Alligators, Lizards, French Fries & Watermelons

by GEORGE YANOK

The Passenger and the Driver hook up in Nashville at a truck stop across from the new stadium.

"We'll have breakfast before we get on the road. You have to see this place. It's like the bar in "STAR WARS."

The Nashville stop is mid-trip for the Driver who started over a week ago with a run from Chicago to Miami and back to Chicago. He's on his second circuit now over the same ground and has invited an old friend along for the ride.

The Passenger avoids the tubs of gravy, biscuits and suspicious looking eggs and sausages on the steam table buffet and orders a short stack from the menu. The Driver asks for a cheese omelet with no potatoes, no bread. He's trying to maintain a high protein, low carbohydrate diet which, on truck stop food, is like attempting to keep Kosher at a Baghdad falafel stand.

"Just give me some sliced tomatoes and put extra cheese on top."

The Passenger will soon learn that everything at a truck stop comes with French fries and that even if he ordered green jello and specified he did not want French fries, he'd still have to scrape them off the plate. Or, given the Passenger's criminal lack of willpower, gobble up every last one of them.

They eat in the area reserved for truckers. The Driver is a little disappointed at the scarcity of weird and crazy patrons here this morning but promises greater weirdness further down the line.

There are telephones at most of the tables and booths and even along the counter. In addition to calling home from time to time, truckers stay in communication with people at each end of their journey -- those who sent them and those who wait for them.

Signs caution, "No incoming calls". Phone company calling cards have effectively eliminated operator placed long distance and drivers save pockets full of coins for the somehow legal electronic slot machine games found in most truck stops.

After breakfast the Passenger climbs in the right side of a Freightliner tractor attached to about 50 feet of trailer and settles into a surprisingly comfortable, pneumatically cushioned seat. Within a few moments the Driver has negotiated the big rig out of the truck stop lot and onto I-24 East, outward bound for Miami. "We're carrying 43,000 pounds of some sort of assorted shit," the Driver tells the Passenger.

This is the Passenger's first nugget of trucking lore. 'Freelance' drivers often don't know nor do they much care what they're hauling. Independent owner/operators contract to carry a wide variety of cargo from many different sources. As long as the load is legal, the weight is right and the trip will pay, they concentrate on getting it to its destination in the most efficient manner possible. Because only then can they load up something else and be on their way home.

The Driver points out other trucks on the road, identifying them for the Passenger. A tanker is a tanker, easy enough. An open topped trailer secured with a tarp is called a 'covered wagon.' A truck with a car carrier is a 'parking lot.' Cabs pulling TWO trailers are called 'wiggle-waggles.'

"Ever drive one of those?" the Passenger asks.

"I've never done it and I never will. The damn things sway and slide all over."

*

Truck stops distribute a wide variety of free literature -- magazines, guide books, newsletters -- tailored to drivers and their professional concerns. An article in one lists tips for avoiding hijack: "Don't talk about your load." That assumes a driver knows what's back there in the first place. The giant logo of an electronics company emblazoned on a trailer obviously precludes secrecy, but the admonitions make simple common sense: "Don't reveal your schedule to inquisitive strangers." "Don't pick up passengers."

The Driver and the Passenger are by no means strangers, having met during their Army days in Texas. In fact, they've been "on the road" together before in a chartered Greyhound bus touring an Army show to military bases. Later, as civilians, they trekked up and down the California coast in vehicles ranging from a British Triumph TR-4 sports car (the Passenger's) to a '53 Chevy the Driver ultimately traded for a motorcycle.

Intervening years saw the Passenger and the Driver follow separate roads spaced with life's mile markers including a marriage or three and various career moves both lateral and dizzyingly vertical.

The Driver started out to be an actor but gave it up when he took upon himself the task of single-handedly raising his infant daughter, a choice requiring that he pursue more dependable employment. He learned to drive a truck and did it well, spending several years driving his own rig. Now single again, his daughter grown, he hires himself out to drive a couple of weeks a month, earns enough to live on, and preserves the balance of his time to write and indulge a variety of creative outlets.

The Passenger is a writer who for many years wrote scripts for television shows. A long résumé is not tolerated in youth worshipping Hollywood which is how he happens to be in Nashville, gone there from California for a job that did not last. And there he has remained for a couple of years, effectively stranded, hoping to get to New York.

The Passenger hopes a big rig ride from Nashville to Miami and back can be something to write about. The trick will be to avoid "Knights Of The Highway" clichés or torturously wrought "modern day cowboy" images. The romance of the road makes a piss poor love story and humping 80,000 pounds of diesel powered steel up and down the nation in service of interstate commerce is a tough damn way to make a living.

*

"We bare it all." "Adult toys." "Couples Welcome."

What the hell are these billboards...?

Amazingly, a several mile stretch of I-75 through Georgia (near the home of former President Jimmy Carter) is solid titty bars. Clap-trappy roadhouses with space to park everything from a Geo Metro to an 18 wheeler pop up at regular intervals on both sides of the highway. Garish color schemes of day-glo and neon promise a panoply of prurient delight to accompany barbecue and beer.

"Ever stop?"

The Driver shakes his head. "Naw. But plenty of guys do. It's lonely sitting behind a wheel all day. So they park, have a beer, stare at some naked chicks and go back to the truck and jerk off. Or they get on CB radio and send out a call for 'lot lizards'.

