Side 1 Go to Side 2

SIDE ONE

CARS FROM THE GET GO
My idea of fun as a 17-year-old kid, there was a car called the Overland. That had in front of the radiator a sort of half round thing, that was about a foot deep, and it sorta like the floor of the radiator in front of the radiator and between the bumper for a style thing. You could nearly sit in that damn thing which was no reason to do it, except that I sat in it so that the guy who was driving the car could race up to the car that was in front of me and stop and miss my legs hanging over the goddam bumper by as little room as possible. So if he misjudged, I had both legs cut off. That how insane you are as a kid. Good clean fun. And I would turn around a be driving my dad's car which was a 4-door sedan and I would go out with a bunch of guys, and we would somehow manage to have one guy who was a little slow in getting the car, and lock the car, and he was on the running board hanging onto the door handles and I would go along the cars that were parked as close as possible to scare the hell out of him, not realizing that if he got snagged he'd just be torn to hell.
He could get killed. I mean the dumb shit you used to do is unbelievable. At what age was this?
Same thing, 16-17.
Then this one was a wild one I did. This was on Alameda St downtown where all the railroad tracks used to terminate north of where the Plaza is, I think that's Brooklyn Ave or something. You go a little further north to where Chinatown is, and there's a big car there for railroad cars and all that. So the train station, which you know is right down there by Olvera St thing, the brand new station, the trains used to come outa there and leave at that point going up Alameda. So I get the right idea for fun, this is the same guy that's got the Overland. He's driving along side the train and I jump off the car to where you onto there you get in the car where you have the two side rails for the fun that I'm going to go into this damn train and then jump back onto the car. So I jump onto the train, and I'm holding onto this thing, and we're gong alongside the railroad, which was paved, and all of a sudden it runs out of paved area 'cause it's pen track, and I still on the damn train and train is picking up sped. And I'm saying how the hell am I going to get off this train, just tumble asshole over appetite once I land. And he had the nerve, to continue where the ties were, driving alongside the car, bumping like crazy, and I managed to jump back on the car. You talk about insane, I got a million of them. I did the craziest kind of things and who a fear that something's gonna wrong. I Nothing's gonna go wrong.
Apparently not.

JUMPING THE TRACKS
And then the worst one I ever did, I decided after watching the guy parachute jump, I'm gonna parachute jump. So what do I do? I take an umbrella, get up on the roof, and jump off the roof. Talk about going down in a hurry. Luckily I land on my feet with out breaking my legs, You talk about…I had just so many of those things where it was near but it never happened. It was crazy.
You're whole life has been one near-death experience.
Oh man, I tell ya.

THE EXPLODING SIGNAL
How about this one? You know in the earlier days where they used to signal the shifting of cars and al that in the yard, they had these things that was about oh what would I say, about the size of a half a lemon, it had a couple of straps that you put around the track, and when the car rolled over it gave a signal with a big bang. Why it was needed I don't remember. So I managed to find one of those that wasn't exploded, and so I take it home, and decide to see what's in it. So I set it down on the ground with a screwdriver and a hammer to open it, and the sucker went off in my face. And how the hell I managed to turn my head, and it was on dirt, so there was all kinds of pebbles and stuff, full in my face, and peppered me all over with those little rocks. And how I didn't get blind or deaf or something is beyond me,
And again, how old?
Then I was younger, I musta been about 10.
You know, I don't thing I've ever mentioned those things for now, 50 years.
Kooky things.

SOME EARLY HISTORY-BROOKLYN TO BOYLE HEIGHTS
Where were you born?
Brooklyn.
So you were born in Brooklyn and came at 7?
Yeah, because of my other's health. She contracted TB.
Wow.
And so the doctors, we were living in Syracuse, NY, my dad bought a bakery, was dong quite well financially there, and she got TB, which heavy coughing and all that, the doctor said this climate is just murder, and in those days they didn't have the medicines or nothing, so in 23 what did they know about TB other than you got it? So he said that you go a go to a warm climate. We were living in Syracuse, which was just 23 miles from Canada, it's the northern port of NY.
My dad left there in 1921, in Syracuse. He was born in 14 in France near Dijon. They came here
Good mustard there.
So they came here and he also didn't like that weather. My understanding is they moved to California for his health. He eventually died in 35 of stomach cancer. He was a more frail gymnast, more frail.
Gymnastics has nothing to with your internals, It makes all these nice, but it doesn't do a thing for the inside. If you're screwing up, you're going to hell. Like smoking, you can be muscular and all this good stuff, but the smoking is destroying your lungs.
Exactly.
You didn't smoke, or you did, when you were younger?


DICK'S SMOKING EXPERIENCE
No, I smoked actually…I started smoking when I was 15-1/2, there was a lot of kids around that smoked
Yeah, that's the usual bunk
And then I remember going into HHS and going up to the counter late for school, and the guy at the counter just, "Gees, I can smell you." There's nothing worse than smoke breath. And he would just go, ahhhgggg, God, you just smell awful. I thought, "Old man, just shit on you", you know. And that summer of my 16th bday, 1960, my dad had a surprise bday party that was an incredible surprise. It was like two days after my bday, and no one told me.
You figured it was over
Oh yeah, and I come home, I come in the house, for some reason I came in a little late, it was dark, and up in the pool house, this is like 8:30 at night, June, dead pitch black. Somehow or other I had been like out, and this is a Thursday or Friday night, and I come into the house at Bel Air. Way up at the end of the property I hear some people, and it sounds like it's on our property, up at the pool house, like somebody has snuck in from the side street, and I said to my mom, sounds like someone's up there. She said, "Na, na." I said, no, no, I'm going to go up and check it out. And I go all the way up, and there no lights on in the garden. And I get to the top step, pitch black, and the lights come on around the pool. "Surprise!!" And I just about fell over. I was so scared,,,uhhhh! But anyway, the next day, my dad and I leave for Salt Lake City, and we drive, and we go to Vegas, and we stop at Vegas. And this is like 1960.
So it's built up already a little bit.
It's way built. We stop at the Riviera, now this is actually Saturday, the party was a Friday night, my birthday was Wednesday or Thursday, and so Saturday, a couple of days after my birthday, we're going up there, and he's letting me drive the car for the first time, he'd drive a little, I'd drive a little. We stop at Vegas. He was a smoker. He smoked Pall Malls. He eventually quit, went to a cigar, went to a pipe, then stopped, and then he died. So, but anyway, he and I stopped about 2 in the afternoon and catch a lounge show at the Riviera, and the lounge show, believe it or not, is Harry James and Dorothy Dandridge.
What a team!
What a lounge show that is!
And there's nobody there. There's just a bunch of little two-top tables, you know.
You're wondering where's all the people.
Right,
And so, I ask the cigarette girl for some Marlboros, and dad says no, no. no, I'm not letting you buy cigarettes. So he gives me a Pall Mall, and here's what I'm doing.
But are you inhaling?
Oh, very much.
Oh Jesus, you're hooked,
I'm sitting smoking with my right hand, and I have my left hand on the table. And between puffs, I put my hand under the table, and it's like this, burning between my knees. You know, typical…that's just what I was doing. I didn't know why, that's just what I was doing. And I look around. Now you have to understand that in Vegas, this is not the cream of the crop of people, Vegas are a lot of lower and middle American hayseed, you know, and so I look around, and what do I see? About 6 different people are smoking at these two top tables. And they are kinda like real farmer-looking people, and they are all in identically the same position I am. They have one hand on the table, and a cigarette is burning between their knees. And I literally got down and I looked down under the table and looked at these people, and I sat up, and I looked at them, I looked at myself, and I said, I'll be damned if gonna look like that. And I put the cigarette out, and that was it for the rest of my life, just like that. Can you imagine? Boom. Thank goodness. Imagine, just imagine the power of the mind to make that decision, and that was it, never smoked again, ever. Funny, I'm so happy.
SAUL-NO CIGARETTES
You're so lucky. Well, I had the experiences where the taste of cigarettes and drink were so repulsive to me, that all I had to do was try it a couple of times, and I said, these people are crazy, what's so good about smoking? What's so good about drinking? They're not pleasant, I want it to taste like candy!
Yeah right.
And it wasn't, so I lucked out, just because I found it….in fact, I didn't drink coffee until I was thirty years old because I saw people always say, I gotta have a cup of coffee. I said, that must be a terrible goddam thing, that you always gotta have that liquid. What's so terrific about that liquid?
Yes.
Caffeine.
That all came later, So I never got into it. That was the same thing with beer, I tasted beer, I said this tastes like soapy water. How the hell are people drinking this stuff?
I hate beer. I have never wanted to develop a taste for beer. I don't like hard liquor, because it tastes like gasoline.
Exactly.
So I will not drink it except in a sweet drink. I didn't like smoking because it tasted terrible. So you know, I was very lucky.
It was repulsive to start with, you didn't want to work yourself into it. Most trouble is the goddam kids see somebody else do it, I'll struggle with it until I can handle it. And I'm saying, why do I want to handle it? This is lousy.
Your body is telling you that, and the whole point is your immune system is giving you all these signals. A friend told me a very interesting story one time, it was Dan. He said, "I realized years ago that I was not smoking for pleasure, I was smoking to allay pain." He says, about every 20 minutes I would start to become uncomfortable and nervous, and so I would take a cigarette and that would tranquilize me. He says he quit. He eventually started up years later, and he is going to quit again. So I did a little more research on it, and it was very interesting what I finally realized, and this is the kind of rap I give people who are smoking: Let's really look at what smoking costs you and what it gets you.
Health-wise and money-wise…
Everything. How much is a pack of cigarettes? What is it now, like almost 5 bucks?
Unbelievable.
Let's say a pack of cigarettes is $5, and there are what, 20 cigarettes in a pack? So you got 20 cigarettes in a pack and you've got 5 bucks. So let's say you smoke a pack a day. OK? So that's what, about $1700 a year, right?
A goodly amount.
But now let's look a little further. How long does it take to smoke a cigarette? 5 minutes?
Or less.
Probably more, but it depends on who is doing it. But let's say it's 5 minutes. You smoke 20 cigarettes a day, that's 100 minutes a day. OK?
Let's be generous and round it down to 90 minutes. Ok? An hour and a half a day. That means in a week you're spending ten hours a week smoking, 53 weeks a year, that's 530 hours. Well, do the math: a work year is 2000, and that's 50 weeks a year, 8 hours a day, every day, 5 days a week, OK? That means, that if somebody is smoking one pack a day, they are doing the equivalent of this: they are getting up the morning at 8in the morning, they are smoking from 8 until noon nonstop, they are having lunch, and from 1 till 5 they are doing nothing, non-stop, not a break at all, but smoking, and they're doing that 5 days a week, for three months of the year. They are spending 1/4 of their working life smoking. Now, during that time, they're making a full time career out of killing their body. And, at the same time, they can not be doing any sports, they can't be having much of an interaction with people who don't smoke, there gonna hang around with people who do smoke. So what are they getting? They're basically creating a life that's centered around destroying their body. And they say to you, if I only had a little more time I'd like to do this and do that. And I say, "Jesus, you got three months a year!" You got three months of 8 hours a day. So, the cost is really enormous, people have no clue, they don't even begin to have a thought about what it is.

