Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [112]
Next I called Mark Swirkal’s exchange and gave the password, then laid down on the bed and passed out.
During my sleep that night, a strange dream sequence began. It was Fat Dog and me, in a complete reversal of roles: Fat Dog, wearing a blue uniform and a gun stopping jaywalkers on Hollywood Boulevard, and me carrying golf bags that seemed to tear at my muscles through my sleep. Just before I awoke, a poem, or fragment of one, ripped through my dream:
There’s an electric calm at the
heart of the storm,
Transcendentally alive and safe and warm.
So get out now
And search the muse,
The blight is real,
You have to choose,
The choice is yours,
Your mind demurs,
It’s yours, it’s his, it’s ours, it’s hers.
Moral stands will save us yet,
The alternative is certain death.
My dream world went up in an inferno of fire and screaming: a 1957 Chevy had just exploded on the freeway. The tall spire of the Los Angeles City Hall collapsed in a heap of rubble and severed limbs flew toward me. I woke up drenched in sweat, straining to remember the words of the poem. I found a pen and some hotel stationery in the nightstand. Gradually the words came back and I wrote them down. Obviously, they were a resurgence of some long-buried, long-forgotten poem discovered during my high school poetry reading days. But who was the author? A memory as fine as mine should be able to recall that, too.
I stared at the words on the paper: storms, muses, and moral stands. The very history of my thirty-third summer.
I showered, put on clean clothes, and went looking for a safe place to put my new fortune. I selected a somber, formidable old B. of A. on Market and Kearney, walked in and inquired about safe deposit boxes. The branch manager was most helpful, took my payment for a five-year rental fee on three boxes, handed me my keys and left me in privacy to stuff the square metal boxes full of money. I retained ten thousand dollars for operating expenses, which left me with an incredibly stuffed wallet and billfold.
Next I went looking for the U.S. Passport Office. I found it on Montgomery Street, within walking distance. The clerk took my application and told me that indently a birth certificate was required as I.D., but since I was a licensed private investigator he could overlook it. He kept glancing furtively at my left armpit, no doubt trying to determine whether or not I was carrying a heater. He referred me to a photographer down the street and told me to bring a photograph back later today. My passport should be ready in ten days.
I made a fast circuit: photographer’s shop, quick photo session, back to the Passport office with the photo, all within one hour. Which left me at a strange juncture: alone in San Francisco with ten thousand dollars in my pocket, an empty Mark Cross suitcase, no desire to get drunk or laid and suddenly bored with my beloved city.
Not knowing what to do, I walked northwest. When I passed the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin and McAllister, I knew I had found my destination. I headed straight for the poetry section on the second floor. For the next six hours I pored through hundreds of volumes, looking for my dream poem. It was nowhere, either as a complete poem or as a fragment of one. I gave up when nervous hunger and eyestrain combined to give me a colossal headache.
A gourmet meal in Chinatown and a walk back to the hotel in the brisk night air put me in better spirits. But with sleep came more nightmares—without poetry this time, but just as vividly violent: monsters wielding golf clubs rising out of sand traps to attack me. On waking the next morning I hoped for a failure of memory, for if the dreams continued after the killing of Cathcart, I would surely go insane.
I had three things left to accomplish in San Francisco: scoring some dope, preferably heroin, acquiring a handgun, illegally,