"'Lot lizards'?"

"That's what truckers call prostitutes who specialize in servicing truck drivers." He does a perfect redneck accent: "'Hey, breaker, innybuddy ott thar wanna suck ma dee-yick?'' Wait'll you see one and you'll realize how damn hard up you'd have to be."

Thereafter the Passenger keeps an eye peeled at every stop hoping for a look at a lot lizard. He's not sure he could positively identify one, remembering a summer in New York before the Disneyfication of Times Square when he'd walked several blocks down 9th Avenue before it dawned on him that the spectacularly bewigged and mini-skirted pedestrians sharing the sidewalk with him were plying the oldest profession.

*

The truck is home as well as conveyance. Sleeper cab design has improved over time, refining the early crypt-like cubicles that were once tucked as afterthoughts behind the seats. Most sleepers, as in this Freightliner, feature two full sized bunk beds and are far more spacious than the largest camper van with Pop n' Marie Retiree rattling around inside. The Passenger, six feet tall, can stand in the sleeper with arms raised over his head and not touch the ceiling. There are reading lights, bookshelves and closet space for extra clothing (although both Driver and Passenger made do the entire trip with shorts and a few tee shirts). The Driver brings along an ice chest for drinking water and perishables although there is space in the cab designed specifically to fit a small refrigerator. There is even a TV which they never switch on. About all the sleeper cab lacks is a toilet...an 'official' one, at least. Tucked away in a compartment behind the Driver is what the trucking magazines delicately refer to as a 'personal jug.' The Passenger has not been assigned a jug . The Driver assures him that if he needs a roadside stop he will be accommodated.

"Riding in a truck can be tough on the kidneys when you're not used to the bouncing around. If you have to go, just say so and I'll pull over." At that moment the Passenger silently vows NEVER to be the cause of an unscheduled stop. He also determines he will not use a jug, having no confidence in his aim or balance at 70 miles an hour. It is a point of some pride that the Passenger is able to conform throughout the trip to the Driver's schedule of stops with no discomfort.

Added to the nuggets of trucking lore is the 'third axle trick', or: 'how to relieve a full bladder with the least chance of outraging public sensibilities.' This is accomplished, with the truck stopped parallel to the roadside, by assuming a position at the third set of wheels from the front bumper, right at the coupler. From here it is possible to whiz with abandon, invisible to passing traffic. Naturally, this does not work as well in heavily populated areas.

*

Truck stop overnight parking areas provide hookups for electricity and water but the Passenger is surprised to learn that most truck engines run on idle all night to utilize their air conditioning or heat, depending upon the weather. The Passenger wonders why they don't suffocate in the night which would be the fate of anyone who went to sleep in the family sedan with the motor running. The Driver's explanation has something to do with the truck's unique exhaust routing system. The Passenger isn't sure he buys this but faced with a choice of shutting down the engine and having no air conditioning or leaving the vents open to mosquitoes, he chooses the former and stops worrying about how it works as long as it does.

On their first overnight stop the Passenger gains a clear understanding of the importance of avoiding parking next to a 'reefer', a refrigerated trailer, easily identified by a huge refrigeration apparatus attached goiter-like to the outside of the front wall.

"They're noisy as hell and run all damn night," the Driver tells the Passenger. In spite of the Driver's best efforts, the spot next to them is vacated sometime after midnight and a reefer noisily takes up residence. The Passenger likens the experience to sleeping with his ear next to a running vacuum cleaner.

The Passenger awakens early and stumbles through the maze of truck rows to the truck stop restroom carrying his tooth brush. The urine redolence hanging in the morning air is vivid evidence that many drivers neither employ a 'personal jug' during the night nor expend the energy required to walk inside to the urinals.

Truckers have their own restrooms at most truck stop facilities, separate and apart from those available to ordinary 'amateur' motorists. The Driver and Passenger take advantage of one chain which offers coupons with fuel fill up which may be exchanged at another stop for private cubicles with sink, toilet and shower. Towels and soap are provided; rubber shower shoes are strongly advised. The Passenger idly wonders how long someone would have to hole up in one of these hygiene refuges before bringing knocks on the door and passkeys. But their schedule is too tight to experiment.

*

Perhaps the most prevalent trucking myth is the one that says the best roadside food is at restaurants where the truck drivers eat. The fact is, truckers eat where they can PARK. You don't whip 60 or 70 feet of iron monster into a diagonal parking slot and if you even THOUGHT about trying to taking a big rig through a fast food drive up window, you'd probably drive off dangling a few of the Golden Arches.

Unfortunately the vast urban sprawl that has filled in most of the spaces between cities in America has resulted in a 'dumbing down' of local flavor in all senses of the word. Blindfold someone and plop them down in any one of a thousand commercial strips that cling like mold to every off ramp along the Interstate system and it would take that person a good long time to identify their location. Everything looks exactly the same -- gas stations, sub shops, pizza parlors, fast-food outlets, motel chains -- each with its towering signage of familiar and interchangeable corporate logos. It is a commercial landscape mathematically determined to merchandise sameness, familiarity and, one supposes, what passes today for security. Evidently an entire society has tacitly agreed that surprises are bad, serendipity is to be avoided and we'll all have vanilla, thanks.