MAY'S SMOKING
Yeah, and you can give them all those pleasant, scientific, rational reasons and still that goddam disease of, what's the word I want to use, addition has such got such a hang on the average person, he has no stupid willpower to make a commitment to get off them.
Nicotine addiction is one of the most powerful addictions in the world.
That why I never say to somebody, you know, like putting them down because they're smoking, 'cause if it was easy they'd all quit.
I mean, it wouldn't be a problem, but it is not easy.
Or it's like somebody says, ah gees, it's easy to quit, I've done it a hundred times.
And you what I didn't realize, my wife, on the first boyfriend she met, this miserable bastard, after he was out with her for a while, he was smoking, and he says, don't you smoke? He says, I'll show you how. So he introduces her to the cigarettes. So when she went with me and she knew I didn't smoke, I could never tell she smoked, because she never carried any cigarettes with her, she never had cigarette smoke on her breath, so I didn't assume she was smoking. So here, we move out to California, we got about two kids already, maybe a third one, I don't remember for sure. And I come to find out only through a conversation she was having with a friend and didn't know I was in the bedroom when it was happening. And she's telling me about that fact that she smokes three packs a day,
Oh my god.
60 cigarettes, can you imagine, 60 cigarettes a day, I says how the hell can she be smoking 60 cigarettes a day and I don't know it?
That's amazing.
Well, the windup was, she couldn't wait for me to leave to go to work, then start #1, and she4'd smoke until she knew I was coming home, and then she'd stop at that point. He had all these kinds of things you could put in your mouth to kill the cigarette breath thing.
He musta changed her clothes, too, because it's on our clothes.
And I was never critical about it, because if you don't have even the faintest idea, and you're going through the normal life thing, it isn't apparent.
That's amazing.
So then in the evening, what she would do, and I never thought about that, she would always be the one to take out the garbage. You know the old saying about the guy, he's gotta take out the garbage, that's not a woman's job. It was never a job for her because then she would smoke another cigarette. While she was outside, like the last cigarette of the day. Can you imagine that? Three damn packs, what happened? Well, I dunno, she smoked for probably ten years and one day she starts to get a strong cigarette cough. She's convinced she's got TB, from the cigarette smoke. How she picked on that, who the hell knows?
Great.
She goes to see a doctor. Doctor examines her. And tells her no, you don't have TB, you've got a cigarette cough. And, so she leaves him, and says to herself, well, maybe he really didn't do a good examination. She goes to another doctor. You know how you are when you're addicted, any goddam excuse except the real reason why you're smoking. She goes to this other doctor. He examines her, tells her the same Goodman story, Now she's panicked, she says to him well, did you ever smoke. He says, yes I did. Well, what did you do about it? He says well I had to make up my mind, either I stop smoking or this cough is gonna get strong enough that I'm going to wind up having a serious lung problem. So she sorta was taken back like, Jesus, the doctor got it, and he quit. Maybe if I got enough reason to what I've got to look forward to, and three kids to take care of, I gotta do something about this. I got stop smoking. And all of this is happening, and I don't know a damn word about it. And she decides from that visit. This, I get the same thing she talking to her girl friend. I'm in the backyard, the windows are open in the summer, and I'm hearing this, and she don't know I'm that close that I'm listening to it. I'm not going out of my way to listen to female conversation, the usual garbage they talk about. And this was going on. So, she stopped smoking, and would you believe it? In six weeks, she was able to cut it off. Unusual. Never went back to it, never wanted a cigarette, couldn't stand the cigarette smoke to be in the area. So, it can be from something that simple to a person that just can't quit. That's the spread. So what does she do? So you figure, okay, nice girl, got it over with, got back to being a good housewife, a mother, I come to find out all of a sudden she took to drinking. She' drinking a bottle of goddam wine a day.
She's a very addictive personality.

MAY'S DRINKING
So she's drinking, how do I find out? The craziest thing. My boss had a wife who was also going to a, what's that anonymous thing? AA. And she knew my wife, and so this boss of mine is telling me about this story. Can you imagine.
And was she going to a AA also?
Of course, that's how she met my boss's wife. Otherwise I wouldn't know she going to AA. The same, thing, when a woman wants to keep something secretive, and they got a way to figure out a plan, they'll make a plan. So, she was on that for a number of years, the same goddam thing happened. She saw there was no way out of it, you couldn't drink just a little bit, or drink socially when you're up to that point of a bottle a day, if you just smell it you want to have a drink.
So again, she had enough will power to shut that thing off.
After how long?
Who the hell remembers the exact time?
No, I mean how long was she drinking?
Oh, I don't how many years.
This, by the way, is where Jock's factory is, right down the street. It goes from….this road curves back up here, there it is. That's the building.
Oh, whoa.
And basically, he's got 5 or 7 acres, and it goes all the way back to the street.
Beautiful scene at this time of day, and in the winter.
Beautiful light.
And he also owned the, Scott and Jacki own, 350 acres right where that nub is. Just past, here's Pacific loops back onto here. Back to the left you'll see a fork in the road. Everything to the left all the way up to base of the hills is his. I was going to build him a house right up on that nub, see this promontory right here?
I see it.
So here comes nature, and decides it's gong to screw up some part of your body, and you can kiss yourself goodbye. That all the wealth, all the material things you have don't mean a damn.
Exactly.
Like I said to you more than once, I look in the mirror, I say when is something gonna get, I've been too goddam lucky. I'm not looking to et knocked off, but what did I do that warrants me not be in this condition that so many other people of means and intelligence and that good stuff and they're gone.
Michael j Fox has Parkinson's and you just as fit as a fiddle.
There's no end to those goddam diseases that can wipe you out.
Yup.
No end.
Dudley Moore.
I loved him.
Wasn't he a good actor, piano player.
Unbelievable.
Are you listening to us, you better, because we do intelligent things here.
I could make a criticism, but I'm not.

SYRACUSE TO SAN BERNARDINO
So, you were in Syracuse, and your dad where, to San Bernardino?
No,. no, here's what happened. Now's the question, where we gonna go, to Rrizona, or you gonna go to California where they apparently didn't know anybody in either state.
And my mother found out some relative that was living in Los Angles. Well that makes already a difference, someone you know, so we wrote to her, and they said yeah, come out, we can put you up until you find an apartment and all that good stuff, so we were in of the bedrooms, me and my mother, and they had the other bedroom, a little room house, and a little while we found a place nearby and then my dad came with my other two brothers.
And where is this? Los Angeles in Boyle Heights.
That was the Jewish section at that time. Give me the cross streets of Boyle Heights.
That was Brooklyn and Soto.
Just s a little SE o downtown.
Right by the big railroad yards.
Yeah, not too far from the, about a mile or two.
So my mother had to go to the sanitarium, she couldn't stay home, because when they checked her out, she was infected enough she could infect everybody else. Besides being sick. So it just so happened the City of Hope in what community are they in? Sierra Madre? Somewhere in there they opened up a sanitarium for TB patients. So she was admitted as a patient, and she stayed there for a whole year, with the food and rest and not having to take care of kids and that stuff, and we were old enough to take care of ourselves by that point, she recovered. She had what they call an arrested case. The small tubercules that nature can envelop them and lock them up in little pockets, and they can't spread, if you've got good living conditions and food. And that's what happened. That was the only thing that was available for TB. And she managed to recover from it, never came, and she came back to the house, and after we were in California about 4 years. My mother was very frugal, and he had a very good job as a foreman of a bakery, and we bought a house.
And he was out here?
Yeah, after we were here then they came out later. So, for $3500 we bought a 3-bedroom house for cash.
Where was this?
Boyle Heights. The house is still there.
About what year is this?
Oh god, this had to be about 27-28, right in there.
My dad bought his mother a house, I'm guessing this was in the 30's or 40's, for $9000 in Beverly Hills, a little 924 SF house.
Yeah, because in those days BH was just another little community out in the middle of nowhere. You know what happens when you decide to make a choice. Instead of taking the first thing available, you drive until the wheels come off. I've had that happen more than once.
For these kinds of things you don't make a choice. You grab the first one you see.
In New York they get $1.50 for a big bag of ice. Is that what it is here?
That was $1.53 for those bags.
No kidding. Everybody's on the gravy train, even the ice man.
That was the kind of truck that was passing me all day long.
Okay, so you get this house for $3500 in Boyle Heights. In about 19…
'27, about that. Because the following year, 1928, my dad was finally rich enough that we could afford a new car. We bought a 1928 Chevrolet, 4-door sedan. That was $600. Brand new. And previous to that, when we first came to California we bought a '23 Chevrolet. And that thing had a cone clutch. The clutch is tapered like a cork in a barrel and it's lined with a piece of leather. And you put mink oil (??) on it to keep it well lubricated and when you let the clutch out this cone would go into a cone fly wheel and it would lock up with no problem. The problem was it would lock up even before you wanted it to. You had to have a very sensitive foot to engage that thing without that sucker leaping. So you could see why that went away. In fact you never heard of it.
I didn't know that existed.
And you say "Well, why did they make it in the first place?"
Because the other ones were always slipping. They couldn't make it good enough. So you come out with a cone clutch, there was never a problem with slipping, it was a problem with engaging too good. So this is part of the historical thing about a lot of things that were in cars.
That's snow on his roof.
That's a California thing. To go up to the mountains and cover the whole car in snow and inbetween the fenders, I used to do it on the old cars, between the fenders and the hood you could pile a lot of snow and come in and everybody would say, "Oh you've been to the mountains. Wish I could have done it."
So 1927, 1928 you get a Chevrolet. What color?
Green. Four door sedan. That was our first new car. So then we're in this old house for awhile, five years, and now the kids are getting bigger and I think at that time we had two sisters, so now we had five kids, so the house was too small. So she found another place that was nearby on Pomeroy off of Soto. And bought that house for some ridiculous price because it was in the depression era. And since he was one of the few guys who was making a good salary. He was a foreman. He was better off that most. A loaf of bread was ten cents.
And this was during the depression years, 1929, onward.
Yes. So we always had plenty to eat because according to the rules of working in a bakery you were allowed to take home whatever bread and cakes you wanted for your family. And if a loaf of bread cost ten cents, how much of a sport was that owner being? He wasn't exactly giving away the store. So he would bring home 3 different kinds of breads, a rye bread, pumpernickel and a white bread of some kind… French bread. And then we'd have a dozen Kaiser rolls with that and we'd have some cake or pie to go with that. Every day. And we'd finish every inch of it. Nothing was leftover for tomorrow with our appetites.
Seven people.
Exactly. And then these guys would over-bake sometimes and there was no such thing as putting in preservatives and all that crap, so the next day that bread would start to get stale. So my dad would take quite a bit of the bread and rolls and put it in the back of this touring car we had and take it down to a gas station that was nearby and over some hill nearby was some poor people, mostly Mexicans, but there were some white people there too, and they would line up to get a loaf of bread out of the back of his car for free. Rather than to just let it go stale and throw it away. That's why he ended up being a member of the City of Hope in later years where he was the chairman and did a lot of stuff to get things together when they had different kinds of get-togethers to make money for the charity. He did more than I did.
And how were his genes?
Oh, his genes were good. But he wound up with cancer in the spine, so his last years, he was at the City of Hope because of all the things he did for the organization because otherwise they have a list a block long and they had just started tuberculosis and cancer as the combination of things they dealt with. Because there are so many diseases you can't work them all and do them well. So you pick something you think you can handle.
At what age did this occur?
He was about 79.
And you were in your late forties?
Yes, and his pain was so severe that he told me when I visited him if he had the nerve he would kill himself. He knew that there was no way he could do it, how can you do that lying in a hospital bed? But he felt that way. And the medication they gave him to kill the pain, they had some kind of limit, they can't drug you to death, and so it didn't last from application to application. So here he was going to the Beverly Hills Health Club, to which he was a member and taking the sun tan stuff… if you looked at a picture of him… but when you've got cancer of the spine it doesn't matter how everything else is. Or how good your muscles are and all that. You've got it in a place where it's hurting like hell and it ain't going to go away.
It stops your life. Literally. How long did he have it for?
He was in the hospital for about 9 months.
From detection to death.
I don't know when he caught it. If he knew it or if it just came on from examination or what. I don't remember the details. So here he was retired, with a nice house on the edge of Beverly Hills. They bought the house when it was possible to buy a nice place near Beverly Hills. And he belonged to a club.
Where was it?
Just before Beverly Hills. The west end of Hollywood.
Near La Cienega and Santa Monica?
Yes. It was one block before La Cienega. There is no family that seems to have a fairy book ending to all of their relatives and all their immediate family and all that.
Look at the Kennedy's.
All that prestige and all that. Doesn't mean a damn. That's why I say when I look in the mirror, why am I getting all this good fortune?
You're just such a nice guy.
Yeah, everybody loves me and can't wait to hit me over the head.
So then, you come to Los Angeles and now it's the '30's and you're fifteen, sixteen years old. Then what happens.
You know what he's doing to me? You know that program, "This Is Your Life?" He wants to know every goddamn move I made. For fifty years.
Come on, let's hurry up. Get on with it.
Fifty years. And me giving you every last bitter detail.
You're a storyteller.
So what's the next age bracket we're talking about.
So now you're a teenager. And you're building your cars. You're an insane guy.

