James Ellroy (10 page)

We kissed in her car. Airport cacophony drowned out my heartbeat. I was tantrically tapped and two-months tumescent. L.A. looked all new. It was
our
town more than
my
town now. I reserved us a suite at the Mondrian Hotel. It was my favorite local brood spot. I wanted to desaturate my images of all other women with Helen Knode right there.

The valet-park guys knew me and dug me. I over-tipped and exuded big-white-bwana savoir faire. I laid on the largesse. The guys called me “Jefe.” The desk fag whizzed us upstairs.

Helen whooped at the suite and whooped at my gauche white-trash glee. We gobbled honor-bar almonds and ran to the bed. It wasn’t anything I had predicted, fantasized, sound-tracked or brain-screened before. Helen’s hands on my face reframed my whole life.

Draped windows darkened us and eclipsed the Sunset Strip. Time did a funny lust-bunker thing. Locations and climates merged. I lost track of all the things I planned to say. Lovemaking and talk got twisted into a slow-burning fuse. My mind went blank as I counted the moles on Helen’s back. We tossed a pillow on the bedside clock. Street noise subsided to a purr.

We found robes and cracked the curtains for some face-reading light. Dusk backlit Helen in mid-laugh. I said, “Will you marry me?” Helen whooped and said, “Yes, I will.”

So you found Her.

What does it mean?

Where does it take you?

It means everything. It takes you everywhere. You follow her lead.

My credo: Expect nothing, risk everything, give all. Helen’s rejoinder: Yes, assume risk. You will gain or lose commensurate with your deepest consciousness and the purity of your intent.

I felt cleansed. Helen’s joy was emancipation. She stamped the deed to The Curse “paid in full” and dared me to dance to her tune.

It was a Baby-I’m-gonna-make-you-mine oldie. She pulled it out of a circa ’60 slush pile. It bid me to re-spin my compulsive appetite and dig on it as happiness expressed.

I’d been happy before. It was always manifestly urgent. I always wanted more and knew I’d always get it. A hollow thunk kicked around in me and kept me vigilant, nonetheless. Hyper-acuity alerts opportunists to the presence of more.
More
was now moribund. Helen Knode had rendered it
Less
.

Lover, confidante, sacred comrade. Satirist, debunker and funny motherfucker.

Nobody had ever
reallllly
gotten me. Nobody had ever
reallllly
gotten her. Our imaginations merged. Our zests for life overlapped and coalesced. Helen Knode and James Ellroy—
that’s entertainment!

We looked
gooooood
together. We exemplified yucks and fucks with refinement. We loved life and lived to laugh. We were
fuuuuunny
. We were always concocting hilarious shit.

Helen messed with my memory. She de-genderized it. I forgot female faces seen and recalled, girls stalked and B&E’d. Helen recast iconic figures and demoted them to bit roles. Marcia Sidwell and the wish-named Joan? Now synaptic flotsam. Helen’s message: I’m here, they’re not. Let’s make love and laugh.

The world was fair comic game. Ditto, her family and friends and a backwash of our ex-lovers. Helen’s act complemented my talking-dog shtick and race routines. Helen’s
character was manifest. It allowed her political wiggle room. She dug my right-wing spiels and scolded me through excessive repetitions. We ping-ponged between the comedy hour and
looooong
talks on what it all meant.

We scheduled our wedding for fall ’91 and rented a house in Laurel Canyon. Helen bowed to my desire for a Christian service and stipulated a female pastor. The woman disliked me. She told Helen that our union would not last—because I had darty eyes.

I met Helen’s family. I liked them fine and dominated them with a bullying exuberance. Helen was complicit. I brought out the class clown in her. I didn’t know from families. Their social codes and clash of egos vexed me. I ballyhooed myself and extolled Barko’s antics. Barko sold dope to the brothers in southside L.A. Barko edited
Snout
magazine. Barko whacked JFK and got Jackie all for himself. The Knodes laughed through their shock and did a “Boy, Helen’s met her match” number. Helen kicked me when my shtick failed to fly.

Issues percolated. I had a sweet three-book deal and wanted to glom a pad in Connecticut. I loved the East Coast and craved access to Barko. Helen was reluctant. The East reeked of the deep tsuris of her Cornell grad school days. L.A. was her town now. I couldn’t live in that ghost zone. Helen agreed to the move. It invigorated me. I delivered God’s plan for her.