*

While every trucker has favorite places along the road to get a meal or grab a nap or even park close enough to some multi-plex to catch a movie during down time, the Driver is most likely unique in knowing where to find a good bookstore along a given route; meaning one with good books AND a good place to park.

A mall just off the bypass south of Atlanta is a favorite of the Driver. He parks the truck on a service road behind a large furniture outlet next to a Barnes & Noble, and he and the Passenger pass a pleasant half hour amongst the stacks, able to forget for the while the frenzy of the road.

Perhaps the Driver's penchant for bookstore pit stops is not surprising given his demonstrated ability to keep National Public Radio tuned in on his truck radio. The trick is to hopscotch frequencies according to strength in the direction traveled. And in those pockets where an NPR signal is just NOT obtainable, the Driver seeks out 'fire and brimstone' radio preachers for entertainment. Even these are becoming a vanishing breed in the homogenization of American culture. Nowadays radio preachers read Scripture as if they were lawyers parsing a particularly dense legal brief. Their message remains the same, though: "Give me the money and I'll get you to heaven."

*

The Everglades Parkway, popularly known as "Alligator Alley" cuts a horizontal line straight as a draftsman's rule across the lower quarter of the Florida peninsula. Chain link fence separates canals on either side of the highway and this is where the alligators are. But the Driver and the Passenger hit the "Alley" late Sunday afternoon of a rainy day and no 'gators are visible.

That night they sleep in the parking lot of a freight terminal near the Miami Airport while a night crew off loads a variety of cartons and crates and boxes.

The next morning, 'deadheading' an empty trailer, they start back across the Everglades. This time the alligators are there, almost every mile, floating in the canals and lurking in the dense undergrowth.

At one point they spot several alligators in one of the little inlets close to the fence. The Driver parks the rig at the side of the road and he and the Passenger pick their way down a grassy embankment, hoping for a closer look. One beast, at least ten feet long, flicks it's tail and disappears with the sudden speed and agility of a surprised garter snake. Another reveals just a flash of front legs and snout as it knifes into the water and is gone, leaving hardly a ripple on the surface.

As the Driver and the Passenger start back to the truck they become aware of a man calling to them as he approaches on foot from further down the grassy frontage. They'd noticed him earlier while approaching the alligators and assumed he was a tourist also viewing the wildlife. But there appears to be no car or truck but their own parked along the road. The man wears Wrangler jeans and a black tee shirt advertising a bar and grill in the Keys and a cap bearing the same logo. His arms and neck are covered in tattoos; the ones on his arms are very elaborate and intricately done but those on his neck appear to be crude prison decoration. He holds up an empty one liter plastic bottle.

"You guys got any water?"

"You mean drinking water?" the Driver asks.

"Yeah."

"We got water. You need some?"

The man nods gratefully and walks along with them. He is very talkative and begins explaining how the canals containing the wildlife are man made and called 'pushes' -- meaning they are a combination of fresh water and salt water. He tells them that alligators which turn up too close to populated areas are transported here and put in the canals for the safety of both sides of nature's equation.

"They put one in here that was 20 feet long."

The Passenger is thinking of the hijack warnings in the trucking magazine, particularly the instances recounted of drivers approached by strangers at the roadside suddenly finding themselves at gun point. The Passenger drops behind the stranger and the Driver as they walk up the bank toward the truck. From this vantage he decides that, barring an ankle holster, there seems no possibility the man is carrying a concealed weapon.

The Driver and the Passenger both assume the man will ask for a ride but he does not. He fills his water bottle from a supply in the Driver's cooler and explains that his car had broken down back on the road.

"I called my partner and he's supposed to come get me but I just started walking. Only got a little ways when I realized I was running out of water."

The Driver and the Passenger exchange a look. Too many questions occur: Where is his car? They'd seen nothing parked at the side of the road. How did he call his partner? If by cell phone, why did he leave it in the disabled vehicle instead of carrying it? Was he casing the truck and either knew somehow that it was empty or did not want to go against two men instead of a single driver? As they climb back into the cab the stranger waves his thanks and lays one more bit of arcanity on them.

"You walk along here at night, you never know what the hell you're gonna meet. 'Gators get under that fence all the time."

*

I-75 cuts through verdant forest and rolling agricultural plain from northern Florida to southern Georgia. This time of year the mother lode crop is melons and this is what they have come for.

At each stop on the way from Miami the Driver makes a series of phone calls to a fruit broker trying to nail down a time and a place to take on a trailer full of watermelons. At one point it seems he might contract a load that will change his ultimate destination from Chicago to Memphis, but it develops that this alternative trip will not pay enough to make rerouting worthwhile. After stopping for the night in Adel, Georgia he is finally directed on a northeasterly track to a farm not far from the little hamlet of Rochelle.

The Passenger can't help it. Rural southern Georgia reminds him of night riders and burning crosses and fat cops with corrupt grins dipping into pouches of Red Man as they terrorize anyone suspected of being Godless-Communist-Jew-homosexual-Democrat-liberal-northerners. Not an enlightened view nor even a fair one in the "New South" of glass skyscrapers, industrial parks, upscale malls and hideous suburbs, but there it sits at the front of the Passenger's consciousness and won't go away. Part of this is American history and, just as vividly, a great part is the movies: he can't help but populate this fecund red dirt countryside with recalled cinematic images of men in flat brimmed hats and mirrored sunglasses holding shotguns on prison road gangs.

