Limo, page 18
Because KRLD in Dallas was only a CBS affiliate, whereas WCAU in Philadelphia was a company-owned CBS station—an oh-and-oh, as you people say in the trade—and the hallways of CBS in New York were teeming with oh-and-oh graduates.
I could have waited around in Dallas for the network to make an offer. I could have waited for another hurricane. Or another interview with Officer Tippit’s widow.
But I was restless and I had done all I could do in Dallas.
And in those days I knew Philadelphia had wonderful race riots, their Eagles were competitive, and the city had a terribly interesting zoo parade.
You know how it works, Arleene. Once you’ve been exposed to the power and exhilaration of production, you’re hooked. And you know the biggest ball games of all are played in New York City, New York, Gotham, Big Town, The Apple.
Now then.
The only good thing about “Just Up the Street” is that it will be live.
And when we are into the countdown in the control room, and Jack Nathanson is sitting in the director’s chair with two cigarettes already lit, and somebody shouts, “Ten seconds ’til air,” I’ll become a part of Jack Nathanson.
I will be up there with my squadron, Arleene.
And for those next three live hours I will be slinging my white scarf around my neck and adjusting my goggles and pointing my Spitfire into loops and rolls and turns.
And while I am doing all this, in those three live hours, I will be the only thing I probably really am.
Or maybe the only thing I ever could have been.
If you don’t want to remember me this way, then think of the huggable, kissable, suburban kid I once had a chance to become.
. . .
Since my real name was signed to that confession of how I got into this, I moved on to the serious business of how I could survive it. Watts and Travers had started me thinking about the potential of their Mr. Kaplan. And something about the photograph of Bob Skidmore, the Washington lawyer with the pompadour and leisure suit, made me wonder how many stewardesses he had on scholarship.
25.
D. WAYNE COOPER had a case of the opening-night jumps.
I could tell it soon after I parked the Silver Goblet at the entrance to the St. Regis and saw Cooper come out of the door with Katherine.
Because it was opening night of Cooper’s bar and opera house, I was driving the Goblet and D. Wayne was riding in the back.
Because it was also Katherine’s first night in Gotham after engagements on the Left Coast, I had thought a suite at the St. Regis stocked with Taittinger and Beluga would be a nice gift for the happy, engaged couple.
Riding up front with me in the Goblet was Sally Hawks.
Except when one or both of us was working, Sally Hawks and I had not been beyond groping distance of each other since the night the earth moved. Funny thing is, Sally and I had both thought of the “earth moved” line from For Whom the Bell Tolls that night. But neither of us had used it because it was true, and neither of us wanted to risk getting a laugh just then.
I, for one, was in love.
I loved Cindy, Frankie, D. Wayne Cooper, and my job. I loved the Silver Goblet, anything live on television, tennis, J&B, chicken fried steak with cream gravy, colorful wars, my eight-screen lashup, André the cat, the Grand Corniche, country music, and string bikinis.
I loved movies, Kona coffee, fireplaces, Arleene, thunderstorms, certain restaurants and saloons, a number of people I could mention, running in the mornings, Japanese baths, the Texas Longhorns, short par-fours with the wind behind me, tortillas, backrubs, and Monte Cruz cigars. I couldn’t help but love Marcie, too. I loved all these people, places, and things on various levels.
But I was in love with Sally Hawks.
If she so much as brushed against my knee, it was like cranking up a six-volt battery and shooting the juice in me.
I loved to look at her and talk to her just as much as I loved to feel her. At odd times I would realize she had been on my mind. That day, for example, I had spent four hundred thousand dollars of the network’s money buying TV rights to the Russian ballet. Even while Herb Grant was telling me four hundred thousand dollars was an absurd sum to pay Commies for hopping up and down, I was thinking how much Sally would like it. Of course, I didn’t make my decisions based on Sally’s opinions. That week I had approved 1.2 million dollars for six pilots of which Sally would probably detest four. But that was my effort to affect prime-time programming, and what was going on with us in the front seat of the Silver Goblet, that was love.
“Look at D. Wayne,” Sally said when we stopped the limo in front of the St. Regis. “He’s wearing a buckskin suit.”
