canyon fodder, chapter 3

Jerry Wachs earned his living running numbers, making collections, and doing other sleazy odds ‘n ends for Sidney Gold’s crime gang, based out of Gardena. Jerry met Mona Green in 1946 at the Turban Room, an after-hours joint on Central Avenue. Mona sold train tickets at Union Station. The two of them enjoyed each other’s company for a few months, going to clubs, seeing a few pictures, and even driving several times out to a secluded beach up near the Ventura County line for pleasant little picnics.

Mona didn’t really care much when Jerry eventually wanted to end their relationship. By that time, he bored her as much as she bored him. But five weeks later, after it seemed like they were comfortably far off and receding in each other's rear view mirrors, Mona tracked Jerry down at the Turban Room and told him she was late.

“It can’t be mine,” Jerry said to Mona. “You’ve banged a lot of guys, I bet. Haven’t you?”

“I haven’t been with anyone else, Jerry. It’s yours.”

“Can’t be. I always pulled out.”

“It’s yours, Jerry”

Cursing his bad luck, Jerry asked around and found out it would cost $500 to make the thing go away. He didn’t have that kind of scratch handy. Mona didn’t either. Jerry’s only option was to go to Sid Gold, the guy people saw when there was no one else to go to.

“First of all, Wachs,” Sid said, “the going rate is 25 percent a week, and it compounds. You’d be working it off for a good long time. That’s the first thing.”

The two men sat in a red Naugahyde booth in back of the Sit ‘n Sip on Western Avenue, where Sid conducted almost all his business. A glassy nervousness clouded Jerry’s hazel eyes as he groveled for the abortion money. He schvitzed under his tan sport coat, ran his hand repeatedly through his sandy colored hair, and had a hankering to calm his nerves with a cigarette, though he sensed it would be disrespectful to light up a smoke unless Sid did so first.

Two toughs in sharkskin suits guarded the front door of the joint and two more were stationed outside. Every 20 minutes or so, Niggy Feldman, the joint’s proprietor, came by the booth to refill Sid’s coffee cup. “Thanks, Nig,” Sid would say each time.

“Look Sid,” Jerry said, “I’ll work it off. I got no other choice.”

“Sure you do, Wachs. You can do the proper thing.”

“I don’t have time for a kid, Sid.”

“That’s something you shoulda thought of before you took your shvontz outta your pants.”

One of the toughs from outside approached the booth and whispered into Sid’s ear. Sid took in the information. His green eyes offered a distant glimpse of how handsome he was as a younger man. With slicked back silver hair, he still looked pretty good at 57, in his blue shirt and loosened yellow tie.

“Screw that fat fuck,” Sid said angrily to the messenger. “If Mickey Cohen wants me to keep the junk south of Jefferson, that’s just too fuckin’ bad. I’m not limiting it to the schwartzes no more.”

The messenger walked away quickly.

“Now where were we, Wachs?”

“I need five yards.”

“Right. You knocked up some floozie, and now you’re fucked.” Sid leaned back in the booth and glanced up thoughtfully at the ceiling before returning his gaze to Jerry. “Answer me this, Wachs. Why should the kid growing inside the girl’s stomach pay the price because you were irresponsible? That don’t seem right to me. The kid might grow up to be President of General Motors.”

Six weeks later, Jerry and Mona were married downtown at City Hall, and one month after the marriage, Jerry was pinched for car theft. Mona gave birth to Zolie Leonard Wachs in May of 1947. With Jerry in stir, she rented a house on 12th and Gaffey in San Pedro. Her mother, Rose, came to the house almost every day from Boyle Heights and took care of Zolie while Mona waited tables at the Bay Breeze diner in Hawthorne.

The house at 12th and Gaffey stood among a number of lovely cottages of all different architectural styles - Mediterranean, Craftsman, ranch, California bungalow... Several were shaded by large oak trees and had fragrant, colorful flowers growing around them, either planted in gardens or just appearing wildly. The southwestern end of 12th street dropped off into a cliff, beyond which lay the vast blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Catalina was visible in the distance beyond the ships entering and exiting the harbor. To the south, Long Beach and the quaint island of Naples. To the north, the rocky cliffs of Palos Verdes.

The house Mona rented was exceptional – by far the crappiest in the neighborhood. Years later, Zolie would tell friends that he "grew up in a shack that looked like a smelly turd floating in a pool of piss.” The place was decrepit, it’s yellow and brown paint peeling, its tiny windows opaque with years of built-up filth. The dark interior smelled of mildew.

