James Ellroy (3 page)

It was surveillance within surveillance. I breezed through coffee shops, used the can and breezed out. I entered lounge lairs verboten to children and eyeballed the bar. I saw women reflected in above-the-bar mirrors. I saw women twirl ashtrays and look pensive. I saw women dangle low-heeled shoes off one foot.

Samo High and Lincoln Junior High were close to my pad. Kids materialized on my block around 4:00 on school days. Boys and girls together. Older kids. The girls hugged their schoolbooks and swerved their breasts. One girl rested her chin on her books and swayed as she walked. She always lagged behind the other kids. She was pale. She had long dark hair and wore glasses. She lived one courtyard over from me. I didn’t know her name. I decided to call her “Joan.”

I spied on her bungalow. I saw her reading a few times. She sat in an easy chair crossways and wiggled her feet. I studied her family life. Her dad wore a Jew beanie and doted on her. Mom favored the doltish kid brother. I have thought about Joan and prayed for Joan for 53 continuous years. I considered her a prophet then. I was correct. The real-named woman Joan appeared 46 years later. She was that wish-named high school girl, physical point by physical point.

Both Joans are gone now. The real-named Joan had stunning gray-streaked hair. It’s been four years since I’ve seen her. I heard she had a child. I wonder how much more gray has swirled through the black.

We made it back to L.A. on gas fumes and a buck-98. The Buick was paint-pocked and minus that right mirror. I
returned to my roamings and ruminations. Jean Hilliker went back to bourbon and Brahms and her nurse gig at Airtek Dynamics.

I didn’t think about the magic book or the Nazi chick and her aborted knob job. I didn’t brew potions. I got pissed at my mother after church one cold morning. I told her to beware—my dad had hired Perry Mason to get custody of me. Jean Hilliker found this sidesplitting. She explained that Perry Mason was a TV fiction. Moreover: That beetle-browed actor’s a swish.

The old man kept bugging me to spy on my mother. He kept calling the crib and driving her batshit. She kept bringing up the move to the suburbs.

She persisted, she insisted, she blathered, she cajoled, she lied. “The Suburbs”: euphemism/propaganda/forked-tongue doublespeak. The San Gabriel Valley was blast-oven exile. Renegade rednecks and waterlogged wetbacks. A shit-kicker Shangri-la.

Of course, we moved there.

Of course, she died there.

Of course, I caused her death.

I throw myself at women and talk to them alone in the dark. They speak back to me. They have convinced me of my guilt.

We left right before Valentine’s Day. I slid a card embossed with a big red heart under Joan’s door. I bought the real-named Joan a Valentine’s card and a blouse 48 years later. We made love in a hotel suite and planned our wedding.

It ended soon after. I’m alone with Joan imagery now. I’m mentally watching her age and grow stronger. She’s inside me with all of the others, each and every one distinct.

My dad got me. He alleged fluke providence. He didn’t have to retain Perry Mason or bribe Jew judges. We were both relieved and gratified. The murder went unsolved. I dodged the issue of my guilt and breezed through a season of adult solicitude. Nobody blamed me.
There, there
. Isn’t he brave and cute?

Alas, no.

Summer ’58 unfurled smoggy and powder blue. I stalked girls at Lemon Grove Park. I stole a chemistry set, mixed powders randomly and sweetened my potions with Kool-Aid. I watched the
Criswell Predicts
TV show devotedly. Criswell was a fruity guy with a cape. He foresaw the future and spoke portentously. He exemplified the shuck of self-confidence. I studied him and honed my act under this boob-tube spell. The Mighty Ellroy has decreed: You will drink this sacred elixir and disrobe!

The caustic chemicals outwafted the Kool-Aid. No girls put their lips to my cups. I dodged murder-one indictments
again
. Credit me with avant-garde panache. My shtick dramatically preceded the Jim Jones Massacre.

A nearby five-and-dime sold various brands of X-ray eye glasses. I stole them all and tried them all and got nil results. I bopped out to the Andrews Hardware Store. They sold
infrared binoculars for night hunters.
I was a skin hunter
. The binoculars were expensive and too big to swipe. I aimed them at female patrons and saw my clothed prey in a red haze. A few women laughed and patted my head.
Awwwww
, isn’t he cute?

Alas, no.

I lived to read, brood, peep, stalk, skulk and fantasize. My reading focus zeroed in on kids’ crime books and lingered there all summer. Rich kids from happy families solved murders. Ordered worlds got resurrected and nobody got too fucked-up. There were no Weegee-like photos. Homicide was sanitized. No semen stains, no blood spray. No locked-limb rigor mortis.

