I came over to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to work on the third installment of the Big Buddha trilogy. The first book, The Big Buddha Bicycle Race, was published by Silkworm Books in the fall of 2016. The second volume, The Bronze Begging Bowl, is pretty much ready to go. Set in Thailand, both were written in the United States. Ironically, the first chapter I’ve completed for the third book, Tinseltown Two-step, was written in Chiang Mai but is set in the American Southwest. Hopefully it will whet your appetite for more.

 

Call of the Road– OR:

The Night the Welfare Checks Came Out in Gallup, New Mexico

 Like Brendan’s story about being picked up by an Eskimo, it had to be told.  Or did it?

Bobby Beach and the Surftones! Damn!  My heroes since high school—and now a chance to play with their sax and bass players—double damn!  When Billy Manic asked me to fill in with my old band, The Moodswings, I turned him down at first for a lot of good reasons. I mean it was an Alcoholics Anonymous convention in Bakersfield—a 113-mile drive from LA—and I knew I’d be working at least sixty hours at Warner Brothers that week and the next. It had taken me over seven years, but I was finally working in the studios as an apprentice assistant cameraman. I had my union card—but the long hours meant my drumming days were pretty well over. Except Billy had a couple of the Surftones coming with us. The Surftones!  They had been semi-underground heroes where I grew up back East. Years before Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, their guitar riffs and sax solos made me and my friends want to get out of Boston and become SURFERS! And we knew a little secret—Bobby Beach, their leader, the King of Surf, was actually Matt Malouf, a Lebanese immigrant’s son from the South Side—a secret that was safe with us Boston hipsters.

In the end, I couldn’t pass it up. Who cared if one was now a stock broker and the other a parole officer? Who cared if it was going to be a long drive to Bakersfield? We weren’t going to be rattling up there in my VW van, we were going to be cruising in style in the sax player’s Dodge supervan, tripped out with a bar and plush carpeting and even a little TV if you got bored.

We rendezvoused out in the Valley at the sax man’s house. I had never thought of a Surftone having a house before. Bruce’s turned out to be a comfy yellow ranch with white shutters and lots of red roses behind a white picket fence, located not far from Universal Studios where he worked at the EF Hutton branch on the ground floor of the Black Tower. He was a tall, good-looking guy with an Irish Afro—a red perm that in LA he could wear on stage or at the office. He met us as we pulled in, opening up the big van and going back inside while we loaded our equipment. I could see him through the kitchen window talking patiently to his wife, but when he tried to give her a kiss good bye, she turned her back and walked away, which was a shame because she was a platinum-haired beauty who could have been mistaken for Tuesday Weld.

“Yeah, she was a little pissed,” he said as we started winding our way up the Grapevine. “We were supposed to spend a quiet Saturday evening at home for a change—“

“But who can say no to the call of the road!” interjected his partner, Krebs, who bore a strong resemblance to Dobie Gillis’s beatnik sidekick. “We could write a book!” he laughed.

“How about the chaplain’s wife and daughter out at Norton Air Force Base for starters?” asked Bruce, our stockbrokering chauffeur. “The way they always had adjoining rooms waiting for us at Motel Six when we played the Officers Club!”

“Whoo-ee!” grinned Krebs. “They were a pair, all right!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “If it’s the chaplain’s daughter I’m thinking about, I hope she didn’t tell you she was a virgin.”

“What do you mean?” asked the bass player.

“I was stationed with a photo squadron out there a few years back. And there was a chaplain’s daughter who knew about every guy in my unit—in the Biblical sense, as a chaplain’s daughter should, the way we figured it….”

The Surftones were undeterred and continued reminiscing. “Remember the widow lady down in Laguna Beach who liked to pose nude for us during the Pageant of the Masters?”

“Definitely not a virgin,” said our stockbroker-driver-saxman with a smile.

It had been a long week. Before I knew it I had dozed off, sleeping for the rest of the drive. I woke up when we hit a speed bump approaching the entrance to the Bakersfield Hilton. For the south end of the dusty San Joaquin Valley, it was like approaching the Taj Mahal. The gig turned out to be a piece of cake because we were alternating with Freddie Flanagan’s high society big band and only had to play two one-hour sets. Best of all, we got to leave an hour early and let Freddie’s warbly saxophones finish out the evening.

We were in high spirits winding our way back to L.A., and soon the Surftones picked up where they left off.  “Yeah, ‘The Call of the Road’ all right,” said Krebs. “That could be the title of a book!”

