Neath Hollywood
Boulevard
Lorenzo Porricelli
The pink and black Cadillac Seville cruising west on Hollywood Boulevard attracted every working eye it passed. The car moved down the street with regal authority, and sidewalk crowds and street traffic were certain this spectacle wasn’t simply driving on the Boulevard, but was leading a Hollywood parade. Necks stretched and wide eyes searched for the accompanying procession.
A camera brigade of Japanese tourists stopped traffic in the middle of the world-famous Hollywood and Vine intersection to shoot pictures of the classic Seville on that spring afternoon, and were joined in the street by a boot-clad woman whose spiked crown of matted hair resembled a decaying image of the Statue of Liberty, which along with the wool army blanket she wore as a poncho, gave her the appearance of an income-tax-return street hawker dressed as Lady Liberty, sans spinning sign.
She pushed a shopping cart with two wheels frozen in a locked position, and harsh scraping accompanied the clatter of empty cans and bottles in a street symphony as the woman tramped across the asphalt. The amateur photographers shoved free fingers in ears and turned to discover what had disturbed the pleasant sensation of 1.2 blood alcohol they had labored to earn at a special luncheon at Murphy’s Hollywood Sushi Temple that was part of the tour.
But the woman’s eyes hadn’t seen the Seville, they scoured the ground in search of street treasure - cigarette butts or empty cans. One of the Japanese men lit a cigarette and pointed at the woman, and the laughing tourists’ cameras began recording what seemed to be a moving part of the city’s street.
Her private procession passed through the laughing group, and the woman snatched the cigarette from the man’s lips and stuck it between her own.
“Cheap sake,” she said.
The Japanese gathered, jabbering rapidly and waving arms at the loss of face the weird street traveler had bestowed upon their leader. Several other smokers protectively cupped lit cigarettes between thumb and forefingers, and as they waved frenetically, smoke trails accented their points.
The tobacco thief puffed on the lifted smoke and stomped her boot heels on the pavement, as she turned her cart into a runaway freight train steaming down the tracks and charged through the group.
The Ansell Adams wannabes scattered, running through the stalled street traffic, and two jumped screaming into the back seat of a taxi. By now, the entire intersection was grid locked, and many in the captive audience stood beside their cars, honking horns in approval of the guerrilla street production.
The newly discovered intersection starlet ignored the accolades and reached down to snatch lit cigarettes that had been dropped as the Japanese visitors fled in horror. She capped the heads with a callused thumb, and stashed the slightly used smokes somewhere under her blanket garment. But she abandoned the cart and ran to a spot in the street where she seized a pack of Marlboros laying on top of a manhole cover.
She held the pack over her head and displayed the war booty to her minions - it was a mother lode – a new pack, virgin-wrapped and filled with twenty, tightly packed cigarettes.
The doyenne of the shopping cart set hustled toward the sidewalk, cackling and laughing at her stroke of luck. Her eyes became momentarily snared by the flash of the pink and black Seville, and mesmerized by colors she hadn’t seen together since she attended a circus as a child, her cart banged the chrome bumper.
“Don’t let your recent success go to that nappy head,” said a voice from the Seville, “although you ought to let something get a hold of that fright wig – maybe you want a glue trap – something horrible is surely dwelling there.” The driver extended his hand out the window and flicked a freshly lit cigarette at the woman. Her hand moved with surprising alacrity and caught the offering between two fingers.
“You lipped it,” she said and spat the cigarette out.
The Seville sped up and the driver’s arm reached and grabbed the shopping cart. He shoved it over, which spilled the contents on the road. Traffic started to move, and the woman righted the cart and gathered the strewn cans into the safety of her mobile home.
“You’re a freak,” said the driver, as the Seville moved away.
Cars honked, but the woman shook her fist at the sky. “I’ll never go with no smokes again,” she said. And having collected as much as she could without becoming a permanent part of the crosswalk in the now fluid intersection, she stepped up to the sidewalk and resumed wheeling down Hollywood Boulevard.
She turned onto Las Palmas Street, and within a half-block was in a friendlier neighborhood. A volunteer from the Hollywood Full Gospel Church Sidewalk Kitchen and Shelter of the Lord was sweeping the sidewalk, and nodded. “Want some lunch, Lizzie?’ he said. She sniffed the air.
“Salmonella on toast points, Nicky? Again?”
“You mean as usual,” Nicky said, “got a square?”
‘Lizzie’ reached under her blanket and tossed him a cigarette.
“You hit the lotto?” Nicky said. He lit it and inhaled, “You gave me a full square, Lizzie.”
“Watch my stuff,” she said.
“I got you covered, Lizzie,” the newly appointed security guard assured her as he dragged on his payment.
Lizzie eased her cart onto the street. She reached into a bag and brought forth some greasy panty hose and tied them to the front end of the cart. She lit another cigarette with the butt she just smoked, and tied her vehicle to a parking meter.
Lizzie crossed the street, and stepped over a wino drooling on the sidewalk just before she entered an open doorway under an aged and faded sign that read, “Mr. Holly’s Bar – We Cheat Everyone.”