Formulaic pap. My sublimated dialogue on the Jean Hilliker snuff. Triage therapy that prepared me for Mickey Spillane.

Mike Hammer was a chick magnet and a Commie-snuff artiste. He pistol-whipped left-wingers and bit women’s necks. He was dutifully dichotomized. He brutalized bad men and saved virtuous women. Mike Hammer’s quest became my moral credo. There was one major sticking point that vexed me.

Not all women expressed virtue. Some women were shrill and usurious. One woman was really a man with an implied donkey dick. Society women were One-Worlders and Comsymps. Mike Hammer slapped bad women around. Mike Hammer shot the big-dick he/she in cold blood. I could not read those passages. I could not endure depictions of violence on women. The same dynamic held with TV and film fare.
I could not see it
. I had to shut my eyes. I banished hurt women from my purview. I insisted that my maimed women remain off-page and offscreen. It was a bedrock of empathy within my overall kiddie-noir predation.

Hurt women brought me back to Her. Mental tenacity kept my guilt suppressed. I was a sex-crazed little boy
before
the death I mandated. I tamped down the upshot now. The fount of my will was, and is, the ability to exploit misfortune. Puberty boded. My hormones hosannaed. The stimulus of All Women All The Time forced me to contain the obsession. I was already a seasoned brooder and watcher. I started telling myself stories to rein it in.

Savior-of-women fantasies. Romantic tableaux set against history. Mike Hammer sans misogynist text.

I got hopped up on the Black Dahlia murder case. Starstruck girl hits L.A. and winds up severed and dumped. It’s another unsolved woman snuff. It’s L.A. ’47, again in SinemaScope.

I saved the Dahlia, alone in the dark. I killed her killer and resuscitated her with magic potions. I time-traveled. We dined at defunct hot spots resurrected from old photographs and impromptu imagery. We made love in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My dad and Rita Hayworth were our flunkies. They shagged us chow from Ollie Hammond’s Steak House. I wasn’t a skinny kid with emergent acne. I was Zachary Scott with that cool mustache and my dad’s giant dick. The sexual mechanics were virgin-boy fantasia. A filtering process came and went and often shut down my narrative steam. I would see my mother in bed with Hank Hart. I would blot the image out and pray it away.

The Dahlia was a frequent co-star. I denied her martyred kinship with Jean Hilliker. A morbid subtext slammed me to Dahlialand. The same death sense shocked me and boomeranged me to my present-day world. I created stirring unions with local girls and their mothers.

I lived in a hotbox dive adjoining swank Hancock Park. Ritzy houses were arrayed in three directions. My dad and I
owned a baleful beagle. She was dominant. She bit us and kept us in line. She defied housebreaking. She turned our pad into a dog-dung
demimonde
. The scent socked itself in and accreted. I took the dog for long late-night walks and peeped Hancock Park windows.

The girls went to posh private schools. They wore pastel uniform dresses by day and prepped-out civvies in the evenings. Madras shirtwaists and tartan kilts. Gingham button-downs inherited from big brothers. Sherbet-shade gowns for cotillions.

The girls were stunning in their collective pedigree. The girls were individually lovely as I peeped them in prosaic context. I had a secret compact with them. My access was God-like. It fueled my hunger and assuaged my privation in alternating heartbeats.

I took the girls home with me and talked to them in the dark. They spoke back to me in candid whispers. I concocted kid stories suffused with social-class struggle and love-conquers-all elation. My girls were never standard pretty or comely in prescribed ways. I was always looking for the physical flaw or distinction that marked gravity. I looked in window after window at face after face. I was looking for one face. There can be only one. Thus she will be me and she will be THE OTHER.

“The Other”: My real self made whole by an image. My hurt salved by a loving female touch.

Voyeur. Pious Protestant boy. Fatuous seeker.

It played out
aaaaall
in my head.

I took the girls home. Their mothers found me and pushed me into walls, threw me down and
had
me. Their hunger was my hunger expressed through their haunted aggression. They squeezed my face. Their hands hurt me. Our mouths clashed. Our teeth scraped. Our nakedness was blurred by a shutter stop inside me. I was frail and
unequal to their bounty. It scared me then. The roughness unhinged me. The absence of a narrative line left me weightless. I didn’t know what it meant
then
. I’ll ascribe meaning
now
. They wanted me because I sensed who they were and went at them with that raging instinct. A dead woman fed me the knowledge. They were indistinguishable and each and every one unique. My moral intent was gender-wide and paid for in blood—frail boy bound credible and ghastly deep.

