BILLY COOK PREVIEW: L. A. DESPAIR A  Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times HARD LUCK © John Gilmore 2005.   All rights reserved

 The only light leaking into the alley was the sheen from a JESUS SAVES sign blinking orange and red across the dirty asphalt. Seventy-six-year-old Gerald Stewart remembers that night. "So black," he says, "you could hardly see your hand at your face. Bums that couldn't get into the mission slept against the back of a building behind Main. You had to be careful where you pissed."

Stewart says he'd been in the alley dozens of times, but that night God had to be looking the other way. "I got the hell scared right out of me by the kid coming at me in the dark, right on top of me and twisting his hands around that length of pipe like rolling a paper to beat a dog. First thought I had was he's got a gun, figurin' I was seein' a barrel. It was 1950 and I remember it like yesterday. A couple days after Thanksgiving, it was.

"Soon as I could see his face, I recognized him. I had a janitor job at the Midnight Mission, and the kid'd slept in the flop a cot or two down from mine. He'd watched me stick some bills in the sock of one foot, and he kept watchin', even layin' there with that one eye open in the dark. Gave me the damn heebie-jeebies, that street lamp shining in and near lightin' that eye he didn't close." 

It wasn't a gun the kid had, only a hunk of pipe, "and squeezin' it like gettin' ready to bust my head," says Stewart. "He had tattooed words on the fingers of his hand, and I didn't know which was worse to die by - bein' shot or gettin' my brains knocked in. He had a look the same as a dead man you got propped on its feet, and he was sayin', 'I want you to know I ain't eat nothin' since day before yesterday . . . I've been on this sidewalk and I hate this stinkin' city more'n I hate anything.' 'What do you hate about it?' I asked. 'You got free turkey and gravy two nights ago, didn't you?' I said, trying not to show he worried me. He kept lookin' me in the eye and he said, 'I just told you I hate this stinkin' city . . .' Sayin' all that like he's telling the time of day, and I said, 'Well, fella, I do feel for you. I ain't found no city that ain't stinking to me neither.' He didn't say nothin', in fact I figured I could say anything and he wouldn't've heard any of it, just a starin' with that eye holdin' still like a damned cat fixin' on a rat. But I didn't feel like any rat with what I'd been through in the War - enough to make you puke the whole thing. Italy and damned Germany and I was thinkin' it's a helluva way to go, a squint-eyed kid who looked like a fire plug about to bust my head with a shit-house pipe."

Stewart dug in his pockets. "I tried savin' my hide and gave him what scratch I came up with. Maybe it was eleven bucks. Could've been less since I'd bought and drunk a pint before goin' in the alley to piss, and then him spottin' me where I'd gone, like he was a black shape comin' out of the shadows. I'd also bought smokes and just about was doin' my business when he was standin' there, same kid that'd wolfed the grub at the mission."

After staring at the older man for several moments, the kid said, "I seen you coming in here down that end, and I said here's a regular guy that'll help me out 'cause I gotta get to Barstow."

Stewart said, "What the hell's in Barstow?" 

"This turn-around collar guy," the kid said, "gave me a card of a guy he knows there. Told me I can get fixed up with work in Barstow." 

"Work?" Stewart said. "In Barstow? That's the middle of the damned desert." 

Stewart handed him the crumpled bills. "He looked at it in my hand and kept looking like he was still contemplatin' the use of that pipe on me even though I was giving him the scratch. I said I was glad I ran into him before I spent it 'cause I always tried helpin' a fella. He said that was white of me and he let go of the pipe - gave a toss and it clanked on the alley and rattled as he walked away. Didn't say nothin' else. 'Course later when I learnt from the newspaper who he was and all that stuff about him bein' the most dangerous man in the country, I knew I'd walked off with my life instead of layin' with my brains in the alley. 

"After givin' him the bucks, I didn't go to the flop for fear he hadn't taken off for Barstow or wherever the hell he was goin'. I got my gear and nosed over to the Salvation Army to hear some singing about the Lord. I figured I owed the Son of God my life and I'd say a prayer of thanks for Him lettin' me live by sendin' that miserable boy on his miserable way."