GARDENING
I'm going to junior high school and loving it. Did I ever tell you about my gardening experience?
I don't know.
I got into the goddamdest… I don't think I told this story in 50 years. I love to take oddball things… why does a guy care to go into a gardening class? That's women's stuff. That intrigued me. So I take this gardening class and they assign me a nice big area in a glass house where I can do my things… propogate plants and bulbs and what have you. And I got hung up on gardens for some reason. It intrigued me what shapes gardens come in and they're slow growing and all that so it isn't like you're going to put a leaf from the ground and wait for it to turn into a tree. You'll be dead before it looks like something. So as I'm walking down the main street, Soto Street, we lived about 12 blocks from the junior high school. In those days everybody walked to school. None of this driving with a car crap. It didn't hurt you one damn bit, either. And I would pass all these different private homes that had… in those days everybody had a nice porch in the front because you didn't have air conditioning. When the weather was nice you sat on the porch to enjoy the air, instead of stifling inside in the house. And so a lot of people had cactus in little pots and so I'd go along and I'd see somebody had about 10 different kinds and I'd borrow one, put it in the hot house and little by little I had about 40 of those different things that I'd pilfered from all the people in the neighborhood. I wouldn't overdo it - I'd just take one plant. And people wouldn't even notice or say, "What the hell happened to that cactus?"
So you were the Robin Hood of gardening.
Right. So after I had about 40 of those plants my teacher got a little bit worried - starting wondering where the hell I was getting all of these plants. She had a little suspicion. Was I stealing? What was I doing? So I conned her and said my dad was very supportive and he was buying these plants for me. Because I enjoyed the gardening. She felt much better about that. Innocent gardening teacher.

WORDS
In New Jersey there was the Hong Kong ferry house and he would ferry people across that spot because there was no bridge in that area. When Washington crossed the Delaware he crossed it at that point. And the expression comes from the fact in those days that when a guy comes in from the fields all frozen they had a table made so it was hinged on one end - they were generally round tables. They would lift the thing up so it would become a back for him to sit in front of the fire and get all that heat and not be chilled on the backside. That's why you have to turn around when you stand in front of a fireplace - you can't get warm on both sides at the same time. So the kids made a joke. And obviously they all had kids. Sneak behind the table and mash the lid down on the father, who, in many cases was falling asleep, so that was called turning the tables. It was a joke on the old man. Can you imagine? That's a stretch, isn't it?
I'm telling the story about a person being a flash in the pan. Especially movie stars or prominent people. Just a flash in the pan. It comes from the fact that on the old guns that used flint, there was a little pan that you used to put the powder in and the flint was ignited when you pulled the trigger which then ran into the thing and got the bullet ignited. And that pan, when you actually got the flash, only lasts that long.

SIDE TWO
Wagon trucks are still there, near Trenton, New Jersey.
No like from the Conklin ferry house because that's where Washington crossed.
On the ferry? They always show him in a boat.
That boat belonged to the Conklin Ferry House.
Oh really? They just showed him in a small rowboat.
That's what it was. It wasn't a thing with motors and fans and a sail and all that. You just rowed across.
You didn't take wagons across.
Dick - there is some lunchtime conversation with people other than Saul, just some small talk about antiques and people are eating
Hundreds of people walked by, saw the coin and walked on. Who stopped to pick it up? A well-dressed woman with white gloves on bent down and picked it up. So when it comes to some things, you never know how to explain it.
More talk about corned beef and how to cook it - but there are other people talking in the background and you can't really pick up what is being said.
Two kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, bell pepper, scallions, just about anything raw that you can eat raw is in that salad. Everytime I make it, because the idea is, if you don't have the other stuff with it - a salad to me is just like eating leaves. There's no flavor. Some people if you say "salad," they say, "I don't care for salad." I don't know what makes a person have a sharp dividing line between..
You've got to put a lot of stuff in it. You know what I like in salad, I like beets.
That's the only thing. If they are fresh beets you've got to cook them. So it's a problem to use it. Canned beets, to me, have nowhere near the flavor.
Canned are still sweet enough. They're still sweet enough.
Digestible and they're edible.
I used to make a lot of salads.
But it's a lot of work. That's why I do it for five meals. I don't do it for one otherwise I'd be annoyed with it. It takes two hours to make a salad. And you just have to get used to the idea that it's going to take that long otherwise don't start. So through the years, I just made up my mind that's one chore.
I used to make… I had a counter at my house that I made all butcher block and had a trash compactor here, I had this salad making cutout which I cut at an angle, with a saber saw. Like a plug and it poured out and you had to put it back in. And here was a sink with the disposal. So I would cut here and it would go into the sink here, into the trash compactor here and I would put what I wanted into the sink and there was a drawer below, just like this has a drawer right here and they would all go into the salad bowl and I would pull it out and there was my salad bowl.
Great. What happened to that?
I moved.
So you moved, you're 16 or 17 years old and you're a crazy Guy..
So then she gets me two tickets to go to a cactus show in Pasadena. So how am I gonna get there? I didn't have a car then, so I said to my dad, "I got two tickets - would you like to go to the cactus show with me?"
He says, "That's ok."
So we go to the show and looking over all these varieties of cactus. And they were also selling little books on cactus maintenance. How to take care of cactus. But the whole book was in German. So I didn't really notice that until I got home. It had a beautiful picture and I flipped through it, just looking through the pictures in there and I wasn't reading the text. But since quite a bit of the words, the ordinary words, are similar to Yiddish, because Yiddish is corrupted German, basically, I took a little notebook and between my dad and myself we translated the whole little book from German to English.
Oh my God.
And brought that to the teacher. Well, she thought that was the end. She thought this eighth year student was unusual.
You were 13 or 14, then.
So every month they'd have one of these things where the whole school would attend the auditorium and they would talk about different things and she got up and made a whole thing about one of her students who translated a little book about gardening from German to English and all that she didn't bother mentioning my name because she didn't want to embarrass me but the other teachers knew who was involved. So that made me feel like, "Hey, man, I'm on the right track now." I knew how to get an A. And I got really interested in plants to some degree through that start.
I notice you still have some cactus today.
I've got some cactus out front. It's an interesting plant. And then you know, as a collection, one of the nicest ones, close by to where we all live is at the Huntington Library.
A huge place.
He's got a 2 or 3 square block area with every variety imaginable and some of them that are a couple of hundred years old that are on his premises. In fact what he did, that nobody else could do, since Huntington was in the railroad business, he took a flat car out to Arizona and where he selected, whatever plant he wanted, he had the guys dig it up, put it on the flat car and bring it over to him in San Marino, where his place is. So that's why his collection is outstanding. And his Japanese Garden is outstanding. Did you ever see the portion where he has the Japanese Garden?
I think I've been there once but I don't remember.
It's hard to remember if you've been away a long time. I've been there more than once so it sticks in my mind.
I'd like to go again.
It's worthwhile. It has a Soji screen house where the entire wall are out of Soji screens. Most people don't realize it is typically a poor country and they made their walls out of paper.
Talk about a paper-thin house…
And there's no furniture. You sat on the floor with your legs crossed and you had a brazier in the center of the room that you sat around to eat your meal and keep warm in the wintertime at the same time. The same brazier. That was unusual. The brazier was about 24 inches in diameter and the family sat around it.
A big wok.
Exactly. There are a lot of things that place has that are worthwhile. They've got one of the original Guttenberg Bibles and it always has an original Chaucer's Tales, the famous English writer. And what's unusual about is that each page has the opening letter done with very elaborate scrolling and everything and in color. In color. So just to look at the craftsmanship of a the page, forgetting what was on it, was really a work of art, all done in India ink so the color of the ink is strong black, to this day.
And what is India ink made from.
I was just thinking, I bet that sucker's gonna ask me… I don't remember. And then here's another thing that's interesting that most people have no reason to really think about it but it's the kind of nutty things that I do and that is why do the letters have this sort of starting out thin, getting fat and tapering off thin again.
It's a wide stylus.
Wide stylus. It's a quill.
Yeah, but it's wide.
Well it's not that it's wide, it's the way you use it. If you pressure it, if you start to press very lightly you've got a thin line, but as you go around with it you would inadvertently press the prongs open and you get a thicker middle and then when you wanted to end it you would taper off so the thickness of the line reduced itself. That way you get the graceful letters without even thinking about it. It's automatic.
The calligraphic pens have a variety of widths and you just dip them in ink to do those. So you start, as you change direction, widen it…
It makes that a really nice art because once you know how that works you can employ it to environment. Dumb things like that interest me.

THE NAME SAUL
You're a curious one, I will tell you that. So, you're into cactus and then what?
Then what? What's after that? Oh yeah, one incident, I loved science and the story of my name came out of that period. I had an English class and at that time, up until that time, my name for all I knew was Solly, They called me Solly. Well, in a lot of cases, with my scribbling of that age and earlier, if the teacher was looking at the names to call to recite something, she would go through a box and ask for Sally. Nobody would answer. And she would say, "There's got to be a Sally in there because the name is here," to herself. And she'd keep repeating the name, "Where is Sally?" And I wasn't going to answer to that, I'm not Sally, I'm Solly. So finally she says, "Well, I'm going to call the names until when everybody says their name the one who is actually Sally is guilty. So she called about 20 names and they all answered to their names, raising their hands, and then they got to Solly and I had to say that I was Sally. And the kids all started laughing. Anything to belittle anybody that's in the class, no matter what. And here I'm ready to crawl under the goddamn table. And I'm in the 7th grade and this English teacher says to me, as I was in her room after the normal class for some reason and I don't remember. We were talking sort of friendly and she says to me, "You like that name Solly?"
And I said, "No."
And she said, "Well, let's see what we can do about that." She takes out a big sheet of paper. She very gracefully writes out the name "Saul."
She says, "How do you like that?"
I say, "That's terrific."
I had my changed by her without any kind of business in the court or any of that crap - I just became Saul. Because I liked the name rather than Solly. And when I finally had to use that stupid birth certificate and I got it, it had Abraham on it. I said, "Nobody ever called me Abraham. Where the hell did that come from?"
Well, my mother didn't speak English at that time and Abraham was probably a name that she selected and through the course of time I was never called Abraham. So I had a job to get that corrected.
Did you do a legal name change?
No, I got it changed on the birth certificate; I'd been using Saul for so long, who cared? I didn't own any property, I didn't have a bank account, all of those things where you needed a name to verify.
And to you, you were Saul.
I liked that better than Solly. So that was an easy way to get a…
A new identity.
An identity that I could live with. Look at how many times people change their names because they just don't like their name. Even my daughter, her name is Michelle. And she didn't like it because it sounded too ritzy, so she changed it to Mickie. Especially since it leans on being a tomboy, she liked it even better. Anything to be more like a boy.
So is she Mickie, or is it Michelle.
No, it's Michelle. Now that she's older, it's a more refined name and she accepts it. Mickie just got lost in her high school days. In that era they had a course in penmanship, how to really write gracefully, remember that era? They would make circles and all that other crap. And really that wasn't a bad idea but very few people stuck with it and made it graceful. Now you see them have their fingers all screwed up around that pencil like they're cripples or something. Not a word is ever expressed about handwriting.
With computers nobody is writing anymore.

AUTO SHOP
So then in the 8th grade I took auto shop. Oh man, I was in 7th heaven in hat auto shop. How many heavens do we have in order to get to 7?
I don't know.
Do you know?
I never picked up on that one. So I'm in the auto shop and he's got about 10 or 12 cars in there, all kinds of oldies and every Friday there would be a question and answer period. He had a long bench. He had 40 students. He'd go down the line with one hand on the left, and ask, "Do you have a question?"
"No."
And he'd go to the next one and then the next one and he'd go down the line.
I was usually sitting around 10, 12, somewhere in there, without any special reason and somehow he noticed when he got to me I would keep him busy for the whole hour.
The next Friday we go to sit down again and I'm there about 12 to 15th in the row and he says to me, "Bastion." He didn't call anybody by their first names - he always called us by our last names, like in basketball.
He says, "Bastion, I want you to get to the end of the line." Everybody's laughing their ass off, even though they don't know what it's about but it's anything to put somebody down who's in the class. So I'm at the end of the line. And he goes through the line with questions and after about 10 minutes he's down to me. And he says, "Okay Bastion, let 'em come."

I kept him going for the whole hour. So I was always the last guy that could keep him going until the goddamn class was over. That was the difference in the interest level. They went to auto shop because it was the thing to do, not to learn anything. So that was my experience between the gardening and auto shop.