"Takin' it off, boss...".

"Takin' it off..."

"What we got here is a FAILURE to COMMUNICATE..."

The Passenger wrote a television movie a few years ago which was partially filmed in Columbus, Georgia. He remembers spending the better part of an evening with a woman network executive trying unsuccessfully to buy a bottle of wine that was neither sugared nor carbonated.

No onslaught of yuppies has yet arrived in Rochelle to tart up the 19th century storefronts along the downtown strip and transform them into Starbucks and frou-frou antique shops. Farm houses and shotgun shacks and graceful Victorian cottages scattered on the side streets are nearly all inhabited, though many need paint and shingle work. People "live" here; they would never think of it as "pursuing a lifestyle."

Two chicken stands across the street from each other serve as Rochelle's 'restaurant row'; one is run by blacks, the other by whites. Neither lacks for customers of any color. A beautiful old brick train station with slate roof and rococo wood trim sits disused and crumbling at the edge of the railroad tracks that bisect the town. But this is no ghost town. Big rigs lumber through all day long, some of them flatbeds stacked with fresh cut timber. When the Driver pulls into the watermelon farm there are already three or four trucks backed up to a loading shed, taking on melons.

The melon harvesting and loading operation is a model of ingenuity. The fruit is harvested in vast fields beyond this pecan grove at the edge of a pond and transported to the loading dock in what were once school busses. The roofs and seats have been removed and the undercarriages reinforced to bear the loads of melons.

A white clapboard farm house sits surrounded by a neatly trimmed lawn, in the center of which is a swing set. Behind the house is the loading dock canopied by a long, tin-roofed shed. Melons proceed in stately fashion along an intersecting series of electric conveyor belts as workers manually stack them into the trailers. In accordance with principles of load distribution, the tallest layers are at the forward end, tapering toward the back. The workers and the pickers are mostly Mexican, some blacks. The 'straw boss' of the conveyor belt line is a black woman who watches each melon as it arrives and grades it as to type and weight and rejects any defects. At her feet are piles of ruptured or misshapen fruit. Cardboard cartons unfolded Origami fashion into six sided bins are filled with melons and placed at the tailgate end to secure the load. Otherwise, an avalanche of watermelons would greet whoever opened the trailer doors.

The truck was weighed, empty, at a scale across from the train station in Rochelle. Once loaded, the Driver must go back and weigh again to determine cargo weight. On first try the Driver proclaims them much too heavy and returns to the farm to off load dozens of melons, each one of which weighing an average of 20 pounds. Then back to town to weigh again. Ultimately, they do it three times. Complicating this process are 1) the seeming inability of the melon loaders to accurately judge weight (the last off load happens after the migrant workers have been bussed away to the chicken shack of their choice and must be done by straw bosses who, in khaki's and plantation hats, look to the Passenger for all the world like 'overseers' out of "ROOTS") and 2) all of this goes on while the skies pour down a virtual deluge.

The hope this morning had been to load quickly and be on the road by noontime. The Driver even had assurance that this would be the case when he spoke on the phone to the broker. But given the protracted period of waiting and weighing and loading and offloading, they do not get underway until nearly nightfall and must make it all the way to Nashville.

*

"Big word or little word?"

"Little word."

"Shit. We gotta stop."

A part of the truckers oddly self-deprecating sense of humor plays into their cliché image as illiterate rednecks. Official roadside signs indicate whether a truck weigh station is closed ('big word') and can be passed by or open ('little word') and require truckers to pull off and pass over scales at slow speed to establish legal weight. 'Big word' or 'little word' has been a running joke ever since the Driver told the Passenger about it.

Since leaving Rochelle, the Driver has periodically punched numbers into his hand calculator, all the while mumbling in frustration.

"We're still about a couple of hundred pounds overweight. I need to take on fuel and I can't fill up because at 5 pounds per gallon we'd end up way over. They let us slide at the last scale but when we cross over into Tennessee, they are really chickenshit. I have to get rid of some watermelons."

"How? Sell some at a rest stop?"

"Maybe. Or I'll just open the door and dump some if I have to. I KNEW those loaders didn't know what the hell they were doing."

They pull into the first truck stop along the line in Tennessee for an evening meal. As they finish, the Driver has an inspiration. He asks the waitress if there is a manager around. She frowns, worriedly. The Driver reassures her.

"There's nothing wrong with the food or service."

When the manager arrives, the Driver levels with him. "Here's my situation...I'm heading north with watermelons and I'm overweight. Can you use a dozen or so?"

The manager is immediately interested. "What would you want for them?"

The Driver holds up the two food checks for himself and the Passenger. "Take care of these and you get the melons."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

The deal is struck; the manager signs the bills and the Driver pulls the truck around to the kitchen door. In 'bucket brigade' fashion the Driver, Passenger, manager and three busboys divest the truck of about 20 melons. As the Driver jumps down from the trailer bed and closes the door he is approached by a man offering to buy more melons. The Driver politely declines. A few minutes later as they are once more rolling up I-75 the Driver laughs as he tells the Passenger, "If he'd asked me while I was still in the trailer I would have given him some. I just didn't want to climb back up there again."

