James Ellroy (5 page)

A stealable drug sold over the counter. A seven-year search engine in my quest for Her.

I swallowed inhaler wads and brain-screened faces. I held down sporadic employment. I got a job at the KCOP-TV mailroom. I stole cash sent in through the mail, banged up the company van and got sacked. I passed out handbills for a Serbo-Croatian psychic. I got a job at an all-night porno bookstore. I raided stacks of beaver-photo books for pictures that might be Her. I stole beaver books and plundered them on my inhaler trips. I tapped the till and got fired for my thefts.

None of the pictures were Her. There was no Her, no She, no The Other. I did not know it
then
. I could not stop looking
then
. I was unstoppable unto the death.

I developed a tolerance for the wads. It took eight to twelve to get me sufficiently high. I saw women’s faces and
heard taunting voices in my head. They accused me of inflicting The Curse and killing my mother. The shit fucked with my lungs. I got pneumonia twice. Two-week jolts at County General cured me and taught me nothing. I walked out the door and stole more inhalers. I resumed my search for Her again.

I consumed cotton wads in extreme quantity and prowled the streets that had enticed me since childhood. I knew all of the houses, many of the windows and the precise location of prior-seen faces. New windows alerted me to new women. I saw familiar faces—older now, and oddly grave. I retreated to dump hotel rooms and parks and got alone with Them in the dark. The voices in my head got worse. I veered very close to psychosis. I stuffed cotton in my ears and heard the voices that much louder.

I bolted my enclosed settings and walked long distances to deflect the sound. I twitched, lurched and betrayed my mental state. People shied away from me. Women stared briefly and averted their eyes. I always tried to note their faces without scaring them. I know that I always failed at this.

I developed a lung abscess. A giant pus ball ate up my left pleura. I stumbled into a hospital. A month of intravenous antibiotics and daily back pounding killed the fucking thing.

The seven-year search.

For Her, She, The Other.

I survived. God has always had a job for me. I’m the guy who lives to tell you the story.

I met a woman in ’73. We ran into each other at a coin Laundromat. I was tailspinning as she was living upright. She was unaccountably kind to me.

Her name was Marcia Sidwell. She was a year younger
than I and worked as a registered nurse. She wore glasses and had reddish blond hair.

We had three conversations at one-week intervals. Marcia initiated the first. She was properly friendly and never flirtatious. I knew that she had surmised my outdoor lifestyle and that she did not judge me unduly. I dredged up a semblance of decorum in an effort to sustain her acquaintance.

Marcia spoke more than I did. We discussed Watergate. Marcia thought my disdain for rock and roll was reflexive and peculiar. She had a somewhat dubious boyfriend. She was vexed by the general male reaction to her big breasts and commended me for not staring. She was not being coy or provocative. I never mentioned my red-haired nurse mother and her 15-year-old death. Marcia had startlingly bright blue eyes. I showed her my grimy Beethoven bust. She touched my arm for a second.

I showed up for a fourth chat. Marcia washed her clothes at the same time every week. I assumed that she’d pull up in her Volkswagen.

She didn’t show that day. I waited every day for a month. Marcia never showed up again.

It devastated me. I figured I’d said or done something wrong or betrayed my acute dissolution. My self-absorbed/guilty-boy logic was entirely specious. Marcia found a Laundromat closer to home or opted for some other convenience. Our acquaintanceship meant the world to me and not much to her.

She told me who she was and treated me justly. I wish I could have done something stunningly bold in return.

February ’58—the San Gabriel Valley as the Third World–cum–Appalachia. Jean Hilliker and I land in the hellhole hub.

Our house was moldy and confining. Pervasive mildew made me retch and sneeze. Our pachuco-redneck neighbors made my pious soul quake and my baby-pervert skin crawl.

Jean Hilliker was boozing more. She always reeked of rotgut bourbon. She got me that loser dog for my birthday. I knew it came with a price.

She sat me down on the couch. She was half-gassed. She laid out a line of shit pertaining to my rite of passage.
You’re a young man now. You’re old enough to choose. Would you rather live with your dad or with me?

I said, My dad.

She hit me.

I fell off the couch and gouged my head on a glass coffee table. Blood burst out of the cut. I called her a drunk and a whore. She knelt down and hit me again. A shutter stop blinked for her. She covered her mouth and pulled away from it all.