MUMMIFYING THE TARANTULA
I would think that with auto shop you would be wild to go there.
And that same period, in the 9th grade I got crazy about science. I had a real good science teacher and during that semester I was taking a ride down to San Diego and as I'm driving I see a real big tarantula crossing the road. And in those days, there weren't all those cars because it was mid week. There weren't people travelling to work and all that crap. So I pull over and now the thing is "How am I going to get this tarantula?"
I wasn't going to pick that sucker up with my bare hands. He's a mean looking sucker.
They don't bite.
All I knew about it was "You look horrible."
And I wasn't going to grab him. So how am I going to get him? And I'm thinking and thinking and I notice I had a pretty good size lunch bag, so I took the sandwich out of the bag, took the bag and pushed it out so it was open and I got a stick and I finally got into a position where I could sweep it in with a stick into the bag. It got into the bag and I got it closed and now I said, "Where am I going to put it? I can't keep the goddamn thing in the car, I'm scared to death with it. How am I going to get it home."
Finally, I got it. My car was an Essex Super 6. I don't know if you remember the Essex - it was a companion car to the Hudson. I don't know if you know about a Hudson.
What year?
The Essex was a '29.
Didn't we see a '27? At Vortech?
That's right.
Up in Oxnard.
Oh yes, Oxnard, right. So I finally figured out - I had the perfect solution. In those days what they had in some makes of cars which was a hangover from earlier days, they had a metal pad that went from the end of the engine over to the frame so that when mud and stuff would splash it wouldn't get into the engine compartment. So I pick up the hood, I put him into that area, shut the hood, now I know he couldn't get into the car. Well, I finally get home and because of the heat and the time, he was baked perfectly. It took all the juices out of him and he was frozen just like he was mounted. And I took that sucker to school.
You mummified him.
My teacher was in 7th heaven. She got a super specimen and I was the wonder boy who brought it. So I was right away in her good graces because I was doing the right thing - I was into science. So that's how I got into the animal world.

WOMEN AND TALKING
You'll love this one. There's an English class I'm into and one of the things they decided to do - I can't believe we're all the way home already. I talked myself into a ride home. They decided to put on a play so naturally you had to have actors so you had to select something so we were going to do Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and what did they stick me into? I was the King of the Fairies. And those guys never let me live that down.
You were set up, buster.
To be continued. Because that was where I took Electricity. Industrial Electricity.
In High School?
Yes.
When you're talking about the same thing that I'm talking about and doing it very soft, easy tones, I can be just as annoyed by what's happening in this tone. I can't - it just goes up because the condition is driving me to talk louder.
This is sort of exercise for you.
And the women, they hate that with a passion. If they can't win on any count - I don't know if you've noticed this, but I'm sure you have, if they can't win on any count, it's "You're hollering at me." That's the perfect out for those bastards to shut you up. The hell with the problem… you're hollering at me. That means no matter what the problem is, it doesn't count.
And they annoy you until you holler.
Yeah.
They needle you until you holler.
And then tell you you're hollering at them. They say "Don't shout at me."
All of the shit that somehow you can't turn around and put it back on their back. They've got it off of their back and on you. No matter what the problem is. When 99% the cocksuckers know the problem is them. So they have to find a way to get around it and that's, "You're hollering at me."
It's taken me 20 years to figure that out.
Really. And the next 35 you just suffer. In silence.
I just didn't listen. I just said, "Fuck it. Do what you want. You ain't gonna get me crazy."
In fact one time she said to me, and that was interesting and I never forgot it just like they'd never forget anything, is she said, "You are so self-controlled. You're so contained."
The fact that I don't come unglued to suit them. That I don't get emotional to make them feel that I'm vulnerable. A fucking goddamn endless channel. I could see maybe that… you've seen that TV show that's got the couple of queers on it.
Will and Grace.
I think they are the funniest things… these guys are really super actors to fake being queer. They do it to perfection and I could see where guys, after being so goddamned annoyed with women could turn queer because they don't have that problem with a man that you get with the opposite sex.
Actually it's not true. Two gays are sometimes…
I've heard on TV programs that when they have a falling out they are just as put out… And that Springer show where the two of those will get on and they will carry on with the crying and the feelings and all that. Is this a man and a wife or what the hell is this? They feel that strongly about each other, you can't believe that the same sex can get that crazy.
The Springer show annoys me because it's really just a bunch of staged shit.
In most cases yes. But they do get some funny shit. The things they dream up to make. And if it was the people wouldn't have the balls to demonstrate it. Pulling off their fucking bras and all that shit. You only do that when you're fucked up.
You're gonna attack somebody in the other chair. Every week, if you watch it, somebody tries to punch the other person out.
Oh yeah, someone's always coming unglued. They could be man and wife, they could be girl and girl, tit could be boy and boy, any way you want it, you can make a fight.
We have somebody here - you've been cheating with this woman and now you can sit next to her and, like, ok…
Very casually keep a thing going.
I know, I won't even watch it, it's so stupid.
Sometimes when I'm going through the dial, every once in awhile there's a woman complaining about whatever her life's problems are and she's such a fucking gorgeous hunk of meat, I say, "How the hell can you not love this broad? She's like the bitter end. And you're having trouble?"
Wait til she opens her mouth.

When I came the cars were lined up, that was full, the lights were on. I'm saying, "Where the fuck is he?"
And the phones don't want to work.
All I'm doing is I'm going to grab a basket and come back out.
I see from the pile of shit that you got to keep here because you're out here all of the time. You gotta slip down all the stuff that fits in this little seat. I would go as far forward as you can without getting in the way of the shift and about that deep so you can put all that shit in there without tripping all over itself every goddamn time you use it. There just isn't enough room without it. You don't have to attach it, nothing. You just drop it in there so it's anchored for moving and everything is in that box.
Actually I'm making one on Monday.
For this purpose.
Uh-huh.
So I wasn't so far afield with this goddamn thing being a necessity.
Oh no, you're actually dead on.
I could just see that this is a question of putting in the glove compartment, you gotta use it every fucking day.
Yeah.

RATTLES, SQUEAKS
And every two minutes you're tripping over it or doing something with this thing being… that kind of thing drives me crazy. If there's something in the glove compartment that slides when you go around the corner, I got to stop the fucking car and get that thing from moving or I'll go out of my mind. There's something about that kind of motion that's so nerve-wracking for me.
I don't like rattles.
I just got to stop it, that's all. Or a door that's rattling. Like it's not latched tightly or the glass isn't all the way up. Because when it's down slightly it's fluttering. That fucking kind of noise drives me crazy. And there's just no accounting for it, it just is.
That's cause you're a control freak. No, I don't like squeaks either.
Squeaks. You know what I used to do in my old cars beyond the Model T stages already? Springs in those days were just springs, nobody ever oiled them or if you did it only lasted a few minutes or a few days and then it would squeaking back again. I couldn't stand those fucking squeaks. I jacked the car up, took the springs off the car, took the leaves apart and I coated them with a combination of wheel bearing grease and graphite and then wrapped the outside with oilsoaped cotton batting and then wrapped the outside of that son of a bitch with a piece of tape and now that cocksucker can't squeak. But what an operation to do that.
Do you know what they make now is liners?
Yeah, I know, but they don't work 100% either but they're better than nothing. So in those days that's what I did. And it worked.
And how old were you when you did that?
Probably 16, 17, somewhere in there.
So you had a lot of piss, vinegar and tape.
Oh yeah. Labor didn't matter to me. The point was to fix it. Time was what I had plenty of. And then it was the personal satisfaction. The way to beat it. There are millions of cars on the road, those bastards are putting up with it, and I'm saying to myself, "There's gotta be a way to beat this fucking thing."
But how are you going to beat it if you do nothing. If you do nothing you don't beat it. One time I asked a couple of guys, somebody who knew about cars, "Why can't they use oil in the radiator instead of water and you won't have the problem with corrosion and all that shit, it won't evaporate, wouldn't it work just as well as water?"
Nobody seemed to really know. I got yes answers, I got no answers, and I got imaginary things, why it wouldn't work because nobody'd ever done it to their knowledge. All that shit. So I said to myself, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna do it."

THE BLACKHAWK STUTZ
That old Blackhawk Stutz.
Really.
Take that Blackhawk Stutz, take all the water out of the son of a bitch, fill it up with oil, take it out for a drive, seems to be going ok and then I'm going down Sunset Blvd. to go somewhere and I'm away from the house about a half hour and I'm looking in the mirror, I don't know what the reason was and I see a trail of fucking oil following the car. Meaning its coming out. It doesn't have the ability to transfer heat like water. Not one dumb son of a bitch could tell me that. It works. So in my old car, what did it ruin? So I drain the fucking thing out, I ran some kerosene through it to get rid of the residual, filled it back up with water and I had the answer. And that's why no car, you would have thought, tried oil in the radiator.
Well, ok, because that's normal because when it gets hot it expands.
Yes, but the point is that it ran until the thing was practically empty. The temperature started to go up on the gauge. It didn't have the coefficient of absorbing to the same degree.
There's also an interesting thing that has been discovered, there's a product called Water Wetter. It's a surfactactant for water which causes it… they claim that what it does is defeats one of the problems in trying to cool combustion chambers. Because right above the combustion chamber is the hottest place in the engine and it's triply troublesome. One, it's the hottest place. Two, it doesn't get the cold water. Most cars until recently had bottom-up cooling . So the water that got to the solderheads was already hot and three, when it gets hot it causes the water immediately in contact with the metal to bubble or to steam and what happens..
It foams.
And what happens is that the water is not in contact with the head, so it's not cooling. So this surfactant breaks that water tension and allows it to stay non-bubbly. And they claim that it works dramatically.
Is that sold for hot rod cars?
Yeah. Supposedly used in Nascar and other things.
What's it called?
It's called Water Wetter.
See there's so many things about the physical sciences that are just amazing how you can divide it when you think of all of the fields, how you can divide the simplest goddamn liquid or metal or force of some sort that can vary with the landscape when you get down to the microcosm of use. In this condition, it don't do that, it does this. And it takes years sometimes for a single individual to somehow get a thought that can decipher that. Everybody else is lost like with the fucking brakes. Nobody knows the real answer.
The pads are too hard, they're too soft. They're chattering.
The clearances that hold the shoes are… the springs are not right. I've heard so many fucking reasons. And this is all written up by guys from Bendix and all these people who are brake people and you say to yourself, "If that's the reason, how come it's happening on every kind of mish mash car and even on the cars where there's a complaint, it doesn't happen on all of them. So all of their answers are full of shit."
I don't say it with bitterness, I say, "Hey guys, you don't know what you're talking about."
Not that you're the least bit annoyed that things don't work. I'm like you. Anything I've ever had I always tried to improve.
It's a natural reaction.
Stock doesn't function very well. There's always some levitation, something's annoying me, I want to customize it for my use, whatever.
I may not be able to fix it but the reaction to it's not 100% right is always there.
So you're trying to customize it for efficiency or for your function.
That's one thing California's great for is all this great way-out shit.

