The Yggyssey (2 page)

By this time, my father was getting a little bored with being a movie star. Also, he was pretty old. He could still ride better than anyone but Roy Rogers, and he was still the handsomest man alive, but he wasn't enjoying being an actor so much. Also, he had saved a ton of money and still had his share of the Alpenglue fortune, so there was really no reason to work. His last movie was called
The Baritone Buckaroo Fights the Nazis.
After that, and to this day, he spends time at our ranch in Arizona, or here standing around Gower Street talking with the other old cowboys, and also hanging out in the History Department at UCLA, helping to record the history of the Old West.

My mother is much younger than my father. She is sort of a normal age for a mother. She is a psychiatrist. She and my father met when the studio sent him to see her about the morbid fear of horses he had developed. He wasn't so much afraid to ride them, but when he was in bed he would imagine that there were horses in his living room, drinking his liquor and laughing at him. The next day, on the movie set, he would turn suddenly and say to the nearest horse, "So, you think I'm a joke, is that it? You think I'm a figure of fun, do you, you miserable hay burner? I know what you and those other plugs think of me." So the studio sent him to see my mother, and they talked it over. She helped him to understand that his problem arose partly from having grown up in the glue business, and also that the horses probably really were laughing at him for being in those lousy Baritone Buckaroo movies.

My mother is the most beautiful psychiatrist alive, and she looked good with my father driving around Los Angeles in the Bugatti touring car, getting hot fudge sundaes at drive-in restaurants. Pretty soon they fell in love, got married, and had me.

My mother still does psychiatry. Most of her patients are movie stars. She says that Hollywood is a gold mine for a psychiatrist. Because she is a psychiatrist, she has theories of child rearing. Her biggest theory is that stress is bad. She thinks that all ailments, mental and physical, are caused by stress. She thinks stress is worse than the Black Plague or a herd of stampeding bull elephants. I am strictly forbidden to be frustrated, repressed, or restrained. This can be annoying. Sometimes you want to be frustrated, repressed, or restrained. Of course, I am also strictly forbidden to be annoyed. To keep me as stress-free as possible, my mother enrolled me in the Harmonious Reality School.

The Harmonious Reality School is modern, progressive, and advanced. It was started by an avocado grower from the San Fernando Valley named Dr. Nathan Pedwee. He wasn't a regular doctor—he was a fruitopath. Fruitopathy is the science of healing diseases with various kinds of fruit. Dr. Nathan Pedwee got rich selling avocados
and real estate, and also wrote a book about how to improve your golf game. His theory about how to become a better golfer was to live a stress-free life. He thought that stress created muscular tension, and that would mess up your swing. Avocados, he said, were the antidote to muscular tension—avocados, and never being made to do anything you didn't want to do. The school runs on his avocados and no-stress principles, as explained in his book
The Pedwee Way.

You can major in finger painting through sixth grade at the Harmonious Reality School. It is a fully accredited primary and secondary school, recognized by the Department of Education of the State of California.

I like the Harmonious Reality School fairly well. You can do pretty much whatever you want, including getting up and leaving the premises. I do this fairly often. The school is near Sunset and Vine, which is smack in the middle of Hollywood, and there are lots of things to do and look at in the neighborhood. The teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and mostly illiterate, are friendly.

Needless to say, there's a lot of health food served at lunch, especially avocados, and this guy called Gypsy Boots comes in from time to time to lecture on nutrition. I tend to slip out at lunchtime and get a bowl of chili or a hamburger over on Vine Street.

I don't often socialize with the Harmonious Reality kids outside of school. It's not that they aren't nice kids, but they are all ... droopy. They are too cooperative—they're completely on board with the health food, no-stress, never-compete, avoid-anything-difficult philosophy, and it makes them seem to me that they're missing a part.

I read in
Coronet
magazine, in one of those bottom-of-the-page things, there's an old Spanish saying: "A kiss without the mustache is like an egg without salt." This stuck in my mind. For one thing, if a kiss is like an egg, that's pretty disgusting right there. And if it's like an egg with a mustache, that's beyond disgusting. But it makes a point I can apply to my fellow Harmonious Reality students—they're like eggs without mustaches. I prefer to spend my time with the various characters who hang out in the neighborhood. There are always cowboy actors, extras who pick up work by the day at the movie studios, hanging out around Gower Gulch (that's Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard).

Most of these guys were real cowboys, and they all know my father, so they're nice to me. They lean against the buildings, rolling cigarettes, and spitting, and telling stories about the old days. Of course, every one of them has a secret map to a gold mine that's guarded by Indian spirits or magic rattlesnakes. There are a couple of drugstores where the serious actors hang out and show off for one another. They're not as interesting as the cowboys, but it's fun to watch them, especially when someone like Orson Welles or some other big director comes in for a milk shake and they all try to get him to look at them.

