The Big Meow

Now a bunch of us are sitting around the bar very late in the Hollywood Hotel: and the bunch consists of Mike the Mick, who is the doorman and opens the door for those rich swells who forget how their arm muscles operate any time they approach a portal in a place where other mortals may see them: and also in attendance is Kip the Cyp, who is not from Greece but from the island where Aphrodite rose from the waves, and so is big on handling other exotic foreign bundles that have been dumped into the water by guys with speedboats and then come bobbing to the surface again before the coppers get there and notice their provenance. And also there is Shady Harry who owns the bootleg bar out back of Max Factor’s: and with him is Dora, who is a shapely blonde and Shady Harry’s companion, and a very highly paid companion at that, one who shops at Robinsons all the day and has tea there with the Hat Ladies in the Palm Room upstairs and would not be seen on the Boulevard except in a big black car with a driver, or a guy with a bankroll the size of the big black car. And while we are sitting nursing our various beverages in the dim of the night, which is most excellently silent for the most part, suddenly out of this silence rises a great howling noise like someone who has had a few slugs put into them, though not in the lung, otherwise they would sound much more like they were gargling.

“Now who may that be?” says Shady Harry, as Miss Dora turns a very light shade of pale for someone of her comely ancestry.

Mike the Mick merely nods in a knowing fashion. “It is a nutjob or head case,” he says, “who we call the Lady in Black. She is a frail who has been coming down Laurel Canyon every month or so in this weather. She has acquired this monicker as she always wears black, and very high-end black at that, so that we think she is bankrolled by some unattentive guy up Laurel. And two weeks after the moon is full, which you cannot miss because of the noise of the other crazies who inhabit these environs, she comes down the Boulevard and commences to save our souls, whether we recollect having mislaid them or not. It is interesting timing,” says Mike the Mick, “since most of our other crazies prefer the Moon to be full. You cannot stir out of doors without hitting them in such weather.”

“I think it is some kind of marketing ploy,” says Kip the Cyp, who in real life is an accountant and knows more than somewhat about ways to get and keep the cabbage, as many studios employ him in this capacity. And since Kip has an adding machine where his heart should be, this is a smart move on the studios’ part. “I think,” says Kip, “that the Lady in Black has spotted a hole in her competition’s advertising strategy and is exploiting it.” And indeed she is exploiting it out in the middle of the Boulevard for all the market will bear, which at this hour of the morning is a considerable amount.

Since it is 3 AM and there is little other entertainment to be had such an hour except the numbers game that Georgio the Wop is running behind Delmonicos, which is nothing to do with New York’s Delmonicos but does not mind being mistaken for it, such is the wicked world we live in, the bunch of us go out through the fine polished brass revolving door of the Hollywood Hotel, the first such door on the West Coast, and make our way out onto the sidewalk of the Boulevard, which is very quiet this time of night, the dice games all having retired out behind the Grauman’s Chinese. And out there in the midst of the boulevard, where few vehicles pass at such an hour, the Lady in Black comes wandering down from where Laurel Canyon crosses the Boulevard, and she is dressed far more like a babe who has just come out of one of those night clubs downtown than any normal type of god-botherer, as such folks are more usually dressed like performers in the band than like the thrush who stands up in front of the mike and sings. The Lady in Black is walking down the middle of the white line in the middle of the street like someone doing a drunk test, but as she gets closer it can be seen that there is nothing drunk about the way she is walking, and as all the while she looks neither to left nor right or at anything in particular, as far as we can see.

The Lady in Black is making the aforesaid yowling noise like some kind of upset animal, and then she stops that noise at the same time she stops in front of the Hollywood Hotel, and she turns toward us, but like someone who sees nothing: and she says very loudly, “You are all doomed.”

“This is the usual routine,” says Mike the Mick under his breath. “She has a rant about not being friends with someone.”