Dancing in the Dark Read online

  “Mr. Peelers, I have a list,” she shouted.

  “Mrs. Plaut,” I answered loudly, seeing that she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid. “This day has turned from a toe-tapping joy to thoughts, if not of suicide, at least of a dark room, a few hours of radio, and lots of dreamless sleep.”

  “Sometimes I fail to understand you, Mr. Peelers,” she said with a shake of her head. “If your toes are cramped, don’t climb in bed feeling sorry for yourself. Do what the Mister always did, stomp around the floor barefoot. And don’t breathe in that Flit stuff.”

  Mrs. Plaut, when it fit her agenda, thought I was an exterminator or an editor for a small but prestigious publisher. I do not know where she got these ideas. Attempts to find out had proved both fruitless and maddening.

  “I’ll stomp around, Mrs. Plaut,” I said.

  “There is a potato shortage, you know,” she said moving from small talk to Item One on her agenda.

  “I’ve heard.”

  “There is a black market in potatoes.”

  “Ah,” I said knowingly, looking longingly at the stairs behind her that led to my room.

  “I should like you to use your resources to obtain as many pounds of baking potatoes as you can.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll think about it tomorrow. I promise.”

  “Promises are daisies. Delivering the goods is orchids. The Mister said that.”

  The Mister was long, long gone. I had never had the pleasure of meeting him. But he was a legend in the House of Plaut.

  “And,” she went on, “more meat rationing is coming April eleventh.”

  “I’ll give you my meat-ration stamps,” I said. “Now, if I can …”

  She handed me the papers in her hand, lined sheets covered with Mrs. Plaut’s precisely written pen-and-ink words. It was the latest chapter in the endless saga of her family. I was expected to edit—minimally—and comment—favorably—on each chapter handed to me. I was expected to do this quickly and to be ready for an interrogation to prove I had read her latest offering carefully.

  “At breakfast tomorrow morning, you can critique,” she said. “We’re having Waterbury crescent scones crafted with mince, orange peel, and a dash of nutmeg.”

  “I’ll have to make it a quick breakfast, Mrs. P.,” I said, trying to inch past her, letting my slightly outstretched arms clutching her manuscript run interference.

  But Mrs. Plaut was not to be denied. She cut me off.

  “Where is it you have to run? Call, make it later. You have the chapter about Aunt Bess and Cousin Leo’s fateful encounter with Pancho Villa.”

  “I have a dance lesson with Fred Astaire,” I countered.

  “The movie Fred Astaire?”

  “Not the streetcar conductor,” I said.

  “He is trying to teach you to dance?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m having a lesson.”

  “He will fail miserably,” she said with a shake of her head.

  “I appreciate your confidence and support,” I said. “I’ll read this tonight.”

  “Potatoes,” she said, finally standing aside to let me pass.

  I paused on the steps and turned to her with, “Have you ever seen Preston Stewart?”

  “In the flesh, no. In the movies, yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “About Preston Stewart? If I were fifty years younger, I’d hide in his bedroom closet and jump on his bones when he came home.”

  “Thanks,” I said, starting up the stairs. Behind me Mrs. Plaut said, “That’s what my niece Rhoda did with Valentino. And she said it worked.”

  The only person I could or would talk to about me and Anne was Gunther Wherthman, who was my best friend, Swiss, and about the same size as Johnny Puleo of the Harmonica Rascals. He was either a midget or a little person, depending on who you were talking to. I wanted to talk to Gunther, who had gotten me the room in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse three years earlier when Mrs. Eastwood had thrown me out of my apartment. Gunther was always proper. Gunther was always perfectly dressed, down to his tiny three-piece suits and a fob with a regular-size watch attached. Gunther spent his days translating books into English from about a dozen languages. He had more work than he could handle with government contracts, industrial and popular publishers. But Gunther was out of town with the normal-sized young woman he was dating and considering marrying, a graduate student in music history at the University of San Francisco.

  I didn’t want to think about anybody marrying anybody.

  I went into my room and was greeted by a loud series of demanding “meows” from Dash. The sun was almost down but not quite. I hit the light switch and surveyed my domicile, Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript pages in my hand.

