My Dark Places - James Ellroy [37]
I made the scene in ’48. The novelty of a kid sent them gaga for a while. They moved out of their place in Beverly Hills and found a larger apartment in West Hollywood. It was a Spanish-style pad with brushed-stucco walls and arched doorways. I grew into a warped state of cognizance there.
Rita Hayworth fired my father, circa ’52. He took occasional drugstore jobs and hogged the living-room couch most standard workdays. He loved to read and sleep. He loved to smoke cigarettes and watch sporting events on our bubble-screen TV. The couch was his all-purpose forum.
My mother hustled to and from work. She had a full-time gig at St. John’s Hospital and wet-nursed a dipsomaniacal actress named ZaSu Pitts on the side. She brought home the bulk of the money and bugged my father to get a permanent job.
He put her off with vague vows and cited his Hollywood connections. He was pals with Mickey Rooney and a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. He knew people with pull. He could parlay his friendships into something sweet.
I spent a lot of time on the couch with my father. He drew pictures for me and taught me to read when I was three and a half years old. We sat side by side and read separate books.
My father favored historical novels. I dug kid’s animal stories. My father knew that I couldn’t stand to see animals mistreated or killed. He skimmed the books he bought for me and shitcanned the ones he knew I’d find disturbing.
My father grew up in an orphanage and had no blood family. My mother had a younger sister in Wisconsin. My father hated his sister-in-law and her husband, a Buick dealer named Ed Wagner. My father said Uncle Ed was a draft dodger and a kraut. He killed lots of krauts in the First World War and had no use for them.
The Wagners thought my father was a bum. My father told me my cousin Jeannie tried to scratch my eyes out once. I don’t recall any such incident.
My parents’ friends conformed to a type: older people naively impressed with them. My parents looked good and hobnobbed with Hollywood swingers. They dazzled in the short run and only fought, carped and bickered in the privacy of their own home. They kept up a united front and limited their offensive broadsides to one witness—me.
Their life together was one long skirmish. She attacked his sloth; he attacked her nightly booze intake. Their squabbles were strictly verbal—and the absence of physical violence made them that much more protracted. They argued in measured tones, rarely yelled and never screamed. They did not break flowerpots or hurl dishes. Their lack of overt theatrics cloaked the fact that their collective will to reason and reconcile did not exist. They fought a self-suppressed war. They worked themselves into the picayune state of the perpetually aggrieved. Their hatred escalated over years and peaked at a level of low fury.
It was ’54. I was six years old and in the first grade at West Hollywood Elementary School. My mother sat me down on our living-room couch and told me she was divorcing my father.
I took it hard. I threw tantrums for weeks running. My histrionics were fevered and a cumulative response to years of chickenshit parental battling. TV had taught me that divorce was permanent and binding. Divorce stigmatized little kids and fucked them up for life. The mother got custody of all minor children.
My mother kicked my father out of the apartment. She tolerated my hurt-child routine for a few weeks, gave me a concise whack in the head and told me to stop it.
I stopped it. I got a crazy little-kid notion to forge an all-powerful separate thing with my father.
My mother hired a lawyer and filed for divorce. A judge granted her temporary custody and allowed me to spend weekends with my father. He rented a bachelor pad a few blocks from his old apartment.
I holed up with him for a string of Fridays-to-Sundays. We cooked burgers on a hot plate and made meals out of Cheez Whiz and crackers. We read books side by side and watched TV fight cards. My father began