Nikki is the kind of mom I generally give a wide berth. She is head of the parent board, volunteers for school and charity events, raises money like a champ, works out every day and drives her daughter all over town for activities. I’m more the type to drop my kid off at school and forget about him until pick-up. I’m the kind of person who thinks working out every day is best left as a good idea. So I couldn’t imagine being friendly with Nikki. She was too… capable. What ever would we talk about? Fundraisers? PTA politics? Being friends with Nikki would be a slippery slope. Before long I would be organizing teacher appreciation days and volunteering to be a room parent. I had anxiety just thinking about it. But Nikki had, of course, been the nice mom who had called to welcome my family when my son started the same school as her daughter. So when Nikki just happened to be walking her dog by my house recently, I did what good people do and invited her in to chat.
Then the bomb dropped and the lens through which I saw Nikki was forever changed. “Wait… your father did what?” I asked again. She gave me a quick sketch of the way she was raised and I was speechless. It did not match the image of the supermom I had constructed. I told Nikki that her story was too good to waste. You have to write it, I told her. Nah, she said. I’m a good talker but I’m just not a writer. I studied her for a long moment and then said, “Well, I am.”
Suddenly I had purchased a microphone and was spending hours interviewing Nikki, her extended family and the characters in the life of Nikki’s colorful father. I have been incredibly moved and delighted by the stories of this extraordinary man and have decided that somebody has to tell them. So the following article is part of a bigger piece I am writing that is taken from the true events and the real life of Daddy Harry: Porno’s Mensch.
DADDY HARRY
Based on the true events and real life of Porno’s Mensch
I don’t know how to tell my daughter that her grandpa made his living in porn. There isn’t a parenting book for that. But my father, everyone called him Daddy Harry, was someone I desperately wish my daughter, Lily, had known.
I should clarify: My father didn’t actually do porn. He was in distribution when it was illegal to transport “obscene material” over state lines. My father spent years of his life on airplanes; film canister under one arm; a gun in his carry-on.
But even though he wasn’t in porn, I’m still not prepared to share this slice of family history with my 12-year-old. Instead I tell her about my father’s other quirks. Like the way he worshipped his cats. Every day he’d open a smorgasbord of food for them—at least a dozen tins, so they could indulge according to their whims. I don’t know what they’re in the mood for, he’d say with a shrug.
I’ve even told Lily a bit about Daddy’s sticky fingers. His entire flatware collection was lifted from local restaurants—most notably, The Ivy in Beverly Hills. While the A-listers were being photographed by paparazzi, Daddy would slip butter knives and lobster forks into his jacket pockets. Sometimes I’d find them in my handbag. He also had an impressive collection of salt-and-pepper shakers. And for reasons that remain mysterious, he loved those giant ashtrays that were once kept inside hotel lobbies. After his death we found four of them in his house. And those were just the ones he kept. Daddy once took a cab to the Sofitel Hotel on Beverly Drive. He told the driver to pop the trunk and wait while he went inside the lobby. A minute later he walked out with an ashtray half his size, deposited it like luggage into the cab’s trunk, and told the driver to take him home.
Another funny thing about my father: He never learned to drive. He loved the bus. In 1978, most middle-class 10-year olds in L.A. would be embarrassed if they were forced to take the graffiti-drenched, slightly stinky city bus to school with their parents. But traveling with Daddy was an adventure. He was like the mayor of the bus. He knew everyone on our route.
“Harry!” They shouted in unison as soon as he stepped aboard. Armed with our backpacks, Pee Chee folders and lunch money, my 7-year-old sister and I waved like royalty as the Bus People greeted our arrival.
I admit that some mornings I was tired and not feeling up to telling Hairdo, the cleaning woman who traveled to Hancock Park, about my previous evening’s homework. And sometimes 7 a.m. was a little early to smell some of the homeless people who my father kept in donuts and loose change on the walk to our stop. But mostly it was fun. My dad was a dynamic storyteller and a generous listener. He treated everyone with equal interest. If the queen of England had been walking down Sunset Boulevard, he would have offered her a donut and loose change too. He didn’t discriminate.
Lily does not yet know this story: One Wednesday, my sister and I were particularly excited about the morning’s ride. There was a lovely Bus Woman we called Sweets who, the day before, had promised to bring a batch of her famous giant oatmeal and chocolate-chip cookies. We were all happily inhaling them when we stopped at the corner of Spaulding and Santa Monica. That’s when the New Guy got on. Usually new people on the bus didn’t stay new for long. They were accepted as part of the group once they were established to be a regular. But this new guy was a jerk. Daddy tried to engage him in conversation many times but all he did was grunt and roll his eyes. Occasionally he made smarmy remarks as bus conversation got going.
New Guy threw down his change, looked down the aisle and smoothed the front of his half-polyester, half-nylon, checkered sport coat that was discernibly frayed around the cuffs. He studied us with disdain, as if we were a bunch of smelly, whiny children. Then he gave his customary sigh to indicate disappointment that we were there yet another day. The bus was busy that morning and he would have to share a seat. Finally he settled on a place next to Lady—ostensibly the least offensive person in a bus full of bad options. Lady probably wasn’t her real name, but we only knew the bus people by the nicknames Daddy gave them. Lady sat up straight, wore gloves even in the summer, and was quick with a shy smile. When New Guy sat next to her, he saw that she was holding one of Sweets’ cookies. He looked around. So was everyone else.
“What about me?” He asked to no one in particular. Loudly.
Sweets had gotten off the bus by then, taking the rest of her stash to her workplace. We saw Lady’s shoulders heave with a controlled but very deep sigh.
Silence. It incensed him.
“No one saved me a cookie?”
Daddy was a few rows behind him. “We didn’t know you’d want one,” he said.
