EARLY 
MEMORIES

Excerpt from Contemporary Authors; Volume 180, Gale Group, Copyright © 2000 Gale Group, Inc.

Early Life - Growing up in 1940s Los Angeles

I was born in Los Angeles in what they called Unit One -- the L.A. County General Hospital, that big white concrete structure looming east of downtown when you're looking to see if you can see the mountains.  The building had been completed two years before I was pulled out of my mother's womb with forceps  -- clamps, arriving a few minutes after midnight in the midst of the rotten Depression. The same year President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act.    

  For decades to come, I'd never pass that ever-expanding, land-eating hospital without thinking about my mom and my dad -- Marguerite McFerran and Robert T. Gilmore, Jr. , and that brief union the three of us had as a family -- mom, dad, and baby me making three.  It lasted almost six months. and that was the end.

Wondering now about how we ended so fast, I get all caught up in that bouncing pinball of my mom and dad's on-again off-again, mixed-up love affair that somehow never panned out as a Good Housekeeping marriage.

 Their romance bloomed right out of the dazzling, tail-end of the roaring Twenties; fast jalopies and Prohibition hootch, the Biltmore Hotel and the Coconut Grove, the hard-waxed dance floors and moonlight rides pushing away the dawns. The on-again off-again marriage stretched over four years of dancing this week, busting up the next. Kissing and fighting again, until the Spring of 1935 when they decided to throw their differences to the wind and make the marriage "a real life proposition." They now had a kid on the way, "certain to be the most lovable baby on earth!" as Granny'd say.

So back from General Hospital, my mom and dad moved into the dinky, clapboard one-bedroom bungalow behind a bigger white frame house built by my step-grandfather, Archie Knox, an RKO Studio carpenter when the Silverlake area east of Hollywood didn't have any asphalt on the streets.

Archie had been a skilled carpenter in the old country--Scotland. A First World War veteran with rows of bullet scars down his legs, Archie'd migrated from Scotland to Canada where my grandma had previously settled from Belfast, Ireland, with my blood grandfather, Robert T. Gilmore, Sr. They'd brought two sons from Belfast, John (actually born in Troon, Scotland), and William--a loner who'd grow into a serious man with a mysterious chip on his shoulder.

Granny (formerly Margaret Armstrong--called Maggie), and my granddad had two more sons in Canada -- my dad and his younger brother, Campbell. And while the old man logged his lifetime of days with the Canadian National Railway, Maggie managed the children while renting rooms in their Winnipeg home.

The war veteran, carpenter Archie become more than a boarder in the Gilmore house when he fell in love with Maggie, and she in turn fell in love with him.

Robert, Sr., "a mean man," it's been said, more readily to instruct with the back of his hand than a pat on the head, ran things like a tough wrangler in a stable of mules. Huey Long would've been proud of Old Man Gilmore.

Learning was associated with pain. Reading--writing--adding two plus two; the lessons were brought home with a slap in face or a thump on the head. Pain was the real route to knowledge.

But the old man was in for lessons himself. Late one afternoon, Maggie ran away with Archie, taking the two eldest boys. She left behind the youngsters -- my dad and his baby brother. After divorcing the old man for cruelty, Maggie worked the next quick years in an Winnipeg hospital while plotting a way to get her other two sons out from under the reign of old Man Gilmore. He wasn't going to let his ex-wife get an inch, and not to be left with breaking the boys in on his own, my granddad hastily united with another woman--a kind of boarder cum breeder who soon gave Gilmore several more sons -- all half-brothers to his offspring with Maggie.

Meanwhile, Maggie'd moved out of Canada into the U.S., settling in Michigan with her sisters, Sarah and Nellie. How to get her other two sons out of Winnipeg became her obsession--her sole course of action.

She hit pay dirt when she finally kidnapped Robert and Campbell, tricking them onto a train ride. The two boys thought they were traveling south across the border on a "surprise" holiday vacation. Some surprise. Their lives were never the same again.