VIETNAM AND WWII
But you know what's interesting back in the 60's society was very anti-establishment. The kids…
It was the first rebellion against big business because big business was definitely not interested in anything except making money. Whoever was victimized, whatever, didn't count. We got the money and we're running the show.
Plus big business was sending kids to Vietnam to be slaughtered. But during that time…
While they made big money doing it.
Oh absolutely.
What gets me is I never heard a goddamn commentator say one time, "How come these cocksuckers who are making money while our guys are getting killed can't get to the point of saying during the war years, every dollar we make above operating costs is going to go to the government. No fucking way to pay for this shit and to make hospitalization for veterans, hospitals and all that stuff and have better care for the ones that did manage to survive. Not a word. They made the money and fuck you.
War is big business.
And that can be changed with the next fucking war with any country. But it ain't gonna happen. But every bastard who's making money from it, he plays deaf and dumb. But here's the bottom line, it's gonna cost you so many bucks. Oh, your friends got killed, we're sorry about that. We'll put a nice stone up for 'em, give 'em a piece of land like they did down in Westwood and show you how nice… they got all these crosses lined up - just a mountain of crosses. Isn't that wonderful? Look what they did.
The Mortician gets paid. When a child dies it's the most horrible thing in the world. The limo driver gets paid. The burial plot gets paid. The flowers get paid. The Mortician gets paid. Everybody gets paid. I don't decry somebody doing that - look what happened to Chrysler during the war and General Motors - they had to stop making their own products and selling to the public and they had to make products for the war. Ok, they deserve to be paid. They're not the ones who are determining the policy unless they are lobbying for it. Of course, they may very well have. But there are guys like McHugh, who used to run Hughes and other guys like that, they lobbied to have the Vietnam War happen so they could build the helicopters and the missiles…
Stretch out… not only check out the technology to improve the product but make a buck too.
There are people who are really just warmongers. There are companies that say "Great, let's go to war. That's our business - defense contracting. That's our business."
And 99% of the time they got it figured that their kids are not going to that fucking war. First of all they have to be the right age, they have to be male and they can find ways that they are going to college and they're doing something and they know the right guys in the military and their kids don't go to war unless they want to go to war. Being a goddamn fool about it. There's no goddamn war that we fought that we can honestly say that the other side was totally guilty and that their people deserve to die and yours didn't.
World War II, I think.
Bullshit.
Well, Germany was not exactly the sweetheart. Germany was nuts. Unfortunately. It was Hitler but the Germans were just absolutely, totally nuts, as were the Japanese.
Look at the way they started out with an undercover thing with hitting Hawaii, and all that kind of thing. They couldn't have been more miserable than that, sinking a fucking warship with 1500 people that went down with the ship.
Right.
I wasn't in the war and when I was on that goddamn little bridge that they built to go out on it…
The Arizona?
I don't know, were you there?
I've been there.
I was on that thing and I broke up into crying, I didn't even know why.
Wow.
It was just so hitting in me, all this fucking death over what? So you didn't have to be a soldier to feel that kind of emotion. I didn't even think about it.

SIDE THREE

SPIN THE BOTTLE
Anyway, so spin the bottle.
Oh, yeah, finally it comes in my direction and I go to the bedroom with a girl waiting to join the next guy that was…
By the way, in my day spin the bottle was basically you kiss somebody. You didn't end up in bed with them.
No, I didn't end up in bed with her either. But here was the funny part. She's in the bedroom because the bottle is facing me and I put my lips up against her lips and I'm waiting for something to happen. I don't know how to kiss a girl. She apparently didn't know any more - we're both standing there with our lips pressed against each other wondering what happens now.
Right.
Finally, after doing that for about 15 - 20 seconds we separate and sort of look at each other..
What's the big deal?
Is that all there is? And that was my idea of the first kiss - is that all there is? I didn't know shit for how to kiss a girl. I must have been 12 or 13 at that age. So that was my introduction to love.
And at 86 you get the wild woman of…
The one you always wonder, is there any of them like that out there?
Right.
And talk, oh you're doing this to me. She's running off in her head through her mouth what she's feeling. Unbelievable.
Only you.
And naturally it didn't take long before she's in love with me. All that shit. And when I tell her, "Hey, this is just a brief encounter."
She didn't like the sound of that at all. And what did she do, she turned it around, "I can't just be fucking, that would mean I'm just like a whore."
In their head they're so crazy with this love routine, she wanted me to send her flowers and letters. I'm saying, "You fucking ditzy broad, that ain't going to happen."
But she's giving me the tape of how I'm supposed to be and then afterwards I'm supposed to hug her and take her around and sleep with her for a couple of hours and do nothing just like that's the ending of the fucking, you don't just get out of bed until she recovers. And I'm saying to myself, "You ditzy son of a bitch, are you 18 years old, or what?"
She says, "Yes, I am."
Meaning I want the full treatment like I'm 18 years old. And I say, "Fuck you."
It's weird.
When it comes to fucking they got it tied in with this love thing, so bad.
Sex and love are all hooked up in their minds.
And not only that, "I don't just fuck, I gotta be in love."
Very few women just say, "I just want to get my rocks off and kiss you goodbye."
No way.
Years ago, I remember meeting a girl name Suzanne Brucker.
Names come easy to you.
I met her in a flower shop. A plant store at Sunset and Doheny. It was called the Wizard of Plants. She was just in there and we started talking and we cleverly pulled our conversations together and eventually we made a date. So I went out with her. And the next time I went out with her I took her up to my pool house where I had lots of plants and we just pounded each other. It was great. So as she's leaving, we're at the back door and I'm walking her to her car and I say, "That was kind of surprising."
She says, "You're surprised?"
I say, "Yeah."
She says, "Didn't you know when I was talking to you in that plant store that I wanted to fuck you?"
And I said, "No. I was hoping, but no."
But here's the problem, if a girl is standing there in a micro mini with her pubes showing and her tits out and her butt's flossed and she's doing all the moves and tossing her hair, god forbid you walk up and make a move.
I dare you.
Not interested.
Just want you to stand there and salivate.
It's so strange. It's either that they've got the one guy they want in their mind or you're not it or if you're interested, they're not. That's it. And it's a very tough thing to look at a woman and know you're interested and play it like I'm not interested. That's hard to do. I had a girl that I met named Leslie Washinsky who was a bassoonist in an orchestra in Los Angeles. Tall, nice looking girl, sort of a Venice, free spirit. She wouldn't take any sexual innuendoes or anything. So I decided that I'm playing this as flat as a piano top. Didn't make a move, not a kiss, not a hug, nothing, six weeks I go out with this girl. Totally not making any kind of overture of any kind.
Just good conversation.
One day I get four calls from her during the day. And she missed me every time. And I said to somebody, "She's arrived. She's turned the corner. She wants it today."
I was right. I just played it until she was ready to burst and and she called me and she wanted to get together and that was the day she wanted to get into bed.
So go figure.
I had another girl. Melo Louy - Turkish. Beautiful girl. Just gorgeous. And sexy. And I met her, played it absolutely cool. Not a kiss, not a hug, other than a little peck goodnight and after about the fifth date she invites me up to her place and she had invited me the week before but I said, "I've got to be up early tomorrow, I've got to play tennis. Invite me again, but really, it's just too late for me."
So she invites me up again and I thought I better come up this time. She comes in, she turns the lights down, she puts the music on, she brings some wine, she was ready for the nasty. She was deliciously pleased. And I was fairly athletic and respected lover. And afterwards, she said, "Jesus that was wonderful. I thought you were gay after all this time. I was getting worried. You didn't make one move."
And I said, "I don't do that anymore. If you're interested, you'll let me know. Like you."
Can't figure them out.
The funniest one I ever had - my daughter and her husband and the kids went down to an area just outside of Cancun on the strip there…
Is that my telephone?
No. And my daughter says I should come, have a good time and blah, blah, blah and I was in New York, but they had already got me the ticket.
When was that?
Six months ago, maybe a year. And so how could I turn them down? They already bought the ticket. I had no good reason why I couldn't come.
Right.
I figured, she's there with her husband and the kids, I'm going to be like a fifth wheel on the deal. But she didn't think so, so we went there and went to different places along the shore - they had all kids on little villages. We come to one and there was a gal there that was running for the State, one of those things about ecology. About the fact that plant life and sewage and all this kind of stuff that the natives weren't taking care of things well and they were contaminating areas. And somehow I looked at her and thought "I think I could screw this broad."
But I had to have enough balls to say, "Let's go to your place."
I didn't have a place - I'm staying with my daughter so I wasn't able to take her to where we were. And besides, where we were at was about 20 miles from where we were at that particular. So they're snorkeling out in the surf and I take her by the arm and say, "Let's go to your room."
And I figure the worst she can say is, "What, are you crazy or something?" And blow me off.
But she got so intrigued just by the fact that I had the balls to say, "Let's fuck.

I followed her to her place and that son of a bitch carried on like you can't believe. I couldn't believe it was that easy with somebody you didn't know five minutes.
86 years old in a foreign country. That's wonderful.
I'm telling you, that was something else.
That's funny.
So now I'm getting all this crazy shit that I didn't have the balls to even approach before.
That's funny. That's so funny.
I was down getting something at Kinko's. And in walks a girl, standing in line, waiting for one of the guys to wait on her, about 25, 28, somewhere in there, I'm looking at her and I say, "Oh, boy, would I love to wrestle with you."
She smiles and I smile back at her and I see a guy takes her over to one of the machines and shows her how to run the computer. And I say, you know, she's there by herself. I'm gonna go over to her and just say to her real close to her face, "You know, in case nobody's told you lately, you are a spectacular looking woman."
She just almost pissed in her pants.
"Oh really."
And I intended to just do that and walk away because I didn't know how to follow up on it at that moment, in the middle of this goddamn thing with a million people. And so I walked away, until I got to the door and I said, "What am I doing? I just had an opening. And I just let the fucking thing slide by."
I didn't have the balls to go back. But she just came unglued, just by making a simple statement like that.
That's wonderful.
And how I started that was a funny thing. I was in New York…
By the way, that's what Larry needs to learn, see. He needs to use that as an opening line.
So I'm in New York on a subway and across from me sits an Italian type with hair like this here kind of thing, you know, the bob thing. Really an outstanding classic looking woman.
How's that for class.
I didn't see. Who's that?
That's my front renter.
She coming in?
No, she's going into her place.
So I see her sitting there and she's reading and she looks up at me occasionally, just the usual kind of looking when you're sitting in a subway and then the subway was so low in population, just before I was going to get off, because this was the first time I pulled this I was going to go over, I knew the train was going to stop - it was starting to slow down, and tell her, "In case nobody told you lately you have the most classic face I've seen on a woman in a long time."
She nearly pissed in her pants. She practically ran to climb on me but I didn't know what the hell the next thing to say, the door opened and I left the subway. So I found that in a lot of cases that one goddamn statement that has nothing to do with sexuality, see, if I said, "Hey, you're a whorey looking broad," you're dead.
Yeah right.
They look at you like, "Who the hell are you?"
But if you extol something. Like another thing that happened that really works good, I guess that was before all the other shit happened was if I would see a gal with beautiful legs I'd say to them, "In case nobody told you, you have an outstanding pair of stems."
I'd always call them stems. I never had one that didn't piss in their pants. They thought that was so terrific that somebody thought she had beautiful legs, more than if they said she had a beautiful face.
And coming from you, see it's a non-threatening compliment.
Yeah. And I never had one say… look at you and…
Piss off big nose or whatever.
Never. They always went into ecstasy. So begin to say, "You know, you dumb son of a bitch, here you got these simple opens you used 40 years ago and you just took up at 80 and it still works."
So I find any kind of a compliment that's not sexual and it's done in an off the cuff thing, not in a nightclub, half drunk and all that shit. They really are bombed out.
That's exactly, if you call it a technique, that's how I used to approach being social. And that was why I was so successful.
Really.
At getting people.
Connections.
Because I would walk up to a situation and I would just quickly assay the conversation and I might make just a little funny remark, just a joke about what was happening. Not intrusive, just a little joke. It was enough for them to pay attention. And if they paid attention, then I would have a conversation, I'd make a compliment and I would go on. And if it didn't go anywhere, I'd just say, "Very nice talking with you." And go on.
Yeah. What could you lose? You didn't spend money, you didn't spend time, and you didn't have to go out of your way. It either connected or unconnected.
A guy named Werner Erhard had a wonderful thing to say one time, he said, "The way to be interesting is to be interested."
Well, like I said, you have the most outstanding pair of stems. Hey, you're not interested in me, I'm interested in you and I'm extolling something of your body which most women, either the face or the legs… Because you can't say you have beautiful tits or a nice ass, but you can say you've got beautiful stems and a gorgeous face, so I found those two areas if you make some noise about, you're not going to get into trouble.
I once told a girl on Mammoth, walking up the stairs on one of the…
Condos…
Well, no, it was out in the - they have one of those…
Lifts.
It's where you eat but they call them something, I forget.
It's an area…
It's one of the lodges. This is in the middle of the ski day. This girl walks up.
A knock out.
Just a great looking body, great ass, everything and I walked up next to her and I said "B.B.O.M"
And she looked at me and I said, "Best Butt On The Mountain." And just walked away.
She just loved that. People just love that.
So you can say something that's a little colorful sometimes but not threatening…
Self serving…
Not insulting to them. How are you going to tell them you got a nice pair of tits? Oh, in fact, I did one time. But it has to be a special case.
Of course.
This girl was wearing a nice silk loose blouse and no goddamn bra. And she was walking down the street and them fucking tits were flying around like I'd never seen. They looked like they were going up and down about this far. And I said, "I can't stand it."
They were going this way and this way. So I'm walking behind her and trying to figure out what I'm the hell I'm going to say to her that won't be threatening and all that. And I finally figure out something to say and I go up to her and I stop her and I say, "You should never wear a bra. Those are the most beautiful pair I've ever seen."
She came unglued.
When you are going to get that case, where they're really - no bra and young enough and they're flying around. That only happens once. I made that crack.
You actually should have had a camera and followed you around…
That would have been good.
That would have been sort of like.
But the thing I was getting at is a simple statement and you can get to talk to somebody and there's no way you can say, "Hey, I want to know you."
I'm the kind of the person… I mean, you're walking the street, what do you mean, you want to know me? I mean, that kind of inference won't work. That's not a reason. The average woman would say hey, "This guy's queer, and I want no part of him."
Yeah.
But you say, "Just a minute, you look good to me, I want to talk to you."
I mean what kind of opening can you make that'll make them stand still and not look threatening or stupid. It's not easy.
Pretty much you gotta give it up. You have to give it away.
These couple of things that I tried just out of the fucking blue worked and I said, "Where the fuck have I been for 40 years?"
What you need to do is write the book Saul Bastion's Guide To Getting Laid Over 80. Yo ho ho.

