My Dark Places - James Ellroy [152]
My parents got married. They moved to L.A. He said they had a pad at 8th and New Hampshire. She got a nurse gig. He went Hollywood. They moved to 459 North Doheny Drive. It was Beverly Hills. The address was ritzier than the pad. My mother said it was just a small apartment. My father snagged a job with Rita Hayworth. I was born in March ’48. My father handled Rita’s marriage to Aly Khan. The Hayworth stuff was true. I saw my father’s name in two Hayworth biographies.
We moved to 9031 Alden Drive. It was over the West Hollywood line. We lived in a Spanish-style building. Eula Lee Lloyd and her husband lived there. A spinster lady lived there. She idolized my mother. My father said she was a dyke. He had dykes on the brain. He said there was a dyke bounty out on Rita Hayworth. I allegedly met Rita Hayworth at a hot dog stand. It was ’50 or ’51. I allegedly spilled a grape drink all over her. Rita was allegedly a nympho. My father had nymphos on the brain. He said all the big actors were fags. He had fags on the brain. Rita fired my father. He started sleeping all day. He slept on the couch like Dagwood Bumstead. My mother told him to get a job. He said he had pull. He was waiting for the right opportunity. My mother hailed from rural Wisconsin. She didn’t know from pull. She pulled the plug on her marriage.
My memories were running in a straight chronological line. My fantasies were running as adjuncts and outtakes. I thought I’d be criss-crossing the memory map. I thought I’d be stumbling over real-life minutiae. I was on the road to recollection. I’d conjured up Tweed perfume and some period snapshots. I was running a linear flowchart I already knew.
I downshifted. The redhead stripped. She had her real-life body and her 42-year-old face. I couldn’t take it any further.
I wasn’t afraid to. I just didn’t want to. It seemed unnecessary.
I let my mind wander. I thought of Tracy Stewart. I’d seen Daddy Beckett’s old apartment. I went out with Bill and Dale Davidson. I saw the key Beckett locations. I saw the living room and the bedroom and the steps down to the van. I walked Robbie and Tracy up those steps. I went from my mother nude to Robbie and Tracy within six heartbeats. Robbie walked Tracy into the bedroom. Robbie gave her to Daddy.
I stopped there. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I could make it horrifying. I didn’t think I could learn anything from it.
I let my mind wander. I went back to ’55. I had a time line going. I decided to let it ride.
My father was gone. It was her and me and nobody else. I saw her in white seersucker. I saw her in a navy blue robe. I put her in bed with some assembly line studs. I gave the guys pompadours and knife scars. They looked like Steve Cochran in Private Hell 36. I was working for hyperbole. I thought ugly details might resurrect ugly memories. I wanted to chart the redhead’s sex roll from my father to the Swarthy Man. My father was weak. He had a tough guy’s body and a candy-ass soul. My mother kicked him out of her life and went minimalistic. All men were weak and some men were weak and attractive. You could not control their weakness. You could limit your awareness of it and euphemize it past recognition. You could let men into your life in limited dosages. I did not see a male stampede to my mother’s door. I caught her in flagrante twice. My father said she was a whore. I believed him. I sensed her sexual bent. I filtered my awareness through my own lust for her. She lived with my father for 15 years. She succumbed to an image. She wised up. Disillusionment was enlightenment. She went at men from a disillusioned and wholly male perspective. Men were containable. Sex and liquor was the way to contain them. She flushed 15 years down the toilet. She knew she was passively complicit. She despised her own stupidity and weakness.