Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder

Author:Ry Cooder [Cooder, Ry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories, Mystery & Detective, Noir Fiction; American, Hard-Boiled, General, Short Stories (Single Author), Hard-Boiled.; Bisacsh, Short Stories (Single Author); Bisacsh
ISBN: 9780872865198
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

My telephone keeps ringin'

1956

SANTA MONICA IS Douglas Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft is Santa Monica. Three shifts a day, seven days a week means prosperity for all.

Douglas has contracted with the Fritz Burns Company to build low­-cost tract housing for the workers and their families in the south end of town between Ocean Park Boulevard and West Pico. They call it “Sunset Park,” a nice place to live and work. Always a fresh breeze off the ocean, which you can almost see just over the hills of Ocean Park.

Sunset Park is a plateau, so the air is dry and the light is good, in a lower­-middle-­class sort of way. There are three grammar schools, two junior highs, and a high school, called Samohi. You can walk to three or four good­-sized grocery stores that feature the modern shopping carts for your convenience, as well as drugstores (Airport Rexall), a movie theater (The Aero), liquor stores, coffee shops, and bars — especially the ones up on Ocean Park Boulevard that stay open twenty-four hours a day on account of the strategic work that’s going on at Douglas Aircraft twenty-four hours a day.

Over on Thirty-first Street and Pico Boulevard is the Gresham Building, headquarters of the Gresham Detective Agency. It’s a two­-story stucco job with the entrance on the diagonal at the corner. Kind of ugly and squat looking. Here comes George Gresham in his 1950 Oldsmobile. George recently purchased the car from Ned Hillael at Hillael’s Used Cars, corner of Thirtieth and Pico, one block over. Paid four hundred fifty dollars in cash, which is a lot of money for a used car in 1956, but George thinks he really put it over on Ned with the cash offer. Got Ned to come down seventy-five dollars. George handled it just right; he’s on top this year. Got the building with his name on it, and he’s doing some bill collecting and credit checking just to get things going in a business way.

Ned is the only used car dealer in the airport vicinity, and he does good business with Douglas employees and the occasional professional like George Gresham. Finally got rid of that Olds — goddamn cracked block wouldn’t hold oil. Ned himself drives a late­-model Cadillac Sedan DeVille. And there’s Herb Saunders, a mechanic, a colored man, who works for Ned. Ned gets these cars from repo auctions and police impound sales, and Herb doctors them up so they run for six months. All sales final at Ned Hillael’s.

Herb himself drives a Muntz Jet, a weird little sports car mar­keted unsuccessfully by Earl “Madman” Muntz, the king of cheap TV sets. It has a Cadillac motor and an orchid-­pink paint job, and it runs and looks sharp. Herb lives in the little black and Mexican neighbor­hood over by Woodlawn Cemetery, down around Sixteenth and Michigan, in a 1900-­era cottage on a deep lot, and he grows his own vege­tables right alongside the garage where he works on bad cars for Ned.

The aircraft

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