Chapter 7- Watching the Detectives

I was at my parent’s house on Canton Drive, not the one where Robbie and Carol’s wedding rehearsal was, it was across the street. The owner of the first Canton home was a man by the name of Pat Senatore, who is best known for playing bass in The Tijuana Brass, Herb Alpert’s famous band. He still is the Artistic Director for Alpert’s Vibrato Grill Jazz in Bel Air, California where he performs and books the music. Pat had decided he wanted to move back to his old haunting grounds and gave my parent’s a generous three months notice. The found the “Leave it to Beaver” house across the street with three bedrooms and a nice, but steeply inclined yard with eucalyptus trees, bougainvillea and low hanging ferns. It wasn’t as artistic as the last place, and there was no guest house, but it was very homey and they were relatively happy there. There was plenty of room for Danny and J, the two puppies that Bridget Bardog had given birth to the year before, to run around in.

 I was there that afternoon in March talking to my mom and dad about the strange series of phone calls I had received the night before. They thought it was insane, but they thought my life was generally insane, so it was par for that course. I asked my dad if he knew anything about Nastassja Kinski, if he had ever worked with her and such. He said he thought she was a wild child and was very beautiful and was the daughter of Klaus Kinski—that’s all he knew on that subject. When I got home to my apartment on El Cerritos, I noticed that my phone machine was flashing indicating that there were unheard messages. I thought that it would be amazing if one of those messages was her, or maybe Bowie. I rushed over to the Phone Mate and pressed the button. The first call was from Chas asking if I wanted to go down to the Sports Connection to work out. The second message was from her.

“James, this is Nastassja. I wanted to thank you again for saving David’s life and if there is anything I can do to thank you, I will. Cheers for now.”

That was it. I was over the moon with excitement. Was it really her? If this was a joke it was going too far but I had to be sure. I made a copy of the message on my double cassette recorder and listened to it until the magnetic backing on the tape was wearing thinner than an anorexic junkie. Her voice was low and sexy and there was a hint of some kind of European accent that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I just wanted to put my finger (and a lot more) on her. I figured I would call Chas back and talk it over with him, which I did on the Lifecycle exercise bike next to him at the Sports Connection.

“James, are you bullshitting me?”

“No Chas, this really happened.” I told him the whole story and he stopped pedaling and listened skeptically.

“Jeez, James. Why do things always happen to you? I remember when you walked through the check stand at Ralphs and all the computers went crazy, and when you drive under a street lamp they frequently burn out.”

He had a name for me—the human sunspot. I told Chas to keep this whole thing to himself and he promised he wouldn’t tell a soul but it was a moot point since there was a girl behind us who had overheard the brunt of the conversation. Her name was Karen and she was known as the mouth of West Hollywood and not just for oral sex. I thought I was in trouble now and soon the whole town was going to know the story after I had promised David and Nastassja that I would keep it under wraps. I turned around to face Karen and told her that I was only kidding about the story and it was only an idea I had about a short story or a song. She smiled and said, “Sure James, I won’t tell a soul about your little story idea,” but I knew she wasn’t buying it—I was screwed.

I went to the local video rental shop (Blockbuster hadn’t even come into existence yet) and rented every Nastassja Kinski film I could get my hands on. There was Stay as You Are with Marcello Mastroianni and The Hotel New Hampshire (it had just come out that week). Of course there was Cat People with that theme song by David Bowie called Cat People (Putting out the Fire). This was the movie where she met David and where their intimate relations had started. I didn’t have a VCR machine so I went over to the house on Canton Drive and watched them. I thought I was Sam Spade or a modern day Sherlock Holmes, listening to every line she spoke then rewinding it and comparing it to the voice on the answering machine tape. It was very similar but I had to be sure and the only way to be sure was to have the tape analyzed.

The next morning I got a call from some woman from the National Enquirer, a tawdry newspaper that prints articles about babies born with three heads from outer space or the latest Elvis sightings, that kind of tabloid. She had heard about the David Bowie story from the mouth of Hollywood I assumed, or from some other loosed-lipped individual. The aggressive woman on the other end of the line was offering me fifteen hundred dollars for an exclusive story about the events of the other evening. I laughed. “I don’t care if you offer me fifteen thousand dollars, there is no way am I going to divulge anything about David Bowie, Nastassja Kinski. I felt like it would be betraying a friendship and I am not one to do that. It would be sleazy and cheap. Now maybe if they had offered me a million dollars I would have definitely considered it, but I knew nobody was going to offer that kind of money. I didn’t even know if the whole escapade was for real or not, but I did have a recording of Ms. Kinski, or from a woman who claimed to be her.

There was a private detective that had an office in the 9000 building on Sunset Boulevard that I had met before through Larry. His name was Tony Pellicano. He would later be known as the P.I. to the stars having clients such as Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Steven Seagal and many others too numerous to count. He later would serve a thirty month sentence in jail for wiretapping, racketeering and obstruction of justice. Tony had just arrived from Chicago and had met Larry at, where else, The Rainbow Bar and Grille. When I called Larry about my dilemma, he was the one who set up the meeting with Pellicano.

As I sat in the waiting room firmly grasping a cassette in my sweaty hands, I looked at all the photographs on the wall. There were signed pictures of Sylvester Stallone, David Carradine in his Kung Fu garb and his brother Keith. There was another photo of him arm in arm with billionaire, Kirk Kerkorian. He called me into his office and I told him the story and asked him if he could authenticate the voice on the tape by comparing it to some of her dialogue from a film that she had made. He said he could do it but it would cost me a hundred bucks to get started, and that was him doing me a favor since I was a friend of Larry’s. Usually for something like this it would cost a grand just to get started. I told him I would get back to him about it since I didn’t have a hundred bucks to spare at the moment. He smiled and shook my hand saying, “Okay Jimmy, when you get the cash I can get started. It shouldn’t take me more than a week or two to get some kind of result for you.”

