occupied and when that weight was equal to the pull of gravity the water would stop at that point, whether it was a quarter of the way past the center or half or 3/4 it would depend on the mass. It wouldn't go out the other side."

Great question. I'll tell you something else, in reality in the 1940's - Superman started that. I'll tell you a little secret about that. If you drill to the center of the earth and you pour water down…

The ocean would go into it…

Do you know what would happen? It'd get down about 1,000 miles and it would come out as a volcano. So it would get all the molten rock and away it would go.

That's funny. We didn't lean on that - we were just thinking about a hole in solid ground and water went into it and came out into the sky but these other things would prevent that from happening.

What's the core? I forgot… with molten rock.

A volcano.

Liquid. Iron and rock.

In Hawaii where they still have the molten stuff, that's what comes out.

From the core of the Earth?

Yeah. That's what volcanoes are. It's a fissure in the mass itself.

Wow. That's around the Pacific Ocean. It's called the Ring of Fire. The Pacific Rim. It's all volcano. Hawaiian Islands - volcano. In the Tubals - volcano - Monserrat - volcanoes.

You know that there are some guys that are so hung up on seeing an active volcano that they have a connection with the people in Hawaii and when they have one they get on a plane and they fly right over there so they can be observing the thing… because it's not going on continuously. But they're a nut for that kind of thing.

There was a thing on The Learning Channel about a seismologist? who was standing next to a volcano when it started to erupt. And it showed a picture of him running. Amazing. I had some cousins-in-law that are cloud chasers.

Yeah. There are those too.

Cloud chasers.

How about the ones that chase tornadoes. I've seen a lot of pictures of that.

That's a tough one.

Oh yeah. You've gotta really be in good shape to enjoy that. And it's funny - there's always somebody that gets interested in the weirdest things that turn them on.

Not that you would do that. And the things people collect.

Oh, collect is unbelievable. Unbelievable things.

You've got quite a collection. You do.

Not worth much. Something that the average person would get a kick out of it to look at it.

A collection doesn't have to be valuable to be meaningful.

It's true. It could be bones. It could be rocks. Shells. Shells are a terrific one. The variety in shells is amazing. Absolutely amazing.

You've got a whole bunch of real weird stuff. You have a portable iron. You have rubber churns. Tell me about these portable irons.

What happened was on one of my trips across country, I ran into a guy that had these little small nickel-plated irons that had a wooden handle on it? What it was was that it was considered a portable travelling iron for women that wanted to touch up their blouses and things when they got to where they were going. So you can't have gas or fill it with charcoal, it would be too messy. Alcohol was around so it was actually run by alcohol flame. So you actually pour a little alcohol - it was clean, didn't smell - it was really the only material that you could use and still not have too many negatives. And then she had to curl her hair so there was a little box, the one I showed you that had two little sections in it that opened up that you could rest your curling iron on it and at one end you had a capped cover over a container that you put alcohol in it - it also had cotton and stuff in it in there - a wick - and the wick would actually heat the bar of the curling iron so that they could curl their hair.

This was turn of the century.

This would all fold up and you could carry it. The box was only about that big.

And made like you cannot believe.

Oh, the workmanship…

Astonishing.

It looks like it was actually stamped but it's all fitted pieces together - there wasn't even stamping machinery then. Then I have a collection of irons of different kinds - more of the history of them than the variety. In quantity. I don't know how I picked up on irons… it had a chimney on the front. Big opening in front and I said, "What the hell was that?"

And there was a latch that you could lift the thing up…

An ironing iron?

Yeah. For clothes. And what you did is you put charcoal in there.

What?

And you actually ironed with that thing and the heat was coming out of the…

Hot coals.

Yeah, and the mouth that was facing away from the hand so you wouldn't get burned while you were using it.

And the escape was the little chimney for that. Wow.

Then another guy said that was too messy so what we'll do is we'll make it so we can put it on a wood stove. So he made it, took the iron and set it on the stove where it got hot enough and then they had a pad of woven cotton so you got a thickness of about 1/4 inch so you could insulate your hand from the handle part. And what you did is you ran it over a rag to get all the dirt that accumulated and then you could use that iron to iron the clothes.

No electricity then.

No.

This was before electricity.

All of these things were really early stuff. And then the next approach was detachable handles. Why did you want a detachable handle? Because then it didn't get hot. You could actually clip it on to the iron and take it off. And I clicked all those stages of how the ingenuity of man is unbelievable. You make anything that somebody out of a thousand people says, "You know if we did it this way we could eliminate this or you wouldn't get your hand burned or it wouldn't do something that was negative."

With those iron it was the same way - all the different varieties of irons like for example one of the other stages was they made it like a blowtorch. You actually pumped the thing up and you could put gas in it and the thing had a live flame inside. Can you imagine? I got one of those too.

Can you make them work?

Sure you can make it work. You pump it up and put the stuff in it. Although I have no reason for doing it.

Incredible.
Then they have one later when gas was popular you hooked it up to the gas line and you had natural gas going into the burner and who used that mostly? The tailors. The iron was about 15 pounds. Why was it 15 pounds? Because if you're trying to iron a suit, you're talking about a heavy piece of woolen, you gotta have enough weight on it to hold everything down to squeeze it so if you're going to have to… which they did at first… squeeze it, it was very tiring. If you put the weight in the iron you only have to push it; you don't have to press down on it. But then the trick was what would be the best way to iron a woolen pair of pants, for example, that you wanted to turn a flap and have a nice crease in it. And I observed old tailors - guys in their 80's and 90's that were still in the business. What was the trick in making a crease and a flattening of the material that would be the flattest? By flattest I mean this - you take a piece of woolen that hasn't been pressed by that method, it has a certain weakness to it - why because you can't hold the material. You want it to be flat and tight almost like canvas.

Do you want me to take this?

Yes.

Thank you.

So that when you wore it wouldn't be baggy and it wouldn't be wrinkled easily so what this guy would do with this heavier iron, you'd lay down a piece of canvas first, then you have a sponge that you put in water, you wring out half of it and then you run this sponge across the piece of canvas which left beads of water all over the canvas. Then you took this heavy iron and rolled it over the beaded canvas. That would turn the water into steam, drive it into the material.

Unbelievable.

And then the magic was now you've got the material limp and flat but you haven't got it together, you continue ironing until all of the moisture evaporates. When you take that off, that piece of material will have a tight crease and will really be tight and flat. This modern thing that you see that they pull down doesn't do the same thing, but it does it much quicker. And since the public doesn't know the difference, they still use that method in Beverly Hills and in high class places in Chicago and in New York where they get $25 to press a suit.

People know the difference.

The people know the difference. So that's like a lost art. Like handmade shoes. Remember what I told you about shoes. Those are just arts that are all disappearing one by one because the salary that they would have to get to do that thing right is just prohibitive. All these arts were lost because labor cost nothing. I even ran into a guy… talking about… that's what I mean, the time. This guy was a 90-year-old jeweler that worked for Tiffany's. That's gotta be pretty rare to get a guy that worked for Tiffany and you're talking to him now and he's alive. And do you know they used to do soldering? The guy would put a torch… I shouldn't say a torch - he put a tube in his mouth with a fine point - maybe you're familiar with this and then you held it over a Bunsen burner and you blew into this thing and it made the flame of the Bunsen burner hotter and you're holding this thing in your hand doing this work and your mouth is blowing this flame. So you need both hands and your mouth to make solder joint.

Wow. This is what year? About?

Turn of the century.

You know, 100 years, look how far we've come.

Oh, everything has happened in the last 100 years. Between the airplane and the telegraph and the automobile and radio and the telegraph - it's just an unbelievable amount of things that happened in this century that was practically nothing before that. Everything… In fact that's the reason why if someone lived in the village and another one lived 50 miles away, they even had a different accent. They were so isolated you were just like in your own world. How would you get to this guy 50 miles away. If you were an ordinary guy, you wouldn't have the money, let alone how to get there. That's why we had in the States, the southerners and northerners, the easterners and the westerners, because that was enough of an area that things could happen locally with dress, with the kind of food they ate and the way they spoke English. I'm sure you know that Indian can be spoken with many accents.

Many accents and many languages. Over 300 languages.

Yes, and that's all caused because the people, wherever they lived they never left that place.

Now I've got the answer for that.

Yes.

Now I've got the answer why we have so many religions, so many castes, we're all isolated.

Yeah. To make a move was big thing.

And still today.

That's why a traveler was looked on as an unusual person. He had to be single, he had to have some money, and he had to live under the worse conditions. How are you going to take a family?

You even went to some parts of China.

Yes.

I would be in China, going to China. People of all classes looking at me. Because I'm not white, not black…

And your clothes are different.

And things like that. They want to look back at me…

That's the first thing - are you real?

It's nice to experience that.

It's a real experience. I mean we have (Dick - you are speaking in an Indian accent and I can't decipher most of what you're saying). That is different…



SIDE 15

They're called scribes - everything was done with a pen. And to make a book extra nice the first letter, if you remember was elaborate, because that was one way of identifying the quality of the man's art.

The scribe had a particular way.

Style. That was his signature. And they have in what's that… what's the name of this place in San Marino?

Huntington.

They have a book with tales of Chaucer and one of those books done in India ink - it's just like it was done yesterday. The quality of the ink is so permanent it looks like it was done yesterday. And that's on display as well as the Guttenberg bible. And he's the one who came out; the big contribution he made was movable type. All the letters were carved out of a wooden block and assembled and that's how you actually got the printed word. So those stages took years and years. And it started way back with papyrus. The Egyptians made the first paper-like material that you can write on.

And where did they get ink?

It was from, surprisingly, octopus for one, as well as some kinds of…

Squid?

Plants. Different ones for different colors.

What is ink now? Do we synthesize ink?

Oh yeah, all synthesized. Because it would cost that much more. They still make India ink for special purposes but not for everyday use.

Michelangelo used berries.

Yes, the Indians did the same thing.

Now why do they call India ink India ink?

India ink? I don't know.

They were probably the first ones to get a liquid that they could use for ink.

Let's find out. Okay, tell me about your model T.

What do you mean?

Your model T and your trip to Palm Springs.

Oh God.

This is an amazing story.

I was about 15 at the time. I had my first car when I was 12.

12?

I was driving since I'm 10. I always wanted a car. Because a car could take you places you couldn't get any other way. Even the streetcar is only going to take you down to a single thing in downtown LA or whatever. It's not going to take you to the beach; it's not going to take you to the mountains, so I'm reading a magazine that's extolling all the wonders of Palm Springs. Tennis courts and all the famous movie stars and all that… In the '30's, that was their hangout - that was the place that they went.

This is literally 1930, right? 1931?

So I say to myself, "Gee I'd like to take that in."

I'm talking to a couple of my friends and I'm showing them the pictures and all that and they're interested too but we have no money. How are we gonna make it. First of all, I give the two kids a five-gallon can to go steal gas out of the neighborhood cars, from the parked cars. Then you gotta do it a second time cause we need gas to come back. So I got 3 cans in back and 15 gallons in the tank and so now I figure out it's 100 miles - I'll be able to make it. On the tank of gas. Now we need food. In those days everybody had an account with a grocer. Paid by the end of the week and the guy put everything in. And he knew the kids cause the kids did a lot of the buying of the stuff. They went to their grocers and I went to mine and we bought soup…

Thank you.

A loaf of bread, salami. Stuff that would keep.

Wasn't your dad a baker? Didn't you get bread.

Yeah, but I didn't take bread from him. Because he was too poor.

Oh, okay. And you were like 15, 14?

Yeah. 14.

And this is 1930 and you had a car since you were 11?

I had a car since I'm 12. I bought my first car all apart. For Two and a Half dollars.

For $2.50. At 12 years old.

And I had to put it together. Since it was laying in parts in this guy's backyard - the guy about 18 who had fooled around with cars and finally got past that thing and just had the stuff… That's what they used to do in those days - you didn't call a guy to take it away. You just slipped it somewhere out of the way in your yard. So I went over to him and I said, "You want to sell that car?"

He said, "What car?"

And he started smiling and I said, "That one over there."

He said, "Yeah, what are you gonna do with it?"

I said, "I'm gonna put it together."

He laughed some more and he said, "Well, what are you gonna give me for it?"
I had just collected the money from my Sunday paper route and I said, "I'll give you $2.50 for it."

He laughed and he said, "You got a deal."

Now all I had to do was take all the parts over to my house. I get my 2 brothers and we have a coaster wagon…

And they were heavy parts.

And it was all-apart. I put the engine in. The 3 of us luckily only lived about 3 blocks from where his house was. Pushed the engine over to his house and the frame were separate. It was a nothing frame, just a little u channel and it was also a cut short Ford. That meant that they had cut the frame in half, cut the drive shaft in half and the length of the car was like a VW. That was to make something cute that's what the kids did in those days. So little by little I got the whole car into my yard and I was taking auto shop in the 8th grade. So I knew I'd be able to get it together because I had somebody I could talk to with what about this and what about that. And I wouldn't let anybody help me because I wanted to put that car together by myself. It took me 4 months to get the thing together to the point where it would run. And one of the things that happened that was very interesting was the line was all gone. When it was taken completely apart there was no wire. But something was the wiring on the T wheel - one wire going ahead, one of the…

Would you like another drink? No?

Thank you.

And I wanted to have the end of all the wires - because when you take the end of the wires and you try to put them around a screw, they all fan out, they do everything except what you want them to do. So I bought the lugs and a small little iron and I go to solder it and I'm putting the solder against the iron and all it would do is just run off because what you got to do is heat the terminal and the wire hot enough so that when you put the solder to it instead of the iron it will flow around it. I was getting nowhere with this thing and I said, "What the hell is wrong with these irons? They don't work. I don't seem to know how to do it."

I remembered the thing about if the terminal is hot enough, it'll solder. So I went into the house and got a box of matches, the wooden ones with the long handle, lit that up, put it underneath there, waited until it was about 3/4 burned down, touched the solder, the solder flew right around and I got a perfect joint. I wired the whole car with a box of matches.

12 years old. That was cute.

Now I got the whole car together. Then my dad didn't realize, I didn't realize it, nobody realized it, and we don't have a driveway. The car's all-together in the yard that doesn't have a driveway. I said, "What the hell am I gonna do now?"

I gotta get this car out of this yard, that's all there is to it. No driveway. This house didn't have a garage. They built a lot of houses in those days and not everybody wanted a garage or could afford a car to put in the garage. So we had a little 3-foot walkway on the side to get from the front to the back on the outside. And I'm lying in bed trying to figure out how the hell am I gonna get the car out of the yard.

No room even to get it out.

So what do I do? I got a plan. Get the friend's coaster wagon - we have a coaster wagon so we put the two wagons together, put a 2x4's over both wagons and make a bed, take off the windshield, take off the steering column, drain the radiator and the oil and take out the battery, turn the car, get all the kids from the neighborhood, turn the car sideways and I have 5 guys on each side, kids that we just inched that car all the way out and put all the parts back on it. That's how I got it out of the yard.

Mark Twain's fence. But it was a Model T.

That's the car we're taking to Palm Springs.

That's the one that's gonna go to Palm Springs.

So now we got the…

How fast would it go?

Most of them would do 25. So, speed was not an issue, as you'll see. We get all the way out there no problem. Driving down the main drag. Everything's closed. Nothing's open. No people. I said, "What the hell is wrong down here."

I look at the magazine that shows all this activity.

And you're how old?

At that time? 15. 14, 15, something like that. So I'm saying, "What's wrong with this picture?"

I'm driving along and finally I see a gas station. In those days the gas station consisted of 2 pumps with the glass bowls with the water - gasoline flowed down by gravity that's how old the station was. And it was open. So I drive in and I say, "What's wrong here?"

I show him these pictures and all that and he starts laughing and he says, "Son, you got a choice. You're either 6 months too early or 6 months too late because it's a winter resort and I'm there in July."

There's nobody there in the dead of summer. Who the hell figured about that? I'm reading just the pages and that wasn't a factor. So what the hell are we gonna do - we're in Palm Springs and the place is dead.

And it's 110 degrees.

In those days they had a stream that was coming off the mountains and ran right near the road. It's not there now. So we figured we might as well take a swim, so we take all our clothes off because nobody's there and we're swimming around nude and we kill about an hour or so, dry off and put the clothes back on. And what are we gonna do? Can't do anything there. Might as well start to go home. So everybody gets back into the car, we have the lunch. I drive a short distance and all of a sudden I get a blowout. So I put the blowout tire on the back, put on the spare that I had, put that on, start driving some more. All of a sudden the car starts acting up, it's jerking and bucking and finally stalls. I take a look. I don't know exactly what's wrong. After all, I'm far from a full-fledged mechanic at that point. And I'm saying to myself…

This is all the same day, right?

This is all the same day. This is like 4 in the afternoon.

Because it took you 5 or 6 hours to get there.

Yeah. So now what am I gonna do? If I can get to a gas station maybe I can get the mechanic to take a look at it so even though we didn't have any money at least we could find out what was wrong. Because the car is not moving. So I try to flag down cars coming by. They come by one every 10 or 15 minutes. You're talking about the summer and that area is not popular for ordinary traffic and they just zip right on by.

At 25.

No air conditioning in the cars.

So I finally decide half in a joke, I got a way to make them stop. Here's what we're gonna do. We take each other's hand and stretch out across the road so we're blocking the whole road with 3 guys hand to hand. So with that covering the road, we're sure the guy's gonna have to stop and we'll explain him the problem. The next car comes along, it's coming, it's coming. This guy is not slowing down. He figures this is a hold-up gang or something and when he gets close enough and it looks like we're gonna get killed, we part and the guy just zips right on by.

So these 2 buddies are starting to see like, they're gonna take a walk and leave me with the car. And I say, "No you bastards, you're not going anywhere and just leave me with the car."

We're still trying to figure it out. It's getting a little late in the afternoon, it's getting cooler.

Dark, too.

And I'm saying, "Jeez, what're we gonna do here?"

So finally in desperation I decide I by myself will go out in the middle of the road and put my hands up like this, like an emergency stop and quite a few cars went right around me. They were just scared to death to stop. Finally who stops? A guy in an old Nash with his wife and 3 kids, a black family.

No kidding.

A black family. He stops. Can you imagine. Okay, I explain the problem to him. And I say, "There's a station about 5 miles down the road." I didn't know where the hell the station was - I needed somebody to get hooked up to. He says to me, "You got a tow rope?"

I say, "Sure."

I run back to the car. I didn't have a rope. I'm trying to decide quickly - what the hell can I do to connect the two cars together. I remember the spare tire that blew out. I put one end around the open bumper, because in those days they had the bumpers like that, you know? Hooked that around there, put the other end on one of the headlights and made a two rope out of the car.

How did you hook up the tire?

I just told you. Behind his bumper and around my headlight.

And he was okay with that.

He didn't even get out of the car to look. He didn't know what I did. I just said okay we can go now. He puts the car in gear; we're riding in there.

Two inches from there.

That car.

But what's the problem? He's only going to be going 20 miles per hour. That was not a problem at that point. The point was to get somebody to make it move.

Get it going.

So we drive and we drive and I think it was 15 miles and I'm hoping that at any minute he's not going to stop and tell me like, "Hey, do you want me to pull you clear to LA?"

So he stops and he says, "Where's this gas station? You said it was only 4 or 5 miles."

I said, "I could have sworn it was right… it must be just a few miles more, can you just pull me another few miles? I'm sure there's a gas station down there."

So, feeling bad for us as kids, he decided he'd tow us to the next gas station. And sure enough, my luck, about 3 miles further down the road, one of those out of the city gas stations, you know, they used to put them way out of the town because they could get the land cheap and they didn't have to pay the regular taxes and all that stuff, so they could sell the gas cheap. So I thanked him profusely and unhooked the thing - he disappears. Now we're in front of this gas station.

How much was gas?

Oh, probably around 15 cents a gallon. But that wasn't the problem. I wasn't out of gas. The car wouldn't run. So I go over and see the guy… Oh, so before I go over to see him, I take another look at the car and I finally decide it's an electrical problem - we're not getting spark. And I said, "What's likely what's wrong is probably the coil is bad."

So I go over to see the gas station guy and I say, "I think the coil is bad on the car. Could I try the coil out before I buy it?"

In those days you could do that kind of thing - today you can't do that. He says, "Okay."

And I'm right there in front; too, he can see me working on the car. So I go over to put his coil on and as I'm starting to do that I notice that one of the wires that went to the coil was just hanging on by one strand of the copper wire. I say, "That's what the goddamn trouble is. That one strand is not enough to carry the current."

So I quickly stripped that wire, tightened it all up nice and put it around the coil with the head in there, tried it and the car started. I say, "This is terrific."

I go back; give him his coil back and we're back on the road.

Back on the road. Now what time? Six, seven, eight o'clock at night?

Not quite dark yet. I'm still going in twilight. So you know the next town out of Palm Springs is Banning. Do you know Banning?

Yes.

And Banning has a sign that goes across the road, because it's only a 2-lane thing and it says, "Welcome to Banning." And it's lit up.

They still have a sign that says something like that.

All right. So now we're driving and I get another blowout. And now I have nothing to put on there, so I say, "Screw it, I'm going on the rim."

As long as it could move, I can go on the rim. I'm driving about 15 miles per hour.

Was the rim metal or wood?

Yes.

Metal with wood spokes.

The rim was above that. When you take off the tire and rim you got the wheel and the steel that holds the wheel spokes together. So now we're driving on the rim. Can't go very fast. And cars coming the other way are looking at that and they wonder, "What the hell is that coming down the road - it don't look like a car."

It was all lopsided and all that. And I keep going and now it's getting dark. And I get about 3 or 4 miles from Banning and the lights go out. Now I got no lights. And we're saying, "We're not stopping - if this fucking thing moves we're keeping on driving."
So I keep driving and here this thing is starting to really make quite a bit of noise from the chewed up rim going over the blacktop road and as I get about a block from the sign, "Welcome to Banning," I see a figure out in the middle of the street. Like peering, what the hell is coming down the road - no lights on it - what is it that's coming down the road?

So I finally get up to where he can see us and it's the city cop. He sees what we're doing and he says, "Where the hell are you going with no lights and you're chewing up the road."

The rim is chewing up the road.

"You're chewing up the blacktop."

The roads weren't that hard?

No.

He says, "Park that car over here and don't move it until you get a tire on there."

And I say, "We don't have any lights either."

He says, "That's your hard luck. You're not moving that car until you get a tire on there and you can move it in the morning."

And I say to him, half indignantly, "Where are we supposed to sleep?"

He thinks awhile, seriously, and says, "Okay, follow me."

So we go down the main street about a block or so, come to a building, puts the key in the door, we walk upstairs to the second story, he opens the door, we walk through the door, he slams the door behind us. Where are we? We're in jail. He took me to the city jail in Banning.

So you could sleep.

Yeah. What kind of a place to sleep? There was a stack of mattresses in the corner, no beds, no sheets, and no blankets. You put one down for the bed and you pull a mattress over you for a blanket. So that's how we slept. One mattress on the floor and one over you to keep warm.

What a trip to Palm Springs.

I'm telling you it was a killer.

It isn't over yet.

He's only in Banning. He's not even halfway home.

You can imagine writing this story for English composition. And this teacher is laughing so hard…

Now your father is wondering where you are, right? By now.

No. By that time, we had a habit of visiting friends and all that and we would disappear for a day or two, when we got back he'd say, "Where did you go?"

They didn't panic like they do today. Today they go crazy. In those days nobody said the worst happened to him, he got killed. That was not even in their minds.

Today it's 15 minutes out of sight.

So finally nine o'clock he shows up to open the door and let us out.

In the morning.

Yeah. And we'd been up since 6 o'clock because how the hell can you lay in that mattress thing?

Between two mattresses.

Just terrible. We couldn't wait for daylight. So he opens up the door and the first thing he says is, "Be sure and put a tire on that wheel - I don't want you digging up the highway with that car."

And we walked downstairs and I try to figure out how the hell am I gonna get out of this?

You have no tire and you have no money.

Yeah. We got gas, though. The car runs. So as we're standing there, the 3 of us, he walks across the street and goes into a café to have breakfast. I say, "Well, at least we have a chance."

What we'll do - I'll go up a couple of blocks, which is dirt roads - it was a very small city at that time. I'll go up to the dirt roads and parallel the freeway for 5 or 6 blocks and then cut back to the freeway and then I'll be gone and he won't see any tracks in the street. He'll figure we're still in the gas station. Or whatever. So that's what we do - he probably was in there quite a while and I make that parallel route, get back on the freeway, the roadway, whatever, we start driving and everything seems to be going okay, plenty of noise. And what happens? The 4 lugs that hold the rim on break loose and the rim goes across the road, misses a car coming the other way by inches because when it comes loose, it gains speed. It goes across like a shot. Now I'm down to the wheel with the steel band on it. You know the wheel has that steel thing. And we're laughing the same and we say, "If this fucking car moves, we're moving."

And it's still going?

It's still going. So we're driving. We're doing about 10 miles an hour, but hey, 10 miles an hour, we can still get home.

You're now on the hub.

Not on the hub. We're on the wheel, the outside of the wheel, which is the steel that holds the spokes together.

Okay, gotcha.

So it's still like a full sized wheel. Except that there's no rim around it. So we're driving around and that is wearing down until finally it wears down to the point that the actual spokes sticking through the steel rim - this rim disappears and now I've just got the spokes. All the spokes…

Spokes made of what?

Wood. So we're laughing about that and we continue driving on the goddamn wheel with just the spokes, nothing on it, just the spoke. So it's slapping each time it's coming down, shaking the car, but it's moving forward. So we're laughing, we think it's a big joke, because we're still moving. Eventually all of a sudden, one spoke breaks. Now the car goes around and falls down where the spoke is missing. I've got to put it in low gear to jack the car back up to get it on the part where the spokes are there.

To get one more turn out of it.

Well that started to go so slow even though we thought it was flooding, and we decide we can't get anywhere with this goddamn thing. What're we gonna do now?

I look at the goddamn wheel and I say, "We've got one more alternative."

I take the sledge hammer which I had in the toolbox, break all the spokes, so now I've got the hub with the broken spokes on it. I got something about that big with broken spokes. I start driving on the broken spokes - cause now they're close together. They're not like way out there with that much space between them, so it's rumbling a little but it's moving along and I don't like to go up and down with the broken spoke bit. So I'm driving on that piece of wheel. I get all the way to Riverside on that piece of wheel and now we're starving, because we didn't have any money to eat. Where the hell are we gonna eat? We have not money. And as I'm driving down the main highway there, a cop cuts me off. Here's I'm going 10 miles per hour. He cuts me off like I'm doing 100. Gets out of the car and says, "Where the hell do you think you're going? You're digging up the highway."

I say, "Gee I didn't know."

I play real dumb and he gives me that look like, "You son of a bitch, you know goddamn well you're wrecking the road."

And he says the same thing. "You leave that car right there where it's parked and don't move it until you put a wheel and tire on it."