“With the names changed, off course, to protect the guilty!” added his partner in crime. They went on for a long while with tale after tale. The Moodswings hung our heads in shame. The best we could come up with was kind of a non-story—about the girl who crashed a party at the USC medical school and was hanging all over us on break. We were supposed to meet her at an all-night coffee shop down near MacArthur Park, but there was something about her that was a little stalker-ish, and we all had girlfriends who wouldn’t have been amused by a stalker knocking at the door. “We decided to shake her!” laughed Billy.  “We drove all over LA for an hour but she stuck to us like glue, so we finally circled back to the coffee shop, had a bite to eat, gave her fake phone numbers, and got the hell out of Dodge.”

Datsun Dave, our guitar player, gave it a shot. “Hey Billy, remember that night your manager sent us down to UC Irvine posing as Blues Image? He claimed it was cool, claimed he owned the rights to the name. What a bullshitter! We only knew one of their songs, ‘Ride Captain Ride.’ But Billy here somehow pulls off a one-hour show by opening and closing with it, performing a couple of his own originals, and then throwing in a couple of tunes he used to do as a Buddy Holly impersonator in Vegas. We went over so well that we were invited to an off-campus party afterward. Chicks were coming out of the woodwork. And then I hear the host saying something to Billy to the effect of ‘You know, you look different from when we saw you up in LA last year….’ And Billy starts bluffing about how there had been some personnel changes. I take my hand off the breast of the sandy-haired blonde sitting in my lap and start making up a lame story about having to be in the studio early the next morning for a recording session. And the next thing I know Leary is outside honking the horn and revving up the engine of that underpowered van of his.”

“We’re not going to put you dudes in our book if you can’t come up with some stories with happy endings,” said Krebs.

“Yeah,” said Bruce.  “Like the time we played out on Catalina Island and an entire UCLA sorority made us honorary members.”

“Or how about those Indian twins out in Tehachapi when we used to lay over on our way up to Vegas?”

I had started to doze again, but the Indian twins reminded me— “I’ve GOT one for you!” I said, sitting up enthusiastically. “I wasn’t with a band, but I was definitely on the road. For Christmas break during my first semester of film school at Southern Cal I was going to get together with a couple of college buddies from back East who were teaching in Santa Fe. We were going to meet up in Taos for some skiing.

“And after a long first day’s drive, I pulled off the interstate in Gallup, New Mexico, when I saw a billboard advertising rooms and breakfast at a Holiday Inn for $30 a night. The room was nice, but when I went down to the lounge for a little R&R, there was a Filipino band playing—white go-go boots, tasseled shirts and all—that gave me an instant Vietnam flashback. When they started singing “Yellow Liver,” I knew I had to get out of there. It was about ten at night, and cruising down old Route 66, the town looked pretty dead. And then, just as I was about to head back, I spotted a neon glow on the horizon and damn if it didn’t lead me to a roadhouse that was really jumping. Pickup trucks had filled the parking lot and were spilling out into the street.

“When I stepped inside, it looked like a cowboy saloon, which it probably was most of the time, with saddles and lariats and antlers hanging on the walls. Except the only white guys there were me and the bartender. The rest were 100% Native American. So I moseyed over to the bar, ordered a Coors and just took it all in for a while. I asked the bartender what the celebration was all about and he explained that this was the day the welfare checks came out. Apparently welfare checks went a lot further in Gallup than in the big city, because the crowd was having a helluva fine time, dancing and drinking and keeping the waitresses hopping. But what really caught my eye was a stunningly beautiful Indian maiden in a blue sequin evening gown—sitting in a wheelchair.

“Being the half-assed humanitarian that I am, I decided I would grace her with my presence. And I was pleasantly amazed to discover that my presence was welcome. Her sister and her sister’s fiancé were sitting at the table with her, wearing glasses and looking so scholarly I could have mistaken them for a couple of Korean exchange students. They got up to dance, which gave me a chance to talk to my princess one-on-one. Turns out her companions were students—at the local teacher’s college. She was going to school there, too. On a whim, I asked her if she wanted to dance. She looked surprised at first, and then, with a twinkle in her eye, she answered, ‘Sure!’

“I wheeled her out, the crowd parting just enough for her to glide through and then parting a little wider when we began whirling around the dance floor. It was glorious! And when the song ended, we glided back to her table, her face gleaming with a smile that could have lit up Los Angeles.

