James Ellroy (7 page)

The woman played the cello. She looked like the wish-named Joan. The real Joan turned 14 that year.

The fictive woman’s body language derived from hookers in assessment. Her contours were those of AA women I had brain-screened in the nude. Her temperament was that of Jean Hilliker. Her gaze prophesied the real Joan and my
married lover Karen. There were brief glimpses of the conjuress Erika.

The plot was a crime-book patchwork. The locale was a rigorously de-slime-zoned L.A. There was no El Monte. I didn’t have the balls. There was no Hancock Park, with all its attendant perversion.

I avoided Hancock Park. I stayed north of 1st Street, south of 6th Street, west of Highland and east of Western. I zoomed by that Laundromat once a month to look for Marcia Sidwell. She was never there. They were quick-search missions. I swooped by and got out.

Verboten! Don’t do it! You’re a new man! Barbed-wire noose, poisoned well, danger ahead!

The houses were still beacons. Remnants of the girls still raged there. I could not let myself go back.

Women fall asleep first. Penny taught me that. Lover’s insomnia—a primer.

She’s right beside you, she’s naked, you’ve already made love. She’s insensate. You’re wired. You’re talking to her. She’s oblivious. You didn’t pay her to listen. She’s not talking back.

Penny’s bed was short and narrow. I was long-limbed and love-looped and liked to sprawl. Penny had perfected her sleep-with-men posture. She always rolled away on her side and created a gap. It was symbolic. She reposed within inches. It was somewhere off Planet Earth.

I scooted closer. I let my foot brush her leg. I had reinstigated contact. Then I started talking to her in the dark.

About her, about me, about
Us
. About her law-school studies and my book in progress. I spent occasional weekend nights at her whim. Penny would sleep in. I got up predawn and zoomed to the golf course.

The bed was a minefield. I never slept.

I craved more contact. I ran breathlessly anxious. She never said she loved me. The relationship was tenuous and unpredictable. I lay there and anticipated movement. A knee tucked my way marked confirmation. I clenched my bladder until 5:00 a.m. I fantasy-talked to Penny. I fantasy-talked
to other women and felt guilty about it. Turnovers filled me with gratitude. Pull-aways filled me with dread. She’s your first sober love and she won’t say the words. It’s not supposed to be this way. You had it all planned out.

We met in June ’79. I was six months off of the whore patrol and five months into my first book. I oozed self-confidence. It was fully justified. I was certifiably hot shit. I rocked with a sense of destiny and exuded a raucous panache. My clergymen ancestors streaked through my soul and anointed me with their calling. They had pulpits. I had my book and AA lecterns. I now had
two
stories to tell.

I told my life story to a captive audience. I became a dazzling public speaker at the get-go. Years of mental rehearsal had prepared me. A conscious resolve shaped my testimony. I turned my sex urge to death’s door into comedy. I omitted certain details.

No murdered mother. No bloody coughing fits. The jack-off man and his loony lust—
that’s
picaresque.

It got me laughs from the AA folks. The book gave me that life’s composite woman with the cello.

My hero meets her in a park I used to sleep in. She’s poised on a bench with her Stradivarius. My hero hears strains of Dvořák and goes batshit. I meet Penny in a supermarket checkout line. She’s buying her nephew a Hula-hoop.

I got her phone number and called her. I blathered and tried to make a groovy impression. I mentioned classical music in due haste. Penny’s reaction was, Fuck that shit—I dig rock and roll.

She was 26 years old and from Brooklyn, New York. She had an East Coast accent and a slight lisp. She was Jewish. That appealed to me. It would force me to atone for prior anti-Semitism. She was a big, knock-kneed woman with auburn hair and brown eyes. She was wary and warm at
oddly equal intervals. She’d been through a string of boyfriends in a ’70s manner and seemed amused by me. She had a married lover stashed someplace. He was a heavyweight lawyer.
Don’t be bummed by this. Don’t be so intense. You can be my main squeeze
.

Equivocation, mitigation, compromise at the gate. The suggestion of inimical values. A thorny personality. Better socialized than I. Respectful of my wild-ass path and in no way floored by it. Offering communion on her terms—take it or leave it.

Well …

We kissed on our first date. We were in Penny’s car. It was a classic mutual lean-in. That part conformed to my script. Then Penny said, No—like this.

