“"That guy's no good. He's a draft dodger." The accordion man in a grade Z movie: clinching with the blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads. * * * Half-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed: L.A., my hometown, in the '50s. Most are just brief synaptic blips, soon mentally discarded. A few transmogrify into fiction: I sense their dramatic potential and exploit it in my novels, memory to moonshine in a hot second. Memory: that place where personal recollections collide w...ith history. Memory: a symbiotic melding of THEN and NOW. For me, the spark point of harrowing curiosities. The accordion man is named Dick Contino. "Draft Dodger" is a bum rap--he served honorably during the Korean War. The Grade Z flick is _Daddy-O_--a music/hot rod/romance stinkeroo. Memory is contextual: the juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutae. In June of 1958 my mother was murdered. The killing went unsolved; I went to live with my father. I saw Dick Contino belt "Bumble Boogie" on TV, noted my father's opinion of him and caught _Daddy-O_ at the Admiral Theatre a year or so later.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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