If you took all the babies in the world and lined them up end to end half of them would cry non-stop and the other half would poop. I know that’s true because I used to babysit for Mrs. Florenz’ seven kids. She paid me fifty cents an hour, and her husband tried to kiss me almost every time he got the chance. He ran the bank in Boon, Alaska, where I used to live, back in the 1950s.
What I liked about the Florenz family was that their house was such a mess. There was even writing on the walls. The children, as they learned their letters, picked up crayons, and on the walls in the living room and the bedrooms and in the halls you could see names—Dirk, Lyle, Milly, Della and so forth. Also you would see the kind of stick figures children draw. Someone with long, frizzy hair would be the mom, and that word, Mom, would be written underneath her. The dad stick-figure would be yelling, which, if you have seven children, you probably do a lot.
My name was Gladys then. It’s Mickey now. I changed it years ago. The mother of the Florenz family has died. The Florenz dad is dead. The children have scattered, and whoever bought the Florenz house bought, I would imagine, a stick-figure history of chaos and error and affection and dopiness—much like anybody’s history except it was preserved in crayons on the wall.
The funny thing about Mrs. Florenz was that even though she lived in a stick-figure house, when she went out for an evening she dressed up like a queen. She wore those long, fancy gloves you don’t see women wearing anymore. She knew the etiquette for wearing them—when to unbutton them, like when you eat, and how to fold the hand part down inside the arm part so the gloves don’t touch the food. She wore her diamond earrings, too, until she lost one of that pair. And for occasions at the Elks Club she almost always wore the mink stole her banker-president, secret-kisser-of-the-babysitter husband gave her for her birthday in 1956. In that regard—the mink-stole part—she was indulging in the little vanity of all provincial wives. Of all provincial wives in Boon, at any rate. Dinner at the Elks Club, and dances there, and talent shows brought out the precious stoles.
Although I dislike saying something like the little vanity of provincial wives. It makes me sound condescending and superior, and I had no basis for feeling superior to the Elks except that my father hated that organization. On the front wall of their concrete lodge downtown they had posted in huge, block letters the initials of their name—B.P.O.E. Officially, that meant Benevolent and Paternal Order of Elks, but my dad said it meant Biggest Pricks on Earth. He believed that in their exclusive lodge they fixed what contracts would go to whom and what businessman-buddy would hire whose son for a summer job.
My father drove a cab, so he wasn’t missing out on any contracts signed and sealed at the Elks. His only child was a daughter, too—me—so he wasn’t angling for some sort of summer internship at the bank or behind the desk at a hotel.
My mother, like my father, hated the Elks. She called them the lah-di-dah people, like they formed a tribe whose costume was mink stoles. She was glad when Mrs. Florenz lost her diamond earring. She said it served such hoity-toity people right, and that if she was me she would find someone else to babysit for besides the seven Florenz brats.
I never told her I didn’t think the Florenz kids were brats. Once they were past the diaper stage, I thought the opposite. I liked the Florenz seven, especially the boy named Dirk, who played dress-up when his brothers and sisters were safely in bed. He didn’t start to do it until he was nearly eight. And even then, for a long time, he was very shy. He’d sweep past a doorway with one of his mother’s scarves around his neck. Or he’d come clumping down the stairs in her high-heel shoes then turn around and clump back up again. He never woke the other children. He only did his dress-up when his sisters and brothers were all sound asleep. And at first it was more like a joke than something he was serious about. He’d sashay in wearing one of his mother’s hats or a strand of her pearls around his scrawny, little-boy neck. He’d adjust the hat or finger the pearls to draw my attention, then he’d laugh as if to say, “Isn’t it funny that I dress up this way? I hope you know I only do it for a joke.” It took six months before what he did became routine and we could dispense with the ha-ha’s. We could pretend he really was a girl, which is what he wished he was.
It was Dirk with whom I ran away, but that was after my babysitting career was over, and I had finished high school and started working at the radio station answering the phone and filing the records and making bill-collecting calls to advertisers. Also dating boys and doing all the ordinary things that people do in Boon when they are young and want to entertain themselves. In the crowd I hung around with we bowled a lot. We didn’t go to bars much. We thought the bars were rowdy. My friends who liked to fish would be out on the water as often as they could. The churchy ones had fellowship things.