Granny's sister Sarah, who'd married a man named Pat Short and practically bred a city of Shorts, hurriedly followed Maggie on a kind of Grapes of Wrath trip from the blizzards of Michigan to the promised land of sunny California.

Maggie knew that short of a second kidnapping, old man Gilmore'd have a hard time getting his sons back into Canada. He'd never even try. He was a closed-up man. His world reached only to the borders his neighborhood, and the greatest distances he'd contemplate were only measured in the miles of Canadian railway track. A root-sinking, churlish man, he walked a small world. The city of Los Angeles was no doubt somewhere on the other side of the moon.

With the addition of two more boys, Archie's new family settled near downtown L.A., on Bonnie Brae by an old hardware company. Yearning for roots, in short order they bought property and built a little house on a big dirt lot. The yard made a perfect baseball field for the boys--except for the oldest boy, Bill, always off on his own somewhere.  

A bigger house was soon put up in front the smaller one, and when the street was paved, Archie built several more houses down the block, working as a carpenter. Land was cheap and wood was cheap; labor was all over the place--four boys and a tough Irish gal in coveralls, sawing lumber and driving nails.

Though a safe bet for some during the Depression, east Hollywood didn't prove a bed of roses for Bill. Along with a cousin, Billy Short, he pulled an armed robbery of a bakery near Beverly Boulevard. Whether they actually had a gun or not has remained a puzzle, and the Dillinger-bent duo netted less than thirty dollars from the heist. They were nabbed the next morning.

Convicted of armed robbery, both were sent to San Quentin prison to serve "example-setting" sentences. After logging in some hard-time years, Bill was offered the choice of serving out his sentence or facing deportation. He wasn't a citizen.

While his cousin Billy Short, a US citizen, stayed locked behind bars (the first of several stretches he'd face), my uncle Bill was delivered to a boat bound for Ireland.

On my mom's side, also hailing from Belfast, Ireland, her grandfather immigrated directly to America as a railroad man. His son, Claude McFerran, my grandfather, was practically born in a steam engine locomotive. A true "king of the road", the Memphis, Tennessee-based McFerran would operate both steam and diesel for most of his life, including a train called "The City of New Orleans".

My mom told me years later, "Those were hard days. The railroad people did a lot of mean things to many innocent people." She was remembering the Ku Klux Klan. "I saw a parade once," she said. "They were all in white robes with the hoods and they had the cut-off head of a black man's attached with wire to the grill of a big automobile." My mom said she'd fainted and remained unconscious for half a day. "People were beaten and thrown from moving trains," she told me. "You never knew who did these things. You were raised to look the other way. You never talked about these terrible things, even though the memories burned in your heart. I hated my father and I knew there had to be a better sort of world somewhere."

Dixie, my mom's mother (my maternal grandmother), pulled away from the high-balling McFerran to lug three daughters and a son in search of that better world. Everyone was going to California. They settled near L.A.'s Exposition Park where the divorced Dixie soon met Bob Smith, a barber with his own shop in the Los Angeles Times newspaper building.

In a few fast years, my mom became a head strong, determined "looker," an "Oh, you kid" 'plucker' ready for the bright lights and carefree nights. She met a young hot-shot, flyer with his own biplane, a stunt pilot and movie extra who married my mom in a week.

Beautiful, talented, artistic; nicknamed "Dimps" because of her dimples, my mom got quickly into modeling, hungry to see herself pictured in magazines. Her young husband was convinced she should be in the movies, and my mom was soon looking for her break.

She had everything to do it, but something was wrong -- something wasn't fitting together. It didn't take long to figure out: she was running up against some stone walls because she was too "self-determined," she put it. She seemed to say that things were going to go her way--not their way, and if anyone didn't like it, they could just get out of her way.

