James Ellroy (2 page)

I leaned close. She misunderstood my intent and ruffled
my hair. I wanted to nuzzle her and taste the bourbon. She didn’t know that.

I dozed off. Jean Hilliker dozed off. I woke up and watched her sleep. She was 42 now. She was boozing more. It showed on her face. She went back to Hilliker, post-divorce decree. It stigmatized me. Her pride, my bifurcated identity. I killed off the dregs of her highball and ate the cherry. It gave me a residual jolt. I saw a woman enter a lavatory at the rear of the plane.

I traipsed over and perched near the door. Passing adults ignored me. Women used the facility. I hovered and heard the door locks click. The women exited and scowled at me. I read biblical censure on their faces. One woman forgot to lock the door. I barged in accidentally on purpose. The woman shrieked. I saw sheer nylon stockings and some skin.

Madison, Wisconsin, was lake-bound and penguin-shit cold. A snow-covered field flanked Aunt Leoda’s house. I got into a snowball fight the first day. An ice-crusted ball busted up my face and loosened some wobbly teeth. I holed up in a back bedroom and brooded.

My cousins were off being happy kids at Christmas. Jean Hilliker was off with plain-Jane Aunt Leoda and porky Uncle Ed. Uncle Ed sold Buicks. My mother purchased a red-and-white sedan from him. The plan: drive the fucker back to L.A. after New Year’s.

I brooded. The practice entailed long stints alone in the dark. I thought about girls then. I brain-screened girls I’d seen at school and at church. It was a pure visual panoply. I did not impose story lines. I have formally brooded through to this moment. I lie in the dark, shut my eyes and think. I think about women primarily. I quite often tremble and
sob. My heart swells in sync with women’s faces merged with improvised stories. History intercedes. Great public events run counterpoint to deep human love. Women glimpsed for half seconds carry a spiritual weight equal to my long-term lovers.

Bumfuck, Wisconsin, was a drag. My mouth hurt. The fucking snowball sliced my lips. I couldn’t kiss Christine Nelson from school. My dad said he knew a TV babe named Chris Nelson. She was married to a Hebe named Louie Quinn. Chris was a nympho. She flashed her snatch at him at some movie-biz party.

The adults came home. My mother brought me a library book. It was wholesome kids’ fare, full of mystical shit. It pertained to witchcraft, spells and curses. My mother turned the bedroom lights on. I had to read rather than brood.

The book jazzed me. I tore through it quicksville. It felt like it was written for me. The mystical jive derived from my ancestral home of Shitsville, Great Britain. Magic potions abounded. Warlocks guzzled secret brews and had visions. This wowed the incipient boozehound and dope fiend in me. The overall text buttressed religious lore I believed in then and believe in today.

There’s a world we can’t see. It exists separately and concurrently with the real world. You enter this world by the offering of prayer and incantation. You live in this world wholly within your mind. You dispel the real world through mental discipline. You rebuff the real world through your enforced mental will. Your interior world will give you what you want and what you need to survive
.

I believed it then. I believe it now. My many years in the dark have confirmed it as a primary article of faith. I was nine then. I’m 62 now. The real world has frequently intruded on my spells in the dark. That book formally sanctioned
me to lie still and conjure women. I did it then. I do it still. That book described the destructive power of formal invective. The notion of The Curse did not feel prophetic in late 1957. It was simply a footnote to my license to fantasize.

I have a superbly honed memory. My time in the dark has enhanced my process of minutely detailed recollection. My mental ruthlessness asserted itself early on.

I needed a Curse a few months later. I was insolently well prepared.

The new Buick was a full-dress road hog. It had wide whites and more chrome than the
Plunder Road
death sled. I wanted to zoom it back to L.A. and see my dad. I wanted to resume my fantasy life back on my home turf.

The adults went nightclubbing on New Year’s Eve. A German immigrant girl baby-sat my cousins and me. She was 17 or 18, acne-addled and plump. She wore a reindeer blouse and a flannel skirt with a pink embroidered poodle. She emitted Hitler-Jugend vibes.

She tucked me in last. The bedroom door was shut. Her fluttery presence felt un-kosher. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted me. The vibe devolved. She pulled down the covers and sucked my dick.

I dug it and recoiled from it in equal measure. I withstood thirty seconds and pushed her off. She talked a Kraut blue streak and bolted the room. I killed the lights and brooded out the bad juju.

