Part 18 (1/2)
Danny Getch.e.l.l--film-f.u.c.ked forever.
I'm humping the Hush-Hush--hated Helen Gahagan Douglas-- the Lewd Lady of the L.A. Left. I'm jabbing some jailbait in the gym at Hollywood High. I'm ecstatically entwined with Ethel Rosenberg--somewhere in Sedition City. I'm holed up with Hattie McDaniel at the height of my fatty phase. I'm liquored up and looking longingly at La.s.sie and her luscious littermate. I'm skunk drunk in a skid-row dive. I'm pa.s.sed out on a putrid pallet. A filthy filly is fellating me. f.u.c.k--it's a dreg-like drag queen draped dramatically!
Dot dunked her doughnut and doused me with John Donne: ”Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
I hit my knees hard. I concentrated on a karmic counterattack. I couldn't cough one up.
I whimpered. I wailed. I keened and keeled over. I cried and cringed, and crawled into an abyss of abas.e.m.e.nt.
White light wafted in. I shot to my feet on a s.h.i.+mmering shaft. His voice vibrated off an old Victrola vaulted in my head. It yipped through me victoriously.
I vowed to roll with the punch and reign on ring-a-ding.
February, March 1999 OUT OF THE PAST.
Half-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed: L.A., my hometown, in the 'sos. Most are just brief synaptic blips, soon mentally discarded. A few transmogrify into fiction: I sense their dramatic potential and exploit it in my novels, memory to moons.h.i.+ne in a hot second.
Memory: a symbiotic melding of then and now. For me, the spark-point of harrowing curiosities.
A man gyrating with an accordion--pumping his ”stomach Steinway” for all it's worth.
My father pointing to the TV. ”That guy's no good. He's a draft dodger.”
The accordion man in a grade-Z movie, clinching with the blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads.
The accordion man is named d.i.c.k Contino.
”Draft dodger” is a b.u.m rap--he served honorably during the Korean War.
The grade-Z flick is Daddy-O--a music/hot-rod/romance stinkeroo.
Memory: the juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutiae.
In June 1958, my mother was murdered; the killing went unsolved. I saw d.i.c.k Contino belt ”b.u.mble Boogie” on TV noted my father's opinion of him, and caught Daddy-O at the Admiral Theater a year or so later. Synapses snapped: A memory was formed and placed in context. Its historical perspective loomed dark: Women were strangled and spent eternity unavenged.
I was 10 and 11 years old then; literary instincts simmered inchoately in me. My curiosities centered on crime: I wanted to know the WHY? behind h.e.l.lish events. As time pa.s.sed, contemporaneous malfeasance left me bored--the sanguinary '6os and '70s pa.s.sed in a blur of hectic self-destruction.
I drank, used drugs, and did a slew of ten-, twenty-, and thirtyday county-jail stints for preposterous and pathetic misdemeanors. I shoplifted, broke into houses, and sniffed women's undergarments. I jimmied hinges off Laundromat washers and stole the coins inside. I holed up in cheap pads and read hundreds of crime novels. My life was chaos, but my intellectual focus never wavered: L.A. in the '50s/corruption/crime. A '50s sound track accompanied my musings: golden oldies, d.i.c.k Contino on the accordion.
In 1977, I got sober and segued into hyper-focus: writing crime novels. d.i.c.k Contino back-burner brain boogied as I attempted to replicate Los Angeles in the 1950s.
In 1980, I wrote Clandestine--a thinly disguised, chronologically altered account of my mother's murder. The novel is set in 1951; the hero is a draft dodger whose life is derailed by the Red Scare.
In 1987, I wrote The Big Nowhere. Set in 1950, the book details an anticommunist pogrom leveled at the entertainment biz.
In 1990, I wrote White Jazz. A major subplot features a grade-Z movie being filmed in the same Griffith Park locales as Daddy-O.
Jung wrote: ”What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.”
I should have seen d.i.c.k Contino coming a long time ago.
I didn't. Fate intervened, via photograph and black-and-white videoca.s.sette.
A friend sent me the photo. Dig: It's me, age 10, on June 22, 1958. An L.A. Times photographer snapped the pic five minutes after a police detective told me my mother had been murdered. I'm in minor-league shock: My eyes are wide, but my gaze is blank. My fly is at half-mast; my hands look shaky. The day was hot: The melting Brylcreem in my hair picks up flashbulb light.
The photo held me transfixed; its force transcended my many attempts to exploit my past for book sales. An underlying truth zapped me: My bereavement, even in that moment, was ambiguous. I'm already calculating potential advantages, regrouping as the officious men surrounding me defer to the perceived grief of a little boy.