  A flowery ancient sofa to my left had a purple pillow resting on it. Stitched onto the pillow by Mrs. Plaut was “God Bless Us Every One.” There had been a bed, but since I didn’t use it I finally convinced Mrs. Plaut that the room was too crowded and the frame and spring should be stored in the vast and overflowing garage in back of the house. The garage used to be a barn and still had the smell of long-ago livestock.

  My bad back was a gift from a large Negro gentleman who had wanted to approach Mickey Rooney at a premiere. It had been my job to protect the Mick from overeager fans. I was all that stood between Rooney and the large gentleman. Rooney didn’t even know what was going on. The big man had given me a bear hug and dropped me on the ground amid the crowd of fans. By then Rooney was safely inside his car and on his way. I, on the other hand, was crawling for open air and feeling a pain in my back that would haunt me on and off from then on.

  I slept on a thin, hard mattress on the floor. I cleaned my room every morning and made the bed. Mrs. Plaut had frequent and unannounced inspections. The rooms of her boardinghouse had no locks, not even in the shared bathroom. Mrs. Plaut didn’t believe in privacy. People only did things they shouldn’t when they knew they could lock their doors.

  I moved to the small table near the window to my right. The table had two chairs. There was a small refrigerator and a small built-in cupboard behind the table. Mrs. Plaut forbade stoves in the room, but we could have hot plates. One of her relatives, an uncle, I think, had been burned to death in his house on the Nebraska plains. It wasn’t clear from her memoirs whether the deed had been done by Indians, bandits, or her aunt.

  I got two cans of tuna from the shelf, opened them, gave Dash some fresh water and one can while I ate the other. I had a glass of milk and a couple of graham crackers decently dunked, took off my clothes and got under the blanket on my mattress, ill-prepared to deal with Mrs. Plaut’s Aunt Rhoda, Cousin Leo, and Pancho Villa. Dash and whatever gods may be are my witnesses that I tried.

  As soon as Pancho Villa appeared on page 1,122, my imagination cast Preston Stewart in the role. I couldn’t shake the mental picture of all those teeth beneath the sombrero. I put the manuscript down and fell asleep to the sound of Dash lapping his water, planning a night on the neighborhood through the open window.

  Chapter Three

  I Won’t Dance

  On the way to Fred Astaire at R.K.O. on a Wednesday morning with a tankful of gas, and close to rich with four hundred dollars, I wondered about where I was going to get black-market potatoes for Mrs. Plaut and whether Preston Stewart and the former Anne Peters had spent all or part of the night together.

  I drove, ignoring a small, strange clinking somewhere under the hood of the car. I listened to the radio. A cute voice urged, “Gimme a little kiss, will you, huh?”

  I turned off the radio and thought about Arthur Forbes, Luna Martin, Fred Astaire, and my city.

  In the twenties, with his honor Mayor George Cryer, who looked a little like Woodrow Wilson, presiding, there had been a boom, probably like no boom in American history.

  In the twenties, Fred and his sister, Adele Astaire, were running across a stage in Los Angeles and waving their arms in the air. The audience loved it.

  In
the twenties, the University of California at Los Angeles sprang sprawling from the earth of Westwood. The Mulholland Highway was built. City Hall rose white and curious downtown. People moved in, speculated. Bought a house in the morning. Sold it at a profit that night. People had money and smiles on their faces. More than once at Beneva’s Pharmacy, half a block down from my dad’s grocery, I’d watched Mr. Pope line up the Coca-Colas on the counter for a group of real-estate salesmen. Then, one by one, he’d drop a five-grain Benzedrine tablet in their drink to, as Mr. Pope said, “perk ’em up and keep ’em on the happiness track.”

  Fred and Adele were touring the country, with Fred singing “Fascinating Rhythm” and dancing to “S’Wonderful.”