So he drives away and we're sitting there.

And you're in Riverside.

Yeah, I'm in Riverside and we're starving and we notice a guy across the way has a nice booth up - a ranch thing with a fence around it and a lot of grapefruit trees in there that were ripe and we go in there and fill our whole shirts with about 10 grapefruits apiece and that's what we had for breakfast. Grapefruits off of this guy's property. And then we're sitting in the car and we're saying, "What the hell are we gonna do now?"

Then I said to myself, "You know, that guy, if he was gonna check out if we're gonna continue driving, he'd have been back by now, because how big is wherever he's at - he's gonna make a spin and come back and see if we're still in the same place. We'll take a chance and drive on. That he's already seen the car parked there, while we were robbing this place of grapefruit, and decided we're not moving."

So we get back in the car and we start driving some more. I'm sure you've had a car up on a rack that when you turn one wheel this way, the other one goes the other way. Ever notice that? Because of the difference. What was happening with that wheel - it was wearing down - it was doing that - the wheel on the right hand side was actually pulling car forward and this wheel was just going backward, skidding on the bottom part of the area where the brake shoes were located. And it's getting smaller and smaller and it's getting tapered from the angle that it's sitting with the road. But it's still going forward. So I get to 2 blocks from the house - I get all the way to Los Angeles and now I say to myself after having all the trouble with the cops, "I don't want to drive it all the way to the house because I have a trail right to my door and if a cop sees that who wants to find out where the hell is this coming from, he just follows the trail."

So 2 blocks from the house I stop the car, I go over to the house and I get a wheel and a tire, because I had all kinds of spare crap, take it back, jack it up, remove the spokes - and I kept that thing - I wish I'd had it because if you didn't see that, it's like, I don't believe the story.

I wish you had it now.

The wheel was down so that the hub was this big; it was just starting to break through the screws that hold the wooden spokes to the hub. You know how close that is? About a 6-inch circle. It was just down to about a 6-inch circle. Worn on the taper.

It was just gliding on the street; it wasn't even doing anything.

It was running backwards. Just chewing up itself. So I took that off and put that wheel on and I saved that thing for the longest time but at that time, so many years back, you say, "How long am I gonna keep it - I'm not going to make a story of it 20 years later."

Little did you know - 70 years later?

Can you imagine? That was one hell of a trip. It took us 4 or 5 hours to get there and it took us 2 days to get back.

And no money.

And as you would say, "Just a little bit of balls."

Yeah. If we'd had said, what if and what're we gonna do, we would have started walking in Palm Springs.

You should have taken your cell phone with you. I want to get some dessert.

I'm going to get some ice cream.

My car, when I was 12 years old. How the hell could you get a traffic ticket? I was tall for my age, it was downtown at Broadway…

And the minute I made the turn he blows the whistle and naturally I have to stop and he comes over - I try to explain to him… but even then you couldn't explain to a cop when he decides he's gonna give you a ticket, so he says, "Give me your license."

I don't have a license. So I have to bullshit. "Jesus, I left it in my other pants."

The old famous line. In those days they didn't have radios and all that to call, nothing. They just had to take you on face value. I gave him my name and the whole thing and he gave me a ticket. Now here I am, 12 years old with a goddamn traffic ticket. What the hell am I gonna do now? They're gonna put me in jail for this traffic ticket. I wasn't thinking about my parents going to help me or this kind of crap - so then I find out from one of the other kids that if you're 14 years old and you're working for a grocery store or one of these places where they've got a little truck that you deliver stuff with, you can get, with your father's and mother's signature, you could get a license. That's how I got my license, but I didn't get their signature. I got 2 kids, one to sign for my father, one to sign for my mother. No notary and I got the license without them even knowing I got a ticket.

That was really crummy too, when you say to somebody you were in the Rose Parade with my own car. How the hell is that possible?

The same car?

No.

A different car.

Yeah. This is a French car called a Peugeot.

Peugeot?

Yeah. In those days they made the body portionalized steel. Portionalized.

Wow.

So the paint would never fade and you didn't have to worry about polishing it, nothing, you say, "Wait a minute, what about the fenders?"

The fenders were made out of paint because that's the part that got mashed, the body didn't. Unless you had a major accident but mostly you got fender crunches. So that was steel that was painted. So anyway, it was New Years Eve and we're all raising hell in the street and you know the Rose Parade is the following day after New Years. So this is 1935, this is happening.
January 1, 1935.

We said, "Let's go to the Rose Parade."

And while we're going there we say, "Wouldn't it be a kick in the ass to get the car in the Rose Parade."

What are you going to do to make the thing interesting - you can't just drive down the middle of the street in just an ordinary car - that's no novelty. So I decided since a lot of those party guys into Christmas and all that in the wealthy homes in Pasadena, they throw all the stuff out in those containers and everything…

On New Years' Eve.

Yeah, so there were flowers, ribbons, all this crap. So I checked out a couple of streets and I got flowers and ribbons and all this stuff…

Were you with anybody?

Yeah, 2 guys.

19 years old.

And take out the radiator cap and I stuff a whole bouquet into the radiator and I wind stuff all through the spokes and put the ribbons all through the top part and the bumpers - it was just a kluge of junk. Obviously, the way I made it it wasn't going to be like a float that was coming down an hour later.

But still how did you get it into the Rose Parade?

So I get the car all decorated and it's 2 hours before the parade starts - 7 o'clock in the morning. And you know the crowds, even then, wind the street, all the way down the street. I put the car in low gear, oh yeah, so before that, now we're got to have an incentive, what's different about this car? And then it dawns on me - the perfect thing to do. Find a grocery that's open and I get a bar of Bon Ami soap and a piece of rag and I put it on the side of the car, on the door area. Float #1. Now I've got a reason for going down the main drag.
Float #1.

And I start the car. The people thought it was the funniest goddamn thing they ever saw. They were clapping, carrying on, whistling. I went down, I get about 2 blocks in and there's a couple of motorcycle cops.

How'd I know you'd run into cops?

I said, "This is the end right here."

So as I approach the cops, one cop nudges the other to make sure he sees it and he points to this goddamn thing coming down the road. They thought it was so funny, they just let me go right on down - I went down the whole length of that Colorado Blvd. with everybody clapping and carrying on. That's never been done before or since. That's the kind of shit I used to get into.

What can they do to me? Get off the street. Big deal. They're gonna what, put me in jail? Jail meant nothing to me anyway.

Not in those years.

Zero. Most kids, "Oh, you went to jail - you're a jailbird."

I didn't tell them the story about how I sat in jail for $10 a day for somebody else. I took their place. I made $10 a day for 3 days to sit in jail for somebody else.

How did they know it wasn't the person?

Until you heard the story you would never be able to believe it.

He's got a story. Can you imagine?

3 days and you made $30.

I collected the money. You know how that goes.

How old were you?

I was probably 17 or 18. I'd gotten a traffic ticket. In those it was $5 or one day. $5 was a lot of money and I said, "Shit, I'll go to jail."

$5 or one day.

Yeah. For the small traffic tickets - a stop sign or whatever. And I lived walking distance from the jail. So I go to jail and I go before the judge and he says, $5 or 1 day and I take the 1 day. And I find out they have 2 sessions in the court - 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. By the time they get through with the 2 o'clock one it's close to 5 and the paddy wagon comes and picks up those guys that are going to jail. So I purposely bring the tickets in the afternoon because they have a place you put the things in a box and I get picked up and go to jail. 6 o'clock in the morning they throw you out. The idea was to just make you stay the night. So now here it is oh, maybe a year or 2 later and I get a traffic ticket and I'm sitting in the audience part and the guy next to me, a nice looking kid about 20 years old, got a ticket and he gets called up and he starts arguing with the judge and the judge got very irritated and he bangs down the gavel and he says, "3 days - no fine."

He wants him to do the time. Then he comes back and sits next to me and a little bit he thinks is funny but he's a little bit unnerved about it. Come to find out the reason why the judge gave him the 3 days is because he started to smart mouth him in front of the group and his dad is a personal friend of his. So it was like he was embarrassing the judge. So the judge got mad and gave him the 3 days, no fine. We're riding to the paddy wagon and this was in the afternoon, because I know all the rules of what to do and I come with nothing in my pockets because you have to take out whatever you got - keys and wallet and all that and you have to leave it in an area where you have your name and so I come with nothing in my pockets. Now we're both in the jail and the first couple of hours everything's funny to him and then it's getting a little boring and we're talking about different things and I say, just off the top of my head, "For $10 a day I'll sit your jail time out."

He says, "What? How the hell can you do that?"

So I explain the guy calls out the names and when you call the name you follow the guys out and go downstairs and you take your belongings and they throw you out. I got no belongings so there was no problem with my stuff. You just go out and I'll get your stuff when they call your name. So he's thrilled to death that he can get out. I sit the 3 days.

There was no I.D.

That was the thing that everybody forgets - you say you did it last week. No way. You couldn't do it. You're so covered in with every goddamn kind of fingerprint, pictures and everything else, no way in hell they could make that happen. So they call the 3rd day his name. I forget his fucking name and I don't answer. And he's hollering this name and he says, "That dumb son of a bitch…"

Finally it dawns on me I'm him. I start running toward the goddamn place where he's at, he says, "You dumb son of a bitch, don't you even know your fucking name?"

Those guys are rough as hell. What am I gonna answer him? I don't answer him. Finally I file out with the rest of the guys. I go downstairs. I collect the shit. They don't ask you for identification. You say that's your crap, that's your crap.

That's mine and that's yours.

Otherwise how would I be there if I weren't him?

Right.

So I walk out at 6 o'clock in the morning on the 3rd day. I go home and then I decide to go collect the money. I have the address and I have his wallet. No money in the wallet. And I start driving down Highland Blvd. Highland Avenue? And the houses are getting bigger and fancier as I go down and the address is one house in from Wilshire Blvd. And I'm saying, "This son of a bitch don't live there, he screwed me. I sat 3 days for nothing."

So I go up to the door and ring the bell. A butler comes out. He says, "Who shall I say is calling?"

Am I in the movies or what? Who the hell ever went to a house where they ask who's calling? He goes upstairs and I give him my name and he sticks his head out of the window and says, "Come on up."
So I go up. And why was he in bed in the middle of the day? He had a cold. What does he do? As I go upstairs he gets on the phone and he's calling his girlfriend and he wants her to come over to see the guy who sat in jail for him for $10 a day. So he gives me the $30 in tens and he had a beautiful suede jacket on that I admired. I wasn't trying to ace him out of that but I said, "God, that's a gorgeous jacket - I wish I had one like that."

He says, "Take it."

He gave me his goddamn jacket. Never saw the guy afterwards. We were in 2 different worlds. But what a goddamn way to make $30.

Did the girlfriend come over and see you?

Oh yeah. She said, "This guy is unreal. He went to jail for money?"

Oh my God.

And to me it was a big joke.

In those years it wouldn't have been so terrible.

No, what's the big deal. To this day, who knows about it. Who knows about it? If I don't tell you the story, it's long lost.

Then it was so… easy. It wasn't a big deal.

No big deal.

It was easy for a guy with a little bit of balls.

Just a little balls.

Yeah.

What could have happened if the guy found out I wasn't him? What is he gonna do? Is he in a position to give me a bigger sentence? They would say, "We've got to tighten up this thing. These guys are getting out too easy."

That's all that would happen.

In those days.

You didn't commit the biggest crime in the world.

How are you gonna move a car on a beautiful polished floor crowded with all kinds of other cars that are worth a lot of money without damaging them. So the guys comes up with an air pallet. You know what an air pallet is? You slip that thing underneath the car. You turn on the air. It lifts the car up just enough to get it off the floor. It floats the car. With one finger you can push the car all around the floor. If you know about these kind of things it changes everything about what can I do about this problem. It becomes a nothing problem when you know the device that will get you out of it. They even can put it in an elevator. And take it down to the next floor and bring it up, which they do. Have you been to…

They would have an argument about something that was absurd. One guy would say to the other, "And the next thing you're gonna tell me you're gonna see a wagon without a horse that's gonna run."

To them that was the height of impossibility. A wagon without a horse. So this kind of thing, you might say, "What the hell. Before you used to carry it on your back?"

Here's an interesting thing about the American Indians I thought was novel. When they had to carry their stuff from one place to another, and they finally were using horses, what did they have? A couple of chaise that went in the back, dragging on the ground, no fucking wheels. Why didn't they use wheels? What kind of equipment did they have. What kind of knowledge did they have to make a fucking wheel? A wheel doesn't just happen. It's a thing that took a hell of a lot of years and skills of a lot of people to make a fucking wheel. In fact you can go down to the County Museum here and they have a 600 year old ox cart, one of the real early ones that the Spanish used when they first came over. The wheel is made out of 3 pieces of wood. Why? Because if you look at the way the wheel is made, the center section, the grain is all running like this. How are you gonna get it for the parts that go on here? You have to make another piece that you can cut the thing on the outside so the grain is still going this way, because if you don't have any grain it isn't gonna last worth a shit.
Snap right off.

And you can't tie the pieces together well. They actually had dowels going into the 2 end quadrants, going in this way to tie to the centerpiece that was the strong piece. And the goddamn actual shaft was 6 inches in diameter, lubricated with beef fat.

Made out of wood.

Beef fat was the lubrication.

Wow.

And you could see an actual wagon, which is a kick in the ass to see and then have the sides put on out of branches the right size, still got the twists in them, driven into the base to made the cage. For the carrying of it. It is a fucking piece of art.

Where?

County Museum. Down in Exposition Park. Very few people are into mechanisms but when you look at that you've got to say to yourself, "You got nothing. Build me a fucking wagon, you bright bastard."

That took brains.

Yeah.

To build it from nothing.

When are we going to go to the Petersen Museum?

It was an experimenter with all kinds of shit and he discovered that if you ran high voltage electricity through a gas, it would illuminate. So he made all kinds of curlicues and different shaped things out of glass and he filled it with neon and he filled it with different gases and he put a high voltage current across it and these things would glow red, yellow, blue and all these colors. Which was a laboratory freak for almost 50 years. Nobody could figure out a fucking thing to do with it. It was just a nice novel thing to see. So they had this thing at Cal Tech and a guy was a student there and he took his dad there. Once a year they have open house kind of shit and one of the exhibits was Gissler tubes and his dad was in the sign business.

Gissler?

Gissler was the guy who made the tubes. Which is you're not into the history of it you have no way to connect with that word. His father was looking at these tubes lit up and he says to his son, "You know what? If that thing works there, could we take it and make maybe larger tubes, fill it with this gas. How many voltage did you say?"

"It's about 20,000 volts. We can make an AC transformer, and we can make a sign that wouldn't have all these volts."

Because the only thing that was effective then was one where these volts would chase each other all around.

And so he says, "Yeah, I think we can do that."

And from this guy taking his father to the exhibit there started the fucking neon sign business. That was in 1925. And what happened then was that was interesting it was so expensive for the whole system compared to a bunch of bulbs, they saw right away there was resistance to putting on all that kind of money, but the idea was good. Everybody liked the brilliance, the difference. It looked good in the fog, everything. So they hit on the idea, we'll just rent them the fucking sign. They pay so much by the month and we build you a sign and when you don't want to use it anymore, we take the sign away. We use the electronics in other shit - we just have to make new tubes. So for the first 10 years they were renting them. Then when they saw how good it was, the potential buyers, they wanted to buy them and they could get the price down more, the system was more organized and all that kind of thing. It was another Jew boy from Los Angeles.

Very good.

When Genghis Khan was making all his raids and wrecking the whole continent of Asia, one of the reasons he was able to do what he did was because you had to transverse tremendous distances with no roads, nothing. How the hell did he know where he was going? Believe it or not, you've heard of the word lodestone? You know what a lodestone is?

Yes.

What's a lodestone?

It's a magnetic stone.

Yeah. But a natural one.

Yes.

Okay. It so happened that somebody, the same way, tied a goddamn string on it and he noticed that no matter how they walked around one end of that thing always pointed in the same direction. Then they discovered it was North. They said, "Well, Jesus, if that thing is always pointing North and we're going up on that path, if we go this way we'd be going East and if we go this way we'd be going West and if the goddamn thing was directly the other way, we'd be going South. So he didn't want anybody else to know about this thing. They built a two-wagon cart all enclosed and this stone was about that big with all this weight on it and he was the only one that understood what the hell it did. A guy was assigned with a wagon and a horse to drag this thing. That was what it took to take the compass with him. And the reasoning was that to be able to do what he did because he knew where the hell he was going over vast distances with no roadsides. Now isn't that a bitch.

How did they make it free? Was it hanging?

Yeah, it was hanging on a single cord. That was the other thing. It had to be almost frictionless or it would be useless.

Yeah.

To hang a string didn't take engineering. You didn't need ball bearings; you didn't need floating liquid. All that shit was not in the picture. But you needed a blob that was really big and where do you find them? These lodestones were not exactly all over the place.

No,

So those 2 things, the goddamn plumb bob and the level and the compass thing all so goddamn basic and some guy…

Pendulum.

Some goddamn Neanderthal figured it out.

I'll tell you another one like that that changed the course of history. Political history.

So did those 3 things.

The lime to eat on a boat so you didn't get scurvy. And it turned the British into the world's most powerful naval power and nothing but a little fruit.

And why do you think they call English sailors limeys?

That's why.

Isn't that a bitch?

Isn't that funny.

That's a bitch. Some of those things are so basic and are so good to this day. They aren't like, "Well it happened and we don't have to fool with that anymore."

The goddamn things never went away.

No.

It's good for eternity.

Yeah.

That's what's fantastic about that to me.

Such basis stuff.
Yeah.

The lobe on the cam wore down until it was flat.

It wasn't flat but it was worn down enough so they wouldn't open a valve but what happened was the lifter was worn concave, see, so that lost the length of the lifter as well as the lift being shorter.

Right.

So what did I do? I pulled off the intake manifold only, got to that one lifter that was bad and it was job to get it out because it burred on the inside, but I struggled with it and I turned it and I got that goddamn thing out, but a new one in. I put that thing back together and while that valve had a shorter stroke, it opened. That's all it took to get that bastard going was the price of one lifter.

That was that brown Cadillac that you gave me?

A much older one, way before.

That's pretty good.

I did all kinds of crazy shit, just as a personal challenge. How do you not spend money?

Well, good.

How would you like to take off a gas tank on a Cadillac with a floor jack?

Okay.

That was some job. Why did I have to take it off? Listen to this. All of a sudden I'm driving down the highway and this thing is dying out, like it's running out of gas. And I let up on the throttle and just let the car go coasting and then after about 30 seconds, I step on it and it came back so I says, "Goddamn thing must have a bad filter. Maybe it's the carburetor filter."

Well, I took that apart. No shit in there. I then found out there was a filter in the tank. And how it keeps clean is that it goes up and down with a cork thing that tells you how much gas you have in the gas tank.

Gas gauge, yeah.

Well now the car's got 160,000 on it. Could it accumulate enough shit to plug it? Yeah.

Damn right.

So I finally decided that was the thing that must be bad. So now you got to take the tank off. It's got the straps. You gotta jack it up first and put it on a couple of stands. And then put the jack and get it exactly in the middle so when you lower it it don't tip this way or that way and all that so it took a couple of tries - you know I lowered it down and see which way it went. If it didn't go right I'd put it back up there until I got it into the right place and got it so I could actually roll that tank out onto the floor jack, take the 4 screws out, take that element out and I changed that whole element because the gas gauge wasn't working right at the same time, so I changed that. In fact I still have the dirty one in the garage for the hell of it. I put that new unit in which I bought in the junkyard for 3 dollars. Put that bastard back together and got it back on the road.

And what year car was this?

This was a 1964 Cadillac, which I paid $200 for it when I bought it.

Wow.

I buy all these cars way under $1,000.

By the way that guy's name down on Haskell is Roland Leveque. Leveque.

On Haskell.

Haskell. The guy with all the cars in his backyard.

Oh, that guy.

The idiot.

Yeah. We were gonna go down there.

We want to go down and talk to him.

We were gonna go down there but you don't want to go down there this minute.

No.

He's a good Frenchman.

You look at cars the way people will probably look at your tombstone and on your tombstone it will just say "Burned Out."

"Just Worn Out."

You just drive a car until it's gone. J Right.

Yeah. It's wheels, that's all it is.

Yeah.

And the reason I - you ask why you bought Lincolns and Cadillacs, all the big ones? Because I could get them for nothing.

Because you made good deals on them.

People were afraid to buy the big old ones because the obvious thing is for the repairs and the gas mileage and when I say, "But I paid nothing for the car, I can buy gas."

They don't have that connection.

Right.

All they can see is I got the big car. They already forgot that I paid nothing but it's costing me a fortune to maintain it.

My thought was, I've seen people spend $35,000 for a Mercedes diesel to get 4 miles an hour better gas mileage. I say, "It cost you $3,000 to save $1,000 a year. What kind of brains is that?"

Listen to that fucking noise and smell and all that shit and looking for gas stations so you can buy fuel. What're you going to do? Hey people can do lopsided thinking by the barrel. It's not a thing that's rare.

Yeah.

I'm saying, we're both saying the same thing, we're not saying this with bitterness, it's humanity. They all react weird. Not I their best interests.

Well, hey, I'm stupid. Look at what I'm putting into this Tbird. It's certainly not cost effective. But, hey, it's a project, it's a toy, it's something I want to have everyday. You know what, I'm going to throw it all in that one.

It's a 1-car thing - you're not trying to make a stable full of them.

Oh no.

I gotta bring over that guy, he's half Hawaiian and half black, but an interesting son of a bitch. He had a trucking company and was into so much shit. He's like me; he can tell you stories all day long about things he's done in his lifespan. Unbelievable shit.

He has a lot of cars.

Yeah. And he's got crazy ways of buying them and all that. We gotta turn here?

No.

We don't turn here. How far we got to go yet? That signal?

Two signals.

Oh, okay. I'm lost on this street, connecting it with turning off of Nordhoff.


SIDE 17

Padding. Hog's hair was very durable.

When did cotton or other things come into being for the padding underneath the seat?

That came probably in the '20's when the cars already were so extensive they couldn't get enough hog's hair on tap. You could get so much so often but what do you with the line that's stopped. You say, "Hey we got to get away from that hog's hair even if we can get it cheaper."

Which it wasn't. The cotton was cheaper.

Is that what was used next?

Yeah. And then came the idea of putting springs in, see, so that you would have more give than you would have out of the cotton itself. So there were all kinds of tricks that had to be ginned up to get the thing better and better. And we start actually getting foam and we start getting layers. There was more than one layer in there and when each layer was done differently as far as stiffness, so there would be a graduated compression.

Slow memory.

Just like you get from shocks, that kind of thing.

There is a new type of foam called slow memory foam where it'll just eventually push down and hold you at a certain level.

That whole world is going to get even more complicated because now that they have some idea how to do that, you will be able to get foam that'll do shit that nothing will be able to come near it.

I have a pad on my on my bed that is slow memory foam. It's about 2 or 3 inches thick and it's about $250 but it's a kind of interesting experience.

In fact the mattresses we got has got that sort of a pad you're talking about that's about 2 inches thick as part of the mattress. It's not even a loose item, it's just part of the top. You've got everything like a regular mattress plus this thing and the mattress cover is the same material over everything. So it's like built into the mattress rather than an add-on.

Mine is what's called a cushion top. Mine is 2 spring systems in the mattress and then it's got a floating 3rd layer that's a set of springs and then over that I've got a 2 inch piece of foam.

So this is again the graduated shit where they found there's no such a thing as it just compresses and that's the end. It's not the end. You can only go so far with each amount of effort before it bottoms out. You gotta do something different.

Well, the whole idea is to try to get you not to have pressure points on your body because what that's doing is cutting your circulation off and then you basically are at a very subconscious level cramping and walking up and turning over. If you had no cramping you wouldn't move. Pretty much you'd stay still. It's interesting. When I got my '83 Tbird, which I didn't want. I got because I loaned a guy money and he gave me the car instead of the money. And it was one of those $700 a month maintenance pits. I ended up selling it for less than I got for it. Than he owed me and it cost me $7,000 plus. In maintenance. But that car was uncomfortable from the first day I got into it it hurt my back. The craziest thing. And then this '89 Tbird, comfortable as hell. Absolutely superbly comfortable.

It just shows you man has a lot of science in just making a place where you park the body.

Yeah.

It's just not that simple.

So tell me about working on the Aqueduct. What led you to that?

What happened was there was an ad or something in the paper and there was another guy and myself that were gonna do this. And he had the car at the time so we went in his car. And when we got there they only wanted one guy.

And what location was this?

Way the hell out in the desert somewhere. I don't even remember where.

Palmdale type thing?

Yeah, probably there or even further east than that. It's just as vague in my mind as hell. That's where you had to go on roads that were all deserted, you know, there were no landmarks that I could get myself oriented. And so he had to go and here I'm left by myself. And we're sleeping in half-tent shacks where the floor and 3 feet from the ground is wood and the rest of it is canvas. Ever seen that kind?

No.

Oh, shit. That was because you just needed the floor and a place to put the bed and the floor being strong enough to hold you so it wouldn't cave in and the rest of it was literally a canvas tent.

Was it a v-shaped tent?

Yeah.

Wow.

So the first day I went out on there and I'm with this whole gang of guys and what they're doing is shoveling the ground up against this v on the outside.

Against the swail?

Whatever the hell it's called. And this was a shitty job. So I waited for this guy to drop us off because this thing is long so they take you out to where it's not been finished, drop you off, you do so many feet of it and the next day they put you where the next portion is. So he's driving away and there are no other things there that you can compare distance to and he's driving in the direction you're looking. So you can't gauge how far is he in so many minutes. So I thought he was far enough away that he couldn't see me and I just sat down on the ground and said, "Fuck this."

I mean, I figure the guys I'm with they're not going to give a shit one way or the other. But I do. As long as they got the job. So I did that for about 4 days and apparently one of them bastards must have said, "Hey, that fucker there, he doesn't work, he just lays down."

So he drove the truck about a block, which I didn't realize and then he stopped and he was waiting for me to lay down so he could then say, "Yeah, these guys are not lying. This guy is laying down."

So when the day was over…

But did you?

What's that?

Lay down.

Yeah, I did it for 4 days. It was no fucking job for me. I figure they want to pay me for just lying down, I'll just lie down. It was really like sitting over the edge with my legs on the inside of the thing. So we get back and…

You're not going that way; you're taking me home.

Oh yes, I'm fucked up already. What was I getting at?

So at the end of the day…

At the end of the day we come back there and he says to me, "You're fired."

And I say real innocent like, "What did I do wrong

He says, "You didn't do nothing. Period."

So what am I going to argue about? So how did they let you go? He pays you off for the 4 days you were there and from there you were out in the desert. No fucking bus, no transportation, nothing. Just throws you into the desert. And I say, "Holy fuck."

You know me, I don't die easy. I say, "How the hell am I gonna get out of this?"

