Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (13 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 65
You know what I'm saying?
Club-jumping was fun for us, because we always won in that exchange
A lot of this was to impress the girls, of course.
Hell, always to impress them.
That was pretty much everything . . . the whole idea.
We used to pull our cars into the parking lot by Knights Beach. The top was always down. Six or seven or eight people in the car.
We had this one guy, Bob Luskin. His car is in surgery down at the Chevrolet dealer, so he gets a loaner car. Of course, being L.A., even the loaner is a convertible.
It was this old beater, a '48 Buick convertible. This was in the days when everyone was role-playing and stuff like that. So he puts on this hat kind of like the Blues Brothers and he walks around the beach calling himself Capone.
He's going, "Hey, who wants to ride in Capone's coach?"
Anyway, Luskin winds up with only 24 people in his '48 Buickby actual count.
I don't have to tell you what comes next. He piles the car up. Hits a streetlight. There's bodies flying everywhere. Nobody got killed. But everyone was walking around with, like sprained knees, cracked-up elbows.
I believe he didn't negotiate a turn. He wasn't going very fast. But we all remember the night Capone's coach ate it.
Mostly, though, you'd cruise into the lot at Knights Beach with only six or seven or eight people sitting on the back.
And the night at Knights Beach would begin.
First of all, we used to have static from the L.A. Police Department. Because you weren't supposed to build bonfires on the beach in L.A. County. You'd have to go to the other side of Malibu to Ventura County to build bonfires, or south to Marina del Rey
So, of course, when we built our bonfires every night at Knights Beach, we dug holes in the sand and built them lower down and huddled around them. So we didn't get too much static, except if a helicopter came by.
But we used to have sleepovers and sleep-out parties there.
In those days, the biggest music system was a portable radio. Or we would take the cars and park them backwards with the top down on the parking lot and turn up the radios so we could hear them down at the water.
Because we had to listen to KFWBthat was the radio station. They had the disc jocks. Al Jarvis and Bill Balance, Joe Yoakum, Gene Weed, Sam Riddle, B. Mitchell Reed. Those were the guys you had to listen to. You had to quote them. You had to know them.
Balance would say, "I just got back from the Hollywood Library. Boy, books aren't the only things stacked there."
 
Page 66
Ha, ha.
Hey, what do you want from me? It's supposed to be sophomoric humor. If they were Johnny Carson, they'd have been on TV. They wouldn't have been ditzoid DJ's.
But these real dumb innuendoes, you had to know 'em and spout 'em.
And if the sex jokes were lame, the sex wasn't.
We didn't drink at these parties. Oh, you'd have a couple guys hit a liquor store. They'd get Country Club Malt Liquor. Or Colt 45. I've never been a beer drinker, though. Most kids didn't at the time, either. We had one guy, Floyd, who put hard liquor in Cokes.
In the absence of a lot of drinking or drugs, we spent our time on something more worthwhile.
Making out.
That was much, much bigger.
The sex was very communal. At least in the sense that it was going on all around you.
Blankets. Sleeping bags. That type of stuff.
The actual sex that went on may not be as close as two or three feet away. But maybe 20 feet down the beach. You had a little bit of modesty in that situation.
But you knew that you were doing it and you knew they were doing it, too.
Sometimes, we'd stay all day and all night. There were hot dog stands. One of them was Roadside Rest. They sold dogs, sodas, Icees. Stuff like that. Or you could walk the couple blocks to Santa Monica Pier. There was access to all the good, cruddy junk food you wanted.
You never wanted to stray too far, though, because you never knew what was going to happen next at Knights Beach, and you didn't want to miss it.
Not that you could have missed this one incident which comes to mind.
You couldn't have missed it if you tried.
One night, one of usSteve Wallace, I thinkgot the brilliant idea of pulling off a commando raid. It was going to be on the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Our military objective: Commandeer all the fireworks they were storing up for the big displays they'd shoot off there.
I guess "commando raid" and "commandeer" were euphemisms for "stealing.'' But back in those days it didn't translate that way to us.
"Caper" sounded better than "theft."
It was wrong, hell yeah.
But we were able to rationalize it as a teenage prank pretty easily.
We just thought we had to have those fireworks.
Reason? To shoot 'em off on Knights Beach. What else?
 