ROADSIDE SERVICE
Three kids and a dog. So she gets in the car with the kids and then she's going clear to New York, never been out of the city.
And how long has she been driving?
About six months.
And what age? This was 40 years ago.
30 something.
1962 is 40 years ago.
Oh yeah, years ago, but she was born in 1925, so how old would she be?
She's be a little under 40 - 38.
She gets 100 miles east somewhere and I get a telephone call, she had a flat tire, what should she do?
I said, "What do you mean, what should you do? Don't we have a spare?"
"Yeah."
"Put the spare on. Get another new tire, put it on the road and put the spare back in the trunk."
She expected me to say, "I'll be out there to pick you up and pull you back."
Right.
She did that and continued the rest of the way.
Got the kids to help her change the tire.
No, the kids were too young. She had to call somebody to get the tow truck out there to change the tire. But she made it out there. She had balls. She had one experience. She was midway across and the car started to falter - there was some dirt in the carburetor or something and she stops into one place, a gas station and the guy says, "Well, I think it's this but it might be that."
And he starts giving her a whole load. And she says, "You don't know what's really wrong with it, you're going to just keep changing parts until you make it run?"
She didn't like that kind of approach to fixing a car. So she gets a phone book, finds out the nearest Ford agency which happened to be about 30 miles away and the car would run, but it would surge and do different things and eat gas like crazy when she had the tank filled, and running erratic she got it to the Ford agency in that town and then burst into tears telling them what was wrong with the car. Naturally when a garage guy sees a wife with all those kids and all that and it's a new car, he's going to be Mr. Wonderful, you know, at an agency. He said, "I want you to take the kids and there's a little restaurant right down the block and all that good stuff, you take it easy and have a cup of coffee."
And they did that and came back and fixed whatever it was, no charge kind of shit, we're talking way back way in the middle of the country, like Kansas or someplace, not New York City where they go like this if you breathe on them and she made it the rest of the way. She had some balls, all right. That was a good experience. Yep.
And how long did you keep that car?

SOME CARS
I kept that car until it was really in need of an engine job and the transmission was running a little jerky - who knew that was going to be a car that would raise in value and there were only a few of them that were sold relative to the car population in general. So I think I sold it to a used car guy because I wasn't going to make a whole thing about selling it because it wasn't running good. You know what I mean? The transmission would act funny when you put it in reverse. I figured a dealer; I would enjoy screwing him better that a private guy. So I sold it to him at that time for $200. It was probably worth $1,000 but big deal. We paid $4,000 something for it that was a fair price for a car that wasn't running. And she bugged me ever since, "I loved that car."
And then I had a chance to buy a reconditioned one many years later but they wanted $5,000, $8,000, $10,000 - all kinds of numbers and we were driving a used Cad at that time. She was in love with that car and I couldn't see paying that much above what it cost new to get it. So I just never would up getting it.
What did you drive after the Tbird.
Cad. Used Cad. '60 something used Cad. I bought cars usually pretty cheap because I usually got a car from someone at work who had an ad in the paper or it was a neighborhood kind of thing. And like I said, I only got screwed real bad one time, a horrible oil burner and the transmission fell out, it just didn't happen. They ran reasonably good and I was able to fix whatever was wrong from putting on brakes to changing an alternator, a water pump. I did all the service on there and I enjoyed doing it. Just lay on the goddamn ground.

THE EIFEL TOWER AND EDISON
Making love to your car and you were on the bottom. You were at the Eiffel Tower.
The whole thing besides being able to look all around is they had a tableau, I guess you'd call it, a scene of a room in which Marconi and Edison dressed in clothes of the day out of wax so it was a Madame Toussaud quality thing and it looked very real and they were talking to each other and Edison's gramophone was on the side and Marconi had his dash system thing and the first message that crossed the ocean was from the top of the Empire State Building to Newfoundland in the Americas.
To Newfoundland. I don't understand.
That was closer than New York.
You said the Empire State, you meant top of the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower. That was the first radio wave signal that was reached and caught.
So they bounced one all along the ionosphere.
I don't know the detail. All I know is they got the message.
Oh.
That happened from the Eiffel Tower. And the other thing that was fantastic about the Eiffel Tower, the whole thing was constructed out of pieces of steel, that were 18 inches long and about 3 inches wide, a hole drilled in each end and stuck together like an erector set.
No, I didn't know they were that short.
Very short pieces fitted together.
When they got it halfway up, they were trying to get it torn down and the rest of it was going to be sold for scrap.
Because?
Because they were trying to get rid of it.
You mean when it got half up?
Halfway up, there was such a protest.
There was a protest. They thought it was ugly. They didn't want it.
And they even made a sale for scrap.
I don't remember that detail, but I know there were a lot of protests and it was considered a very ugly building.
And now it defines Paris. Isn't that funny.
They wouldn't let anybody touch it.
Do you know one that actually freaks me out is the Arch D'Triumph.
Yeah, why?
The big arch on the Champs Elysee.
Yeah, I walked through it.
It's huge.
Massive.
Huge.
You can go up on it, you know. You can walk to the top of it.
I know, but I just walk through.
I did a funny thing, on noon on a weekday I ran through the Champs Elysee, through the Arch D'Triumph traffic circle, ten lanes of traffic.
All you need is one crumb to go down the wrong pipe. Drives you crazy until you clear it.
I dodged traffic and ran through 10 lanes of traffic in that traffic circle considered by some to be the most notorious traffic place in the world.
But if you look at Paris, that is the high point, that's the hill and everything slopes gently away from that and they laid out all the streets and the entire city was laid out around that point. Isn't that amazing. There are 13 streets that come into the star, called the equal.
In fact without it there'd be no way in hell you could get across. Can you imagine arranging any other way to get from one side to the other without a circle.
There are circles within circles within circles. So there are circular streets that are out further.
That big one, to get across it, how would you arrange the traffic.
No way.
To make it happen.
Yeah, that's the only way.
Such a sensical way. Far too dynamic for here, except down in Bellflower. Do you ever watch this?
You know that whole thing is only as thick as a 50-cent piece? The whole statue.
It's just a shell. It's all built around an interior grid. Eiffel did the grid, didn't he?
Yeah. And a wooden form was made for that whole statue in pieces.
And they pounded it around it.
And they took sheet copper and pounded around it. Because there is no way. How could you determine the shape without having something on the inside. You're working on such a scale, it's impossible as a human to trace you away. How could you get anywhere, you just couldn't. And people don't appreciate what the hell is involved to create that statue.
And the dickie American public - it was like a big friggin' deal to just build the pedestal. Millions of dollars had to be raised to make the pedestal.
From school kids.
Oh, it's stupid. Yeah, it was so amazing.
That part they sort of lay quiet about the negative part that they were so chickenshit that they didn't even want to put it up.
Right.
Some of those things you can write a pretty good description about how we stink in what we did.
Yeah, absolutely.
We have a habit of always getting these people for money that will glorify anything you want because they're good at speaking and writing…

SIDE 4

CENTRAL PARK
His real feelings about anything.
It's that old wonderful thing - do you know how you can tell when a politician is lying? When his lips are moving. You're going to tell me how Central Park got there.
That was the worst part of Manhattan, for over 100 years.
Central Park?
Yeah. They built all around it and Central Park as one big piece of land with nothing on it.
Really?
And you might say, "Why did that happen?"
That area was very rocky, uphill and downhill, compared to the rest which was flat as a pancake, and full of little pools of water and whatever, so if a goddamn contractor had to build a house on any part of that it would cost him a lot of money, you couldn't connect to the sewer lines easy because you would actually have to blast rock. What the fuck was the incentive for him to get involved when he couldn't get his money back?
Very interesting.
Nobody could pay that kind of money it was gonna cost him to put a house there in the first place.
So you're gonna build in a rocky swamp.
So it stayed empty and what was on it, what do you call those things with the hobos and everything hang out? A piece of land where just trash live and put up shacks and all this kind of stuff?
Right.
It was niggerville.
Oh my goodness. Right in the middle in the '70's was a big area but nothing but blacks who were just trying to stay alive. They couldn't afford housing of any kind.
Hobotown.
Yeah, Hobotown. And it was that way for quite a few years. It was only after, all around the edges, when bigger homes started to get built they got together with the city and naturally increased the taxes and did all that kind of shit, collecting a fee for anything and everything that they could get their hands, that they could get a couple of architects who were willing to take on the job of turning that thing into a park. And they worked ten fucking years with over 2,000 people to turn that thing into a park.
Really. Wow.
Because it was no easy job. And it was only possible then when they were getting 2 and 3 dollars a day for the goddamn labor.
Now it would be Teamsters and the guy sweeping the street would get $35 an hour.
Yeah. They would have some equipment that could cover some ground. So it would be a whole different thing. And what do they do in Mexico on a similar thing? Did you ever hear of the area called Piedras Negras, which means Black Rocks, just out of the edges of Mexico City, there is a volcanic outburst from a zillion years back, big rocks and everything grew out of the ground from all the convulsions that took place and it was the same thing, who the hell was gonna build you a house there? It cost a fortune. Plumbing wise and moving these rocks. Some of them were as big as buildings.
Sure.
I mean, they were big. Naturally, when a city gets built up to that level and people really got big money and now you can say, well, artfully, if we put that house right there and make use of the rock as background and all that shit, now I want to live there and put gates around it.
Funny.
Now it's choice property. You couldn't give that shit away 100 years ago. That's the way those things go.

