It’s a puzzle cube. Memories and conceits snap off inner gears. Images replace colored blocks and click to cohesion. Bar rows connect. Plumb lines appear. You take what you need and what you were and sift it through what you’ve become. You impose order. You lay on some moonshine. If you’re skillful and honest and pure, it all works.
I’m from L.A. My folks hatched me in a cool locale. I checked in at the hospital Bobby Kennedy checked out of. My mother hated Catholics and dug ruthless men. Bobby K. would have rocked her ambivalente.
My birthright mandates a disclaimer:
I viewed L.A. as a native. I never saw it as a strange land chronicled by outside writers. I grew up there. I sifted data and transfigured it kid-style. It was diverse shit. The connecting threads were corruption and obsession. Kiddie noir was my metier. I lived in the film noir epicenter during the film noir era. I developed my own strain of weird shit. It was pure L.A. It was bravura L.A. for one reason: I denied the existence of non-L.A. shit.
Because I’m from there. Because I thought L.A. was everywhere. Because I was that xenophobic and self-absorbed. Because I knew my weird shit was the best weird shit alive. Because you don’t smear your hometown with outside writers’ perceptions. Because L.A.’s weird shit is the best weird shit on earth and I grew up where it flourished prosaic.
My dad worked for Rita Hayworth circa 1950. He told me he poured her the pork. My mom wet-nursed juicehead film stars. My dad was lazy. My mom was workaholic. My dad taught me to read at age four.
I gained access to scandal rags and the Bible. Profligacy and the stern rule of God hound me still. I got man’s schizoid nature young. We lived in West Hollywood. My dad called it the “Swish Alps.” We lived beside a Lutheran church. Proximity made me a Lutheran. Martin Luther torched the world in 1530. Martin Luther reviled the Catholic Church. He blasted its corruption. He disdained its celibate laws. He was horny and craved some fine trim.
Papists took their orders from Rome. My mom said so. I puzzled the logistics. I developed a theory: The Pope spoke through their TV sets.
The Bible featured sex and wall-to-wall carnage. Ditto the scandal rags. Martyrdom and trysts with Rubi Rubirosa. Sex and published smears. My narrative gift incubated. My imagination afire.
My folks split the sheets in ’55. My mom got main custody. I shuttled between them. I studied their separate lives. I logged their separate cultural donations.
My mom drank bourbon highballs. I watched her shape-shift behind booze. She dated men who vibed the film noir psychopath. I caught her in flagrante twice. My dad lurked near the pad and spied on his ex. My mom fed me healthy meals and epic novels. My dad fed me Cheez Whiz and the fights. He taught me to root. I rooted for Mexican fighters over Negroes. I rooted for white fighters first and last.
Race: A ’50s primer. Sex: the big deal above all. The ’50s joke ne plus ultra: I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he’s working on now.
Both parents made me read. Both parents hauled me to flicks. My dad riffed on nympho movie stars. My mom spieled on actors she nursed. She took me to a Martin and Lewis show. A scene portrayed a dog driving a car. It cracked me up for days running. My mom found the reaction extreme. She was enlightened. She took me to a kid shrink.
The shrink was female. She gave me play blocks and probed my eight-year-old mind. She quizzed me per dogs and divorce. I said I liked to read. I said I liked the fights. I said I loooooved to tell myself stories and think.
My therapy lasted three sessions. I caught my mom hobnobbed with the shrink. The gist: I was imaginative and fucked up.
The two-parent shuttle continued. I bopped back and forth and picked up dirt. Rita Hayworth—nympho. Rock Hudson— fruit. Floyd Patterson—cheese champ. Mickey Rooney—satyr. ZaSu Pitts—a sweetheart and a pleasure to nurse.
June ’58 hits the calendar. My Walpurgisnacht goes down. My mother is murdered. The scenario is SEX. The crime goes unsolved.
I went with my dad full-time. He exulted in my mother’s death and tried not to gloat in my presence. My bereavement was complex. I hated and lusted for my mother. Bam—she’s dead. Bam— my imagination finds CRIME.
The fixation sidestepped my mother’s death and locked in on surrogate victims. The Black Dahlia became my murdered woman of choice. Her death-details were savage. They blitzed my mother’s death-details in malign imagery. The Dahlia was my mother rendered hyperbolic and distanced enough to be fantasy-savored. She was my invitation to mourn once-removed and my beckoning to all-time obsession.
