My Dark Places - James Ellroy [46]
I went back to stealing and watching. A man caught me in his yard and chased me out. I quit voyeurizing altogether.
The nightmares and day flashes continued. Their power dwindled through sheer repetition. My Black Dahlia obsession assumed new fantasy forms.
I rescued Betty Short and became her lover. I saved her from a life of promiscuity. I tracked down her killer and executed him.
They were strong, narrative-based fantasies. They took the queasy edge off my Dahlia fixation.
I was set to enter junior high in September ’59. My father told me I should start taking buses by myself. I exploited that new freedom in the name of formal Dahlia research.
I took bus trips downtown to the Main Public Library. I read the 1947 Herald-Express on microfilm rolls. I learned all about the life and death of the Black Dahlia.
Betty Short came from Medford, Massachusetts. She had three sisters. Her parents were divorced. She visited her dad in California in 1943. She got hooked on Hollywood and men in uniform.
The Herald called her a “playgirl” and a “party girl.” I decoded the terms to read “whore.” She wanted to be a movie star. She was concurrently engaged to several army flyboys. A guy named Red Manley drove her up from San Diego a week before her death. She had no fixed Los Angeles address. She’d been bouncing around between rooming houses and cheap apartments for months. She frequented cocktail bars and cadged drinks and dinners off strange men. She told whopping lies routinely. Her life was indecipherable.
I instinctively understood that life. It was a chaotic collision with male desire. Betty Short wanted powerful things from men—but could not identify her needs. She reinvented herself with youthful panache and convinced herself that she was something original. She miscalculated. She wasn’t smart and she wasn’t self-aware. She recast herself in a cookie-cutter mold that pandered to long-prescribed male fantasies. The new Betty was the old Betty bushwhacked by Hollywood. She turned herself into a cliché that most men wanted to fuck and a few men wanted to kill. She wanted to get deep dark down and cozy with men. She sent out magnetic signals. She met a man with notions of deep-dark-down-and-cozy cloaked in rage. Her only complicitous act was a common fait accompli. She made herself over for men.
The Herald ran the Dahlia story for 12 solid weeks. It played up the massive investigation rife with fruitless leads and weirdo suspects. False confessions and other tangential offshoots got front-page coverage.
The lesbian theory was hot for a while: Betty Short might have traveled in dyke circles. The smut-picture theory had a good run: Betty might have posed for pornographic snapshots.
People ratted their neighbors off as the killer. People ratted off lovers who jilted them. People went to psychics and sought out the Dahlia’s spirit. Elizabeth Short’s death inspired a minor hysteria.
Postwar L.A. coalesced around the body of a dead woman. Hordes of people fell sway to the Dahlia. They weaved themselves into her story in bizarre and fantastical ways.
The story thrilled me and moved me. It filled me with a perverse sense of hope.
The Dahlia defined her time and place. She claimed lives from the grave and exerted great power.
Stephen Nash went to the gas chamber in August ’59. He spit some chewing gum at a chaplain right before they strapped him in. He sucked down the cyanide fumes with a big shiteating grin.
I enrolled at John Burroughs Junior High School a few weeks later. Harvey Glatman went to the gas chamber on September 18th. I hit my father up for a bicycle. We conned a C-note out of my aunt and bought a candy-apple-red Schwinn Corvette.
I customized that bike to the nines. I added gooseneck handlebars, plastic saddlebags, rhinestone-studded mud flaps and a speedometer that tapped out at 150 miles an hour. My father called my bike a “nigger wagon.” It was beautiful—but very heavy and slow. I had to walk it up hills.
I had a vehicle now. My