  However, in the short time she'd work her way into the studios, first by doing extra work, then landing a bit-player contract at MGM Studios, filming Red Dust with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Soon she was working with Dolores Del Rio and Mervyn Leroy, and was chummy with John Darrow, a young actor having played in the famous Howard Hughes film, Hell's Angels. Through Darrow, my mom got together with Jean Harlow, Richard Arlen, and several other actors, and all were drinking pals for a short time. She'd later tell me that before she'd hooked up with my father, she'd flirted with Howard Hughes. But it was all short-lived; those stone walls seemed to pop up out of nowhere. 

  Her marriage to the hot-shot was annulled, and she was the epitome of that line in a song about once they've seen the bright lights--how're you going to keep them down on the farm?

My dad met my mom at a Hollywood fraternity dance and he'd say it was love at first sight. Heady, quick moving; everybody was on the go. A 'glamour puss,' and while chasing after my dad, claiming she was sick of fighting with her own mother and sisters, my mom decided to rent the couch in Granny's living room. Most everyone was living at home, neck-deep in joblessness and the Depression blues.

Everyone (except my dad), said Dimps and he should get married. Unwilling at first, he finally joined them on the "marriage ride" to Yuma, Arizona, along with his brother Campbell and Granny. But only a month after the marriage, my mom moved out, calling for an end to the new marriage. "Getting tied down" wasn't the life for my mom. Sharing a little apartment in Hollywood with another fast-moving gal, she quickly boarded the party bandwagon--fox-trotting around LA's fraternities and cocktail lounges and afterhour dives. She was working in a movie at MGM when the big March 3, 1933 earthquake leveled Long Beach, taking down sets and scattering crews and players in Culver City. Calling my dad, she said she'd been terribly afraid, and life was too short to be unhappy. Since they were legally married, maybe they should give love another chance.

So, swearing their love to one another, my mom and dad kept their hit-and-miss marriage alive with late night visits and a weekend or two to the Mexican border. They never stayed together too long, as if by 'sticking it out' in the marriage, they'd quickly come face-to-face with their bedrock incompatibility. And what the hell was it anyway? They didn't even know.

In fact, they'd gave it little effort until she was pregnant with me. He'd later believe she got pregnant just to force them together again.

Though hard times prevailed, my dad and mom took up housekeeping in the little bungalow behind my grandma's house, my dad delivering Colb's Bread on a dawn route that took him through Brentwood. My mom quit smoking and laid off the hootch while carrying me, but a few months after I arrived, it seems she decided to make up for lost time. The little Gilmore family--mom, dad, and baby me--was finished before it really began. My mom grabbed me up and took off, and that was the end of our family.

By then, Dixie and the barber Bob Smith, had moved to a new house on a small farm in El Monte where my mom showed up with me. She plopped me down with her mother and after a few weeks of "giving single motherhood a try," and feeling that the "good times" were seriously slipping away from her, my mom was flying for the bright lights once again.

There was the divorce to deal with, and the custody issue. Six months with mom and six months with dad was the way the joint-custody was spelled out. It was agreed I'd stay in El Monte the first six months since that's where mom'd brought me. But only a few weeks after the divorce, my mom gathered me up, diapers and bottles, and delivered me back to my dad's.

She said she couldn't handle the situation at that "point" in her life-- too many problems with her own family. Too much to do and no time to care for the baby.

So okay, my dad took the first six months slot. She'd have the next six months. But when the second slot came around, my mom said no again--she couldn't "cope". Another six months later, and when she came back singing the same song, my dad said, "Forget it!"

She lost the joint-custody without a battle. I lived with Granny in the front house, slept in a crib in her and Archie's bedroom or in my playpen by the old Singer sewing machine. I'd spend hours watching Granny sew, fascinated with the cable and belt and the rapidly pumping foot trundle. I went everywhere with my grandmother. I knew she loved me.

I grew up in a kind of Raymond Chandler L.A., of potted geraniums, stucco and palms, and white clapboard houses shining under clear blue skies. Nights rolled over this cornucopia called the 'city of angels,' as black velvet, sparkling magically with millions of twinkling stars.