I had the photograph framed and spent a good deal of time staring at it. Spark-point: late-'50s memories reignited. I saw Daddy-O listed in a video catalogue and ordered it. It arrived a week later; I popped it in the VCR.
Fuel-injected zooom. . .
The story revolves around truckdriver/drag racer/singer Phil ”Daddy-O” Sandifer's attempts to solve the murder of his best friend while laboring under the weight of a suspended driver's license. Phil's pals Peg and Duke want to help, but they're ineffectual--addled by too many late nights at the Rainbow Gardens, a post-teenage doo-wop spot where Phil croons gratis on request. No matter: Daddy-O meets slinky Jana Ryan, a rich girl with a valid driver's license and a '57 T-Bird ragtop. Mutual resentment segues into a s.e.x vibe; Phil and Jana team up and infiltrate a nightclub owned by sinister fat man Sidney Chillas. Singer Daddy-O, cigarette girl Jana; a comely and unstoppable duo. They quickly surmise that Chillas is pus.h.i.+ng Big H, entrap him, and nail the endomorph for the murder of Phil's best friend. A hot-rod finale; a burning question left unanswered: Will Daddy-O's derring-do get him back his driver's license?
Who knows?
Who cares?
It took me three viewings to get the plot down, anyway. Because d.i.c.k Contino held me spellbound. Because I knew-- instinctively--that he held important answers. Because I knew that he hovered elliptically in my L.A.-in-the-'5os novels, a phantom waiting to speak.
Contino onscreen: a handsome Italian guy, late twenties, big biceps from weights or making love to his accordion. Dreamboat attributes: s.h.i.+ny teeth; dark, curly hair; engaging smile. He looks good, and he can sing; he's straining on ”Rock Candy Baby”--the lyrics suck, and you can tell this up-tempo rebop isn't his style-- but he croons the wah-wah ballad ”Angel Act” achingly, full of baritone tremolos, quintessentially the p.u.s.s.y-whipped loser in l.u.s.t with the ”noir” G.o.ddess who's out to trash his life.
The man oozes charisma.
He's the flip side, subtext and missing link between my conscious and unconscious fixations.
I decided to find d.i.c.k Contino.
I located a half-dozen of his alb.u.ms and listened to them, reveling in pure Entertainment.
”Live at the Fabulous Flamingo,” ”Squeeze Me,” ”Something for the Girls”--standards arranged to spotlight accordion virtuosity. Main-theme bombardments; sentiment so pure and timeless that it could sound-track every moment of transcendent schmaltz that Hollywood has ever produced. d.i.c.k Contino, showstopper on wax: tapping two keyboards, improvising cadenzas, shaking thunderstorms from bellows compression. Going from whisper to sigh to roar and back again in the length of time it takes to think: Tell me what this man's life means and how it connects to my life. I called my researcher friend Alan Marks. He caught my pitch on the first bounce. ”The accordion guy? I think he used to play Vegas.”
”Find out everything you can about him. Find out if he's still alive, and if he is, locate him.”
”What's this about?”
”Narrative detail.”
I should have said containable narrative detail--because I wanted d.i.c.k Contino to be a pad-prowling/car-cras.h.i.+ng/moonhowling/womanizing quasi-psychopath akin to the heroes of my books. I should have said, ”Bring me information that I can control and exploit.” I should have said, ”Bring me a life that can be compartmentalized into the pitch-dark vision of my first ten novels.”
”What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.”
I should have seen the real d.i.c.k Contino coming.
Richard Joseph Contino was born in Fresno, California, on January 17, 1930. His father was a Sicilian immigrant who owned a successful butcher shop; his mother was first-generation Italian American. d.i.c.k had two younger brothers and a sister; a maternal uncle, Ralph Giordano, a.k.a. Young Corbett, was a former professional welterweight fighter.
The family was tight-knit, Catholic. d.i.c.k grew up shy, beset by wicked bad fears: the kind you recognize as irrational even as they rip you up.
Athletics and music allowed him to front a fearless persona. High-school fullback, five years of accordion study--good with the pigskin, superb with the squeeze box. d.i.c.k Contino, age i ready for a hot date with history; a strapping six-foot gavonne with his fears held in check by a smile.
Horace Heidt was pa.s.sing through Fresno looking for amateur talent. His Youth Opportunity radio program was about to debut-- yet another studio-audience/applause-meter show, three contestants competing for weekly prize money and the chance to sing, play, dance, or clown their way through to the grand finals, a five-thou payoff and a dubious shot at fame. One of Heidt's flunkies had heard about d.i.c.k and had arranged an audition; d.i.c.k wowed him with a keyboard-zipping/bellows-shaking/mikestand--b.u.mping medley. The flunky told Horace Heidt: ”You've got to see this kid. I know the accordion's from Squaresville, but you've got to see this kid.”