“Well, I do,” growled New Guy, not bothering to turn around.
I snuck a glance at Daddy’s face. It drove him crazy when he couldn’t win someone over. He gave it a noble, last attempt.
“We’ll save you one next time.”
New Guy was quiet for moment. He was stewing. We could feel it. The air in the bus was as thick as the smog outside. Our driver, B.B. (short for “Baseball.” He always wore a Dodgers cap), glanced anxiously into the rear view mirror.
Suddenly, New Guy reached over and grabbed Lady’s cookie right out of her delicate, vanilla-colored, gloved hand.
“She can get one next time,” he barked. Then he turned around, flashed his snarky smile and held up the cookie in victory.
Daddy sighed. He didn’t like mean people. And he really liked women. He gave a disappointed shake of his head, then pulled himself up with a definitive tug to his fist-sized belt-buckle. The eyes of all the bus people were upon him. Daddy walked over to New Guy and Lady, who studied her hands like they had inexplicably sprouted from her wrists. New Guy looked at up at Daddy with amusement and moved the cookie, very deliberately toward his mouth. It was halfway there when Daddy reached inside his tan, leather, leisure jacket, pulled out his .22 caliber pistol and shoved it right between New Guy’s sweaty, little eyes.
“Give her back the cookie,” Daddy demanded.
New Guy was dumbstruck. With his comical cowboy hat and his thick, gold Hebrew Chai resting snugly in his black chest hair, my father did not cut a terrifying figure. He was 5-foot-8 when he stood up straight and, although he only had a smattering of teeth, my dad’s smile was quick and sunny and not indicative of a man with a temper.
“If you eat the fucking cookie you, will eat a fucking bullet, ” Daddy said, sounding more like an instructive school marm than a man who would shoot your head off. He glanced over at Lady.
“Pardon my language.”
Lady shook her head to assure him she wasn’t offended.
The cookie was frozen just shy of New Guy’s lips. He made a high-pitched sound and slowly, without looking at her, handed the cookie back to Lady.
“Now get up,” Daddy said.
New Guy held tight onto the seat in front of him as he shakily pulled himself up. When he finally spoke his voice was a few octaves higher.
“You wouldn’t shoot me in front of all these people.”
Daddy smiled. “Hey, folks,” he tossed out, “does anyone see me holding a gun to this guy?”
The chorus was fully in Daddy’s camp.
“What guy?”
“No sir.”
“What gun?”
Daddy cocked his head to the side. “You heard them. What guy, what gun?”
For once, New Guy didn’t have a response.
“B.B.,” Daddy yelled toward the front, “pull over, please!”
“You got it, Harry!”
All was silent as the click, click of the bus’s indicator became the soundtrack guiding us to the sidewalk. When it stopped, the hydraulic hiss of the doors seemed to sound a triumphant flourish.
By now the gun was pointed at New Guy’s chest.
“Find a different route,” Daddy instructed.
New Guy nodded. He was pretty fast for a man whose legs shook like Wile E. Coyote after a TNT backfire. Once he was out the door, the New Guy just kept bolting. He was never seen on the corner of Spaulding and Santa Monica again.
***
For the first couple of years after my mom overdosed, my father dropped us off at Gardner Elementary School every morning, then went straight back to our original stop, where he met up with his second wave of bus people that rode with him deep into the San Fernando Valley for work. It was a long ride—a good hour and a half at least. But Daddy had a blast with his revolving stream of friends. There were The Religious People, Tie Dye Guy, Freddie the Freeloader… I think each one of them landed at our house for one reason or another over the years. At the very least they would be there for Daddy’s annual bash on New Year’s Eve, which just happened to be his birthday. The eclectic group of bus-ers somehow mixed easily with the Rockers, the Punks, the editor of Big Butt Magazine, the Hippies, John Holmes, the Teamsters, the neighbors, our school friends, and Traci Lords. Everyone that came into Daddy’s orbit was considered family.
I don’t know if any of the bus people knew what Daddy did for a living. But had they looked into his well-packed brown-leather man-purse, they would have found a .22 caliber pistol, a wad of cash, three packs of Pall Malls, unfiltered, and a sock full of quarters, which he used both for change and as an alternate weapon when a gun seemed like a bad choice. He also carried a loaf of bread for the pigeons he would feed once the bus dropped him off in Canoga Park. They cooed and toddled over to him, surrounding him like disciples. Daddy tossed pieces of day-old rye, singing to them softly and clucking when they fought over scraps. Then Daddy ambled about a block to his office, where he would often pick up a reel of the newest pornographic film, a Pan Am plane ticket registered under a false name, and the aforementioned man-purse. He would deliver the film to a porno theater in a different state, trade it for another wad of cash, and whenever possible, fly back home in time to take us to school the next morning.
Life wasn’t fun before I moved in with my dad. Living with my mom meant waiting for the bump in the night that indicated she had fallen off the wagon and, literally, onto the floor. It meant walking through the door with a new friend from school and finding my mother naked, scrubbing the kitchen floor with a cigarette dangling out of one side of her mouth. It meant being shuttled between little-known relatives and foster homes while my mother, full of promises, submitted herself to rehab. Again. So you can see why it means so much to me that my daughter knows about her grandfather. And yet, I’m not quite ready for Lily to get the full scope of her distinguished family history. I guess for now I’ll stick to stories of cats and kleptomania. Porn and weapons will have to wait. It’s hard to say when the time will be exactly right. But there is something I can tell my daughter with 100 percent conviction: Daddy Harry would have shoplifted anything in the world to see his granddaughter Lily smile.
Footnote: During the writing of this article, Nikki managed to get Michelle to spinning class three times per week, train for a marathon, and a spin fundraiser for a Cancer Support Community Center. And guess who is now a room parent?