Cooper’s new suit had fringes on the sleeves from the elbows down and on the legs from the knees down. I decided Katherine had brought him the suit from Western Costume in L.A. Cooper wore his Indian jewelry, his boots, and his brown beaver hat. Katherine wore a denim outfit with a long skirt, and she clung to his arm.
The way I could tell Cooper was jumpy was he opened the front door of the Goblet and fell in on top of me while the St. Regis doorman held the rear door open.
The doorman helped pull Cooper to his feet.
Cooper pushed the doorman away and said, “Pass moff.”
“It wasn’t his fault, D. Wayne. Get your ass in the car,” Katherine said.
Being at the wheel of the Silver Goblet was like steering with your brain. You thought about turning left, and the Goblet read your fingers and did a left so smooth and fast the smoke from Sally’s cigarette would still be going straight ahead.
“Goddam, watch it, will you, Frank? You like to busted that old Buick,” Cooper said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. Which is not the way he would have answered me if he had been driving.
“You can’t make every fuckin’ light all the way down Park Street,” Cooper said. “I’d rather get there alive than in a cigar box.”
“D. Wayne, are you having menopause?” Katherine said.
“Pass moff, too,” Cooper said.
“Oh, shut up. You know the damned club is going to be a sellout,” Katherine said.
“Shit, it don’t mean nothing to me anyhow. What do I care about a god-dam honky-tonk? Fuckin’ honky-tonks pop up like mushrooms in cow turds. Ain’t that right, Sally?” Cooper said.
“I’ve never been to a country music nightclub before,” Sally said.
“Well, they ain’t none of ’em worth shit,” Cooper said. “Just a pile of hicks and outlaws is all. Lot of fightin’. Do the cowboy two-step. Throw a beer bottle at the sanger. Puke in the parking lot. Goddam, I do love a honky-tonk! Hey, Katherine, I forgot to bring my Binniss. Naw, whewsht, here it is in my left boot. Frank! You damn near hit that Checker!”
“Let me fix you a drink,” Katherine said.
“Maybe one little old South Dallas martini,” Cooper said.
We went into the tunnel at Fortieth, cruised silently through the tube of streaking lights, came out at Thirty-Third and stopped for a red at Twenty-Eighth and Park.
Cooper had drunk a fast South Dallas martini and was working on a second. He had turned on the TVs in the back seat and was watching one of those college football all-star games they keep playing right on through the spring and summer. It was called the Last Chance Bowl and was made up of players no pro scout had ever personally spoken to. The game was played in Danville, Illinois. Our network’s former vice president for Sports had bought it. My predecessor in prime-time programming had locked it into the schedule.
Cooper was describing to me that it was third and fourteen at the Eastern Unknown All-Star thirty-four-yard line. Western Unknown All-Stars had the ball, trailing six to three with a minute to go. Western Unknown quarterback threw a pass. The ball was in the air.
“Son of a bitch!” Cooper said.
“Touchdown?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Cooper said. “They all of the sudden put on one of them promo deals for your show about the saps.”
Cooper turned up the volume.
“. . . huggable, kissable suburban frolic . . . ‘Just Up the Street’ and just on CBC,” I heard the announcer say.
“. . . what a lousy break for a plucky kid,” the football color man said. “The ball just seemed to leak its air.”
The sign above the front door of the club said COOPER’S COUNTRY.
The marquee said JACKIE JACK SNOWDRIFT & THE DEAF COWBOY BAND.
Posters in the windows announced future appearances at Cooper’s Country of Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Billy Joe Shaver, Patsy Cline, Charley Pride . . .
“I think one of those people is dead,” I said.
“Don’t let on,” Cooper said.
I double-parked the Silver Goblet at the curb beside a black Cadillac limo. Cooper had hired two off-duty cops to keep order on the sidewalk and watch over any limos that might arrive.
It was still early, but the bar was almost full and the tables close to the stage were already occupied. We walked on red carpet, seeing ourselves in a long mirror behind the bar. Two guys in overalls stood on a stepladder working with screwdrivers on the baseplate of a chandelier.
“Stealing it, more than likely,” Cooper said.
