James Ellroy (8 page)

I finished my first book and started my second book a month later. I was consumed with a hyper-feverish urge to tell stories. Jean Hilliker had been dead for 21 years and six months. My
re
mystification had
de
mystified The Curse. I was
happy
. I had nullified the red-haired girl from Shitsville, Wisconsin. Now I could trump her. Now I could write her story as fiction and quash The Curse flat.

Heedless boy, how could you know?, fate calls you home late.

My new hero was a womanizing cop. He had predatory instincts and my seeker’s rationale. Karen’s presaged twin showed up early in the text. Jean Hilliker showed up dead, under a pseudonym. A guy based on my dad killed my mom. The cop meets a lawyer based on Penny. A dipshit kid represents me at age nine. The cop and the lawyer rescue his sanitized ass.

A family ripped asunder and a family reborn. Isn’t that sweet?

It worked dramatically. It further entombed Jean Hilliker and postponed the rush of The Curse.

I dedicated the second book to Penny. She swooned over the manuscript and declined to sleep with me that night.

Both books were sold to a publisher. The combined advance was chump change. I decided to move to New York. L.A. felt old and constricting. Fewer phone calls were coming in. I sensed that the women had found real lovers. My time in the dark felt reductive. I was unstoppable and none of Them was Her, She or The Other. New York would provide me with a whole new swirl.

I made some good-bye calls. None of the women called
me back. Penny and I had a last nooner. The hookers had vaporized off the Sunset Strip. The Hancock Park houses looked the same. I checked for Marcia Sidwell in half a dozen phone books and didn’t find her. The real Joan turned 16 that year. Dream-woman Karen turned 18. Erika the sorceress turned 17.

I looked Penny up in ’07. She was 54. She was married, had a teenaged son and lawyered for the state AG. She’d read most of my books. Our first phone chat was a catch-up.

She asked me how many ex-wives and daughters I had. I said, Two and none. She asked me if I still sat in the dark by the phone. I confirmed it. She said, You’ll always do that.

Paperback writer.

My first book was called
Brown’s Requiem
. It hit the stands in September ’81. It sold scant copies. There was no author photo and no woman with a cello represented. The cover sucked Airedale dicks. Fuck—a man with a gun and a golf course.

I found a basement pad in Westchester County. I got a caddy job at Wykagyl Country Club. The Big Apple was a train hop south. I blew my book cash on Hancock Park threads gauged for cold weather. I dressed up for jaunts to Manhattan. I knew She’d be there.

My book agent quit the biz and offered me some referrals. My third manuscript was white-hot and ready to unload. It was a sex-fiend cop versus sex-fiend killer turkey. Two male agents urged extensive rewrites. A female agent
looooved
the book and thought I was cute. New York, the go-go ’80s, a slinky woman of pedigree. She had hard brown eyes. She cleaned her glasses on her blouse tails and soft-focused her heart. We had dinner and a nightcap at her place. She played me a new record—the Pointer Sisters, with “Slow Hand.”

It was sexy shit. I believed the message of
make love now
.

The bedroom faced north. The Empire State Building filled the window. The spire was lit up red, white and green.
The woman and I undressed. This ardent arriviste had arrived.

The basement was my all-time darkest brood den. The lady upstairs was a conductor’s widow. Music kept lilting through my vents. She went too heavy on the Mozart and too light on the Liszt. I didn’t care. My publisher rejected my third novel. They found the sex-fiend cop and his feminist-poet girlfriend hard to believe. They were right. I wrote the book in a Let’s-ditch-L.A.-and-find-HER-in-New-York fugue state. My quasi-girlfriend agent sent the book to 17 other publishers. They all said nyet. My quasi-agent girlfriend dropped me as a client and pink-slipped me as a quasi-boyfriend. I owed her $150 for Xerox fees. I paid her off with extra golf-course bread.

A male agent coerced me into a rewrite. I went at it, reluctantly. Winter hit. Caddy season ended. I worked dishwasher and stockroom gigs and lived ultra-cheap. Manhattan magnetized me. The faces popped out of dense sidewalk traffic. The women were overcoated, hatted and scarved. I couldn’t see enough skin to read auras. Cold air and breath condensation. Voyeur prowls deterred.

I habituated coffee bars and got numbers. I got callbacks at a low percentage of my L.A. rate. I lived in the “burbs.” That was déclassé. You wrote a book. So? You schlep bags at a golf club. Stockbrokers are more my meat.