Billy Cook drifted out of L.A. like dust on a wind, the same as he'd floated in - hitching rides or cheap buses, hoofing it through roadside truck stops and all-night diners. He apparently headed northwest into the railroad town of Barstow, but no one has ever recalled what he might've done or exactly how long he'd stayed. 

Days later he showed up on a windswept stretch of desert highway, the land desolate except for an occasional wrecked car rusting in the rocks or a makeshift cross of broken sticks and hunks of wire to mark a grave in the sand. A mile past Baghdad, a tiny oasis of a couple of gas pumps and oil drums, Cook was walking backward on the road's shoulder, hunching against the wind. He stuck up his thumb as a produce truck rumbled toward him. 

Hal Connelly of Indio was hauling a load south on Route 66, and says, "I couldn't see him at first." When he did spot the hitchhiker, Connelly pulled to the side of the road and stopped. "I asked him where he was heading and he said he was going west. I said I was going south to Blythe, a few miles west of the Arizona border. I wasn't going west but he could get a ride on Highway 10 out of Blythe. He shrugged and said he might as well go the way I was heading instead of hitching another ride where he was." 

The truck headlights pierced the dust blowing across the highway. Connelly says, "I offered him a smoke but he said he didn't use them. I asked if he'd been in the service and he said no. We drove further, him saying nothing. Just sitting there. I asked where he'd been coming from and he told me L.A. I said, 'That's where you're from?' I was going to say I had a sister and brother there - well, in Torrance, down by Long Beach, but he said he wasn't from L.A. He looked at me said he was from Missouri. I said, 'You're a ways from home,' just making talk. He didn't reply to that, just gave a shrug.  A nontalker, I figured. His hand had H-A-R-D L-U-C-K tattooed on the fingers below his knuckles, and I said, 'That's a tough motto to lug around' and was going to make a joke but he clenched his hand into a fist, held it up and said, 'Tough on anybody getting in the way of it.' I thought well, to hell with you, Jack, and I sat back, sorry I'd made a mistake stopping for him. Nasty and unfriendly, and he sat the rest of the way to Blythe staring through the windshield at the road in front of us. 

"Had I known then who I'd picked up, I would've dumped the son of a bitch and run over him. Backed over the bastard and saved the world a lot of grief. As it turned out, I just keep remembering how I'd seen him, that lone guy on the side of the road and the wind and desert blowing around him." 

Blythe, another railroad dump, blistered in the summer and froze in the winter. Billy Cook hung around the town like a spider in someone's garage. One afternoon he stumbled half-heartedly into a dishwasher job in a little highway café on the edge of town, saying he had to get some grub in his stomach. He'd slept under a stand for a butane tank.

One somewhat permanent hanger-on in Blythe was Paul Reese, living in an old motel not far from the cafe. "I'd eat breakfast there," says Reese, "have coffee and chew the fat with Cecilia, the waitress. She was the wife of Homer Waldrip, a deputy sheriff and a pretty good guy. They had a guy washing dishes and I said to Cecilia, 'Got a new one working,' and asked where the Mexican had gone. She said, real quiet-like, the new guy was sleeping behind the café. He looked like he had grease on his pants, and when he was outside we started talking, like shooting the breeze.

"He wanted to know where he could get a room and pay the end of the week. Said the waitress had told him to ask me. I said the hotel wasn't much but they'd want him to pay in advance, and I said the same with the motels - he'd have to pay in advance. I said I didn't know, though, maybe he wouldn't since he was working at the café. He said he didn't have a place to sleep, and I suggested he could have the other bed in my room until he got something else. The bed was a fold-up job, I said, and he could pay a part of what I was paying for the room." 

L.A. DESPAIR: A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times 
is available NOW on Amazon

PREVIEWS: SPADE COOLEY -SHAME ON YOU ::  EDDIE NASH-BAD EDDIE
WONDERLAND CRIME SCENES :: BARBARA PAYTON :: BARBARA GRAHAM