57 – Dan the man
Even as we
strode back along Fountain to the Ranch Market, I couldn’t get one thought out
of my head, details clicking inside me for the first time as to why Louise had
taken up with me in the first place.
I was like a
stray dog, an animal in need of a good home.
So was Tim and
perhaps in some way every other man Louise ever took up with, needy in some
important way and she had some inner sense that detected it.
I kept thinking
about Sledge Hammer Harry back at the print factory and how she condemned her
for being the wrong kind of woman because she injected herself into his married
nephew’s life, and how she seemed to give him, me, even the boys on the high
school football team something she thought they needed not merely wanted.
Her men weren’t
the self-pitying kind, but the self-deceived, unaware of what was missing in
their lives.
She always
found some important wound she thought she could help heal.
Tim attracted
her perhaps because of the testicle he’d lost in one of his car crashes. He
thought he was whole, she knew better.
This, of
course, made me wonder what she had seen in that pack of villains she’d taken up
with in the mountain, those highway robbers she claimed had kidnapped her, and
had their way with her, until she found some poor sucker on a motorcycle to
help her get away.
But the minute,
a man became aware of his own vulnerability, when he saw his true self in the
mirror, Louise discarded him.
The kittens
didn’t know they were helpless.
Neither did Dan
Newhall, who met a short time later, standing near the front door of Hamburger
Palace on Hollywood Boulevard, dealing his usual prescriptions of speed and
pot, nothing heavy, he just needed to make enough so he could afford a room for
the night.
In fact, he
seemed nervous when he approached us, as if he didn’t quite know what to make
of us, me with my hair still short from my stint in the army, and Louise with a
stare very typical of a tourist.
He seemed to
think we were a cross between narcs and suckers.
People who knew him best called him
"Dan the Man," one of those cool cats that patrolled Hollywood Boulevard
like he owned it. He was so lean he seemed to be all bones, a fact emphasized
by the huge handle bar moustache. He saw himself as a modern urban cowboy, a
Black Bart for 1970 Los Angeles, who generally wore brown books and black
jeans, and assortment of t-shirts, under a leather vest. Later, he would
complete the look when he inherited a leather cowboy hat from me.
. In many ways, he reminded me of my
best friend Hank back east, displaying the same slick moves with available
women. In fact, Dan was a New York boy, someone who had made the trip from one
coast to the other as part of the overall migration of the 1960s. While he
wasn't exactly a hippie in the peace and love dove stuff, he dressed the part,
and his motives for coming to California sharply differed from those of us
around him.
He had not become suddenly inspired by The
Mamas and Papa's "California Dreaming," he was avoiding alimony from
what he called "a money grubbing" ex-wife. California was one of the
few states that did not acknowledge alimony claims from other states, and so
long as he stayed on this side of Arizona, he could whistle a happy tune all he
wanted, and did, though sometimes bemoaned the massive amount of money he made
while living in New York.
Dan was never clear on what exactly he did for
a living back east, except to allude to Wall Street. Apparently, he had been
quite a conservative there, dealing in stocks and bonds the way he later did in
pot and LSD. He made so much money, the divorce -- although costly -- would not
have broken him. He claimed he wouldn't pay on principle.
"I earned that money and I wasn't going
to let no floozy like her take a chunk of it weekly," he said. "I
wasn't going to let her wear fancy clothing and live in a Park Avenue high rise
at my expense."
Yet for his money, he couldn't leave with it.
"The bitch guessed what I was up to and
had a court freeze all my assets," he told us. "I had been a fool. I
let it happen."
His ex-wife figured he wouldn't leave that bundle tied up in litigation,
but she was wrong. All Dan needed was some working capital, something he got
from dealing pot and LSD down around Washington Square, where he developed not
only a taste for the hippie life, but also for the hippie chicks, who joined
him nightly in various crash pads and hotels.
When he had enough money, he split.
Once in California, he completed his
transformation, shedding the last vestiges of Wall Street by growing his hair
long and his handle bar moustache, setting himself up as one of the Boulevard's
regular parade of characters.
He was not big or tough, the way many of the bikers
or street hustlers were. He was shorter than my six foot by several inches, and
less wide in the shoulder than I was, always more or less sloped, giving him an
under-fed look he constantly used to his advantage. Women took him home to feed
him and found him feeding on them in bed.
While Dan proved a scamp in many
respects and avoided work as much as possible, he held true to his word. We
could trust him with vast amounts of cash in a pinch, and when he did take from
us, it was only a meal or a place to stay, a kind of pet we could count on to
act as a guard dog when we needed it.
