Crime Wave Part 29

Wilbur Hanson was a conscientious objector. He refused to fight in World War II and served out his draft commitment with a pick and shovel. The Hanson family moved back to L.A. in '46. Curtis and his older brother banged around a big, run-down house at Fifth and Hobart. His mother rented out their spare rooms. His father taught at the Harvard Military School and chauffeured rich kids to school for extra money.

Wilbur Hanson was a gifted and thoroughly dedicated teacher. He took his students on field trips and gave them more time than he gave his own sons. The Harvard School was an upscale dump site for the sons of the Hollywood elite. Darryl E Zanuck's son matriculated there. Old Man Zanuck got a hard-on for Wilbur Hanson. He didn't want no f.u.c.king CO teaching at his kid's school. He applied the big squeeze and had Wilbur Hanson bounced from Harvard.

Wilbur Hanson caught a Red-scare bullet but dodged another one. He got certified to teach in the L.A. city school system. He was not excluded on the basis of his expressed pacifism or his doc.u.mented CO status. The family moved out to the San Fernando Valley. Wilbur Hanson began teaching at a school in Reseda.

Wilbur and Beverly June Hanson encouraged their sons to read. Beverly June loved movies and dragged Curtis and his brother to bargain matinees all over the Valley. He had seen dozens of film noir flicks before he knew the term "film noir." He watched Dragnet, M Squad, The Lineup, Racket Squad, and Mike Hammer every week. School bored him. His real curriculum was films, novels, and TV shows. His major course of study was narrative. His minor course of study was crime.

He wrote a story called "The Man Who Wanted Money" and read it to his fifth-grade cla.s.s. His teacher found the story and Curtis's general crime fixation disturbing and ratted him off to his parents.

Curtis had a dual-world thing going. He had his family/school world and his film/book/TV-show world. He figured he'd grow up, become a screenwriter and director, and pull off a two-world merger.

He developed a dual-L.A. thing. It grew out of a dual thing with his dad and his uncle Jack.

Wilbur Hanson was a morally committed schoolteacher with $1.98 in the bank. Jack Hanson was a morally desiccated rag merchant who sucked up to movie stars and s...o...b..z players.

Dad had a shack in the Valley. Uncle Jack had a big pad in Beverly Hills. Dad spent most of his time with schoolkids. Uncle Jack hobn.o.bbed with Hollywood swingers. Dad took kids on uplifting field trips. Uncle Jack owned Jax--the grooviest, s.e.xiest, most altogether bonaroo boutique on Rodeo Drive.

Curtis spent weekdays in the Valley and weekends in Beverly Hills. Uncle Jack loved having him around as a companion for his son. Curtis's two worlds were regulated by his school duties and divided by the Hollywood Hills. Uncle Jack gave him access to a world within his world. It was the fast-lane world of aggressive people out to get all they could and flick the cost. That worldwithin-a-world dovetailed with Curtis Hanson's crime fixation. Uncle Jack's movie-biz fixation dovetailed with Curtis's ambition to grow up and become a filmmaker.

Jack Hanson was noir personified. He was a movie-biz toady straight out of The Big Knife. He h.o.a.rded money and paid his people the minimum wage. He was arguably the cheapest c.o.c.ksucker who ever walked the face of the earth. He opened up the Daisy in the mid-'6os. It was the first members-only dance club in Beverly Hills. Jack sold memberships to s...o...b..z hipsters and employed it as his vehicle to suck his way further into the in crowd.

Curtis watched. Curtis took mental notes. Curtis finished school and got a chump job with Cinema magazine. He drove copy to the typesetters and film to the photo lab. The magazine started to go belly-up. Curtis convinced Uncle Jack to take over the operating costs and let him do all the work.

He did it. He wrote the critical pieces and feature interviews and took the photographs. He took some shots of Faye Dunaway and was paid with a plane ticket. He flew to Texas and watched the filming of Bonnie and Clyde.

It was a period film and a crime film. Curtis Hanson wrote it up in Cinema magazine. He prophetically called it "the most exciting American film in years."

I read that issue of Cinema magazine thirty years ago. I was 19 and strung out on pills and Thunderbird wine. I was breaking into houses in a ritzy L.A. enclave and stealing things that wouldn't be missed. I was shoplifting and reading crime novels and going to crime movies.

Hanson got me hot to see Bonnie and Clyde. I saw it and wigged out on it. I stole the money that paid for my ticket.

A year ago, I drove out to Lincoln Heights to watch a day's filming of L.A. Confidential. It was mid-August and very hot and humid.

A northeast-L.A. street was doubling for a street in south L.A. Nineteen ninety-six was doubling for 1953.

