Chapter 24 – Blue-Eyed Blondes

It was early May of 1988 and I went down to visit Peter Gries who was assistant director of a film that was shooting in Santa Monica. Stephen had invited me down there and I brought along with me a phone number. Peter had a non-running Austin Healey 3000 parked in front of his house in Nichols canyon and I would see it there when I went to visit my sister, Susan. I had made him an offer once but he refused. The phone number was from an ad in the paper for a 1958 yellow Austin Healey 100-6 for $4200 in Marina Del Rey. I figured I would stop by and take a look at the car after schmoozing on the set. I took all the money I had in the world with me just in case— $4000. I would have to be crazy to spend everything I had on a car, but this was my dream car. I actually had several dreams about buying an Austin Healey 3000 (the same body style as the 100-6) in metallic blue. In my dreams I had paid $2700 for the car. Dream On. Today, that car would cost me almost fifty grand in decent shape.

It was around two-thirty when I called the guy with the Healey and I asked him if the car was still available. It was, and he said I could come by and take a look. I was driving my mom’s 1974 Mercedes 250 sedan and wondered what I would do with it if I decided to make the guy a low-ball offer and he accepted. I hoped that it would happen and I also prayed that it would be a safe enough area to leave the Mercedes, get a ride back and return it to my mom and dad before the sun went down. That was asking a lot—but what the hell, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Right?

When I drove down the quiet designated street I saw her. It was love at first sight. The body was straight and it was a nice shade of yellow. The Great Gatsby car (my mom would coin that nickname for her later). I don’t know why men always refer to cars or guitars as her. It’s a sexual thing I guess. There were two guys in their early to late thirties standing beside the car and I was checking them out and thinking to myself how I could grind them down to a price that was fair.

“Hi, I’m James. I called about the car.”

The older of the two guys extended his had to me and said, “I’m Terry, nice to meet you. This ugly dude next to me is Frank.”

I didn’t think Frank was any uglier than Terry so I laughed and shook his hand too.

“So you’re asking $4200 for her?” I think he liked the fact that I called the car, her. It’s a guy thing. “Is there room for negotiation?”

“Well, maybe a little but I’ve already got that much in the car. I need to sell it quick though. Money talks and I’m listening.”

“Why don’t you fire her up?” I asked.

Terry struggled to get his six foot two inch, two hundred and fifty pound frame inside the sports car. I, being five foot nine, would have no problems. He turned the key and the car whined and whinnied like a sick quarter horse. It finally started but was running extremely rough. I knew something was wrong but without the proper testing equipment I couldn’t be sure.

“Sound like it’s not running on all six cylinders,” I said to Terry. Frank was busy drinking a beer by the front porch and I realized that Terry was the brains in this operation.

“I know. I don’t think it’s serious though. Probably just needs a tune up.”

I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what was wrong and I made him and offer of $3500. He scratched his head and came back with $4000 cash. That was all the money I had and I knew the car was going to need some work just to get it home and I didn’t want to call a flat bed tow truck. We haggled and finally agreed on $3800. I paid him the money and asked him if he would keep an eye on the Mercedes. I would be back as soon as I could to pick it up. He said it would be no problem at all. I climbed into the car and drove away. The Healey lurched and was so underpowered it couldn’t get out of its own way. As soon as I was around the corner I pulled over and open the hood. I did another inventory of the vitals. I checked the distributor, the plugs and then it hit me. The plug wires were in the wrong sequence. I knew it was the same firing order as the TR-6 so I switched the wires to the proper places and fired it up. Beautiful! It ran like a champ. I made it back to Camrose by 4:30 and called my dad. He picked me up and we were back in the Marina by 6 p.m. He thought the Healey was beautiful too.

On the morning of the Fourth of July, I got a call from Paula. “You have to get out of the house today. You are going to meet her.”

“Her?”

“Yes her, the blonde with the blue eyes and round face.”

I was still living two blocks down from the Hollywood Bowl on Camrose Drive. That day I met not one, not two, but three women with blonde hair, blue eyes and round faces. The first one was photographing an old church on the corner of Highland and Franklin. She was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and jeans and looked kind of tough-cool but approachable. I asked her if there was some special theme she was going after etc. She said they were doing a restoration of the old church and wanted some before and after pictures. She had already photographed fifteen or sixteen other churches from all over the country. We started talking about our lives and about an hour later, when the time was right, I got her number. Her name was Rachel and I thought she was a possibility but I was not blown away.

I then went to lunch at a cafe down on Highland—I can’t even recall the name of the place. I saw a blonde haired blue eyed waitress. The nametag on her white cotton blouse told me her name was Colleen. She was nice and kept refilling my coffee and paying extra special attention to me. I invited her to sit down when the customer base thinned out. I didn’t say much about myself other than I was a musician and like The Beatles and Bob Dylan. She said she liked heavy metal music, film noir and had broken up with her boyfriend a few days ago—Prime material. She gave me her number but something inside told me it would never work out between us. Round two.

I went back home to sort it all out. I was restoring the Healey now at Richard’s place in the Valley, and I was covered from head to toe in oil and grease. My Grateful Dead T-shirt was ripped and my gray loafers had holes in them and were coming apart at the stitching. I weighed about 130 pounds soaking wet, when normal weight for me was around 155. It was starting to get dark, so I decided to go down to the Hollywood Bowl and check out the fireworks. I was standing in the courtyard by the ticket office when I noticed the sign read: sold out. I didn’t really care since it was Andy Williams performing that night. I only wanted was to witness the fireworks display and I could see that perfectly fine from the parking lot.