Then when I was four years old, Adolph Hitler made his big move against the human race, and the crystal sky turned black in daylight as swarms of American bombers flanked by squads of fighters. They packed the clouds as thick as flocks of eagles and the world shrank fast in the ominous roar over our heads. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and we were at war with Japan as well as the Nazis. I didn't know any Germans, but I had a friend named Bobby Asashi who lived in the corner house Archie'd worked on. The Asashi family'd bought the house and his dad raised rabbits. I didn't understand what was happening the day federal agents swarmed all over the place, making Bobby's mother and old grandmother stand in the street while the men searched the house.

That evening Bobby crossed the street and gave me a sand bucket full of sea shells. His face was bruised and he looked very scared. They were moving, he said. I asked where, but he didn't know. I was downtown at Union Station Depot with Granny when Bobby's family was herded together with a hundred or more other Japanese people. All had suitcases or paper bags, or containers with rope and string around them. I saw Bobby sitting on a box, peeling an orange. I called out and waved but he didn't hear me. I never knew what happened to him.

Granny told me they were going to the desert because the Japanese people couldn't remain in L.A. We lived too near the harbor, she said, and some Japanese were being suspected of sabotage. I wasn't sure what sabotage meant. The whole thing seemed crazy to me. I kept thinking about Bobby's tin bucket and the sea shells he'd collected.

Jack McCormick, a perpetual boarder in our house, knew what sabotage meant. He worked as a steward on board the Lurleen, a passenger ship of the Matson Line, docked in San Pedro for sailings between Honolulu and L.A.

Usually intoxicated, Jack would tell other tall tales about San Pedro--"the city of sin," rumored to be one of the toughest towns on earth. Squatting on the harbor, San Pedro was like a mixed-up spider web bars, flophouses, beds of prostitution, opium dens and seedy waterfront cafes.

Apart from getting drunk in San Pedro, Jack, also a movie extra, spent his ship leaves drinking in downtown bars or hopping the streetcar to drink in the Hollywood bars. He had scrapbooks of photographs showing himself in weird disguises--many dressed as odd-looking women. Other photos, from naked Samoan women to soldiers beheading Chinese civilians, filled the books. One showed a men tied between stakes and split down the middle. Some soldiers were standing beside the bodies and grinning for the camera. A lot of loose photos of other people working on the ship, and also dressed in women's clothing or dancing around the ship's deck.

During the war, Granny boiled rolls of cotton material in big pots of black dye. These were to cover the windows for the blackouts. Always ready for air raids, but they never come. Or on the watch for submarines supposed to sneak out of the water onto Santa Monica beach. They never came. Meanwhile, we lived on ration stamps, radio programs and the March of Time newsreels at the movies. I ate Wheaties and filled coloring books of commandoes and dive-bombers and flame throwers. We collected tin cans and gum wrapper, newspapers and cardboard boxes. I grew up thinking it wasn't possible for a world to be separated from war, and I began to write stories about P-38 pilots like a cousin I had. I remember his salute with his thumb and first finger fixed in an "OK" signal. He never came back from the war.

My uncle Campbell was in the air force--associated with the Flying Tigers. The army wanted my dad but he beat the quota by a single day. He'd remarried a beautiful woman named Sylvia, and was working with the city. As an auxiliary policeman, he was selected to enroll with the police department, and the government granted exceptions: big cities had to have a police force as well as the country needed an army. So my dad entered the L.A. Police Academy for training. He was one of the oldest guys in the class.

His new wife, my step-mom, working for the army department as a civilian secretary to General George Patton. Recently widowed in Nebraska (following the death of her army doctor husband), she'd brought a young son to L.A., and I adopted not only a step-mother, but a step-brother a year and a half older than me.