The burbs were sexile. I kept hearing that. I lacked lifestyle loot. I kept hearing
that
. Publishing parties got me
some
clout and indoor access. I saw the first Her at a Murray Hill bash.

She was a big preppy woman. She ran six feet and probably outweighed me. Tartan skirt, winter boots, burning eyes and freckles. She was THE OTHER, assuredly.

I walked to the can, combed my hair and adjusted my
necktie. I popped back to the party. She vanished—auf Wiedersehen.

I prowled the surrounding blocks and didn’t see her. I went back to the bash and interrogated the guests. I came on too persistent. The host suggested that I leave. I flipped his necktie into his face and skedaddled.

The night was cold. The moon was full. I walked up Fifth Avenue, baying. Passersby swerved around me. Dogs bayed back from swank apartments. I cut east on 43rd Street and hotfooted it toward Grand Central. I saw a woman hailing a cab just west of Madison. The Brooks Brothers’ windows golden-glowed her. She was blond. Her overcoat was mud-spattered. She wore red leather gloves. She was shivering. Her face was goose-bumped, her hair was askew, she’d chewed off her lipstick. Her nose was too big. Her chin was too strong. She was THE OTHER, uncontestably.

I fast-walked toward her. An eastbound cab pulled by me. The woman opened the door and got in the backseat. I sprinted, slid on my feet and hit the rear bumper. The woman looked around and saw me. I winced. My knees got ratched from the collision. I smiled. It spooked the woman. She looked away. The cab turned northbound and brodied on hard snow.

Easy come, easy go. It was cold. My knees hurt. I could relive the heavy heartache back at my pad. Douse the lights and spin the Chopin nocturnes. Baby, we were
close. It should have been
.

I limped to Grand Central. The waiting room was crowded and overheated. I bought my ticket and walked onto the train. I saw the woman. She was THE OTHER, incontrovertibly.

She was tall, sandy-haired and ten years older than I. She had grail-grabbing gray eyes and a gaunt and sweet face.

She was carrying a cumbersome portfolio. I helped her hoist it to the rack above the seats. She thanked me. We sat down together and talked.

Her name was Marge. She was a commercial artist. She’d been showing work samples at ad agencies all day. I asked her how it went. She said, Bad. She was in a dry spell. She inquired about my employment. I told her I’d written two published books and worked at a country club.
Your family? I don’t have one
.

She smelled like wet wool and dissipating eau de bath. She sat on my right. Her damp hair brushed my jacket. She asked me where I detrained. I said, Bronxville. I said, Your destination? She said, Tarrytown.

The train chugged through northern Manhattan and the Bronx. Milk-run stops slowed the passage and pressed time in on me. We talked and leaned toward each other. I tried to read Marge and sensed her reading me. It was soft-voiced. Small anecdotes made big points. We spoke contrapuntally and never interrupted. Our hands brushed. We retained the contact. The pact was synchronous.

I said something funny. Marge laughed, displayed bad teeth and covered her mouth. I showed her my bad teeth. She laughed and held my chin to get a better look. I put my hand on her hand and steadied it. She said, Your teeth are worse than mine, and let her hand drop.

We looked away and gave the moment a breather. The train jiggled. We bumped. I brain-scrolled the script.

I instill confidence, she rebukes rashness, we consolidate our hurt. Dogs on the bed and warm nights in cold climates. Her older-woman status and insecurity. My assurance of how much I loved it. Her body’s ripening currents over time. That eau de bath caught first thing in the morning.

The Bronxville stop approached. Marge and I shared a look. She said, I’m married.

I touched her shoulder and got up. Our knees brushed. My knees spasmed from the stunt with the cab. I got off the train, walked down the platform and stood by Marge’s window. She pressed her hand up to her side of the glass. I placed my hand over it.

The brood den enclosed me. Caddy gigs and chump jobs kept me borderline solvent. I wrote and chased.

The sex-fiend cop became a hardback trilogy. The feminist poet was supplanted by a brainy call girl and the cop’s resurrected ex-wife. The woman-with-a-cello book stayed in print. Ditto the my-mom-got-whacked-and-I’m-in-flight epic.

I was happy. I was grateful. I wrote books for minor remuneration and got minor acclaim. I was too circumspect to self-immolate and too tall and good-looking to lose. All my crazy shit stayed suppressed.

New York in the ’80s. Jesus—what a fucking ride!!!!!

