When Guys Get All Knotted Up Over A Dame-With Burt Lancaster’s Criss-Cross In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Zack James

 

Of course Steve Thompson’s story was about a dame, about a guy can’t shake some gal off his mind dame that has been done a million times in Hollywood, and not just Hollywood, by a thousand guys ever since Adams got bopped, be-bopped according to some sources but they we jazz-addled benny popping 1950s hep cats and hipsters so consider the source, some well-placed sources though when you think about the situation by the way so I am not just blowing smoke about that, making it a hypothetical situation or just making it up. Making it up while I am still scratching my head, still in shock really, to fill some time until I figure out how my boy Steve could be such a sap, could have gone back to her, practically begging, practically begging to wind up with some very bad karma, maybe a few slugs or more if things worked out that way. Or maybe  I had it wrong on that script business and it was a thousand times on a bum Hollywood script by a million guys that got waylaid by a skirt because even though I am a partisan of my boy Steve another guy, another smart guy got waylaid by the same frail and so how are you going to figure the story hasn’t been told some number of times since Adam took that first roll in the hay with the Lady Eve, who when you think about weren’t no lady when Adam delved and Eve spanned if you know what  I mean.

But I am getting behind my story, way behind, although if you were old enough to have been able to go see a movie titled Criss Cross starring old time film noir hunk, Burt Lancaster, a 1940s and 1950s hunk which had a lot to do with looking good to guy-starved women with their men away at war, and after that those guys finished up in Europe and the Pacific trying to come back to the “real” world of nine to five, a nice wife, a housewife wife, three kids, a picketed white fence and a dog of indeterminate breeding a bit moody and sullen those women still guy-starved for a while. That film, film noir really, where you get a serious look at the starkly beautiful black and white cinematography and the great shots of our old neighborhood, the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, around Thornton Street, a corner boy generation or so before our coming of age time in the early 1960s, dealt with Burt Lancaster and his travails with his own Anna who came up on those same streets then you know what is what about my boy Steve and I am not telling any tales out of school when I tell you I am talking about the late Steve Thompson.

A lot of that “late,” as in RIP, part was my fault, although about six guys from the old neighborhood who hung around with us at Doc’s Rexall Drugstore on Norton Street and later at Molly’s Diner on Vine, I mentioned Steve’s fate to have told me he was built for the fall, had played with dynamite when he first tangled with Anna and so nothing I could have done would have changed a damn thing. Maybe, maybe not. But I take my share of the fault for this part, because I didn’t see it coming, didn’t see the real reason that he had come back to Los Angeles, had come back to the old neighborhood, right back to the Bunker Hill section where we came of age together to find her, to get back under the linens with her instead of starting fresh in say El Segundo or maybe Pasadena, places where she wouldn’t dream of going, places for the squares she would say in that brittle voice of hers which would be cooing one minute and high dungeon bitch the next, but you probably figured that out already. (Steve told me once he had taken her, after he made a big score at the track and had dough for a few days, to a swanky hotel over on Wiltshire, a place where they don’t ask questions as long as the money is green, very green, that they had satin sheets there but she didn’t like them because when he was on top of her, or when she was giving him some head the damn sheets would slip and slide all over the place so linen was the bedding material she wanted, although more than once she said to me even she had been done in the back of a car more than once, a super 1949 Hudson among others, and scene with no sheets was okay too, strange chick, strange that way.)

So no way I  should have fallen for that  cock and bull story about Steve being lonely for home, for Thornton Street, for Bunker Hill, Jesus, every guy including me was looking to get out of there, corner boy-bred or not once the bikers, and not the candy-assed guys that Marlon Brando was hanging with in The Wild One who ripped through a small hick town with him on a lark but guys with chains and the ability to whiplash with them, hipsters, dopesters, tramps, you know hookers, good time girls, and low-rent con men came to the Hill to nurse their acts. No way. He wasn’t there, hadn’t come back  to support dear old mother in her old age, or his younger brother either who was all hopped up to marry some bimbo, Rita was her name, and she really was a bimbo because I had dated her sister, Kate, for a while after high school once her ex-boyfriend told me she was “easy” if you bought her a few drinks or a little sister, you know cocaine from the drugstore depending on who you knew at Doc’s and while she was nice under the sheets, knew how to “curl a guy’s toes” as she would say when she was done, she was nothing but a bimbo, stupid as hell outside the do-you-want-sex bit, so it ran in the family.

I see I really am getting behind in my story about Steve’s fate so I had better go back to the beginning, not the beginning beginning but the beginning of Steve’s troubles because like I said nothing good was coming of his getting mixed up with a tramp like Anna, Anna Chavez, a Spanish hot-blood or that is the way she played it although she looked as much Indian as Mex to me. I found out later after the smoke had cleared and everybody was accounted for that she was half-Navajo, half Indian on her mother’s side so I wasn’t that far off. But you know when you mix-up hot-blooded races there is bound to be trouble so maybe all that happened was in the cards anyway but somebody else can figure that one out, that one is beyond me except like I said she had that Indian streak in her and that had to mean trouble for a corner boy like Steve.

