Saturday, January 30, 2010

Chapter Thirty Six


I was looking for a less expensive place to live and a fellow cast member of “Getting Out” told me of a vacancy where he lived.

The apartment house was owned by two elderly sisters. They'd inherited it from their parents, evidently, and hadn't heard about high rents. I got a furnished bedroom with bath and a small refrigerator for $110 a month -all bills paid.

I was doing a little window washing to earn some coin but it was slow going. By now everybody and his brother had discovered there was money to be made doing windows.

In 1969 I had made a name for myself as Mister Clean. I shaved my head bald, stuck an earring in my ear, dressed in all white, and started washing windows in Downtown Dallas.

The press did a few stories about the "hippie who found his fortune in a bucket" and I appeared on a few of those local news interview shows that predated Sally Jesse, Oprah, et al.

I began washing windows all over the downtown area. Business got so good that, during the summer months, I hired a couple of high-schoolers and put them to work washing residential windows.

One of our clients was Abraham Zapruder, the man who shot the graphic Kennedy Assassination film that almost everyone in the industrialized world has seen at least once. When we did his home in University Park, just a few blocks from where I spent my teen years, he was sunning himself in his backyard. He was an emaciated skeleton of his former self.

He had breathing tubes hooked up to oxygen bottles to keep him alive and had the hardest time just moving about.

He was gracious and offered to have his maid fix lemonade to cool us off but we declined.

If anyone had come upon him unknowingly they would have thought he was dead, he looked so ill.

Now, in ‘82, I was at it again but not doing so well as before. I had three or four downtown business accounts. I passed out fliers in a few neighborhoods and picked up a few jobs from time to time, but it was winter and folks weren't thinking of their spring cleaning chores just yet.

Downtown Dallas had been dug up and replanted with new skyscrapers in the decade I’d been away and customers who'd kept me in squeegees were no longer around.

Their buildings, in many cases, were no longer around either. The city had changed. Historic landmarks were razed and new historic landmarks were rising all over the area.

Lesson: History doesn’t pay the rent.

The new customers I found meant I was pulling in all of about $100 a week. I was paying the rent.

I rode the bus and hitchhiked again but Dallas was not as hitchhiker friendly as Austin had been. One young lady, who picked me up, and I struck up a short lived romance for a few weeks, but she moved to some island getaway and I never saw her again.

I signed with the Kim Dawson Talent Agency, but the relationship I had with the agent who was "handling" me was rather cold and impersonal.

I only got one job through them and made my national television debut on the hit series, Dallas.

I auditioned for Rody Kent, the head of the series’ local casting. She liked my look and called me back for a second read. Naturally I was thrilled.

Then she called me for a final approval by the producer, Leonard Saltzman, and director, Michael Preece.

The decision was between me and another actor. His look was that of a street bum, mine was as an “everyday Joe”.

They went with my look.

The part called for Martha Smith, a former Playboy Playmate (July 1973) and, later, the co-star of the popular TV series “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” (she was the executive secretary who always wore high fashion outfits), to accidentally run into a friend of mine with her car.

Of course it was one of J.R.’s set-ups.

My “friend” would fake the hit, then I'd help him to his feet and convince her to leave the scene before the cops showed up. She gives me a $50 bill for our trouble and drives off. I then gave the signal to J.R., Larry Hagman, indicating his plan to blackmail a government official was moving along smoothly. The scene lasted a few minutes and with the car crash, the dialog, and the signaling I was thrilled at the amount of "screen time" I got.

I just knew my career would skyrocket to outer space with this one appearance and went home after the shoot and waited for the phone to ring.

We shot the scene during the summer months and it aired in November.

By then I was dating Linda Nasir, a computer software design engineer who worked at Texas Instruments. Much of her job was top secret so all I know is she worked on the software that helped the Air Force read high altitude surveillance photographs.

She threw a screening party for me at her house in Plano, north of Dallas, the night of the broadcast. This was the night I’d passed up a visit from Terry, for.

The neat thing about my scene was that the story line for the entire show focused on that faked accident.

The episode was titled, "Hit And Run"!

Years later, regular "Dallas" fans still remembered it, and me.

But the casting directors stayed away in droves.

Lesson: Never wait for the phone to ring!

I still get residual checks for the appearance. They’re usually for around thirty five cents!

Linda and I were spending a lot of time at each other's domiciles. By January she'd asked me to move in with her and we made ourselves into a couple. She was getting divorced from a Middle Easterner she'd married five years before so he could stay in the country and do whatever he had to do here.

He helped her buy the house she was living in and then returned to his country.

Her life at TI was not satisfying and she was very disturbed her latest performance review did not get her the raise she had expected and felt she deserved.

I told her TI wasn't the only employer and with her credentials and work history she should try to find a place that would not only pay her her worth but would be a place where she'd be able to grow.

One of those headhunting firms that produces job fairs called and invited her to attend their next one.

She got interview offers from Raytheon in Rhode Island and IBM, in Houston.

She wasn't too impressed by Raytheon but IBM was very interested in her and she was in them. She accepted their offer to move her to Houston and pay her about a grand more a month than she'd been making at Texas Instruments plus pay her tuition to further her expertise at the University of Houston.

She jumped at the offer but told me she wanted to make the move alone: she needed time to get herself situated in her new home. She wanted to find out who she was...etc, etc. etc.

Somehow I wasn't surprised. And I was quite used to my women moving out of town by now.

This was her move and I knew I wasn't going to be a part of it long before she actually told me her decision.

She, amazingly, sold her house quickly, and at a profit, before she had to pack up and head out. She was generous to me and moved me into an apartment of my own.

We promised to phone each other regularly and she promised to come up to see me from time to time on the weekends. We professed undying love for one another and made love a final time the night before she left.

A few weeks later Hurricane Alicia hit the Texas coast and devastated Houston and Galveston. There had been plenty warning about the imminent danger so Linda got in her little Honda and fled to my waiting arms and bed.

The storm dropped plenty of rough weather even as far north as Dallas and we rode it out in my apartment. When it was safe to return she told me she wanted me to come live with her again. She'd missed me, and I missed her, and we both wanted the relationship to continue.

We rented a moving truck, loaded my belongings, hooked her car up on towing wheels and headed south.

The first week I was in town I signed with an agent and was working a few days after that. It was marvelous to be working regularly at my craft again. I was doing voice overs again but now I started getting some on-camera work in industrial films, too.

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