Mr. Holly’s Bar resembled a cramped shoe box stuffed with dusty memorabilia. The aged serving bar ran the full length of the small room and occupied half of the narrow space available. It appeared to be made of dark walnut, but the years of now permanent grime that covered the base, the layers of greasy fingerprints that polished the bar top, and the infinite scars received from burning cigarettes, all combined to deeply blacken the abused wood.
A dim wall sconce located behind the bar was the room’s only lamp. A film-coated window was covered with dingy blinds, tuned to allow a small amount of dust-filled sunlight to enter and its sash was adorned with dead flies. A small fan sat on the back bar, and its blades turned halfheartedly, prevented from moving faster by a gritty, syrupy substance that covered the motor.
Eight stools lined the bar, and a white-haired black man with piercing, hawk eyes and a mean glare, stood behind the bar at Mr. Holly’s as Lizzie entered. The left side of his mouth was raised in a snarl, and a filtered cigarette, with an inch long ash, sat burning on the right side of his lower lip. As it burned, the smoke slowly rose under his nostrils, adding another square’s worth of tar and nicotine to the yellowed streak that colored the center portion of his white mustache.
“If it isn’t the royal highness herself.”
“Give me a triple with a chaser, Charlie. Those lips of yours flap more than a bucket of chicken wings.” Lizzie lit another cigarette. In Mr. Holly’s Bar, there was no smoking statute.
“Miss high and mighty – did you hit the damn lotto or something?” Charlie said as he pulled the tap and filled a chaser glass with beer, “You smoking a full square- I ain’t never seen that.”
Charlie placed the beer on the bar and took a bottle of Mr. Jack’s Whiskey off the back bar. In bars throughout the world, the back bar is traditionally two or three tiers high, with liquor of various distinction and pricing adorning the space. In Mr. Holly’s there was no top shelf, no middle shelf, and no recognizable brands, just a few glistening bottles of Mr. Jack’s.
“We serve cheap booze to rummies who wanna get drunk fast,” Charlie told misguided tourists from the Boulevard that appeared in the doorway.
Lizzie placed a faded bill on the bar. “Quarters.”
Charlie filled three jiggers and placed them in front of Lizzie, “And what the hell you
gonna do with quarters? This ain’t no laundromat.”
Lizzie tossed the shots back. “Does that box still work?”
“The juke? Nobody’s played that damn thing in five years.” Charlie’s ash dropped onto his shirt. “Anybody coming in here with a quarter ain’t gonna give it to no damn music box, they’re gonna drink it.”
Lizzie squinted as her fingers flipped through the old juke’s barely readable playlist. Her eyes still twinkled, but she reminded Charlie and other street denizens of a crone from some childhood fairy tale, but simply because she always carried a few sprigs of honeysuckle everywhere with her, she was known on the streets as Woodbine Lizzie.
Charlie laughed, “Gimme the damn quarter and I’ll sing you the song you want, Lizzie. You know I used to carry a tune.” Charlie had been a Hollywood crooner in years long past, but because of the skin color ban at clubs on Sunset Boulevard, he had never made it past dive bars on Las Palmas. “Yeah, those old stars would love to hear me sing ‘em a tune, – but not in their clubs,” Charlie said, “then they’d have to pay me. But I got my payment from their women, and it was top dollar. I boffed every one of those Hollywood broads – at least two or three times each.”
“And one night, Sammy Davis came in with Sinatra and heard me. They took me out partying with them for five days straight and we just…” Charlie continued, droning on with a tale of his career high spot that Lizzie had heard too many times. She put a coin in the box, and prayed it would play.
The coin dropped and the invasive mega-sound of tortured distortion blared forth from the feedback explosion of Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster wailing as his drug etched vocals sang, “So you think you’re a sweet little heartbreaker…. Foxy Lady. ”
Lizzie hit the chords on an air guitar as aggressively as Pete Townshend, and perspired with similar zeal. As Hendrix hit the final notes, Lizzie pushed a quarter at Charlie.
“Play it again, Charlie, play my song for me again, for old times sake,” Lizzie said, and gulped the cold beer.
Charlie filled one of Lizzie’s jiggers again. “Here, on the house. You look rancid girl, and you know what my momma always said.”
Lizzie smiled wide enough to show her gums, and they both blurted, “Alcohol and tobacco will cure everything.”
“That’s right,” Charlie said softly, “alcohol and tobacco will cure everything.” He lit two cigarettes at the same time, and handed one to Lizzie. They sipped their shots. “Don’t even think about none of them fools, Lizzie,” Charlie said, “we got the stars.”
“He thinks he’s an Evremonde,” Lizzie said. She drank the last shot and tapped the heavy-bottomed glass on the bar. “And I’ll finish him like one.”
“You want me to have someone capped for ya?” Charlie said.
“I want to decap some bozo who thinks he’s royalty,” Lizzie whispered, “Like A Tale of Two Cities.”
“Some bad luck dude lost his head in that book,” said Charlie, “Evremonde got away.”
“Justice sucks,” said Lizzie.
Charlie hummed along with the music and poured two more whiskeys. Setting the bottle on the bar, he kissed Lizzie’s forehead. “We’re a pair to draw to.” He smiled. They lifted the jiggers and interlocked their forearms in the universal drinkers’ solidarity ritual.
“Power to the people,” said Charlie, “whatever the hell that means.”
“It don’t mean a thing,” said Lizzie. “Keep pouring till it does.”