I don't know why I didn't particularly like my step-brother, not that we'd fight, but there was just a distance between us--basically two very different kinds of kids. I had no interest in what he did and he had little interest in what amused me. No sooner were we together than the path seemed to divide, never to unite in some essential way. We had one bond: the stories. We'd make up stories, imagine characters, fabricate casts and wild situations. At "lights out," when the last radio program went off at bedtime, my stepbrother and I would we'd lie in our separate beds and for hours improvise long tales of adventure and intrigue. It was like making up movies in your mind and acting them out.

The Rampart Theater on Temple Street changed shows several times a week. I went on Monday nights with Granny and again on Wednesday nights when they played Keno, spinning the big wheel and calling out the numbers we punched on little cards. On Monday nights they gave away a gold-bordered dish and you could get a complete set in six weeks by going to the movies every Monday night.

Granny loved the movies. I sat through hundreds of films I didn't like--so bored by Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald, my toes would ache from bunching them up in my shoes. Sometimes every nerve in my body'd throb to get out of the theater. Not so with the Sherlock Holmes movies. You couldn't budge me out of the seat. Movies became more and more important to me. We went to the Saturday and Sunday matinees (always to the Campus theater on Vermont and Santa Monica, or the Belmont on Virgil). A steady diet of serials--Batman and Robin, Captain Marvel, the Phantom leading the pack. Buck Rodgers, the Green Hornet...

At nights we were afraid of the zootsuiters. There was a lot of violence during the war. Walking in the dark was dangerous--especially in the Silverlake and Echo Park areas, even though the walk wasn't that far. Granny'd rented out the little house (where I'd first lived with my mom and dad), to a young guy named Ronny, and his older sister.

One night Ronny was stabbed and almost died. He'd gone to Currie's Ice Cream parlor and was walking back when three zootsuiters attacked him. Two held him while the third stuck a knife in Ronny's chest. The doctor said the blade deflected from a rib and missed his heart by half an inch.

I saw wars at school, stabbings and shootings. Zip-guns were made out of pieces of short pipe to hold a bullet, clothespins and strips of inner tube. The firing pin was usually a shoe nail driven through a piece of wood. These little contraptions proved as deadly as any police revolver. So many homefront wives of servicemen were being assaulted, mugged, raped by zootsuiters. The blackmarket was high for ration books, and anything else that could be pulled or torn away from a woman on the ground.

A controversial subject in L.A. history is the night the servicemen retaliated. Before they headed back overseas, the sailors and marines moved through the city, teaching the zootsuiters a lesson. One had to have lived in L.A. at the time or been closely associated with the police blotter to really know what it was all about. In the not too distant future, I want to write about growing up in L.A. during the Second World War; an obligation I feel to that city in my blood, to those years that shaped the writer I'd eventually become.

New shoes were a special treat. We'd go to Sears & Roebuck on Santa Monica where they had an x-ray machine. You stood up on it, stuck your feet under an opening and looked into a viewer shaped like the eyepiece of an old stereoscope, or one of those ornate things on peep shows at the amusement pier. Looking down into the x-ray machine, you could see all the bones in your feet; wiggle your toes and see how the bones fit into the new shoes or how they rubbed against the leather. No way of knowing back then the doses of radiation we'd stockpiled.

Later we got new shoes at another place in Hollywood where my dad had a police discount. But more than often, we took the same pair to the shoemaker for new heels and soles. Our pants were patched and patched again, turned up a few times at the cuffs or a piece of leg from another pair was sewed around the bottoms if our legs'd gotten longer than the pants. When our pants got too short, we'd cut the legs off and use the pants as bathing trunks for the beach or short pants for the summers.

Maybe it had to do with the Drome of Death--that fatbob Harley motorcycle that raced around and around inside a big wooden barrel on the Amusement Pier, running up the sides of it without falling over. I met the guy who ran the Drome of Death through a cousin to the Shorts, Spider Mattock--married to one of the Short girls. Spider was a stunt man for the movies and raced midget autos at the stadium. He told the Drome of Death guy I wanted to take a spin. He told me it was nothing more than going around in a barrel, like someone rolling the barrel down a hillside. I said I was afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of, he said. Nothing could happen unless the guy killed the engine, and even then he could coast down off the walls of the barrel.

