The Hollywood Trilogy Read Online Free Page A

finished before long, since we had been nipping at it in the trunk of the car.
    Even then the thought of going up onstage scared the shit out of me, but Jim was up there in front of the mob, loving it, bright-eyed, holding his beautiful silver-chased B-flat cornet with its glowing brass bell, onstage all the time I was there, through fistfights, guys yelling and vomiting, musicians coming and going. Later, when Jim’s group was finished with their part of it, he saw me from the stage, shading his eyes, and waved for me to come on up, and then laughed because he knew I’d be scared, and started to leave the stage himself, but the leader of the new guys, a tall skinny black kid with a glowing saxophone, said into the mike, “Hey, Doctor Jim, may we detainyou?” and to a hell of a lot of applause—every bit of it deserved—Jim came back onstage, waved his trumpet over his head as a kind of thank-you and they all took off into a version of “How High the Moon”—five or six black guys and Jim—that lasted at least twenty minutes and had everybody in the place screaming like banshees.
    That’s the way it was, and I can understand how Jim thinks of it as the best night of his life, although at some point during the early morning hours Dotty McCarty slipped off (or was kidnapped, what did I care?) and I saw her no more, not that I gave a damn about her, but Forni was pretty sarcastic all the way back to my neighborhood, and for that matter it wasn’t pleasant to have on all those fine duds and end up alone. But hell.

    I DROVE from Sonoma Mountain to Hollywood on a Monday, eating my way south as usual, pancakes with raspberry syrup, fried eggs O.M. with fried potatoes and bacon, rye toast with apple butter, always an eightpack of Coca-Cola on the floor of the car for me to uncork, draw off about half and put the bottle between my legs, five or six handrolled joints in my shirt pocket, a little bottle of cocaine underneath the rug next to the eightpack just in case I got sleepy; B.L.T. on toasted white bread with tall glasses of milk and french fries, lots of french fries, sometimes stopping at a McDonald’s for a couple of big orders of french fries because McDonald’s makes the best, but not ordering anything else because nothing else measures up to the fries; vanilla milkshakes, orders of fried clams, and when I stop at the gas stations to fill the tank I have to spend a little time getting the grease off the steering wheel, a little coke on my lip and away we go, up through the long hot run of the San Fernando Valley with the floor of the car awash in Coke bottles clinking against the unused seatbelts, hot, sick, stoned and tired, sticky and smelly, glad to make the turnoff at LAUREL CYN and whip up over the hill to Hollywood, the hotel, a quick checkin and up to my apartment and the icecold shower I had been dreaming about for the last couple of hours, with the window open in the bathroom so I could look down Sunset Boulevard toward downtown L.A. in the reddish twilight as I soaped the trip off my body.
    But it was all a waste of time. I was sitting in the living room with a big white hotel towel around my middle, watching “I Love Lucy” on the colortelevision set when the phone rang. It was Karl, our producer, and as usual he was in a state of panic, although he never liked anybody to know he was in a state of panic. We talked about this and that for a while, and then he said, “Jim’s not here.”
    â€œHe’ll show up,” I said.
    â€œThis is not the same,” Karl said, making reference to the fact that Jim is never on time anywhere. But he wasn’t exactly late. I always show up a few days early to get some of the garbage out of the way before we really start shooting the picture, like reading the script, going for fittings, etc., but Jim would just show up finally one day, take a look at his pages and step into the lights. This drove