Bio: Kim Cooper is the creator of 1947 project, the crime-a-day time
travel blog that spawned Esotouric's popular crime bus tours, including
Pasadena Confidential and the Real Black Dahlia. With husband Richard Schave,
Kim curates the Salons of LAVA - The Los Angeles Visionaries Association. When
the third generation Angeleno isn't combing old newspapers for forgotten
scandals, she is a passionate advocate for historic preservation of signage,
vernacular architecture and writer's homes. Kim was for many years the editrix
of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture. Her books include "Fall in Love
For Life," "Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth," "Lost in
the Grooves "and an oral history of the cult band Neutral Milk Hotel. The
Kept Girl is her first novel.
Excerpt: Tom James visits L.A.'s Main Street, summer
1929 (from Chapter Ten of "The Kept Girl" by Kim Cooper)
Thank you for the
opportunity to drop by The Pulp Den on my February blog tour for "The Kept
Girl," a novel of 1929 starring the young Raymond Chandler, his devoted
secretary and the real-life cop who is a likely model for Philip Marlowe.
With this guest post,
I'd like to share a section of the story that was a particular pleasure to
write. In it, Tom James, a former Police Commission investigator who has been
bounced down to a busy Broadway beat and is helping oil executive Chandler
off-the-clock with a business matter, goes down to Main Street to clear his
head.
This famous
boulevard, once L.A.'s center of vice and cheap entertainment, is today in the
throes of uneasy gentrification, with low-income SRO tenants mixed in with
fancy pet shops and faux speakeasies.
Los Angeles is a city
that largely abandoned its downtown in the middle part of the last century. Now
young people are coming back, falling in love with the old buildings, but with
no easy way of knowing what rich stories they hold. For the past nine years,
I've been doing my part to bring these lost narratives back, through the
1947project history blogs and Esotouric's true crime bus tours.
I am particularly
fascinated by the Main Street that was, and based the following scene on
extensive reading of old newspapers and non-fiction accounts, archival visits
and the study of vintage photographs and films. Main Street feels very
different today, but these lively old ghosts are right up at the surface if you
know to look for them. I hope, dear reader, that you find them as beguiling as
I do. – Kim Cooper
Main Street was loud and crass in the late afternoon
sun and smelled like hamburgers. Tom fell into a stroller’s pace and observed
the changing scene, not as a cop but as just a set of eyes, with the same cool
detachment with which he’d watch the slim, darting bodies in a fish tank. It
was restful to be just one conscious form among thousands on the sidewalk,
wanting nothing that anyone was selling.
Main Street was a base and ugly boulevard, the end of
the line. Lusts were whipped to a frenzy in its fleshpots, but rarely ever
satisfied. Yawning thirsts were quenched in its rum cellars, only to grow back
stronger with the dawn. Pawnbrokers promised cash for memories, never telling
their customers that if they managed to redeem the shelved treasures they’d
seem tawdry and pathetic upon collection.
Main Street was bright lights and hollering barkers,
sharp-eyed women whose high color signified not youth but some tubercular
condition, fat men who made thin men work hard for small wages, a place where
boys were corrupted and girls ruined, where street preachers failed
consistently to save souls, and where each one of these small tragedies meant
nothing much at all.
Just inside the penny arcade across from the rescue
mission, a couple of kids with dirty peach fuzz mustaches lurked around the
peep booth. One idly turned the crank and snapped the gum in his mouth. A
horn-shaped speaker blared a low-down blues. Inside her glass cage, the
mechanical gypsy rolled her eyes and fanned five cards, waiting for a customer.
The crimes of Main Street were minor, tedious. A drunk
sailor losing his roll to a B-girl, a newsboy hocking stolen watches, a vicious
fight over a woman neither combatant cared one fig about. Occasionally,
something unusual would happen— a murder or a lost child found—but on Main
Street even a miracle would seem drab. Such was the klieg light power of the
commercial engine that fed the place, and the artifice that was its only real
product.
On Main Street, even the Salvation Army majors were
blase ́.
A skinny white fellow in a Hindu costume shimmied around
the sidewalk at 5th & Main. He had a banjo on a strap around his neck, but
couldn’t be bothered pluck it. On reaching the corner he threw back his head
and bellowed, ‘‘See the geek! Gen-you-wine freak of nature and a marvel to
behold, only at The World Mu-see-um!’’
Here, people were just characters playing their
two-dimensional roles: the whore, the john, the hustler, the mark, the pimp,
the bum, the temperance worker, the loan shark, the addict, the wide-eyed boy
from Beaver Dam, Kentucky, who came to Los Angeles and had all his dreams
dashed and then remade again into something more practical, less likely to be
dashed again.
Signs covered every permanent surface, a cacophony of
typography and misused punctuation.
WE BUY GOLD.
5¢ HOURLY SHOWS ALL DAY
SEE! A REAL MUMMY.
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS - EVERY THING MUST GO.
ROOMS - FIRE PROOF.
A boy walked against traffic in the gutter. He was
pulling a narrow cart with an upright painted sign advertising the coming of
the circus, featuring Goliath (the mammoth sea elephant, one ton heavier than
last season), and Hugo Zacchini, human cannonball. The kid’s shoes were falling
apart at the back, and the skin of his heels stained black.
Tom stepped into a narrow flower shop, turning
sideways to pass the sprawling sprays of moist, wilting roses standing on
mirrored shelves. There was nobody behind the counter. He lifted the little
trap, pushed the sleazy curtain aside, and walked down the steep basement
steps. He tasted violet perfume on the smoky air.
Down below, a radio was playing soft classical music,
and three little gals in tight satin dresses were slouched on their bar stools.
When they heard his steps on the stone, they pulled their stomachs in. The
blonde at the end looked over her shoulder, made Tom for a cop and clucked
disapprovingly. She yawned at him. The bartender gave him the fish eye. It
wasn’t Friday, and he wasn’t the designated collector.
Tom shrugged and took a seat in the corner. The girls
slumped down again.
It was peaceful down here, with the music and the cool
stone wall against his back. A little time passed. A soft-looking guy in a
wilted linen suit came downstairs and admired the scenery. He went up to the
blond and whispered something to her. She snuggled up close and called for a champagne
cocktail and a bourbon, water back. You’d have to be fresh off the truck not to
know that her $2 drink was nothing but ginger ale with a sugar cube and a dash
of bitters, and that the bourbon box behind the bar still had Venice Beach sand
between the slats. She held the mark’s hand with a practiced tenderness, and
drank her cocktail fast enough to keep the boss happy, but not so fast that the
man beside her felt like a fool. It was illegal as hell, but almost innocent
compared to most of what went on above and below Main Street. The blond
whispered in the soft man’s ear and he traced the curve of her jaw with the
edge of his thumb. Tom supposed there wasn’t much harm in it, but he felt all
of a sudden mad and a little sick and he made for the stairs. It wasn’t worth
fighting them. He didn’t care so much as all that.
Main Street was an education in the real life of
humans. Books were full of remote ideals that couldn’t be realized in everyday
life except by those insulated from reality by money, breeding and character.
The people you met in church were wearing their best faces. Down here, nobody
pretended to be something they weren’t. It wasn’t a pleasant world, but it was
a natural one. Since he’d first arrived in Los Angeles, Tom had been coming here
to practice compassion. He tried to love everyone, but it was hard. At his
best, he managed not to judge.
But he wasn’t at his best today.
Kept Girl website:
http://www.thekeptgirl.com
Kept Girl blog tour
schedule: http://www.thekeptgirl.com/p/events.html#blogtour
Kept Girl Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/keptgirl
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