The Hollywood Trilogy Read Free

came, didn’t spoil things. Debbie leaned over the counter and said to me in a low voice, “Aren’t you David Ogilvie?”
    â€œYes, Ma’m,” I said.
    â€œYou must love his music, too. That’s wonderful,” she said, and went to take food to the couple. They were having a merry old time, now that some coffee was inside them and the baby asleep, and after a while Mom got up and went to the jukebox and played a couple more of Jim’s tunes. She smiled at me on her way back, shyly, and didn’t say anything. The smile thanked me for rescuing them from the hell of four a.m. on the road.
    Debbie thanked me, too, in her own wonderful way, out in the parking lot, and I guess now you know why I chose a career in show business.

    THE FIRST time I saw Jim Larson he was on the bandstand in the Berkeley High School gymnasium playing for a noontime dance, only nobody was dancing much, because the band had gone, mostly, for a break and left a small combo—rhythm, a couple of saxophone players, and Jim with his silver-chased B-flat cornet. They were blowing their heads off. This was a while ago, and while swing was what the big dance band played, this little combo with no name was inspired by Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and those. I don’t know whether it was the music or the performance that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but instead of continuing with what had brought me into the gym, which was the search for a girl named Chloe Melendrez, I joined the big bunch of kids gathered below the band and kept listening.
    My musical tastes haven’t changed much since then, my idea of a major trumpet player is Harry James, but even I could tell that these kids were just really very damned good. And they were so cool. One would take a solo and the others, instead of listening to him, would gather around the piano and talk to each other, tell jokes, paying no attention at all to the kid blowing his brains out, and then casually without any signal that I could see or hear, the whole combo would take up with the soloist and they would rant along like that for a while and then, say, Jim would take the solo and the others would leave him alone with the music (except the drums and bass, of course) and Jim would wander all over the stage in front of the empty folding wooden chairs and all the music racks from the full band, wandering with his head down and his trumpet held so that the bell was almost pointed at the floor.
    He was dressed like the others, Levi’s rolled to a thin line above his shoes, striped orange-and-yellow socks (I had on a pair myself), huaraches that had been dyed from their natural pale yellowish brown to a dark cordovan with an inch and a half of extra sole and heel added by the shoemaker (I had on a pair myself), white dress shirt, only instead of the leather flight jacket like mine or the baseball warmup jacket that nearly every Berkeley High School student wore if he didn’t want to be accused of being a faggot, Jim and the other musicians were wearing either knee-length topcoats or sports jackets. Jim’s was baby blue, two-button roll but hanging open, and his hair was done in the standard pompadour-into-duck’s-ass that separated the pachucos from the goats (these are not racial terms, but social), and of course he and all the others in the combo were wearing the darkest sunglasses they could find.
    I stayed for the rest of the lunch period and then rushed out of the building and across the street for a cigarette before class. While I was standing there wondering where Chloe Melendrez would be later in the afternoon (underneath a football player, as it turned out), Jim came out the side door to the gymnasium building and lit a cigarette and crossed over to where I was. We stood about five feet apart, sucking on our cigarettes while the hotrods rumbled and crackled up and down the street, radios blaring,or other popular hits of the