"It's like riding down the street, only the world around you looks like it's to spinning around you," Spider said, "like a top--and humming just as easy." He was right. At first, I thought I'd fall off but the guy had two leather belts attacked to his seat on the cycle, to go around your legs like you'd see on the bottom of a parachute. "Centrifugal force," he said, "like you're swinging around a bucket of water... The water don't spill and the bucket's holding it in. The bike'll hold you on."

So it did.

We seemed to be racing straight ahead on the road that kept piling up over us, like the whole world was turning around while we were standing still. Only I could feel the speed and the wind and the roar of the engine, like the time I rode the roller-coaster with my dad. I'd been sitting on his lap, strapped in, and hollered out the fun of it as the roller coaster plunged down the tracks. My fears loomed in front of me; I could sense them having nothing to do with what I was riding or whose lap I was sitting on. On the Drome of Death, I felt myself going into a sort of orbit, like I was taking off on a voyage through space. Straddling a rocket ship--dancing a few feet in front of my fears. They were tagging behind me and I was going faster than they could catch up.

A generation later I think of myself as still traveling in that orbit--still thinking I was out-of-reach from my fears. Then some day in the desert it'd strike me like a branch bopping me on the head, that what I'd feared had actually had nothing to do with me.

I remember the breakfast nook, the seats were lids to compartments where shopping bags were kept. Above the table, fitted into the little alcove and looking north over the side yard and Ben Coleman's property, there were pictures of Hawaiian girls --framed menu covers from the Lurleen.

Outside the window in the narrow strip yard was a hole I kept digging and Archie kept filling in. The hole was a kind of burial place where I'd cremate my paper dolls. My first girlfriend, Kay, lived around the corner and was the only person I'd told about my paper dolls. A couple times she played with me with the cut-outs, and we didn't wind up lighting them on fire. A few times (if it wasn't too late in the afternoon), we'd walk to the Ice Cream Parlor and put some nickels in the jukebox.

Kay was my first love. We'd get a strawberry cone and I'd play Peg O' My Heart or Don't Fence Me In. Sometimes I'd walk to Kay's house at night because it just half a block away, and we'd listen to the radio. We'd hold hands and I think we exchanged a kiss once or twice. Sometimes we hung out with Sammy, a friend who lived in a house on the edge of a vacant lot. Vacant lots were strange places. After dark they were spooky--sometimes dangerous. At dawn they were places where somebody might found a body and call the police.

I felt lost in school. I didn't care. I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to succeed at what I liked to do--being an artist or telling stories. I could give the most astounding book reports because I'd make them up on the spot. Everybody looked forward to my oral book reports, though they'd never find any such books at the library.

Carrying the imaginary books one step further, I wrote a novel in Junior High School about a gangster who made it big in Hollywood like Mickey Cohen, the real gangster. It was called Black Lights. I was writing it on the sly because there was a lot of sex in the book. Apart from being a hot and heavy necking and petting machine by that time, I'd never had anything really to do with a girl.

My first experience was with a girl who was a well-known singer's niece, rumored to be a kind of nymph around school. She was my age and we made out one evening in a building under construction. I laid my windbreaker on the wood floor in the plaster dust and saw how far we could go. I really liked her.

There were quite a few other girls after that. A couple of them I took to dances because they loved to dance. One girl, named Dolly, in my art class, was a good dancer and we'd make dates whenever a school dance was announced. We did all these elaborate dips and twirls, and half-tango numbers. People'd step back to watch us. Dolly was so light on her feet it was like spinning around with one of my big paper dolls turned life-size. A couple other friends and I would go downtown L.A., to buy rhythm and blues buy records at Dolphin's of Hollywood on Central Avenue. Rock 'n' roll was just sort of teetering into the picture.

