Don Ameche!"
"No, George Murphy!
George Murphy!"
They milled around, looking at one another.
Handsome queer boys who had come to Hollywood to be cowboys walked around, wetting their eyebrows with hincty fingertip.
The most beautiful little gone gals in the world cut by in slacks; they came to be starlets; they ended up in drive-ins.
Terry and I tried to find work at the drive-ins.
It was no soap anywhere.
Hollywood Boulevard was a great, screaming frenzy of cars; there were minor accidents at least once a minute; everybody was rushing off toward the farthest palm – and beyond that was the desert and nothingness.
Hollywood Sams stood in front of swank restaurants, arguing exactly the same way Broadway Sams argue at Jacob's Beach, New York, only here they wore light-weight suits and their talk was cornier.
Tall, cadaverous preachers shuddered by.
Fat screaming women ran across the boulevard to get in line for the quiz shows.
I saw Jerry Colonna buying a car at Buick Motors; he was inside the vast plate-glass window, fingering his mustachio.
Terry and I ate in a cafeteria downtown which was decorated to look like a grotto, with metal tits spurting everywhere and great impersonal stone buttockses belonging to deities and soapy Neptune.
People ate lugubrious meals around the waterfalls, their faces green with marine sorrow.
All the cops in LA looked like handsome gigolos; obviously they'd come to LA to make the movies.
Everybody had come to make the movies, even me.
Terry and I were finally reduced to trying to get jobs on South Main Street among the beat countermen and dishgirls who made no bones about their beatness, and even there it was no go.
We still had ten dollars.
"Man, I'm going to get my clothes from Sis and we'll hitchhike to New York," said Terry.
"Come on, man.
Let's do it.
If you can't boogie I know I'll show you how.'" That last part was a song of hers she kept singing.
We hurried to her sister's house in the sliverous Mexican shacks somewhere beyond Alameda Avenue.
I waited in a dark alley behind Mexican kitchens because her sister wasn't supposed to see me.
Dogs ran by.
There were little lamps illuminating the little rat alleys.
I could hear Terry and her sister arguing in the soft, warm night.
I was ready for anything.
Terry came out and led me by the hand to Central Avenue, which is the colored main drag of LA.
And what a wild place it is, with chickenshacks barely big enough to house a jukebox, and the jukebox blowing nothing but blues, bop, and jump.
We went up dirty tenement stairs and came to the room of Terry's friend Margarina, who owed Terry a skirt and a pair of shoes.
Margarina was a lovely mulatto; her husband was black as spades and kindly.
He went right out and bought a pint of whisky to host me proper.
I tried to pay part of it, but he said no.
They had two little children.
The kids bounced on the bed; it was their play-place.
They put their arms around me and looked at me with wonder.
The wild humming night of Central Avenue – the night of Hamp's "Central Avenue Breakdown" – howled and boomed along outside.
They were singing in the halls, singing from their windows, just hell be damned and look out.
Terry got her clothes and we said good-by.
We went down to a chickenshack and played records on the jukebox.
A couple of Negro characters whispered in my ear about tea.
One buck.
I said okay, bring it.
The connection came in and motioned me to the cellar toilet, where I stood around dumbly as he said,
"Pick up, man, pick up."
"Pick up what?" I said.
He had my dollar already. He was afraid to point at the floor. It was no floor, just basement.
There lay something that looked like a little brown turd.