But then abruptly he’s sitting up again and clapping his bandaged hands together and staring up at the TV screen.
“It is Daffy, Mother. It is Daffy!”
“Yes, dear,” she says. “It is Daffy, isn’t it?”
Gunslinger
Once again, I was doing research for a historical novel when I came upon the fact that in the Los Angeles of the 1910s and 1920s, real cowboys lived in a veritable ghetto and left only during the daytime to work as silent movie extras. At night, they drank and sang sad songs of the West they'd left for fame and fortune. Eventually, that fact became this story.
He reaches Los Angeles three days early, a scrawny forty-eight-year-old man in a three-piece black Cheviot suit made of wool and far too hot for the desertlike climate here. He chews without pause on stick after stick of White’s Yucatan gum. He carries, tucked in his trousers beneath his vest, a Navy Colt that belonged to his father, a farmer from Morgan County, Missouri.
As he steps down from the train, a Negro porter accidentally bumping into him and tipping his red cap in apology, he takes one more look at the newspaper he has been reading for the last one hundred miles of his journey, the prime headline of which details President Teddy Roosevelt’s hunting trip to the Badlands, the secondary headline being concerned with the annexation by Los Angeles of San Pedro and Wilmington, thereby giving the city a harbor. But it is the third headline that holds his interest: DIRECTOR THOMAS INCE, NOW RECOVERED FROM HEART TROUBLE, STARTS NEW PICTURE THURSDAY WITH HIS FAMOUS WESTERN STAR REX SWANSON.
Today was Monday.
He finds a rooming house two blocks from a bar called The Waterhole, which is where most of the cowboys hang out. Because real ranches in the West have fallen on hard times, the cowboys had little choice but to drift to Los Angeles to become extras and stunt riders and trick shooters in the silent movie industry. Now there is a whole colony, a whole subculture of them out here, and they are much given to drink and even more given to violence. So he must be careful around them, very careful.
In the street below his room runs a trolley car, its tingling bell the friendliest sound in this arid city of ’dobe buildings for the poor and unimaginable mansions for the rich. It is said, at least back in Missouri, that at least once a day a Los Angeles police officer draws down on a man and kills him. He has no reason to doubt this as he falls asleep on the cot in the hot shabby room with its flowered vase lamp, the kerosene flame flickering into the dusk as his exhausted snoring begins.
In the morning he goes down the hall, waits till a Mexican woman comes out of the bathroom smelling sweetly of perfume, and then goes in and bathes and puts on the things he bought just before leaving Morgan County. A bank teller, he is not particularly familiar with real Western attire, but he knew it would be a mistake to buy his things new. That would mark him as a dude for certain. He had found a livery up in the northern edge of the county that had some old clothes in the back, which he bought for $1.50 total.
Now, looking at himself in the mirror, trying to be as objective as he can, he sees that he does not look so bad. Not so bad at all. The graying hair helps. Not shaving helps. And he’s always been capable of a certain blue evil eye (as are most of the men in his family). Then there are the clothes. The dusty brown Stetson creased cowhand-style. The faded denim shirt. The Levi’s with patches on knee and butt. The black Texas boots.
For the first time he loses some of his fear.
For the first time there is within him excitement.
In his room, before leaving, he writes a quick letter.
Dear Mother,
By the time you read this, you will know what I have done. I apologize for the pain and humiliation my action will cause you but I’m sure you will understand why I had to do this.
If it were not for the man I will kill Thursday, you would have had a husband all these years, and I a father.
I will write you one more letter before Thursday.
Your loving son,
The next two days...
In the Los Angeles of the movie cowboy extra, there are certain key places to go for work. On Sunset Boulevard there is a horse barn where you wait like a farmhand to be picked for a day’s work; then there are a few studio backlots where you can stand in the baking sun all day waiting for somebody already hired to keel over and need to be replaced; and then there is Universal’s slave-galley arrangement where extras are literally herded into a big cage to wait to be called. Five dollars a day is the pay, which for some men is five times what they were getting back in the blizzard country of Montana and Wyoming and Utah.
It is into this world he slips now, making the rounds, trying to get himself hired as an extra. If he does not get on Ince’s set Thursday, if he does not get that close, then he will be unable to do what he has waited most of his life to do.
He is accepted. Or at least none of the other cowboys question him. They talk in their rough boozy way of doing stunt work — something called the “Running W” or the even more frightening “Dead Man’s Fall” are particularly popular topics — and they gossip about the movie stars themselves. Which sweet young virginal types can actually be had by just about anybody who has taken a bath in the past month. Which so-called he-men are actually prancing nancies afraid to even get close to a horse.
All this fascinates and frightens him. He wants to be back home in Morgan County, Missouri.
All that keeps him going is his memory of his father. The pennies on Father’s eyes during the wake. The waxen look in the coffin. The smell of funeral flowers. His mother weeping, weeping.
The Navy Colt burns in his waistband. Burns...
Late on Wednesday, near the corral on the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Ince makes his two-reelers, a fat, bald casting director in jodhpurs comes over and says, “You five men there. Can you be here at sunup?”
He has traveled fifteen hundred miles and forty-one years for this moment.
Dear Mother,
I never have told you about where I saw him first, in the nickelodeon six years ago. He used a different name, of course, but I’ve seen so many photographs of him that even with his dyed hair and new mustache I knew it was him. I see now that bis whole so-called “murder” was nothing more than a ruse to let him escape justice. He is not dead; he’s alive out here...
He is very popular, of course, especially with the ladies, just as he was back there. He is also celebrated as a movie hero. But we know differently, don’t we? If Father hadn't been riding back from the state capitol that day on the train...
In the morning I go out to the Miller ranch where the picture is to be shot.
It will not be the only thing being shot...
Say hello to Aunt Eunice for me and think of me when you’re making mince meat pie next Thanksgiving.
I think of your smile, Mother. I think of it all the time.
Your loving son,
All he can liken it to was his six-month stint in the Army (six months only because of what the post doctor called his “nervous condition”) — hundreds of extras milling around for a big scene in which a railroad car is to be held up and then robbers and good citizens alike are attacked by an entire tribe of savage Indians. It is in this way that the robber will become a hero — he will be forced to save the lives of the very passengers whom he was robbing.