Blood trickled into my mouth. I recalled the book, I issued The Curse, I summoned her dead. She was murdered three months later. She died at the apex of my hatred and equally burning lust.

Her crime was passionate and thus forgivable. She inflicted her own damage and repented in true haste. My punishment was callous and premeditated. I parceled my rage and mystically summoned a killer. We are as one in our hunger and rectitude. I owe her for every true thing that I am. I must remove The Curse I have placed on her and on myself. I must revoke her status as The Other.

Home again.

I looped back to L.A. in ’06. I’d spent 25 years in points north and east and plowed a return course. Two divorces and a crack-up were part of it. My survival sense played in. The real-life Joan dumped me in San Francisco. A married woman I’d met for two seconds lived in L.A. Joan and I had wanted a daughter. The married woman had two daughters. That ghost of a chance pushed me the rest of the way home.

The film version of
The Black Dahlia
was out. It was a critical and box-office dud and a paperback smasheroo. My publisher scheduled a reading at Skylight Books in East Hollywood.

I looked good and felt good and tingled with I’m Back! resurgence. Spirits were nudging me. I missed Joan and my second ex-wife, Helen. I had seen the married woman the night before. Our rapport mutualized. We discussed daughterhood as reality and unfulfilled longing. I pulled the Let’s-have-lunch ploy. I doubted that she’d call me. Marcia Sidwell was on my mind in a big way. Thirty-odd years and three dialogues. Marcia
owned
a big and separate part of me.

I’d made stabs at finding her and always came up short. I spent dough on private eyes and deployed my cop pals. I
wanted to see her and say thank you. I wanted to do something costly and
large
. Maybe she had a sick kid who needed my spare kidney. Two seconds with those bright blue eyes would tear my heart up.

Skylight was packed. I counted 200 people. A full third were female. A bookstore guy introduced me. My fans went nuts. I noticed a luminous redhead about 50. The guy beside her radiated stooge boyfriend.

I walked to the lectern. I thought, Fuck it, let’s try.

I said, “Stop me now. It’s going to my head. I need a strong woman to tame me with her love and walk all over me in high black boots.”

My fans dug it. A few women whistled. I read from my book, took questions and repeated the line four times.
Get it? I’m scrounging affection
.

It was a knockout performance by my own exalted standards. I signed books for the folks afterward. The redhead waltzed the boyfriend by and showed me her boots. I groaned and clutched the lectern. Seven women slipped me their phone numbers.

I called three of them. We had dinner dates on consecutive evenings. I told them I was between obsessions and needed an intimate friend.
Am I being too abrupt or in any way offensive?

All three said no and evinced delight. Instant intimacy evolved. The anticipation and hope were softer and weightier than the acts.

I gave another reading the following week. I was played out and boffo regardless. The married woman hadn’t called me. I brooded on her incessantly. I stretched out on my bed and talked to her. We discussed daughterhood. Beethoven glowered above us.

The bookstore crowd dispersed. I walked back to my car, dead-ass tired. I noticed a woman at a sidewalk café.

She was the right age. She had similar coloring and identical deportment.

I caught her eye and said, “Marcia?”

She blinked and said, “No.”

The married woman called me the next day.

I want to hold your hand
.

That was the concluding shtick. You sat through the drunk-and-dopealogs and laced up for the Lord’s Prayer. Ninety minutes of confession for twenty seconds of skin. I had to reconstruct my life. That felt like drudge work. The dykey redhead felt like momentary payoff.

My first AA meeting. Monday, August 1, 1977.

I was 29. I had survived the seven-year run of inhaler wads and psychoses. I quit booze, weed and pharmaceutical uppers. My new regime was abstinence. It boded horrific. I quit shoplifting and breaking into houses. I had not had a spiritual awakening. Brain-screening women’s faces had almost killed me. My compulsive appetite had now hung a 360. The straight and narrow beckoned. A ruthless self-interest defined my apostasy. I wanted women. I wanted to write novels. Sobriety meant efficacy. I couldn’t advance my agenda in my current raggedy-ass state.