I almost ran. The correction racked me. She had a car. I didn’t. She would become a lawyer. I might write an unpublished book.

I leaned away, leaned back in and kissed her the right way. We kissed three more times. I understood that kiss #4 might be rejected. I said good night before Penny could.

Date #2 was delirious. I showed up at Penny’s pad with flowers. She noticed my erection and rolled her eyes. She wanted to rent bicycles and ride a path at the beach. I hated all antic activities. My reaction showed. Penny mollified me and tried not to act impatient.

I blew my roll on the rentals and a burger lunch. That meant extra work at the golf course. We rode the bikes single file. We couldn’t talk. It was existential anguish and a macho-mangled loss of control. I got pulsingly paranoid. I thought I saw Penny checking out a black dude. Danger! Danger! Danger! I detoured to the Dick-Size Diaspora. Penny might be a coal burner! What if she required a hard black yard?

Lunch was torture. My stomach churned, my eyes darted. I orbed to Penny’s breasts and Penny’s eyes. Was she
trawling for dark meat or measuring baskets? She caught my eyeball track. She said, Don’t be so intense. I said, Can we go someplace and talk? Penny said, Your place?

It was a first-time afternooner. It felt precipitous. My movies never equaled their coming attractions.

The move-in was synchronous. I kissed per Penny’s date #1 instructions. My bed was as too-small as her bed would be. It was over too fast. A shared desire for release pushed us through. I wanted marriage, daughters and a crib in Brentwood. Penny wanted an open-ended blast.

Okay, let’s
talk
now. You go first. I’m here to
listen
.

Penny said she couldn’t. She lisped those words and shook her head. She had to go home and study tort law.

Her slouchy scope moved me. Her clumsiness ripped me up. She chewed her nails. Her hands were as big as mine. She was both ill at ease and content in her body.

We loomed over people. She was five ten, I was six three. We were similarly awkward and bruised from bumps into fixed objects. Walking entwined was dicey. We kept tripping each other.

Late lessons unfolded. I was 31 and an unschooled zealot. I was covetous, jealous and possessive. I never questioned Penny’s honor. I lived in fear of her contentiousness and a streak of emotional absence. It was a fight I had to win. I was irrepressibly vigilant. I was always watching and assessing. I wanted Penny. She possessed significant human value and stood up to me. We were both intransigent and fearful. She was
of
me and therefore worthy of my obsessive attention. We were alternately brutally willful and sad-sackish. Her intelligence was diffuse and unimpeded by conceit. My brainpower was didactic and stupefyingly attuned to personal advancement.

Penny lived in the world. She had a family, friends,
acquaintances, colleagues, classmates. Her self-worth was undercut with a loopy irony. My mission was to grant her importance. The Curse carried a debt of formal acknowledgment. She should allot herself more power as a woman and assume potent destiny as her birthright. My assumptions were a lover’s perceptive gift
and
the shuck of a controlling maniac.

That’s
what gets me.
That’s
how I misdiagnose female personae.
That’s
the twisted core of my love-starved largesse.

I recast Penny in my own image. I superimposed my drive upon her—because I was delivered from self-destructive doom, and the corollary of exalted design sure as shit worked for me. That was my grave disservice, whatever my intent.

Penny was smart, funny, honest, kind and proficient. The dumbfounding truth in retrospect: she was different from me.

And
we had a groovy kid-lover time—when I eased up a little bit.

Sex was sweaty and clumsy. Long arms and legs flailed. Nightstands collapsed, bathroom fixtures caved, pictures fell off of walls. Debate was active. Topical chat was frazzled. Penny yelled and sulked more than I did. My game was to apologize and re-seduce. Penny always evinced forgiveness—because I always listened to her and always showed up.

She kept me high-wire tense. She withheld the love talk I craved. My anxiety and desire
sizzzzzzled
. She believed in my self-expressed and unconfirmed talent. She never lied to me. She dumped me, lured me back and put out one-night-only calls that I always jumped at. No marriage, no daughters, no possessive pronouns. Constant heartache and no narrative line.

I stayed in the fight. I fixed on Penny’s formative trauma and tried to salve her there. Her trauma was less hyperbolic than mine. She allotted her trauma a sane contemplation and not much more. She was not out to exploit her demons for public renown.

You know, I’m not you. Won’t you please lighten up?

No, I will not
.