We went through a door at the side of the stage. A roadie in a cowboy hat sat on a folding chair guarding the amplifiers. He looked at us suspiciously as Cooper stomped through the backstage area to a gray door with HIGH VOLTAGE—KEEP OUT painted on it. Cooper knocked loudly, then pulled out a key ring and unlocked two locks.
A man in suedes with a fat beard and polished glasses jumped up when the door opened and said, “D. Wayne, this is a bitching layout you got, bro.”
Arranged around the musicians’ backstage lounging room were Jackie Jack Snowdrift and the Deaf Cowboy Band. The bearded guy who jumped up was Lester Stagg, their manager-agent.
Cooper introduced everybody. Stagg shut the door behind us and double-locked it again.
Jackie Jack Snowdrift was on his feet. He smiled at us and his adam’s apple jiggled as he swallowed from a bottle of tequila.
“Nice to know you all,” Jackie Jack said. “D. Wayne, you put a sound system in this mother that’d make a harelip sound good. We threw our own stuff back in the truck.”
The room was dark-stained plywood with mirrors and chairs and couches, and a shower and toilet behind another door.
The seven members of the Deaf Cowboy Band looked at us amiably. Three or four were plunking at guitars or mandolins. A couple plunged their arms into a plastic garbage can of ice and beer. Another was asleep on the floor with his boots on the arm of a couch. Four girls in pioneer-woman dresses wondered who we were.
Cooper and Jackie Jack Snowdrift did a cult handshake and then a hug that tipped Snowdrift’s big white felt hat back against his neck.
“You old motherfucker,” Jackie Jack said.
“You country pissant,” Cooper said.
I had known they were friends.
“Love the double lock on the dressing room door,” Stagg said.
There were bottles of J&B and Wild Turkey on a table by the shower. We all made drinks.
“You wrote one of my favorite songs. ‘If I’d Listened,’” I said to Jackie Jack.
“If I’d listened, I’d never found the truth behind your lies, . . .” sang one of the Deaf Cowboys.
The Deaf Cowboys had long hair and wore cowboy hats and jeans. Except for one who wore jeans, boots, and a Homburg.
“It’s weird of you to say that,” Jackie Jack said to me.
Jackie Jack was tall and had a turkey neck and big brown eyes. A pocket was ripped off his Hawaiian shirt. From his belt he took a container made from a polished piece of deer antler.
“I’m trying to recall how it goes,” Jackie Jack said.
He unscrewed the top of the deer antler. The top had a bone scoop sticking down from it. Jackie Jack dipped the bone scoop into the bottom of the antler and came up with enough coke to cover a fingernail. He snorted that much in each nostril and passed the antler to me.
So I did a scoop in each nostril and passed it to Cooper.
I should point out perhaps that despite what Herb Grant thinks, cocaine is not the same thing as heroin. And cocaine is not what skinny little Chinamen smoke on wooden bunks in back streets of Singapore, either. Cocaine is what Sherlock Holmes and Freud used for a smartener.
Cocaine comes from the leaves of the coca bush which mostly grows in the Andes. Mountain Indians in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and places like that chew the leaves or brew them into coca tea. This makes the Indians feel very zippy even when they don’t have food to eat. Which is usually.
Forty years ago, cocaine was an ingredient in tonics and pills you could buy in any drug store.
It was thought then that cocaine was a good nerve and brain medicine. A lot of people think so even today. But cocaine is illegal now. In New York they can put you in prison for life for doing cocaine.
Being illegal, cocaine has become so expensive that almost nobody can afford it except musicians, movie stars, doctors, politicians, lawyers, gangsters, professional athletes, and dope dealers.
I don’t do cocaine very often myself. But I don’t turn it down when it is offered in amiable surroundings such as the dressing room of Cooper’s Country on a gala occasion like opening night.
I will let drop a secret. Herb Grant takes speed. Only he calls it diet pills. Herb Grant says people who take speed should be flogged and locked up.
In his case, I might agree.
In the dressing room, Jackie Jack had picked up his guitar and begun to sing:
I’m gonna do it
Gonna leave this happy scene
I’m packin’ up my outfits
One dirty
and one clean.
I’m goin’ where the sweet life don’t turn sour
where a man can drink and laugh,
forget about the hour.