*

Sometime after three AM, approaching Murfreesboro from the south, the Driver is able to tune in a 24 hour jazz station broadcasting from the campus of Middle Tennessee State University. The sublime sound of Dexter Gordon's tenor saxophone fills the Freightliner cab, invigorating their flagging spirits and turning the inky black and humid night into a comforting velvet cocoon. Soon the skyline of Nashville looms and, a short time later, the Driver lumbers the Freightliner into the same truck stop where he picked up the Passenger nearly five days ago. The Passenger retrieves his automobile from the 'civilian' parking lot and when he drives back to the truck to pick up his duffel bag he sees the Driver standing over an enormous watermelon.

"I picked you out a good one."

The Passenger completes his own journey by driving the deserted roads to his home feeling strangely diminished in what now seems to him this ridiculously puny 4-door sedan. A mile from his turn off he finds he has a choice of overtaking and going around in front of a slow moving truck or falling in behind and adding perhaps 30 seconds to his trip. He slows, lets the truck pull safely ahead, signals, and crosses the lane behind it. It's late. What's the point of forcing some driver to deal with a speeding 4-wheeler maneuvering in front of him?

The fact that the Passenger is asleep the moment his head hits the pillow makes moot the extra half minute it took him to reach his bed.

His dreams are of many things...

An alligator measuring 20 feet long, if somehow able to stand on its tail, could peek over the top of a two story building.

Lizards are uglier than alligators.

French fries are a lot like sex, in that even the worst is great.

The watermelon is a triumph of nature -- pleasing in color, texture and taste to both the eye and the palate.

Trucking is hard work.

###

ONCE UPON A TIME...
A record reissue company is poised to release a prized, scarce KINGSTON TRIO album originally recorded during a 1966 stint at the Sahara-Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada. Originally titled, "Once Upon A Time" the re-release will actually be two discs and be titled, "Once Upon A Time" and "Twice Upon A Time". Really. Anyway, since I once traveled with the Trio, I was asked to contribute to the liner notes. Hope you find them entertaining...

My Kingston Trio/Sahara Tahoe experiences were of a type that normally require about $3 million in therapy sessions to unlock in order (please God) to understand finally and deal with. Only then could one separate the demons from what was truly a transcendent three weeks...or was it three years we stayed in that grisly hotel on the edge of that painfully beautiful lake?

The first memory I'm able to dredge of that once-and-twice-upon-a-time in question was Frank Werber calling me one day in my little round office at Columbus Tower (which used to be his) and summoning me up two floors to his penthouse suite/headquarters for all things 'TRIO' and the only bunker I've ever seen with a view of both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges.

"We're flying up to Tahoe to check out the showroom at the Sahara," he announced through smoke clouds of the substance Frank employed to fuel his managerial style. The Trio's opening at the Sahara was imminent and tonight was Henry Mancini's closing. It took about 20-30 minutes in those days to get from North Beach to the San Francisco airport, so naturally we sped off from the Kearny St. garage in Frank's enormous blue Caddy convertible about eleven minutes before our flight. Which we missed. Undaunted, Frank got on a pay phone to make alternative arrangements. No cell phones in those days and yes, smart ass -- the planes WERE jets. Except the one Frank chartered. I learned to fly a little years later and I seem to remember the plane Frank arranged was probably a Cessna 172. About two steps up from a kite and only slightly faster than driving. It held a pilot, Frank, me, and our two ditty bags. We were staying overnight in a high-roller suite so mine held extra socks and shorts and a toothbrush and Frank's was jam full of management 'style.' If we'd crashed and burned on the way to Tahoe, we would have brought a rich new dimension to the concept of HIGH Sierras.

In our suite before heading down to the show Frank decided to take a quick shower. On his way to the bathroom he handed me one of his famous hand-rolled numbers (sometimes known as "the assassin's tool") and said, "Light this. I'll be right back." When he emerged a couple of minutes later I'd smoked half of it. Frank was aghast. "That was ONE TOKE stuff!" NOW he tells me...

If I tell you now that Mancini was great that night, you'll be polite enough to believe I had any awareness of it. As it happened we were seated ringside at a VIP table. I may have eaten a steak (or maybe that was a real live cow...!) but beyond that I can't tell you anything other than I saw things during the show that I never saw again until I caught that movie with Johnny Depp where he played Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. At one point, somewhere between "Moon River" and "Elephant Walk" I was seized with a need to flee. The altitude and the colored lights and the crowded showroom had put me in serious danger of hurling. I managed to stumble to my feet and careen up the aisle toward the 'gents', bouncing off banquettes all the way and hoping desperately that people would think I was only drunk instead of in the first stages of what I was convinced was a permanent psychotic breakdown. It's amazing, the recuperative powers of curling up on a tile floor, resting one's head against a commode...

Anyway, I did not mean this to be some kind of weird, 1960's hippie 'memoir d' opium'. Since those days I've never been a fan of the stuff if for no other reason than I never found any of it to come even close to the quality curated by Mr. Werber. In any case, we were who we were then and none of us still is. I mention it only to frame the Sahara Tahoe shows in the context of ...well, 'once or twice upon a time'.