Period cars lined the curb. A dozen equipment trucks and trailers were parked just out of camera view. Twenty-odd technicians and gofers were standing near a catering van. They were snarfing cookies and ice-cream bars in the hundred-degree heat.

The focal point was a shabby wood-frame house. It was a near perfect match to the house I'd described in my novel. I visualized the scene I wrote in 1989.

A cop vaults a backyard fence and walks up a flight of outside stairs in broad daylight. He slips the catch on a second-story door and enters a cramped apartment. He sees a woman gagged and tied to a bed with neckties. He walks into the living room and shoots her presumed a.s.sailant in cold blood.

My cop was named Bud White. He was a huge man with a football-injury limp and a gray flattop. The movie Bud White is an actor named Russell Crowe. He is a compact and muscular man with dark hair and a quasi-flattop.

I watched Crowe nosh an ice-cream bar and bulls.h.i.t with extras in cop uniforms. The actors playing Lieutenant Ed Exley and Captain Dudley Smith were standing across the street. My Exley was tall and blond. Guy Pearce, the film Exley, is medium size and dark haired. My Smith was burly and red-faced. James Cromwell, the film Smith, is pale and imperiously tall.

I felt like I was entering a brand-new L.A. world and a multimedia extravaganza. Period snapshots and scandal-rag headlines formed the visual borders. The audio track was the sound of my written words spoken by the actors around me. My mother's ghost was somewhere in the mix. She was eating popcorn with a spoon and humming Kay Starr's 1952 hit, "Wheel of Fortune."

I reeled behind a jolt of heat and a thousand quick-cut blips of my own private L.A. I had written L.A. Confidential as an epic hometown elegy. It was established fact and half-heard scandal and whispered innuendo. It was the world of horror I had first glimpsed the day my mother died.

It was Mickey Cohen and his henchman Johnny Stompanato. It was Hush-Hush magazine, my stand-in for Confidential. It was s.e.x shakedowns and perverts modeled on Stephen Nash and Harvey Glatman. It was the "b.l.o.o.d.y Christmas" police-brutality scandal and the twisted story of a theme park disingenuously disguised to remind readers of Disneyland.

L.A. Confidential was conceived and executed as a large-scale novel. It was not written with an eye toward movie adaptation. I did not expect it to bushwhack me six years after its publication.

I read the screenplay. Two writers had taken my milieu, my characters, and a good deal of my dialogue and fashioned their L.A. world within my L.A. worlds.

I walked into the wood-frame house. I was entering their visual world now. I pa.s.sed the bedroom where the woman would be gagged and bound with neckties. I found Curtis Hanson framing a shot in the living room.

He saw me and smiled. He said, "What do you think?"

I said, "It looks inspired."

I had dinner with Hanson that night. We met at our mutual favorite restaurant.

The Pacific Dining Car is a sw.a.n.ky steak pit on the edge of downtown L.A. It's been there since 1 921. It's dark and wood paneled. It's a self-contained time warp in a city of time warps and dark continuums.

Hanson's uncle Jack brought him to the Car for steak dinners that his father couldn't afford. My father brought me to the Car on my tenth birthday, in 1958. I met my wife at the Car. A minister married us a few yards from my favorite booth.

I sat down in the booth and stretched my legs. I was exhausted.

I'd watched Bud White shoot the rape-o two dozen times. I'd watched Hanson refine and perfect the scene. I felt dispersed. I was losing track of all my L.A.'s.

Hanson showed up a few minutes later. A waiter brought us our drinks automatically.

We discussed the day's shooting and the thematic shifts between my novel and his film. Our conversation drifted back to L.A. in the '5os and the dark corners we had peered into as children.

I said, "There's a phrase that puts it nicely."

Hanson said, "Tell me."

I said, "L.A.: Come on vacation; go home on probation."

Hanson laughed and said, "It's inspired."

October 1997

LET'S TWIST AGAIN.

Seasons of grace come and go. People never designate them in th moment. They look back individually or en ma.s.se and imposc narrative lines. It all comes down to what you had and what you lost.

The lines apply to nations, cities, and people. Kodachrome snapshots offset them. Faded colors send out a glow. Gooey music fills in the rest of the picture and tells you what to think.

It was better then. We were better then. I was younger then.

It's specious stuff all the way. It's schmaltzy hindsight built from verisimilitude. It obfuscates more than it enlightens. There's just enough hard truth in it to keep it running strong.

One season defines the whole mind-set. A formal name denotes it. Knights and maidens in a savage time. A three-hanky weeper on stage, screen, and CD.

A corny musical and a worn-out media concept. With a threepoint intersection running soft and sure in my head.

