Widespread Panic

The wheelman lot. It’s the baaaaaad bane of wicked wives and horndog hubbies, hot to trot. Divorce begins here. Lowlife lawyers call the pay phone by the lube rack. Punk PIs hustle off to hot-sheet huts and kick doors down. There’s flashbulb flare and eeeek and shreeek and fuckee-suckee singed on celluloid.

The wheelman lot. It’s my lurid launching pad today. Confidential’s cornholing Art Pepper. Artful Art’s an alto sax hopping high on the Downbeat poll. He’s a junkie with a jacked-up jones for high school honeys. He’s nailed Miss Belmont High and Miss Lincoln High already. He’s meeting Miss Franklin High at the Leechee Nut Lodge in Chinatown, one hour hence. I’ll be there to instigate fuckus interruptus.

I’m serving two masters here. Confidential’s calling the piece “Sax Potentate Pepper: Junk and Jailbait Call the Tune Now!!!!!” LAPD Vice laid on the lead to the meet and laid down the law: We’ll be there to slam this slime for Stat Rape/1st Degree.

Bill Parker hates hopheads and jailbait jumpers. Bill Parker’s out to keester Confidential. He wants to catalogue Confidential’s coercive methods and march the mag to Indictment City. He’s implementing a looooooooooong-range strategy.

I lounged in my Packard pimpmobile. Ward Wardell and Race Rockwell reclined in their surveillance van. Donkey Don Eversall worked the outside spot. Miss Franklin High had her own sled. She handed out hand jobs, at five bucks per, and glommed a beat-to-shit ’48 Merc. Donkey Don would call the pay phone. He’d say It’s on and tail the twist to the Leechee Nut Lodge. The desk clerk was an LAPD lapdog. He told Don that putzo Pepper was smack-back in Room #9. Two Vice Squad goons were mainlining mai tais in the Lily Pad Lounge. They were set to grind Pepper while my camera crew rolled film.

I’m a snitch. I’m a rat fink. I’m a doofus double agent. I’m LAPD Lapdog #1.

I eyeballed the lot. Six wheelmen reposed in their rides. They drove hellacious hot rods and blew their gelt on booze, kustom kar kits, and cooze. They lived at the lot. They slept in their sleds. They poked B-girls from the Kibitz Room at Canter’s Delicatessen and bounced their backseats, six at a pop.

Ward Wardell walked to the phone. Race Rockwell schmoozed a wigged-out wheelman with pizza-pus zits. The cat was a cop buff. He said the Hat Squad was chasing two 211/rape-o’s. They stormed steak houses at closing time. They tapped the tills and took wallets. They purloined purses and made the women strip and dispense snout jobs. The Hats were out to take scalps on this one.

I tuned it out. The Hats and I had shared some shimmering shit. Fuck them — more current shit shivered through me.

Bondage Bob called me this morning. He beefed a southside radio station and a late-nite show called Nasty Nat’s Soul Patrol. It was all pimp patois, cool-cat consciousness, and jive jazz. A woman called in three nights running. She came off winsome and waaaay white. She called herself “Miss Blind Item.” She jawed with Nasty Nat and aped Confidential’s alliterative prose style. Bob had no gripe there. But — she crossed some craaaaazy line and madly mauled the magazine. She baaaaad — beefed the August ’52 piece on “Red Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman.

The piece bawled boo-hoo per Chessman’s tripartite conviction. It’s baaaad: Kidnap/Armed Robbery/Forced Oral Cop. Dig: the tone was apoplectic apostasy. The tone disregarded the magazine’s perpetual fry-the-fucker stance. Chessman was convicted in spring ’48. The Little Lindbergh Law applied. Hanging judge Charles Fricke righteously mandated DEATH. Chessman professed his innocence. Chessman excoriated capital punishment. Lunar-looped liberals took up his hue and cry. ’48 to ’55. He’d held off his trek to the green room for seven full years. He filed appeals. He wrote screechy screeds and peddled them to pinko publishers. Now, this wiggy witch was mocking my magazine, and lambasting its one lamentable lapse in moral tone.