Most people liked Dan and respected him,
including the local Hollywood icon, Free Press Bob, the local distributor of
the L.A. Free Press, the sale of which supplied many of the local hippies with
a weekly income.
Dan and Bob became close friends, and when Dan
wasn't with us, he was over at the Free Press office, smoking pot and talking
about life with Bob, who used Dan as an information source as to what was going
on along the Boulevard, since Bob hardly got out of the office any more. Both
contemplated Dan's fate when Governor Reagan eventually did away with
California's exemption to alimony laws. Bob also worried over Dan's future,
saying the man couldn't grub off people all his life.
Dan always grinned through a haze of pot smoke
and asked: "Why not?"
Dan's tour of duty took him along the ten
block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that was most popular with tourists,
hippies and everyone else, studying the landscape of bikers and prostitutes,
gays and dirty old men, teenyboppers and Jesus Freaks, for some opportunity
that would supply his need of women, drugs, parties and places to sleep. He
told us later he liked to associate with all kinds of people from junkies to
Hari Krishna, saying it made life interesting for him. While he feared the
cops, he said his talents on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had
taught him how to talk himself out of ugly situations, pulling out his
conservative rhetoric for those moments when he needed it most.
When we first met him, we found him holed up
in a booth at Hamburger Palace -- which he claimed was his home away from home,
the cheap read interior and smell of grease like many of the truck stops we
would later encounter in our travels along the highways. He more than willingly
took up our offer to crash in our spare room, carrying in his handful of
possessions like a pauper. He had a few extra pairs of pants, shirts,
underwear, all tucked into a brown paper grocery bag.
Once installed, he became like a piece of
furniture, and though I did not trust him at first, I grew to trust him more
than most I met in L.A., understanding that we had very little he wanted. He
ate with us. He hung around with us, and though I thought for a time he was
secretly making love to my girlfriend, I later came to believe he never did,
maintaining a sense of ethics I still don't completely understand.
Dan looked old at 20, one of those characters along
Hollywood Boulevard, who once he made up his mind about us, latched onto us and
our supply of cash until the cash ran out and we got evicted from the McCadden
apartment.
He didn’t always wear a floppy hat – he got that from me
after I discarded it, but his silk shirts and aggravatingly tight jeans painted
him as one of Hollywood’s premiere gigolos – a man who greeted any of the new
Midwest girls he happened to stumble upon during his routine patrols.
His narrow, bony face gave him that a sense of maturity that
allowed young girls to seek out his help. His dark steady eyes rarely revealed
his thinking, though he tended to curl the ends of his moustache around his
forefinger when he found girl’s particular attractive and vulnerable.
I often mistook him for 30, rather than 20, part of that
gaunt look he carried with him as he strode along, more cowboy than half the
rednecks that invaded the city on weekends, though monstrously thin, bones
poking out at every corner of his tight clothing.
Although he had a hardy laugh, his voice tended towards
nasal, and gave him away whenever he tried to act macho. To him, everything was
“far out,” two words he could only keep out of a sentence at gunpoint, and
often, failed. With the floppy leather hat, he not only looked like a riverboat
card shark, but sounded that way, too, often speaking so quickly, you had to
ask him to repeat himself to catch everything he said.
Never shy, Dan tended to strut along the Boulevard during
his routine walks, calling out to everybody he knew. This was a habit he had
learned growing up in New York City from which he had fled a bad marriage,
seeking asylum in the independent California divorce laws that robbed a man
blind for divorces instituted in California, but tended to protect people
against prosecution from other states.
Dan had originally come west for his health, an incurable
case of TB that slowed down in the dry air of Arizona. But as a one-time Wall
Street stock broker, he had lived a high life in New York and found Phoenix a
bore.
Unemployed, he found he could survive by crashing in other
people’s homes, selling dope or playing the horses.
While Arizona kept down his hacking cough, the state lacked
many of the other things he considered necessary to make life bearable.
So when his wife went to court to force him to pay, he
slipped over the border into California, at first, seeking a dessert community
where he could continue to life cough-free, and when that proved as boring as
communities in Arizona, he gravitated towards the big cities, touring them all
from Sacramento through the San Francisco-Berkely complex to eventually settle
in Los Angeles.
He would arrange through our kindness, to become a regular
guest in our spare room. This was not a terrible arrangement, since he managed
to educate us about life on the street and taught us about who we should avoid
and how to cop dope without getting arrested.
