My Uncle Larry came to stay with us for a while in Hollywood. I was happy because I would finally have a straight-shooting male role model that I could look up to. I didn’t even mind giving up my bed (with its cool Superman bedspread) to him while I took a spot on the floor nearby.
He flew in one day in 1981. He really could have done that himself because he was a pilot. He was a lot of other things too; a big rig driver, a postman, a Doctor, an oilman, a Korean War veteran and even an astronaut. He’d once lost a vote that would have made him his county’s coroner, by just a handful of votes. He was big and burly, a 6-foot tall florid man who loved to laugh. He looked a little like my mom, which I always kind of liked, as it underscored the whole “in-it-together” ethos that my family espoused. Two years in Hollywood, and we had already had that hunkered down mentality.
He also looked a little like a later-version Spencer Tracy, which to me meant he was going to fit right in, in Hollywood, that is. Plus, he had told us he had befriended several celebrities over the years and that they still kept in touch.
Like us (obviously) he was from the Midwest. It was nice having another one of us out here because sometimes the Cali kids could be incomprehensibly obtuse. Like a couple years back when fellow Seventh Grader Shavarsh asked me if “they had cars yet in Oklahoma.” He was serious and apparently just wanted the facts, so I gave them to him. I drawled, “Dude (I was trying that word out for the first time), we got them back in the ‘60’s, c’mon.” It turned out I may have inherited a little of Larry’s gift for exaggeration.
Larry was a man steeped in fantastic stories yet cloaked in Okie modesty.
Stories about what he might or might not have done preceded him before every arrival. To me, whatever ‘exceptions to reality’ that others may have claimed existed didn’t matter because he had already done so many great things, as far as I was concerned he could have well done them all.
He lied about his age so he could get into Korea. Worried that they might not believe he was of age; he shaved off his zits; which was what made his face into a planetary landscape. He learned to drive a tank while there. He also learned to fly somewhere along the line and became a pilot, logging many hours in the air. Once he talked his daughter into a plane and flew her right under a highway overpass. Her terror was only slightly abated later by the purchase of a pony (yes, a real live pony).
He drove those big rigs too; all this stuff impressed me because he was clearly a master of large machinery (small machines, not so much, he once “repaired” my radio controlled jeep by taking it all the way apart – at a loss as to how to rejoin the pieces). He wouldn’t talk about any of these things though, anything that might have brought him embarrassment. And like many fellow veterans he certainly didn’t talk about about Korea. He didn’t dwell in the past. And the underpass incident? He’d chuckle and say it really wasn’t all that. Other things he would deny utterly.
Larry (I always called him UncaLawrence) was really a just shape shifter in a Mack Truck. He’d drive around the country, and when he needed a meal or a place to stay, he could transform himself into what a potential host needed the most. There was an implied altruism that I chose to believe in.
Once, on old Route 66, and nearing downtown Tulsa, he was getting really tired. He pulled over near a hotel convention, probably people in the petroleum industry, and walked into the lobby. Having this innate ability to sense the needs of others, he stepped up to a podium. He got the vibe that this convention needed a hero. He announced that he was one of the Gemini astronauts and was loudly applauded and feted that night.
Sometimes, driving through small towns, he’d easily procure lodging, because who wouldn’t want a successful surgeon or an architect for an evening, just to pass the time?
Larry and I. With such a pained look, I think I was trying to imitate him.
At the beginning of his stay with us, my mom leaked out these stories and many more, never in his presence, but often with an admiring chuckle. One morning I walked up to Uncle Larry in the kitchen. I truly had to stifle my gorge because he was having one of his favorite meals, cow brains and ketchup. I WANTED to ask him if some of my mom’s legendary stories were true, but these queries quickly fell down and out of my personal “Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown.”
“WHAT is THAT?!”
“That’s cow brains Billy!”
“WHERE’D you get it?!”
“Over at Von’s (the supermarket, they sold tongue there too, Larry proudly pointed out).”
To me, forever after, the strange-to-me smell inside Von’s (I’d already noticed it was kind of sketchy) was probably what the inside-out bear in the movie “Prophesy” smelled like, and I avoided that store like a virus.
“WHY do you eat it with ketchup?!”
“Cause it makes it taste like scrambled eggs.”
Instead of reaching for the stars like Casey suggested every week I was headed to the bathroom. I didn’t have breakfast that day but moving forward I stuck with the scrambled eggs. He had, maybe accidentally, but still deftly, avoided all of my questions.