She
got
it. The crime novel, the female journo in duress. The hated father, a botched patricide, the cop-lover redolent of
me
. Brilliant Helen: she heard me out and started popping plot points within minutes. I knew she’d excel at the task.

Summer ’91. Warm nights and the overfurnished love shack. The moment I turned 43 years, two months and seven days of age and outlived Jean Hilliker.

Helen said I would outlive her influence. Our union was proof positive. I had chosen to forsake traumatic drive and compulsion for joy. I had fictionally replicated the redhead. My cast of ’50s women were
of
her and
served
her as vessels of acknowledgment. My job now: seek groovy happiness—with H. M. Knode.

Which I did.

I dubbed Helen the “Cougarwoman.” She was sleek, tawny and indigenous to the western plains. She was conversant with outré religions and grokked their animal worship. She called me “Big Dog,” because I loved dogs and bayed extemporaneously. My dog-den mentality unnerved her. I lived to be alone with her or plain alone in tightly structured spaces. I craved containment. I viewed other people as interlopers and den crashers. I wanted to contain our relationship and four-wall it. It was wild-ass one-on-one. The exclusive nature sandbagged my long-standing fixation with having a brood of daughters. Helen didn’t rule out children. It was put on indefinite hold. Passion ruled our immediate moments.

Summer ’91. Weekend jaunts to Santa Barbara. We always ate at a joint called Paul Bhalla’s Cuisine of India. It was always empty or close to it. That gored me. The place felt talismanic and linked to our fate. I did not want that restaurant to tank or close. We had to be able to go back and thwart the passage of time there. Helen always sat to my left. She always took her glasses off and made her eyes kaleidoscopes. Fear slammed me then.
I must never lose this woman. Please, God. Don’t let her die or let anything rip us apart
.

Our wedding: 10/4/91. Two rooms at the Pacific Dining Car.

Helen wore a pink-peach ’40s vintage dress. I wore my ancestral kilt. Helen looked stunningly cougarlike and
hip/feral. The pastor performed our hybrid vows. I got Christian lip service and Helen got lots of New Age woo-woo. The pastor glared at me, but did not mention my darty eyes. I tagged her as a pissed-off dyke.

Helen’s family flew in from Kansas and Texas. My publishing friends flew in from New York. Some old buddies from AA showed. The toasts ran heartfelt and slightly off-color. Helen tossed out zingers like “hot cougar love” and quoted Doris Lessing: “Marriage is sex and courage.” I threw out a mock-impromptu rock song, replete with lurid lyrics. Helen whooped and busted me to the guests. “That’s a retread, Big Dog! You wrote that for one of your ex-bitches!”

Steak dinners off the menu and a custom wedding cake. Cross-table chitchat while Helen worked the room and I withdrew into my head. I brain-tripped. Jean Hilliker would have been 76 years, five months and 19 days old had she lived.

Helen pirouetted, her dress swirled, a few of her male friends whistled. I got evil mad and sent out shitty looks. Helen caught my eye, smiled and brought me down in a heartbeat.

Please, God, don’t let this end
.

Please, God, let us ascend to you at the same instant
.

Helen recharted my brainscape. She heard all my stories and demanded new interpretations. She respectfully requested sex yarns. I recast all my previous lovers as buffoons and Knode wannabes. Helen was less disingenuous. She layered in the good sex and donkey-dicked dudes and got me angry and jealous. I wanted to control her life’s narrative. It had to be properly titillating
and
anoint Helen as saintlike. I pressed Helen for revisions and got the single one I craved: Before you, it was all puerile and trifling.

Ubiquity.

Helen was flat-out alive. Jean Hilliker was the entomber. My mother ghost-danced through dark rooms and encouraged me to scroll faces. Helen cracked the blackout curtains and let me glimpse the light outside.

We moved back to New Canaan, Connecticut. My ex-wife and ex-dog lived a few miles away. Helen dug the greenbelt aspect and hated the surrounding urbanism. I bullied her there. Our tidal-wave courtship came with a price. The move ripped her away from her family and friends. The move dumped her in a hostile burb with a familyless man and a talking ex-dog. I levied a jive male mandate. We have to live here, that’s the bottom line, you’ll get used to it. The fucked-up subtext: A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

New Canaan remained Hancock Park East. My ex-wife remained a composite of the prep school girls I’d prowled and peeped years back. I lured Helen to a reconstructed memory zone. She subverted my relationship to my past as we lived a re-creation of it.