A guy whose previous experiences with women, girls really, were those sulky Irish Catholic girls who we really never did figure out, one day they had the bible between their legs and the next day, next night really, they were asking if you wanted a blow job to “ease your tensions” by which they meant to give you that treat in order to avoid losing their virginity and still be able to tell their girlfriends how “fast” they were with the boys once the damn Mass was over and they had taken holy communion to build up their sin accounts for the next time.  Once though a girl, one of those bible between the knees types told me she just flat-out like giving head, didn’t like the thought that it might get around that she was getting laid since her older brother was the protective type and might wail on the guy. She didn’t like the idea from what one girlfriend describe to her the mess of vaginal intercourse either. You know that was probably true since she was a swallower, said she also didn’t like the idea that she would get your seed all over her face or hair once you came and the jimson squirted all over the place. We used to have a great debate at Molly’s about the girls who gave head and whether they would swallow your jimson or spit it out. This girl I am talking about also would lick you dry and then keep at it try to get you hard again just for kicks to see if you could come again so she could get another swallow again said the stuff was good for her, that somebody had told her the stuff helped a girl’s complexion.

That was high school stuff  but see we used to after high school, after we graduated from Doc’s and Molly’s to real hangouts, hang at Florian’s Bar on Norfolk Street (and in high school too if Jimmy the Greek was behind the bar, a guy who asked no questions if you gave him his graft, his tip and a big one for serving you the house rotgut whiskey but what are you going to do when you developed a thirst and Jimmy was the only one who was a stand-up guy if you didn’t count the winos over under the bridge on Vernon Street who would get you a pint of whatever you wanted as long as they got their Ripple along with the order). Hey, not the Florian’s over on Central Avenue where a guy named Moose and his boys used to hang out listening to some warbler named Velma singing torch songs, not a bad singer either when I checked later and found she had recorded a few songs in the Billie Holiday style but like a lot of dames was looking for the main chance and so turned Moose in on an armed robbery beef for six bits and a mansion up in the hills. No that Florian’s was strictly for black people in our time and we wouldn’t have been caught dead there, or maybe we would have been caught dead there if we had tried to go upstairs where the real action was. Wouldn’t have gone there even with Roosevelt Barnes, a black as night brother who hung with us, to grease the way.

The one on Norfolk Street as we, or rather Steve found out when it was too late, was run by Slim Dundee the “connected” mob guy, who was using the place as a front for drugs, high stakes gambling and prostitution, prostitution mainly for guys who were into weird stuff like getting whipped by a broad or who liked to tie girls up that kind of thing. Slim was maybe ten years older than us but he was smooth, had all the angles down, and of course was in with the boys that counted back East as they were heading out to claim the West as their happy hunting ground. Here’ the thing though, the thing that Steve didn’t know until it was too later Slim was secretly married to Anna, had been since she was sixteen and he had bopped her, some say be-bopped her which is what made her such a tramp. Be-bopping in our old neighborhood meaning that he was pimping her out, making her walk the streets, you know making her nothing but trade, when he was on his way up to make some dough to buy Florian’s. So Steve when he walked into that fatal rhumba with Anna on the Florian dance floor didn’t know the score, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered that minute when she started getting him stirred up as she rubbed up against him all provocative that first night when Xavier Del Rio and his band were calling the shots.              

Steve should have known when Anna took him out back in the alley that night, both of them half-drunk, both of them randy as hell if what Steve said was right, and showed him the world. Christ he was hooked, hooked right there. But when you are dealing with fire you are going to get burned and so from that very first night she led him a merry chase. Got him thinking marriage and kids and houses shit he could have cared less about before, and which she could have cared less about ever. She kept stalling though every time he asked, every time he said they should settle down, saying they had to know each other better. Here is the funny thing she was half serious about taking a run at Steve, at the square life once Slim got tired of her, tired of her enough to spent more time at his businesses than with her but that was only half serious because she knew what Slim would do to her, to Steve if she stopped being Slim’s property. Yeah, that was exactly the way Slim saw his women, chattel property.  

Here is the outline of the half serious part, how Steve wound up “two slugs” the late Steve. Steve, hell all the corner boys, me too were not only strictly from hunger but we had been less than stellar students and so like maybe from time immortal guys like us got heavy-lifting, you know, working class jobs, me, working over at Selmo’s garage as an oil and grease man and Steve as a trucker, for National Pacific, good pay for working stiffs but strictly to meet expenses kind of work. Anna as the Annas of the world will do wanted dough and lots of it that is why she rode with Slim even when he was hustling her on the streets. She could see he was going places and took the ride along with him. But when she got her hooks into Steve she was too old to go back on the streets although she said she could still show those young gals she would see on Hollywood and Vine a thing or two about doing tricks and Steve said he agreed, said she “curled his toes” about six ways to Sunday, showed him stuff he had only seen in girlie magazines and he had been in the Army and knew what was what when it came to odd-ball sex stuff.

 So he had to do something to get dough, and fast, since Anna was murmuring about going back to Slim, full-time, leaving Steve out in the cold. So Steve got this bright idea that he would go where the money was, no, not a bank like the famous bank robber Willie Sutton said when asked about why he robbed banks but Slim’s Florian’s Bar where he had an office upstairs and kept his big cash in a safe. Do it solo so that no one would figure it was him, do it quietly too and not tell Anna a thing except to meet him up in Malibu on a designated day.            

Well, strangely, Steve actually pulled off the heist, caught Jimmy the Greek putting some money in the vault and just slugged him over the head and scrammed. Made a clean get away. The only problem was that Slim having sensed that Anna was seeing somebody else, or so he thought which was the same thing had a tail put on Steve and so once Steve got to Malibu he was easy pickings. Slim’s man had them cornered until Slim showed up. Then, cool as a cucumber, Slim walked in to the hideaway love nest and without saying a word put two into Steve and then for good measure two into Anna, RIP. Then walked away smooth as silk. Yeah, Steve is the prime example I always use when I warn guys about getting knotted up over a dame. Little good it does.