A real lack of communication existed between my dad and myself. In my heart, I believed he'd sided with my stepmother and her son--my stepbrother. I kind of hunkered around with idea that I was an outsider. My dad, as he'd later tell me, was a loner, not given to opening himself though he was a fascinating public speaker, an actor at one time and still acting on radio (as part of the police department).

I thought he didn't love me, didn't really want me. He was holding custody of me, I thought, to keep me away from my mother. I'd been seeing her every other weekend as the result of court hearing when I'd turned eleven. And though I wanted to get close to my dad, I somehow couldn't cross that line, and he didn't seem to be able to reach across to me. He never said things about my mom, though she'd bend my ear whenever she got the chance, filling me with a lot of promises and no delivery.

I was walking around with my head in a sling. I had misinformation and I was living a mixed-up existence without knowing it. I thought everyone else was against me, except the "bad boys" I'd sidle up to at school, the other "outsiders."

My step-brother and I had been post-war latch-key kids. That phrase came in during the war when both parents were working. Most of the time neither of them were home. Maybe two nights a week. Usually we'd get a couple bucks to eat at the local drive-in, get a "Chicken in the Basket" and maybe a chocolate malt or a coke. Everyday after school I'd hang out in drugstore, drink cherry cokes, screw around with some girls. We'd stick pretty close; one was a real beauty who was going with some older guy who wasn't even in school. He drove a lowered Pontiac.

After some juggling around and getting a loan from my mom, I got a '39 Ford two-door with a shaved deck. Sometimes I ran it without the hood since I had so many chrome do-dads on the short block. Dual pipes, the rear end shackled about three inches off the asphalt, the back deck shaved and primed, and I never got around to doing anything with the rest of it, except running a leopard skin steering wheel cover and small argyle socks hanging from the rear view mirror where a few little contraband could be tucked away.

When I was sixteen I left my dad's house--another turning point. I didn't know at the time how keen that turning point'd be. I'd had a row with my stepmother--we'd never gotten along too hot, always an arms distance between us. I just grabbed the Hawaiian shirts my mom'd made me, tossed them into the back seat of my car and drove off over the hill into Hollywood.

Landing at my mom's apartment, it was finally, the first time I was actually living with her. Unknown to me at the time, it was bad news for her. I had no way of seeing that then since she'd spent so many years pumping me full of the 'promises'--how good life'd be when I was living with her. She'd tried to convince me that's what she'd always wanted when in fact she was after just the opposite. Only she'd never wanted to pay the piper.

Walking out of my dad's was a big mistake, and it sort of constructed a wall down that line already between us. I couldn't see it back then, but living with my dad or my mom wasn't really living at all. It was just being housed in a kind of emotional prison. It was like living in an empty house... An abandoned house.

Yet Hollywood was different, and being there gave me a sense of home. I started Hollywood High School, was running around on studio calls and agent calls, and occasionally getting bits in a picture or some television shot. I was also hanging around with a fringe group--a producer for Ida Lupino and Howard Duff's show, and I was hungry to make it as a movie star. I now pity that poor sap kid. Definitely a rebel. A genuine odd ball.

An english teacher at called me in after school one day. I thought it was some kind of problem, but he said he'd read my report (a sort of essay on Hollywood's hot shot producers and the casting couch scenarios).  The teacher said it was "amazing." I said, "Oh, good, glad you liked it. Anything else ?" "Yes," he said, he wanted to know if I'd thought about journalism or a writing career?

I said I was going to be a movie star. Not just a clown, but a serious actor like Montgomery Clift. I wanted parts like he'd played in the John Wayne movie, Red River. Those parts came rarely, I was told; a lot of lesser parts have to undertaken if you're going to make a living at it.

That's what I wanted. But for me, it wasn't happening in Hollywood. I seemed to be the only one who knew what I wanted. Nobody else could get the picture. After wrecking my car in the desert, I left my mom's and went to New York on a Greyhound bus. I had sixty-eight bucks and a blue canvas suitcase.

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