I had my own Camelot. It ran concurrent with the Broadway show and Jack Kennedy's spin in the White House. I lived in a dive apartment with my p.u.s.s.y-hound father and our unhousebroken dog. I had a fancifully corrupted mind and poor social skills. I had a Schwinn Corvette with gooseneck handlebars, chrome fenders, rhinestone-studded mud flaps, fringed saddlebags, and a speedometer that topped out at 150 miles per hour. I had a great city to roam and a s.h.i.tload of kid lore to a.s.similate.

Our pad straddled Hanc.o.c.k Park and lower Hollywood. To the south and southwest: Tudor castles, French chateaus, and Spanish haciendas. To the north: small houses and studio back lots. To the east: wood-frame cribs and apartment dumps on a hilly plumb line downtown.

My beat covered Hollywood to Darktown. The southern border was a race line that white kids never crossed. It was pre-riot L.A. L.A. was pre-hysteric. Parents told their kids not to stray south of Pico and let the little flickers roam.

I started roaming at age i i. It was summer I had to start junior high in September. It scared the s.h.i.t out of me.

I bike-roamed. I shoplifted books and candy bars. I ran into strange kids in bike cliques and picked up information.

How this girl popped some Spanish fly and impaled herself on a shift k.n.o.b. How Hitler was still alive. The word on aspirin and c.o.ke. The word on Liberace and Rock Hudson. The word on your local junior high schools.

Le Conte Junior High, AXA "Le c.u.n.t": Coool guys. Fast girls. Partyville, U.S.A. A breeding ground for studs in the "Lochinvars" and "Celts." Be cool or stay out.

Virgil Junior High: Full of cholos with Sir Guy shirts and slitbottomed khakis.

King Junior High: Full ofj.a.ps and creeps from Silverlake--the "Swish Alps." Lots of h.o.m.os who wore green on Thursdays.

Louis Pasteur Junior High: Full of uppity spooks who thought they were white.

Berendo Junior High: Danger zone. Pachuco rumbles. Full of Catholic girls who smoked Maryjane and had babies out of wedlock.

Mount Vernon Junior High, AKA "Mount Vermin," AKA "Mau-Maunt Vernon": n.i.g.g.e.rland, U.S.A. Beware! Beware! Frequent homicides and race riots on campus.

I was slated to attend John Burroughs Junior High, AKA "J.B." I asked about it. n.o.body had a riff down pat.

I spent three years at J .B. It was the buffer zone between my dark childhood and bleak postadolescence. J.B. was Camelot writ small and contained and unimpaired by hokey images of lost innocence to come. It was my taste of earned privilege and potent destiny and the unacknowledged secret pulse of my wild L.A. trip.

J.B. stood at 6th and McCadden. It was the southwest edge of Hanc.o.c.k Park. Kosher Canyon kicked in a few blocks away. J.B. divided two diverse and significant hunks of Central L.A.

Pedigreed goys and big-a.s.s homes to the east. Hard-scrabbling Jews in duplex pads and stucco huts to the west. A legacy of entrenchment and a prophecy of powerful emergence. A contentious demographic. Two gene pools programmed to sp.a.w.n swift kids.

J.B. was red brick and built to last. The main building and north building were contiguous and joined at an L-shaped juncture. Offices and cla.s.srooms covered two floors linked by wide stairwells.

The main building adjoined a large auditorium. A blacktop athletic field stretched south to Wilshire. Shop bungalows and two gyms ab.u.t.ted the main and north buildings perpendicularly. They enclosed the "Lunch Court"--a paved s.p.a.ce dotted with benches and green-and-gold trash cans.

J.B. was named after a dead guy who f.u.c.ked around with plants or soybeans. n.o.body stressed his accomplishments or gave him much play as an icon. He was stale bread.

The student body was 8o% Jewish. I didn't know from Jews. My father called them "Pork Dodgers." My Lutheran pastor called them complicit in the famous Jesus Christ homicide.

Fifteen percent of the kids hailed from Hanc.o.c.k Park. Their parents preferred J.B. to prestigious prep schools. My guess: they wanted their kids to compete with Jews so they'd grow up tough and kick a.s.s in business.

The final component: Gentile riffraff and a few Negro kids who escaped restrictive housing laws and certain death at Mount Vermin.

There's J.B., '59. I storm Camelot on my steed--a two-wheel taco wagon.

I'm tall. My dog s.h.i.ts on my living-room floor. I pick my nose with gusto. I stick pencils in my ears and excavate wax in full view of other kids.

I'm afraid of all living things. I pull crazy-man stunts to attract attention and deter kid predators. My psycho act is now in its third or fourth school year. The performance lines are starting to blur. I can't tell when I'm putting people on and when I'm not.