Shortly after Mona signed the rental lease, her new neighbor, an elderly Ukrainian woman, came to visit. She told Mona that the previous resident living in the house was a fireman who had hanged himself from the living room rafters after being fingered in an arson investigation.
By the time Jerry got out of Terminal Island on good behavior, 14 months after the birth of his son, prison life had already stripped him of the capacity to feel anything. “I didn’t give a shit about getting beat up in the joint,” he told an acquaintance. “The beatings make the time pass. I just didn’t wanna get fucked in the ass.” Even still, Jerry’s heart swelled the first time he saw little Zolie lying in his crib. The infant instinctively held his arms out to his papa, and something primal pierced through Jerry’s otherwise cold-blooded sensibilities, filling his soul with a love that ached.

Jerry’s sole reason for stopping by the house at 12th and Gaffey was to visit Zolie. He rarely spent the night, and when he did he slept on the living room couch. The only evidence that he was still married to Mona was the legal piece of paper that said so. Conversations between them tended to be terse and purely practical. No intuitive understanding or mirth ever slipped into their words to each other, and they stayed married for no reason other than that neither of them could be bothered to go through with the divorce proceedings.

Mona’s skinny, small breasted physique and blond hair continued to attract men, many of whom spent the night in her bed. She treated the men who came home with her as sources of immediate and fleeting pleasure, nothing more. The sounds of vigorous lovemaking often traveled through the walls into little Zolie’s room at night. At first Zolie took the sounds to mean that Papa was home, talking to Mama. But the mornings after would bring disappointment as one strange man after another emerged from Mona’s bedroom – the butcher, or a guy from down on the docks, or the mailman, or just some guy she waited on at the Bay Breeze.

Eventually Zolie stopped expecting his Papa to be there in the kitchen at breakfast.

Mona fed, clothed and washed Zolie, took him to school, and she worked at the diner everyday until she was dead tired so that they could have a roof over their heads, but she would not give Zolie the answers he needed.

“Mama, who was that man in the kitchen before school today?”

“Just a friend, Zolie. No one you need to worry about.”

A hardened, peeved expression had by now burned itself permanently into Mona’s face, forming premature lines at the corners of her green eyes.

“How come all your friends are men?” Zolie asked. “And how come they all sleep in your room at night?”

Mona smirked in a manner at once cynical and droll.

“I don’t know, Zolie,” she said. “All your friends at school are boys, aren’t they? All my friends are boys, too. No reason.”

Zolie frowned thoughtfully for several moments.

“Mama,” he finally asked, “why don’t you like Papa?”

Mona lit a cigarette. “Don’t ask me dumb questions, Zolie. You give me a headache."

Just then, The sound and vibration of footsteps from the porch made Zolie's body stiffen with excitement.

“Papa’s here! Papa’s here!”

Jerry walked through the front door of the house. “How’s my boy?” he said, grinning as he lifted Zolie up to the heavens. Zolie's legs made short, ecstatic kicks through the air. “Are ‘ya glad to see your old man, kiddo?”

“Where the hell have you been?” Mona asked Jerry.

Jerry ignored her.

“Mama, Papa’s here!”

“You know what we’re gonna do next week, kiddo?” Jerry said to Zolie. “We’re gonna build a train set, with toy choo choo trains.”

“Mama, we’re gonna build a train set, with toy choo choo trains!”

The calm in Jerry’s hazel eyes, and the invitingness of his thick, sandy blonde hair, suggested a gentle, empathic man, as opposed to one involved in daily acts of usury, extortion, robbery and violence. Two months before Zolie’s eighth birthday, Jerry sat with his son in at the counter in Fosselman’s Ice Cream Parlor. Zolie was a tubby little boy. The black cowboy hat Jerry bought for him could barely harness his curly blond hair, and he already had such bad vision that the lenses for his glasses looked like two huge magnifiers on his face.

“What flavor you gonna have?” Jerry asked. “You can have anything you want.”

“Can I have a chocolate sundae?”

“Anything. Maybe you’d rather have a banana split?”

“Yeah! A banana split!”

“You gonna have whipped cream on that?”

“Yeah! Whipped cream!”

“And how ‘bout some sprinkles?”

“Yummy sprinkles!”

“You got it kiddo.”

Al Bergman, another one of Sid Gold's bag men, walked through the front door of the ice cream parlor, wearing a cheap pinstriped suit, a porkpie hat, and a look of dull resolve on his pock marked face.

“What the fuck?” Jerry said under his breath as he saw Bergman approaching.