Women were everywhere and nowhere. My dad hid his girlfriends. Our dog-shit dive deterred assignations there. I overheard his “Hey, baby” calls and inferred fuck-pad dates. He had no family. Jean Hilliker’s kin were back in Whipdick, Wisconsin. I went to school and church because I had to and because there were women there. It got me out of the dog den and into the fresh air. Human interaction momentarily rewired my fantasy life. I was forced to sit, listen and talk. Matriculation led me to second-rung obsessions. American history and classical music started tearing through me. They were subsidiary fixations. They momentarily fogged my all-women mind-set.

I co-opted them fast. My woman-savior tales took on verisimilitude and topical oomph. Beethoven wrote me scores. Our rhapsodies out-juiced the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets.

I
had
to talk to people.
All
people scared me. Women and girls scared me much more than men and boys. I addressed all males with braggadocio undercut with tight-throat fear. I ducked my head, made provocative statements and cut in and out of discourse quick. I could not talk to females beyond non sequiturs. I flopped at talking
to
boys about
girls
. Their chat was too graphic, too uninformed and jejune
without my puerile grandeur. I stayed pent-up into raging adolescence. Age ten to age thirteen was an onset-of-puberty blur. I grew tall and stayed commensurately unbodied. A neighbor boy introduced me to masturbation. I discovered it astoundingly late. That fact explicates my mental predisposition and horror of real sex. I reinvested sex and postponed approach every time I saw a female who might be The Other. I was a Scottish pastor’s grandson and the scion of farmers and clergymen who took to the bottle instead of the flesh. I would have it all in due time and nearly die from it. My mind and soul met my right hand at age 13. It all accelerated. Jean Hilliker moldered in the backwash of fresh hand technique and constant stimuli.

Junior high was high-octane. It featured Hancock Park girls of high lineage and Jewish girls from Shtetlville West. I saw the wish-named Joan reborn in dozens of Semitic incarnations. I stalked Donna Weiss around Beverly and Gardner. I saw her go to synagogue shindigs and Gilmore Park. She was blondish and curvy. Her features were too big for her face. She wore a demure bikini poolside. Her tan deepened through the summer of 1961. The Berlin Wall fracas almost took the world down. I craved the easy out of nuke devastation. I loved Donna, Cathy, Kay and many window faces seen. I yearned for mental monogamy. It drove me batshit. I wanted one image captured for endless consolation and sex.

There were
too
many girls and women. Hancock Park was ultra-swank and a hotbed of sex within view and reach.

Cathy Montgomery was pure Hancock Park. Kay Olmsted was fringe Hancock Park. The tall brunette. The short blonde with the hurricane-hurled hazel eyes. Villager shirt-dresses for Cathy. A black beret for preppy beatnik Kay.

I hoarded paper-route money and sent both girls big floral bouquets. I was 14. It was my Summer ’62 D-day
Assault. The
D
stood for desperate and delirious. I got blow-off/thank-you notes back.

I became a B&E artiste years later. I snuck inside Cathy’s house and Kay’s house repeatedly
then
. The notion to enter and prowl hadn’t hit me yet. My desperation and delirium had yet to peak.

My teenage life stood in arrears. My acceleration was all internalized. I struggled through junior high and into senior high. I had shifting cliques of loser friends and no friends. I taped pictures of Beethoven over my bed and pondered our genius. He composed his greatest music for his “Immortal Beloved.” Her identity remained as mysterious as The Other for me. Beethoven understood my deep loneliness and sorrow. His deafness inspired visionary thoughts unknown to mortal men.
My
deafness was voluntary. Beethoven dug that. I often played the adagio of the Hammerklavier Sonata before I went peeping. Beethoven approved more than condemned the practice. Sometimes he’d scowl at me and shake his finger. He never quite told me to grow up and pull my head out of my ass.

I was deaf to the real world and anything that contradicted my monomaniacal private agenda. The 1960s social scene was pixilated newsprint and no more. Nothing in the real world touched me or fazed me. Jack Kennedy got elected, got laid, got whacked. What,
me
worry? Fuck—that’s Joanne Anzer. We’ll almost
do
it in the Summer of Love. Now she’s on TV. Fuck—that’s
her
. She’s doing the wah-watusi on the Lloyd Thaxton Hop!!!