I studied Dahlia news clips. I rode my bike to the Dahlia’s dump site. I brain-spun savior stories. I rescued the Dahlia as the killer’s blade arced.
James Ellroy in 1958 at age ten. Just after cops told him his mother was murdered, a newspaper photographer took this photo. (Photo courtesy of James Ellroy)
I never posed her story as a novel. I brain-spun the tales for kicks. I did not equate my mother with the Dahlia then. I did not know that her death betrothed me to crime.
I read kids’ crime books. I jumped to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. The stories were vindictively anti-Commie. I dug Mike Hammer’s fervor and rage. I was a childhood Red basher. I raged to punish some unseen other. I was stalking my mother’s killer then. I didn’t know it. I didn’t know that I was dredging shit for my own future pages.
My dad let me read for thrills and ignore my homework. My dad let me hoard scandal rags and skin magazines. We watched crime TV shows. My dad knew a costar on 77 Sunset Strip. He said the guy’s wife “flashed her snatch” at him. My dad spoke in non sequiturs. He assumed my sex knowledge. He praised male homos. He said they expanded the pool of fuckable women. He saw groovy quail on the stroll. He always responded thus: “Somebody’s screwing her, and it sure isn’t us.”
He let me learn life void of good-parent intrusion. I did poorly in school and educated myself. I read From Here to Eternity in 1960. Crime merged with social history. I gorged on a life-in-the-raw text. Institutional sadism/the adult laws of sex/young men reared as cannon fodder. Schofield Barracks/Hawaii/1941—a spritz on my All-L.A. World and the spark point of my grandiose kid ambition.
Dig it:
You can do this. You can write big stories. You can become a great writer.
Dig the subtext:
Fuck school. Fuck hard work. Fuck that bromide that you’re french-fried fucked without a high-school diploma. Read, watch crime flicks, bop around L.A. Fantasize and pick your nose and tell yourself stories.
Dig the subtext decoded:
Be lazy. Be slothful. Disdain adult wisdom. Be inflamed with your fatuous new self-knowledge.
My life skills were substandard then. They declined from ’60 on.
I lived to read and fantasize. I shoplifted books, food, and car models. I cruised L.A. on my tacoed-out bike. Dig the gooseneck handlebars and chrome fenders. Check the rhinestone-studded mud flaps. Orb the plastic saddlebags, aaa-ooo-gah horn, and toy tommy gun. Grok the speedometer—it tops out at 150 miles per hour.
I bike-stalked girls. I was a conspicuous stalker. I stalked rich Hancock Park girls and Jewish girls west in Kosher Kanyon. They spotted me by daylight. My taco wagon magnetized and drew yuks. I stalked better by nightfall. I parked and reconnoitered on foot. I peeked windows and glimpsed undies and skin.
I stalked through summer ’61. I detoured to protest gigs and chucked eggs at ban-the-bomb fools. The Berlin Wall ascended. Uncle Sam and the Commos played chicken. A newsman ran a nightly warometer graph. The odds on nuke war soared to 90%. I knew it was curtains. America was fucked. Mike Hammer couldn’t save us from this one. The crisis filled me with nihilistic glee. I was fucked. I would never become a great writer. I could brave fallout and steal books with impunity.
The crisis tapped out. The warometer lied. I grooved a theme—small lives set against big events. Summer ’61 snapshots bipped off a screen in my head.
Bomb-shelter kits on sale in a Christmas-tree lot. The Larchmont Safeway picke
d clean. Our dipso neighbor stocking up on scotch and cigarettes. Those ban-the-bomb pinkos egged up.
It was history. It was dramatic infrastructure. Memory and conceits connected. I was seeing things. I was sensing things. I was living free and dreaming big. I was indexing big future pages.
Nobody called me bright. Nobody tagged me with bipolar disorder. I was a charmless mini-misanthrope with poor hygiene. I was an egomaniac with cystic acne. I was an acquired taste that no one ever acquired.
I squeaked through junior high and hit high school. Adult life loomed wicked large. Fairfax HS was almost all Jewish. I stood out only as a gentile and bad-skin exemplar. I craved attention. I lacked attention-getting skills. I was a poor student, worse athlete, worse social mover still. Stock losers and teenage lepers shunned me. My loserdom did not conform to adolescent rebellion laws. Stock martyrdom bored me. I disdained the canonized alienation of disaffected kids worldwide. I wanted to promote myself as strictly unique and attract commensurate notice. I was a rebel with self-aggrandizement as cause.