He also put up with a ton of our bickering, turning his head
away from the worst of our arguing in order to keep his newfound home.
Dan, however, also had a secret hankering to see Alaska,
that one state in the union he had not visited. A bug we caught and attempted
to accomplish, but found our money running dry before we could reach the
Canadian border.
Dan lost favor in our eyes later when we wound up on the
street and he moved on to some other provider, and his habits became like a bad
cartoon, too much of a user with his intentions too obvious.
But he thrived, his cough growing worse over the months we
knew him. He flatly refused to seek medical care. He also refused to move to a
better environment, and continued to smoke cigarettes – which made his
condition even worse. He loved an unfiltered sweet cigarette called “
If he ever lost his temper, I never saw it. Perhaps, he saw
extensive emotion as a waste of the limited time he still had to live. He
seemed to understand that he had to grab at whatever experiences he could when
he could because he wouldn’t have long to appreciate them.
When we left Los Angeles for the last time in late June
1970, we saw him still haunting the streets, but lost touch with him. When we
arrived in New York City later in the year, we ran into an old friend of his
from the road, but even this friend had lost touch with Dan, believing Dan
likely died as he lived, hacking his way up and down Hollywood Boulevard,
grubbing cigarettes, meals and a place to sleep, settling into the comfort of
death well before he ever reached the age of 30.
“You want some pot?” he asked, twisting his handle bar
moustache like a silent movie villain.
“Us?” Louis asked.
Dan’s expression soured a little, as if he realized he had
read us wrong, and turned away in search of another victim.
“Never mind,” he said.
But it was an off night. The people who passed us looked too
dignified for his kind of customer, people making their way to the theater
after a dinner at one of the better restaurants down along The Strip.
The only other viable souls looked as much like dealers as
Dan did, down and out and frustrated, and looking perhaps for a fight.
Dan glanced again at us, twisted the end of his moustache,
and then asked, “How about buying a fellah a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” Louise said, suddenly enthused, as if she’d found
another kitten to adopt.
We stepped inside Hamburger Place, a stark place with yellow
walls and red plastic tables. The serving counter ran along the far wall with
signs behind it indicating every sort of hamburger possible. Doors to the
bathrooms were to the left of the counter with signs on both men’s and women’s
rooms saying: “for customers only, ask clerk for the key.”
Dan slid into one of the booths along the wall, the mirror
along both sides creating a strange effect, duplicating him, and then his
reflection, as well as ours when we sat across from him, this mirror on this
wall, reflecting everything on the other wall, and making the handful of down
and out people seated at a few of the tables seem like a crowd.
Behind us, the large windows let in the illumination from
the street, the blinking of theater lights and car lights, and at intervals,
the passing flashing lights of cops, or ambulances or even a now and then fire
truck.
I did not know it until many years later that the father I
never met, who had left me when I was an infant, drove one of the ambulances that
made their way through the streets of Hollywood, often in the company of a
woman that had become his second wife, though he’s never bothered getting a
divorce from my mother, his first wife.
Fate had put us in the same place at the same time, but
denied us the luxury of actually meeting, or if we did, not allowing us to
recognize each other so far from the place where we had parted.
Louise brought cups of coffee for each of us, and a hot
chocolate for herself, dumping packets of sugar and creamer on the table
between us along with wooden stirrers.
Dan sipped his coffee black, the brown liquid clinging to
his moustache as he did.
He told us who he was, and we gave him our names back.
“We’re pretty new here,” Louise said.
Dan coughed a little, not so much from the coffee, as from
the diseased that wracked his lungs, a disease he said had sent him west from
New York to escape polluted air.
“But the air is just as bad here as it is back home,” I
said.
“True,” he said. “Frankly, I didn’t figure on coming this
far west. But I have a very greedy ex-wife, who I owe a lot of alimony to. She
would really like to get her hands on me. New York State is very strict about
those things. Which is why I left New Mexico when the sheriff’s department
showed up with the warrant. California doesn’t recognize some of the divorce
laws other places have. So I’m safe at long as I stay on this side of the
border.”
“There has to be healthier towns to live in that Hollywood,”
Louise said.
“There is if I want to cut my hair and turn into a Reagan
Republican,” Dan said. “Go too far north or too far south looking like I do,
and I’d get lynched.”
“So what are you doing now?” I asked.
“You heard me, I deal drugs,” Dan said, his voice lowered as
he glanced around the room for what I would later learn might be narcs.