So it just so happened that there was another guy that was working there that was going into town. So I flag him down and I say, "Is it worth $5 to drive me into town? You going that way?"

He says, "Yeah."

And so I had a ride home. Otherwise God knows what the hell I would have done out there.

You always manage to slither your way out of trouble.

I'm telling you, I don't just panic and go to pieces because that doesn't help.

No.

That's the thing that for some reason or other most people do. The first thing they do is make the worst condition in their head. "What am I gonna do?"

How about saying, "How are you gonna do something?"

Instead of "What am I gonna do?"

Right. So you had one day of shoveling dirt on the Aqueduct.

4 days.

Well, 3 days of sitting.

Yeah. And that was the time that Cassius Clay was boxing.

Really? He didn't box until the 60's.

No, I'm talking about when he was nobody yet, just…

No, no, you said this was 1934.

1934? Wait a minute. I got it mixed up with the fighter. What the hell was popular at that time? Was it Dempsey? And what was this other guy? Jack Dempsey and there was another guy…

Not Joe Lewis. Lewis was later, right?

I can't think of the other guy's name. Anyway, they were black. He was black, this guy that all of the guys there were all honked up - they wanted this guy to lose only because he was black. Can you imagine? And they were betting against him with anybody who would take a bet because this guy was black.

Not Sugar Ray?

I'm saying to myself, "How the fuck can a guy be that crazy when you don't know him, you don't see him and you by osmosis try to put him down by betting against him?"

So I got my first taste how insanity people are about prejudice.

Yeah.

Unbelieveable.

And today, 70 years later, black athletes are gazillionaires.

Yes. In all kinds of fields.

Shack makes more than some 3rd world countries.

Yeah. Absolutely crazy. What do you see, a truck?

You went to Budweiser when they gave tours? They don't do it anymore. I was there, not that I rode on it, when they had the monorail. They had a monorail.

I went on that too, way back when.

I don't think I ever rode the monorail, but I was in the front room where they had all the big copper kettles, where they had the beer.
Yeah, I went to the gardens when the gardens were here?

Busch Gardens. Yes.

Busch Gardens. A lot of things came and went.

I tried to get a tour of Van Nuys General Motors Plant…

I took that one in once.

The guy wouldn't let me go. They said, "No, we're gonna close down."

I said, "Let me come through, I'd love to see it."

"No, can't do it."

I was lucky. I was there when they were taking them through. And the biggest thing I got a kick out of was the fact that when they were aligning the hoods, because naturally they didn't have the skill in those days of making all the sheet metal so perfect that you could just take the hood and drop it in place. This guy had a large rubber mallet and he'd beat the shit out of the edges from one side of the other until that thing would drop in okay and then the line would move up.

Wow.

So that's how they made it fit, with a rubber mallet. That tickled me, thinking that was what you had to do make car parts fit. Of course, that was the only part. Doors and others were fitted well enough that you could slide in and make whatever adjustments were necessary. But that hood, when you think about it. Big, bulgy and they were in the first throes of making a one piece hood that big. So it was a lot more critical to try to make it perfect.

Bam bam.

And it wasn't affecting the paint because they were doing it on the tapered edge. It was about an inch, you know what I mean? Of the hood. You rolled it over and then went at right angles to the edge. But the best tour I had was at the Ford plant in '39 - when I went through it with one of the engineers.

Yeah.

That was a fucking tour. Yeah, you can't get an idea of the enormity of the operation and what kind of people it takes to make that happen. That's not something that Joe Blow who sits in a closet and says, "Here, just put this here, put that there and it'd done."

Plus, I mean really, all of that has to be done by profit. In other words you don't do any of that if you're selling a huge amount of product and making a profit.

Oh yeah. That's for sure. That's a monstrous operation. It takes a lot of skills and quite a few people who are in some supervisory level to handle those things.

There were acres and acres of floor space under there.

Oh you cannot believe…

Here, this is it right here.

I passed it?

This is it right here.

Right here. Okay. The thing that was remarkable to me about the goddamn thing was that here was where the car was completed. One every 10 seconds. Can you imagine coming off the line?

God.

One every 10 seconds. Now these cars are being shipped all over the 48 States, right? Can you imagine the coordination on that lot that's outside of the plant to get those cars out of the lot?

Like where are they going? Were they being made on order or just cranking them out?
The order was only like general, like all of the agencies needed so much that they knew already months in advance there would be scheduled, this year we'll make so many in March and April and all that. None of the cars remained on the lot. When they got made they got moved. There was no lot for parking cars.

They were just staged to get out.

Even to the idea of testing them. There was an area where you drive the car up and they put in so much gas, start the thing up and if the car didn't run it was sidetracked immediately and there was some other guys that were the hotshot guys that could figure out what was wrong with the car and then get it back on the line. That was a monstrous operation.

Did they load them right onto rail cars right into the parking lot?

Rail cars and these other cars, you know, these trailer things? They were in the throes of making those already. But the long distance ones, they had them on rail cars. Like you say. And they ran into an interesting problem. They take the cars off and all of a sudden they go to run them and there's a noise coming out of the front like bearings or something. It's grinding. What the hell's wrong with these brand new cars? And since it was happening to so many of them they thought maybe it was a bad batch of bearings from the Timken bearing. Come to find out because of the way they were tied down they had just enough movement to do this, and the balls were brunelling into the races. Do you know what brunelling is? That's where it actually flattens out a spot from the pressure of the ball pressing in the same spot continually because the ball is not rotating. It's just oscillating like that.

Into the wheel bearings?

Into the wheel bearing and it ruined the races.

Oh my God.

So they had to change how they tied the fucking things down.

They had to put a support under the frame.

Yeah. So this was the kind of shit - you wouldn't get to know that, but it's interesting about the fucking problems you can have with cars just to deliver them.

Isn't that amazing.

So they discover what they call brunelling. Son of a bitch. It's just fantastic what those cars will do. Just to deliver them. And even this business about putting a certain kind of gunk on them so when they got them to the place where they had to prep them to sell them, that was done because if in the beginning they did nothing they didn't figure it needed anything, but when they got them to the place they had all kinds of clean-up work. It took a ton of work. So the agencies were saying, "Are you crazy? We're putting in x-number of hours to get these fucking cars so they look like new cars."

Yeah.

Something else.

There was an oil-based stuff - something Dean - I don't know what it was called. I know like motorcycle parts were all coated with and…

I'm trying to think of the word. There's a word for that.

Yeah.

That they did that. Look what's happening with fruits and vegetables where they've got this goddamn wax coating on cucumbers and…

Apples.

Different ones where the skins will shrink in and dry out that protects that from happening. But the worst part I hate is the fact that the stuff was picked green so they'll have good shelf life. What the fuck do I care about shelf life when it has no taste? They care about it because they want to sell every goddamn thing that was picked. They don't care that you know that it could taste better.

It's like cardboard.
Like when you buy strawberries. You know how a good strawberry tastes.

Sure.

They pick them so fucking green they don't taste like a strawberry. They taste like a piece of shit. I wouldn't give you a dime a box.

How about tomatoes?

Yeah, the same way. They pick that fucking thing so green they have no flavor.

Like wood.

Absolutely no flavor.

Incredible.

And yet the general public slowly gets so used to eating that low level of quality. You never hear… How many people do you hear that said to you these things we're talking about? Nobody ever mentions it.

Richard Beta. He grows his own food.

It's a bitch. And now the stuff they get all the way from Chile, for example. Grapes and different shit up here. There's no fucking taste. They look good. Nectarines. You bite into a nectarine and you say, "What the hell is this. It's like eating a piece of soap."

Right. You know what? It's like good looking women. Good looking on the outside. Vapid on the inside.

Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. What a fucking world. What a world. So what's on the program. So you got the, what do you call it, the Gremlin that you're gonna have a plate on it when you get it and hopefully you get the son of a bitch sold, this guy saying when he gets his money. You see that was a case again. It's just like…

Stringing you along…

Before I decided to give this Indian guy the 5 grand, I had so many of these guys. The money is there but it's not. It's just out of reach. That's where the money is.

Yeah.

They mean well and they eventually will get it but in the meantime whatever date they told you they're gonna give you the money you don't get it. Crazy. And when they loan it from a bank it's different. Right away you're paying interest penalties, all this kind of shit. When you get it from a guy that's doing you a favor, you don't even get the fucking interest, let alone penalties.

There was a wonderful story by my uncle, when my dad moved to Encino in 1970. He bought this house. A court with a house.

A court? What's a court?

Tennis court. It wasn't a house with a court. It was a tennis court with a house. Because he bought the property because it had the court. He said, "Isn't this great?"

I said, "It's great. How's the house?"

He goes, "Oh, yeah, I guess we ought to look."

It was a great house. He spent about 35 or 50 grand fixing the house up.

No shit, after you bought it?

Yeah, we did a lot of things. New pool decks, sauna, Jacuzzi. We did some stuff around the tennis court, put a walk way up the hillside. But in any event, he hired his brother to come out.

From where?

He lived in Anaheim. He lived in North Hollywood at the time.

It wasn't too far.

And so he said, "Oversee this for me."

And he was very good with that kind of stuff, anything. And so he needed the work at the time so he comes up and he pays him whatever amount of money for 5 or 6 months and about 3 months later he hasn't heard one word from his brother after this project and he says, "Jack, what's the deal? I haven't heard from you? It's been months and months and months."

He says, "I don't need you."

What a way to greet him.

I don't need you now. But it was so blunt and perfect and true. The minute somebody needs money, they need you. The minute you give them the money, they don't need you because now they've got the money. And you say, "Where's my money?"

"What do you mean? I don't need to worry about the money. I've already got the money."

Wait a second, you wouldn't be happening right now if I didn't give you the money. I need my money back.

Well, that's too bad. Don't bug me.

I, with very rare exceptions, I won't loan anybody any money unless I have collateral. If it were you, I'd give you the money.

Do you know how many times you've been fucked?

Yeah, exactly.

Even way back when.

Right. Exactly.

I used to loan guys when I was working. The fuckers couldn't wait until the next week's paycheck, for the next end of the week paycheck and so I'd loan the guy $20, $30, whatever and they'd say, "I'll give it to you just as soon as I get the next check. That day comes around, Friday, they don't say nothing. I figure I'm not pressed for the money, I'll get it next week. Another week rolls around still no sign of him saying something happened or whatever, make some reason, nothing, he's dead, like I never loaned it to him. The 3rd week rolls around, I say, "You know you were supposed to pay me back that money the first week."

And he says, "Don't worry about your money, you'll get it."

With that insinuation like, "What do you mean bugging me for the money? You'll get it."

Isn't that amazing? God I hate that. I hate that.

So instead of being apologetic this guy's on his high horse that this money doesn't mean anything, you'll get it when he gets ready to give it to you.

How dare you. How dare you insult me?

What the fuck do you do with people? It's happened to me so many times it's just crazy how people can be that blunt and that hardened that they know they shouldn't be saying what they're saying, but they are.

And of course they just shoot themselves right in the foot.

Of course you never loan the son of a bitch another dime but they find somebody else. They just find somebody else. It's fucking crazy. There's just some class of people that when they tell you don't loan anybody money if you want an enemy, unfortunately that happens in a lot of cases.

In some cases. You have to give to the right person. So far it hasn't made you an enemy for me. Which I appreciate. We're getting close…

What was I going to say, something about in your house, the equipment and shit.

Hi Fi equipment? Tools?

Oh, that was the thing. I was over to a, what day is today?

Friday night.

Right. This guy said it was Friday and Saturday that they're having this garage sale.

Okay.

So I'm on the way going somewhere and I pass by this thing so I stop and most of the things he had was nothing I was interested in but he had a pressure spray painting machine. You got a motor and a pump.

It's called an airless sprayer.

Yeah, an airless sprayer. And a couple of wheels that it moves on, for portability. And he wanted $300 for it used. And I didn't know how much those fucking things cost when they were new. Are they pretty expensive?

Some of them are thousands.

Oh, they are?

Some of them are.

So I meant to mention that earlier that if you were interested we could go over but I didn't know if you needed it.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind looking at it. If it's airless. There's a brand called New Hero or somebody that makes airless sprayers. Some of them can be several thousand. Some of them you can get in the 6, 8, 9 hundred-dollar range.

So $300 if it's running might be something you could use.

Where is this place?

I'm trying to remember where the fuck that is now. Me and my memory.

Every fucking day it's something else I've got to take care of that's still not finished. It's fucking crazy. But…

I don't know why you don't have the balls to just put it in an envelope and send it to your daughter and say, "You know what? I have no more time for this? You take care of this."

It's too far down the stream to at the last minute I'm going to tell them…

Why?

It just isn't worth the aggravation.

Listen, if you dropped dead tomorrow they'd have to do it, wouldn't they?

Exactly.

So, fine. So drop it dead and you get on with your life. It's their problem. Listen, let them earn a little of it. You know, you've done enough. 3 years of this shit is enough. Am I wrong?

Yeah, that's true.

Come on, you've got better things to do with your life on a daily basis.

But here it is.

You're not 20 years old. You don't have 80 years left to enjoy. So let's use this time wisely.

They're up 350 miles away.

What the hell does that have to do with anything?

The paperwork is here. I got to send it to them. The new stuff that comes in I got to re-mail it up - it's just too involved. I'll just have to sweat it out because number one…

You're a pussy. You're a friggin' pussy. And you won't do it.

They are just in the throes almost of getting this goddamn, what's this thing when you have to go to court to divide all the money and all that shit?

Probate?

Probate. It's just about due. Once they've got that fucking probate they can do anything they want.

But that's what you're taking care of.

I'm taking care of it. Yeah. I want to make sure that it's finally to the point where the court says, "Here's the way it's divided. You get these divisions and get the hell out of my life."

And I'll bet you they'll find reasons, even though they're good kids and all that, but I either didn't do it quite right, or each one didn't get, they felt, their fair share. It's just endless this shit that goes on.

So why don't you give it to them and let them finish it off and let them fight it out.

That's why I'm having a probate. So it has nothing to do with me.

But give it to them and let them do it. It's all done.

It's not a question. You see, you make it sound so fucking easy and you don't know all of the crap that has to happen that I have to take these fees, what do you call it, taxes, any of these fucking words that means the government or some organization gets money, how much is it and where's the checkbook that I sign to give it to them? That's all of that shit that's part of it. Because I got to take it out of the account that's in New York that I established, or kept the same account that she had, that's what is called the checking account. So all the money that had to do with that property shit went into one source.

And they can't sign on it?

No, because I'm the…

Executor?

Executor.

Well, guess what, they can send you by mail or FedEx or UPS or overnight mail - they could send you a pack of checks every week and you sign every check and you send it off to them.

You know, you are like all these people that when something is wrong with somebody else, they all have the answer.

Of course we do.

All you do is this, that and the other and they don't understand why there's a problem. No matter what it is. Whether it's a marriage, whether it's a business, whether it's personal health, you name it and every cocksucker knows how to run your life.

Absolutely. Because they have an outside look at it. You're sitting there in the quicksand not realizing that you could just walk out of the pool.

No I can't.

You could. You're just not willing to.

It's too far downstream to turn this thing around. Now it's just a matter of weeks or a couple of months or what have you, because this probate thing is now, by next month it's one year old.

So what. It doesn't mean it's over.

I know, but I'm saying it's one year downstream.

And it's 3 years of this shit. Saul, the only reason I'm having this discussion is I like you and I'm tired of seeing you wasting your time being an unpaid secretary.

What the hell. What's that?

That a tape recorder.

I was wondering what the red light was. I know you don't smoke.

It's a laser. You're under surveillance. So I'm just battling here to let you get out from under the camel's yoke, if you will.

No, I'm going to ride this thing into the ground.

Oh, okay.

And get it over with.

I just hate to see you…

Now what I want to know is when the hell are you gonna do anything with… Once you fix the Tbird and you got rid of the Gremlin.

And I get rid of the Mercedes which…

























SIDE 18

Or you're losing the appetite and you're thinking about packaging it up good enough that you're gonna sell the whole package.

Well, to be candid with you, the thought goes through my head like, fuck this.

Because how much time have you got to fuck with?

But the fact is that I've spent all this time getting it now to the point to go run it. I've got a spare everything. I have a spare engine, a transmission, fuel pump, magnetos, I've got spare lots of things, you know, and I've rebuilt the car and now it's ready to go have fun. So and it's only been some cash flow and some time and weather that have prevented it right now.

That's quite a few things.

Right. But the fact is now for $30 I can go up to Palmdale, take you and a couple people with me and we can go out and have some fun and pound the ground. So it's ready to go.

What have you done to get rid of that fucking hesitation or whatever you had that didn't want to let that thing really unwind?

It had 2 flaws. It had a gap in the blower gasket between the blower and the manifold.

When did you discover that?

When we pulled it off and looked.

Oh.

I looked and I was looking at the edge and I said, "Look, it looks like there's no gasket here."

And then we fixed that, put it back on, fired it back up, which is not an instant process, and then we still had problems and I looked again and when the thing would kind of backfire when I'd hit it and it would lean out I'd see a little something out the manifold. And I said, "Ah."

The intake manifold right above the intake port. On the high side of the head. So we pulled the blower off, we pulled the intake manifold and sure enough there was about a 1/2-inch gap out of one part of the gasket and the intake manifold. Go figure that.

And these were new gaskets?

Brand new. They were built by the guy who built the motor. But, if the motor sneezed, you know, it can blow these things out. It's a very minor little amount of mating surface at that point. The actual - the manifold or something would have to be welded on to give me more mating surface for the gasket. Or o-ringed or something so anyway it's as good as we can do it so we changed those, put it back on, it ran a little better. And what we did is we changed the mixture, which is how lean or fat it is, richer or lean, we put it way back to richer than it was. We were leaning it out because it was acting like it was fat. But the fact was that it was real lean.

Because you were sucking in air.

Right.

So now we've got it back to the point where we feel that it's not hiccuping, you know, off of idle. When you open the gas, if there's two much air, the motor stumbles. Cough, cough. Rather than if it's too rich it blubbers. So this was cough, cough, cough. And I call that the hiccup.

That had to be one son of a bitch, what shall I say, hunting game.

John, the guy we saw, the first guy we met when we got out of the car, when we were standing by that De Soto, he was the guy who was helping me when we were finding that.

No shit.

He came 2, 3 weeks in a row and helped me. So it's ready, it's basically ready. I've worked on the trailer, we've gotten the generator working, we've gotten the whole lot of stuff. Now it's just a matter of getting some crap out of the trailer and hooking it… I fixed the Dooley. I had to put another motor in the Dooley. I had to get that all done. I've worked on the trailer. I've worked on the car. I've worked on the truck. I mean everything. So now it's ready to go.

And when you're saying that I'm saying to myself, "How the hell can you have a cash flow to keep your business solvent when you're eating up all this fucking profit in this stuff that you're doing?"

Whether you're marking it down or not doesn't matter. All I know is you're out of money.

Like I said, money is just like blood or air. I'm not trying to save it; I'm trying to use it.

Unfortunately you're doing it a little too heavy on the wrong side. You can only be wonderful up to a certain point until it hurts.

I actually have not put a whole lot of money into these things other than what I had to. The Dooley motor I had no choice. I had to do it. And I thought I'd made a real good choice buying a crate motor and of course I had to do it twice. So that hurt. That took a lot of time and labor and extra money. So I'm at the point where I'm trying to actually get some of my life work done and not just construction work. I'm not working because it's the end all of my life, I'm working as a means of providing the air and blood to breathe and live. You know money. And so… And I've felt, it seemed to me that doing $400,000 worth of business a year I had enough money to spend 10 or 20 thousand dollars a year on stuff like this, which is part of maintenance and making things better. So as it is, it's still fingernails to the chalkboard trying to climb up the wall.

And the other thing that you're casually overlooking is if that was really true then why would you have to make a new mortgage on the house if this stuff isn't really covering all these things you say its covering.

Are you talking about right now, the new mortgage? Oh, the only reason I was considering a new mortgage is that rates are very low and if I can refinance it and drop my payment $300 a month…

Oh, so you're not doing it to get money.
Oh, no…

You're doing it to reduce the interest level.

Absolutely. I'm not borrowing against anything anymore.

I'm gonna say, if you're doing that you're just drowning.

Exactly. You're borrowing rich.

You're just drowning.

Yeah.

So what's the story? Is there a possibility of getting a better mortgage? Or the difference between the points and all the other shit that they come up with it just makes it a wash.

Well, it's a 30-month wash, is what it is. Basically let us say that, I don't think I'm going to do this loan, but let's just say that I actually were willing to take the $10,000 in fees that they want to handle this.

It is that much.

$10,000. Yeah, it should be about 5 or 6. But let's say it was $10,000. That means that if I save $300 a month, it's gonna take me 30 something months at $300 a month, do the math, to pay that $10,000 back. So after 2 1/2 years of payments I will have actually paid off the difference in those loan costs and from the 30th month on now I'm actually saving the money. But it takes you 2 1/2 years before you're saving the money. So make no mistake - to refinance you just took on another $10,000 of obligation. That's how it is. The refi isn't free. It may be free in terms of not spending any money out of my pocket at the moment, but those fees are thrown into the loan.

It's like balloon payment bullshit.

Well, yeah. So I'm not… I've rejected… I can't tell you how many times I've rejected any thought of refinancing because between the bankruptcy and what I've had to go through and I've not even… But at this point there's a guy who claimed to make it look good. Well I have a friend - a dear, dear, dear friend who is in the mortgage business and I emailed him and I said, "Look, I need an answer to this right now."

And I also asked my guy at the end of the Le Tip meeting, Manny, what about it? He said beware and so I said okay, so I'm making this guy jump through some hoops before I give him an answer.

Is he saying beware because they have different ways of massaging this thing around to make it look like it's one set of figures but it's not.

But the fact is they're getting points from both the lender and the loan so… and from the banks, so it doesn't make any… they're making money, they don't need to see a penny from me, they're making .2 of a percent here or 2 percent there or whatever.

It's volume.

Yeah. No, I'm not looking to borrow any money. Let me tell you, if somebody dropped $250,000 on me today, you know what I'd do with it? Pay my house off. Instant. Because the minute that house nut is gone, I'm a happy guy. And the fact is that right now $250,000 I can't make better than 7 or 8 per cent on that money. So you know what, I'd be just treading water. Now it might be nice to think about having a quarter of a million dollars in the bank and using the interest to pay the interest. Because most of your payment, for 25 of 30 years is interest.

That is only possible when a house is free and clear.

Well no, if it's not free and clear, let's say my mom dies and drops $200,000 on me. If I kept that money in the bank earning say 7% and I took that 7% and I paid my mortgage, so for 20 years or 25 years I pay that mortgage off at 7%, when the mortgage is paid off I still have the principle.

Yeah, but 20 years, you're gonna be a much older person.

I'm gonna pay it 3 times. That's the point.

To enjoy that fucking money.

But the point is that I would still have the money. Another way to look at it is if I paid it off right now I don't pay out all that interest. For the next 20 years. So the fact is that my house will probably appreciate to the same degree that I would have had if I'd kept the money. And if I ever need the money I'll just sell the house. So…

Plus the fact that it's a completely different feeling when you know that that goddamn lump of money that you got to come up with every month is not there…

My life would be very different if I didn't have $2,200 to come up with.

Exactly.

Majorly.

And with all this goddamn rental shit, how much of that is paying it off?

$1,100. Excuse me, it's more than that. $1,100 - it's about $1,600 or $1,700. So I've got most of it paid. I get $600 from Millie, $750 from the girls in the back, $460 from the girl in the front. So that's $1,810.

And the full amount is how much?

$2,200. With taxes and insurance.

But still you know, that is still variable in the sense that this person moves out, this does that, this does that, the market goes down, you can't get the same rent that you could get. There's so many fucking ways things can go wrong.

There are utilities too.

And then you've got to rebuild it or maybe then some bastard comes over and says, "Wait a minute, we don't have a record of there being a house in the back here. You're screwing us out of some money thing."

And here comes another…

Debacle.
Another goddamned kick in the ass thing. So the point is if the house is free and clear, all of those things can't happen.

Can't impact you, can't hurt you. Right. I would love to get rid of $25,000 or $30,000 monkey off my back. And then that money would be money I'd be putting towards other things. I still have other overhead. I mean, I have $4,000 more of overhead every month. I've got business licenses and liability insurance on the business and maintenance on the trucks and tools and…

And how about your own insurance? Jesus, the rates you've got to pay. Fantastic.

Screw you and your stupid little insurance. I can't believe it, what you've got. You've catbird seeded a lot of stuff, man.

You talk about dumb shit ass luck, like all these things that have happened to me that have been favorable, it's been crazy. On top of that we bought the house when they had that, what's that law? When they reduced the taxes to the $500 level?

Prop 13.

I'm still under Prop 13.

Oh, Jesus.

For my taxes.

So what are you paying? $300 a year?

$800. $500 was the lowest.

And you're paying $800 a year?

Yeah.

Jesus. I pay $2,500.

If I move out, it's $3,000 for the next party that buys it.

Well that's their problem.

I know but that's the difference of my taxes and the next guy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Talking about falling into a pile of shit. I just happened to get old at the right time, retired at the right time, bought the house at the right time, and had kids at the right time. Everything was just favorable in so many ways that it couldn't have been favorable that it was almost like… And me never getting sick, you know… Never getting into debt buying old cars, buying everything for cash because I hate fucking payments. So I was always solvent. On top of that.

That's your name. Saul. Solvent.

My mother-in-law was naturally in better circumstances than we were so the kids would get $1,000 bonds from year one kind of thing, so from every kind of which way, like we bought the first new car and only car we bought it was only because my wife said to her mother, "I want a new car."

And that was with the intonation meaning that you could afford to buy me a new car. And I want a new car.

So she says, "What kind do you want?"

She didn't even know what kind she wanted. So she started watching cars go down the street to see what kind she liked and she picked a Tbird and that's why we would up with a 1962 brand new Tbird and so she came up with a check. It was $4,500 at that time. For a brand new Tbird and we drove off with a new Tbird. I didn't have no fucking $4,500 to waste on a car. So talk about falling into shit. Another way to fall into shit.

Unbelievable.

So many things happened to me, that was better than the average slob experienced that I never was with this "why me" attitude. "Why can't I be rich and famous?"

That never got into my psyche.

If you tried to plan it to be this good you couldn't have made it this good.

And then having the balls before I was married and all that, like I say, when I wanted to take in this shit in Detroit, the 25th Annual Congress, to get on a bus and have $20 in my pocket, not knowing how the fuck I was going to get back and say, "I'll worry about it when I have to get back. I have to get there first."

And that's what I did. Otherwise there was no way in hell I could go there and say well, how do you get back? It would mean that you're never gonna get back so you can't go.

That's right.

You're a survivor. You're just a clever, wiley ass survivor.

I just figured that somehow if you're by yourself, you're the only one you have to support, fuck I can sleep on a bench, I can scrounge food, I can do what the fuck ever it takes. I won't die. And I just had the… here I am in Detroit. And I decide to stay, don't know a fucking soul and you say, "You're gonna get a job? Doing what?"