I felt sideswiped, more than assaulted. I recalled the magic-spell book. I figured I could brew a blank-memory elixir. I could create X-ray eye powder at the same time. I got bilked on those glasses. My secret eyeball blend would set that straight.

I fell asleep in ’57 and woke up in ’58. Jean Hilliker and I split Madison in snow flurries. It worsened a few hours in. We crossed the Iowa border. The road froze. The snow turned to ice. My mother pulled over and bundled me in the backseat. Cars lost traction and brodied on the highway. Wheels slid on slick blacktop. Low-speed collisions multiplied. Fool drivers smoked their tires down to bare tread and skittered into cornfields.

Jean Hilliker
winked
at me. She was
performing
. I’ve got the entire sequence freeze-framed. She wore a tartan scarf over her hair and a brown overcoat. She pulled back onto the road.

I watched. She chain-smoked as she maneuvered. She worked the pedals in her stocking feet and gained ground in low gear. Cars caromed, bumped and rolled backward all around us. Jean rode the slow lane and sliced mud with her right tires. Ice shards bombarded the windshield. Jean ran the defroster and melted the ice on contact. The car was steam-room hot. Jean ditched her overcoat. She wore a short-sleeved blue blouse underneath it. I noticed how pale and lovely her arms were.

We skidded in and out of mud troughs. We clipped rural fence posts and sheared off our right sideview mirror. Jean scanned the road for no-ice patches. She stayed ahead of back-sliding cars and kept her eyes peeled for new ones. She gripped the steering wheel loosely and braced it with her left knee. She smoked cigarettes, white-knuckled.

The weather shifted. The ice mulched and set the road traversable. We turned into an auto court and got a room for the night. It featured timber walls inset with plaster moldings. My mother found a string quartet on the radio. We were sweat-soaked from her boffo play with the defroster. I showered first and put on pajamas.

She felt different that night. She overtook my dad within
my crazy heart for a moment. Her eyes were tight and gray-flecked some new way. She had smiled and went “Oops” every time she banged a mailbox.

I pretended to sleep. She walked out of a steam cloud and toweled herself off, naked. I slitted my eyes and memorized her body for the ten zillionth time. She never hid her nakedness. She never flaunted it. She was a registered nurse. Her nakedness was always deadpan working on brusque. She was a woman of science and undoubtedly equated sex with cellular function. She wanted me to ask her the facts-of-life questions. She wanted to vouch her stance as an enlightened mother and the first Hilliker to attend college. I didn’t want abstract responses. I wanted to know about Her and sex in an enticing manner with a mystical bent. I wanted God and Her and her separate world in perfect proportion.

I had seen her in flagrante before. This geek Hank Hart was her first post-divorce squeeze. I got some of the mechanics down and stood back from the doorway. Hank Hart had lost a thumb in a drill-press mishap. My mother had lost the tip of one nipple to a post-childbirth infection. I skimmed the Bible and my dad’s scandal rags for a sex-with-missing-body-parts parlay. I got adultery condemned and Sinuendo. I went back to eyeballing women for my answers.

We cleared the storm zone the next day and turned right in Texas. I scoped out girls in passing cars and scratched my balls on the sly. My mother said we might move in February. She was hipped to a house in the San Gabriel Valley. Our gelt was running thin. We were splurging on cheeseburgers and rustic motels. The Buick slurped high-test gas through four fat carburetors. We laid up in Albuquerque and went to a movie. It was a seagoing turkey called
Fire Down Below
. The stars: Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon and Rita Hayworth.

I pointed to Hayworth’s name on the screen. My mother
glared
at it. My dad went back to the ’30s with
La Roja Rita
. It pre-dated his circa ’40 hookup with Jean. Rita was half Anglo, half Mex aristocrat. My dad was working as a croupier in T.J. Rita’s father hired him to watchdog Rita and deter mashers. My dad told me that he poured Rita the pork. I cannot verify this assertion. My dad
did
enjoy a long run as Rita’s chief stooge. Rita sacked his lazy ass, circa ’50.

My parents defied easy classification. Jean Hilliker hit L.A. in late ’38. She won a beauty contest, tanked a screen test and returned to Chicago. She lived in a big pad with four other nurses. A beefy bull dyke ruled the roost. Jean got pregnant, tried to scrape herself and hemorrhaged. A doctor chum undid the damage. She had an affair with him, dumped him and married a rich stiff. Marriage #1 fizzled pronto. Jean remembered how good L.A. looked and caught a bus. A friend knew a ginch named Jean Feese. Jean F. was wed to a hunky drifter named Ellroy.