Under cover narcotics cops plagued Hollywood Boulevard the
way roaches did a bad restaurant back in New York, and even with the L.A. Free
Press printing their pictures, it wasn’t always easy to tell who was a narc and
who was not.
“You don’t seem to be doing to well with that,” Louise said.
“I’m not,” Dan admitted. “There’s just too much competition.
If things don’t pick up soon, I might have to get a straight job. Heaven forbid.”
“Where do you live?” Louise asked, taking on that same look
she’d had back at the Ranch Market when she’d first glimpsed the box full of
kittens.
Dan’s expression grew grim, the edges of his eyes taking on
crinkles that made him look older than he was, and sadder, though his gaze grew
hard, suspicious, glancing around the room again, and then with the look at he
had first taken on when looking for narcs, looked at us.
In a lowered voice, he asked, “Are you two cops?”
“Cops?” I said, thinking at first he might be joking.
“You look like a cop,” he said, angrily. “You and your short
hair don’t fit in around here.”
“His hair is short because he just got out of the army,”
Louise said, alarm ringing in her voice as the conversation clearly had become
less friendly.
I cringed. I didn’t like that kind of information being
spread around, just in case someone might be looking for me, a trace of our
retreat from Boulder leading my uncles or perhaps the police to LA.
“If you’re a cop, you have to tell me. It’s California law,”
Dan insisted.
“That sounds like a silly law,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“The last thing I would ever be would be a cop,” I said,
thinking of my one-time best friend, Dave, who had wanted nothing less, and
could not get it. I never felt the same hunger for the uniform, nor lusted for
the kind of power than came with wearing a gun.
“Are you or are you not?” Dan said, his hands flat on the
table, as if to push himself up from it and make his way out.
“No,” I said. “I am not a cop.”
Under his long hair, Dan’s shoulder’s fell, easing out from
a tension I had barely noticed, and from a panic I would see again and again, a
man perceiving himself as hunted, even when he was not.
Then, he looked closely at me, studying my face in an
attempt to make out what I was now that he knew what I wasn’t.
“If you’re not a cop, what do you do?” he asked.
“At the moment, I don’t do much of anything.”
“How does that work?”
“We have a little bit saved,” Louise interjected, looking a
bit concerned, as if picking up on my earlier fear of saying too much. She
clearly regretted telling him about my being in the army after my dark look in
her direction. “We’re on a kind of holiday until one of us can find work.”
Dan grinned. “So you just float?”
“For the moment,” I said.
“Some of my closest friends are like that,” he said. “Do you
live around here?”
“Down McCadden,” I said.
Dan’s eyes sparkled.
“You wouldn’t consider letting me crash at your place,” he
said. “I wouldn’t ask you. But things are tough. It doesn’t look like I’m going
to make enough bread for supper, let alone enough to rent a room.”
I glanced at Louise; she seemed to nod her head.
“We do have a spare room,” she said to Dan. “It’ll be okay
with me if Al says it’s all right.”
Dan’s gaze turned towards me, his brown eyes thick with hope.
I could almost hear the stray cat blues playing in my head.”
“Why not?” I said after a long delay, laughing a bit
although I was still more than a little suspicious.
He and Louise laughed, too, and we made our way back down
The Boulevard, passed Bank of America, and Coffee Dan’s, The Hollywood Theater
and the parade of lights beginning to come alive on both sides of us, the
printed advertisements on the sides of buildings for The London Shop and Graman’s
Chinese Theater giving away to the bolder neon that seemed to turn Hollywood
into its own version of Las Vegas.
We asked us to stop on Argyle, at the local distribution center
for Free Press where he collected his tooth brush, backpack and sleeping bag,
and then joined us along on trek from the Boulevard down McCadden, across Fountain
and Santa Monica to the palm-tree-lined street where we lived.
Louise looked thrilled as if we were bringing home another
kitten, although with his saggy moustache and slumped shoulders, Dan looked
more like a shaggy dog.
Letting him into our home felt wrong to me, like a bride and
groom asking a stranger to come along on their honeymoon.
I kept thinking his was merely a reaction the previous
invasion by Dennis and his friends, and yet I couldn’t get it out of my head, pulling
Louise aside to suggest we ask Dan to leave as well.
“It’s getting near Christmas,” she said. “We can’t let him
be homeless for Christmas. Besides, he already said this is only for a week or
so until he can find more permanent arrangements.”
Yet, somehow in the back of my head, I knew better, knowing
that once he latched onto us, we wouldn’t be able to get loose of him easily.
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