GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

When I walked into Carey's apartment I could see the phone cord disappearing into the stack of sofa cushions.  The previous day we had buried his telephone in the middle of six cushions and then topped it off with a dining room chair to help stabilize things.  The mound was the result of an experiment to see if we could deaden the sound of his phone which had been ringing almost non-stop for several days.  Carey had tried to break things off with some girl after a brief fling but she was determined to get in the last word.  She had Carey's phone number but thankfully did not know where he lived.  Carey could have simply disconnected the phone but that wouldn't have been as interesting.  The phone had continued to ring while we were constructing our cone of silence and I had asked Carey if I could give it a try.  Carey said, "It's pointless.  This girl can't take a hint.  But sure, go ahead.  Knock yourself out." I picked up the phon...

When I was a kid, the thing I was most impressed with about street cars were the seats.  They were more like benches than chairs and both the seats and the seatbacks were made of narrow strips of wood butted up against each other.  All of the seat backs had a wrought iron handle on the aisle side.  You could grip the handle and pivot the seatbacks to reverse the direction they were facing.  When the street car got to the beach they didn't turn the car around, they just flipped the seat backs to face in the opposite direction. Right about the time they ripped out the street car tracks in the early 1950s, my cousin Donnie and I would often spend the afternoon counting automobiles.  The tracks were only 35 yards from where Donnie lived with his mom near the corner of Norwalk Ave and Eagle Rock Blvd.  We positioned ourselves behind the wall that separated his front yard from Dick & Hal's gas station on the corner.  The house and th...

The only thing larger than the eyes she paints are the size of the balls she must have to charge money for her paintings.  I spotted Woman with Chihuahua going for $29,000 earlier today on eBay.  If there's any question regarding her artistic talent, one need only look at the family portrait commissioned by Jerry Lewis back in the 1960s.  The work must have taken immense patience and displays Jerry with his wife, their three cats, four dogs and five sons resplendent in harlequin gear.  It's oil on canvass, although I'm sure there was serious consideration given at some point to black velvet. I am speaking of course about Margaret Keane who was the subject of the latest cinematic triumph "based on a true story" entitled Big Eyes by Tim Burton.  Margaret and her husband Water began their visual assault on the general public in the 1960s by flooding supermarkets, department stores and greeting card racks with cheap reproduced portraits of bi...

Heger spent some pre-dawn hours that morning trying to coax the bird down from the palm tree.  He stood in the front yard with one arm raised above his head, offering an index finger as a perch.  The bird was a black Myna given to Heger a week earlier by his girl friend Geraldine.  The Myna supposedly had a large vocabulary but other than some occasional squawks, it had yet to utter a single word.  Heger had named it Joe and during that first week had tried to get the bird to say something.  Speaking in a ridiculous sing-song meter, Heger had repeated the phrase "Hello Joe" several million times to no avail.  One afternoon the bird got loose, made its way out side and settled in the palm tree.  Heger initially figured the bird was long gone but around three in the morning he could hear some squawks that he thought sounded familiar.  All of which led to Heger being stationed in the front of the house like the statue of liberty and...

I don't think Carey realized he was claustrophobic until he went to Carlsbad Caverns.  I've known him since kindergarten and I never suspected he had a problem.  However, there may have been earlier signs that I simply failed to pick up on. In the mid 1960s, Carey was working for Sparklettes.  He worked hard all year long hauling 40-pound bottles up and down Mount Washington.  He had the most demanding terrain to deal with of any of the company's delivery routes.  When he went on vacation it took two guys to fill in for him.  At the time, a Sparklettes employee with less than five years on the job was granted a measly two weeks vacation.  Carey was making good money pushing water and decided he deserved something special in the way of a vacation.  I remember being very surprised when Carey asked me to take care of his dog so he could spend two weeks in Tahiti.   I remember asking him rather bluntly, "How in hel...