“Thanks, Tony. I will call you as soon as I get the money, thanks.”

I left his office feeling a little dejected. Did I really want to invest a hundred dollars just to find out if all of this was on the level? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until she called again and arrange a meeting with the starlet? I thought that would be the more prudent way to go. I went home and threw on my roller skates to get some exercise for myself and Bridget. Our usual route was to go down the stairs and hang a left on El Cerritos and another left on Hollywood Boulevard past Grauman’s Chinese Theater heading east. Winding our way through the pedestrians and tourists I saw a couple of young punk rock girls with shaved heads and safety pin earrings. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen and looked like they hadn’t had a decent meal in days.

One of the girls called out, “You got any spare change?”

I stopped on a dime and turned around as Bridget sniffed them out. They seemed harmless enough to both of us.

“If I give you some money what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Get some food,” the second and less attractive girl said.

“I’ll tell you what. Let’s go to the pizza place down the street and I’ll buy you both a couple of slices. How does that sound?”

They looked at each other and nodded their heads in agreement. The next thing I knew they had followed Bridget and me to Tony’s Pizzeria on Hollywood and Wilcox and I ordered four slices and four paper cups of water, one for me, two for the girls and one for Bridget Bardog. They began to tell me their life stories of how they came to Hollywood to meet rock stars and do drugs and ended up on the street. They were obviously runaways. I knew they weren’t going to tell me who, what and where they were running from, so I didn’t ask. After they scarfed down the pizza like there was no tomorrow I asked them, “How would you girls like to earn ten bucks each?”

“Yeah, I suppose you want some head or something,” the prettier of the two said.

“No, I don’t want to get arrested today, thank you very much. Are you girls handy with a mop, brush and vacuum?”

“What? You want us to clean your place?” the less attractive runaway asked.

“Exactly. We could stop by Savon and get some Mop and Go. My apartment is just a few blocks past that. Are you game?”

They looked at each other with suspicious eyes then the pretty one said, “Sure. Ten bucks each?”

“Ten bucks each.”

After tying Bridget to the bus stop bench we went inside the Savon. While paying for the cleaning supplies at the cashiers I spotted a stand with Star Scrolls so I picked out an orange Scorpio scroll. I didn’t really believe in those Astrology cons, but I liked them for cheap entertainment, and sometimes they were fairly accurate. Unwrapping the scroll, I read that on May ninth, which was only a few days away, I was going to meet the sweetheart of my dreams who was going to knock on my door, completely out of the blue. I thought that was reaching a little and laughed as I rolled the scroll up and put it in my pants pocket.

When we got back to El Cerritos, they asked me if they could stash their backpacks in the bushes in the back of the apartment complex. I said it would be alright. Then we walked upstairs and they surveyed the work they had committed themselves to and realized that I was getting off cheap. There was so much dog hair you could weave a carpet from it. After three hours of sweeping, vacuuming and mopping they were done. I gave them both ten bucks each and a couple of cokes. They thanked me and I returned the favor.

“I wouldn’t leave your backpacks past Tuesday morning, that’s when the gardeners come with those blowers and they might steal them.”

“Okay,” the pretty one said. “You are pretty cool for an older dude.”

I laughed. I guess to them I was an older dude, but I was just thirty-one, and a young looking thirty-one for that matter.

The next day they came back with a couple of other girls and asked me if they could hang out at my place for a little while. They looked pretty rough and tired. I said it would be okay and the three of them came inside. I made them all tuna melts, (my specialty) and gave them each a soda. They thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, or lines of speed, whatever floated your particular boat. I took it as a compliment.

On the night of May 9, 1984, I was alone in my apartment wondering if the Star Scroll had lied. I was supposed to have the sweetheart of my dreams knock upon my door and it was 11:30. I resigned myself to thinking it was all a bunch of bull and then took off my pants and turned on the TV to watch the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (in my opinion he was the greatest host of that show ever. He would retire in 1992). I was settling in for the night thinking I should get some rest, maybe make a few call backs in the morning on some sales leads I had secured for Independent Data Supply and after that I would put the finishing touches on a new song I was writing about Nastassja called Messing Around With the Wrong Heart, when there was a knock on my door. It was one of the runaways who had brought a friend to hang out. I was dumbfounded because there was this punked-out vision standing in my doorway was drop dead gorgeous even with half of her blonde hair shaved and a long string of paper clips dangling from her ears. She looked like a model, or could have been one if she cleaned up her act. She spoke in a German accent and said her name was Maria. They stayed until four in the morning and I thought I was going to die from frustration. She had the bluest eyes I had ever seen and she was tough as nails on the outside but inside I knew she was just a hurt kitten. She said that she was living in an abandoned and condemned building on Hollywood Boulevard they had aptly named “Hotel Hell”. I said she could stay here at my place if she wanted for awhile to get away from that environment. She said she would think about it. She did stay. Damned if those Star Scrolls weren’t right on the money. Little did I know at the time she would be more trouble than a jar of nitroglycerine on a rollercoaster. Live and learn, right? Not always.

After a week with Maria I had forgotten all about Nastassja, Tony Pellicano and David Bowie. I was much too busy with Maria now. I found out she was a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday so having sex with her was out of the question—for now. Then she dropped the bomb. She told me she was pregnant.