I'm talking to myself, "Doing what?"

Well hell, I worked in gas stations. If I want just a brute labor thing and gas stations in those days were practically on every corner. There's this gang shit like we have now, that changed many years later. I said, "Well, I'll just walk down the main street, just like, what the hell is this street over here?"

Sherman Way.

Yeah, Sherman Way, and there'll be so many gas stations on this side and so many on that side, I just zigzagged across and asked if they needed anybody to help in a gas station. I walked 7 miles because in Detroit they have a crazy circular thing that they laid out that when you get 1 mile from the heart of the city, they named it One Mile Road. When you get 2 miles out, you got Two Mile Road and these are circles. All the way around. I got a job on the corner of Seven Mile Road in Woodward. So I walked 7 miles and I got a job. So when you say, what are you gonna do? Get off your ass.

You've always proved that. You have had the initiative and the intuition…

And I never had this fear. That's the next thing - the fear. The only fear I ever had was I don't want to buy a car with a payment. Anything I had to buy that I couldn't buy for cash that was a fear. I just didn't want to own a fucking thing that all I got was a bill and then my worry was what if I lose my job? And because I worked on such a tight basis of never having a big bill to pay, I never was out of work. In all of the years I worked, I was never out of work.

You couldn't really get a life to work out a whole lot better than you had worked out. Except for being a stupid old ass working this fucking probate for your kids. Other than that you really haven't had much go wrong.

I'm telling you, in so many goddamn ways, like I was trying to bring out, what the hell was it? The first job I got as a draftsman. I told you I got conned into it because I went to visit my cousins in Brooklyn, New York and the first thing they said to me after we're talking awhile is what do I do? This is when I was 19 years old and I didn't do anything - I worked in a gas station. I didn't have any profession. So you felt like shit, what are you gonna say you work in a gas station to a cousin? That'd be like you're just a ditch digger. So out of the blue I said to him, "I'm a draftsman."

I don't know how the hell I picked out that fucking trade. So the guy says to me, did I tell you that story?

Yeah, but tell me anyway.

So I say to one of the cousins, or he says to me, "Oh draftsman. The fucking paper's loaded with draftsman. I'll get you a job. Come here tomorrow morning and we'll go down to an agency and you'll get a job."

And I'm saying, "Oh shit. What am I gonna do now?"

Draft.

I bullshitted my way into that. How am I gonna get this guy off my back. So I say to myself, ah fuck he won't be here tomorrow morning. I'll worry about what I'm gonna do later. I'll make up some goddamn excuse. Tomorrow morning 7 o'clock here he is at the house ready to take me to an agency. I say, "Holy shit, what am I gonna do?"

So you say, well wait a minute if you picked that you're gonna be a draftsman, what do you know about drafting at all that if you had to go into a drafting field could you even come in as a low level draftsman? Well, I had 1 year in high school of drafting. I sort of liked it. It was interesting. And 1 year in junior college. So it wasn't that I wasn't acquainted with using the tools and making drawings. I made some but what level could you make when you're working in school. That's shit. So I finally conned this agency in - I gave them a phony place that I worked in California. That was the next thing I had in my favor. I figured since there was so much distance between us it's gonna take time for him, if he even writes a letter to find out what I did, what I got paid and all this bullshit. And I go see this guy, an old German guy that was in charge and he says to me, "Come to work tomorrow."

I conned him enough that since I was only going in as a junior draftsman, how bright did I have to be. So now the catch was I knew they were going to ask me to fill out a sheet of paper where I worked and all this shit. So I say to myself, "Well, I'm going to give them an address in California and I'm gonna make the address purposely wrong so that when that gets sent back they're gonna call me and say, "Hey, you asked me to send it to this place and they say no such place."

And I had the ready answer. Cause you had to have this all planned. Otherwise you're going to trip on your own shoelaces. And I knew that this was about what was going to happen. I take a look at the address and I say, "Gee, I'm sorry, I got the numbers twisted. It's not 549, it's 945."

Something that would make about 5 or 6 blocks difference so it was plausible. So you see, that's another thing I learned. If you're gonna be a bullshitter, make it plausible. If it's not plausible, it can be the truth and it isn't worth a shit. Cause it isn't plausible. If it's plausible you've got a chance. So that's what I did. I made it plausible. He sends the thing out again. By that time I'm working already 4 weeks. This thing comes back again and the chief draftsman calls me in and he says, "What are you pulling here? That company don't exist."

And I'm ready for him cause I know what's going to happen, so if you're trying to keep yourself alive you better have the fucking answers. So I say to him like this. I bend over close over the table and I say to him, "You tell me sir how I'm ever going to get a job if you don't let me have a chance."

He looks at me, puts on a half smile and he says, "Get the hell back out into the drafting room."

That's great.

That's how you can bullshit your way into something. And then the next thing was, what was I gonna lose? I was going to be lost anyway, so try and make some way to beat it.

Gotcha.

That's how I beat it. And my wife - we moved to California. She was a bookkeeper by trade. That was the only thing she did. She went to different places here and the problem was everything looked like she almost had the job and one of the final questions they would always ask is "What is your local reference?"

Where did you work here in California? Obviously she hadn't worked any places. She said, "No, I just came here 3 months ago."

And they'd say, "Sorry we can't hire you - we only want people with local references."

Because there were so many fly by nights - they'd hire them and they'd work a couple of weeks, make a couple of bucks and then disappear because they were only using this money to get somewhere else. So here she's very despondent and she's almost in tears. What's she gonna do? How's she gonna give them?

I say, "Okay, let me think about it for awhile."

Then I say to her, "I remember myself, what I did? Now here's what you do. You answer the questions and when he finally gets to the point where he asks for local experience you look him right in the eye. Don't sit back like a little lamb, you look him right in the eye, serious, and you say 'How am I gonna get local experience if somebody like you doesn't give me a chance.'"

Because they know she's from Brooklyn, that's part of the bullshit. The same thing happened. They said, "Okay, go see so and so."

So sometimes a dumb shitty thing like that can turn the other guy around because you're telling him something that's realistic. How the hell are you gonna get that if you never work here?

Exactly.

And because she had a very good personality and good handwriting and all that shit and they finally said okay and what was the company? CBS. She worked for that company until we had the first child.

Wow.

And she was so good. She was in payroll department. So somehow different people that she paid. She even paid Johnny Carson when he was working for CBS.

She paid him?

Yeah. The weekly check kind of shit. Then there was this other guy. I'm sure you know him. He was the other half of that team that they had on the long running TV show as well as they made a movie with Jack Lemon.

Walter Matthau.

No, the other guy.

Jack Klugman?

Yeah, Jack Klugman. So Jack Klugman comes there and she's got a memory like an elephant so she knew she paid him yesterday. He comes and he wants to get his check again. She looks him straight in the face and says, "I paid you yesterday."

And he was doing that to show somebody else, try and get past this kid.

Oh, I see. Very good. Cool.

She was something else. She had a memory that wouldn't quit. And she'd do things like this. Here she's working for this guy and he's talking to somebody on the telephone. She gets enough of the one side of the conversation to go over to the file cabinet, take out the information that he's gonna ask her for and when he hangs up the phone she throws that packet on the table before he says to her, "Get so and so."

And he says, "May, you're just unbelievable."

That she could be that sharp while she's working, get a one sided part of a conversation and know what he's gonna need. Then after we were married, let's see the time went by until it was about 6 years from the time that she had to give up the job. First she had to give it up because we had the kid and she's not going to have a babysitter. And after the kid was growing already she didn't have too much of an appetite to go back to work. So she gets a phone call and all he says was, "Do you know who this is?"

She says, "Yes."

All he said is, "Do you know who this is?"

And she had such a keen ear she knew it was her boss. Her old boss. And this guy flips out and he says, "Would you like to come back to work? I haven't had a good secretary since you left."

So that's the kind of accountant she was.

And she went back to work.

No. Because by that time we had already the other kid. No, she wasn't going to go back but he would have taken her back in a minute. So we both seemed to have the idea of how to satisfy whoever is your superior. One of the buttons you need to make them know you're there. And you'd think that everybody that's working would have that kind of a reaction towards what do you do to preserve your job, what do you do to get a better salary and all this kind of shit. Well I even worked up… this is what I was trying to get at with all this bullshit. Besides now I got the job and all that and I'm in California and I want to get myself a bigger salary. I know that if you get a raise from whatever job you're on it's gonna be a pittance. 5 dollars, 10 dollars a week. Some chicken shit amount of money. The only way you're gonna make a bigger jump is you got to increase your classification. If you're a junior draftsman you got to go to the next job and apply as a senior draftsman. That automatically is gonna give you more money than the $5 deal is and in those days they don't do the research like they do today. You say you're a senior draftsman. They put you to work. If you can do what is necessary they're not going to say to you. "Wait a minute, we don't know if you're a senior draftsman."

But shit, you're doing the work. That ends the problem. And that's what happened. I increased my position by myself in every fucking job I did. I went from junior engineer to senior engineer by that same method. And then you would say, "What happens if you couldn't handle it?"

I said that to myself. "What happens if you take a senior engineer job - are you gonna be able to handle it?"

I say, "I'll worry about that when I get it."

You always handled it.

Never fucking failed. I was able to handle the bullshit that they gave me at every step that I went along the way.

And the famous phrase is? Just a little bit of balls. That's you.

Exactly. Because my argument was what's the worst they ca do to me? So you don't get the job or you're not capable. I figure I can take that chance. That's no skin off my fucking back.

Not only were you lucky but you were smart. You've had the talent and the intuition and initiative.

Exactly. Like I told you in New York when I went to work for, what the hell was the name of that company? They're out here. But they were doing the job back in New York… Northrup. Northrup was building the famous flying wing. I don't know if you ever heard that expression.

Yes.

And their object was you didn't need a fuselage and all that shit, everything was in the wing. This wing, believe it or not, the center section, where the pilot and all the instrumentation and everything took place was in the central portion of the wing. What was distance from the bottom of the wing to the top of the wing on this B35 that I was working on? 9 feet. Can you picture the fucking wing? 9 feet thick in the middle. So you could have a seat and instruments and all that and room for the gas tanks and whatever. So when I went to work for that outfit, the next project that we were on was the largest flying boat in the world that was going to be made then and that was going to be for Glen L. Martin Company, because thy built seaplanes at that time as well as land planes. And I got assigned to do one of the bulkhead doors because in the seaplane you can divide it like on a ship that if one area got bad you can shut it off and you can keep it from sinking.

Gotcha.

Like with a ship. So I'm working on the mechanism and the way it works is your hinges are














SIDE 19

Dummy head so when they took it off they knew it fit perfectly. Because it just came off the dummy one that they have in the plant.

Brazing.

Yeah. Brazing because it's all copper.

Oh, the exhaust manifolds were copper?

The intakes.

Oh, the intakes.

It's a fabulous car in a lot of ways.

Well Royce was like the craziest… he was a genius. Rolls was just a salesman.

That's right. That's how they got together.

But Royce was…

In fact the guy that was the salesman was the one who talked him into making the car the way he would up making it because it was a different kind of a car before and they had 2 R's on the radiator. One died - there were 2 red R's. When one died, they made it black.

Really.

For that year. When that guy died.

One black R?

Yeah. One black R, yeah. And the radiator element, the statue on there? Was a full size one that they got in their factory but it was miniaturized down from a guy that was a real good artist?

I understand it was the daughter of one of them.
I don't know who it was but the point is that it was a full sized statue that they shrunk down. And the bastard was made out of German silver so a lot of them were stolen once cars got into more into the regular places instead of where the wealthy stayed so they had to put a chain inside to keep it so you couldn't steal it. One of those chains that you put in and they spring open and you could unscrew it but you couldn't take it away from the car. I mean the shit. Radiators. The whole outside was made just like the Model Ts. That son of a bitch was all put together, soldered that the shell is part of the radiator, it's not a cover. It actually gets as hot as the rest of it. So it's radiating from that surface. That's also in German silver. By the way, they call it German silver. It's got no silver in it at all. It looks like silver.

What is it?

It's a mixture of metals that has that color. That has the color of silver. You've heard the expression German silver?

Never.

Really? That's surprising. It was used in a lot of things, German silver. They were the first ones way back in about 1910 that came up with a mix because they wanted to get away from stuff that corroded. But it was too expensive. In fact silver is no good because it gets dirty easy as well. So they figured out a mix that had the color. I don't remember what the mix is but it's common metals.

And it stays bright?

Yeah. Stays bright. Eventually it will tarnish, even chrome will too but it takes months. Instead of the old days like brass. The old cars were made out of brass. The only reason they went - it was very interesting how that went. When you had no kind of plating everybody had brass. Because that was the only shiny metal you could use. The fucking thing needed attention every week. So finally when nickel plating came out then they went to nickel. Then they found that the nickel, while it was better than the brass, was still not really as good as when they went to chrome. So now the ordinary chrome plate that you see - ordinary - any chrome plate that you see today is really, you've seen the expression triple plate? What it means is you got a flash it with copper, then you flash it with nickel and then you put the chrome and the reason you need the 3 ways is each one provides something in the way of grip for the chrome because if you put the chrome directly on steel, it'll peel. And that took years of fucking around to get that. That had to be done wrong and people had to have the car, have it go bad and 3 years later they'd say, "What the hell's with this?"

Because nobody had life tests. How are you gonna make a life test on something that just came out? And you ain't got time to fuck around and send it to Florida, put it in all the conditions that they do on stuff now like for example, when you get new paint now, it's been in a process 3,4 years down in Florida. To see if it stands up.

Really?

Yeah. You don't get it from a new mix that the guy says, "Okay, let's put in on a car."

Because that could be a disaster if it's wrong.

The chrome itself is only; it only takes about 1 minute to chrome it.

Yeah, and that's the hardest metal also. So when you get into that it's a whole different thing about, just like people - and this is the funniest part, when they come into a place and they say, "I want to have my bumpers rechromed."

And they think he takes a brush out and he paints it. Well, hey, when you don't know what it is, how can you blame the guy? It's just like if somebody asked me about electronic shit I don't know one end from the other. But I can tell you why they call it watt and why they call it amperes and why they call it…

Ohms.

Ohms. And it's interesting all from 3 different countries. Ampere came from the French, because they were the ones that figured out how to measure that. Volts came from the Italians; it was called volta in Italian. And ohm came from the Germans. They found out how to measure... Oh yeah, all of these are names. And Watt was an Englishman. So you had practically all of Europe just to come up with the expressions for electrical terms. Now to me I find that fascinating. I mean 99% of the people, even the ones that are in the trade say, "So what?"

It just doesn't interest them.

You're a curious guy.

I love that shit. It envelopes thousands of people, you know, like another one that was interesting, when they made the first battery, that was the Italians, by the way, you ever hear of a thing called a voltaic pile? Voltaic pile.

Kind of.

Old, ancient electrical history kind of thing. Because you don't use it today. Why do they call it a pile? Because you took these slugs of materials one out of one thing and one out of another to make that thing that would make current. First battery. So it was called a voltaic pile because it conducted current. And at that time they called it volts - voltaic pile. So it's interesting they started out in the craziest ways and how did they know they had current? Because they had no fucking meters… Somebody got hold of a frog and dissected it. It was still not totally dead and he found if he put current on it he could make the legs jump and that's how they discovered that it's like an electrical current that make the nerves react. From a voltaic pile. Fantastic. I love that old time shit that you gotta go into… historical stuff, and that's one tiny slice of all of this. You know you look on the shelf of electrical stuff, shit it can be a thousand feet long.

A car called the Reo. I've heard the name.

It's the initials of R.E. Olds.

R.E. Olds.

Makes Reo.

Oh.

He founded that company.

He had a 1903. Right?

He had that and the Olds. The Reo came later downstream about in the 20's.

Oh really?

Yeah. That was the same thing that the guy that owned General Motors before it became the kind of corporation it was, this guy was named Durant. He was the one that bought all of these companies up and put them together and did the bookkeeping monkey business that it takes to keep that together as a corporation. He finally got kicked out. He decided to make his own car. So he called it a Star. A Durant Star. And one of the features it had that was interesting and unless you read something about it you'd never know it even happened, was on the brakes. They called it the car with the locomotive brakes. What the hell was that? It was the first car that had shoes. Before that it was a complete band. And that's what used to lock up when everything wasn't right. With the shoes you could get the pressure so that it was so uniform that it'd slow you down fast but wouldn't lock up. Now every stupid car has it. He didn't get the credit. He was just lost in the noise. It was a lousy little 4 cylinder car trying to compete with Fords, Chevys, and everybody else that was out there, so what are your chances? Zero. So it died. Would you buy a new car with that name as against one that has been on the market already 15 or 20 years for the same money? You'd have to be crazy. So it didn't make it.

And he was out of General Motors at that point?

He was the head CEO.

But was he still part of General Motors trying to do it on his own?

He did it on his own but he was already out. He was big enough that he could get companies to give him the tools and give him the plant and the whole thing and with the kind of background he had, he could get credit that was coming out of his ears. But if he didn't make money, they all lost it, not him. All he did was supply the hoopla. And then there was a line of cars, the Willys Knight. Did you ever hear of those?

Sure.

You know what's different about them? What makes it a Willys Knight? Or… It's the Knight engine. Knight is the guy that came up with the idea. What is there about a Knight design that's different than any other car? Listen to this. We had so much trouble with intake and exhaust valves burning, getting noisy when the clearance got big, so what did he do? He came up with the idea, "Let's not have valves."

He eliminated the valves. So how are you gonna open and close it to get the gas in and out, right? He made 2 sleeves over the pistons with slots, with cranks going to a small crankshaft making these things go up and down timing right that when the piston was coming down on the section stroke on the intake side you had 2 sleeves on the outside of the piston made a slot so that it would suck it in. Then when the piston got all the way to the bottom, the valves… the 2 sleeves would slide, shut that thing off, now you had compression, and now you fired the thing and on the other side you had your exhaust ports, they lined up, the intakes were still closed, the piston went up and threw that gas out. So that's a very elaborate arrangement. But what it had was extreme quiet. That engine was just like it didn't have valves in it. Because there were no tappets, no camshaft, no valves, and no springs, no rocker arms. All of that was out. So you say, "Gee, that sounds so good, why didn't we all go to it?"

It wasn't cheap, number 1 and number 2, they couldn't get those sleeves that they wouldn't suck up oil after they got a little miles on them, that would drive the guy crazy unless you replace the sleeves which, imagine, they're longer than the pistons, and they fit one within the other and they're connected to connecting rods and have bearings in those. A fucking nightmare. Once you had it repaired it went right in the junkyard. So those cars, none, hardly any survived. Go ahead, hit that. No? So the idea was so good that there was 5 or 6 companies in the U.S., England and Germany that paid royalty to use that arrangement. But they also found it had more shortcomings than it had benefits, so eventually it all disappeared.

It almost sounds like a 2-cycle design, but using moving slides.

No. Yeah. Except it was 4 cycle. That's the big difference. You went to 2, that's a whole… Then you don't need the sleeves. You leave it the way it was.

Nothing's moving. In a 2 cycle.

But in a 4 cycle the idea was you could have any compression ratio you wanted, you could have the exhaust ports easily arranged on both sides of the motor and all that good stuff. I know one guy that just fixed one up. Touring. A 1924 model. And I had an interesting experience with it. And they always smoked. Why? Because it was sucking this oil up. So whenever you saw a Willys Knight going down the street… In those days we didn't have all those laws about smoking up and all that, so people laughed at it but these guys kept using it. Then eventually it sucked up so much oil; it fouled the plugs easy. And they didn't have this range of hot plugs, cold plugs, all this crap that you can buy today, so it was an ordinary plug and maybe you'd get 5,000 miles out of it and the plugs would be all clogged up. So how long are you gonna keep a car that's giving you that kind of a pain in the ass? So the car never survived. Then Chrysler came out with one. This was the best one of them all. But also the idea didn't work. Because of the sleeve valve that Knight had which was a good idea except for the shortcomings, they said, "Let's do it differently. We're gonna take a cylinder, put it in the middle of the v-8 engine and we're gonna have this thing not only go up and down but we're gonna have it rotate. So we can face the slot to the cylinder we want."

Follow that? A round cylinder goes up and down, has slots in it, the slot faces the cylinder you want it to be suctioned or exhaust or compression so it works like the Knight except you have 1 large cylinder that not only goes up and down but goes around.

Wow.

It was a nightmare. Why? How do you lubricate a fucking nightmare like that? How do you keep it tight? I saw that actual engine in Roosevelt High School. Do you know where that's? On 4th Street in Boyle Heights?

Okay.

In the actual auto shop. You say, "How did they get it?"

Because it was on display somewhere when they had a show and somehow since it was a piece of junk afterward, just iron, what are you gonna do with it? The company didn't want it, especially that far back, when it doesn't work, who wants to be an owner to it? So it got swung into that area. What happened to that? I'm sure it's long gone. Because we're talking 1934 when I was looking at it so what's the likelihood of that being in that auto shop today? Zero. But that had a very interesting electric shop. I got interested in the electricity bit. They had a course in industrial electricity and this guy had a shop where he rigged up the wiring just like you do a city, a complete city. But in miniature. All around. He had a generator and a converter to convert the voltage to 110 volts ac, all of this kind of stuff and you could check out instruments and you could do all this kind of thing just like you're wiring up a city. It was a neat damn course.

I'd like to see that today.

Yeah. I'd be interested to see if it was still there. And the other thing that was very interesting was the guy that in charge of the electrical area, because they had more than one version of this thing or portion of it, this guy was so unusual mentally that he'd do this for acting… there's 40 kids in the class. You write down the name of any object you want. A flower, a car or whatever and you write it all down on a piece of paper. Then you tell him, one at a time, item one and he puts it down, item two and he gets all 40 of them down. He erases the board immediately. You call out which is item 34 and he gives it to you right off the top of his head. Just put it on and just erased. 40 items. All unrelated.

A memory trick.

Unbelievable that one guy should have that. And then in that same school I took drafting. This guy could use both hands to make letters and he could write left-handed just as easily as he could right handed. I don't know how they found those guys to be in school is beyond me. But those were 2 things that one school had that was unusual. Another thing that was unusual about the electrical guy, you remember I was telling you about the car that went around the world, the Thomas Flyer? He was working for Thomas Flyer when he was younger. And he is the one that wired the Thomas Flyer that went around the world. In addition to that he was telling me a story about a banker that decided to make a trip across country with his family, that's his wife and his kids, and he wanted somebody to come from the factory to be the chauffeur so that if anything went wrong he could fix it. Because you know, when you have money… In those days it beat a train. A train was no comparison to going on land. The train goes on in the middle of nothing. You don't see anything. He had this route going through all the cities going across the country. So they get about halfway across and a hose goes bad that goes to the radiator. So they carried hoses as well as belts, whatever they could that wasn't big and bulky for safety. And he tells the owner, "Yeah that's what's happening, a hose is bad and has to be replaced."

And the guy says, "No, I want to replace the hose."

The banker. Because he wanted to have the pleasure that he could fix the car. So he gave him the tools, he unscrewed the clamps, cut the hose off, gave him another one and he struggled, put it on, got himself all greased up and he was in 7th heaven that he fixed the car. Like he overhauled it. He put a goddamn hose on. So that's the guy we had in our goddamn class. Can you imagine?
Who was the?

His name was Reese. See, I can't remember shit. Why would I remember his name and the last time I used it was in 1934.

And this was the chauffeur?

He was the chauffeur. For this trip. And he was paid…

He worked at Roosevelt High School?

Yeah, he was now a teacher there. He was telling me this when he was working for the Thomas Flyer company before he went into teaching. And the other thing he did was…

He was paid what?

He was paid well by this guy because he was… they had to put him up in a hotel that they stayed in, in a separate room and the whole thing. He was like a member of the family and got paid besides. They paid for his meals and everything else. So that was a very interesting experience for him. He did another thing that was interesting. This one guy, from what I can recall some of the things that he said to us, this one was very interesting because I used something like that myself in a different way and that was this. He went into Westinghouse for a job. He was an electrical man at that time and he saw it was a tremendous line. He says, "With the number of guys they got in here, I ain't got a chance of getting a job."

And they give him an application to fill out. 3 pages. So he said to himself, "This isn't gonna work."

He's not going to fill that thing out. He's gonna turn the thing sideways, at a 45 degree angle and he's gonna write on there, "If you want a top notch electrical guy in this so and so field, call me."

And he puts his name down and hands it in. And he got the fucking job. Because they said, "This fucking guy has balls."

And so on some of the shit I did the same thing. Now what did he do? Did it cost money? Could it embarrass him? Nothing. But it had the kind of thing that made you say, "Hey, we gotta look into this guy. He's offbeat."

And that's the way but in a different way when I did crazy things, I used the plausibility factor. If it's plausible you got a chance. And that worked. Even with traffic tickets. You know 9/10 of the traffic tickets I got through the years I got off by seeing the judge only because I had a plausible reason for why I got the ticket. Not why it actually happened. But a plausible reason. And the guy says, "Okay, case dismissed."

I even went to the trouble… my father-in-law got a ticket. And I said from the way he got the ticket, "Give me the ticket, I'll get it."

He said, "Are you crazy? You're gonna go, you're gonna take my ticket and you're gonna get the thing dismissed?"

So I go to the court, the same thing, from what he told me what happened. I told the story. I put the ticket in like it was me. They didn't have the shit, give me your wallet and check out who it is. None of that bullshit. We're talking way back. In the 40's. The guy dismissed the case. I bring him back the ticket. It blew his mind. And I did it just for the… What could they do? Put me in jail. Say, "Oh, you're not that guy."

I didn't give a shit for that. It takes that much balls to even try something. You know? Offbeat. And I'm not trying to make it look like I'm Mr. Wonderful. It's just that some things you can say, "What does it take to get around it?"

Like that thing I told you when I went to Detroit for those 3 days. Would you take a chance to come from L.A. with not even enough money to come back and know you're gonna get in on this thing for 3 days that only qualified working automotive engineers are invited to this thing? You'd say, "Are you crazy? You're never gonna make it."

It's crazy. Just that little bit. No kidding. In a lot of instances I found just that little bit of going over the edge can make a difference. Most of these things had nothing to do with making money, you know, like, hey, if you do this you get a big pot of money for doing it. No, it was a way to get into something or to do something that you wouldn't be able to do any other way. Even though what you're doing is for your own pleasure. Nobody got any benefit out of this but me but it was the idea, can you get to do it? So that was a lot of fun. When I think of all the goddamn things that happened through the years, it was something else. I did another thing that was really a kick in the ass. I got an F in the 11th grade in English. I don't even remember what the hell they were teaching in that course but I got a failing mark.

An F you mean.

Yeah, an F. So when you have to take it over you can take any other English teacher because the school doesn't want you to say, you have to take it over with the same teacher like he's gonna be prejudiced. You're not gonna pass. So me being the way I am, when it came to taking it over, I went to the same class. She looks at me sort of puzzled and says, "You know you can take this class over with any other English teacher."

