Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Read Free Book Online Page B

killed making movies, maybe I’d go out in a blaze of glory trying to stop a runaway stagecoach.
    Ray said the studios making all the cheap cowboy pictures had their offices clustered around Gower Street—Lily had been right about that—but he called it Gower Gulch, which was a slap at the fellows parading around the neighborhood in their cheap cowboy clothes. I guess Ray could see how green I was, because he made a point of saying I wouldn’t spot any horses tied up along Gower Gulch. The pictures mostly got made elsewhere; he was just sending me to the studio offices. He fished out a piece of paper and wrote down a few names—casting directors he was friendly with and second-unit men who might hire me as a rider. And in case I didn’t get on with any of them, he gave me a telephone number to call, a switchboard for people wanting day work as an extra. If I hit it lucky, they might be looking for riders, he said.
    It was after four-thirty by then, too late in the day to hop on the streetcar and start looking for work. I should have been holding on to what money I had left—the Saint James, cheap by Hollywood standards, was still more than I’d counted on. Instead I went around the corner to a diner and spent four bits on a bowl of clam chowder. I must have figured I’d be on some studio’s payroll by the next morning and shortly riding a horse alongside Buck Jones.
    The day had been hot, and when the sun went down it didn’t get any cooler. In my room I peeled off all my clothes and lay down naked on the bed. I could hear voices through the thin walls, toilets flushing and the rush of water in the pipes, cars going by and streetcars squealing their brakes, people calling to each other and banging the lids of trash cans, and every so often an ambulance or police siren or somebody laying on a car horn. I had learned over the last year to sleep in a room full of snorers, but I’d never had to sleep with all this racket of a big city at night; plus I was used to sleeping in the dark, not with neon signs flashing and street lamps pouring light through the paper shade on the window. I don’t know if I ever did fall asleep completely. It seemed as if I was always in a half-dream, riding a Greyhound bus as it swayed up on two wheels, or lying on my back in a field of dry weeds, looking up into the broad faces of dairy cows.
    I had saved a couple of oranges from the Grapevine fruit stand, which I ate for breakfast, but I was stale from lack of sleep, so I went back to the diner and paid for coffee in a thick china mug before I caught the streetcar. I was still thinking I’d have a day’s pay in my pocket and be moving into a better hotel by nightfall, so I took my duffle with me.
    It turned out Gower was ten or fifteen minutes straight down Santa Monica Boulevard, and if I’d stayed on the streetcar the day before I would have landed right at it. But as I watched the neighborhood get more expensive by the block, I began to realize it was lucky that Lily took us off the trolley where she did, because I didn’t see anything west of there that looked as low-rent as the Saint James. What I did see was a cemetery so big the tombstones and crypts marched out of sight to the horizon, and big glossy pepper trees in front of a row of baroque office buildings, and every so often a two-story Spanish-style apartment building painted coral pink or pistachio green. I had only ever laid eyes on such things in the movies.
    They used to call the part of Hollywood where the cheap studios had their offices “Poverty Row,” and when Ray Mullens was working in the business dozens of them were making movies on a shoestring with not much more than a camera and a truck and a rented vest-pocket office. The ones making westerns were strung out along Gower Street and one block over on Beachwood. They’d shoot for a few days at one of the small movie ranches close to town or up in