The meeting dragged on. Most people smoked. The fumes tickled my healing lung tissue. A guy called the redhead “Leslie.” She looked like a low-rent Marcia Sidwell. The hand-holding ended. Leslie never glanced at me. You came that far for
this?

•    •    •

Things weren’t
that
bad. My chronic cough was cured. I was young and heroically resilient. I had a caddy gig at the Bel-Air Country Club. I had a twenty-dollar-a-week hotel room. The communal bathrooms and shower were down the hall. The in-room sink was a pissoir.

A new Beethoven poster loomed above my bed. I played the Master’s soaring psalms on an eight-track contraption and brooded. A late-blooming moral sense kept me from peeping. I
peered
now. I roamed Westwood Village, stared and stopped short of approach. I possessed no notion of a social code. The world was still hazy. The sexual revolution applied to other folks. The permissiveness of the era belonged to the cute and the glib. I was a tenuously reformed pervert, adrift.

My sex urge had almost killed me. It was drug-driven and solitary. It’s a still-memorable blur of female faces. I credited God with the save and pondered His mission for me. It came down to write books and find The Other. That was 33 years ago. The faces swirl inside me decades later. The women remain as images seeking a narrative thread. They did not know who I was then and do not know who I am now. Real women have joined them. Real experience and active discourse have in no way dissolved the blur. My lustful heart has expanded to keep them all in.

I almost died. I attributed my malady to The Curse. It was divine punishment and collateral damage to the death I’d caused. I spun shameful fantasies of Jean Hilliker and paid a near-fatal price for that Curse-derived transgression. My mother was 19 years dead. I carried no love for her and ignored my debt to her. I feared her power and nullified it by banishing her from my mind.

My hotel room was narrow and underfurnished. I kept it spotlessly clean. I rarely turned the lights on. I played Beethoven and his lesser acolytes and brain-talked to women, dead sober.

Faces whooshed by from my childhood. The Hancock Park girls were there. The wish-named Joan appeared often. I mentally aged her to 38 years and reveled in her power as a prophet. The real Joan turned 12 that year.

It was mental brushwork. I was creating a visual palette with a newly urgent sound track. I was desperate to write stories and touch women for real. I heard women’s confessions in AA. I weighed their depictions of gender bias and sexual trauma, unfettered by notions of male supremacy. I conversed with them in the dark. I was consoler, interlocutor, friend. Seduction was mutually proffered in deep empathy. Sex expressed our lives of thwarted hunger up to that first kiss.

The fantasy was endlessly repetitive and easily transferred. I went from face to face, in search of probity and sex transcendent. I embraced woman images discerningly and abandoned them callously. Sobriety enhanced my fantasist’s prowess and fucked with my powers of suppression. I felt voodooized. It was a crybaby crisis and punch-the-wall fury fit. It drove me to the point of action.

With the knowledge that women would not read my mind and thus detect my prayerful condition.

With the knowledge that my moral intent vibed pure lust.

With the knowledge that women did not view me as a savior and were, in fact, terrified of me.

I lurked in bookstores near the UCLA campus. I read women’s faces for character and a sense of humor that might mark them as susceptible to my charm. I miscalculated here. I possessed no charm and oozed nervous tension. My pickup lines all pertained to books and were all levied on women who appeared to be self-assured and brainy. They had survived the stringent first cut: no heavy makeup, no nail polish, no sexy chick affect or rock-and-roll trappings. I was seeking a blend of wholesomeness and hot passion. I was looking for a fellow autodidact oblivious to trend.

The first run of women rejected me fast. I betrayed myself instantly. Conversation sandbagged me. My mouth twitched, my beady eyes burned, my jerky body set off alarms. My glasses slid down my nose. I displayed stubby teeth caused by losing fistfights and poor dental care. I was an SOS call. Women knew it immediately. The brushoffs convinced me to readjust my criteria and up the spiritual ante.

Only lonely and haunted women would grok my gravity. They were sister misfits attuned to my wavelength. Only
they
grooved internal discourse and sex as sanctified flame. Their soiled souls were socked in sync with yours truly.

My rationale was
that
convoluted. My love seeking was that mystical and predatory. I threw myself at a second run of record-store women. They possessed less than stellar world-standard looks and were stunningly un-svelte. I dug them and wanted them anyway.