I said, "I know. But I want to take you."

She says, "Why?"

I said, "Because you're the best English teacher in the school."

She didn't know how the hell to answer me, like if I'm the best one how come you failed?

I didn't do the work. So when I went through it the 2nd time I got a B. So that's the kind of crazy shit I would do. Everybody else would say, "That's a bastard teacher. I wouldn't have her again."

Why? Crazy shit. I'll tell you.

Okay, I'm gonna through you out because…

Yes…





CONVERSATION WITH CRAIG HARTER

The speed bag and weights some barbells and some dumb bells.

Pancho Gonzales.

Yeah, Pancho Gonzales. And of course he'd play as much good quality tennis as he could each day but he would eat steak and salad. And he would hang up his cigarette for a couple of weeks before the tournament.

Amazing.

He had it, didn't he? He wouldn't have… in some tournaments he'd have beans but he would for the most part have steak and salad. I just remembered that. Darn.

So did Bill Tilda.

Check on that with Ralph, yeah, I mean, he did the Atkins Diet without knowing it. But anyway, gosh, you sound terrific.

I'm okay. I'm good. I got a refund. You got your $17,000 or whatever which was sweet and I got my $16,500 back from the Contractor's Board that screwed me and made me put up a $15,000 bond 4 years ago, so I got that money back.

And, it sounds like, with interest.

A little bit.

Awesome, Dick.

It's about 2 1/2 percent, but whatever, it's fine.

Alleluia.

So I got that back which is good.

Was that a surprise out of the blue?

Oh no. I've been battling them for a year and a half to get it.

Right. But the timing was at least a surprise? I mean…

No, I was expecting it.

Because some of that stuff can drag on and on.

Oh, it did.

Oh I know.

It dragged on a year.

I bet it was excruciating. When did you get it? A couple of weeks ago?

No, I got it Thursday and it's almost all gone.

I know. Ours was gone. She's got so many bills…

Really?

Oh, ours was gone in 3 or 4 weeks and we were trying to hold onto it was hard as we could. But we just had to pay down some terrible, excruciating credit cards that went up to 28.9% interest.

That's ridiculous.

It's just really criminal. I mean, but it's our fault. We got ourselves into it.

You gotta stop that.

I know. But anyway…

Easy to say. Easy to say.

It helped us a ton. Anyway, the main thing, your body, brains and bucks sounds like it's been pretty good.

I'm paying attention to the body, which is good.

Yeah.

The brain will… I'm working on the brain. I've done a whole bunch of Tony Robbins programs and stuff and unfortunately the cd players in my cars don't work so I've got to fix that.
I know how it goes. What a bummer.

And the bucks. I'm taking quite a different attitude towards everything this year.

Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, look, can you still get out and roll up the track? Even though you're trying to control the bucks a little bit?

Oh, it's ready to go. I've just been waiting for kind of a time… I'm hoping to go out next weekend.

Really?

God, what day?

Probably Saturday.

Where would you go?

Palmdale or Bakersfield. I think there's an event in Bakersfield so I might not go there.

Oh yeah, okay. Oh man, what's the closest one to our area here?

Bakersfield.

Oh, okay.

There's going to eventually be one called Drag City out in Banning.

How far is that in time from us?

Banning is San Bernardino.

Oh really? Oh. Anyway, Dick, please, I miss talking to you - I would have called you earlier but I was really wigged out making that last decision. I was sweating bullets and I was so nervous…

Really?

My body was telling me that I had made a wrong decision.

Meaning what?

Meaning the decision to not do the last chemo. I then couldn't sleep. For a few nights I only got a couple of hours sleep.

So it went all right?

Tossing and turning. I went back and had the last one. And the number 6 cycle and as I kind of suspected but it didn't matter, it was a little harder on me than number 5 which was harder than number 4, and… But I felt I had to do it. But I was happy that I got it done and, you know, now I'm just trying to get my revs back up and my positive mental attitude and I started to get a little bit of it yesterday. And a little bit the day before but a little bit more yesterday, maybe a little bit more than that today. And through the evening now, as I'm getting a little more tired, I fall back into a little bit of despondency or something that I worked so hard to get myself better with so much uncertainty as to how to do it. You know…

God, you sound great.

Oh thanks, man. It's just cause I'm talking to you. Really, you just think I'm making that up, but I just really appreciate you Dick, just how you are. I mean, you don't have to say any damn thing. Just that I know it's you on the other end of the line. That's all I need.

Well you might as well be talking about yourself.

Thanks.

Because that's how I feel about you.

Anyway, well thank you, Dick.

But anyway, so now that that phase is done, now what's the…

I'm starting to have a little exercise myself. We have a little mini trampoline here, you know, nothing much, but that's really good for the lymph system as you know, that's maybe one of the best ways to get the lymph to make sure to move and my joints are real sore, my oncologist told me. My hands, elbows, shoulders, back, knees, especially the knees and ankles a little bit. But that's a rebound effect from the prednisone.

Really?

Yeah, and he said that that would eventually go away. I tried watering down the driveway and man; I could hardly stand up. But it doesn't matter. In other words, I can't run or jog or even walk really hard, although each day I'm feeling a little better, but the trampoline being smooth, you know, it's just fabulous.

Just a little mini tramp?

Yeah. But I thought of you. But actually that would be great for the knee, wouldn't it? Know what's fascinating about it, I don't know if you know this or have ever looked into this but you're a professional trampolinest, you maybe…

I was an amateur trampolinest.

I saw you at one of your parties man, you went up so goddamn high and then you twist around and do flips and do layouts and then you'd come back down. It was just so cool watching you do that. What guts you got, man. Anyway, the most fabulous thing, I don't know how it works but jumping on the trampoline because…








SIDE 20

I mean, what it is is weightless and then stress. Weightless and then stress.

Yeah.

So the body is getting a tremendous…

Stimulation and of course they've known through work with the astronauts that loading improves calcium metabolism very much but for me the single best thing on the planet exercises on a mini trampoline and you can get the benefit of quite a bit of time just from relatively few minutes on the mini tramp.

Do you know that I did that in rehab for my knee. What I would do is I would bounce on one leg, my right leg.

That's tough.

And I would have another trampoline setting at 45 degrees out in front of me and I would throw a 5-pound foam ball in front of me and catch it while bouncing on one foot.

Oh.

Now that, you want to talk about getting your balance.

You got to be an athlete. Oh, that's great. But it was the left knee that you had the work done on, so you weren't bouncing on it? No?

No, it was the right one.

The right one?

Yeah.

You were bouncing on that one?

Sure.
Jeez, man. It didn't hurt much?

No, it was okay. There were certain things that it didn't like, but it was good.

But boy, yeah, it does pay attention, doesn't it, it says, "I gotta keep this joint straight and the muscles really all come into play."

Now did they have you do that or did you invent that?

No, they had me do that.

Oh, man. Jeez. Anyway, that's just great. That's just great for us. I'm gonna do that every day and do it a little more and a little more. I can only do it for 4 minutes until my legs get a little wobbly.

Then that's all you need to do.

I should do more than that, preferably 15 minutes a day but it can be divided up. In this case they find that that's still okay. Some circles used to say you had to do an exercise cardiovascular straight, but now pretty much everything added up. For the day, that's so much benefit. Provided you get the heart rate up sooner or later. If you didn't get the heart rate up on any of your training sessions, then it wouldn't probably be of much use except the trampolining might really be cool.

Well it is because you're getting all this balance work, what's called procreaceptive.

Definitely, yeah.

So that's very helpful.

Oh, yeah. Anyway, so to answer your question, I'm slowly and I tried some Bethany pushups and I'm pretty weak but I'm able to do it. And just to stimulate appetite and to get some muscle tone back. And posture back but my hair's starting to come back.

Oh cool.

And I even lost my eyelashes - that made me look real funny. Not totally, but most of them… My hair turned pretty darn white but then it's coming back in a little darker. Kind of weird. But that's enough of that. It's just nice to catch you in. Thanks for calling that last week or so, whenever.

So when am I gonna see you?

I'll see the doctor tomorrow. Because I have to ask him when I can have 2 teeth pulled. I've got one tooth half of which fell off but I couldn't have it operated on because my red blood cell count was just going up and down with all these treatments. I'll have it yanked out and one other one on the back on the other side the dentist said. I'll find out tomorrow when I do that and so maybe I can see you in-between. You know, coming up here real quick. So I'll just get those days down. I'm not going to have the teeth work done probably for 2 weeks, but I'll get the okay from the doctor.

Now how's all your chemistry and the tests and the levels.

I just called today to get it. It was last taken last Wednesday and my liver enzymes and everything looks really good. My red blood cell count is back up, my platelets are back up and I had a little bit of a scare last week, very interesting, but I seem to have caught it. Not at first, but I went in for a blood check - I'll do that weekly for a month and each month after that but I asked for a copy of my most recent blood test, just to look over it and man, it was off the charts. The liver enzymes were 10 times worse; platelets were 460 rather than my standard 120, which was low. But, so all of a sudden it looked really bizarre. And I was depressed and I didn't know if I was gonna tell Karen and it was kind of sad. I was really frightened and this was just last week, last Wednesday. And then I got home and I did finally realize that I had to tell Karen something so I said, " Well I wasn't too happy about my blood test. It came back and looked like it was getting a little bad. But that was probably just the chemo and that'll just get better."

But I was trying to act pretty macho so I said, "I'll go upstairs and compare it to the last one."

And I found I had a CVC, a portion of this little blood chemistry done on the same day, April 4th, at 2 o'clock. I looked at when this one was taken - it was taken at 10 p.m. First of all, I've never had 2 blood tests taken on the same day. Certainly not at 10 p.m. I mean, he's not even in the office at 10pm. I mean, I know when I take a blood test because I don't like them. And so I then called the office the next day and I said, "Look, there's a chance and I might be wrong and I know all your patients probably wish this, but I think the lab mixed up my name on somebody else's lab tests."

Anyway, they couldn't figure it out by week's end last week, so I'll check in the morning when I go to see Dr. Masterson. See what they've come up with. But at least the one that they did take last Wednesday showed me back where I should be. So I think something was funny. But that was kinda scarey.

Now, I have to remind you of something. You have to get your tape recorder out and you have to have it next to your phone so that we record all of your brilliant words.

Oh, thanks, Dick. I have it in the sliding drawer to my left.

Well guess what I did, I've had it recording while we've been talking.

You didn't.

Of course, that's why I'm on the speaker phone.

Oh you little son of a gun.

So we need to do that. So anyway, when am I gonna see you?

Okay, tell you what; let's just talk tomorrow evening. I will see Masterson
Tomorrow mid-day sometime. I've got to go into the office and wait until they can take me in. The sign me up for a particular time but God, he's always so busy. I sometimes have to wait 2 hours. So does everybody. So I'll call you tomorrow later in the day and see… Are you around tomorrow later in the day? We'll set a date and I'll come over. That'd be the best thing for me.

Yes.

So, okay, Dick, that's great. I just feel better. I mean, just from a couple of hours ago, checking with the doctor's office about those blood chem values, but they're back to normal, if it was indeed my test, but I don't think it was.

It doesn't matter. You're back down so that's what counts.

Yeah. Okay Dick, well say hi to lovely Millie.

Okay. We miss you.

Thanks a lot Dick. You take good care and I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Yes Sir.

Okay, bye.

END OF CONVERSATION WITH CRAIG

Too late. It's endless.

I don't even know why you throw that away.

He does. What's the name of that powder that makes acetylene gas when you add water to it?

I have no idea.

You know, old miner's lights used to have it.

I have no idea.

Well, I know it but it just doesn't want to show. So the next thing they did for something unusual in that same year is they had a replica of a free farm with cows, chickens, all this shit and they're all, dummies, naturally, because they're in a museum, but somebody recorded all the sounds and you can hear the rooster crow and the cow moo and all that shit, going on as you're going around looking at this stuff, to make it as realistic as possible. Then you go a little bit further in this museum and they duplicated… All of this is elaborate and there's no reason for changing it because whoever goes to see it now is going to enjoy it just as much as 50 years ago. So they go down one street that they duplicated - an 1890 street - cobblestone, stores on both sides, all with original stuff like a ladies' dress shop, ice cream parlor, a shoe repair, all that shit and the very thing at the end of the street was a movie house, when they played silent movies and the guy played the piano up front and there's a guy there and a film that you go see… Nothing's static. Cars in the street. Of that vintage and before you walk into it, you got these railroad things that come down because they laid a railroad track in there to give you that. Can you believe doing all that shit?

That's neat.

To come up with it, even. And I took in that show and they had that famous couple there, Tillie, I think it was called Tillie The Toiler, I forgot the name of this big, homely looking woman that played in a number of silents, because she was popular.

But anyway, so besides that thing the Piece D'Resistance to me was they got an intact submarine, German, from World War I. How the hell did they get that in there? They actually ran that son of a bitch down the St. Lawrence River in Canada, all the way down and you know there's a river that connects to Chicago and from Chicago you can go clear the hell down to New Orleans, you know. Did you know that there's a circle you can go halfway around the U.S. by going through that? Let me show you how that works - you'd get a big kick out of that as well. I mean these fucking stories; they just go on…

They sailed that U-boat?

They sailed it all the way there and then mounted it so you can get to go into it. What a fucking deal, with the goddamn batteries, because they had the gold batteries in there. The hammocks are over the engine, I mean you talk about crowded. You sweated being a goddamn submarine…

Were they diesel electric?

They were diesel electric, yeah. What a piece of work. And to go in there and see the actual machinery.

That'd be neat.

What a goddamn job - I really flipped out on that one.

They weren't very roomy either.

No.

Because I've been in an early vintage World War II and…

I told you when I wanted to go in the Marines for the British… This thing just goes on and on. Here I am in New York and luckily I'm missing the service because I'm working for a company that's making a diesel injection pump that's used on the tenders that go back and forth to the battle ships, because you have to get the crew on and off. And so anything that had to do with that you could get exempt. So I got exempt. Four fucking times. By the 4th time, this guy says, "You're not getting any more exemptions. That's it."

So I figure I gotta go, I gotta go. And the only reason I got 4 was the fact that my boss where I was working was an ex-Navy man and he had all the braids and shit and he would accompany me when I went down there, so he would get me off. And when he would come they'd think, "Hey, this guy must be important."

A shit-ass draftsman. But anyway, I was working on a diesel injection pump. Which was a completely new design. So where the hell… I'm getting lost with this whole fucking thing… So what I'm doing then, I read in the paper that the British are looking for U.S. men that would undergo submarine duty. They hadn't got enough for that. I say, "Now that looks exciting."

So I go down to get signed up and I'm filling out all the papers. Everything was fine. He's got his head down; he's busy with other shit. He reads the thing over and then he sees the height - 6'1" - and he says, "Shit, everything looked great but 6'1", we can't get you on."

I said, "Why not?"

He says, "You'd be walking around like this."

You have enough trouble standing up in that goddamn thing at the right height. So I saved my ass because I was too tall.

All those sailors were jockey sized.

Yeah. So I got into the goddamnedest things. Really wild. I never thought much about what did I do in my lifetime, you know, that was unusual.

How about fucking everything?

I can't believe the shit that my circle just seems to jump and turn and twist every fucking which way. And meeting the damndest kind of people and devices or something that was a one-of kind of thing. Imagine when I did that 3 day thing that I did in Detroit, imagine to be at a table where Ford was still alive, he was the head of the goddamn table that we had lunch at. And Chrysler, they had all 5 presidents from the 5 divisions and at General Motors they had 2 guys - come on, what are those names again? The guy from the National Cash Register. What the hell was it? All of a sudden I lost these 2 names which I know just like the top of my head. I'll figure it in a second. The one in… they got that cancer institute in New York. One that they financed. I'll think of it in a minute - somehow I go blank on that shit, but usually I can remember those crazy things. And those 2 guys were at the head of the table when we went to General Motors - imagine being at the General Motors proving ground - do you think you can get a fucking pass to go there? And you should see what a deal that is. It's in a little town called Milford. It's 40 miles outside of Detroit. They bought…

Yeah.

You know the area?

I know where Milford is. I don't know where the proving grounds are. But I know where Milford it.

3 square miles they bought. And why, because it's uphill and downhill and all that shit and it's fairly close to the Detroit area. The first thing they did is because they are sensitive to wind and temperature, they built to specification a weather station that the government operates and they gave them the station. So they'd have it on the premises. What is the temperature today? Which way is the wind? Because all that is going to affect speed in tests. So that's the first thing that was unusual about that place. Then they had 5 separate enormous rooms for all of the 5 divisions. Each guy worked independently, each division worked independently because how are you gonna make the cars different if you're all going to be in the same building you might copy each other. But the thing they had that was very unusual and I think this was one of the reasons way back when why General Motors had the edge on these bastards. They built a room where you could put in any size car. Now you want to know what is the competition doing. And by competition I mean even the cars in Europe. They buy one of all the leading brands. And they bring them over here and they say, "You mean the guy's gonna take a tape measure and you want to know what it is bumper to bumper? Hubcap center to center? How high is the top?"

It would take a long fucking time to do that right? So they make up a sheet with all of the things that they want and then they have a stantion set up as long as the time with a rack and pinion with a, what do you call it that the guys do when they measure a property?

A laser?

No, the other.

No, a…

I don't know what the hell they call it but you know what I mean.

Transit.

Transit, that's it. You run it over to the front of the car, set it on zero, go like that… In 10 seconds, you know how long the car is. One guy's taking it down, the other guy's doing it. Two guys can measure the fucking car in an hour. Every dimension. The size the windows, everything about that car. How could you lose with a goddamn set-up like that? Just taking care of that one thing. That was a fantastic… The thing is so big and has so many people working on it they had to build their own commissary because there's no place you can go to lunch - if they did they'd fuck up all the time. They built a commissary on the premises. They built a place for housing the guys, just like it's a boot camp. Now that's what you call an operation.

I know, yeah.

They had a racetrack 3 miles and a quarter with a bank so they could do all the speed stuff. Then they had this one that was interesting. A series of low areas in a road filled with water so they could see resistance drowning out the ignition is it fucking up the brakes? How are you gonna do it except just duplicating what you're gonna find in the street? That's how far they went. They had gravel roads; they had dirt roads they had asphalt roads in the premises of the 3 miles. Every kind of road condition you imagined where a car's gonna go. When I saw that I said, "No wonder that fucking General Motors then was on top of everything."

They had the means to do it right. Fantastic. And I'm gonna say you're gonna know somebody that's going to bring you there and isn't part of a… and the only reason I was there was the fact that this was the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal or organization which has that journal, they were 25 years old at that point and they were making a big blow-out and one of the things they did was to write letters to the European countries and say, "We invite the engineers, automotive engineers, to join us on this tour."

And here Mr. Nobody, I'm the only son of a bitch that wasn't an engineer. You call that balls, that's balls.

Never be able to duplicate that.

No way.

So that's… in all those cases you just have to have this much balls because in most cases, what would happen if they said, "Oh, you can't go there."

So you can't go. Big deal. I mean, do they shoot you? Put you in jail?

Just drop kick you out.

And here the other interesting thing about all these things I did, that I got away with is I always looked at it, is it plausible. If what I'm bullshitting them about is plausible, it's better than if it's fucking real. And that worked for me in nearly every fucking case. Traffic tickets? I used to get away with traffic tickets because I had a plausible bullshit story, not what actually happened. Because that's all that he's gonna go by is that is does it sound plausible? In fact, it got so bad that I was saying that one time to my father-in-law back in New York and he got a ticket. I said, "No problem, I'll get the ticket and I'll see you won't pay for it."

I take his fucking ticket, I go there - they didn't have all this shit, show the license and all that bullshit like they do today. I got the ticket squashed. They threw it out. I brought him back the thing - he didn't understand how I could do it. I said because it's you and I'm me.

That's great.

I did that as a lark. I mean, what could they do to me? The worst thing that could happen is I pay the ticket like I'm him, that's all.

Plus it was a challenge.

Yeah. That's right. I just wanted to see if I could work that plausibility gag again. So that was the thing that I got the biggest kick out of from a psychological standpoint, you know, what can you do to psyche him or yourself out to make something happen. There's no strain, no pain, right? You didn't lift anything; you didn't put money, none of this shit. That's what makes it interesting. What does a woman do 99% of everything she wants? It's all with this fucking talking. They bullshit you out of everything. And anything. Starting right with, "I got a headache."

It doesn't have to plausible. They don't go on that.

You got something there. Yeah, that's fun stuff. That's such a clean-cut little rascal, isn't he?

Busy too.

So what's your schedule? You start tomorrow again, put 3,4 days in a row or you just got off?

I'm off tomorrow. Yeah.

So what I wanted to do is make you a deal. Give you a little more interest to finish these coins. I give you 10% of everything you sell.

I'm getting so much out of reading.

I don't want to make this like I'm imposing on you.

You're not. I'm learning what I want to learn. Doing history.

Because I want to get you further down to get into some of this other shit.

Okay.

The next batch I'm giving you is easy from this standpoint. It's all silver and it's dimes, quarters and halves and so that's a question of seeing are the dates in the area that it's worth more than face value. And you know which ones if it's way early it's worth even more. So at least that when you don't go nuts looking 40 different ways and that fucking box you can pick off the top.

I don't want anything. I don't.

No, it's not that.

I love learning.

But still. I want to show my appreciation. When we get it to the point where we go to dump it we go there together and whatever he says here's 10%. How's that?

You got it. I'm not interested but you got it. What was the other thing I was gonna say? What's happening with the car you were painting those walls, those sheets out? Didn't get to it?

No, I'm not doing that. I've got the engine all apart now.

Oh, why did you do the engine?

I wanted to change the induction on it a little bit.

What was wrong with it?

It was real lazy. It accelerated… real poor response.

Draggy?

Just lazy.

What do you figure it is.

Real low performance motor. Real low compression. Real small cylinder heads to pass through ports and stuff - real small valves. And I just… there's a couple things that I can change fairly inexpensively…

That's the word I was gonna say. How expensive?

No, no I'm not interested in putting a bunch of dough in this.

None of this racecar shit - just something that you know you can increase the performance for minimal dollars.

Exactly. Yep.

And at the same, and that way you can make sure the valve stems are good, you put new seals in, small shit that is easy to do and dollarwise it's not out of range. That would be a worthwhile change, then you can honestly say, "Hey, I worked this thing over and this is reason it performs as good as it does."

Paint everything nice and all that shit. Which you can't do if you don't take it apart. There's no way to get it to look nice - you can see everyplace you slopped it with a brush or even if you spray it's all over everything except where it belongs. And now they've got some fucking good enamels that stand the heat well so they have a good luster. Do you know that, what the hell's that made of, all of a sudden I'm drawing blanks. Duesenberg. Had green enamel on their cylinder blanks and heads. Did you ever see some of those early ones?

Yeah.

That was a factory paint job.

Oh it was?

Yeah.

I figured somebody dolled them up.

No. All of them were apple green. And aluminum. Polished aluminum manifolds. Some hunk of car.

Well I gotta get out of town.

Yeah, where do you go?

Home.

That's out of town?

I was taking English and I forgot whether it's mandatory or you could select it but they were doing one of Shakespeare's plays and you had to be an actor so when it came to selecting they arbitrarily said, "Which part are you gonna take in the play?"

So what did they give me? I was Oberon the King of the Fairies. Everybody loved that one.

Perfect.

Oberon. Did you have tights on and everything?

Yeah, we had half assed school type stuff. And who did they give the play to? Some elementary school kids came to watch this play. So it was like a waste, as far as I was concerned. I had to do all that stuff for kids from kindergarten.

Performing is really for the performers.

Well, it was a sweat, I tell you. To remember all that bull.

Yes.

Ride when you're on a raid and you have 3 steps on it, you can have 3 speeds. They had pulleys with belts on it - you want to change the speed, you change the pulleys. You go from a smaller one here and a bigger one there.

It's all the same length but it's just different ratios.

Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. You want a ratio. So you use the same contraption you use to run away. You slide the belt over just like they do for the fucking thing up in the air.

And that was his transmission.

That was the transmission on the Mercedes. On the Benz. They used what they knew. The good thing about that transmission you never could clap gears.

Because there were no gears - it was just all belts.

And that model had a tank with water in it and no radiator. You boiled the water off and then added water.

Yeah.

And if you forgot about it and you froze the piston, then you waited for it to cool off and added water.

It's too bad the cars today can't do that.

You talk about elementary… The connecting rod and the piston were out in the open. There was no crankcase. They had an oiler with a regulated needle that you could regulate the drip. When you parked it you turned it completely off so it wouldn't drip. That was the lubrication of the connecting rod and the cylinder and the main bearings.

And it was all exposed to the dirt below the car.

Of course. How can you worry about dirt - you were worrying about making it move. How can you worry about everything that's not a problem?

So they didn't care if they put some oil on the road, nobody gave a shit.

Oh shit, that was the last of the their worries. Their worry was what are they gonna do to make it to continue to move? That's what fascinated me about all the fucking problems to make that goddamn thing self-sufficient.

And you're right; it's just taken so for granted.

Do you ever.

Was the Mercedes… the Benz a 3 wheeler?

Yeah. In that era.

Was it tiller steering?

Yeah, but that had nothing to do with it. They had tiller steering on the later models with 4 wheels.

Really.

Sure. Oldsmobile was a tiller job until 1904. The early Oldsmobile was a curved dash. It was stick steering with 3 wheels. But you're not answering, why did they start with 3?

Puts it together with a stick in the middle so on a bicycle you got one wheel and there's no problem to make it turn. So they copied it from a bicycle. It was nothing to think out. You had a shaft with a wheel and a fork and you had the stick to steer it. The end of the problem. 3 wheel vehicles are not stable. So they found that out and that's why they put another wheel on it. And then a German by the name of Ackerman is the one who figured out how to make the goddamn arms so that the thing could steer with 4. And they called it, in the early days, Ackerman Steering. They still kept his name. I like the word Ackerman, which is German for plowman, the guy who plows the field. Acker.

Okay. I didn't know that. There's… Now why did they call it rack and pinion steering? Is it because the pinion is in the box?

No rack and pinion is just what it is. A pinion and a rack. A rack is the straight gear and it was used on other kinds of equipment. Way before they put it on cars.

I thought the rack was just the rod that went from one spindle to the other.

With teeth on it.

With teeth on it?

How do you think you're gonna get the 2 to mesh so you can make it move?

Oh, so in rack and pinion.

You got a pinion and a rack.

So you're actually…

You're forcing it.

It's like a rain gear, a straight rain gear.

Exactly. You didn't get that picture?

No, I've never understood rack and pinion steering because I always thought it was a steering box.

No.








SIDE 21

The outside was laid out.

I've seen the outside. I went out… so the 1904 brush, you pull on the handle with two 90-degree discs.

Yeah, you pull the handle and it just changes the ratio as you go.

Did they have little steps so you could lock it?