It's '59. Performance Art has not been conceptualized. I'm prescient and avant-garde and unaware that I just got lucky. Art requires an audience. Camelots play out on stages--large and small. I hit the one place that would tolerate and occasionally laud my amped-up and wholly pathetic act.

I didn't know it going in. J.B. was regimented and rule-bound.

A dress and appearance code was strictly enforced. Jeans, Capri pants, and T-shirts were banned. Boys kept their hair neatly trimmed--under threat of swats on the a.s.s. Girls wore oxford shoes and maintained low hemlines.

The boys' vice-princ.i.p.al ran J.B. His name was John Hunt. He was a short, bl.u.s.tery man. He had bloodshot eyes and ruptured veins and strutted like a low-rent Il Duce.

Hunt stressed hard work, hard play, and physical reprisals for f.u.c.kups. He addressed Boy's League a.s.semblies and got borderline bawdy. He said s.h.i.t like "You're young men now, soon you'll discover that broads should be broad where they ought to be broad," and "I know you're studying hormones in science cla.s.s. You know how you make a hormone? Don't pay her."

Hunt dispensed swats with a s.p.a.ce-age paddle. Air shot through holes on the downswing. He made you drop trou. The aftermath exceeded the impact. The welts, blood dots, and sting lingered loooooong.

Hunt had a teacher/goon named Arthur Shapero. Hunt was 56". Shapero was 64. He looked like Lurch and Renfield from Dracula. I kept waiting for him to say, "Master, I come!"

Shapero hulked around the lunch court. Hunt kept him on a long choke chain. He ran the s.p.a.ce Cadets, s.p.a.ce Legion, and Solarons--kiddie cops empowered to cite other kids for littering and dress-code infractions.

The little s.h.i.ts abused their power. Hunt and Shapero backed them up. It was minidrama worthy of a mini-Camelot--and as futile as JFK's attempts to suppress Fidel Castro.

You couldn't quash the exuberance oftheJ.B. rank-and-file kid. You could infiltrate his imagination and hope your lessons took. The J.B. rank-and-file teacher knew this. He knew he was up against a big ego and a spongelike mind eager to soak up the latest and greatest knowledge--if it was sold in a boredom-proof package. He learned to digress off his basic curriculum and work in topical angles. He never played down to his kid audience.

I had my act. The teachers had theirs. We shared the same audience.

I infiltrated it as aJ.B. student. I stood apart from it as a grandstanding leper afraid of his peers.

It's fall I hitJ.B. I scope out the turf and rule out a.s.similation. I'm a stranger in a strange f.u.c.king land. Ike is still in the White House. I don't know from Camelot. I don't know that I'm about to embark on my first and most formative season of discourse.

With: Little sharpsters with hungry eyes and paperbound copies of Exodus in their hip pockets. Jokesters who said, "Did you know Abraham Lincoln was Jewish? He was shot in the temple." Twelve-year-olds who'd read more books than I had and could recite baseball stats back to the time the n.a.z.is ran Mom and Dad out of Poland. Hanc.o.c.k Park surfers who dry-surfed the main building on slick-soled penny loafers. Girls with stunning big features die-cast for s.e.x appeal generations back in the shtetl. Girls bred breathtakingly blonde and raised refined by the back nine at Wilshire C.C. Kids with their own acts. Kids who could spiel, spritz, run shtick, and perform without hocking their soles.

I settled in.

I listened. I learned. I performed.

I observed.

Formal learning came easy. I read fast and retained well. My father did my math homework and supplied me with crib sheets. I gave oral reports on real books and books that I concocted extemporaneously. I hipped a few kids to my ruse and watched them howl. No teacher ever busted me for book-report fraud.

J.B. had some tres hip teachers. Lepska Verzeano was Henry Miller's ex. I asked my father what this meant. He waggled his eyebrows at me.

Walt Macintosh killed Reds in Korea. His gun barrel melted during a Red death charge. He doped out the '60 campaign and held a cla.s.sroom election. The Jewish kids backed JFK. The Hanc.o.c.k Park kids backed Nixon. I backed Tricky d.i.c.k--because my father said that JFK took his orders from Rome.

Laurence Nelson got me hooked on cla.s.sical music. Beethoven wrote the sound track for myJ.B. years.

I fell for an English teacher named Margaret Pieschel. The kids called her Miss "Pie-Sh.e.l.l." She was dark-haired and slender. She had bad acne. The J.B. boys considered her a dog. I sensed her inner torment and caught her s.e.x vibe full on. It was Beethovian. I stared at her and tried to zap her telepathically. I tried to tell her, I know who you are. I looked at her and knew what it was like to love a lonely woman to death.

J.B. teachers were cla.s.sifiable and divisible by two. Call them the Quick and the Dead.