Category: Celebrity Cameo

The Hair of My Chinny-Chin-Chin

Happy Decembeard! It’s an annual campaign where people grow beards (or fake beards) during December to raise money and awareness for bowel cancer, a serious but treatable disease, especially when caught early. Participants start clean-shaven on November 30th, grow their facial hair all December, and use it as a conversation starter to educate others about symptoms like changes in bowel habits and blood in stool.
Since those are Hack’s favorite topics of conversation throughout the year, it’s not a big deal to him, but we thought you’d like to know.

The Ride-Along

The studio brass made their decision with the same casual ruthlessness they used when choosing which actors to send to pasture: they picked up the option on the Jonny & Boris Detective Agency picture. A real prestige number, they said. A velvet-rope crowd-pleaser. And for something like that, only one name could tower above the marquee in foot-high lights—Gable. The king of MGM himself, all teeth and tailored charm. Jonny didn’t give a damn who played him on the silver screen, but the studio cared plenty, so they hauled Gable out to the mean streets of Van Nuys for a “ride-along,” the kind they thought toughened up their leading men. He even brought along his brand-new bride, Carole Lombard, because in Hollywood the honeymoon never ends—it just gets new lighting.

Boris took one look at the pair—Gable in a fresh suit still creased from the wardrobe department, Carole smiling like she was hosting a radio charity drive—and he knew trouble had come knocking with a florist’s ribbon around its neck. Gable carried himself like a hero in a three-reel newsreel, but beneath the movie-star jaw he had the constitution of a cream puff you’d find in a Chinese bakery window. And that was rotten news, because this was the night Boris had promised Big Tim—yes, THAT Big Tim—that he’d finally knock a certain rival’s face clean off his skull and send it skipping down Victory Boulevard like a misplaced hubcap. It was hard honest work, and Boris doubted Clark would stomach the sight of his own shadow once things got messy. The man was built for close-ups, not close quarters.

But Jonny wasn’t worried—not about the job, not about the King of Hollywood, not about anything except Carole. She might’ve been a starlet to the rest of America, but to Jonny she was something rarer: a woman who’d spent so long propped up on a golden pedestal she forgot what real hands felt like. She’d married Gable thinking he was the last of the real men, a walking slab of swagger, but one brush with Van Nuys grit made her see the truth—he was just another studio mannequin, painted heroic for the paying customers. Then she spotted Jonny leaning against the streetlamp, a modern-day Neanderthal with a moral compass held together by scotch tape and bad intentions, and she knew in that instant that her Hollywood dreams were about to get trampled under the boots of something far more dangerous: the real thing.

Historic Filipinotown

Jonny watched the Packard fishtail down the alley, exhaust coughing like a dying bullfrog, the blonde bombshell behind the wheel shrieking at her sister/daughter/niece/second cousin in that high-strung way that made every vertebra in Jonny’s spine beg for mercy. She’d been nothing but trouble from the moment she waltzed into the agency flashing those baby-blue peepers and waving a retainer check big enough to pave over her neuroses. But it was Jonny’s ex-partner on the force—a tall drink of nitroglycerin whose slow burn around him could’ve been detected by airport security—who made the next move. She raised her service piece for a polite little “stop or I’ll shoot” communiqué… only the communique went rogue, zipped through the dawn haze, and rearranged the dame’s golden noggin into something resembling a seven-layer dip left too long on a picnic table.

When the smoke cleared and the three of them gathered round the wrecked beauty, Jonny felt a jig bubbling inside him like champagne in a thin glass. She’d been a headache, sure, but sweet saints of the city, what a dish. He’d even bragged—loudly and to anyone within earshot—about the time he’d done the horizontal hula with her. Now, with her skull looking like a Jackson Pollock study in red, he couldn’t exactly break into a victory Charleston in front of gawking bystanders clutching their shopping bags and moral expectations. Jonny’s face needed to broadcast “tragic remorse,” but his soul was performing a conga line, and that was a tricky two-step to pull off without coaching.

Luckily, Boris knew his partner’s heart was made of equal parts confetti and ratchet straps, and he’d taken precautions. From the shadows stepped a lone trumpet player—Boris’ doing—blowing a low, mournful note that told Jonny exactly what emotion he ought to paste across his mug. With the horn’s wail guiding him, Jonny mustered up a look of deep, operatic angst while privately debating whether to stream some trashy reality show or the latest Bill Burr standup special on Netflix that night. Boris padded close, laid a steadying paw on his partner’s shoulder, and whispered the words that deepened Jonny’s fake grief just enough to fool the crowd and maybe, just maybe, fool himself.

“Forget it, Jonny… it’s Historic Filipinotown.”