Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [62]
A little while later, Dean gently reminded me: “Look, Jer, before you shpritz someone ringside, just keep in mind who gets those ringside tables!”
“How am I supposed to know if it’s a wiseguy?” I asked him.
“Oh, you’ll develop a sixth sense about these things,” he assured me.
And I did. Dean’s advice was sound, and I mostly remembered it.
There were times Dean protected me from others, but there were more times he had to protect me from myself. In 1952, Purdue University decided it wanted us to entertain at its homecoming festivities. Now, Purdue happened to be somewhere in northern Indiana, but since we happened to have just finished an engagement at the Copa and were on our way home to L.A., we agreed.
But—West Lafayette, Indiana? Deep in the cornfields of the Hoosier State? We asked for a very large sum of money (I mean very large) for the one evening, thinking we could get out of it that way. But Purdue promptly agreed. We were stuck, but good.
The whole crowd of us—Dean and I, Dick Stabile and our entire twenty-six-man band, our security guys, and our press agent Jack Keller—all flew to Chicago, then got on a bus and into a couple of limos for the three-hour drive south to West Lafayette.
One thing the planners hadn’t counted on, though, was that the light snow that was falling as our convoy pulled out of O’Hare Airport would turn into a full-fledged blizzard. It looked like a grip on a sound stage had been cued to let the white stuff come full force!
The longer we drove, the darker it got and the more heavily it snowed. This was before the Interstate Highway System; we were slogging along on two-lane blacktop, making very slow headway into deepest Indiana. After five hours, it became apparent that we weren’t going to reach the nice hotel in West Lafayette anytime soon.
Dean and I were in the head limo, along with Dick, Keller, our pianist, Louie, and our drummer, Ray Toland. The six of us started peering into the darkness for someplace to stay—six guys in a limo in the dark ain’t the tunnel of love, folks! Tempers were beginning to rise when Dick, who was in the front seat alongside the driver and Louie, lit a cigarette. Which wasn’t unusual in itself (we all smoked)—but after the match blew out, the four of us in the back (two in jump seats) began to smell an odd aroma.
Dean smiled. I wasn’t sure what was going on until I heard Ray tell Dick, “Gimme a hit!” Now I knew....Dick passed the reefer back, and Ray sucked in the smoke like it was his last day on earth. Then he passed it to Keller, who inhaled, and passed it to Dean—who puffed on it like a pro, then passed it back up to Dick.
“Hey!” I called. “What is this shit? I’m twenty-five, going on twenty-six years old, for Christ’s sake! Give me that thing!”
“Okay, kid, go slow,” Dick said, handing me the joint.
I inhaled deeply, as I would with one of my cigarettes—and Dean yelled, “Let the coughing begin!” And did it begin. I must’ve coughed for five solid minutes.
Then I asked to do it again.
“Here’s a new one, guys,” Dick said, and Dean handed it to me. We went around again, and pretty soon I was feeling exactly like Errol Flynn. How easy it would be, I thought, to step outside and leap over the limo....
After a while, none of us cared about the gig, the storm, or the hotel. We just kept riding into the night, as the windshield wipers slapped at the heavy flakes. Soon a chorus of snores echoed from the back seat. Dick was still awake up front, and I asked, “What was that I smoked?”
“It’s called Emerald Feet,” Dick told me. “Comes from an island in the Indian Ocean. Very expensive—about a buck-fifty a joint.”
“Can we get more?” I asked.
Around two in the morning—eleven hours after landing at O’Hare— we rolled into West Lafayette. The night clerk at the hotel gaped at the sight of Martin and Lewis and a dozen other guys stomping in out of the snow-storm.
“I saw you guys on Ed Sullivan!” the clerk told Dean and me. “You were great!”
As we thanked him, Keller made a remark too obscene