Now seems like a good time as any to ramble on about gainful employment. I'd been doing one thing or another since 1963 and I think the first job I had was at "Drown News Agency", the company that distributes magazines to all the newsstands. Mostly to be near the font of monster and SF mags and thus had one of the largest collections of coverless monster mags on the west coast. From there, on to McDonald's for a stint running the shakes in those primordial days pre "Ronald McDonald". Chocolate, Vanilla and Strawberry. simple enough keeping the freezer full of the good stuff. Our lesson in burger wrapping from Neil the Nasty Nazi was "You must caress the burger as you would a woman's breast!" Besides all the free fries you could eat, you were basically treated like dirt and any smart-ass observations brought a terse "If you don't like it, there's more where YOU came from!" For a couple weeks I put in some time at the ancient McDonald's in Downey where the mascot was the original "Speedy".
Wound up selling shoes at Lakewood Center. Mandel's was the place and kind of a hoot. Certainly a good place to meet women - especially hookers coming in from Long Beach and Bellflower. They loved me I must say - cute and dripping naivety, but in they came on Friday night wearing nothing but bathrobes - one might surmise they run through a pair of cheap heels rather quickly but they certainly had plenty of dough and could buy the best.
There were plenty of characters working in the place. The manager, Alex, was a diminutive sort, with a nose as big as your fist. We would have sales with tables covered with shoes where he would hop onto the mound and play dead for hours. Meanwhile women would fish about him digging and prodding for shoes as if he weren't there. I think he just liked getting felt up.
Craig was a sharp, stocky guy with a '64 Impala, lowered with a pearlized white paint job, packed with an 8-track tape-deck - even a LP record player, reverb system and mood lights. Taking a break late at night, he would roam the parking lot, breaking into cars and stealing their tape decks to make a little money on the side.
Drake was the coolest of cool - a kind of Fonzie. Had nothing to say to me but yeh, was a cool guy though not impervious to mistakes; one night he and his buds got liquored up, parked on the train tracks and were killed.
Steve was just cool enough that I wasn't intimidated, but brave enough to join me on weekend trips to Tijuana where we'd buy switchblades, hit the bars and Jai Alai games.
Joe was a huge, ex-marine that could break you in half by looking at you. He took Betty the cashier under his wing and would drive her to and from work every day; nothing to it, just being a nice guy. She'd been through a rough divorce and the ex was being a nuisance. One day we closed the shop and I'm heading to my car when the ex shows up, pulls out a gun, demanding Betty go with him. Joe disarms the guy, who immediately pulls out another damn gun shooting Betty who drops like a rock. The ex runs behind a car and suddenly there's a gunfight going on in the parking lot. Upshot being - the guy shoots himself and Betty turns out OK. Mall security called the paramedics and I got the hell out of there so I wouldn't be up all night talking to the police.
I was driving a blue, gold flaked '66 Chevy Camero RS with a pretty cool, if dated sound system. Being one of the first I knew to put in a tape deck, mine was still a four track. Wherever anyone else was cruising the hot-spots blaring their music, yeh, I was a dork, and blaring "East Meets West" by Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin. Check out My Mandel's Management Certificate from 1969 . Worked for them two years, became manager, yet when I finally asked for a vacation, they said "You're fired!"
I met a gal at one of the Dracula meetings agenting for TV commercials and catalogue modeling. She hooked me up with a foreign product distributor who wanted an American look to his advertising and so we did a number of commercial for soft drinks no American would ever taste and a few clothing catalogues as well. It wouldn't last long, but it beat flipping burgers and selling shoes.
Here and There
The best thing employment offers is the freedom to strike off on your own, with your own living space and somewhere to park your stuff.
The Fan Pad
Roger Miller's song "England Swings" had nothing to do with it, but here, as the dust was still settling on Woodstock, it was time to explore the world, or at least a small part of it anyway. Joe Viskocil and I went to London on a poster buying spree more than tourism. There were a number of shops catering to movie fans and we would be hitting them all.
Call me madcap, but before we left, I wrote a letter to the Queen and asked if we could drop by. 's the reply.
The BOAC jet took a route over the pole giving an amazing and unforgettable panorama of the icy wasteland below.
We arrived on something called "Boxing Day" and thought the stores were closed because everyone was at the fights (silly us). We had also arrived during a flu epidemic and ended up spending a couple days under the covers in our hotel room! We found London, cold, snowing, inhospitable and cold. Of course, for SoCal boys, anything below 75 is positively frigid.
We were there during the Christmas and New Year holidays - and yes, standing shivering in Trafalgar Square at the stroke of midnight as a number of foolish youths plunged into the ice covered fountain! A tradition too hardy for one of our delicate natures.
We stumbled into a number of poster shops during our stay and bought so much material, I had to leave my clothes at the hotel when we left! One of the shops we visited was Bram Stokes' 'Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed", one of the founders of the fanzine "Gothique" to which I had been subscribing for several years. It was here I found an intriguing photograph and gave it to Don Glut that found its way into the pages of Famous Monsters .
Eating London. We found the food remarkable for its unremarkableness, but stumbled upon an edible oddity: The Kentucky Spaghetti House! Frankly, I'd never put the two together, but when in Rome. . . The walls were covered with murals of what appeared to be a psychedelic depiction of an Antebellum Spaghetti Plantation including cut-out mechanical "Darkies" bobbing up and down, harvesting, I suppose, spaghetti we will be eating that very night! To think I had to go to London to see this.
What we craved was a cheeseburger and real orange juice. Both apparently non-existent on this side of the globe. Oh, we saw places advertising cheeseburgers alright, but were tasteless representations of the real McCoy.
Warn out, puny and undernourished, with a stopover in New York, all we could think about was getting warm and scarfing down a few greasy burgers. Our hearts were crushed when the pilot related the temperature in New York was 26 degrees. Not only that, it was snowing to such an extent, the plane couldn't get to the terminal sending a tram to pick everyone off the frigid tarmac.
I thought London was cold but this was too much, wearing several layers of clothes, I may have well been in the buff. Still wired from the flight, we ended up standing in line for a midnight screening of Steve McQueen's, The Reivers at the Ziegfeld Theater.
Things Left Over from 1969
Didn't know what to do with a few stragglers. . . See you next year!