They met, they sizzled, they shacked. My dad dumped Jean #1. Jean #2 got pregnant in ’47. They got married in August. A troubled pregnancy foretold my rapturously troubled and memoir-mapped life.

I never
got
Rita Hayworth. She was plucked, lacquered, varnished, depilatoried, injected and enhanced. She shit-canned my dad before the Hilliker-Ellroy marriage imploded. She was my dad’s defaulting deus ex machina. He had a sweet deal with Rita. She blew it—not him. There were more sweet deals ahead. Other Ritas were out there. He would glom himself one.

It was loser shtick to a dipshit child predisposed to believe it. I heard it expressed plaintively, whiningly and disingenuously. Jean Hilliker heard it shrieked, sobbed and bellowed—behind bedroom doors closed to me. She underestimated my ability to eavesdrop and extrapolate. She did not credit me with a knack for decoding sighs. She went at
my father with less volume and pathos. I watched her sadness and fury build from the inside out. I never
heard
her say it. I watched her think it and suppress it from the outside in.

You’re weak. You live off of women. I won’t let you take much more of me.

I knew it was true—then.

I sided with him—then.

I hated her then. I hated her because
he
was
me
and once he was gone I’d be alone with the breadth of my shame. I hated her because I wanted her in unspeakable ways.

I was an Ellroy then. I’m a Hilliker now.
Our
pride, my bifurcated identity.

My father made me his co-defiler. His mantra was,
She’s a drunk and a whore
. I cravenly acceded to the dictum. He told me he had private eyes tailing my mother. I believed it then. I know it was hoo-ha now. It didn’t matter then.
Cherchez la femme
. The imagined detectives led me to women.

All solitary men were detectives. All male pedestrians were detectives. All men hiding behind newspapers were specifically tailing me. My dad employed at least one whole detective agency. An equal number of gumshoes were stalking my mother.

My father was out discovering the next Rita Hayworth. His job description was “Film-Biz Slave” and “Hollywood Bottom-Feeder.” He was tapping some fantasy windfall. He scored the big bowl of bread that Sergeant Bilko and the Kingfish fell short of in pratfalls and greed. Private fuzz ran pricey. My dad loved me
that
much. A flatfoot fleet safeguarded me. Fleet #2 tailed the round-heeled redhead to juke joints and hot-sheet motels. Moral turpitude was a tough sell. Kiddie-court judges usually sided with the mom. My dad had film-biz clout. He had the lowdown on bribable Jew judges. He just slipped Perry Mason a fat retainer.

That wowed me. I watched
Perry Mason
every week. My case might wind up on TV.

My school was on Wilshire and Yale. My pad was off Broadway and Princeton. Santa Monica had semi-brisk foot traffic. I walked to school most days and dawdled home indirectly. My roaming range was two miles in circumference. Wilshire was dotted with cocktail caves and auto courts. I grooved the Broken Drum, the Fox and Hounds, and the Ivanhoe. I loitered outside and watched the detectives enter and split. I gave them perfunctory glances and shifted my gaze to any and all nearby women. I confirmed that my dad’s goons were on the job and went wild with the adjoining scenery.

It’s a fifty-year-old blur in ’50s film-process color. It’s etched in VistaVision and Sinerama. There’re stop frames and jump cuts that signify new stimuli and depict my divided attention.

Some details remain ripe. Uni High coeds pour off the Wilshire bus. One girl dangles her schoolbooks, cinched by a brown belt. I side-tail a chubby girl. She’s bare-armed. One dress strap keeps falling, she keeps retrieving it. She’s got dark stubble, all powder-flecked. I watch women enter rooms at the Ivanhoe. One woman is Italianate and picks at her stocking runs. Bus stops were good spots for repeat eyeball business. I saw the same detective at Santa Monica and Franklin several times. He was always chatting with a neighbor lady. She wore a dark green dress one day and showed boocoo back. The zipper was stuck above her bra strap. She told the man she worked in Beverly Hills. She carried a briefcase instead of a purse. I placed her age as Jean Hilliker’s age. She always smoked a last cigarette and dropped it ahead of the right-front bus wheel.

I waited for her one evening. I was
nine
years old and just that obsessed. The westbound bus dropped her across the street from the outgoing bus stop. I tailed her to a crib on
Arizona. She opened the door and saw me. She gave me a schizy look and shut the door. I never saw her again.