I put almost all I earned into savings because I still lived at home, and my mom only charged me fifteen dollars a week for room and board. I’d see Mrs. Florenz every now and then, but she never seemed to recognize me, maybe because I’d grown up so much since I’d been the babysitter she habitually called. She still wore her mink stole. And she favored hats almost exactly like the ones I’d seen Dirk parade around in, stumbling his way from the dimly lit upstairs on his mother’s heels. I saw Dirk, too, at school plays and talent shows, never in a skirt or scarf like on the nights we’d talked in his stick-figure living room. He’d grown into a very handsome teenager and was always at the center of a crowd of laughing friends, so it was very surprising when he showed up at the radio station one afternoon and told me he wasn’t going to finish high school but would run away to Hollywood to be an actor.
I asked him what he’d live on till he found acting work. He didn’t answer in words, but he’d been holding his fist clenched shut, and he opened it to show me what it held. On his palm, his mother’s diamond earring glittered.
I should have told him everything that was wrong with his plan, from the theft of his mother’s earring to the dream he had of Hollywood success. Instead, I said, “Take me with you.”
I had saved enough money so I could do what I wished. Plus I had bowled enough and prayed enough and fished enough to convince myself staying in Boon would mean bowling more and praying more and fishing more. It wasn’t Hollywood and all the glamour that drew me away. I would have told Dirk to take me with him even if he planned to run away to Tacoma or Ellensburg, where I almost went to college. I ran away because the time had come for me to run away. That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to explain to myself why I bought an airplane ticket and packed my bag and quit my job. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
It made sense to Dirk. To him, I didn’t even have to offer reasons. He felt the same way I did.
So on the twelfth of April in 1959 we found a place to live not quite in Hollywood but close enough. We could stare down the main street of our part of Los Angeles and see the shops and restaurants where movie stars had people park their cars and tailor their clothes and style their hair and manicure them and pedicure them and walk their dogs.
Dirk spent I don’t know how many hours every week identifying dogs he thought belonged to this star or that star. He felt if he made friends with a star’s dog walker that person might introduce him to the star, and having an introduction like that was halfway to becoming a star himself. That’s what Dirk believed.
Though he also would have walked dogs if a star had asked him. He knew we needed money. The apartment we found was almost like the opposite of the pampered Hollywood places, where people parked your car for you. We lived in a ticky-tack jumble more like a chicken coop, with every apartment squeezed up against every other. Through the walls we heard our neighbors’ arguments or listened to their TVs blare. We ended up there because, unfortunately, Dirk’s mother’s diamond earring wasn’t pawnable.
“Where’s the other one?” is what the pawn guy said when Dirk showed the earring to him.
“I haven’t got it,” Dirk said.
“Come back when you do, son. People have two ears in California. You might not have known that. They don’t like to buy just one earring. So unless you’ve got two, or unless you know somebody who’s only got one ear, just hang on to it. And are you sure that that’s a real diamond, by the way?”
He would have got his eyepiece out to look at the jewel more closely but Dirk wheeled around and led me from the shop. It was after that we found this place to rent that was only a little more than what we could afford. It was called a court, like royal families lived there, but who lived there were delivery men, and women who worked at dry cleaners, and waiters, and typists, and even one guy who dressed up like Uncle Sam and sold patriotic neckties in some busy part of town.
I liked where we lived because I could talk to the typists about where to look for a job. I found one almost right away at a laundry that cleaned sheets for hospitals. What I mostly did was push carts full of dirty sheets from the loading platform, where the truckers brought them, to the tables where some ladies wearing rubber gloves sprayed the stains with chemicals that would help dissolve them out. Back and forth I went between the loading platform and the spraying tables. I would have thought, before I took the job, the monotony would drive me nuts, but what I liked was talking to the truckers and the ladies. I listened to them tell me they were only doing this part time. Each of them knew somebody who was going to introduce them to a friend in the motion-picture business. Each of them thought the same as Dirk—that eventually they’d get a break and be in pictures.
Except Dirk would not take trucker jobs or put on rubber gloves to spray the stains on sheets. He went where the dog walkers were. He made friends in parks and other places. These were friends who liked his handsome looks. From them he got some money now and then. He told me not to think there was anything unusual in that. He said it was the way things worked in Hollywood, and if he wanted to meet the right people and go to the right parties and make the kind of contacts a person has to make to win a studio’s attention, he had to dress the right way, and have the right haircut and exactly the right tan or they’d know he was a nobody.
