Hollywood Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

days, when he still had a horn, when he'd stand out there on the boulevard and play cool licks like Kai Winding and J. J. Johnson, jamming as good as any of the black jazzmen he'd played with in the nightclub down on Washington and La Brea forty years ago, when cool jazz was king.
    In those days the black audiences were always the best and treated him like he was one of them. And in fact he had gotten his share of chocolate cooz in those days, before pot and bennies and alcohol beat him down, before he hocked his trombone a hundred times and finally had to sell it. The horn had gotten him enough money to keep in scotch for oh, maybe a week or so if he remembered right. And no trash booze for Teddy. He drank Jack then, all that liquid gold sliding down his throat and warming his belly.
    He remembered those old days like it was this afternoon. It was yesterday he couldn't recall sometimes. Nowadays he drank anything he could get, but oh, how he remembered the Jack and the jazz, and those sweet mommas whispering in his ear and taking him home to feed him gumbo. That's when life was sweet. Forty years and a million drinks ago.
    While Trombone Teddy yawned and scratched and knew it was time to leave the sleeping bag that was home in the portico of a derelict office building east of the old Hollywood Cemetery, time to hit the streets for some nighttime panhandling, Farley Ramsdale woke from his fitful hour of sleep after a nightmare he couldn't remember.
    Farley yelled, "Olive!" No response. Was that dumb bitch sleeping again? It burned his ass how she could be such a strung-out crystal fiend and still sleep as much as she did. Maybe she was shooting smack in her twat or someplace else he'd never look and the heroin was smoothing out all the ice she smoked? Could that be it? He'd have to watch her better.
    "Olive!" he yelled again. "Where the fuck are you?"
    Then he heard her sleepy voice coming from the living room. "Farley, I'm right here." She'd been asleep, all right.
    "Well, move your skinny ass and rig some mail traps. We got work to do tonight."
    "Okay, Farley," she yelled, sounding more alert then.
    By the time Farley had taken a leak and splashed water on his face and brushed most of the tangles out of his hair and cursed Olive for not washing the towels in the bathroom, she had finished with the traps.
    When he entered the kitchen, she was frying some cheese sandwiches in the skillet and had poured two glasses of orange juice. The mousetraps were now rigged to lengths of string four feet long. He picked up each trap and tested it.
    "They okay, Farley?"
    "Yeah, they're okay."
    He sat at the table knowing he had to drink the juice and eat the sandwich, though he didn't want either. That was one good thing about letting Olive Oyl stay in his house. When he looked at her, he knew he had to take better care of himself. She looked sixty years old but swore she was forty-one, and he believed her. She had the IQ of a schnauzer or a U. S. congressman and was too scared to lie, even though he hadn't laid a hand on her in anger. Not yet, anyway.
    "Did you borrow Sam's Pinto like I told you?" he asked when she put the cheese sandwich in front of him.
    "Yes, Farley. It's out front."
    "Gas in it?"
    "I don't have no money, Farley."
    He shook his head and forced himself to bite into the sandwich, chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. Dying for a candy bar.
    "Did you make a couple auxiliary traps just in case?"
    "A couple what?"
    "Additional different fucking traps. With duct tape?"
    "Oh yes."
    Olive went to the little back porch leading to the yard and got the traps from the top of the washer, where she'd put them. She brought them in and placed them on the drain board. Twelve-inch strips of duct tape, sticky side out with strings threaded through holes cut in the tape.
    "Olive, don't put the sticky side down on the fucking wet drain board," he said, thinking that choking down the rest of the sandwich would take great willpower. "You'll