The stories and sustained sobriety saw me through. The stories were all a man meets a woman and now he moves on. They reflected my life as a minor artist and self-absorbed failure in love. New York City was felicitously female. It was a dizzying disproportion. The face pool was bottomless and bottomlessly reflecting. I kept seeing myself.

My prescience had deserted me. My spiritual aptitude had gone south. I had seen three brilliant women within moments early on. One had given me a precious vignette before her own vanishing. I saw women less discerningly now. Creative contentment had induced callousness. My psychic holes were patched with my books on shelves and the wound of Jean Hilliker stitched. The Curse had been roadblocked by hard work and a curt dismissal of the debt. I was out looking for women looking back and up at me.

My watcher’s lifetime ran nearly four decades. My debilitating hunger was vaulted and lockboxed. I believed that it had given me mastery and an endless ticket to ride. Unbodied sex had almost proved fatal. I had sought death to prove my love to a ghost. It was the unconscious courting of reunion. I wanted to expunge our disparities and unite us as a whole.

I went at women because they were there and I wanted them. My revised standards denoted my flight from and back to the vault.

The stories I wrote controlled this self-phenomenon. I acceded to the strictures of the hard-boiled school and honed my craft. I perfected the art of womanizing simultaneously. I felt the weight of horrible circumstance upon me. It was huge. It did not justify my predation. I once scanned faces for rectitude. Now I read them for susceptibility to male charm.

One-night stands, short-term deals, longer-term girlfriends. Sex and no sex, brood sessions and phone calls. “No” was still “No”—but I heard it less and less. I was
that
attuned to female discontent.

I was a ruthlessly attuned listener and self-serving confidant. I was adept at dissecting devolving relationships and merciless in my critique of feckless men. Interrogator, interlocutor, pal. Rebuker of male weakness. The murdered mother’s son. The feminist with the right-wing chivalry code. The demonizer of all misogynistic men. The guy who always wanted to get laid. The guy who always let the women lean in for the first kiss.

Fuck—the phone rang a lot. I kept a C-note tucked away for late-night cabs to the Apple. They were all decent women. No STDs, no coke-dealer boyfriends, no Glenn Close with a knife. They
loooved
my I-want-a-wife-and-daughters spiel. It was abstractly true. It was specifically and equally true that I didn’t want it with
them
. I knew it
going in. I shouldn’t have lied. I’d possessed greater honesty in my unlaid and mystical state. I never bought their Let’s-see-how-shit-plays-out routine. That permissive jive got kicked out of me in L.A. I capitulated to the notion for more sex and softness. I rejected it in my heart of hearts—and my heart of heart cradles my conscience.

If sex is to be everything, then so She must be
. God kept saying that to me.
I did not bring you this far to drop you in an inappropriate bedroom. These women do not possess your ferocity. You’ll know her if and when you meet her. Be assured that I love these less fierce women just as much as I love you
.

Stand back now. Sex is the investing of your full soul.

I know it more consciously now. The revelation often curtains my current time alone in the dark.

I ached for the kinship of the body then. I wanted every touch, taste and breath I could have. I was too compromised to ever let it be just like that.

I wanted an unnamed woman. It was the inextinguishable flame of my life. I wanted to write a specific woman’s story. I
knew
her name: Elizabeth Short.

The Black Dahlia.

I had postponed the book. My debt to Betty Short intimidated me. I wrote six novels in breathless preparation.
I owed her
. I had to grant the woman a precious identity.

Betty Short died at 22. She was fatuous. She exemplified the silly-girl dreams indigenous to post-war America.
She
was
me
. She never got to outgrow her crazy shit and be somebody. She was all the Hancock Park girls with some fucked-luck chromosome inserted. She was all about invisibility. I never knew her, I never saw her, I only imagined her. I understood the male callousness and horrid pathology that mandated her demise. My predation provided the
insight more than my mother’s death did. My tender heart and smothering sense of conscience provided empathy. She died at 22. She was a kid. She was a wannabe actress with a chameleon personality and a penchant for telling whopping lies. She lied credibly on occasion. She had some knowledge of the limits of verisimilitude. She could have developed into a lie-for-profit storyteller. My depiction of Betty Short had to err on the side of honor glimpsed and foretold. She was visible in her invisibility. She died and spawned my kid crush and belated moral mandate. She preceded Joan, Karen and Erika and would in time lead them to me.