And then there is a nice assortment of street loonies, like the Leprechaun Man, who's always talking about, and to, the Little People, and my friend Chief Crazy Wig, who is a real shaman, I think, and occasionally works as an Indian extra at Columbia pictures.

When I get tired of standing around in the street I can go into the CBS building and talk to the engineers at radio station KNX and look at all the neat radio equipment, or sit in the audience and watch them do a radio show. They have a television station too, but not much goes on there in the daytime. And there's the public library, where I spend a lot of time, reading or talking with the old men and lady bums who sort of live there. Another place I like is the Hindu temple and mushroomburger stand with a nice garden behind it.

As for personal friends my own age, there are these military school kids I spend time with, Neddie Wentworthstein and Seamus Finn. Neddie lives in the Hermione, and Seamus Finn hangs out with Neddie's family most of the time, so he as good as lives here. A couple of years ago, Neddie had us all convinced that the world was coming to an end—the world, or civilization as we know it—and only he could prevent it from happening. Crazy Wig and another Indian shaman named Melvin were in on it. The big crisis was supposed to happen on a certain night, and Neddie went off to have some kind of battle with the powers of darkness.

And that was the last we heard about it. The next day, everything was normal as usual. Neddie said there was nothing to worry about and refused to discuss the details. In fact, the only unusual thing was that it must have rained a colossal amount during the night while everyone was sleeping, because the whole town was really, really soaking
wet in the morning. I mean really soaking wet. Stuff was floating.

So I assume Neddie is kind of crazy, or maybe he was just influenced by Crazy Wig and Melvin, who are obviously deranged. Nice guys, though, all of them. Seamus Finn is the handsome son of the handsome movie actor Aaron Finn. He's nice too. I went to his bar mitzvah.

Seamus and Neddie go to Brown-Sparrow Military Academy, which is the complete opposite of Harmonious Reality. They have to wear uniforms, and march, and salute each other. I don't see how they can stand it. And they have a friend who is a ghost! Billy the Phantom Bellboy. He's different from the Hermione ghosts in that they all sort of hang around and haunt one place. Billy used to haunt a hotel in Arizona, but he took off with Neddie and Seamus and now he lives—well, not lives—in Los Angeles, and goes all over the place, wherever he wants. Those are my friends. Call me weird, but I think my best friend is Chase the ghost bunny rabbit.

It's about a hundred times harder to cut school at Brown-Sparrow Military Academy than it is to just walk out of Harmonious Reality. It's a military school. They have rules, and rules, and rules. It may help that the guy who stands guard at the gate, Sergeant Caleb, is Neddie Wentworthstein's shaman friend Melvin. I have seen Melvin at work, in his crisp Marine Corps uniform—apparently he is a genuine retired Marine Corps sergeant—and it's a far cry from the way he looks when he is hanging out at the Rolling Doughnut, where he dresses like a be-bop hipster.

Anyway, on this particular day, I came out of the Harmonious Reality School like a shot at lunchtime, intending to head over to Vine Street and get a tamale. There in the street, wearing their stupid uniforms, were Neddie and Seamus Finn.

"Going to lunch?" Seamus asked.

"Come with us. We're going downtown to Clifton's Cafeteria."

"Is that the gigantic place with the waterfalls, and the fake Polynesian decorations, and the neon palm trees? I've heard about it."

"That's the place," Neddie said. "Also, there's part of the restaurant where there's an indoor rainstorm every twenty minutes, you don't have to pay for your meal if you don't want to, and there are life-size dioramas of scenes from the life of Jesus in the basement."

"I've always wanted to go there," I said. "But how are we going to get downtown and back? We might have to wait an hour for a bus, each way, and it's too far to walk."

"Behold!" Seamus and Neddie said. They stepped aside to left and right and revealed a fancy Packard convertible.

"Isn't that your father's car?" I asked Seamus.

"Yep. We borrowed it," Seamus said.

"Wait! You guys aren't old enough to drive," I said.

"Billy is going to drive," Neddie said.

"Billy? Billy the Phantom Bellboy? He's a ghost. He's dead."

"But I have a license," Billy said. If I squinted, I could just about see him in the driver's seat. Ghosts hardly show up well in daylight.

"Putting aside that you are not among the living, how could you have a license?" I asked Billy. "You don't look any older than maybe fourteen."

"I'm fifty-nine," Billy said. "I was fifteen when I died."

"Wait. You got a driver's license after you were dead?"

"Do you want to stand around in the street talking, or do you want to come with us?" Billy asked. I climbed into the car.

"Are you sure this is all right with your father?" I asked Seamus.

"As you know, Aaron Finn is sort of my employer," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said. "I act as a technical advisor on ghostly matters, and script consultant. Use of the car is one of the fringe benefits, since there's no point paying me with money, me being a ghost and all." He put the car in gear and it lurched forward.