Soon, I realized that my doubting what was true or what wasn’t, didn’t ever amount to so much that I had to ask him anything at all. It just didn’t matter. After all, he HAD introduced me to what would be my best friend in my 20’s: my little friend Beer. One day when I was 9, sitting in a little boat on a little pond near a little town in Illinois, I had a Schlitz. Part of one, anyway. Larry was trying to teach me to bait a hook but I really had empathy for those little worms in the bucket and wouldn’t do it. So he handed me a Schlitz.
He may not have turned me into a fisherman, but he did end my apparent vegetarianism when I was about three years old. He got me to eat a piece of steak for the first time and he was really proud of that. I know this because he retold the story about 54 times just while he was in California.
Pretty soon after arriving in Hollywood Larry got a job at Capitol Records near Yucca and Vine. I loved that building because I’d seen it collapse in “Earthquake” and would sometimes just stare at it, fixated, thinking that I might still be watching when “The Big One” hit (would it collapse the same way?).
His was a night job, a night watchman or security guard. After a couple of nights, knowing we were star struck and maybe sensing something that WE all needed, he told us he had befriended a celebrity. The man in question was: Deacon Jones.
Of course he knew I liked the Rams.
To me this had to be true because I had to kind of ask around to find out who he was. It wasn’t a real obvious celebrity so it had that ring of truth to it. After all, Deacon’s playing days predated my football-sentience. After Larry would wake up in the afternoon he’d regale us with stories of what he and Deacon were up to.
He told me Deacon had broken the thumb of the man responsible for one of the most heinous crimes in LA, Sirhan Sirhan, just a few miles away at the Ambassador Hotel. He’d tackled Sirhan and wrested the pistol away, but only after the fatal bullets had been fired at RFK; and it was a source of endless woe to Mr. Jones. I found out later that it was in fact Rosy Grier, thumb-breaker and probable woe-feeler. Hey, at least he was also an LA Ram.
Larry would have hated Wikipedia or, you know, any search engine. He absolutely thrived in the era that predated convenient fact checking.
Larry got bored at Capitol after awhile and took a job with my mom at a cleaning supply store called On The Spot, out in the Valley. This got him back on a regular sleep schedule, which was a relief to him; he could keep an eye on us kids (once my little sis had painted his toenails pink while he slept). In no time at all he’d formed an “old boys club” with my mom’s boss Jim, which had him schmoozing with his feet up on the desk or out playing golf.
My uncle was getting restless, he moved out in an attempt to shake things up (I got my bed with its Superman bedspread back but acted like I didn’t care). He probably felt too supervised, he moved in with Jim. I was kinda sad, I thought we’d needed him as a father figure but this wasn’t a shape he could shift into too readily. After all, he had a wife and daughter back home and he was missing them terribly. Something was going on there but it never occurred to me then and he never talked about it.
With his own family he could relax and be himself, with strangers and friends his bullshitty persona manifested and took control of his easy-going manner. Either way he knew what he was doing and he AND they would usually have a great time.
But with us he was suspended somewhere in the middle between the dad and the astronaut and I guess he kinda lost his way.
He was too much of an older generation to get our “silly” fascination with Hollywood, and in Hollywood lifestyles. He got grouchier; he sensed he might not belong after all. He was wavering; he was ready to go home.
The deal was clinched one night when he came for a visit then stepped out to a local bar for a drink to clear his thoughts. The Lemon Twist Lounge was about a block away at Yucca and Cahuenga; it was also a thriving gay bar. Larry didn’t know this, and when he sat down at the bar he was really glad to find a guy or two that he could talk to. It was cool, they seemed interested, and then….he started to think a little too much so. He turned and saw a guy sitting in another guys lap and fled so fast he left his beer tottering on the table.
When he got to our apartment a couple of minutes later the “fantastic Larry” had checked in, it was awhile since we’d seen that; but now he had a new story to tell. He recounted the story with a chuckle and a great big smile, and probably a little bit of “mustard.”
But that was it for him, it was his last hurrah, he didn’t fit in here, he was too hemmed in, he needed to be “out there” where anything could happen. He also knew he needed to get back to his family. LA, usually the land of dreams, had become the opposite for him, and he needed to rediscover his possibilities out on the road. So, we lost our family member/neighbor/resident.
There was a big minus sign around us for a while and I missed him, even when I’d step around the beat up Von’s paper bag with the thousand toy jeep parts inside, sitting there forlorn on the bedroom floor. We saw him several times again over the years, and I was always glad, for I loved my Uncle Larry. He’s gone by now, but his oral history lives on and is part of the family legend.