“Hello, Wachs. I saw your car outside, figured I’d stop in. Sid’s been lookin’ for ya.”

“This ain’t really a good time to talk, Al. I’m here with my boy. Zolie, say hello to Mr. Bergman.”

“Hello,” Zolie said.

“Hey there, kid. Cute kid, cute kid. Look, Wachs, this’ll only take a minute.”

“OK. But make it a short minute.”

“Yeah, mister,” Zolie said. “Make it a short minute.”

Bergamn grinned faintly. “Cute Kid,” he said.

Zolie spun himself around and around on the counter stool.

Bergman stepped closer to Jerry and lowered his voice.

"Remember that colored kid,” Bergman asked, “with an ear missing? The junkie Sid helped out two months back?”

“Which one, Oscar Parks?”

“No, not Parks. Parks has both his ears. I’m talkin’ about that other colored. Lives just off Avalon. His name’s Washington.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Link Washington. That’s one crazy spook.”

“Spook - spook - spookey!” Zolie called out joyfully, continuing to spin around and around, pointing his face up to the ceiling. Then the spinning stopped suddenly. “Papa”, he asked, “what’s a spook? Is that the same thing as a ghost?”

“Wait awhile Zolie. I’m havin’ a conversation here.”

“You handled that Washington thing, right?” Bergman asked Jerry.

“Yeah, I handled it. I told the kid somebody would be coming to collect in two weeks.”

"Yeah, but it’s been two months now.”

“Didn’t Sid send somebody over there to settle the whole thing?”

“Sid thought you was gonna do it.”

“Me? He never said nothin’ to me about going back over there.”

“OK. It’s no big deal, Wachs. A misunderstanding. The big deal’s that Sid saw Washington last night at some dive in Gardena. And the minute Washington saw Sid, he ran out the door.”
“Crazy lowlife.”

“So you can understand that Sid is…concerned. He told me to tell you to deal with it by the end of the weekend.”

“Tell Sid I’m on it.”

“Yeah, tell Sid he’s on it,” Zolie said, pointing cheekily at Bergman.

“Keep quiet, Zolie,” Jerry said.

“And remember, Wachs. If Washington doesn’t have a payment, you’re gonna have to get rough with him.”

“I know. I'll bring Fats Bigman with me.”

“It’s a shame, but ‘ya gotta do what ‘ya gotta do.”

On his way out, Bergman tipped his hat to the waitress.

“Sorry ‘bout all that, Kiddo,” Jerry said to Zolie.

Zolie attacked the mountain of ice cream right away when the waitress brought him his banana split. Half way through the fiesta, whipped cream and chocolate sauce covered his face and shirt.
“How ‘bout if I take ‘ya to hear some jazz next week?” Jerry asked. “Would ‘ya like that?”

“Uh huh,” Zolie said with his mouth full, much more interested at that moment in ice cream than music.

Just then, Jerry’s mind drifted back, as it often did, to how he had tried to stop Zolie from being born. A pall of shame followed Jerry everywhere, becoming intensely oppressive in those moments when Zolie looked at him, through the huge glasses, with bright green, lovingly devoted bug eyes. And yet, Jerry could manage nothing more than to slip in and out of the boy’s life sporadically. He tried, and usually failed, to rationalize things to himself by telling himself that his work wasn’t a Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 type of deal.

“I gotta take you back to your mother now,” Jerry said when Zolie finished his banana split.
“Papa, how come you don’t stay with me and Momma?”

“Oh. Well, Zolie, kiddo. That’s a long story, for next time. OK?”

“Do you like Momma?”

“Of course I like her. And she likes me. And you know we both love you, right?”

“Momma doesn’t love me.”

“She sure does, kiddo. And I really love you. You’re my boy, right?”

“Right. How come I can’t stay with you?”

“Well, because.”

“Because why?”

“Because…because you need to stay with your mother.”

“But I wanna stay with you.”

“I know ‘ya do, kiddo. I wish you could.”

Jerry was friendly with the tough guy working the door at the Lighthouse and otherwise would not have been able to bring Zolie into the club with him. The decor inside was a bamboo-based Polynesian kitsch. The place seemed to be lit by nothing more than a handful of Tiki lamps. Ukulele music blended hypnotically with the bossa nova shake-shake-shaking of dry martinis and the din of dozens of conversations. The men wore short-sleeved, floral-patterned shirts and sports slacks, the women breezy dresses in light beachy colors. Sitting with Zolie at a table near the left side of the stage, Jerry drank a Johnny Walker Black on the rocks and smiled contentedly. He ordered Zolie a banana daiquiri with everything but the rum and Tripple Sec. Zolie was glad to be there with his papa, instead of at home with his mean mama.

