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My Life as a Trained Killer and My Close, Personal Friendship of Clint Eastwood. Trust Me.
Let me preface this by saying Clint Eastwood doesn't have the faintest idea who I am. None. But I did meet him. Let's start with me heading out to basic training.
I walked out the door and looked back. My girlfriend, naked, was waving good bye and laughing. She knew I'd wouldn't see another woman for months and was having a great time rubbing it in. The cab driver was enthused. I was off to join the army. It was 1962, fifty eight years ago, and I'd been drafted.
At the time I was singing in the Alley Kat Cafe in Seattle and it was not a top of the line nightspot. To get to it you had to walk downstairs from Skid Row at First Avenue and Union Street. It had been a longshoremen's bar when John Timmons bought it. John also owned the Pamir House in the University district, and that was the coffeehouse where I got my start in show business. I think I made seven dollars a night, which doesn't sound like much but I'm sure it's well over ten dollars in today's money. We were folksingers back then, in the transition period between beatniks and hippies and the Pamir House was painted black inside with candles in bottles on the tables.
John bought the Alley Kat with the idea of turning it into a folk bar downtown but it never quite made the transition. Instead it featured a strange mixture of longshoremen and folkies and I learned a great lesson in life. Never, ever mess with longshoremen. Just shut up and try to be friends. In a major blunder, John once thought it would be smart to bring in a bouncer. It was like giving the longshoremen a gift. They had a big argument to see who could take on the bouncer first, and the poor guy didn't last the night.
I was well on my way to Skid Row stardom when I got drafted. I've already told you about my days as a bridge-playing clerk, but that was just the first year. During that year I used to head into Monterey at night and play at the Mission Inn la Cantina in Monterey. I would also sit in with the Dixieland band at the