My Dark Places - James Ellroy [42]
It was a literary formula preordained directly for me. It let me remember and forget in equal measure. I ate those books up wholesale and was blessedly unaware of the internal dynamic that made them so seductive.
The Hardy Boys and Ken Holt were my only friends. Their sidekicks were my sidekicks. We solved perplexing mysteries— but nobody got hurt too severely.
My father bought me two books every Saturday. I went through them fast and spent the rest of the week suffering withdrawal pangs. My father held the line at two a week, no more. I started shoplifting books to fill my reading gaps.
I was a sly little thief. I wore my shirttail out and stuck the books under my waistband. The folks at Chevalier’s probably thought I was a cute little bookworm. My father never mentioned the size of my library.
The summer of ’58 sped by. I rarely thought about my mother. She was compartmentalized and defined by my father’s current indifference to her memory. El Monte was an aberrant non sequitur. She was gone.
Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses.
I didn’t know it then. I doubt if my father knew it. He was scheming his way through the summer with his redheaded demon in the ground.
He bought ten thousand Jap surplus “Tote Seats” at ten cents apiece. They were inflatable cushions to sit on at sporting events. He was convinced he could sell them to L.A. Rams and Dodgers organizations. The first batch would get him going. He could get the Japs to churn more Tote Seats out on a consignment basis. His profits would zoom from that point on.
The Rams and Dodgers brushed my father off. He was too proud to hawk the Tote Seats street-vendor style. Our shelves and closets were crammed with inflatable plastic. You could have blown the cushions up and floated half the county out to sea.
My father wrote off the Tote Seat venture and went back to drugstore work. He put in crash hours: noon to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. He let me stay alone while he was gone.
Our pad was un-air-conditioned and soaked in summertime heat. It was starting to smell—Minna defied housebreaking and urinated and defecated all over the floors. Dusk cooled the place off and diffused the stink a little. I loved being alone in the apartment after dark.
I read and skimmed the TV dial for crime shows. I looked through my father’s magazines. He subscribed to Swank, Nugget and Cavalier, They were full of nifty pictures and risqué cartoons that went over my head.
I stared at my father’s World War I medals—miniatures encased in glass. The aggregation marked him one big hero. He was born in 1898 and was three months shy of 50 when I was born. I kept wondering how much time he had left.
I liked to cook for myself. My favorite meal was hot dogs scorched on a coil burner. My mother’s canned spaghetti dinners were nowhere near as good.
I always watched TV with the lights off. I got hooked on Tom Duggan’s Channel 13 gabfest and tuned in every night. Duggan was half hipster, half right-wing blowhard. He abused his guests and talked about booze constantly. He portrayed himself as a misanthrope and a lech. He struck a deep chord in me.
His show ended around 1:00 a.m. My summer ’58 rituals got scary then.
I was usually too agitated to sleep. I started imagining my father’s death by homicide and car crash. I waited up for him in the kitchen and counted the cars that went by on Beverly Boulevard. I kept all the lights off—to show that I wasn’t afraid.
He always came home. He never told me that sitting in the dark was a strange thing to do.
We lived poor. We had no car and relied on the L.A. bus system for transport. We consumed an all-grease-sugar-and-starch diet. My father did not touch alcohol—but compensated for it by smoking three packs of Lucky Strikes a day. We shared a single