My Dark Places - James Ellroy [45]
I read Jack Webb’s account of the Black Dahlia murder case. It sent me way off the deep end.
The Black Dahlia was a girl named Elizabeth Short. Her body was found in a vacant lot in January 1947. The dump site was four miles due south of my apartment.
Elizabeth Short was cut in two at the waist. The killer scrubbed her body clean and left her naked. He placed her two inches off a city sidewalk with her legs spread wide.
He tortured her for days. He beat her and sliced her with a sharp knife. He stubbed cigarettes out on her breasts and cut the corners of her mouth back to her ears.
Her suffering was horribly attenuated. She was systematically abused and terrorized. The killer probed and rearranged her internal organs postmortem. The crime was pure misogynist insanity—and thus ripe for misinterpretation.
Betty Short died at twenty-two. She was a flaky kid living out flaky kid fantasies. A reporter learned that she dressed solely in black and named her “The Black Dahlia.” The tag nullified her and vilified her and turned her into a sainted lost daughter and a slut.
The case was a huge news event. Jack Webb steeped his twelve-page summary in the ethos of the time: Femme fatales die hard and are complicitous in attracting death by vivisection. He didn’t understand the killer’s intentions or know that his gynecological tampering defined the crime. He didn’t know that the killer was horribly afraid of women. He didn’t know that he cut the Dahlia open to see what made women different from men.
I didn’t know those things then. I did know that I had a story to run to and run from.
Webb described the Dahlia’s last days. She was running to and from men and stretching her mental resources schizophrenically thin. She was looking for a safe place to hide.
Two photographs accompanied the story.
The first one showed Betty Short at 39th and Norton. Her legs were half visible. Men with guns and pocket notebooks were standing over her body.
The second one showed her in life. Her hair was swept up and back—like a 1940s portrait shot of my mother.
I read the Dahlia story a hundred times. I read the rest of The Badge and stared at the pictures. Stephen Nash, Donald Bashor and the firebomb guys became my friends. Betty Short became my obsession.
And my symbiotic stand-in for Geneva Hilliker Ellroy.
Betty was running and hiding. My mother ran to El Monte and forged a secret weekend life there. Betty and my mother were body-dump victims. Jack Webb said Betty was a loose girl. My father said my mother was a drunk and a whore.
My Dahlia obsession was explicitly pornographic. My imagination supplied the details that Jack Webb omitted. The murder was an epigram on transient lives and impacted sex as death. The unsolved status was a wall I tried to break down with a child’s curiosity.
I applied my mind to the task. My explication efforts were entirely unconscious. I simply told myself mental stories.
That storytelling worked counterproductively. My daytime tales of death by saw and scalpel gave me terrible nightmares. They were devoid of narrative lines—all I saw was Betty being cut, slashed, poked, probed and dissected.
My nightmares had a pure raw force. Vivid details burst out of my unconscious. I saw Betty drawn and quartered on a medieval torture rack. I saw a man drain her blood into a bathtub. I saw her spread-eagled on a medical gurney.
Those scenes made me afraid to sleep. My nightmares came steadily or at unpredictable intervals. Daytime flashes complemented them.
I’d be sitting in school. I’d be bored and prey to odd mental wanderings. I’d see entrails stuffed in a toilet bowl and torture gadgets poised for business.
I did not willfully conjure the images. They seemed to spring from somewhere beyond my volition.
The nightmares and day flashes continued through the spring and summer. I knew they were God’s punishment for my voyeur prowls and thievery. I stopped stealing