The emcee appeared on the stage at ten minutes past eight. He had salt and pepper hair and wore an off-white linen suit with a pink shirt. In back of him, the musicians took their spots - a trumpet player trying to sweat the monkey off his back, a chain smoking pianist, two golden haired saxophone players, an alarmingly skinny bassist, a huge trombone player, a tuba player in a light blue linen suit, a smiling drummer, and a French horn player working on his fourth whiskey sour.

"Good evening boys and girls," the emcee said into his microphone. “Welcome to beautiful Hermosa Beach.”

He grinned appreciatively at the applause, and as he panned over the audience with his gaze, Zolie caught his eye.

"My goodness," the emcee said, motioning with a jerk of his head towards Zolie. "That's how I know this place is doin' a good business. The crowd comin' here keeps gettin' younger and younger!"

The audience laughed and applauded. The spotlight shined on Zolie and reflected off his glasses. He became the focus of hundreds of eyes and froze with terror.

"You're in luck, kid. There's plenty of women here tonight lookin' for a good young man, just like yourself!"

The audience laughter and applause grew louder. Jerry smiled, raised his glass to the emcee, and patted Zolie on the head.

Zolie remained motionless.

"Boys and girls, we're glad you could make it out here to the Lighthouse this evening. And now, without any further ado, let's have a warm round of applause for our very own Lighthouse All Stars.”

For the first 10 minutes of the performance, Zolie remained disoriented as he recovered from the emcee and the spotlight. When the trauma finally faded, he had no idea what he was supposed to do while the musicians performed. Should he just sit there and listen? Does something else eventually happen? Boredom set in and Zolie played with his straw. Jerry periodically rubbed his palm up and down Zolie's back and wondered whether bringing the boy to the club was such a good idea after all.

But halfway through the band's third number, the subtle pitter patter of the bass pushed a magical button in Zolie’s brain. The perfect rhythm massaged Zolie's temples and eyelids, and his head began to bob up and down ever so slightly. He looked over at the next table. A couple with umbrellas in their drinks were smiling and bobbing their heads, too. Then Zolie looked around at the crowd and the entire room seemed to be smiling and bobbing. The bass led Zolie down a path at the end of which was a saxophone. With each velvety-smooth note, the sax increased Zolie's pleasure ten-fold. He wondered how the sax player could remain so calm while making such exciting sounds, and then his head began to sway from side to side.

"Bud Shank on the alto sax, ladies and gentlemen. Let's hear it for Mr. Bud Shank."

The sax continued to enchant Zolie as the band slowed the tempo down. Soon the other horns captured Zolie’s imagination as well. Their sweet sadness touched his soul and he closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them, he saw Jerry smiling at him.
The tempo picked up again as the band broke into a Comanche-inflected number. The drummer unleashed a menacing war beat, and Zolie's body rocked and bounced. He stood up and drew an imaginary gun, out of an imaginary holster, and shot at imaginary Indians, on an imaginary corner of the western frontier. Grown ups smiled down on him and gave him encouragement, drawing their own make-believe pistols in return. The drummer broke into a faster beat and Zolie mimicked him, using two straws as drum sticks, waving them frenetically through the air, hitting pretend tom-toms, snare, cymbal and high hat. Then the horns picked up their energy and wailed away. Zolie danced in place and clapped his hands.

The piano moved into the center of the next arrangement. Zolie became completely rapt. The pianist leaned his body this way and that for emphasis here and there. The tinkering notes penetrated into the deepest regions of Zolie's head and lifted his little body off the ground. He floated up over his father, and then the sound waves moved him high atop the center of the room. He twisted and turned, did somersaults through the air, and then glided to a gentle landing back in his chair.

"On the piano, Mr. Claude Williamson. Claude Williamson on the piano…"

After the performance, Zolie sat in the passenger seat of his father's Lincoln, keyed up to the point of hyperactivity, trying to copy the movements of each musician all at once.

"Can we go again tomorrow, papa? I wanna hear jazz again tomorrow. Can we? Can we please?"

"Not tomorrow, kiddo," Jerry said, making the turn from Pier Avenue onto Pacific Coast Highway. “But we'll go again next week. I promise."

"But next week is such a long time."

"It'll be here before you know it." Jerry paused thoughtfully for a moment. "Say Zolie," he finally said, "you think you might wanna learn how to play music?"