No. You could just pull the handle… Oh, you mean to make it stop at any given position? Yeah. It had a series of notches so it would go like a ratchet. It would go forward unless you moved it over to disengage it, then you could get it back to neutral. But the thing that was unusual about the car was not only that transmission, but it was first fucking car that had 4 coil springs. In 1904. So out of all the fuckers that made a car, how come he was the only guy that decided, "Hey what's the wrong with the coil spring - they don't make any noise, they take up a hell of a lot less room. You can mount it easy on the axle."

And no fucker followed him until way the hell up in the '40's.

Wow. Now it wasn't independent suspension.

No.

It was solid.

Yeah. And the front axle was made out of wood. And you say, "Now wait a minute, how the hell are you gonna turn the wheels and all that."

With fittings that were made out of steel. But the bar itself was a wooden bar.

Oh.

You say, "Well, wait a minute, why would he even entertain that idea?"

What the fuck do you think they had on wagons? The same arrangement on a 5th wheel wagon. You didn't see anything wrong with that. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to go forge an axle or have a company make him one when he can put the fittings on from a blacksmith shop. That's what they did. So that's how he got that fucker with a what-do-you-call-it, a wooden axle in the front. And it was chain drive. You say, "Why the fuck would they have a chain drive?"

In that era a differential and the way it had to be mounted next to having a motor up high with a sprocket that went down at whatever angle it took to get down to the larger wheel sprocket where the wheel was. Simple as hell. It was really a better way to look at it. Now the problem was, how long did it last? Not so good. Noisy. When it got slop in it you got jerking. So there were other things about the chain that was wonderful when it was brand new. But when you got mileage on it you had other problems and then you had to replace it because eventually it would get sloppy - they didn't have that idler arrangement. That son of a bitch would fly off the small pulley.

Do you remember at Bonneville a few years ago we saw one of those streamliners that had about a 6 or 8 foot long Gilmer belt… worked for them?

Sometimes it's strange you can say, "No that won't work."

And there's a lot of invention durability-wise that comes in that they couldn't do then. Yeah, a car, I'm telling you the amount of engineering that went into it where every manufacturer had some wrinkle somewhere that was better than the next guy that everybody didn't jump on it. They say, okay you want, like twin ignition; you know how many cars had twin ignition? A handful. You remember the Nash car?

Yeah.

Nash had twin ignition.

Really?

Six cylinder. And they were with sixes already. You say, "Why would you go to a 6 and everybody seemed to be zeroing in on the 4s?"
Because it was so much smoother. You had good low-end torque. When you were into cars and you rode in more than one, you could AB them. When you didn't ride anything and you rode the 4 that's the way it went. But when you could AB them you said already, just like this fucking car, "Hey, this runs better because a lot of things on this isn't on the cheap model."

Right.

So a lot of that mystery, if you have some way to AB it, you say, "I get it now."

On your own you can't get it. You don't have the background to get it.

Do you know that interestingly that more cylinders actually are a more efficient engine?

Yes, but…

More, smaller cylinders.

Yeah, but there's a problem with that. You eventually reach the point of no return on maintenance. The fucking thing costs you a fortune to do anything you have to do to it. Whether it's a valve grind, changing the plugs or whatever. Everything is considerably more expensive. And the tune up is critical. Because when something is down 10%, you're down 10% of 12 cylinders. It's different than when you're down 10% of 6.

I think it's the same difference. 10% of 1 cylinder being out in a 12 cylinder is going to impact you less than 1 cylinder in a 6 or a 4 or a 1. But it's interesting, like the new trucks, like Dodge has come out and Ford has come out with V10 motors.

That's because they got the thing off the Viper.

No, but the Viper, by the way, was used as the prototype to develop the truck engine. The only difference is the Viper motor is aluminum and the truck motor is cast iron.

I didn't get into that detail.
But Ford makes a Triton V10.

Now.

Yeah, they've had it for about 6 years.

No.

Oh yeah. They've had it. It's called Triton. It's been used in the vans - in the heavy-duty vans.

Are you sure? I don't remember.

Absolutely.

Bragging about that. Once they got to the new models my interest went down because there was so much similarity to every fucking car, it's like you've seen one you've seen them all.

That Ford truck right there is the Triton V8.

Which one?

The silver one with the bike in the back.

Oh yeah?

But the vans have the V10's.

Never heard that.

And I don't know that I've ever seen that in a pickup. But the Dodge, the pickups use them.

You say you're going to Westwood?

No, I'm going actually to Culver City first. Then we'll go back to the car show. Pick up the plans first. Get the money deal first.

What's the car show?

The car show is in Pacific Palisades.

Oh, you figured on going over there?

That's the one I was gonna take my car to.

I know but I didn't know you were going to go to it anyway.

Oh, that's what I was telling you.

I didn't hear you say that.

We don't have to go.

The first time I see blue cabs. I never saw one blue, did you?

Yeah. I've seen them green?

I've seen a few green ones, but not blue.

By the way, we're driving around with no license plate, do you know that?

In this car?

Yeah. I've got it. I have it but the screws are missing off the back. I've had 4 cops drive right by my car and they don't say a word. Now if this was a car, some old beater, they'd probably say something. They probably think I just bought it. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, that's weird. What's special about the screws? Nobody's got them?

They're metric.

Yeah.

I've got to find a place that's got metric screws.

There's got to be one in the Valley somewhere.

There's one in Burbank called Allen Bolts.

Oh yeah. I think you'll probably have to go way up there.

I'll just drive over there and try some until I get it. Unless I can find a Mercedes place that's got them.

Once you get in that fucking place and get up to the counter and they charge you… just the idea of a dollar apiece for a fucking screw because it's on a Mercedes. Piss on them. So what's the deal? Any more takers for this car?

No.

And you got some bites on the red one again?

No.

Who are you talking to when you were talking about a car? Weren't you talking to somebody about a car?

What? On the phone?

Yeah.

That was my buddy from high school.

Yeah. Were you mentioning the car at all?

I mentioned my racecar.

Oh.

His kids are into photography and hot rods. So I said, "Come on down, I'll show you the car."

Yeah, I noticed something about a car but I didn't pay much attention.

When it's like this, you say, well they're going to work. Where the fuck are they going now?
Yeah.

I've been on this freeway at 3 o'clock in the morning and it was like this. And I don't know where the fuck these guys are all coming and going from. 3 o'clock in the morning.

It's a wonder.

And then they slow down, like we said, more than once. You get beyond it when they start to go normal again and there's not a fucking thing that was in the way.

No.

Absolutely crazy.

So what about you and I taking a trip?

How are you gonna do that with all this shit you got hanging?

One thing at a time here. First of all, are you open to the idea, we'll go around and we'll do a car buying trip.

Are you in a position to, how do I say, pick up $40,000 or $50,000 worth of cars? Otherwise, what are we gonna do? Find one car? That's all you'll probably be able to do. Then after you get this one car you're gonna be in the same problem I was at - how the hell are you gonna get it there? You don't have a trailer to drag it, number one, you ship it by train it's cheaper to get the whole boxcar which you get room for 5. There are a lot of complications.

Okay.

You gotta be aware of that. Just finding the car and buying it is only part of the problem.

Yes.

In the middle of nowhere. Because I've done it otherwise I wouldn't have the faintest idea what's involved. I even went to the trouble to build the fucking trailer to take these cars to California and then that didn't work out. That didn't work out and I ended up having to get the boxcar. Again, it was the first time I ever did it. What the hell did I know? First of all, I only intended to get one car. That was the reason.

Did you end up with one car on the trailer?

Two.

You put 2 cars on the trailer?

Yeah.

And you put 5 on the train?

No, when I saw I had those 2 cars and I was pulling it with this goddamn '36 Oldsmobile and I started to go up even an average grade and I was down to low gear to pull it, I said, "This ain't gonna work. To go clear across the fucking country."

Oh.

I didn't realize how much of a load that was on a Flathead 6. It was a nothing automobile. I went to a wrecking yard, got a truck frame, and I got a rear end and set it up to make it into a thing. Even got a license plate for the goddamn thing, put a light on it, all that shit, put the 2 cars on there. One of them was a 1912 International Truck. It was Tom McClure in Sinking Springs, Ohio. I'll never forget that fucking name. And it was in gold leaf letters on the side of the fucking truck. The curtains that came down on the side, they were still fucking new when I unrolled them and had the tackiness on them. They were never unrolled.

How did you come by this?

Oh, this was fucking weird. It was in Sinking Springs, Ohio. And through asking people, "Do you know anybody who's got an old car?"

I don't remember where I saw that - in the garage or if somebody led me onto it. I was pretty good on snooping around kind of thing, and here's this goddamn car in the garage with both back wheels sitting in a dirt garage where the wheels were buried 6" below the surface. So the spokes were starting to come apart. So it wasn't safe to even use the son of a bitch by itself. But since I was gonna haul it I didn't care. These had solid rubber tires. Chain drive. Two cylinders under the seats. What a fucking car that was to have. Nothing like that you ever saw on the road.

And in beautiful shape.

Everything else was good. It was just in that fucking garage and wrecked the wheels, which could be repaired.

What did you pay for it?

That one there, I gave $150. It had been in the garage for 10 years. Since the last time he used it.

And was it…

This guy was in the feed business. He was, what do you call it, his son. Still in the hay and feed business. Tom McClure.

His son.

Yeah.

Wow.

That whole thing was an experience you could write a fucking book about.

So you didn't…

I had no idea to collect cars. I'm driving across country and I reach Ohio and I'm talking to myself and I say, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could pick up a 1910 or 1912 Model T and make it sort of a fun car that I could drive on the weekends or on a holiday and use it just for fun, not for transportation."

Right.

And as I thought about it, I say, "Gee, this being the middle of the country, it must be somebody's got one in the garage or something."

And I'm driving down this road and on the left side in an open gas station,
you know, where it pumps out the air, there sits a fucking Mercer, racer with a moniker windshield, you know the circular one over the steering wheel, and I say, "Oh shit, if I could buy that, forget the Model T."

So I pull into the gas station and the goddamn thing looked like it was fixed up pretty decently and I said, "Who owns that Mercer?"

He says, "One of our customers."

I say, "Any chance he might want to sell that?"

He says, "Hell no, he's worked that thing for years to get it up to this condition. He wouldn't sell that."

So I figure, "Oh, okay, back to the Model T."

So I say to him, "Do you know anybody around here that's got a Model T that's just sitting in the garage?"

He thinks awhile and says, "Yeah, I'll tell you, there's a guy that's got an enormous garage, a farmer, and I'm pretty sure if I remember right, he had a Model T."

So I go to see this guy. This garage is longer than your garage. Twice.

Wow.

What's he got in it? For starters, 3 horse-drawn hearses with the glass panels and the silver candlestick lanterns on the side.

Real silver.

Real silver. Fuckin' A. They're from the 18th Century. He got 3 of them. To start with. So I'm looking around and before we're getting to the car there and he has a collection of arrowheads of every description you ever saw in your life. All originals from the Indians that made them. So he had that collection. Then he had a collection of all things, buggywhips, in the stand that was made out of cast iron that held about 2 dozen of those whips and there they are with the goddamn whips in them. In addition to that, what did he have there in the rest of the garage? Some other shit. Oh, a collection of furniture. Brass beds, you know, the fancy ironwork frames, the brass beds with round turrets on them, all this kind of shit.

Were these arranged in any artful way or were they just piled in there?

Just piled in. This wasn't a display. This was a guy's private yard.

Just a warehouse.

A big barn that he had that he wasn't using for what it was originally intended and he kept buying this shit and putting it in there.

Oh.

Which a lot of people do. It grows. You know, you don't start out and buy a barn full. So anyway, we get to the fucking T and the T had a broken axle, which is rare for a T. He says, "No problem, come back in a couple of days and I'll take it apart and put an axle in."

So in the meantime I say, "Well, I'm not going to stand around and do nothing."

Since I found that T there must be some other shit around here.

Did you negotiate a price with him right then?

No, we didn't even get to that. I wasn't even concerned about that because if there was a broken axle and all that shit and the way that thing was set up I knew that price would be reasonable. I would have gone even as high as $500 if I had to - I had the money. So what do I run into? Another guy with a barn that has a 1912 just like his that's in running condition with a tank full of gas and I talk to him for awhile and we get to what it was he'd be asking for it. And he thought quite a little while and said, "How's $50?"

I drive it out of his fucking garage for $50.

Forget the other guy.

Yeah. Never went back there. So now I've got one car for $50. I say, "Shit there's got to be a lot of cars around here if I can get a deal that quick."

So I'm in the town of Williamsburg, Ohio, and I see a Ford agency that's been there since 1910 in this little neighborhood. What are we gonna do here?

Pick up plans.

Oh, pick up plans. Is this one that you made the plans for?

I didn't put her address here. It's 4308 or 4380.

This is 4280. If you want 43 you're a block off.

I think that might have been it.

42.

We'll find out. Anyway, so… Williamsburg.

Yeah.

I think that's it.

I start to talk to this old guy; he's about 80 - white haired. He's the owner of this Williamsburg Ford Agency. And he's got this 1906 Ford. I saw that, I pissed in my pants. Not to own the fucking thing. That was the dumb part. I kept thinking only to buy these cars and sell them to Ford agencies in California because I thought every fucking agency would be glad to display something like that in their window. They don't give one shit about old cars.

No.

So I start talking to him. Okay, we'll take care of this first. Are you just gonna run in and run out?

So, you're in Williamsburg…

Oh yeah, so I'm talking to this old guy about the car and…

And you buy the T?

Yeah, and he's got this 1906. I saw that I almost pissed in my pants. That's antique.

Yeah.

So I talk to him about buying it and he says, "No, I don't want to sell it.

I say, "What do you do with it?"

I wanted to make some conversation to try and get him off the hook. He says, "Well, on the 4th of July I put it in the parade with the rest of the other cars and on Christmas we do the same kind of thing."

I say, "Well, that's no problem."

I say, "I live in…" and I name a town that's right next to that town, I can't remember the name right now.

I say, "I live here in Brewster, 35 miles away - no problem, if you want to use it I'll clean it all up, bring it up and you can put it in the parade."

Little did he know he'd never see the fucking thing again. Because how the hell could I let him have the car with that bullshit story when I don't even live there.

Right.

So he listens to that awhile, he's still not anxious to sell it and he's living with his 2 sisters, they're in their 80's and he's in his 90's.

Oh my.

That's the kind of people that own this agency. And I talk to him some more and I say to him, the car wasn't in perfect shape but it was a running car, "I'd like to really fix the thing up, put on a new top…"

The body was all wood, no metal. All wood. The fenders were the only thing metal and they were the kind that just come over in a simple arc attached with two brackets, like a piece of tin. Cover the fenders so the mud wouldn't splash them.

All wooden body.

That's the way a lot of them were made, you know before 1910, a lot of them were all wood. To make it out of metal now you have to have dyes and all kinds of shit. You can get a carpenter to do woodwork a lot quicker and easier.

Yes.

So when I started leaving and all this all this other shit about what I was going to do and they could use it, then we started to go down about the price. And he says, "Well, you know that car's worth a lot of money."

I say, "Yeah, but you're gonna have the use of it so it isn't like you're giving it up."

I keep giving him that horseshit.

So finally he says, "I've got to have at least $400."

I say, "Well, it's a little high but I think it's fair."

Before he could say anything I whipped that fucking cash out so he can't back away and talk to his sisters or to anybody… his help or what have you. You give him an hour and he's got his mind changed.

You bet.

I got the fuckin' car for $400. Then I really was up to so many cars…

Now you got 2.

Yeah. Then I get this goddamn 1912 International truck.

Now, how'd you find that?

Same thing. Roaming around and asking. It was all within a radius of 20 or 30 miles from Williamsburg.

Oh my God.

Now where was I staying? I had a place to stay, right? So I stayed in Williamsburg. In a place where a woman had a room for rent. The room I rented had a pot underneath the bed so you could take a shit in it right in your bedroom. Imagine. I looked at that and I said, "If I have to shit in the street, I'll shit in the street before I'll shit in that pot."

Now, the interesting thing about this was you have an outhouse in the back, was, we got to talking and come to find out Johnny Appleseed, do you ever hear of him?

Yeah.

Was one of her fucking relatives.

For real.

For real. She showed me pictures of him, carrying his bag of apple seeds. He actually, in Ohio, decided that the countryside needed some apple trees because it would be nice not only for the scenery, but people could pick the fruit. He did this all on his own for free. And here I'm with the fucking relative. I mean, I run into the fuckingnest goddamn things in my time.

Amazing. Now how long did you stay there?

I stayed there, because when I got in with the cars I stayed there a week.

Oh, okay.

It wasn't very long but once I had the point of calling up about the boxcar, because originally I was going to put 2 cars on a boxcar because I couldn't haul them. So when I'm talking to the agent he says, "Well, you know for $100 more you can have the whole car and you can put 5 cars in there if you got them."

So shit, when I heard that and I'm getting these cars for peanuts, I look a little harder. So that's how the fucking thing started. Then I got this one car that you probably never heard that fucking name - they made it only 2 years - 1908 and 1909 - called Whiting, just like the whiting fish, Whiting. All wood body. Roadster. Bucket seats. 4 cylinder engine.

What did you pay for that?

$75.

So you just asked people - kept asking people.

And looking in garages as I drove.

You just fell into the motherlode of antique cars.

Absolutely. At that point. To do that again you're talking about a whole different thing. But it's still doable because one of the guys I talked to when I was in Kansas City, Missouri, this guy had the sign on with some shit for sale, like antiques and stuff. I stop anywhere. If there's nothing there, what did you lose? Ten minutes and you're back in the fucking car and you're on the road. But you never know who's got what. So I stop there and what's this fucker got? I can't believe it. That's the guy I told you who used to buy all of the local newspapers from all the small towns all around and look in the obituary column and look for guys who passed away that had businesses, a grocery, hardware store, you name it. And he would go visit the widow. Because in most cases the guy's died first. They work the fuckers to death.

Yep.

All they have to do is lay down and that was a fucking job.

Right.

Do you a big fucking favor - they lay down. I mean, the whole thing is… Don't get me into that. I come unglued all over again. But anyway, where the hell am I?

You go into this store…
Yeah, so I go to see this guy, he's out in a countrified area, and he's got this building with all this shit in it and his house, and what's he got in there that he just happened to have at the moment was a buyout of a hat store.

Oh yeah, you told me.

All them fancy hats… So I bought a hat, a brand new Stetson, silk lined and all that shit for $1. Then he bought out a shoe store. With high button shoes. I mean just to look at those fucking things was a kick in the ass. Good leather, all new in the box. I bought a pair of those in my size for $2.

Those are not considered spats are they?

No, spats go over them.

Okay.

That was another style that was interesting. Usually out of gray felt. And it had buttons on the side but that covered the actual shoe. I don't know how the hell that style, I think it's probably from Europe, France or someplace came up with that shit. Anyway, the next thing he had, you won't believe this, was a fucking mountain of coffin handles that you put on caskets. But not ordinary shit, with little escutcheon plates that get bolted on, silver plated, the handle part is covered with silk black braid, I mean these fucking handles were as nice as the coffins. So I say, "Shit, I got to have a set of those."

What are you gonna do with coffin handles? I'm putting it on the T. I put them on the fucking T and underneath and I said, "Lift here."

The idea being when this fucking thing cracks out you lower me with the car into the grave. Everybody got a big kick out of that when they saw that on the fuckin' T. But anyway, so I got a set of coffin handles. So in the meantime I got to talking to this guy and asked him how does he operate and all of the that so he starts to tell me about all the things he did and the most unusual thing that happened to him was in a town about 100 miles away there was a family where the husband passed away and there was a 1-cylinder 1904 Cadillac that was in the garage. He roars down there to check that thing out and now the story of that Cadillac goes like this: he had heard about all the problems with starting these fucking cars so he wasn't anxious to buy a car.

The guy who actually owned it.

Yeah. But like all bullshit salesmen naturally he had one out there he was using everyday, he showed them how to turn the key on, lift the thing up a quarter turn, the car starts right up. He turns it off, does it again. He doesn't realize we can do it when it's hot - sure, it'll start instantly. What's he going to do when the fucking weather's cool? So this guy says, "No problem, the car will start under all conditions."

So finally he convinces him that he can handle it. So he buys the car and since he lived 50 miles away, in those days, they would ship it on a flat car, in a box, totally enclosed, the car's that small. It's a 2 seater. It's the same size as the Mary Oldsmobile style.

How much was this car new?

That car new was $500. No windshield. All you got is a seat, a motor and 4 tires. That's all you needed. Because you're only gonna use it when the weather's nice. Anyway, he goes to use this, takes it out of the box, goes to start it the following day or week, whatever, and that motherfucker will not start. He is beside himself. He calls this fucker on the telephone and reads him the riot act, "You take this goddamn thing out of here, blah blah…"

Well the car salesmen were no different then than they are today. They're cocksuckers. They have your money, you can die. They didn't even want to answer you. So he's got this car and in the meantime he boxed it back up. Back in the box and it sat there from that fuckin' time until I was talking to him when I was going across country in '45.

Forty years later.

Yeah. In the box. So one of his friends, who was president of American Airlines at that time was a car nut and said to him, "You know if you ever run across something really good we'd be interested in buying it because…"

When a guy of his stature, without him saying it to the guy…

Sure.

He wanted something unusual, naturally. So he starts to tell him about this fucking car. The guy is beside himself. He says, "I can ship it…"

He says, "No, I don't want you to touch that car, I'll send a van down to pick it up."

He didn't want him to move that fucking thing. They made the deal on the telephone for $10,000 for the car. The car sent a van down from where the hell he was at, got the thing into the truck - that's the deal he made, $500 the car cost new. I forgot what he gave her. $200 - $300 - it doesn't matter. Even if she got $500, he got $10,000. So this is the kind of shit how he made a living.

Wow.

Going on in that era.

So there are guys that can make a living from the goddamndest kind of way and still have pleasure. That's a fun fucking job.

Yeah.

He can buy anything and the whole thing is who's gonna buy it from him? And he had that ability.

Yeah.

And today with the Internet? There isn't anything you can't sell.

Yeah.

You can sell, like they say, shit on a stick. There's somebody out there that wants it. So while I'm on this trip what do you think happens before I even got to the cars? I'm going down some road and it looks like I ain't going the right way, like I'm lost on my direction, so the farmhouses are quite a few apart and they're stuck way the hell back in off the road so I finally find one that looks fairly close and it's on a slight slope going down. I get out of the car and I go over to knock on the door and I see the fucking car slowly going down this road. It's a downhill road. I say, "That's the end of my fucking car."

You couldn't catch it?

No, I was too far away. I started running but fuck I just tripped over my shoelaces. I was too far away to get it. So, as a matter of fact I ran so hard I tripped on my cuffs and I was laying on my stomach, watching the car disappear down this thing and I'm waiting for the crash and there's no fucking noise. I say, "What the fuck happened?"

I get myself off the road, I'm laying on the side and I'm getting all scratched up from doing a belly flop like that and there's the fucking car on the right hand side of the road, off the road, into a wire fence, hanging in the fence. The only thing that's happened is the right front fender is getting scratched from the way it's suspended on that slope. Can you believe that? Now my next problem is how the hell am I gonna get the car out of there? That's a new job. Go find somebody. I'm on foot and I'm way the hell out in no man's land - it's a mile or so between houses - what a fucking place to get stuck. Even if the car didn't get smashed. I'm standing there trying to figure out what to do and here a few minutes later, here comes a fucking tractor from the other direction. I stop him, explain the problem to him, he turns the fucking tractor around, hooks up a goddamn chain and slowly pulls me out of the fucking area back out on the road with no charge. Can you believe a fucking story like that? That couldn't happen in a thousand years. I had more shit happen like that to me over my lifetime that when I think of it now I didn't appreciate how fucking easy I got away in so many cases where I could have gone nuts.

Yeah.

The fucking car just started up and took off.

And what car was that?

That was a '36 Olds that I fixed up.

Jeez.

Listen, that was the car that I told you when I was going across country and I was now in Ohio I said, "Gee it'd be nice if I could find a Model T."

That was before that happened. When I got my directions screwed up. By the way, another interesting car that I saw, which that one was the most interesting of all of them, as an old, old car. This fucker here was located in Chillicothe, Ohio. And what's the main drag named? Paint, like paint your car. How the hell did they come up with that? You couldn't forget it.

Wonderful.

So I'm in the town and I see in an old wooden weathered barn the back end of a car, with wagon wheels on it, solid rubber tires. I mean, this son of a bitch is like turn of the century. Man I put the brakes on, I go over and I start looking at it.

Had you bought any cars yet?

At that point? Yeah. I had 2 of the cars. And this was a town that was part of that circle I'm driving around. I'm not going to California. But you know what, you can't have the fun going everywhere when you've got something like that. You've got to have good roads, you gotta be on the main road, and you can't go on the class 2 and 3 roads. Is this Sunset Blvd.?

Yeah.

I haven't been on this fucking piece in I don't know how long. You got Will Rogers place somewhere along here. Somewhere. Did you ever stop off? No.

Yes, I used to run and bike in there.

Oh, did you. An interesting little place.

So you're in Chillicothe.

Yeah. I'm in Chillicothe…

On Paint.

And what's the name of this car? It's called an Autobug.

Autobug.

Autobug. One cylinder and listen to this… it's one cylinder under the seat with one wheel drive. It's connected to one wheel off of the crankshaft pulley and what is the drive? A one and a half-inch diameter toggle rope. Rope drive.

Wow.

With a half channel thing for the rope to lay in, the pulley thing. To accommodate a rope.

Is it a wooden chase or a metal seater for the rope?

Oh that was a metal… sheet metal rolled piece to be that shape and then attach to the wheel.

Okay.

And you cranked it from the back. That was where it worked out because the wheels are so big and the motor where it was located you couldn't run a handle on it without having to go through the wheel. So they put it in the back and that's where they got the expression, twisting for tail when you start the car. Twist your tail. Ever heard that expression? Hey bitch, hey, that's a piece of work. That is all right.

That is some piece of architecture.

Yeah. That's nice. Do you remember out this way? No, it wasn't on this road. It's the one where you get to Pacific Palisades… Magnetic Hill. Ever hear of Magnetic Hill? They had a place there where the illusion was when you went on it this goddamn thing is going uphill as you're looking at it but it's really going downhill, because the car won't go uphill in neutral. This fucking thing - you put it in neutral and you're going uphill. But the way the ground was around it gave you the illusion like you're going uphill but you're going downhill.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. I don't know if it's still there, but that was the place. Southern California's got shit that don't quit.

Exactly. Okay, so you're in Chillicothe with this one…

Yeah, 1-cylinder thing. Couldn't buy it from the guy. He just wouldn't let go but what a fucking car that would have been. All wooden. It was literally a wagon with a motor attached. And the only reason you could get away with a rope drive - here's how it went. Like a cement mixer that you see at the curb. The fucking thing was doing probably 100 rpm.