Page 67
Which we did.
Memorably.
Let Gen. Wallace debrief you on the results of the first annual Knights Beach Great Fireworks Shootoff.
"We didn't know what the hell we were doing," Wallace said. "We just sat the things down on the beach and started lighting 'em up. We didn't know what special handling they needed or anything.
"So we fire 'em off. The next thing you know, these rockets are zooming all over the beach. Half of 'em don't go up. They go sideways. Which means, they're shooting at us.
"We're running like mad. We're diving for cover.
"A whole bunch of these things are whizzing across the Pacific Coast Highway straight into the banks, into the ice plant and all that good stuff. Traffic has to stop. We actually stopped traffic on the PCH as all these rockets and buzz bombs and everything are ripping across the road.
"It looked like a war zone."
It was pretty spectacular, too.
I think it should have become an annual event. On TV. We should have negotiated the rights. Maybe sold tickets.
When we weren't making love or making war on the beach, the other big activity was dancing.
Lots of dancing.
We had great dances. Great dancers.
I had to laugh when Robert Shapiro, OJ's mouthpiece, popped off in People magazine that he was the best dancer at Hamilton High.
Horsefeathers.
Shapiro was in the class below me, and he would have given his left nut to be a Knight. He was a Count. We wouldn't let him in.
Shapiro was a slimeball. Still is.
And, in addition to being a slimeball, he was not the best dancer at our school. Not even close. He was not cool at all.
Not all Counts were slimes like Shapiro. Some of them were nice guys.
Joel Siegel was a Count. You know, the film critic who's on Good Morning America? Joel was a good guy. I would have liked Joel to have been in the Knights, but he was too fat.
I was the only fat guy allowed in the Knights. That's because I was the coolest fat guy in L.A. County.
But Joel was a good guy. I liked Joel. The Counts could be all right.
But Shapiro was a pud.
I, on the other hand, was what Shapiro wished he could be, in his dreams.
I was a very good dancer.
Not as good as Al Barbakow, who was the best dancer in school.
 
Page 68
He was a Knight, of course.
What you saw on the beaches were the shakin' dances. Chubby Checker, of course, started the first one, the Twist.
Then we did the Monkey. The Jerk (hey, Shapiro mighta been good at this one). The Swim. The Fly. The Watusi.
Hey, man, we did whatever dances we made up, and whatever we wanted to. Because whatever we did, caught on.
We were the trendsetters for the United States.
And I know it was crazy, even to me, but I was the guy setting the trends the trendsetters set.
That's how it went down. Dumpy Lumpy, the squat kid you saw on the "Beaver," was the king of Surf City, USA.
The Frankie and Annette movies, those beach parties in the beach scenes? They all happened a long time before they ever showed up in the movies.
At Knights Beach with me and my buddies and our girlfriends.
Our crew.
The "Beach Blanket Bingo" movies copied us right down the line. We were there with our babes and our cars and our blankets and our radios.
Oh, wait. There's another thing. We had guys who sung.
We didn't always need the radios.
Because we had the people who later played on the radio.
We had some of the biggest groups that ever hit.
Phil Specter went to Fairfax when we were going to Hamilton. We'd party at the beach together. Ever hear of Phil Specter, the god of rock and roll music?
What about Russ Titleman, one of the biggest rock 'n' roll producers of all? He was a Knight, of course.
Annette Klinebard was going to Hamilton. She was the lead singer of the Teddy Bears: "To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him . . . and I do."
That was Annette's song. She sang at Knights Beach.
Richard Clasky had a No. 1 hit, "The Image of a Girl." He was from Hamilton.
Arnie Marcus was with the Hollywood Argyles that did "Alley Oop" and some other big hits.
All that good stuff.
It was down at Knights Beach first.
After the beach, if it wasn't an all-nighter or anything, you'd all meet later at DL's and hash out the happenings of the day
And we'd wolf down big old double-decker cheeseburgers with "Z" sauce. More Suzi-Q's. The original curly fries.
That was the deal, congregating back at DL's. Like meeting at Arnold's on
 
Page 69
"Happy Days."
They copied all that "Happy Days" stuff off what we did. This was our life.
We would go out on a date. I could take a cool girl out. I would maybe go to the movies with her. Or wherever. When the date was over, if she was your girlfriend, you would bring her back to DL's.
If she was just a date, you would take her home. If she was just a chick you were trying to make, you would take her home.
Of course, you would walk into DL's with a big smile on your face to let them know if you scored or didn't score.
Because everyone says, "Well, did you or didn't you?"
Just like Richie and Potsy and Ralph Malph on "Happy Days."
That's the way it happened.
Another common happening was the Stadium Theater where we'd work the old Popcorn Box Ploy. This is where you put your click in the bottom of the popcorn box, let the girl reach down into the bottom of the box.
Surprise!
Say hi to Dick.
My friend, Floyd, got one of the best reactions I ever heard or saw. I don't remember the girl's name, but I remember her howlin' and screamin' and all the guys crackin' up.
The girls, by the way, were crackin' up, too.
If it didn't happen at the beach or the movies or at DL's, it was happening down on The Boulevard.
Hollywood Boulevard.
There has never been and never will be another scene like it anywhere in the world.
George Lucas tried to copy it in "Grafitti."
He failed.
Failed miserably, really.
Nice try, George.
No go.
The real Hollywood Boulevard was much, much wilder than what they showed in "American Grafitti."
Imagine what it would be like in a wall-to-wall traffic jam, with everyone's top down (the car's, hers, yours, more often than not). The music playing. Everyone hitting on everybody else from all angles for six hours a night.
You're on Hollywood Boulevard with neon that's almost like daylight.
Traffic would be about one mile an hour. It took about an hour and a half to go from Hollywood and Vine to LaBrea, a couple miles or so.
Guys are hanging out the window: "Screw you!"
"Yeah, up yours."

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