I pondered the dilemma. I hit on a solution. I joined the American Nazi Party. I debuted my führer act in the West L.A. shtetl.
It backfired—and worked.
It got me some attention. It got me recognized as a buffoon. I did not subvert the status quo at Fairfax High School. I did not derail the Jewish hegemony. I passed out hate tracts and “Boat Tickets to Africa.” I anointed myself as the seed bearer of a new master race. I announced my intent to establish a Fourth Reich in Kosher Kanyon. I defamed jigaboos and dug the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I ragged Martin Luther Coon and hawked copies of “The Nigger’s 23rd Psalm.” I got sneered at, I got laughed at, I got pushed, I got shoved. I developed a sense of politics as vaudeville and got my ass kicked a few times. I learned how to spin narrative and elicit response. I knew that I didn’t hate Negroes or Jews—as long as they comprised a rapt audience. I harbored a warped sense of the early-mid ’60s. I nursed a writer’s feel for timing. I honed my ability to stand tall and eat punches. I learned to front my crazy shit and revel in it as unique.
My Nazi act succeeded and tanked. It moved me, bored me, and vexed me in sync with my audience response. I lived to fantasize and assimilate storylines. Good books and TV fare subsumed my performance art. I flew with shit that clicked real in my gourd.
It’s fall ’63. My dad’s health is fading. Poor nutrition and Lucky Strikes are playing catch-up. Bam—The Fugitive debuts on TV.
It’s pure concept. There’s a small-town doctor. His marriage is fucked up. His wife’s an alcoholic shrew. A one-armed bum B&Es the doc’s pad and snuffs her. The doc gets tagged with the snuff.
He’s tried, convicted, and sentenced to fry. Prissy Lieutenant Gerard takes him to death row. Bam—the train derails. Bam— he’s on the run forever. He’s chasing the one-armed bum. The cop’s chasing him.
The show grabbed me. The show obsessed me. The show messed up my sleep. Dr. Kimble ran. I ran along at warp speed.
There’s Kimble. He’s a slick cat. He’s haunted and twitchy and doomed. He’s isolated like me—but imbued with better looks and hygiene. The cop’s hounding him. The cop’s got some secret agenda. My dad thinks he’s a fruit. He’s a chicken-chasing Charlie at the Hollywood Gold Cup.
Kimble hits numerous towns. They all look like studio lots or L.A. He’s a lightning rod. He attracts sexual discontent and ennui. The grooviest woman in town always finds him.
Real women. Women ripped by loneliness and hunger. Lois Nettleton, Patricia Crowley, Diana Van Der Vlis. Barbara Rush, Sandy Dennis, Madlyn Rhue, Shirley Knight. Suzanne Pleshette, Elizabeth Allen, the great June Harding—the most accomplished TV actresses of the era.
Ooooooh, Daddy-o!!!! They were tripping up my trouser trout triumphant!!!
Kimble was a heat-seeking missile. The women sizzled with longing. Nobody got laid. Exigent circumstances precluded it. Kimble’s sprint was one long dry hump. It was my futile drive for selfhood refracted. The women were my mother transmogrified.
The Fugitive slammed my imagination. Mass-market noir— Tuesday nights at 10:00. Counterpoint to my nutty life and weird public life ascendant.
My dad had a stroke on 11/1/63. I came home from school. I found him weeping and babbling. He was streaked with his own feces and urine.
His condition horrified and repulsed me. I saw his death as my abandonment and my own death decades hence. I started prepping for life solo. I started shutting him out.
He spent three weeks at the VA Hospital. His condition and survival prospects improved. I ditched school every day. I bike-looped L.A. I swiped nudist magazines. I visited my dad. I watched episodes of The Fugitive. They ticked time to the JFK hit. I recall the plotlines and the guest-star women still.
My dad split the VA on hit day. Jack’s death and the attendant hoo-ha bored him. Ditto for me. Fuck Jack. We were Republicans and Protestants. Jack took his orders from Rome. The fruit cop almost nabbed Kimble that Tuesday. Patricia Crowley’s red hair beamed in black-and-white.
MY DAD RETRIEVED IT. My dad blew it anew. I distanced myself. I sabotaged out of his grasp.
He resumed smoking. He resurrected his high-salt/high-fat diet. I ditched school most days. I flunked the 11th grade. I bike-roamed. I watched The Fugitive and read crime novels. I brain-screened crime fantasies. I eyeballed rich girls and their fortyish moms throughout Hancock Park.