THE UNBELIEVABLE 40 YEAR-OLD
Unbelievable - never had one like that. And gorgeous, half hour later, let's do it again. 4 times in a couple of hours and I'm in bed with the son of a bitch for 6 hours at a time.
And she's what, 40? It's the new math. 87 into 40.
And she thinks I'm the best piece of ass she ever had.
She's probably right.
She keeps telling me shit like, "Where did you learn all that?"
Learn what, doesn't everybody do that? "Oh," she says, "are you crazy?"
So now without a prostate, can you get an erection?
Very slowly.
Seriously.
Yeah, I get it.
Brilliant. Functional?
Functional, but slow getting up there. I ain't in a hurry, so fuck with it. And the funny part of it is that they're desperate that I get a hard on. She's having such a good time she owes me. That's the reaction. I say, "Hey, if it doesn't go up it's no big deal."
No, they want it to go up.
So you just work her over every other way too.
That's for sure.
It's a kick in the ass to see how many different ways you can make them climb the ladder.
That's wonderful.
That was a kick in the ass. She was the only woman who would call me up and tell me, at 10 o'clock in the morning, "I want to come over."
She always came to my place because she lived in an apartment and she didn't want anybody to know. She did all the fuckin' coming. She walked over to my place.
In more ways that one.
Yeah. Imagine 10 o'clock in the morning. I say, "I've got a lot of things to do."
She says, "We'll only be together an hour."
All day.
That's not going to happen. She says, "What do you have to do that's more important with me?"
That's the same old shit.
They think a woman is the center of the Universe.
You're passing up ass? And while it's happening, when did that happen to you Big Boy, never. Fuck a woman begging to come over and she's doing the walking?
I like that.
When the hell does that happen?
Now. The timing is good.
Now, can you get off with that?
Off where?
Can you have an orgasm?
Oh yeah.
Beautiful. Beautiful. You know, you're a master forever.
Fuck.
Literally.
For as long as it lasts.
Listen, that's great. So I see why you weren't in such a hurry to get home. You were just putting me off.
No, the big problem I had there was she didn't want me to leave in the worst way. We'd be in bed together, fucking tears were running down her cheeks. Because with them it's always that love shit.
Yeah.
They can't just fuck they gotta have love.
Isn't that amazing?
They don't refer to fucking as fucking it's loving.
Lovemaking.
They don't like the word to be coarse. That's with everything.
I understand.
That's the way they are.
No, I understand that.
It's gotta be not so much delicate, but it's gotta be…
Refined.
Refined, that's the right world.
No, I fully understand that and I don't mind that but the delusion that sex is love…
Is always in their fucking head.
Yeah, it's like the thing I told you the other day, when the girl looked at me and said, "Didn't you know I wanted to fuck you when I first met you?"
No.
And especially when she is saying it.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten away from guys who say, "Excuse me, I've gotta go take a shit."
Thank you for sharing.
Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom. That's good enough for me.
Ugliness has no benefit.
I don't need that. "What's the matter with you?"
Not a thing.
I think that in that area on my part, at least, I want everything to be as refined as possible. It's costing you no more. Why the hell shouldn't you make the thing nice?
Yeah, exactly.
And everytime you say I love you, I love you, I love you. You'll fuck her up. I just want to fuck you, honey. No, you gotta love each other.
I told you the joke about when Millie was hard of hearing and I said one night, "I love you," and she didn't respond.
So I said it again, "Good night, I love you."
And she said, "Oh, whatever."
Because she didn't hear me, she thought I said something else. So I said, "What's this whatever stuff?"
She said, "Oh, Jeez, I didn't hear what you said."
So from then on our code word at night was "Whatever."
It's good when you can twist it around.

OLD COINS AND RANDY
So you got, that's one of four boxes or five boxes that you've got of coins. And how did you come by these coins? You didn't tell me how you got them, though. I know, she died and he died, but how did they come to you?
They were up in her attic, which I found out before they passed away.
In Northern California. San Francisco.
So it's a question of who's gonna get it. So we figured don't tell anybody and take it.
So you just took it.
Yeah, what was I going to do, tell my father in-law?
Tell your wife?
Oh, she knew about it.
So Randy will do real good for you.
The way he talks, shit. I couldn't have given it for a starter to anybody else. Because, first he's interested, second, he's got the machine to record all that shit and enough of a box. What do you see?
Nothing, I said, third, he's ethical.
Yeah.
You couldn't ask for a nicer guy.
Hey, if I was gonna get fucked, you couldn't judge him then give up.
Yeah.
You know what I mean, there's no use in judging anybody.
If he lost it or did something he'd just go out and buy it for you. That's the kind of guy he is. He's incredibly ethical.
Like he didn't want to take the coins out and put it in his truck until he was going to leave because something might happen during that time, something taken out of the truck.
Exactly. He's got the mind to think very…
Precise.
If he builds an engine you cannot imagine how many times he double and triple checks things and "Oh, no, you have to massage that corner, no you have to take the burr off this. No, no it's gotta be a half a thou better than that."
He does an engine job?
Oh no, he's a mechanical wizard on cars. He does everything on cars. He's done body work, paint, he owned a VW repair shop for years, and he worked on Mercedes and VW.
I didn't know that.
He had a Laundromat for awhile.
Yeah, he told me about the Laundromats. And then we got together on the business about buying all the coin machines that he could make the money on by owning the machines. That's what my goddamn brotherinlaw did up in the bar. He says, "Hey, either sell me the machine or take it out."
And everybody said, "OK, we'll sell you the machine."
Sure.
Because one of the things was they probably had more machines that weren't placed, number one, and the other one, number two, maybe business was not that good, when they took it out they'd have the machine and no money. This way they dropped the machine and had the money. Plus….
It's a used machine.
Yeah.
So if something goes wrong it's his problem.
That's the way the ball rolls.

SODAS AND BEER
What's with this fucking soda that you have to have every 5 minutes.
I just take a lot of liquid.
Why do you take expensive soda instead of water?
It's cheap. This is cheaper than water.
How is it cheaper than water?
First of all, tap water is terrible, so bottled water is very expensive. This is cheaper than tap water.
No shit?
My argument to all that shit was beer is cheaper than the goddamn soft drinks.
I don't like beer.
I know you don't but I'm just saying, if I want to wet my whistle sometime and I got both in the refrigerator, I grab a fucking beer because it costs me less money than a soda. And I find there isn't enough difference between the quality brands and the piss water when it comes to beer anyway - I only drink one bottle and I usually have it with a steak or something that has a lot of protein.
Do you like beer for that?
One beer. I used to drink the shit that tastes like beer, forget it.

DICK'S FINANCES
We got something serious to talk about.
Just one second, I got to make a call. Born again pagan, I like that. I was just reading that woman's bumper sticker. Two bumper stickers. One said Born Again Pagan. The other one said, The last time we mixed religion with politics, people were burned at the stake. I like that. That's right on.
It's amazing that people can get so worked up about that those two areas that they mess up the world so badly.
Look at these Muslim fundamentalists, they're crazy.
And I love the bullshit-added feature they got that it's God's will. And the cocksuckers planned that and then blamed it on God, who I don't believe in anyway but the point is that's the way they get around it.
More people have been killed in the name of God than any other thing.
Oh fuck, unbelievable.
How's that for a welder.
Yeah.
Generator and everything.
Yeah, that's what they do in Brooklyn the same way, because you got to be able to take that thing right to the job.
Ok, serious.
Serious bit, now. What the fuck is it gonna take for you to get past the zero bank account. How much money do you have out there that if you could collect it would you actually be above zero.
Ok, I'll answer that in three ways. First, if I had all the money that was owed to me…
That you could get.
If I had all the money that was owed to me period…
No, that's not good.
I understand.
That'd be about 1/3 of a million dollars. Now if I got the money that I have judgments on, just judgments, that would be about $80,000.
And what's the likelihood of getting any of that?
It's low, not something I bank on and I haven't gotten it. One guy's owed me it 11 years and I can't get it. Now if I were willing to hire Guido the leg surgeon and have him change the direction of some people's kneecaps why yeah, then I could do it, but I would expose myself to something terrible…
Too chancy.
So I have to just kiss that shit off.
Now the third part is, right now in the here and now, when I finish these jobs and collect monies, I'll probably break even.
Break even.
In terms of what I owe, not some outstanding loans like yours or some other monies, just in cash flow I'll probably be even by the time those jobs finish because the overhead's gonna click along and I'm gonna still owe the money. In other the 7 or 8 grand a month is gonna click along and so if it takes me 2 or 3 months to finish a couple of jobs, by the time I collect it and spend the money to do the jobs, the overhead will eat most of that up. What was that last sentence.
The overhead will eat that up.
So right now the reality of what is going on in my business is I did my second biggest year this year. My overhead was higher by 7% because I paid some loans back and I also had to buy a work truck and buy some tools. So that bumped my overhead quite a bit. So my overhead instead of being $80,000 was $114,000, ok, so it was up substantially. So right now I have a $35,000 job in Pasadena of which I've been paid $11,000. So there's $24,000 left and I've got to build it.
And how much of that is profit when it's paid.
If net profit, not gross profit, if net profit was 20%, then about $7,000 was mine.
But it's not that?
Well, ok, but that $7,000 is already spent. He gave me 10 or 11 thousand, it's already gone. I spent a little money on the job, not much and it's basically gone, so now…
What's left will be used up.
So there's no net monies coming from that job. This job that we're doing here, she has given me a total of about 8, 10, 12 thousand dollars on a $25,000 job.
How much of that is profit?
Again, $5,000 would have been profit, but that's all spent.
Because of what?
Paying the bills. Every month it's 5 to 8 thousand dollars.
So you're working negative even when you're taking money home. With everything that's happening, even if you were to pay all the money that you owed, regardless of what it was, if you didn't owe any expenses to anybody, you're still not making money.
Not right now. Because this period, the November to February period is usually quite slow. Oh, ok, there's a couple of other jobs. Now I've got another job that owes me $2300 that's gonna take me $300 or $500 to do that job. So there's approximately $2,000 of clear profit coming from that job when he pays me. He's not paying me because he is procuring the moldings for his job but he's holding $2300 of my money to do a $300 job when he gets the moldings.
How do you get into such a fucked up deal?
Because this guy's just a lunatic and we got to a point in the job where it became clear that we couldn't get these moldings unless he spent money to go buy them and he started stalling and doing all sorts of stuff. So I got stuck in the middle. Now, I could have take him to arbitration.
Enough of that.
So I said, you know what, instead of giving away $500 for the privilege of having someone tell him he should go and do what I told him he should do, so I'll take less now, I'll get the rest when we're done and I'm out of there.
So I forewent crunching him, which I had every right to do, the contract said this is what we'll do. But I allowed us to have mediation with the guy who put us together and I said ok, fine. And my buddy, by the way, agrees. He said, "No, he's fucking you. And there's no getting around it. You'll get your money, but I agree he's shafting you right now. That's his mindset."
How's he shafting you if he buys the goddamn moldings and you put them on, or they put them on, isn't that a fixed amount of money you're gonna get regardless once the molding shows up?
Yes. When the molding shows up and we put it up…
You get your money. So you're not losing it, you just have a delay in getting it.
But he should be holding $500, not $2,300. That would have been right, that would have been fair. And he's not being fair. Now, if I didn't have.
He's not being fair only in the fact that you're not getting the money according to schedule, but it doesn't say that you're going to be screwed out of the amount you settled on.
No, but a very important point and I'll tell you in a second. Remember I said it's a cash flow deal. So right now because he hasn't given me the 2 grand, where do I have to get it? I have to get it from another job.
Because you're on zero in the bank.
Right. And now I have another job that owes me 5 to 8 thousand dollars right now, out of which I have to spend, say 3. So I've got somewhere between 3 and 5 thousand dollars net when he hands me the money. He's hurting, he's in the middle of his down time so he can't pay.
What does he do?
He makes software. He makes a program, RAM or whatever.
He could get wiped out completely with that field, no?
I guess it's possible, so right now, I've been busy, but it's still not gangbusters busy, but it's been busy so what has happened in a cash flow slowdown and a couple of guys didn't pay - well if you take what the two guys didn't pay me, that's about the money I've stolen out of one job, just to keep going. If they had paid I would have had the money and I would be funding and I'd be ok. So now I'm just struggling. But the overall major factor in all of this is that I have done work, by paying people hourly, which goes over my fixed price budget. Now, there are only 2 choices. Well, there are 3 or 4, but 2 of which are really workable. For instance, I could raise my prices by 25%. Well, guess what, I'm not going to get any work.
Exactly, especially in a down market.
Right, so I think that I'm pushing it right now because I'm bidding 10 or 20 jobs to get one, so I know I'm not the low bidder. And I have had… I wrote a letter about this.

REFRIGERATORS
Most guys do the wham bam thank you maam shit. Then you show them you're able to go on them all night and they got a different set of problems. No matter what fucking way you go, you're not doing it right.
You can't win.
I mean you can't win.
They scream about I could go all night and then you go with them 3 times and they're moaning already. Oh God, I love it. These fuckers are all too small. She's right about her size and the counters.
Yeah.
They're made to look at not use.
Right.
And that was done. The arrangement was done more for eye appeal than use appeal. And what were you going to do about the refrigerator so that it didn't stick out like they always do because refrigerators have been getting bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper.
Actually, you know what, they've been going the other way. The designer refrigerators are now 24 inches, not 30.
Deep?
Yeah.
How are they beating it?
By putting the compressors on top.
Oh, that's the only one that's been doing that because they were big units.
And then the rest of it is just a box. See the rest of the refrigerator in those units, there's nothing behind. You shove them right to the wall.
You know, when you think about it, when you go back to the early GE's that had that round thing with the radiator on it - it's just what we've returned to except they're square instead of round.
Right.
Because at the time they made it round, that was an appearance thing as well as a function. You've got a lot if coils around it and all that and it looks like a little contraption.
I like that. I really like the look of that.
And then by lifting the thing out, you took the whole refrigeration unit without doing a single unbolting. It just dropped in by the dead weight.
Right.
Which was a hell of an idea. So sometimes we start out on an industrial product real smart and little by little we get fucked up for other reasons.
We trick ourselves out.
Yeah.
Because that is the most practical goddamn way to handle that. For replacement, for repair, for everything.
Everything.

