“Live at the Fabulous Flamingo,” “Squeeze Me,” “Something for the Girls” — old standards arranged to spotlight accordion virtuosity. Main theme bombardments; sentiment so pure and timeless that it could soundtrack every moment of transcendent schmaltz that Hollywood has ever produced. Dick Contino, showstopper on wax: zapping two keyboards, improvising cadenzas, shaking thunderstorms from bellows compression. Going from whisper to sigh to roar and back again in the length of time it takes to think: tell me what this man’s life means and how it connects to my life.
I called my researcher friend Alan Marks. He caught my pitch on the first bounce. “The accordion guy? I think he used to play Vegas.”
“Find out everything you can about him. Find out if he’s still alive, and if he is, locate him.”
“What’s this about?”
“Narrative detail.”
I should have said containable narrative detail — because I wanted Dick Contino to be a pad prowling/car crashing/moon howling/womanizing quasi-psychopath akin to the heroes of my books. I should have said, “Bring me information that I can control and exploit.” I should have said, “Bring me a life that can be compartmentalized into the pitch dark vision of my first ten novels.”
“What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.”
I should have seen the real Dick Contino coming.
Alan called me a week later. He’d located Contino in Las Vegas — “And he says he’ll talk to you.”
Before making contact, I charted the arc of two lives. A specific design was becoming clear — I wanted to write a novella featuring Dick Contino and the filming of Daddy-O — but a symbiotic pull was blunting my urge to get down to business, extract information and get out. I felt a recognition of my own fears binding me to this man: fear of failure, specific in nature and surmountable through hard work, and the very large fear that induces claustrophobic suffocation and causes golden young men to run from Army barracks: the terror that anything might happen, could happen, will happen.
A merging in fear; a divergence in action.
I joined the Army just as the Vietnam War started to percolate. My father was dying: I didn’t want to stick around and watch. The Army terrified me — I calculated plausible means of escape. James Ellroy, age seventeen, fledgling dramatist: pulling off a frantic stuttering act designed to spotlight his unsuitability for military service.
It was a bravura performance. It got me a quick discharge and a return trip to L.A. and my passions: booze, dope, reading crime novels and breaking into houses to sniff women’s undergarments.
Nobody ever called me a coward or a draft dodger — the Vietnam War was reviled from close to the get-go, and extricating yourself from its clutches was held laudable.
I calculated my way out — and of course my fears remained unacknowledged. And I wasn’t a golden young man sky high on momentum and ripe for a public hanging.
I’ve led a colorful and media-exploitable life; my take on it has been picaresque — a stratagem that keeps my search for deeper meaning channelled solely into my books, which keeps my momentum building, which keeps my wolves of nothingness locked out of sight. Dick Contino didn’t utilize my methods: he was a man of music, not of words, and he embraced his fears from the start. And he continued: the musicianship on his post-draft dodger beef albums dwarfs the sides he cut pre-’51. He continued, and so far as I could tell, the only thing that diminished was his audience.
I called Contino and told him I wanted to write about him. We had an affable conversation; he said, “Come to Vegas.”
Contino met me at the airport. He looked great: lean and fit at sixty-three. His Daddy-O grin remained intact; he confirmed that his Daddy-O biceps came from humping his accordion.
We went to a restaurant and shot the shit. Our conversation was full of jump cuts — Dick’s recollections triggered frequent digressions and circuitous returns to his original anecdotal points. We discussed Las Vegas, the Mob, serving jail time, lounge acts, Howard Hughes, Korea, Vietnam, Daddy-O, L.A. in the ’50s, fear and what you do when the audience dwindles.
I told him that the best novels were often not the best selling novels; that complex styles and ambiguous stories perplexed many readers. I said that while my own books sold quite well, they were considered too dark, densely plotted and relentlessly violent to be chart toppers.
Dick asked me if I would change the type of book I write to achieve greater sales — I said, “No.” He asked me if I’d change the type of book I write if I knew that I’d taken a given style or theme as far as it could go — I said, “Yes.” He asked me if the real-life characters in my books ever surprise me — I said, “No, because my relationship to them is exploitative.”
I asked him if he consciously changed musical directions after his career got diverted post-Korea. He said, yes and no — he kept trying to cash in on trends until he realized that at best he’d be performing music that he didn’t love, and at worst he’d be playing to an audience he didn’t respect.
I said, “The work is the thing.” He said, yes, but you can’t cop an attitude behind some self-limiting vision of your own integrity. You can’t cut the audience out of its essential enjoyment — you have to give them some schmaltz to hold on to.
I asked Dick how he arrived at that. He said his old fears taught him to like people more. He said fear thrives on isolation, and when you cut down the wall between you and the audience, your whole vision goes wide.
I checked in at my hotel and shadow-boxed with the day’s revelations. It felt like my world had tilted toward a new understanding of my past. I kept picturing myself in front of an expanding audience, armed with new literary ammunition: the knowledge that Dick Contino would be the hero of the sequel to the book I’m writing now.
Dick Contino’s Blues was blasting its way into my consciousness. It seemed to be coming from somewhere far outside my volition.
Dick and I met for dinner the next night. It was my forty-fifth birthday; I felt like I was standing at the bedrock center of my life.
Dick played me a be-bop “Happy Birthday” on his accordion. The old chops were still there — he zipped on and off the main theme rapidamente.
We split for the restaurant. I asked Dick if he would consent to appear as the hero of a novella and my next novel.
He said yes, and asked what the books would be about. I said, “Fear, courage and heavily compromised redemptions.”
He said, “Good, I think I’ve been there.”
The night was cold; Las Vegas neon eclipsed every star overhead. The sky seemed to expand as I wondered what this time and place meant.
Dick Contino’s Blues
I’m enjoying a half-assed Renaissance these days.
Some dago festa gigs, some lounge work. A gooood spot on an AIDS Telethon — my “Lady of Spain” reprise goosed ten grand in contributions and got me a surreptitious blow job from a college girl working the phone lines. Daddy-O was released on video, and film critics hooked on ’50s kitsch have been bugging me for interviews.
Their questions have my memory turning cartwheels. It’s ’58 again — I’m an accordionist/singer top-lining a “B” flick for chump change. Did you write “Rock Candy Baby” and “Angel Act” yourself? Did you pour the pork to your co-star, that blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads? Who did your wardrobe, who did your stunts — how’d you get that ’51 Ford airborne, the fuzz in hot pursuit — the footage looked real, but hastily spliced in.