  In the twenties, there was money to be made and laws to be broken. Jazz and Prohibition hit Los Angeles. Bookmakers, gamblers, and prostitutes set up shop and handed out cards. Morality laws, alcohol laws, gangs moving in. Even in Glendale, where I was a kid cop, there were opportunities on the street to earn enough fast money to buy a house and make your wife happy. I had two partners when I was on the force. Both were on the take. Both thought they had good reasons. I was young and had a brother on the Los Angeles Police Department who would break your fingers if you tried to slip him green paper. But there weren’t many Phil Pevsners on the police force. It was a golden opportunity for Fingers Intaglia to change his name and come to the boom town as the official representative of Detroit’s Purple Gang and the son-in-law of Guiseppi Cortona.

  In the twenties, Fred Astaire, wearing a striped beret and matching socks, was back on Broadway playing the accordion, leaping to “New Sun in the Sky,” and doing a dream ballet to “The Beggar’s Waltz.” The papers said he had bought a $22,000 Rolls Royce which he never drove.

  Police captains grew rich; patrolmen and detectives didn’t do badly either. In 1923, in an attempt to purge the police department, the city of Los Angeles hired August Vollmer, then chief at Berkeley and hailed as the incorruptible father of modern police science, to head the department, clean it up. He had one year to do it. He started the Los Angeles Police Department school, and one of its first graduates was James Edgar “Two Gun” Davis, who two years later became L.A. Police Chief, followed by Roy “Strong Arm Dick” Steckel. There were raids in 1923, lots of them, but the big-buck bad guys had taken a one-year vacation, leaving the small operators—who had to keep making a living—to get their wares busted and one-way tickets out of town or into prison. Success for Vollmer, and then his term came to an end in September 1924. Just before his one-year term ended, billboards began springing up, reading, “The First of September will be the Last of August.” And it was. Things were back to normal, and people like Arthur Forbes, the former Fingers Intaglia, simply raised their prices and doubled their payoffs, and took over the operations of the smaller gangsters who were behind bars or back in Dayton or Troy terrorizing the locals. Arthur Forbes bought buildings and people and land and more cops.

  Those with dollars in their pockets and those with no dollars, to work for those with dollars. The Mexican border was wide open.

  Then the Depression hit. Latins, even if they were American citizens, were rounded up, herded on trains, shipped over the border, and told they would be jailed or shot if they returned. Illegal border checks, the bum’s brigade, were set up on the major highways and roads. And if the cop on the border didn’t like your face or your wife’s or the amount of money in your pocket, he could turn you back. Chinatown was shut down and leveled after a vigorous campaign by Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. The Chinese scattered, most of them going east, reverse Oriental Oakies. Union Station went up in their place, and in 1938 a new, much smaller seven-acre tourist attraction called China City went up fast, giving jobs to voters, none of whom were Chinese. You could get a phony rickshaw ride around China City for a quarter. A year after it opened, China City mysteriously burned down to the ground, putting the remaining Chinese who had become tourist attractions out of work.

  But now we had Fred Astaire on the screen in the dark, smiling, dancing, Flying Down to Rio, singing, getting Ginger. He looked like one of us. He could dance as if he had found a way to defeat gravity and fatigue. And nothing bothered him. Getting off a train with Victor Moore, walking down the street in a tux with empty pockets, Fred could always see the bright side.

  In L.A., the Arthur Forbeses were grabbing more land cheap and keeping whole precincts happy. People were hungry. There were lines at Clifton’s Cafeterias, the cafeterias of the golden rule, where all you had to do was refuse to pay your bill for any reason and you wouldn’t be charged.

  And Fred Astaire tilted his little sailor cap over his right eye, hitched up his bell-bottom trousers, and danced around the deck of an R.K.O. battleship, telling us it was okay to “put all our eggs in one basket.”

  What mattered was a job, any job. The county started to build sewers and highways, using federal and state funds and bonds bought generously by the people who still had money, people like Arthur Forbes who legally began to buy the city. But people were working. Working the sewer detail in a gas mask for the Los Angeles Department of Public Works was a great opportunity.

  And Fred in a suit and tie and a pair of brown-and-white shoes leaped over a low railing onto a dance floor, took Ginger’s hand, started his feet tapping, and advised us with a smile to “Let Yourself Go.”