DUMB CAR
Smarlmobile.
A little Honda. A 3 or 4-inch exhaust pipe on a 1 1/2-litre engine, you know.
Lowered so it won't ride good.
They cut the coils so it just bounces along. It's like women, they sacrifice themselves to fashion, you know.

MORE CONS
So you've never done anything with these coins?
No, I've looked at them in a very haphazard way, because I'm not going to look at every fucking coin - what's it going to tell me where to look in the handful of them?
It might serve you better just to sell them to Randy and let him figure it out. You know?
Well, for the moment, let's see what he thinks is in there. And how time consuming doing all that is going to be.
Oh no, it's going to be very time consuming. A lot of that shit might be once you get into it might only be one valuation, you start to arrange them in those boxes in that they make where you have an envelope for each coin and you can put the bullshit on the outside, in a plastic window so you can see it without taking it out and all that shit. Which it only grew because it was such a pain in the ass once you got past a handful of coins. How the hell were you going to handle it - take them out each time?
Right.
And then they tell you got the oil from your hands on it and that's going to reduce the value because now it's soiled? It just goes on and on.
There are wear patterns on the coins too.
That's a whole different world again.

SIDE FIVE

OLD CARS AT GREAT PRICES
Now this is a 1912 International.
Two cylinder.
Under the seat. Gold leaf letters. Jesus, and you must have paid all of what?
$200.
Jesus. Do you remember what you sold it for?
No. I don't. It was under $1,000, I know that. And the thing I forgot to tell you about this whole exercise was, when I found the Ford I was gonna keep for myself, I envisioned that International and these other car companies would be very anxious to put one of those things in the showroom as a display car.
Yeah.
They didn't give one shit about old cars.
Oh really.
Didn't mean nothing. Not in the era when I was…
That's funny.
Didn't give a shit about it. So what was I gonna keep them for? I didn't buy them to keep. I thought I'd make myself some extra money.
And this was what year again?
1946.
1939. Oh my God.
Just after the war.
God, you're just unbelievable.
I told you, a one-cylinder brush I could have bought - $75.
The guy wouldn't…
His wife said no, she wants to keep it. It wasn't the money. It's gonna be worth a lot of money after she's dead and she was 70 already - she's worrying about keeping it to get money. What are you going to do? I ran into some interesting stories when it came to those cars, where they were kept and all that shit. How they got there. Including that one cylinder Cadillac that the President of American Airlines bought.
I don't know about that.
Maybe I didn't tell you that whole story. When I was going across country and I decided to pick up an old brass Model T - 1914, somewhere in there, to have some fun when I got into California, because I had Model T's before but they weren't that old. And I thought, you know, for Halloween and all that shit I'd take it out and horse around with it. And I had a lot of shit to put on it. For example I had these very high, very elaborate spittoons that I had bolted on the running boards. I had a telephone in the back, a wall type.
Oh, that was the Model T Roadster. Model T Pickup.
No, this was the touring, the one that I bought for $50 - drove it out of his garage.
Ok.
So we're getting to the part of the story - what the hell were we talking about.
You said that the one cylinder Cadillac - so I'm in Kansas somewhere and I see this sign Antiques and all that bullshit so I stop and that's the place that I bought high button shoes, brand new for me, my size, for $3 a pair. I bought a Stetson beaver felt hat with a silk lining inside for $2 and that's where I bought the coffin handles to bolt on the side of the car. But in the course of talking to him, I said, I need to find these places to get this stuff. He buys all the local newspapers for 3 or 4 States around him…
When everybody dies…
When anybody dies he goes to see the widow. And he gives them a practical story - you're not gonna keep the stuff. I'm sure you can use the money rather than the old iron and he would get even the inside of a hardware store. With all the shit in the hardware store. And coming the way he does and being a sweet-talking fucker he'd get it at a good price. And he'd find a way to get rid of it. So the American Airlines president wanted, because he belonged to an antique car club, he wanted something different, something unusual. And what the hell's more unusual than a one cylinder Cadillac, 1904, with zero miles on it. How can you get a Cadillac with zero miles on it? This guy that owned it knew all about the problems of starting these old cars. You really had to crank your ass off to get them going, so when he's downtown, which is 50 miles away from where he lives…
This is the antique dealer.
No. A different guy altogether?
This is the guy who owns the car.
Oh, ok.
And he goes to this agency and he tells them about it - he's not going to buy this goddamn thing if he's going to have trouble starting it.
This was when it was new?
Brand new - never used.
In '04.
In '04 - and like all salesmen, lying son of a bitches, he had no idea how much trouble it was going to be to start and naturally the one he demonstrated on in the goddamn showroom started because it's under nice weather conditions and all that. Ok, he buys the thing and being 50 miles away, they deliver it to him on a flat car. In a box, because it's that small. The whole thing is in a little box.
It's like a little buggy.
Exactly. No windshield. Curved dash front, stick steering. One cylinder. I mean you're looking for a rare fucking automobile.
Right.
And he opens the box and gets a dray horse and wagon thing to get it pulled over to his garage where his house is and they put it into the garage and then they open up the box. And naturally he's going to start it up. And that motherfucker won't start. He calls this guy up and raises hell with him and naturally he gets all kind of talk. "I'll send a guy out there, don't worry about it."
Blah blah blah. In the meantime he closes that fucking thing back up in the box and it sits there for years and years and year. Because when I saw it in 1946.
And you saw this car?
No, I just saw the guy who bought and sold it to the guy who owned American Airlines.
And he just sold the car?
I don't know if he just sold it. I know he had bought it so it had to have been some time after I met him. But the point was, when he told him what he had, this guy almost pissed in his pants - he says, "Don't touch the car - I'll send a moving van out there to pick it up. Don't touch it. Leave it in the box."
Because he didn't want to take a chance for anything to go wrong with it, to disturb even the paint. And I said, "What did you get for something like that?"
He says, "Well, I can tell you now, because it doesn't matter."
He got $10,000.
In 1946.
And he paid $500.
Wow.
So that's how weird some of that shit is. And that was the year I was picking up all this other shit.
It doesn't sound that long ago, but it was almost 60 years ago.
It's a long time ago.
Did you want to go home or are you coming home with me.
No, I think I'll drop off.

JOHNNY APPLESEED
What was interesting, I was staying in a house, renting a room in Williamsberg, Ohio, which cost me $3 for the week and it had no toilet in the house. They had a chamber pot under the bed. I wasn't going to shit in that thing, I'd go out to the back and use the out house, which when you open the door, and it would bowl you over.
They didn't have any nice chemicals back then.
No way. So I get to talking to this woman, and come to find out she's a distant relative of Johnny Appleseed. The guy who planted those trees along one of the main highways in Ohio, when it wasn't a main highway, this guy decided the countryside ought to have apple trees because they take care of themselves real easy and people can have free fruit and so he put it along the highway…
I thought the guy was a figment.
No, he showed me a picture of the guy.
So here I was in that house with Johnny Appleseed's relatives.
Wow.
The shit I run into - I can't believe it. I don't think I mentioned that story now for maybe 20 years.
No, I never heard that.

MORE AMAZING FINDS
Nice woman. That was the town, believe it or not, where they had, no it was the next town over, I'll think of the name in a minute, not that it matters, it was a parts house and one of the things that he had that I saw, sitting on the shelf was a brand new in the box brass Ford radiator, 1912 model. I said, "What do you take for that radiator?"
Nobody's asked for that fucking radiator, probably been in there 5 years or longer. He says, "How about $20."
I'll take it. Unfuckingbelievable. The shit that I picked up. Had I known how this world was going to turn.
Just put it in that garage somewhere and left it.
I had five grand to blow that I took from New York. It was the money that I earned before I was coming back to California.
So you said, "I'm going to have some fun with it."
Yeah.
Wow.
That was the same trip I told you where this guy knew these people who were building perpetual motion machines. Did I tell you about that? I must have told this story to somebody recently and I guess I forgot who the hell it was.
You might have told me. Go ahead.
And he decided to make a museum out of this shit because they're all different and they're in people's garages because the fucking thing embarrasses them because it isn't perpetual motion, it was an attempt. The one that less friction and ran a little longer, just raised the fucking price $1.40. It was $1.35 yesterday. So in his place, what I got, I'll show you one of those one of these days that I got…
His place… he being whom?
Being a guy that sold all kinds of old shit. In a store. In Kansas City, Kansas.
OK.
Out in the rural districts somewhere. He had 4 coach lamps that were used in the old wooden coaches, made out of cast brass with milk glass panels inside, three sided, the back is heavy cast iron and it was kerosene lamps. And that's what they had inside the goddamn coaches. 4 of them. I bought all 4 for $50. Still have them.
Real coach lamps.
Yeah.
Wow.
And I found out from a guy that was a railroad nut that they were out of an 1860 coach.
These are railroad or horse-drawn.
No railroad.
I got a suggestion for you. You got a whole bunch of stuff that you can't even find, let alone display. Why don't we put it up on the wall in my garage? At least you could see it. Want to do that?
It'll take awhile to dig that shit out. I got a butter churn that's made out of solid cedar. Cedar is a sweet wood that doesn't influence the milk. With brass bands, tapered sides and you plunge it up and down until you create the butter, hand-operated. I mean I did collect some unusual shit that cost me peanuts. I think one of the other things that I got that's rather nice, is I've got a camera and wooden tripod, the camera body itself is covered with rococo leather, which is goat skin and it takes pictures on glass plates. I've got some of the glass plates. This belonged to a doctor. I bought it for $12.
What do they call it? A daguerreotype?
That's different, daguerreotype. That was the ones that did it on metal. And I have a picture of my mother in a daguerreotype. That she took somewhere, I don't know where, probably in Europe.
This is a glass plate.
These are glass plates and from that you can make the films. But that was actually the negative, the glass plate.
What was it coated with?
Who the hell… you always come up with the fuckingest questions. How the hell do I know what it's coated with?
Don't you know anything?
It's a glass plate. I don't know shit. It's not a concern of mine what kind of fucking coating is on it. I'm not using it so why the hell would I give a shit. Anyway, I got… this is a nice, unusual one. This is a machine for creating noodles so that you don't have to cut them by hand after you roll up the dough.
You mean a big, wide, many-wired thing?
No, you roll the thing up, you put it in this machine, it advances itself and you turn the crank and the blade comes by and cuts it off and you can adjust to whatever wide noodles or narrow noodles.
One at a time, or does it cut many noodles.
No, one slice at a time. You're always with these fucking goddamn details I never heard of. Why the fuck would the thing cut multiple if it's an antique? They got all they can do to make it work, period. Let alone cut multiple.
You think you're the only curious guy in the Universe? Interesting.
I got two vacuum cleaners that are really antiques son of a bitches. Only saw one in a museum that was like it. This vacuum cleaner has a cylinder that is 4 inches in diameter, the tube is about 3 feet long and a mouth about that big down on the bottom, you set that on the rug and you go like this, and you push it back in. And you do that over the fucking rug - can you imagine trying to clean a rug with that kind of a thing? And the suction. A fucking joke.
Where does the dirt go?
In a portion of the thing. It had a contraption there to keep.
Always with the fucking questions again.
The next thing was, that was no good so this guy saw that was horrible. You work your ass off and it's not gonna clean very good so he turned around and made a 12 inch cylinder only 12 inches long, put 2 scissor handles on it so he could go this way, now he can pull that cylinder quicker and easier than going like that. So I got one of those.
Like a bellows.
No, not a bellows. Just a scissor grip that will pull that plunger which is 12 inches in diameter over a 12-inch stroke.
That's a big motor. A 12-inch bore stroke.
You're going like this, and you're going this fast, it's just doing it more frequently but the efficiency is still not worth a shit. You can beat that thing with a rug beater by hanging it on a clothesline better than either one of those goddamn contraptions. But you got to stop somewhere. These guys didn't even know how lousy that was until they sold a handful and people said, "This thing ain't worth a shit."
And God knows how many are left. I've probably got one of the few left in the whole goddamn country. So I bought those things for a