CHAPTER 23

Exploring

The thing about eating in the hat, about eating in a restaurant shaped like a hat, is . . . it’s a restaurant. Shaped like a hat, of course. But once you get over that, it’s just a restaurant. My cheeseburger was very good, and my mother and father had them too, and liked them—and some of the people eating there were probably movie stars, though we didn’t recognize any of them. I have to say, it didn’t measure up to the Lagarto Chamuscado, and I felt a little let down. Not so my father. He just loved it. He was happy as a clam. He was joyous. He was smiling from ear to ear the whole time. He was over the moon. He was tickled pink. He was eating in the hat.

After lunch we did more touring. We parked the car and took a walk. We saw Hollywood and Vine, which is famous. Why it is famous I cannot say. It is an intersection. Hollywood Boulevard meets Vine Street. There’s a traffic light. There’s a drugstore. There are people walking around. Some of them are tourists—they are the ones taking pictures of Hollywood and Vine.

We walked along Hollywood Boulevard, which was mildly interesting. There were stores, movie theaters, hotels, restaurants. Then we came to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. That was interesting. It was this big building looking like a Chinese palace or temple. It was very fancy. There was a sort of courtyard in front, where movie stars had pressed their hands, or feet, or hands and feet, in wet cement, and scratched their names. We walked around looking for the hand- and footprints of movie stars we liked. And we bought some popcorn at the little store to one side of the courtyard. The thing I liked about Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was that with all the fancy you could buy a ticket at regular prices and go in and see a movie.

We crossed Hollywood Boulevard and walked back along the other side. We found the Hitching Post, the movie theater Seamus Finn had told me about. It looked good—it had wagon wheels outside. I thought maybe I would go over to Brown-Sparrow Military Academy before long and see Seamus. Maybe I could meet him at the Hitching Post on Saturday morning.

Then we came upon the greatest store in the world. We went in and looked around. This store was brilliant. It was a big store, and in the back it had magic tricks—not just little ones, but big professional ones involving mummy cases, and Chinese cabinets, and all kinds of shiny equipment with gold paint and lots of colors. This reminded me of Seamus Finn again, who was a member of a magicians’ club. I thought he must know about this store—probably bought tricks here. I knew a couple of simple card tricks, but I was no magician. Looking at all the neat equipment, I thought maybe I might learn a little more.

The middle part of the store was all model airplane kits! Here was something I knew about. I am pretty good at building models. They had some pretty fancy big models hanging on strings from the ceiling. And besides model airplanes, they had model ships and trains. There was a model of a clipper ship, the Flying Cloud, all built and finished, with complicated rigging made out of thread. And they sold the kit to build it. $9.95. It looked like it would take a year. Pretty nice ship, though.

In the front part of the store, in glass cases, they sold a variety of things anybody would want—harmonicas, switchblade knives in all sizes, and big chrome-plated rings with Indian heads and skulls with rubies for eyes, all with lots of sharp corners, so if anyone got slugged by someone wearing one, it would hurt. As I said, the greatest store in the world.

Oh, they also sold jokes. My father loves jokes. He bought a flower you wear in your buttonhole, with a thin tube that connects to a rubber bulb full of water you keep in your pocket. You invite someone to smell your flower, and when he bends close to smell it, you squeeze the bulb and the flower squirts him. A good idea, but the flower was completely fake-looking, a red rose made of plastic. Anybody would see what was coming. I pretended I was a regular citizen and sniffed the flower, and let my father squirt me. He thought it was great. I was pretty sure I was the only one he would catch with that thing. He asked me if I saw anything I wanted. I told him I needed to come back and think about that. There were too many choices—and I needed to decide if I was going to be a magician, the builder of the biggest ship model ever, or a knife-carrying, harmonica-playing practical joker.