He also took acting lessons, and voice lessons, and even lessons in singing and dancing. The money he got from friends paid for all of that. My salary went to pay the rent. That’s how we worked things out until someone called from a hospital and asked did I know a guy named Dirk. This call came when I was almost out the door to go to work. I had to call in sick and then take a cab to where Dirk was. I found him with his eyes blackened and his lips bruised and his head wrapped in yards and yards of bandage.
“They beat us up.” He had to croak to say it, like his throat was injured, too.
“Who, Dirk?”
He started to cry, and I had to wait till he stopped because I couldn’t pester him with questions while tears poured down his cheeks.
It turned out he had met a guy named Louis at a dog park, and Louis had driven him to some small restaurant in the hills where the waiters spoke French. Many of the people dining there spoke French as well, and a woman who looked like Gertrude Stein—I had to ask who Gertrude Stein was—visited their table and spoke about underwear in such a funny way everyone at all the nearby tables put down their forks to listen, everybody laughing.
“Then, after Louis paid the bill and gave the waiter such a generous tip, out in the parking lot, these guys—these thugs—came calling names and waving tire irons. They threw a rock that knocked me down. Louis got into his car. He drove right through them and he got away, but they pounced on me as soon as he was gone.”
“The police will catch them, Dirk. Did you call the police?”
He shook his head, even though the pain of that made him cry more. He cried and cried, and every time I said to call the cops it was like I was hitting him myself, like it hurt him to hear me say such a thing.
The next day was Saturday, and I went back to the hospital with a box of Whitman’s chocolates I had bought at a drugstore. This was to be a gift that would tell Dirk I was sorry for being so bossy about calling the cops. I understood that the police would not do much for him. He was one of those guys policemen don’t like. That had never been said between Dirk and me. It was unsaid but it wasn’t a secret. The other reason I brought the chocolates was because I planned to say to Dirk, “We should go home.” What had happened to us in Hollywood was that I pushed dirty sheets to where the laundry ladies sprayed them, and Dirk made friends in dog parks and took voice lessons from a lady who said he had to round his vowels.
I never got the chance to give him the treat I’d brought. His bed was empty when I went up to his room. At the desk they said he had checked out and there’d been a guy who’d come to get him.
“Who? … What guy?” I had a lot of questions, and none of the hospital people, who barely paused to hear them, had any answers.
“Was it a guy named Louis? Do you know who Louis is?” I actually followed one young doctor down a hall to ask that question. A lot of good it did me. After about ten minutes I was out on a bench and the chocolates were melting. The bench was where you waited for a cab. I sat there with the stupid chocolates thinking how much I had paid for them, and how I’d wasted that two-fifty or two-seventy-five or whatever it had been. It wasn’t the chocolates I was mad about, of course. It was my stupid life and stupid hopes and the whole stupid world. “Hello, you stupid world,” I was thinking, “would it kill you to make sense once in a while?”
I must have looked like I was thinking such an angry thought because a guy who had been watching came to sit beside me on the bench. “Do you always look so dramatic?” he said. He only had a little time to talk before my cab came, but in that time he gave me his business card. It turned out he made movies, and he thought if I could keep on looking furious he could use me for a part he had in mind.
I wouldn’t have ever seen him again except I got fired from my laundry job. It was my own fault. On Monday, which was my first day back at work, I took my very first cart filled with dirty sheets and pushed it off the loading platform. All the sheets dumped out on the dirty concrete. Everybody stared. The thing is, the thought had come to me that among the stained sheets in that particular load might be one with Dirk’s blood on it. And even if that wasn’t true, the sheets were stained with someone’s blood, or someone’s sweat, or someone’s pee. Hundreds and hundreds of sheets all stained by suffering people. It seemed like madness to keep doing what I did. And, of course, after people yelled at me, my supervisor came to say, “You’re fired.”
I got back to the rinky-dink apartment and started bawling, wondering, what will I do now, knowing I didn’t want to starve. I still had the business card from when I’d waited for the taxi. I called the movie guy. This was how my name got changed to Mickey. He gave me roles in several different pictures.
If you’ve ever seen Creature from the Haunted Sea or Hercules Against the Moon Men, you would have seen me. The only part I had I really liked was in Monster A-Go-Go. No lines, but I got to dance. Dancing looking mad. When I saw myself in that—saw the seven seconds of my shadow on the screen—I thought I’d like to make movies for the rest of my life. But that is like saying you like getting up really early in the morning and standing around and waiting a lot and being with guys who always get fresh. Just on the basis on that, I don’t think I would have stayed in movies more than those few years, but two other things happened that made me quit: One was that Dirk came to see me; the other was that I got married.