 I had resigned myself to the sad fact that Paula might have been getting some bad information from the psychic network and I was not going to find HER—at least not today. Just as I was thinking that, I heard a sweet lilting voice speaking in a Scottish accent. “Oh no, Shelley, what are we going to do it’s all sold oot?” I turned around and saw a young woman with blonde hair, blue eyes and a pleasing round face. She reminded me of Haley Mills. Round three.

“Excuse me lassie, where are you from?” I enquired. If she was all alone she never would have followed me, but since her friend Shelley, a compactly built specimen, was with her she felt safe. I told them I knew a secret way in to the Bowl, and I promised I could and would get them in to the show. All they had to do was walk right through the front entrance and then get in line at the concession stand and said, “If you have a coke or a hot dog in your hand they are not going to bother you, especially on Independence Day.”

 I rushed ahead thinking they were right behind me but they had slowed their pace and were twenty feet away. I walked back and asked what they were doing, but I guessed they were discussing the situation amongst themselves. They told me later they thought I was a homeless person sleeping on the benches in the park, but they decided that I was a harmless homeless person.

“Come on,” I said, “Just act like a roadie.”

The pretty blonde looked at me blankly and asked,” What’s a roadie?”

“It’s someone who carries the equipment for musicians. Just act like you work here, that’s all.”

They followed along and did what I had told then to do. We rushed to the concession stand and I bought them both a hot dog and coke, and the same for me.  Then we sat down in the middle section of the outdoor venue and listened to Andy Williams sing Moon River, and a few other of his hits. After the show, we wanted to get a drink. As we walked past my apartment on Camrose, she noticed the lights were left on and it appeared that the TV was on, too. I told her that my dogs felt less lonely if there were human voices around and that’s why I had the TV on. I knew I had scored point number one with her.

The night was mild and clear so we walked all the way to The Cat and Fiddle and got a table outside in the courtyard. I ordered a gin and tonic and she and Shelley ordered the same. While I was sitting there, a scruffy looking cat had wandered up to me and jumped on my lap. I was cleaning out its ears with a napkin –I noticed they were in pretty nasty shape. Although she thought it was a bit gross, I felt I had scored point number two with her. I found out her name was Donna and she was from Fife, Scotland, and had been living in Joliet, Illinois for the last few months on a one year working visa and was due to go back overseas that December. I got the phone number where she was staying in L.A. and I also got her home number in Joliet in case we didn’t have a chance to hook up while she was on vacation.

On the day she was heading back home, she called to thank me for the nice time she had on the Fourth, and wanted to say goodbye. I had to think fast. I spontaneously said, “You have a rental car, don’t you?” She said it was Avis. I told her that Avis Rental place was over a half mile from the airport and I would be more than happy to escort them to the gate. She agreed. That morning I took a nice, long, hot bath and washed up like I had never washed up before. I may be a slob by nature, but I clean up well. Later that day, I pulled my TR-6 into the parking lot at Avis and I spied them sitting on a bench outside the office. They squinted their eyes at me—probably wondered if I was the same guy they had met a few nights ago. Donna had a stuffy nose and we had a congested and awkward kiss goodbye at the gate.

A few days later, I called her and we had a delightful conversation. She had a great sense of humor and was worldly as any woman I had ever met at the tender age of twenty-four. The next day she called then I would call her and it went on like that for a more than a week. By the second week we were talking two times a day. She then said out of the blue, “I am coming back out there to see you.”

“Come on, really,” I said. “I’ll make a date with a girl to meet me at the local bar and they usually don’t even show up, but you’re going to come all the way from Joliet after a month and I am supposed to believe that?”

“Be there on August, 20^th, American Airlines flight 1970 at 8 pm.”

I went there thinking she might not be on the plane. But when I arrived at the gate she was the second one off. She looked great and seemed to have lost five pounds of baby fat, not that she was fat or anything. I myself had put on about five pounds. We went to Magic Mountain, (which I failed to get to three times with Marly) Catalina Island and the Queen Mary, but it wasn’t until we drove in my Healey to the Laundromat on Fountain; the piles of dirty socks and holes in my underwear were stacked up in the rumble seat, I knew, yes I knew, she was the woman for me.

She went back to Joliet and I went to visit her there in September. We had decided that she was going to move in with me at the apartment on Camrose, so I started cutting out physical therapist job positions from the newspaper and mailed them to her. This was the day before email and fax machines were only seen in office suites, banks and insurance agencies. She had contacted several physical therapy clinics, and had six appointments lined up by the time she got off the plane and decided on Centinela Medical Clinic. Two days before the tragic incident at Lockerbie, we, along with her best friend from Scotland, Irene, who arrived at Camrose with her friend Fiona on the way to Australia, spent Christmas together. We all wore funny paper hats they call crowns, pulled Christmas crackers, and ate our Yule Tide dinner from a blue table without legs on the hardwood floor since there weren’t enough chairs in my humble apartment.

The year before, I had broken my ankle by sliding into home plate at a pick-up softball game at the park right underneath the Hollywood sign. The doctors had put in a plate and screws and I had them removed right before Donna came out to L.A., so I couldn’t drive my stick shift car. Donna drove and did an exemplary job at it. After all, she is from Britain and learned how to drive on a manual transmission.

To make matters more difficult, I had lost my driving privileges after smashing my first TR-6 into a parked car in front of a crowded theater on Ventura near The Baked Potato. I had sold my second TR-6 to John and Marion Hamilton and all I had left was my Austin Healey. I used to drive the back road loop around Camrose without a valid license just to keep it in good running condition. Other than that, Donna did all the driving until I got my driving privileges back a few months later. Soon tragedy would strike my family and I was comforted and delighted to have Donna in my life at that turbulent time. She was a like the Rock of Gibraltar to lean on. I wish there was more I could have done to let her know how much I loved and appreciated her strength and kindness. I am still trying to this day.