You may speak.

Hah! There was one summer when I was going to high school. And a guy who had a vegetable truck that used to bring stuff to the house. Most of these guys would hawk it on the street and everybody would come out, they'd ring a bell, something like that. He was a high-class operator. What he did was, he had all the customers by name. He had a pencil and a pad. He'd go up and ring the bell and take an order from the customer, what they wanted. So much apples, peaches, vegetables, etc. And he'd fill up a bag, bring it to the door and the woman would pay him. She didn't look at anything? Why? Because everything he handled was grade A. You never had a worry you had one of them that was going to be rotten. Or it's gonna be green because he wouldn't buy that kind of stuff. It was a very unusual arrangement. So he drove this Model T for about 10 years and it finally wore out. Business was good and he decided to upgrade and he bought a new Chevrolet truck.

And what year was this?

This was in '29.

Before or after the crash?

That was, Jesus, I don't remember that part. It could have been a little later. It was in the Depression. Maybe it was '32. So the point was he couldn't drive this car because you had to shift it and you had to clutch and all this and it was completely different than a Model T. If you drove a Model T and then they put you in that car, forget it. There's just no way of connecting. So he couldn't drive this thing and he has this brand new truck, how long can he keep his customers waiting before they find somebody else to get their vittles from? So through the grapevine somebody told him that I am a good driver and I might be interested over the summer to drive the truck. This was in the summer months. And I was out of school.

And how old were you at this time?

In high school.

So I took the job and I was more or less showing him how it works to shift the gears and all that but in the meantime I had to do the driving because he couldn't do it. And I had to get up at 6am because he went to the market to buy fresh fruits and vegetables every day. There were no leftovers on his deal, no refrigeration in his truck to start with so he was so used to doing that there was no way you were gonna change that pattern, but I had to drive the thing to get him to the market which was down on 8th and San Pedro. Remember the Central Market? It's probably still there. I haven't been down in that area in 30 or 40 years. And the thing that was unusual about the guy, because he bought everything the best, I didn't have to do anything about loading the vittles into a bag or something, he did everything himself. The fact that he didn't have to drive made it even easier for him to take care of everything. So he would get the list from the woman, fill it all up, take it up and collect the money. In the meantime I'm sitting in the truck and here he's got the most delicious peaches, pears, plums, everything that in those days you got nothing that was out of season and nothing that was half green - it was ready to eat. And did I eat. I didn't eat breakfast, dinner or supper. I ate that truck.

Well, let me guess. You ended up with a case of the shits like Joan of Arc.

No way.

Really?

No way. I just loved fruits and vegetables and they agreed with me perfectly.

Wow.

SIDE 22

Yeah. And that was right near where she lived.

Hadley's.

Yeah, Hadley's. The packing was done there. It was a really small outfit. What he would do, he would get half a dozen girls together and he would buy all the best stuff and we would pack it according to the different arrangements that he had. A lot of it was sold on holidays, you know.

Is this Hadley personally?

Yes, this was the original Hadley's.

His orchard was down in Cabazon.

Yeah, that was only some of it. There was other stuff he had to buy. Like walnuts - he didn't have walnuts, he didn't have almonds, and he didn't have coconut. So he just took the best of everything that had to do with dried fruit and dried fruit packaging and made it into beautiful packages. And we were the guys doing it. So I soon discovered which were the best halves of the walnuts, which were the best dates, which were the best figs and I stuffed myself with everything in that line until it was coming out of my ears. I didn't eat breakfast, dinner or supper. I had everything that guy had to offer and I just munched away the whole goddamn day, which I was making the packages. And I loved it and to this day I love all kinds of dried fruits for that same reason. And my dad being a baker… Somebody at the gate? My dad being a baker, bringing home the best Danish pastry and the best corn rye bread and Kaiser rolls and all this stuff ruined me in the bread department.

Let me tell you something, I think that you probably had a very lucky upbringing because you really were bred, pun intended, nutritionally.

Really. My mother was a wonderful cook. She could make varieties that were unheard of. Of everything. Soup to nuts. So foodwise we had not only the best tasting but also the best grade.

Amazing.

Yeah, that's a strange thing how those combinations of things were all in one family. In our family it was a kind of thing we were all to have good and the best food, clothes and all that other stuff was very secondary. I had one pair of pants, one pair of shoes, that kind of thing. It didn't worry me. I never thought about it. Hey, if it was clean, that was the only consideration.

Your eating habits have stayed with you well.

Oh yeah. I just love certain combinations and it just happened to be fruits and vegetables if you use them to the degree I did, like I said I never had to use a laxative. At all, because when you eat fruits and vegetables like that, man you're using the best laxative that nature offers you.

Yeah.

Using the real thing.

So upset stomachs and this kind of thing they just weren't in the picture. And since I didn't smoke and I didn't drink all that crap helped in its way as well.

Absolutely.

And it wasn't that I was a teetotaler, yeah, if there was a party somewhere and you had 2 or 3 drinks, just enough to get the edge off, okay, but to get drunk where I didn't know where I was at and all that kind of stuff, I say, "That's got to be stupid."

And I used to hear all these guys say, "He was so drunk he don't know how he drove home" and all that and I'm saying to myself, "And that's a good thing?"

I don't know what's good about that. Even some of them when they were with a girl and they finally got her to go to bed and he didn't even remember what he did.

No.

And I'm saying, "This is a thrill?"

In fact I was so bad when it came to that area that I can remember when I went to the first group to a party when they had spin the bottle. You know spin the bottle?

Yeah.

So finally it comes my turn. The bottle faces me. I spun it for the girl. I don't remember but anyway, you get into the other room with the other sex and so I assumed you had to kiss her. So I put my lips up against her. I'm waiting for something to happen. Like it's up to her. And I'm just pasted up against her, like I've got my lips up against a wall.

Like a window.

Yeah, and so I said, "What happens now?"

Like that old Peggy Lee, is that all there is? I don't know what the hell is supposed to happen.

Yeah, right.

So we just separate and I go back out there and the others are doing their thing and I'm wondering what's so terrific about this game?

Exactly.

So that was my high sexual experience and further downstream I told you about that deal we had with taking the gal on…

To the Hollywood Bowl.

Yeah, the Hollywood Bowl. So when it comes to that area, my experience was like zero. I was as sexless as you can get.

Really? Until what age?

Until what age? Oh, God, until I was about 22.

I was a 20 year old virgin myself.

Yeah, I just didn't click that way. I felt at odds when I had to do wrestling with gals.

Now…

And I couldn't dance worth a shit. So everything I had with the other sex I was zero.

If they only knew. All that libido.

Gone and wasted.

Fine equipment and all that energy. You're a late bloomer.

Yeah.

In your 80's.

I'll take them on now, though. Where are they?

You're scary now.

You're terrorizing young women.

I get turned on at the drop of a hat.

That's wonderful.

Hold it, hold it. Why wouldn't you want to put one here and one all the way down to make sure the thing wasn't twisted?

Because I looked at it and it was perfect.

You dreamer. Wait you got the cord caught under the door. Now you got it. Now you're okay. But I had some weird ones when I finally did get going. I'll tell you one that really was a kick in the ass. I'm driving down the freeway and there's a gal walking with her thumb out on the freeway. You know she must have had her car stuck or something. You don't walk the freeway with your thumb out. You'd be down on surface streets, right? So I stop and I pick her up and I forgot what the story was but somehow the car thing disappeared in the scene and where are we going? Since she didn't say anything about going home, the Hollywood Hills weren't far so I turned up into the Hollywood Hills, found a nice place to park and I parked and now we're talking and sort of getting cozy. She puts her head on my chest. I attempt to kiss her and she keeps keeping her head down on my chest. And I go, "What the fuck is this with the chest routine? I never had a girl that did that."

Yeah.

And she didn't go any further than that. So finally I wrestle around with her for about 15, 20 minutes and I say, "There's something weird about this broad, I might as well take her home - I don't know what the fuck's wrong with her."

So I say, "Where do you live?"

She tells me where and I start driving, I get to the house and she starts to get out and she says, "You're mad at me, aren't you?"

I say, "No, not exactly mad, I just don't understand your style. What's it all about?"

She says, "Why don't you come into the house."

Oh shit, now we're talking. So I get out of the car and into the house, into the living room. I sit down; she opens up a bottle of wine. We have a couple of drinks. She's playing classical music. She's a classy broad.

Oh, my.

And we're sitting together and the same shit. She puts her head on my chest. And I say, "What the fuck is going on?"

Come to find out, finally she says to me, "Would you mind if I go down on you?"

Fuck I tore my pants off. In 2 seconds. And she gives me a blow job. But that isn't the end of it. This broad was the only girl I ever had that did that and you know more of those dumb bastards should have done this. You know how they always complain the guy, 1-2-3 and it's over? Hey, cause when a guy's hot he's not going to lounge around waiting around for 20 minutes until she's warmed up.

Right.

So she gave me a blowjob. Then you fuck her. Now the 2nd time around I can keep a hardon because I just got de-esthesized. So that's the way I would do it with her every fucking time I met her. We'd sit down. She'd give me a blowjob. We'd have a couple of drinks. I never took her anyplace. Right in her house. Music is playing and I'd jump on her and she was in 7th heaven and she'd squirm like a stuck pig. And I'd say, "Man, this is made to order."

This is cool.

No struggling, no romancing, nothing. The romance for her was to get me so that it would stay hard when I got on her. How the hell do you figure out of all the fuckin' women, I had to find one like that. Never heard of anybody else say, "Yeah, I had one like that."

Never happened.

That's funny.

And it works.

Yeah. Well, Dan and I were sort of notorious womanizers and one of the things that we used to joke, he was the tool, and I was the tongue. We were the tongue and the tool. But I early on developed basically the capability to screw forever, so everytime I would go out with a girl the sex would be as long as she could handle it. The first time, anytime, it was like the endless hardon for her and I got a hell of a reputation. I had girls who would send their roommates and sisters to me. They said, "You've got to get this guy."

Of course. Nobody has that action that you can go until I'm tired.

Right. And I'd basically eat them until they were screaming and I would pound them until they were creaming. And it was just amazing. And it was really fun to develop that. The trouble is that…

And know exactly how they were going to react.

Well, yeah. It was, sounds silly, it was great to be of service.

It was a process. A routine.

So it was a lot of fun. And I gotta tell you; the '70's were wild. I went from a guy who had about a 6-second trigger to a guy who had an infinitely long trigger. And, boy, did I have… And I was tennis pro besides. So I had a reputation to live down to. You know. And I did nothing to discourage it. I mean, I was standing on the tennis court one day and I was… of the 4 women there I slept with 3 of them. And it was fun.

And then after I got going with some of these, they would look at the watch and say, "We've been together 4 hours."

Like it was unheard of. Everybody she went with in 15 minutes the guy's ready to leave. And I didn't realize this was the problem. I just said, "Hey, she's still wiggling and squirming and all that - I'll keep it going for you."

I'm having a good time, right?

So go figure. Nobody ever said a shit, you don't read it anywhere, your friend didn't know about it - it's sort of like by osmosis you even find this thing out.

That's right. And that's the same as this girl that you had last year in New York. A 40 year old.

Yeah. She's still bugging me.

87, no prostate and you still got it and the 40-year-olds are still chasing your dick. I love it.

I'll show you the last letter she wrote. Shit, you'd think it was an 18-year-old kid.

It's got to be tough to be humble when you're this good.

Oh, I'm telling you. And all of this is basic shit that every guy should know when he's 18 years old but where do you find it out when you don't read about it and you don't know a friend that can tell you about it. He's just as dumb as you are.

They're just saying, "I got this girl last night."

Nothing about the quality. He won't get her again. So, hey, listen, that's life, baby.

And then what I didn't know - and this was scary. After I'd been doing that for probably about 8 or 10 times, I get a phone call and my wife is home and this girl asked to speak to me.

You met her before or after you got married?

This was after I was married.

Ah.

So here this girl calls and here I'm making conversation like it had nothing… Who called? The friend of the girl I was screwing, since they were both living in the house. And why was she calling? She was calling to say, "This girl is going crazy. She wants you in the worst way."

And she was trying to give me the word, like hey; you're tied up with somebody else. She's gonna fuck you up good. And here I'm trying to make conversation like it's somebody at work. "Oh yes, we have those parts."

Something that's connected with the job so my wife, who was no dummy… Boy, on the spur of the moment, somebody pulls that… That was so close to the edge, you had no idea. And she's just like every typical wife, would go bananas if she knew you had somebody else on the side.

That's funny.

That was something else.

You sly devil.

She was a good fuckin' screw, man. She'd just loved a good screw but she had to give me a blowjob first. Because she knew I wouldn't last.

That's good.

Yeah, that's terrific. But go tell another girl, "Hey, I think you're fine, but this first."

She'd say, "What?"

You want to prime that pump.

Yeah. Oh, shit. And then out of all of those, how many girls did you ever have that really was a good kisser? I mean that could kiss that you really… it was almost like screwing? I only had 2. That could kiss that good that you just could wrap around their face just as much as you could wrap around their snatch. Only 2. The rest of them… every way but right.

Well, I have a little advantage because I was with close to 400 women.

You had a few more.

But you're absolutely right.

There are very few that really know how to kiss. Just putting your face up against the other face and kissing.

Like putting your face against a windowpane.

Exactly.

Big deal.

Something else.

Okay, I'm gonna send you home.

Yeah.

You're out of here.

They had one of the batteries on the spacecraft and here it is on the pad. That they wanted to disconnect it but it would require soldering and bringing in tools and all that that was verboten to do on the launch pad. That was like doing garage work that you were supposed to do at the hangar area. And they had to come up with some way - how do you disconnect that thing? I come up with a little tool that you could just strap over that thing, pull that handle and cut that sucker loose - it didn't require heat - it didn't require anything except this little handmade tool. Another guy who was really in charge of that department came up with a more elaborate arrangement. His and mine were submitted to the guy who was huffing and puffing with phone calls to the guys at the Cape. Mine was the one that was selected and to be sure that it could be done, he had me flown out there so I could pull the handle. It was that critical to them. Because there was no time for it to not work or we can't make it work or something like that. Here I did it at the company. I certainly can do it out there. So it was crap like that. So I got a chance to go to the Cape just to cut a cable.

Did you get up on a gantry and…?

It was the do you call it? On the pad. And that part was naturally not on the ground but they supplied the ways to get up there. So it's all that fun… And here's the part - they didn't ask me to do that job. I only overheard it because our department is next to the battery department. And by overhearing it I just said, "I think I can picture a way to do this."

So I happened to know the guy that was the head of the battery area and after he submitted his I said to him, "You know I got a rig that I think might work."

He said, "Hey, go ahead, submit it."

Because he thought he had it bagged. But he was a little miffed when they selected mine. But it wasn't my fault.

Cool.

So it was little crazy things like that that made the job to me very interesting because it was always like something that a little ingenuity could solve the problem. And those guys were just, "Hey, it's not my job - they didn't ask me."

And all this bullshit. If I overheard something and I thought it was something I could put my 2 cents in, I just did. I didn't wait for, "Oh wait, that's not your department."

You gotta do it in a way that you don't try to be a bore, but you can do it in a way that the guy can either say, "Well, we don't want to entertain it for whatever reason."

But it would be done in a pleasant atmosphere.

Not like your delivery today.

Yeah. Interesting shit.

So do you want to go look at the TR?

Sort of made a niche for myself. I forgot about the 8 to 5 and when I go home when I didn't have to work until midnight every night. Whenever we had a calamity they were even embarrassed to say to me, "Gee, can you stay later? Can you come in on Saturday. We're behind on this fucking thing - it's holding up…"

And in most cases it is. It's holding up other people from doing their jobs. Because we're talking a satellite, the fucking thing is always… timed fucked up, you know, they're always cutting corners, trying to make it… "Yeah, we'll make it, we'll make it."

They have no idea that they can make it. So they never had to ask me about that. If I knew the fucking thing had to be done by tomorrow and I had to stay until midnight or whenever it was I did it because I knew I was doing a job that was meaningful and that it is appreciated. And when I had a normal day's work, yeah, I could go home at 5.

And you're a team player.

Yeah. So I was always a guy that you could rely on and I had enough general knowledge that no matter what the hell came up that I'd come up with an answer and the other thing that was really unusual about that goddamn company was they only had 1 machine shop - there were about 6 in the whole plant - that did all these small jobs that they didn't want to farm out in house. But that was the only one that had 2 shifts. So when all the other machine shops went home this guy had a 2nd shift that I could go over to him and say, "Okay, bump whoever you want, get this thing done for me so I can have it in the morning."

And I'd work on the fucking drawings from the afternoon until I could go over and see it and it was like magic to me. I'd come in the morning with this part, whatever it was that was modified and I'd just sort of slide it on the desk to my boss and say, "Is that what we needed?"

And he'd say, "How the fuck did you do that? Really, how did you do that?"

And I'd say, real serious, straight face, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

I'd never tell him. So I had little things like that I got a big kick out of. Where I could put myself in a spot where this fucker is indispensable.

And plus, the amount of overtime you gave to them…

I didn't care about that. Because to me it wasn't a time times a dollar, it was could I beat the challenge? For me, not for them.

Plus if you'd been working for yourself like I am, that would be every single day and you would never get the good feeling.

Exactly. It becomes a fucking frustration already. Because there's no end. It just changes the next fucking day or week; it's some other kind of disease that you now have to solve.

Broken glass versus shards of steel versus barbed wire.

Strange son of a bitch. And it doesn't matter to feel like I told you. A guy can be in anything from soup to nuts - the problems are all the same. Due dates, material not available, wrong kind of material, the customer didn't really give you the story of what he really wanted… It's just endless. Just fucking endless.

It is.

Lousy customers that give you information that's the opposite of what you guys signed up for. Hey you can make a list that long. In your lifetime all of the things that these fuckers presented you from time to time is endless.

Well, let me tell you, every job has added a paragraph to my contract and it's no joke, my paragraphs now total 22 pages.

You told me. And I don't know if that solves the problem either because you see the shit they come up with. "Well, I thought we had a bathroom here."

Yeah, at least that one stopped cleanly. Hey, I want to show you…

To start with the country itself is so beautiful, you cannot believe. California doesn't hold a candle to that country. The looks.

At least to Rio, I think.

Oh, the whole area. Every city you go to has some goddamn river going through it - it's got some mountainous up and down and in and out - it's a combination between the poor that look like Mexico and the guys that have money with the most modern anything. Two extremes and they're just side by side. So you got 50% of the people that are just barely getting by and then every other level to the wealthiest to the latest model cars with in-garage parking underneath the apartment house. Every feature you have here, they got it. Appliances. Anything you want to name in the architecture of the buildings - glass, nice furniture, fancy lobbies and modern elevators. There isn't a thing you could say, "They're short this, after all it's a 3rd World country."

Hey, it's only a 3rd World country when you don't have the money. When you got the money its first World country.

The difference between rich and poor there is big. There's kind of no middle class there.

Yeah, and what do you think is happening in the States? Now they just ran the thing and they said California has 1 million more poverty level people than they had the year before. And nobody gives a shit because as long as they are okay, they're gonna do nothing.

I can relate to the poverty part.

So that's a bad sign about the general attitude towards people. About their own world. But getting past that, the girls down there. Now, not every one is built like a brick shithouse that has got the kind of a figure that you're gonna drool over, but a very high percentage. A very high percentage. And over there, they've got one peculiar thing that is more outstanding than here. Here we go for tits and legs. There it's ass. What beautiful round asses they got. Shit, that's all you look at is the ass. Yeah, they're built like a brick shithouse from the rear view and then they get to the front.

I'm a navel to knees man. That's my section. I'm the essential middle 3rd - that's where my interest goes. Flat stomach, round ass.

Well they got them every way you want them and plenty of ass. Anyway, oh, a convertible, I haven't seen one of those for awhile. I think that just came out, the converts. And it makes a big difference because to me the hard top models are a poor imitation of the original. By the way, they closed down the VW plant in Brazil and the new president made them reopen it because they need every kind of way they can make a buck so they're back in business again.

How did they force VW to build cars?

Don't ask me.

That's very… That's a nice car right there.

Yeah. Husky build, yeah. Solid.

Mustang. How can they make a car company make cars?

There's nobody there that I can talk to - all I'm talking to is just the average guys on the street. And you can't talk to them because they don't speak English. So I couldn't find out anything about anything. The people in the stone business - they got all they can handle working stone. They don't give a shit about politics or nothing. All they're worried about it how can they sell the stone.

How close to Rio were you?

I was in Rio. Oh, but then where we stayed? We were about 200 miles. In the town that we stayed in.

Did you ever hear of a town called Goyana?

I heard the name but it's further north.

That's where the girls are from.

Oh. Michael's wife and her family.

That's the gold country.

Okay.

And you should see what do you call it; National Geographic did a thing on the people digging for gold. You won't believe these guys filling up a backpack with muck out of where the gold is up to the level where they can process it on their back. You say, "How can they get people to do that?"

Hey, it's that or nothing.

Right.

And nobody's forcing them to do it - they're doing it because that's the only job in town.

Or out of town.

If they're lucky and they work on a percentage basis. So if they dig and something is pretty good and they're in there when they're doing the processing, they get their share.

If they happen to find a rock, then they're…

Hey, they made it good. So anyway, the kind of companies that process stone are anywhere from the most primitive set-up with hand tools, almost back to the hammer and chisel.

Cave man.

Yeah. You go from that level - no roof to work under, out in the open, the guys are working with no shoes on. No shoes. Not even flip-flops. No shirt, just a pair of shorts.

No shoes with all those stone chips.

Yeah. I don't know how the fuck they do it. Their feet just turned into leather. And that's the kids going to school the same way - no shoes on. So when you talk about poverty level and these kids going to school - hey, they're going just by their toenails to get there.

Literally.

So from that standpoint you think Mexico has a large percent and with that you have a high percentage of blacks.

Really.

They imported them from Africa before we did.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. Before we did. They imported them clear back in the 16th century when they were first developing Brazil. And the interesting thing about the whole South American thing is that it's divided in 2 parts - it's either Spanish or Portuguese. You can say, how the hell did they do that? Well, when the Spanish king was sending all their ships out and they did a lot of the stuff on the west coast and the Portuguese who did the exploring before the Spanish, they landed on the east coast because that's the closes thing to Portugal. So they got communities going there. So when those 2 kings got together they divided South America with some line, with some rivers and all that shit so almost half of South America is Portuguese. By the dividing of those 2 kings of the whole continent.

Brazil is a huge part of the continent, isn't it?

Yeah. As a single country, it's the biggest.

Is that the only place they speak Portuguese?

That's right. Everything else is Spanish. Then there are smaller communities of Italian and German. You say, "How the hell did they get there?"

Well, they wanted to get out of their countries and they didn't have the right time there either. So they figured fuck, they'll take a chance in a new country. So Argentina got a large percentage of Italians. That's why the style of their architecture is all European. If you get dropped off in, what's the major city there?

Buenos Aires.

You get in there and you think you're in France or Italy. Because all the styles of the buildings, wide boulevards, everything, you say, "This is South America? I don't believe it."

It does look European.

And it's spacious as hell. The distances between the building, boulevards, parks, trees.

I hate to interrupt you but here's your new car right here. A little Ferrari.

That's squatted down pretty good, isn't it?

You'd look good in that car. You're a Ferrari looking guy.

So to get back to Copa Cabana for a starting point, shit, the beach line… Here's the other thing that was… Here's the one part of that area that if everybody was able to take the plane that goes into Rio De Janeiro Airport and that's actually the local one that flies to a number of cities within the state, that airport was built before the big international airport which is out of town and the difference is when the plane comes in to go to the local one, like when we go from Victoria to Rio, which is where the international one is, you've got to fly in to the heart of the city and it makes very elaborate u-turns to get into position to land because of the wind and the mountain areas and all that - it gives you a view of that area that you can get no other way unless you're in a helicopter. And this takes about 10 minutes for them to get into position and you're just looking at this thing and the shoreline and the lagoons that cut into it and the nice lakes and buildings and all kinds of mountain shapes - hey a movie set could not do it better. Absolutely a movie set. From the air.

That whole place is volcanic. And escaped cinder cone architecture.

All over.

Amazing. Plus it's all green, so it's very beautiful.

And unless somebody's been there, all the pictures you say and the little movies don't hold a candle to what it's actually like.

It's dramatic.

If I was… In fact my daughter, who likes to go with her husband various places, I would strongly recommend that their next trip they go to Buenos Aires. I mean to Rio.

I think it's the most picturesque things I've ever seen.

To me it's the most beautiful, topography wise that I've seen anywhere.

I agree.

So that was an eye-opener. And these people had lived there like people live here - they don't know shit about nothing. They just have their own problems of the day and as long as they can make enough to survive and have a bottle of beer, they're happy. And if you aren't happy you don't know about it because they take every opportunity, time off, to make the most of it with parties and all that shit.

They're a very festive culture down there.

So that was sort of interesting to watch that kind of reaction. And then one of the most interesting things were one night one guys says, "Hey, I'm gonna take you to a night club."

This fucking nightclub. This is in a little local city that was in a hotel. The name of the city was Dishmero (spelling?). You should see the letters in it were that long but it come Dishmero (spelling?). Okay, so this town, which is about 50 miles from Victoria. They say Victoria, because they don't use the "c" in that word which means victory. And the reason the city is called victory is because they had a large fight with the Indians at that time and they won the battle so they named the city after that battle. It's nothing unusual, but I always thought it was named after Queen Victoria. It had nothing to do with the English. It was Victoria, which means victory. I got this little by little out of these guys. So anyway, we go to this nightclub - it's up on a hill and it's isolated and they have guards at the beginning, at the entrance where if you're less than 18 years old you can't get in and all of that. But what they allow you to do inside is unbelievable - I don't know why they were worrying about if the kids were 18 or not. They have a typical stage and the stage is about 3 feet off the floor. You're sitting at tables all around it and they have about 6 individual dancers that come out one at a time - they come some with clothes on, or very little clothes but after they get into the dancing a little bit they're all stripped totally nude and built, everyone of them - you want to take every one of them to bed. More of them fucking broads. And one of them was six foot two - a fucking statue - a fucking statue. You look at her and say, "I don't believe this thing is alive. She's so fucking good."

Anyway, where the fun begins is they have a bar that comes down from the ceiling where the girls can reach - not this shit coming out of the floor. A bar on the top. And why do they have it there? They're swinging their ass around front and back, in your face and all of the young guys are lined up against this goddamn stage. Against their thighs and as these girls are wailing around one of them picks her legs up, throws them around the shoulders of the nearest guy and puts her pussy right in his face. And this fucking guy grabs her ass… just people in the audience… grabs her ass and hangs on for as long as the broad will let him and then she finally puts her leg in his chest and kicks the fucker off her.

This sounds like Tijuana in the 60's.

Yeah. And this is every fucking day down there.

Jiminy Christmas.

