The Hollywood Trilogy Read Free Page A

day. I thought it would be nice if I complimented him on his playing, so I said:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Open the do’, Richard . . .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Open the do’ and let me in . . .
    â€œYou’re the trumpet player?”
    â€œHuh?” He was so cool . . .
    â€œThat was great in there . . . the music . . .”
    â€œHey, well, yeah . . .” Or something like that. Jim was definitely in his cool period. After he dropped and stomped his cigarette he looked over at me and his mouth curled into a small grin: “Thanks, man . . .”
    He scuffed across the street and reentered the gym.
    â€œHey, well, Oh gee gosh wowie,” I murmured to myself, and the bell rang, so I ran across the slope and into the Academic Building for class.
    The next time I saw Jim was at a dance at the Tennis Club up by the Claremont Hotel. The dance was given by a couple of the high school fraternities, who sold bids to anybody who would buy them. I might as well describe the bids because I don’t think anybody uses them anymore, at least I haven’t seen any since I left Berkeley High; they are little dance cards on colored silken strings that you buy to get into the dance and then give to your girlfriend, several pages, a flocked front cover (they were all different in design) and spaces inside to put the names of the people you danced with, except that it wasn’t considered polite then to cut in or dance with somebody’s date. Girls would collect them and put them up around their mirrors like Christmas cards. You had to buy the girl a corsage, too, so the darkened ballroom full of dressed-up kids would smell like a gardenia factory.
    I had a date, Gloria Somerlade, who did not smell like gardenias because I had spent four dollars on an orchid for her, not because I had the four dollars to spare, but I thought it would show her a little class and make things easier toward the end of the evening. As a matter of fact, the orchid made her dance at a distance from me, to keep from crushing the flower. Jim was playing the dance, but like all the other musicians, working directly from the charts. He was not even the solo trumpet, that was a guy who sat next to Jim and who must have admired Harry James even more than I did, because he played just like him, at least so it sounded to me. I waved to Jim as I danced past once, but he didn’t see me, even though he wasn’t wearing his dark glasses.

    WE KEPT running into each other on the #7 streetcar after school, except on the days he had practice, and after he had hit me up for a Camel several times, we got to talking and joking around. The streetcar was always crowded with kids standing in the back, and that’s where we rode, sometimes getting on through the back door without paying, a dime was a dime, ⅕ of a drunk if you could get served. Another kid we knew named Bunky could work all the contraptions in the back of the car, which was just like the front, so that when the car got to the end of the line the driver just came back and set up and away we go. But with the thing packed and rolling along Grove Street, Bunky would take control and get us heading in the wrong direction. The driver would get up and fight his way through us kids with blood in his eye, while Bunky sneaked around outside and planted the track bombs he had stolen off the car in the first place, so that when the poor harassed driver finally got things calmed down, right away BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
    Jim and I thought this was pretty funny stuff.
    Then we would spend weekend afternoons at his place, a tiny apartment in Cordenices Village, the housing project on San Pablo Avenue in West Berkeley, the worst part of town. He shared the apartment with his mother, but I never saw her. She was across the street at Knapp’s Bar when she wasn’t working, so we had the place to ourselves. Mostly we stayed in his room, drinking beer, smoking Camels, listening to