My Dark Places - James Ellroy [38]
He told me she was a drunk and a whore. He told me she was fucking her divorce lawyer. He said he had a shot at gaining custody of me—if he could prove my mother morally deficient. He urged me to spy on her. I agreed to snoop out my mother’s indiscretions.
My father got a job in downtown L.A. I snuck out and met him on his way home from work every chance I got. We rendezvoused at a drugstore on Burton Way and Doheny. We ate ice cream and talked a little bit.
My mother discovered this treachery. She called my father and threatened him with custody injunctions. She hired a baby-sitter to watchdog me after school.
I ditched my school bus the next morning. I hid out in the courtyard by my father’s apartment. I wanted to see my father wicked bad. I was afraid of the Salk vaccine shots scheduled at school that day.
My mother found me. She drove me to school and arranged to inject me with the Salk vaccine herself.
She shot me up in her nurse’s uniform. She was skilled with a needle—it didn’t hurt at all. She looked good in white seersucker. It offset her red hair alluringly.
The divorce case went to court. I had to testify in closed session. I hadn’t seen my father in a while. I spotted him outside the courtroom and ran to him.
My mother tried to intercede.
My father whisked me into a men’s room and hunkered down to talk to me. My mother stormed in and dragged me out. My father let it happen. A man standing at a urinal with his dick in his hand observed the whole transaction.
I testified. I told a kindly judge that I wanted to live with my father. He ruled otherwise. His decree stipulated a weekday/ weekend split: five days with her, two days with him. He sentenced me to a bifurcated life divvied up between two people locked in an intractable mutual hatred.
I caught both sides of that hatred. It was resolutely scornful and eloquently expressed. My mother portrayed my father as weak, slovenly, lazy, fanciful and duplicitous in small ways. My father had my mother categorized more concisely: She was a Lush and a Whore.
I lived by the divorce decree. Weekdays meant restricted drudgery. Weekends meant freedom.
My father fed me tasty food and took me to cowboy movies. He told me World War I stories and let me leaf through his girlie magazines. He said he had several sweet deals cooking. He convinced me we were just moments shy of great wealth. Big money meant big-time lawyers and big-time legal pull. Those lawyers had detectives who could dig up dirt on the Lush and the Whore. They could get him full-time custody of me.
My mother moved us to a smaller apartment in Santa Monica. She quit St. John’s and got an industrial nurse job at Packard-Bell Electronics. My father moved to a one-bedroom pad on the Hollywood-Wilshire District border. He didn’t own a car and transported me by bus. He was well into his fifties and starting to look like a gigolo past his prime. People probably thought he was my granddad.
I transferred to a private school called Children’s Paradise. It was unaccredited and set my mother back 50 bucks a month. The place was a dump site for kids from broken homes. Passing grades were guaranteed—but the hours of confinement stretched from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily. The teachers were shrill or beaten-down passive. My father had a theory about the long school hours. He said they were calculated to give single moms time to fuck their boyfriends after work. He said this was not all bad.
Children’s Paradise straddled some prime west-side real estate. A dirt yard jammed with play equipment faced Wilshire Boulevard. The yard was three times the size of the main classroom building. A swimming pool was positioned at the west flank.
I daydreamed my way through the third and fourth grades there. My reading skills eclipsed my retarded comprehension of arithmetic. I was a big kid. I flaunted my size and bluffed my way through minor kid confrontations. It was the genesis of my efficacious “Crazy Man Act.”
I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and