She’ll get the house and ever’thing else and
I’ll get the albums of Willie Nelson.
Thought it was fine
but she called it hell.
It must have been bad,
She’s still yellin’.
I’m gonna do it
Gonna leave this happy scene
I’m packin’ up my outfits
One dirty
and one clean.
If I’d listened, I’d never found
the truth behind your lies.
The antler had gone around the room.
“Lord, I wish we didn’t have that gig in Buffalo tomorrow,” Jackie Jack said, mashing on his eyeballs. “I’d like to lay in the yard back home in Texas and play with my dog or my wife, either one.”
Cooper said, “How long since you been to sleep, Jackie?”
“Five days, I believe,” Jackie Jack said.
He snorted and passed the antler again.
“You took a nap at the table at that bar in Oklahoma City,” a Deaf Cowboy said.
“Yeah, I forgot. That musta been yesterday,” Jackie Jack said.
“That was four days ago,” Stagg said.
“Ole Jody stayed up thirty-six days one time last fall,” another Deaf Cowboy said.
Jody, the lead guitar player, grinned and blinked.
“I can go a week, but thirty-six days is hard to believe,” Cooper said.
“Cost me seven thousand. What I can remember, it was worth it,” Jody said.
Jackie Jack played a lick on his guitar and said, “I hate to sleep because I don’t dream. If you ain’t dreaming, there’s nothing happening asleep. So I’d rather be awake.”
Cooper grinned dimples at Katherine and said, “Jackie Jack don’t dream because he don’t really go to sleep. He stays up until he passes out.”
“He must be trying to kill himself,” Katherine said.
“Naw, guitar pickers don’t think that far ahead,” Cooper said.
“I didn’t believe trumpet players did, either, until I married one,” Katherine said.
Her first husband, Billy, played in the brass section for Kenton, Dorsey, Sauter-Finegan, and several other big bands. When last heard from, Billy was at Bellevue.
“Trumpet players got good lips, godawmighty,” said the Deaf Cowboy who had his feet on the arm of the couch. “Ever see one of ’em eat corn on the cob?”
“Their necks swell up,” one of the girls said. “Dizzy Gillespie, his throat gets so big. Like a bullfrog.”
“Well, fuck a cornet player,” a red-bearded Deaf Cowboy said.
“You got to get an appointment, man,” the Deaf Cowboys’ horn player said.
“Don’t mind me, keep on talkin’. . . . I’m just lookin’ for my hat,” Jackie Jack sang.
I whispered to Sally that Jackie Jack had just done a line from “Ain’t No God in Mexico” by Billy Joe Shaver. She smiled and accepted this as a fairly important piece of knowledge. Which in fact it was. But you might be shocked at how confused some people could look when you told them something like that.
Sally and I both did another toot from the antler and passed it on.
One thing cocaine will do is make you want to pour J&B down your throat every time you notice there is a glass in your hand.
Another thing cocaine will do is make you consider how stupendously fucking easy it would be to get through lunch at “21” with the Big Guy. Which was what I had to do the next day.
“Jackie Jack, I appreciate you cutting in here for the grand opening,” Cooper said.
The last two times Jackie Jack Snowdrift had played in Gotham, it was to sellout crowds at Carnegie Hall.
“D. Wayne, in my opinion you could stand flat-footed and shit in a dump truck,” Jackie Jack said.
Cooper had worked for Jackie Jack Snowdrift off and on between Cody Huber and me.
“We get out of Buffalo without no serious diseases, I’ll stop and play here awhile before I go home,” Jackie Jack said.
“Uh, I don’t know, Jackie,” Stagg said. “You understand, D. Wayne. This has been a tough tour. Jackie’s tired. He needs to go home from Buffalo.”
What was understood without Stagg saying so was that Cooper also could not pay the Snowdrift price. Jackie Jack could get fifteen thousand dollars for one show at the Convention Center in Tulsa. That didn’t put Jackie Jack in the Cody Huber rock star class. But it was a long way from what Cooper could pay him. Which I happened to know was expenses, scale, and a $2,000 ounce of coke for the band to split. Plus all they could drink. And that was heading toward a possible historical marker for eight musicians and one manager and three roadies and from four to twenty groupies.