“Next thing I know, the sister and boyfriend are inviting us over to their place for a nightcap. I had a sporty little Toyota SR-5 back then and it was just big enough to lift her into the front seat and stow her wheelchair in back. By the time we had a few more drinks over at the apartment, we were all pretty lubricated, which gave me the false courage to ask what happened to my princess, if she had always been in a wheelchair.

“And she answered, ‘No, about ten years ago—when I was seventeen—I was up for Miss Indian America.  But somehow my boyfriend got it into his head that I was cheating on him. The night before the preliminary here in Gallup he threw me off a railroad overpass. In an instant, my dreams of weddings and beauty pageants were shattered.  For me, the future meant physical therapy.  For him, it was prison….’

“And that was it. Suddenly I was in LOVE. Such grace, such courage, such indomitable will to push on.  After a long rehab she graduated high school and was now finishing up a degree in social work. I guess I had earned their trust, because they were tired and ready to turn in and when I offered to give my princess a ride home, they all said fine. I carried her back down the stairs in my arms and her soon-to-be brother-in-law followed behind with the wheelchair. With no muscle control in her legs, she was heavy, but I didn’t mind. It felt good to be a genuine humanitarian. And I got to be even a little more of a humanitarian because it had gotten chilly and I gave her my USC sweatshirt to put on over her evening gown.

“When we got to her little cottage, we parked in front and kissed for the first time. And my God—she devoured me like a stick of cotton candy at her first state fair! I started drunkenly fantasizing, who cares if she’s a paraplegic—with lips like those, who needs sexual intercourse! But I could tell she was tired and I was pretty worn out myself, so I unloaded the wheelchair and carefully lifted her in and pushed her gently up the ramp to her front door. She made an effort to take off the sweatshirt, but I said to hang on to it, I’d stop by and pick it up on my way back to L.A. I kissed her good night, just a light kiss on her forehead at first and then a soft, sensuous smooch that melted my humanitarian heart a little more. Before she turned to go in, I asked her, ‘By the way, whatever happened to the guy who pushed you off the bridge?’

“‘Oh, he gets out of prison tomorrow.’ And with that she disappeared into the darkness inside.

“As it turned out the skiing was pretty challenging for a guy from the East Coast, leaving my legs a little rubbery. And on the fourth day three feet of powder fell, something I had never skied in before and managed to pull a hamstring. Since that meant the end of my ski vacation, I decided to wind my way up north to see an old girlfriend living in Denver and return by way of Las Vegas, where my best friend from elementary school bought and sold rare coins. So I never got that sweatshirt back. And now I can’t even remember her name. But I always wondered what happened to my Indian princess.”

The silence that followed was deafening. For some reason I had been expecting applause.

“And that’s it?” asked Bruce the stockbroker. “What a shitty story!”

“And it will sure as hell not be in Call of the Road,” added his partner.

“Next time you tell a story, make sure it has a friggin’ ending,” said the EF Hutton man.

“Leary does that to us all the time,” said Billy. “Gets us into one of his long, drawn-out narratives, and then leaves us hanging high and dry.”

Bruce, the stockbroker-saxman, popped in a cassette of some early Surftones and despite its staccato guitar riffs, I was soon nodding off. Back at his house in the San Fernando Valley, he pulled in next to my van in his dimly lit garage, told us he’d lock up later, and disappeared inside. Billy and Datsun Dave piled their gear into Billy’s car and took off. Krebs was close behind. The curse of the drummer is to eternally be the first to arrive and the last to leave. I was groggy as hell and had only gotten two cases into my old van when I noticed a silver Porsche convertible gliding to a halt just beyond the red roses and white picket fence. The top was down on a warm California night, and I could see Tuesday Weld’s twin—Bruce’s wife—tilt her head back languorously. The driver leaned over and kissed her in a way that told me this was just cooling down from the real heat of the evening, but it was still a very hot, wet kiss and suddenly I was wide awake. Before I knew it she had gone inside and the Porsche had vroomed away. The allergy to gunshots I had developed during the war was starting to kick in, and I decided I could pick up the rest of my drums at EF Hutton on Monday. It seemed like super-slow-motion—slower than the night we fled the Blues Image Fan Club—but finally I was putt-putting in my old VW van along Ventura Boulevard. I rolled down my window, savored the fresh air blowing on my face, and breathed it in. And as I merged onto the Hollywood Freeway, her name came back to me:

Socorro…

Socorro Little Eagle….