  And there were disasters. Major floods in 1934 and 1938 from sudden ten-inch downpours that lasted only a few hours. The Los Angeles River went over its banks, driving people from their houses in a wild search for anything that would float. A major earthquake struck around Long Beach and Compton. And fires. Mostly fires. In 1938 the Baker Block, built in the 1870’s, a major tourist attraction, was hit hard by fire.

  And Fred in elegant tie and tails, arms floating to the music like a magician, said, “The hell with it. Hum ‘The Picolino,’ dance ‘The Carioca’ and ‘The Continental.’”

  When I got to the gate at R.K.O., a guy in a gray uniform, complete with black-leather strap over his shoulder and matching cap fixed evenly down to his eyebrows, walked out of the guard booth and motioned for me to roll down the window. The look on his well-shaved face made it clear that he didn’t like leaning down so far and he didn’t much understand who would be trying to get through the R.K.O. gate in a battered refrigerator on wheels.

  “Yes, sir?” he said, but I somehow felt that the “sir” had a professional tinge of contempt.

  “Name’s Peters, Toby Peters. I have an appointment with Fred Astaire.”

  The guard nodded. His body and head squared, face flat and gray, the smell of retired cop on his Sen-Sen breath.

  “Astaire’s gonna teach me to dance,” I explained.

  The guard looked at me and nodded. A pro. No expression, just a brief blink of the eyes.

  “I’ll check,” he said. “Meanwhile, please just sit where you are.”

  Since my only option, now that there was another car behind me, was to crash through the gate, I sat. The clink under the hood had grown worse. The seat next to me smelled like cat and I sat inside wearing some reasonably clean trousers, a tieless white shirt that I had tried, with some success, to flatten out with Gunther’s iron.

  The guard lumbered to the gate house and made a call as he watched me through the window. In my rearview mirror I could see Butterfly McQueen in a blue Buick, watching me with impatience. I shrugged. The guard came back.

  “Stage Two,” he said. “You just …”

  “I know how to get there,” I said. “I did a few security jobs. That was a while ago, but I think I can find my way.”

  “You were in the agency business and now you’re a dancer?” the guard said, brow furrowed.

  “Life can be strange and wondrous,” I said.

  “It can also be shit,” he whispered.

  Butterfly McQueen hit her horn, and the guard pulled his head out of my window and waved me on.

  I parked right next to the en
trance to Stage Two between two piles of light stands and thick coiled wires. The on-stage light was out so I went in. I went through a bank of floor-to-ceiling dark curtains and came out on a black polished floor covered with footprints and scuff marks. Fred Astaire sat alone at a table in one corner. There was no furniture on the stage except for the large table on which sat a phonograph, a stack of records, and lunch. Astaire had a soup spoon in his hand. Another place was set across the table.

  “Toby, I’m glad you came,” he said, rising and taking my hand. “I was afraid you’d changed your mind. Arthur Forbes …”

  Astaire was dressed in white slacks, a dark-blue, long-sleeved billowy shirt, and a small white scarf tied around his neck.

  “Shall we dance?” I said.

  He smiled and waved toward the table.

  “Shall we eat first? I took the liberty of ordering. I don’t like eating in the commissary. I hope you haven’t had an early lunch?”

  “Nope,” I said as he took his seat and I joined him.

  “Chicken noodle soup,” Astaire said as I picked up my spoon. “The trick is in the noodles. The noodles must be wide and flat. I’m afraid the ice cream is starting to melt a little.”

  “Looks fine,” I said, reaching for a bottle of Ruppert Beer near my soup. I opened it with a shining church key conveniently placed in front of my bowl and poured the beer into a tall glass. I drank the beer and tasted the soup.

  “How do you like it?” Astaire said with a real interest.

  “Flat noodles,” I said, holding up a spoonful.

  “That’s the secret,” he confirmed solemnly.

  I gave him the very short version of my background as we finished eating. He nodded, listened, asked a question about my brother, Phil, and what I thought of various people I’d worked with, for, and, once in a while, against.