Dirk’s coming was first, though that didn’t happen until after Monster A-Go-Go came out. He must have seen my seven seconds. He showed up at the ticky-tack apartment and asked if I could help him find a job.
“In the movies, Dirk?”
“If you can.”
He was dressed the way guys dressed in Hollywood back then, in linen trousers and a silk, Hawaiian shirt. All very smart, except his clothes hung on him in a scarecrow fashion and his hair had changed so much it looked a lot like straw.
“Do you need money, Dirk?”
He knew as soon as I said that I wasn’t going to BS him in the Hollywood way. I know director so and so. I’ll mention you to him. People talk in Hollywood to sound like Hollywood’s where they belong—they know so and so, they used to work with Tyrone Power. People who say that are exaggerating, and people who hear them know it’s empty bragging.
“I’m surprised you still live here,” Dirk said, looking around like my dump was a dump he’d never set foot in before.
“It’s what I can afford.” That answer turned the light off behind Dirk’s pretty eyes. He probably knew a lot of people who had to live in dumps. He’d lived in my dump long enough, and probably lots of others. I shouldn’t even say “dump”. I should say tiny, boring, shabby, ricky-ticky, awful, horrible, ugly, two-bit, rented rooms. There must be tens and tens of thousands of those places in L.A., and tens of thousands of Dirks who move in and move out like shadows. Pretending people. Lying people. People whose golden hair is turning into straw. It’s the same kind of life as laundering slimy sheets and then more slimy sheets.
Which is not what made me say yes to the proposal of marriage from Clive. Clive was a motivational speaker. Or I should say that’s what he became after he had been an assistant cameraman and a sound guy and a guy working with a woman who did site locations. He used to talk to me on breaks about how he didn’t want to work in movies all his life but wanted to help people feel confident about themselves. He looked like someone from a toothpaste ad. He had that kind of smile. For a long time I didn’t even think he had romantic thoughts. We didn’t go on dates or anything. We talked a lot when I was making Monster-A-Go-Go, though. Maybe he liked my skimpy little dance costume. He was always a gentleman, not crude like some guys.
It was when Clive started speaking to groups—like at churches and colleges and industrial places—that what there was between us became a bit more complicated. He took me along to help check his sound system or to greet those coming in, or I stood up on the stage and introduced him. After we got married, he always thanked me from the podium before he launched into his program. He called me “My movie star wife.” In the days I still had my looks. We’d always put up stills from movie sets that showed me in my costumes with what was called my famous, glowering look. I don’t believe that anyone really thought I was a star, however. Clive’s comments were more like a joke.
We had four kids. I didn’t do many motivational appearances when they were pooping and crying, but I’m back at it now. I introduce Clive at what we call his workshops. I try to set a tone that’s light enough to preview an attractive lecture but weighty enough so people know they’ll get their money’s worth.
Clive speaks sometimes at Elks Lodges, and while I stand there smiling, I wonder if I’d have the nerve to go with him to Boon. Possibly, the Elks up there could hire him to speak. I know I wouldn’t see Mrs. Florenz. Years have passed and she had died, so she would never hear Clive’s motivational speech. And what would a motivational speaker say to Mrs. Florenz? “Your son stole your diamond earring and then vanished in a sordid segment of the L.A. underclass.”
My own speech, if I were to give one, would not be motivational. I was not much motivated to push a cart of laundry off a loading platform and sit with melting chocolates at a cab stand in the sun. My life has been a stick-figure, drawn-in-crayon sort of life. It has the dopiness of things not planned but lived despite the lack of looking forward. I am scrawled on a wall. I have stick arms and legs. Someone close to me is yelling, and smaller figures made of sticks have their names in crayon printed bold beneath their feet.
“Motivate this world,” is what I ought to say in the warm-up speech I give. Motivate the dress-up boys who move to Hollywood. Motivate their babysitters. Speak to them of effort and of focus. Speak to them of dauntless courage. Dauntless courage is required. Tell the Elks Club that.
Robert Kinerk’s fiction has recently appeared in Narrative, Summerset Review, and Hunger Journal, and is scheduled to appear in Dime Show Review, New Guard Literary Review, and Five on the Fifth. Seven of his picture books for children have been published. Fifteen of his plays have been produced.