Then another one comes out. And she's dancing around. Got a beautiful pair of tits on her and on one side there's about 4 or 5 or maybe more - maybe about 8 guys. Guys 20 years old. Kids working in the stone yards. She gets on her fucking knees and swings her tits around. One guy grabs one tit, another guy grabs another tit - they're chewing on her tits. The other guys are grabbing her fucking legs and there are like 500 hands all around this fucking broad and she's eating it up - she's not even shoving them off. And the fucking audience is clapping and screaming. Now this is what I call a fucking nightclub.

Poor Sheldon isn't catching any of this.

He didn't get in on it.

Oh, that's so funny.

So when I told him that, he was just beside himself, like when are we gonna go to the nightclub again? And believe it or not the guy that knows all the angles and all that, who speaks English, his kid got sick so he went out of town. We didn't have anybody who even knew how to get there because it was out of town. And we don't have a car, so all those things had to be coordinated for us to go there. So anyway, on top of that, the same girl, she starts out sticking her tongue out. These fucking guys - 3 mouths come at her, all want to put their tongue into her fucking tongue. Then they go with the tits thing. Then she turns around and lays down on the fucking floor and puts her legs on the shoulders of the nearest guy and there's 500 hands all over this fucking girl's body and the funniest part is when you see these young kids doing this it's just like, what did they do? Just come out of a 10-year jail sentence? Or what? They go bananas. They did everything except jump on the fucking stage. And so happens, this thing is going on for about… with different girls. I say to myself, "Well fuck this - I'm joining this goddamn thing."

So the next broad that comes out that's swinging herself all around, I give her the signal and she puts her fucking legs on my shoulders and I put my head into her fucking crotch. And the audience they went bananas because I'm the oldest fucker in there and I'm doing that and they're screaming and clapping like crazy. That was a fucking scene, I'll tell you.

Saul, you are peaking. You are having the time of your life.

Oh, that was great fun.

That's wonderful.

In addition to that…

In addition?

Yeah, in addition to that they have about 10 girls that wander around in the club itself and they start flicking your ears and kissing you and grabbing your cock and you say, "What the fuck's going on here?"

These are actually girls in there and they have rooms connected with that and if you like what's happening you get up and go into a room and you fuck them. All in the same night club.

Did you?

You're fucking right I did. Oh, what a deal that was. And the fantastic price. In American money. It was 10 bucks.

Oh my God.

It was 30 dollars Brazilian money, which is 3 to 1 now so it cost me $10.

To have the time of your life.

Oh, shit.

I guess what you're gonna do is basically you're gonna move down there, get an apartment across the street…

And kill myself.

And just eat pussy until your neck breaks.

I have a thing made out where to send the fucking body. And the whole thing.

That is so funny.

That was a fucking riot. Now the best part is… what do you do with the girls that aren't in this club and all that shit? Well, I met a bunch of guys through a whole chain of things and they practically adopted me. They just liked the fact that this old son of a bitch wants to go to all these places and all this shit - they thought I was unusual so they called me King Saul. Everything was King Saul. So we go to one disco and at one of the discos… Oh, before we go there they say, "We got a girl just for you."

I say, "Yeah, what's so special?"

She's 5'10" and she speaks English.

I say, "Shit, bring her on."

So we go to this place and here she is - an Italian English accent - she speaks English and she speaks Italian. She speaks Puerto Rican and she speaks Arabic. You say, "How the hell did that combination work out?"

Seems that she married some wealthy bastard that was an Arabian guy. She had 3 kids with this guy. She couldn't live that lifestyle that they have over there with the veils and all that shit and the woman's gotta stay in the house and not go out. She finally blew up and left. And left the kids with him because she knew she couldn't get the kids out. So this is the kind of girl I'm being introduced to. Here she is, she's only about 33.

This is the girl of your dreams.

Yeah. Built, I'm telling you. You would die for this one. This one is thin but I can take this one thin because she's got everything.

She's got a rack.

Oh, shit. Everything. And a fucking willowy body, the kind that you just squeeze them and they compress likes cotton. I never had a fucking broad like that. And she's all over me. And I'm saying, "What the fuck is going on here?"

She tells me, indirectly through all the talking and all that she has a hard time to meet a guy that she feels comfortable with - all they want to do is fuck her and all that - naturally I don't give her that impression. Because I know right away that you're on the wrong track with any broad. You gotta give them the illusion you love them. You know the old shit. So I'm giving her that I love her. And I buy her, after that night club thing, I go to a florist shop and I get a beautiful plant with all kinds of blooms on it, some South American thing which costs me again, about $10 and I have a guy deliver it, because the idea is I don't want to be there when it's delivered so she calls me on the phone and she's telling me she's crying because nobody ever did that and all that kind of shit, that cared for her to that degree and I just met her, and I'm saying, "Hey, I'm on the right track here."

And I take her out the next night and we go to the club so you can't do much in the club but there's very few places you can take them in that small town. We get back into the car and she's the one furnishing the car so we'll continue on this goddamn thing.

We're still waiting for him.

So I start to romance her in the car and oh man she is so… I never had broad French kiss you like this one. Man, she was in my mouth. So we wrestled around for awhile in the car so we finally had to say, "Okay, I'll see you tomorrow."

And I get out of the car at the hotel - she's the one with the car and she drives herself home. In the meantime we have some conversations on the phone and all that and she says to me when am I going back. And I say, "We'll probably be back in about 3-4 weeks."

I figure what's the difference when I tell her I'm coming back - I don't know if I'm ever coming back. And she says to me, "Give me your phone number."

At first I sort of hesitated a little and she says, "You're married?"


































SIDE 23

So we arrived, it was Monday - we arrived back here, the phone rings - she's on the phone.

What's her name?

Simone. It's Italian for the female version of Simon. Simone. And she gives me that shit, she's missing me already, when am I coming back and I'm saying, "I can't believe this broad."

If she was anywhere near where I could get at her, hey, I might be tangled up with that one permanently.

Bring her out here.

What a beautiful fucking broad…

Bring her up.

I'm not that involved that I'm going to get into that shit.

I would love to see - your kids come down to visit and there's a 33-year-old femme fatale.

This fucking guy's gone off the deep end sure as hell.

That's great.

And the next thing is she's gonna get every fucking dime he has. That's the next worry.

Of course.

And I have to assure them, no, we're not getting married, she's not getting any of the money. Stop worrying. I could see a hundred guys want to marry her at the drop of a hat. She's just gorgeous.

Bring her up.

All the other gals they're okay, they're Brazilian type and all that but this one has a sort of European flavor to her, being with all those languages she's just more… and the jewelry she has, because her husband was wealthy - fucking jewelry I've never seen in a store as nice she was wearing on her neck and on her hands.

What kind of work does she do?

She is in the stone business. She's a salesperson for stones. In fact this week her company sent her to the show in Italy.

Have her drop by here on the way home.

Easier said than done. I mean, the company's paying for all that shit. She isn't making that much money that she can make side trips. I wouldn't put any string on that.

You know that's debating like you know Brazilian pussy.

Yeah, I looked at the different houses here - every one's different. Every one is different. This is the ugliest looking son of a bitch with terrible colors, horrible.

It's not done. They might get a little better. Somebody else is doing something here.

Modern nothing. He's got the nice top of the hill. Amazing the shit that's up here.

I can't believe the prices right here.

Driving Corvettes and all the good shit.

You'd say they haven't got the money in the house but you look at these - it's a little tastier there. It's all gotta crash back out. Pricing can't hold. If interest rates goes up all these people will be on the street. So, you partied your brains out.

Oh yeah, shit. And the price of food - here we were at this nightclub - this is when I went up to the Brazilian gal - and somehow one of her girlfriends wandered in and so it was the 3 of us. So we're all having beers and she's having some kind of cocktail shit and we finally decided to order spaghetti with 15,000 different kind of toppings on it and so they brought it - the plates were so heaped, no way in hell you could even eat half of it, and the bill came to a husky 50 Brazilian dollars, which costs 1/3 in American dollars. For 3 fucking people, boozing it up with the fucking food, even nightclub.

The only way to go down there is to go there with American dollars.

Exactly - if you go with their money it's the same as spending it here. You better have it.

Just better looking women.

Oh, fuck. And they love the idea of Americans. That's a little bit of magic to them. Just like, hey I dig you being Brazilian. You know?

It seemed like a magic time for you. By the way, Saul, I'm going to pinch you. Because you are awake and this is heaven. So Simone - would you consider having her come up and live here?

Oh shit - you're going too fast. What's the fucking hurry? I only met her twice.

Hey, I'm just asking.

No, shit. No, that's a long way off. Getting involved with another goddamn woman. Shit.

It's fun to play.

Fun to play but hey, when that son of a bitch becomes permanent property it's a whole different ball game. I'm not too hot to get into that.

Gotcha.

I'll buy you presents, I'll do all that good shit, but I don't want that knot around my fucking neck.

Good for you. So what about the business end of the trip.

He's doing quite well. He got a lot of people lined up that will give him 120 days for payment, which gives him enough time to get rid of the stuff so he doesn't actually put out money he hasn't got. You know, with all this shit he really doesn't have much capital, as you know. He's an operator from the word go like buy this, do that, he's got a chess board with all these fucking plays that he's got to make to keep afloat. So that's one of the problems. He keeps telling me that he was in other businesses that he got screwed out of. Hey, everybody says that. You know, if you don't make it, it's because somebody screwed you - you didn't screw yourself. Apparently. I don't know if it was true or not in his case. But all I know is he's operating on a shoe string even though sometimes he's got material that's worth $100,000. But he's depending on these guys that he knows that want material and use his opinion blank - carte blanche - whatever he says you're gonna need or you're gonna want or like, he buys it. So it's the turnaround for him buying it down there for a rock bottom price, bringing it here, selling it for a relatively small margin, so he can get rid of it quickly, pay the guy off that he bought it from and have something left over. He's far from having a stone place like these other guys have, where they have a big investment and they have some cash in the bank. He's not in that condition.

He's also trying to keep his overhead down by not putting in…

Whatever he's doing is a lot of fucking chess plays. When he goes to sleep he doesn't go to sleep. He's worrying about how he's going to make the next maneuver. And this partner he has is some sort of half-assed flake that he has to keep correcting from doing the wrong shit.

You're talking about Edson?

Yeah. That's like a Plymouth or something. 1932 Plymouth. What was I gonna say. And he's got other trips planned, to go to India and to go to South Africa. But they're all sort of tentative, depending on all sorts of local, last minute things from happening. So he's got a lot of irons in the fire, but none of them that make big money.

Not a good investment place for you?

Investment? Shit, no. What am I going to invest? First of all, I'm not looking to take the few bucks I have and jeopardize it when if I live until I croak if I don't do anything with the money.

Right.

So fuck that.

You don't need to make a killing.

All I need to do is just last.

All you got to do is eat pussy and spend money and enjoy yourself.

Exactly. It's now or never. What am I going to be saving it for? The kids? Piss on that routine.

They're fine.

I saw one house in the Hollywood Hills just off of Sunset that I liked the best for the longest time and this was on a downhill side like that one and what this guy did was he built a retaining wall flush with the roadway and he had a 2 car garage that you drive right in off the street and they made a few rooms at that level and then the main house was the level below the garage and it had the view of the canyon and across the canyon and on the right hand side he had a pool dug in that you could look out over the canyon and the whole thing and it was sliding glass from the living room on the floor 10 feet below the roadway. And it just looked terrific and had everything in the right place that I felt was a graceful mountainside hill. Mountainside house.

I am just not crazy about hillside living.

Well, like I saw…

Terrible traffic, no parking…

Like there was an architect one time that had a program on KFI in 1930 and I still remember it and what his thing was, why would you want to buy hillside property when here's what happens according to him. You look at the view, the view looks beautiful, you build a house and you got this glass window that looks out over the whole thing. Then as you're living it and you find that now the sun is coming in you close the drapes, you come home from where you're going, you go into the house, you don't even know you've got a view property. The view just automatically disappears and you spent all this premium money to drive up that hill and you're not using it.

I agree.

And that was a guy telling me that in 1935.

I agree.

And I agree too. It's a premium that you really don't get the benefit because you're not sitting in a fucking chair looking at this view everyday like it's God's country and you're not going to live without it. So his story was hey, get yourself a level lot and easy access and save the money. And that was an architect. Did you ever hear of the Byrd houses? A guy by the name of Byrd. And he built a really nice style, what would you call that style? I'm trying to think of the right word. This goddamn Glendale and Burbank going crazy.

Anyway, this guy Byrd?

Yeah, so he built firehouse style. Shingled roof and cute little ins and outs and little curved sections for breakfast nooks and all this kind of shit and they're all in the Hollywood Hills. You can spot them in a minute once you see one. And I love his style of house. They weren't cheap because they had all of these fancy little details to them. And he built one that I thought was unusual in this sense. The piece of property was on a down side. This guy didn't want to build it up on the edge. He went way down deep in the lot and now you needed a driveway that went all the way down to where the house was. You didn't want that wall flush with the roadway kind of thing. So now you're down this goddamn steep hill and if you have the conventional garage you got to back all the way up this high hill and you can't see the street. So what a fucking hazardous goddamn way to get out of your house everyday. So he had a turntable built and he turns the fucking car around with the press of a button before he leaves the garage, the car is facing the right way when he parks it. Now he's going up where he can see where he's going - he had 2 large barriers put up there so he can see the roadway both ways and he can shoot right up and go out of the fucking place.

I like that.

Now that was terrific. And I've rarely seen turntables in a garage.

I thought you were going to tell me he put a funicular in or something.

No, he couldn't use it. That'd be a bitch for the car.

Park at the top and funicular down.

And this was a hell of a steep driveway to move. At least if you're facing in the same direction you know where the hell you're going.

So how is it to be back?

It's nice. It still feels better than all of these outside places where you're living in a goddamn hotel room and a lousy kind of a bed and the pillow is out of the goddamn sponge shit - you can't rest your head worth a damn. And foodwise, horrible. Those Brazilians have no fucking taste for anything when it comes to food.

Really?

Oh, the worst. The only thing I could eat without having a fit was a salad. And that you made yourself. They had all the things there and you mixed whatever you wanted. The meat was rubber. Every fucking thing… And we were at the fancy hotel where they come around and slice the meat off on a stick and there's about 10 guys coming around with every kind of meat - lamb, chicken, steak, what have you. Every fucking one of them was lousy. Tough as nails. With that burned flavor of the goddamned flame roasting the goddamn meat - they don't take any of the fat off - everything is dripping with fat. They eat fat like dirt. So I was really disappointed on the fucking food. Terrible. It was just to me survival food that's all. Bread, oh, the bread - the worst I've ever eaten in my life.

Really?
Putty. Absolute putty. You know how shitty our white bread and stuff is here - that's eaten like uncooked bread. Unbaked bread. Horrible. And these fucking - I look at the table and these fucking people are eating it like it's good. I couldn't believe my eyes, watching them. And Ashook, he can eat shit on a stick. He has absolutely no fucking taste for anything. Whatever they put in front of him he eats. He never said one fucking time that the meat was tough or this tastes terrible - even the goddamn papayas and that other shit that they have there - they tasted like a dish rage. No fucking taste to it at all. And he's just spooning away. The only thing they couldn't fuck up for me was watermelon. But all the other things - horrible tasting stuff. And they're like - when you have this breakfast included with the hotel stuff?

Continental breakfast.

Yeah, the kind of ham they have there? If you were to eat a piece of newspaper it would have the same fucking taste as their idea of ham. And the eggs are all scrambled in a mass like they are here - scrambled eggs - you know how they make them? The worst. You couldn't eat those fucking things. And the coffee. So fucking strong, I couldn't put more than 1/4 cup in and fill the rest of it with milk.

Really?

If you were to drink that coffee straight you'd be awake for a week. That fucking coffee is unbelievable.

It burns through your stomach and comes out your shoes.

And they're gulping away like it's fucking soda pop. So I could live with that for all the other things that were good.

You'll eat shit…

Oh and here was the cute part. I get into bed with some of these broads and 99% of the time they couldn't speak a fucking word of English and they're trying to make conversation and I keep telling them, "No comprende."

Which is "I don't understand."
And go back to romance them - shut up - and then I found an interesting thing that works real good. I bought a bottle of goddamn massage cream and I give these fucking broads a massage before I go to work on them and they loved it.

Great.

You massage the body and you get to their tits and I was really working their tits over and they're wriggling like a stuck pig. And I say, "Man, this is it."

That was fun.

You're a happy guy.

Oh, shit. So there were a lot of things there that were cute. And I was trying still the hardest to get to this woman that has this stone place, Helena. I'd been trying all this time to get into her pants. I'd send little gifts and do all kinds of shit.

I thought she was hot for you.

She's hot for me this way. You know what I mean. Just don't try to get me into bed kind of shit. And I haven't been able to get her to lie down yet.

Okay.

But I figure fuck it I wasn't short of broads anyway, so I just played with her. But she is a good number. She's athletic. She has her own motorcycle. She exercises everyday. She goes in the sauna everyday because the hotel has a sauna. So she's firm as a rock and a nice medium build, not skinny. And she's about 40, just solid pork.

There's your red T-bird.

Yeah.

That's the new one.

With a redhead in it.

Yeah.

Yes indeed. And the cars there - all these small little shitty Fiats and the European ones. No Cadillacs, no Lincolns, no big American cars. Hey the fucking gas - for them imagine, is $2 a liter, that's $8 a fucking gallon their money. For a fucking gallon of gas. How the hell can you buy a big car? Motorcycles by the zillions. One cylinder with 100 c.c.s kind of shit.

That's $3 American.

Yeah. It's a lot of money. So fuel is a bitch.

Yeah.

And we're pretty spoiled in this country.

Yeah, in a lot of ways. And like I say, food, our shittiest hamburger beats anything you can buy.

Speaking of food.

And about wearing apparel. A fucking copy of everything American. It doesn't matter if it's for the young guys, the old guys, the girls, everybody's America crazy. Hair-dos. Shoes. You name it, it's all American. Style. Gotta be American. Actually shipped from the same 3rd world countries that they ship to us, they're getting it. So that is almost like a disappointment. You have to copy every fucking thing we got in the U.S.? Music the same way. Movies the same way. So this American disease is the one thing to me that's a little disappointing. You go to a foreign country and all they're trying to do is be American. So in time America is the one that's going to mesmerize, what's the word when you massage everything together?

Homogenize?

Homogenize the whole fucking world. Hi Fi equipment, all that shit. All American.

Hey, we're the…
We're the center, we're the thing. And the goddamn TV causes part of it where they show American stuff and the movies and the clothes. What do you have?

Nice looking car.

Oh yeah. It looks like yours.

Identical.

Pepper Tree Basher. And the reason they pinned that handle on me is that time I told you we screwed that broad on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. And all those trees in there were pepper trees.

That's funny. I thought maybe you were just hung like a pepper tree.

No. This fucking broad took on 8 guys.

Well see now would be the time for you.

I was gonna say if she'd come back I'd really work on her.

So how did your house look to you when you got back?

Nothing changed. Everything looked in place. He's still got to catch up with a lot of loose ends of paperwork, watering, because no matter how much that guy waters, it's never enough. And he can only spend so much time on each customer. I know it. He won't say it but I know it because if the water dries out in 2 days, it isn't watered deep enough. But at least nothing died, that kind of thing, and the pool was kept okay, was clean, so I don't have any complaint. And I had to catch up on all the fucking bills - gas, water, electric, lights, insurance - car insurance - I had to get new… All that kind of shit. Eventually when I get squared away with this fucking, what do you call that thing again? That probate, then all of that's gonna go to the bank and I'll know exactly which company to give them the bill from, you know that I'm with and I've got my Social Security will cover all that shit without me having to give it a second look.

You guys can do all automatic payments.

Yes. The check comes automatically from the government. These bills can be paid automatically. What the fuck do I want to fuck it? Just give me work for what? This tank never goes dry. Or never stays full.

Thanks, there was a big hole in the top of that one.

Never eating it like it's worth eating. You don't eat meat, only chicken. So they had chicken on the stick too. The chicken was burned from the fucking fire that they had it on and when you char the meat, does that add anything to it? To taste burned fat? Tastes like shit. So I said to myself, all the other good things made up for it.

You bet. All that muff you were eating had no char. It was all fine, pink stuff.

Would you like a massage? They thought that was so novel. I never did that to broads. I was in a different fucking world. I'm thinking, what the hell have I got to lose. They can't speak English but they knew what massage was.

You bet. When you put the magic fingers on them they know. Got them ready, got you ready. You're in heaven my man.

Yes, indeed. It was fun.

12 fucking hours in the plane.

And I know how bad you had to pee the whole time.

Yeah. I didn't go once.

Jerkoff.

I just gave Ashook a bad time, I said, "You're going to the bathroom again? What's wrong with your fucking bladder."

He'd look at me and he'd just couldn't believe I hadn't gotten near that goddamn bathroom the whole trip.

You're part camel.

But I've been that way my whole like I don't know why my bladder is so flexible that when I have to go it's no problem, you just let it ride.

Well there's a couple of aspects to that. One is bladder size, two is, depending on the person and depending upon their hormone levels, you have more pain or less pain when you have to urinate.

I have very little pain when I have to go. Mostly none. Just the fact that I feel that I have to go. But not like, "Oh God, if I don't go I'm going to piss in my pants."

Well, there's that for me a lot and boy, I'll tell you, when I'm laying in bed it hurts.

Really?

Oh yeah. It'll wake me up. Silly. How do you like the gray color?

Yeah, somehow it looks a little better in a convertible.

Okay, what did I do?

Jerry's got rebuilt finally? That's the one that burned up?

Yeah.

Those fucking prices - $10 for a corned beef sandwich or some goddamn thing?

Yeah, it's pretty pricey.

That's a little ridiculous.

My friend that lived up here finally passed away.

Yeah, he died. His brother just died by the way.

Oh yeah? The other guy.

Just died. And what is the difference in your salad?

It's the fact that all of the vegetables have more taste than you eat down there. They taste like straw.

You mean in South America.

Yeah. Well you also put probably more things in your salad.

Oh yes. And their tomatoes taste like a dishrag. No flavor whatsoever. They don't use any celery.

Really?

They got more greens that taste like straw than they have up here. They have about 15 different kind of greens.

All tasteless.

All taste like straw. Ashook sure can eat shit on a stick. That guy had no fucking taste. Did you ever go with him to an Indian Restaurant? And eat Indian food - when he'd take you to an Indian place.

Yes.

Oh, like shit. Absolutely no taste whatsoever. Boy that's a tree, isn't it?

It's called a silk tree.

Yeah.

About every 3 years she just prunes the crap out of it.

Yeah, they're all too dense.

She says it's a pretty tree but it's messy. So they built 6 houses here.

They got so fucking mad and in those days many of the Frenchmen wore wooden shoes because the roads were so terrible that it was all mud and if you wore leather shoes it turned them into shit. So they wore wooden shoes like the Dutch did. Same idea. Little clogs. Well this guy got so fucking mad he took off his shoes and threw them into the gears and broke the fucking machine. But he was working for a guy. So the word sabat means shoe and sabotage is throwing the shoe into the fucking machinery. So that's how you sabotage something - you throw a wooden shoe…

I thought that was pretty wild. There were a lot of oddball ones like that with language where people twisted something around and made it into a thing from a completely different area.

For instance, in colloquial English today, if you're bad you're. They're even saying now, black guys call other guys niggers and it's starting to take on a different connotation with different generations. It connotes someone who is a lower class and not educated. They use it as a kind of…

A dig.

And some other things. It's almost a term of endearment, "Hey nigger."

Like a brother.

Yeah.

There's a lot of other twists of language like that.

Turning them around.

Another turn of phrase like that, an inversion of meaning… A guy who works for a big corporation said, "Hey, I just got this great idea about something - it's really cool."

And the boss is really pissed off and says, "Cool is why my son's college is costing me $8,000 a semester. Cool is why…"

And he rattles off all of the reasons why cool ain't cool. So finally the guy tells him the idea and then the boss pauses and says, "Cool."

He sets it up, picks me up and it was only he and his girl and there's no second girl. So I say nothing and he says to me, "She was supposed to get her and I don't understand why she didn't get her."
And where were we going from there? We were going up to his place but I was going to wait in the car. At first I didn't know what the hell to do… wait in the car? But the point was this guy was a little weird. He goes up and he screws her. Then he comes back down and he says, "Now you go up."

He couldn't get me the girl so he let me screw his girl.

That's amazing. So you did?

So I went upstairs and he came down so quick… I wanted to do a little extra. Played with her tits and massaged her around and all that. So after that happened she called me on the phone - she wanted to leave him.

She wanted the real action. That's great. So did you date her?

No because it was too complicated. But imagine that.

Quality speaks for itself, doesn't it?

And then the other one that was funny - I met a girl at a dance. Slim and well educated, pleasant to talk to and a good dancer. So finally after I took her out a few times she said, "I want you to meet my sister and brother-in-law."

What am I going to get out of doing that?

You're getting married.

She's trying to present me, what do you think of him.

I don't need that.

She hounded me so much I finally said, "I'll go up for 5 minutes that's it."

So I go up and sit down in their living room and I talk to the brother-in-law and the sister and everything's going along pretty good and before I knew it about a 1/2 hour went by. I'm getting ready to leave and the guy says, "Well, I have to get up early tomorrow."

He shakes my hand and says, "Nice meeting you."

He goes into the bedroom. Then her sister, a few minutes later, says something to the effect of she's got to go to bed too. They both were working and I guess the idea was to leave us alone. Okay. Which was fair enough. So she goes into the bedroom and then about 10 or 15 minutes later she opens up her bedroom door - I don't see it but I know what's going on and she says, "Saul, your towel is on the back of the bathroom door."

How the heck can I fuck her when I know her sister is right there? My dick went right down. But the gal I was with she went to work on me and I went to bed with her and I screwed her anyway, but what a surprise to have her goddamn sister leave a towel on the back of the door.

That's the greatest.

I never heard of anybody else running into that.

That's funny. That's a great line.

That was in 1940 - can you imagine? 1940. Son of a bitch. That was a while ago.

You were like 24 years old.

Yeah. Oh, shit. Then there was another one that I met there. This one, I don't remember how I met her. Here's how it went - I was living, boarding in a room - for sleeping, that's all. And it was near where I was working at the gas station and a woman that owned the apartment had a brother that came to visit her once in awhile and he's the one that said, "Let's go out on a double date."

And I said, "Well, I don't have any girls."

He says, "My girlfriend will get you a girl."

Okay, so we go out and we have a pretty good time.

Double date?

Double date. Nothing serious happens. Then a couple of days later I make a date to take her out and we get into the back seat and we start wrestling, after a few hours with her and she's giving me very tepid resistance and finally she says, "Aw fuck it."

And she pulls her pants down.

That's great.

In Detroit I had some weird experiences.

Detroit was good to you, baby. It gave you a chance to show your magnificence.

If this shit keeps up I'm going to have to write a book.

Well, I'm writing it for you.