Obsession suited me. My self-obsession blinded me to extraneous social trends. America mourned Jack the K. It was fodder for my Nazi shtick and no more. LBJ goosed the Vietnam troop count. I stumped for nuclear war. A store cop detained me for shoplifting. My dad had a heart attack as I sweated custody. The Jack-hit aftermath metastasized. Conspiracy talk bubbled up. My feelers perked. I dug the inherent mystery. I brain-screened Dallas scenarios for Doc Kimble. Jackie Kennedy was June Harding for the poor.
The blur heightened. School became a nonendurable drag. I was seventeen. I was white. “Free” would make it the trifecta. I stepped up my Nazi antics. I got suspended from class for a week. My dad started calling me “you kraut cocksucker.” I painted swastikas on the dog’s dish. My dad wore a Jewish beanie to torment me.
I returned to school. I juiced the escape process. The Folk Song Club met. I regaled and disrupted with a pro-Nazi tune and a chorus of the “Horst Wessel Lied.”
They expelled me. It was midweek in mid-March of 1965. I walked south on Fairfax. I’ve got the details memorized.
The smell outside Canter’s Deli. School kids sneaking cigarettes. The old Jews headed for shul.
I hitched home on Beverly Boulevard. I felt airless and scared. I got a jolt of destiny. High-school dropouts were fucked. I’d better become a great writer fast.
THE NOTION HELD. I stalled the work. My wacked-out education continued.
Future writers hide inside books and snort up the craft by enjoyment. They read and learn structure and style. Their curiosity points them to subject matter. They read to titillate and edify. They scratch the itch to see life revealed. They swing on an I-can-do-this/I-can’t-do-this tether. The novel form awes them. The soapbox aspect entices. A sense of potential accomplishment looms. The novel is autobiography mislabeled. The novel avenges sand kicked in the face and larger and more longstanding trauma. The novel enraptures career losers with justifying visions of self. The novel itemizes and encapsulates experience and contains it within a worldview. The novel takes abstraction and turns it to dramatic incident. The novel makes incident specific and loftily abstract. The novel explicates moral concerns to the novelist himself and reveals them through his dramaturgical choices. The novel bestows a huge ego on the novelist and jerks him to humility concurrent. The novel is a big fucking endeavor. The puzzle-cube aspect of the novelist’s gift always stuns.
Novelists mold memories and conceits. Their images replace colored blocks and click to cohesion. Plumb lines appear. They take what they need and what they were and sift it through what they’ve become.
Their voices build off a mute state often nurtured in recklessness and privation.
The novel is a daunting task. It takes some building up to. My prelude took fourteen years.
I dawdled post–high school. I nursed an urge to blow town. My dad let me join the Army. My dad had a second stroke my second day in. I exploited his condition. I faked a nervous breakdown.
The Army scared me shitless. I hated the discipline. I was a craven and seditious faux führer. I did not want to go to Vietnam.
I got an emergency leave. I visited my dad on his deathbed. His last words to me: “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.”
The Army cut me loose. I was parent- and draft-free at age 17. I got a jolt of destiny. Teenage orphans were fucked. I’d better become a great writer fast.
“Fast” is relative. Fourteen years runs relative against a lifetime. “Great” is relative. It’s often a self-bestowed or posthumous tag.
Ellroy’s father, Lee. (Photo courtesy of James Ellroy)
It was time to live and read. It was time to complete my picaresque education.
I matriculated in L.A. I majored in booze and dope and minored in random desiccation. I read a shitload of crime novels and true-crime books and eschewed “mainstream” literature. I ate up plot, structural density and character development through implication. I judged books by their human content and authenticity. I made qualitative judgments and dropped further analysis. I possessed no gift to gauge abstraction. It was pure assimilation. I lived in a fictional criminal universe and brain-screened criminal fantasies. I committed petty crimes out of sloth and moral default. I shoplifted food, booze, and books. I stole empty pop bottles from reclamation bins. I broke into apartment-house laundry rooms and pried coins out of washers and dryers. I stalked Hancock Park girls, broke into their pads, and sniffed their underwear. I did county-jail time. I hobnobbed with other jejune jerkoffs and Mickey Mouse misdemeanants. We lied about our beaucoup bitches and criminal exploits. I honed my nascent narrative skills via jerry-rigged jailhouse jive.