Patricia Crest

            On Monday morning I memorized the fifth verse of “Au revoir mon enfance” (Goodbye My Childhood) by Boris Vian. There are four verses left to nail down. 

           I memorized the third verse of “À poil ou à plumes” (Naked or in Feathers) by Serge Gainsbourg and revised my translation. There are two verses left to learn. I revised my translation of all but the final verse but I have an idea how to finish the song. 

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around 13:00 I packed my laundry into my bike trailer and took it to the laundromat. I brought it home at around 15:00. 

            I weighed 89 kilos at 15:24. 

            I took a siesta at 16:00 and got up a little before 17:30. 

            I walked over to Queen Fresh market and bough three bags of red grapes. 

            There’s a woman living in the nearest bus shelter and she’s made it into a home. She’s got a lot of milk crates set up with the built in metal bench to support a little mattress and all of her things are very tidily arranged. 

            I weighed 89 kilos at 18:08, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since October 2. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:10.    

            I re-digitized the cassette tape of my recording session at what I think was Cherry Beach Studio on August 4, 1994. The copy I made last night had too many skips so I made sure I copied it a couple of times. 

            I finished my “I Love You. Neither Do U” Movie Maker project and published it. I started a “2024-10-09 Song Practice” project. I synchronized the audio with the video in part A but then deleted part A and so I left off for supper with the audio behind again. 

            I mixed the sauce from the herbed potatoes I made on Thanksgiving with the rest of my gravy. I had some with a potato and a slice of roast beef while watching episode 5 of Cain’s Hundred. 

            Cain goes to a club where sex workers are employed and picks up a girl at the bar. She takes him to an adjacent motel room where he locks the door and calls her by her real name of Millie. She tries to get away but he’s got the key. He tells her that her father has cancer and wants to take her back but he mainly wants her to testify against Frank Andreotis the man who is behind the prostitution ring that she’s caught in. She says they’ll kill him but he says they won’t because he’s federal. I wonder if that’s true. He grabs her arm to look at her track marks then gets her to tell the story of how she ended up there. She went to Chicago to try to get into modelling. She met a woman named Bunny who brought her there from Chicago and they got her hooked on heroin. She tries to leave with Cain but sees Bunny and says she can’t go. He tells her he’s at the Mirador Hotel. Bunny talks to Millie and says she knows Cain. When Cain goes back to his hotel room Frank is waiting for him. They know each other from when Cain was a lawyer for the mob. Frank hands him $100,000 but he refuses to take it. Frank threatens him but again Cain says the Syndicate won’t allow Frank to kill a Fed. Bunny contacts Cain and they meet. She talks about how they knew each other before. She tells him his contacting of Millie was very dangerous for her. She says she’ll bring Millie to him. Millie is put in a hospital for withdrawal under guard. Someone posing as an orderly gets in through the window and tries to kill her but the guard shoots him. Bunny is taken for a ride and her body is found on the beach. Cain has Frank’s innocent daughter picked up and brought to the hospital where he forces her to see Millie going through cold turkey. He tells her about her father and his sex ring of junkies but she doesn’t believe him at first. But when she realizes it’s true she goes home and starts wrecking all her expensive things. She scratches her father’s face. Frank contacts Cain and says he will confess to tax evasion, conspiracy and gambling. Anything but the prostitution rap but he wants Cain to tell his daughter that what he told her about him wasn’t true. Cain refuses and so Frank comes out firing his gun and is shot down by the feds.

            Millie was played by Patricia Crest, aka Linda Vargas, who was half Cherokee and half Irish. She worked as a model in Chicago. She was the Playboy Playmate of the month for December 1957. She went to Hollywood with very little training as an actor but was sure she was going to be a star. She approached Jerry Wald and walked out of his office with a movie contract and a part in the film The Best of Everything. She appeared in a few films and TV series but didn’t become a star. She died of a drug overdose on May 26, 1973.