I always thought the Kingston Trio in a huge Vegas-style showroom was kind of bizarre. Sort of like going to see Pete Seeger and he dresses and acts like Wayne Newton. ("This land is...ho-ho, hey-hey" - -RIMSHOT)

Not that the Trio changed anything or copped out in a casino setting. Exactly the opposite. They were just as honest and authentic in a big showroom with sophisticated sound equipment and lighting and a big house band as they were in some college 'all-purpose' room with two mikes and one spot. I am an unabashed and constant fan of the Trio and have been ever since I saw them in a college concert at my school, the University of Santa Clara. It was 1957 and they played the bill with Turk Murphy's jazz band and a singer named Barbara Dane. This was just before Tom Dooley, during their Purple Onion days. Nobody knew who they were. I remember seeing posters advertising the concert and getting them confused with "The Nairobi Trio" which was an Ernie Kovacs comic skit with three guys in ape masks. (This was also before they were seen by a certain Mr. J. Stewart who, a year younger than I, was still back at our high school doing Elvis.)

They tore it up that night, blowing Turk and everyone else off the stage of our big old drafty, rickety wreck of a theater on campus. They were great that evening and they were great every time I ever saw them, from the night they recorded "College Concert" at UCLA (I drove John Phillips) to the first night I went on the road with them at a concert in a college gym in the round somewhere in Oklahoma. The NEVER did a bad show EVER. They were hip, they were funny, and they swung. That's the extent of my musical acumen. I'm a drummer, after all.

A couple of things about the Sahara Tahoe gig:

- To our immense glee, Don Rickles was playing the Crocodile Lounge in the Sahara and we were constantly in attendance. The first night he spotted us, he went into his standard riffs about how Nick was a dwarf and Bobby was from Hawaii ("Since the war they're ALL Hawaiians) and accusing John of having somehow done away with Dave Guard. When he spotted me, he said, "Who's that?" The guys told him, "Our new road manager." Rickles snorted derisively. "Road manger. A hundred a week, gets to say 'I'm with them'. 'Don't hum when we sing.' " It was totally false, of course. I was making tens of dollars more than a hundred a week.

-These were the days when John and Frank were almost constantly at odds over one thing or another. They had great battles and each gave as good as they got and, bloodied but unbowed, lived to eagerly fight again as soon as possible. The Sahara Tahoe conflict grew out of housing arrangements for the gig. The hotel had come through with some cottages of some kind that would accommodate families. Nick got one. Bobby got one. Even Dean Reilly, our bass player, got one. They were bringing their families. At the last minute, Frank arranged one for himself. And there were no more.

John was assigned a room in the hotel - a single not unlike mine but with a better view of Lake Tahoe. And he fumed. The fact that he wasn't bringing his family made no difference. John perceived the slight. And I was put right in the middle. Because I knew about the arrangements and was sworn to secrecy by Frank. He knew I was John's best friend from high school, a fact he'd carefully considered before offering me my job, but he demanded I maintain what he characterized as 'dispassionate professionalism'. The only reason to mention this is to reiterate what I said above and to make the point that NONE of this nonsense got on stage. The shows were great. Talk about 'passionate professionalism.'

- Tahoe was a great place for a 'sit down' gig. We could ride horses around Emerald Cove in the daytime and go hear Count Basie at Harrah's down the road on the way from a great dinner up at the (now snowless) Christiana Ski lodge and then segue over to a cruddy roadhouse that had a killer bar band. We could also go a little stir crazy, even in that majestic setting. I remember destroying a telephone in my room over some idiotic dispute with room service.

-I remember walking through the casino with two thousand dollars in my pocket to distribute to the stage crew ("toke the locals" Frank called it, but smokeless in this case) and seriously considering putting it all on red at the roulette table. I stood there imagining I'd done it...as the croupier announced, "Eleven...black!" Frank would have TRULY assassinated me.

My favorite musical recordings are almost without exception live performance albums. I think it goes back to my early teens when I taught myself to play drums listening to "Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall" which was recorded about a month before I was born but to me was as 'live' and current and exciting as being there. Live performance adds something to the mix that makes for great music. And what it adds, obviously, is not only an audience reacting to what they're hearing but musicians reacting to what they're getting from the audience. The Trio was no exception -- they were an act designed to be experienced and enjoyed in person. (It doesn't always work. When I saw the Beatles at Candlestick Park with John and John Denver, all I remember is half a chorus of their opener, "Roll Over, Beethoven" and the rest was audience screaming. )

An added advantage to having a live performance recording of the Trio is the inclusion of the 'bits' between the tunes -- the intros and banter and comedy material. John remains, to this day, a terrific stand up comic. Bobby can play 'straight man' as well as get a laugh. And Nick is in the very small company of comedians who say things funny as opposed to those who just say funny things. Groucho Marx is a prime example. At the other end of the spectrum was the great country comedian, Grandpa Jones, who could get a bigger laugh on a set up line than whoever had the punch line. Nick has that talent along with his considerable list of others. His wit, I am happy to note, remains sharp as ever. He can still put John on the floor as anyone who's been to Fantasy Camp can attest.