Munson returned to the race track in hopes of retrieving the hippopotamus cookie jar he had left behind the day before.  Over the years he had received several large ostentatious cookie jars as gifts from friends and family.  The hippo was the most recent and he had taken it to Santa Anita the previous day as a good luck charm.  It was a bilious bright green and the size of a basketball.   A day at the track with Munson can prove to be quite hectic and yesterday had been no exception.  As the afternoon wore on his analyzing, drinking, wagering, gloating, regretting and threatening of horses and jockeys intensified, and he and the hippo became separated.  He hadn't noticed it was missing until he was almost home.  The following day he was told at the entrance gate that the lost and found was inside the administration office.  As Munson entered the office he spotted the hippo sitting on the desk of a young lady.  She cou...

We drove to Munson's in San Francisco on Thursday night to avoid the weekend traffic and planned on taking in the oyster farm the following day.  Michael was 14 and Marc was 10.  They were unfamiliar with oysters and with what takes place when Munson gets out of bed.  Friday morning provided them with their first exposure to Munson's daily ritual.  My way of dealing with it had always been to go out for Danish and a newspaper.  I had neglected to mention anything to my sons about this in advance.  They witnessed the typical 90 minutes of loud and excessive groaning, coughing, hacking, snorting and retching that could only come from a life-long, self-obsessed hypochondriac.  Once Munson conceded that he would in deed have another day on earth, we went off to the oyster farm. The Johnson family operated their oyster farm in the Point Reyes National Seashore for more than 40 years until it was shut down by the government in 2014....

The drive through the San Joaquin Valley favors Spanish-speaking evangelicals.  From the bottom of the Grapevine to the City of Modesto, 95% of the 48 radio stations that reach this area broadcast in Spanish, religious zealotry or both.  Before the I-5 opened in the 1960s, driving to San Francisco on U.S. 99 took you through the middle of every hick town there was north of Bakersfield.  The I-5 turned out to be a straight shot along the west side of the central valley that took far less time but provided drivers with fewer stimuli than a sensory deprivation tank. Driving alone to Munson's on the I-5 was a long and monotonous chore that always sent me searching the radio dial for a distraction.  Popular music has never had any appeal to me.  In any other circumstance, it would be a toss up between listening to Cher for five hours and undergoing a colonoscopy.  On second thought, schedule the colonoscopy.  On my trips north o...

In the late 1960s, I flew round trip to San Francisco every week day.  I took the first PSA morning flight from Burbank to San Francisco and flew back in the late afternoon.  Every day I enjoyed a fully-paid, 5-hour layover in North Beach.  There was a pickup truck waiting for me when I landed at San Francisco that I would use to make my morning delivery to a downtown bank and proceed to the company yard a block away from Fisherman's Wharf.  Fred Cook ran the yard and supervised about 40 delivery drivers.  Fred was a big burly guy who could be pretty intimidating.  His claim to fame was having driven an 18 wheeler full of cattle to safety through the worst blizzard in Montana's history.  On my first day as a courier, Fred was waiting for me when I got off the plane.  He showed me where the pickup was and the route I would drive everyday to the bank, through China Town and ending at the yard. With Fred at the wheel, th...

The hole in the center of Munson's living room ceiling had grown larger every year.  What began as a small water stain had become a gaping overhead chasm bigger than the sofa bed that sat below it.  I regularly went to visit Munson every 4 or 5 months and had observed the gradual change for more than 20 years.  Munson was known to procrastinate well beyond the normal limits but even he was beginning to acknowledge that something had to be done about the ceiling.  For Munson, the novelty had worn off of watching people walk into his living room, come to an abrupt halt, throw their heads back and stare upward for a full minute as though they had entered Carlsbad Caverns. Doug was living in the house when he met Munson at a 49ers game.  They became good friends and together went to many games, sports bars, casinos and race tracks.  Doug liked the idea of collecting rent for the 2 nd bedroom and they became roommates in the mid 1980s....