She was homesick. She ragged New Canaan as she torch-songed L.A. She’d moved for a man. It rankled her feminism. Manhattan brought back her wild days as an East Village journo. She was past all that kid shit now. The East torqued her as it cradled me.

We settled in. Helen began work on her novel. I compiled notes on a political epic. It was my first non-L.A.-set fiction. I saw L.A. as a dark room I couldn’t revisit. I wanted all my memory spaces compartmentalized. I viewed my new marriage as a legal document that expunged our collective past. Special provisos allowed us to exploit it for dramatic purposes and titillation. I had misread women many times before. I had superimposed my single-mindedness and go-go ethos upon them. Helen possessed it
already. I knew that then. She possessed a more refined version of my drive and could integrate the world within it. I know that now. She was attempting to provide me with a stable overall life and a balanced day-to-day existence. I rolled over for her charm, wit and passion. I resisted the moment-to-moment toil of domestic duty. I abrogated my responsibilities along gender lines. I could not wash dishes or vacuum floors and left those jobs to Helen. I saw no point in social outings. They entailed other people and often bid me to rude behavior. Helen was Her, She, The Other. She had countermanded Jean Hilliker adroitly. We were united in pursuit of a divine efficacy. Our purpose was to sustain each other and create big art. Our love would see us through the performance of our sacred duty. The more circumscribed our world, the more direct our point A to point B journey.

That was my mission statement. It was not Helen Knode’s. I did not inflict it upon her as a philosophy or a step-by-step task. I saw it as a logical expression of our great romantic adventure. Helen was considerably more flexible and viewed my agendas as liberating in intention and often restricting in practice. I lived with the woman who was then the great love of my life. I bopped in and out of My World and Our World on an ad hoc basis.

Helen’s physical presence and surety juiced my creative engine. My brain cells popped in an effort to keep up with her. My blinders fit more securely and cut off the female spirits always clouding my peripheral view. There was She, there was Me, there was Women relinquished as Obsession. Helen Knode was inherently delightful. It sugarcoated her critique of my abysmal social skills, barnyard table manners and household helplessness. Helen was hilarious—even when pissed off. She called me “Big Dog” with love and “Zoo Animal” in exasperation. Low fury bubbled within
her and occasionally popped into rage. She revered my maleness. She glimpsed dark domestic dimensions early on.

I was impervious, imperious, oblivious. The manifestations were all preposterously male. I could earn big dough, but not read credit-card bills or balance checkbooks. I dug good chow, but refused to cook. I made exultant animal sounds in the john and treated the place as my personal trough. I grandstanded at family gatherings or skulked off to read sports-car magazines and brood in the dark. Social gigs left Helen frayed-wire tense. I pulpit-pounded and baited her left-leaning friends. I seized up around other men and dominated them with glares, right-wing barbs and general rancor. Helen nursed that low fury and blew up on occasion. I repented on occasion and reneged on my vows to change.

It was easy to repent and easier to renege. I saw Helen’s beefs as small when compared to the big blast of US. I was blithely disrespectful. It dishonored our marriage. I know it now. I didn’t know it then.

The Big Blast was all-encompassing. I felt safe and provided safety for a transcendent woman. Our daily rapport was astonishingly quick-witted and grounded in the big idea of the sacred ride of life. I turned Helen on to boxing and watched her become a rabid fan. We went to piano recitals at Carnegie Hall. Helen fed me drafts of her personal wisdom and watched me work them into my worldview. We went to films and further anthropomorphized Barko—New Canaan’s K-9 King.

We wrote books in separate rooms, under one roof. Helen attacked the discipline of the crime novel with cougarlike tenacity, native skill and Knodeian konviction. She pulsingly persevered. It thrilled me and vouched my great faith in her. She never took my name. She remained a Knode and not an Ellroy. I’m a matriarchalist now. I wasn’t
then. I wasn’t yet a Hilliker in my soul. I watched Helen write her way out of my shadow—as I worked triple overtime to make that shadow grow.

The political novel had incubated pre-Helen. It derived from my conscious decision to dump L.A. as my sole fictional locale. The preceding L.A. Quartet was my hometown elegy and another giant contain–Jean Hilliker compartment. Those books were all Bad Men In Love With Strong Women. Those books reeked of A Man Meets A Woman—as historical L.A. intercedes and demands that they change. Four novels, one Beethovenian manifesto. Fictional infrastructures complementing large public events. Earthquake combustions of physical love defining
everything
therein.