One more historic cosmic upheaval must be mentioned in relation to the Sahara Tahoe record. It was at times an orphan. I'm trying to remember how it happened that I spent hours in the tiny Columbus Tower studios 'mixing' the "Once Upon a Time" album. It had something to do with one of Frank and John's protracted battles. Frank, I believe, expected John to volunteer his time out of the goodness of his heart and out of some sense of responsibility to the material to supervise the mix. This, of course, was after the group broke up in 1967, and John was busy with his solo career. But no payment of any sort was to come his way, much less gratitude. Or maybe Frank and John argued over how to put the album together. It seemed Bob and Nick cared only that the record come out with a hole in the center -- a joke for those old enough to remember vinyl.

There were other people around and others were credited along with me on the original album jacket -- Hank McGill, the engineer and maybe Jon Sagen or Randy Sterling who worked for Frank. Lost in the mists of the past...all I remember is that it became my responsibility. I'd never done anything like it before. I had no idea how.

I ended up bringing a copy of "College Concert" to the editing room and constantly playing it for comparison. The big auditorium sound of that album was at least close to the sound of a showroom seating about a thousand people and I just tried to make the stuff from Tahoe sound like that. For all I know, somebody mixed it after I did.

I understand that for this release the Sahara Tahoe tapes been totally tweaked with all the expertise and equipment that didn't exist forty years ago. What wouldn't I give if they could tweak the whole bunch of us into some enhanced version of what we were all those years ago? Except I wouldn't smoke any of that stuff this time. No way. Uh uh, buster.

Some Comedy Lessons

“SOME COMEDY LESSONS”

Comedy is a funny thing...but not always. Those who write it or perform it hope to get laughs, but when they don’t come nobody really understands why. All you can do is take the silence, the hole where a laugh should have rocked the rafters, and consider it a lesson learned.

Once as writer/producer of some justifiably forgotten sit-com I wrangled with a network executive over whether some dumb joke in a scene was funny. Red-faced with self-righteousness, collar bursting, I ordered tee-shirts for my writing staff that read: “Comedy is truth.” Who knows what the hell I thought I meant at the time? The problem was, the guy who made the shirts couldn’t spell and they came back: “‘Comdey’ is truth.” The lesson there? A recurring one: there are more ways to screw up a joke than you can possibly imagine.

I came into the WGA at a propitious time, in the days of weekly variety shows. Every network had at least a couple of these shows and they all had large writing staffs combining seasoned pros, up-and-comers, and rank neophytes. That was me. Neo and rank to beat hell. But I had a JOB on staff of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. And I began to learn the lessons.

Early in the run of the Goodtime Hour Jimmy Durante was booked as a guest. We’d written lots of stuff for him and Glen that promised to be very funny. Each show had a five-day rehearsal schedule starting on Wednesday and taping on Sunday. On Monday we heard Jimmy was in the hospital with some unspecified ailment. He must have been 80 then, so I figured he had a right to ail however he cared to, specified or not. The producers were assured Jimmy would miss only the first script reading on Wednesday, but Thursday found Jimmy still hospitalized. We were two days behind and uncertainty reigned.

On Friday the producers sent me, the most junior writer on staff, in a pouring rain to Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica to read Mr. Durante the sketches we’d written for him and return with his suggestions, if any. I walked into the dimly lit hospital room and saw this tiny, ancient man lying under a sheet with only his head and feet sticking out. I was fascinated by those feet, the bare feet of the famous Jimmy Durante. They were small, bunnioned...and old! Two men in suits sat at his bedside. One spoke softly into a telephone while the other read the paper. Agent and valet were my guess. Neither paid the slightest attention to Jimmy, who was squinting quizzically at my arrival. I tried a joke I’d made up on the rain-swept freeway: “Well, Mr. Durante, if you’re going to be under the weather, you picked the right day for it.” The agent hung up the phone and the valet put down the paper. Silence. My joke was DOA at Saint John’s. (Lesson...? Don’t open with your “A” stuff, I guess.) I still couldn’t keep my eyes off Durante’s feet. They were really ugly.

The valet leaned over the bed and said loudly, “Jimmy, this is the writer! From CBS!” Jimmy nodded. “Writers!” he said in his familiar rasp. Then he launched a profane tirade against some producers and songwriters who’d tried to cheat him. It took me five minutes to realize that this had occurred around 1928. He ended with a flurry of curses, then closed his eyes and went to sleep. The agent looked at me and shrugged.

Late Friday the producers managed to replace Durante with Tony Bennett. On Saturday we all gathered in a marathon session and came up with a whole new script. On Sunday, Glen and Tony, on a bare stage and wearing tuxedos, taped our tribute to the music and memory of the legendary Hank Williams. There wasn’t a laugh in the entire hour. The next season we were all fired. CBS thought the show needed to be funnier, and brought in some Dean Martin writers.

Lesson... If you’re going to do comedy, make sure you have a comic firmly booked.

Another lesson, a little harder to discern, happened a few seasons later on a Flip Wilson special, with Bob Hope as guest star. Not only did Hope faithfully attend rehearsals and taping, but much fanfare surrounded his arrivals and departures. It was deemed necessary to transport Bob between his Toluca Lake home and CBS Television City by helicopter. Don’t ask me why. But Coldwater Canyon traffic was a bitch even then.

