Dang me, dang me, they oughta take a rope and hang me.
When I’d finish the line, I’d mimic Miller’s scat singing and drink in the laughter and applause. It was my first taste of showbusiness success.
I got a weird, little-kid thrill whenever Idie and Helen would come home late from a night at the local watering hole, the Del Rey. Mom would needle Dad and they’d get into it. Eventually, Idie would have enough and turn his attention to us kids. I could hear him dramatically stomp into my sisters’ rooms and wake them up with a good-natured “What the hell’s going on in here?” The girls would shriek and plead, “Dad, we’re trying to sleep!” but Idie would launch into some nonsensical monologue liberally peppered with swear words. The girls hated it—and my sister Jane says this is the reason why she still can’t sleep well—but it never failed to crack me up. I guess Idie’s humor didn’t translate well to the feminine mind.
As kindergarten loomed, my parents became concerned about the local school district and didn’t particularly want me attending public school in Indio with a bunch of Mexican kids whose parents were farther down the social scale than they were. They thought I might do better with a Catholic school education, so Helen covered the furniture with old sheets to protect it from dust and boarded up the house to await our eventual return and we left to be with my dad in Inglewood, which, in those days, was white—and safe—as milk. Besides providing me with what they thought would be a better education, the move would also save my dad his three-hour commute to the desert to be with us on the weekends.
Idie didn’t change once we were all living together full-time. He was a full-time character. I left the house to go to school one morning and was stopped dead in my tracks by what I saw in the driveway. There, already surrounded by the neighborhood kids, was a golden two-seat sports car. Maybe it was an MG. Maybe it was a Triumph. It was hard to tell since the front end had been reworked. There, in midroar, with a fixed, thousand-yard stare and a frozen tongue, was the skillfully preserved head of what had once been a living, breathing African lion. It really was a testament to both the taxidermist’s and the auto body worker’s art. It had been painted gold to match the rest of the car. It was the weirdest fucking thing I had ever seen, but also the coolest. Idie had been out drinking the night before and overheard some guy who boasted about his custom car. Idie chatted him up and went out to the lot to have a look at it. After he saw the one-of-a-kind creation, and with several drinks in him, he had to have it, so he bought it on the spot. Helen wasn’t happy about it.
“What the heck is that … thing?” she asked.
“Baby, it’s custom. There isn’t another one like it anywhere!” he said.
“It’s hideous,” she said. “And it’s impractical. There’s only room for two in it.”
“Well, we still have the station wagon for you to haul the kids in … but this has a real lion’s head right on the front! I’ll have to see if I can get a horn that roars.”
“It’s ridiculous,” said Helen.
She may have hated it, but I dug it. The kids in the neighborhood were impressed and I basked in the reflected glory of being the son of the guy who had a car with a real lion’s head on it. You didn’t see stuff like that in sixties suburbia. Not in Inglewood. Not in Palm Desert, where our other house sat idle. Probably not anywhere. And it had a radio, which I was allowed to control whenever I’d ride with Dad. The hits never stopped. Thanks to the AM radio of the day, I was constantly exposed to a wide variety of music. For anybody who didn’t experience it, Top 40 AM radio of the sixties and early seventies was like nothing that’s followed since. Stations played the best of everything in every genre. You’d hear poppy British Invasion stuff followed by James Brown’s haunted screams followed by some twangy Jerry Reed country followed by jangly California folk rock followed by Carole King followed by who knows what. And on and on it went for twenty-four hours a day, only broken by the staccato ads for Clearasil, Marlboro cigarettes, local auto dealers, and the rest of the things that teens and young adults couldn’t live without. Now radio’s dominated by format and you get the best of nothing … or you get talk. The commercials are pretty much the same.
But things started going wrong. Dad’s business was collapsing fast. Neon advertising was in its death throes as cheaper and less delicate plastic signs began to take over the market. You know that line in 1967’s The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman is pulled aside and told the future is “just one word: plastics”? It turned out to be true. Plastic signs were the future and the future had arrived. Idie refused to—or couldn’t—adapt to the reality of the times. We had to sell the Inglewood house and move into an apartment in nearby Culver City. It wasn’t a bad place, by any stretch. It was upscale and roomy, but an apartment was a step down. At least we had the house in Palm Desert. Still, they managed to send me to Catholic schools like St. Frances X. Cabrini and St. Augustine, and that’s where I had my first sense of the cultural power of rock music. Up until I was about eight, I just liked music because of the way it sounded. It wasn’t anything I could specifically explain,
