Babe being shipped off in a horse trailer to her new owner. She and I had grown up together and had spent many happy years trudging down the dirt road to school, come rain, hail, sunshine, or snow. I felt my heart being torn to pieces as I heard her hoofs echoing on the metal floor of the trailer as she clip-clopped into it, and then there was that dreadful thud as the door was closed. We were sad to see the chickens and the hogs go, too. Each one of them had a name and a distinctly individual personality. Especially upsetting was seeing the cows and the horses go. Momma sobbed as they were taken away. Don and I, the ones who knew them best, were horribly cut up about it. I hugged my favorite cow before she was coaxed up the ramp onto the trailer that took her and five of the others to the farm of our friends the Jones’s, ten or twelve miles away.
But that was that. Our days on that glorious piece of Midwestern farmland were over. And the day Dad, Mom, Don, Phyllis, and I drove off for the last time I knew I had left a piece of me behind.
4
Full Service
H ollywood was probably about the most different place from my Illinois hometown that I could have ever chosen to move to. And I ended up spending my days right in the very heart of it. Because car culture was so dynamic and essential to the city, a gas station was the best place I could possibly be to arrange tricks for people from all tiers of society. And my gas station became the focal point for everyone looking for a trick. It became the crossroads of the city’s sexual underbelly.
The station was ideally located, convenient to most of the major movie production centers in town: Warner Bros., Universal Studios, Republic Pictures, and Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. It was just a couple of miles away from Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Samuel Goldwyn Studio, Columbia Pictures, General Service Studios, and the Charlie Chaplin Studios in Hollywood. Slightly farther away, between Santa Monica Boulevard and West Pico Boulevard, lay the sprawling studio complex of Twentieth Century Fox. A few miles beyond that in an area known as Culver City was the vast Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complex, Hal Roach Studios, and another huge RKO studio lot that was once home to Selznick International Pictures, makers of Gone with the Wind. With the war over and the American economy booming, film production was at an all-time high. The town was buzzing. And, like a glowing oasis offering something very special in this frenzied firmament was the little gas station where I worked on Hollywood Boulevard.
I still don’t quite understand how it all happened so rapidly, but it did. Whenever anyone was on the prowl for sex, my gas station was the place to head.
“Need a trick for tonight?” someone would say. “Well, go see Scotty Bowers at Richfield Gas on Hollywood Boulevard. He’ll set you up.”
These folks included creative types, executives, and technicians. The majority of the men who sought male partners were in the makeup, wardrobe, or hairdressing departments, but there were also production designers, art directors, set decorators, dialogue directors, casting people, and writers. Some were gay, some straight, and some bisexual. Most of the technicians who worked with heavy equipment in the lighting, camera, grips, sound, construction, and transportation departments were straight and in search of the perfect young lady. Well, I could help them out, too. I began to cater to all tastes, all sorts, all interests.
The queens were the most demanding. A straight guy would merely ask for a blonde or a brunette or a girl with a cute figure or big tits or one who was good at some specific sexual technique like giving a fantastic blow job, but gay guys were a lot choosier. They not only wanted someone tall or blonde or very good-looking, he also had to be suntanned or hairy or smooth or muscular. He had to have a big cock, be circumcised or uncircumcised, have big feet, long