The sketch we wrote for Hope was a take-off on his soldier shows, featuring Flip in his famous drag as our own glamorous Navy ensign...Geraldine. The set depicting the deck of a battleship was wonderful, but the sketch had problems. (This isn’t THE lesson, but an important peripheral one: “If the scenery gets a bigger reaction than the jokes, look for bigger jokes.”)

We, the writing staff (including Pat McCormack and Jack Burns) had great fun putting together a monolog following Hope’s patented rhythms: “Welcome to shore liberty in Okinawa. Okinawa, that’s native for ‘do I have time to take a pill?’ But I wantya to know...”

At first reading we got some encouraging table laughs (lots of lessons about believing table laughs, but that’s for another story) and Hope seemed satisfied. But the next day’s incoming chopper disgorged Hope toting a stack of replacement jokes for our monolog, commissioned from the stable of writers who worked for him on year-round retainer. At first we were miffed, and then we got really pissed. Because the jokes he brought in weren’t as funny as ours. And it wasn’t sour grapes, because when he tried them on the dress rehearsal audience only the dreaded sound of crickets was heard. Hope knew he’d bombed. Pat McCormack reported that he’d seen Bob with tears in his eyes, so upset was he at the lack of laughter. But no one had a wider appreciation of the lessons of comedy than Bob Hope. Hell, he wrote a lot of them. With not a moment’s pause he threw out his jokes and went back to ours. And he got laughs. The lesson? “Never look a gift joke in the teeth. You might miss out on a laugh.”

Alan King was more than a student of comedy; he was a professor who could have written learned volumes on the theory and practice of laugh-getting. But it’s probably good that he didn’t take the time to write text books or we’d have had that much less opportunity to enjoy his performing genius.

I met Herb Sargent on a Lily Tomlin special and, based on that, Herb introduced me to King, who hired me for one of his specials, “The Many Faces Of Comedy.” The faces were indeed many – Alan liked to swoop in from New York and from a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel book everybody in town from George Burns to Danny Thomas to Henny Youngman with Angie Dickinson thrown into the mix. (Peripheral lesson: “Man does not live on jokes alone. There must also be ladies.”)

My main contribution to the show was a sketch I wrote for Alan. He was a husband at a party who tries to tell a joke, but his wife keeps interrupting him with corrections and details and finally destroys any possibility of a laugh. “No, honey, it wasn’t a lobster, it was a parrot.” “No, dear, he took him to a barber shop, not a bar...” More Joe Miller than Moliere, I admit, but Alan liked the piece. He eventually decided that he was in too many sketches on the show and assigned the role to Danny Thomas.

I don’t remember any rehearsal with Danny. All I recall is that Alan set out a buffet and bar in his dressing room that must have been as long as the Santa Monica Pier. Cast and crew alike were welcomed and encouraged to dive in. Alan liked a party almost as much as doing a show. But Danny Thomas took one look at the groaning board and decided that nothing would suit him except a bologna and cheese sandwich on white bread. Alan cheerfully sent out for it and we all smirked at Danny’s idiosyncrasy. What the hell...more shrimp and chicken livers for the rest of us. But I should have seen this as a portent of idiosyncrasy to come.

When it came time to tape my sketch on a big stage at ABC Prospect, there was a huge studio audience and everybody was having a good time. Alan introduced Danny and Angie, who was playing the wife, to an ovation. As the cameras swung into place, Danny suddenly grabbed a hand mike and stepped down to address the audience. “Folks, we’re going to do a sketch now that isn’t funny. I don’t like this sketch and I don’t know why I’m doing it. But I’m Danny Thomas and because you love me...you’ll laugh.” Well, I’ve seen dog funerals start on a higher note. Naturally audience members were so cowed in their love for Thomas that they dared not utter a peep for the duration. Even the crickets kept silent. That’s when Herb Sargent noticed me standing shell-shocked next to one of those big weighted microphone booms, trying to figure how hard I’d need to swing it to knock Danny Thomas’s head off. Failing that, I knew that Danny always carried a pistol. If he’d left it in the dressing room maybe I could duck in there quick and grab it and hide and be waiting when he came - -

Herb gently took me by the elbow and moved me out of the path of Danny, who was striding off stage no doubt in search of another bologna on white. “You realize what happened there, don’t you?” Herb said. I stammered something to the effect that, no, I didn’t have a clue. “It’s his reputation,” Herb explained. “Danny Thomas is known as the master story teller. Nobody better at telling a joke. And even though your sketch was funny, it killed Danny to have to stand out there and be a guy who fell flat on his face. He made sure everybody knew that.” And there was my lesson: A comic will do ANYTHING to get a laugh...except not be funny.

I wish I could tell you I learned all the comedy lessons and became an expert. But I can’t. What I have learned very well is that when something that should get a laugh doesn’t, then blame must immediately be assigned in directions that do not fault the writer. (The obverse of the Shakespearean actor hearing boo’s who steps to the apron and says, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t write this shit!”) Actors are easiest to fault for jokes that bomb. After all, the stuff was funny when it left the writer’s room. Right? In any case, actors could stand to be a whole lot more helpful in this comedy game. We writers sit in a room and eat cold take-out while performers get to dress up and be in front of people and make big bucks. The least they can do is learn the classic lesson imparted by one of the pantheon figures of comedy writing, George S. Kaufman, who counseled actors: “Speak your lines loudly and clearly. If there is no laughter, other lines will be given to you.”