Penny had that married lover. She’d dropped details on occasion. I called him a “Jew cocksucker.” Penny kicked me. I boo-hooed and repented. Penny laughed and took me to bed.

I was fighting a two-front war. There’s Penny. There’s my book and the woman with the cello. Beethoven had engaged in similar combat. There’s the “Immortal Beloved.” There’s comely piano students in the meantime. Embrace me, my darling. Later, babe—I gotta write the Fifth Symphony, and I can’t hear you anyway.

The presence of the married guy sanctioned me to prowl. I went at it, full speed.

I re-faced another set of women and melded them into my blur. They were
real
women. I met them, talked to them, courted them and had brief liaisons. My new self-confidence inured me to rejection. I jumped on “Yes,” tried again at “Maybe,” packed my tent at “No.” There were AA women and nude coffee dates at “Hot Tub Fever.” It was 1980. Java in the buff was risqué and less than a wolf call. I met women in restaurants and movie-theater lines. I got a lot of phone numbers and developed phone-talk relationships. I waited in the dark for the phone to ring. That’s still my nightly MO. The phone rings or doesn’t ring now. The phone rang or didn’t ring then. Dead air, vibelessness and swinging conversation.

The women were indistinguishable and each and every one unique. They informed me that the world had turned a
corner with sex and that it had become less mystical. I replied that I knew this. Experience had demystified me. Experience had not dampened my ardor or altered the goddess-worshiping scope of my quest.

My telephone and dive pad were conduits. I worked at the golf course, wrote my book and waited for the phone to ring. The phone rang intermittently. Women called me back or dug out that note slip with my name and number. There was a good deal of sex and no sex and sex as a topic of discussion. I picked the women discerningly. I wanted women who could talk and interpose questions. The era was self-absorbed. Candor was a facet of the freewheeling lifestyle. Phone calls overlapped. Deep talk ensued. I zoomed to strange addresses to have sex or not have sex or roll around clothed. I took on a confessor role. There was a vampiric edge to it. I wanted the women to be fucked-up, so that they would need me.

The counselor role came easy. I was actively pursuing my life’s mission and had empathy to burn. I was happy because I was writing a book and was engulfed by women. They got me out of myself and back into myself and returned me refueled to the woman with the cello. The story proceeded apace with my brooding sessions and phone calls. The fictive me is that breathless first-person detective. He’s been morally reawakened and sees the woman with the cello as his payoff. He will be with her tenuously and lose her in the end. He will be alone with her memory and wait for a new grail to seek. He will exist in a solitary and dark-roomed state. My first novel predicted the through-line of my life. I didn’t know it then.

Calls came in, calls went out, I got numbers and distributed my number. Penny bombed through my life, unpredictably. She still had that married geek. She sensed my independent action and adopted a “Don’t ask” policy.

Always the faces, always the blur, sometimes the faces bodied. I got
de
mystified and
re
mystified at the height of this new swirl. I knew I was looking for one face for one purpose. The phone-call women had validated my skewed propriety. They were good, solid humans. Their faces had played out true. I started Identi-Kit building from their physical pool. I wanted to finish my first book and start a new book quick. It would be set in 1951. I needed a face for the lonely and haunted woman in quintessence. I brain-bopped through my current life and my voyeur’s path to date and came up empty. A rainy-night dream gave her to me.

She was tall and strong-featured. Her hair was near red and not blond. She wore crooked-fitting glasses and squinted without them. She came forward in laughter and nearly gasped in retreat. Mark me a prophet and recast my mysticism years later. She was my married lover Karen’s identical twin.

I possess prophetic powers. Their composition: extreme single-mindedness, superhuman persistence and the ability to ignore intrusions inflicted by the real world. I believe in invisibility. It is a conscious by-product of my practical Christianity, honed by years spent alone in the dark. Faith magnetizes me. It allows me to adhere to the world as I trek a narrow path through it. I am most moved by what I sense coming and can in no way actually see. I pull stories out of thin air. I know that women I have summoned in dreams and mental snapshots will make their way to me. Divine presence forms the core of my gift. I knew the dream woman would materialize in her fully visualized form. I did not know that she was 17 years old in 1980 or that she was a Greek girl from Bumfuck, Queens. I was a solipsistic and chauvinistic prophet. I did not grant women the gift of conjuring. A 16-year-old girl named Erika lived one borough
over from Karen. I did not know that she existed or that she was the sorceress who would ultimately summon me.