My Dark Places - James Ellroy [49]
I followed the case. Spade Cooley copped a plea and beat the gas chamber. Ella Mae got fucked out of a just vengeance.
I was 13 years old. Dead women owned me.
9
I lived in two worlds.
Compulsive fantasies ruled my inner world. The outside world intruded all too often. I never learned to hoard my thoughts and hold them for private moments. My two worlds clashed continually.
I wanted to crash the outside world. I wanted to wow the outside world with my sense of drama. I knew that access to my thoughts would make people love me. It was a common teenaged conceit.
I wanted to take my thoughts public. I possessed exhibitionist flair—but lacked stage presence and control of my effects. I came off as a desperate clown.
My performing repertoire mirrored my private obsessions. I liked to spiel on crime and Nazi fiends in hiding. “Kiddie Noir” was my metier.
My forums were classrooms and schoolyards. I ran my spiels to doofus kids and exasperated teachers. I learned an old vaudeville truth: You hold an audience only as long as you make them laugh.
My fantasies were dark and serious. My audiences had a low tolerance for vivisected women. I learned to topically digress for yucks.
The early ’60s were good comic fodder. I took contrary stands on the A-bomb, John Kennedy, civil rights and the Berlin Wall brouhaha. I yelled “Free Rudolf Hess!” and advocated the reinstatement of slavery. I did wicked JFK imitations and stumped for the nuclear annihilation of Russia.
A few teachers took me aside and told me my shtick wasn’t funny. My classmates were laughing at me—not with me. I caught their implied message: You are one fucked-up kid. They caught my message up-front: Laugh at me or with me—just laugh.
My fantasies made for marginal stand-up routines. My fantasies were a schizoid bridge between my two worlds.
I fantasized endlessly. I got up a head of fantasy steam and rode my bike through red lights. I sat in theaters and ran fantasy riffs off the movies I was seeing. I turned boring novels into enthralling ones by adding extemporaneous subplots.
My one great fantasy theme was CRIME. My one great hero was myself, transformed. I mastered marksmanship, judo and complex musical instruments in a microsecond. I was a detective—who just happened to be a violin and piano virtuoso. I rescued the Black Dahlia. I zoomed around in sports cars and bright red Fokker triplanes. My fantasies were richly anachronistic.
And sex-saturated.
Jean Ellroy-type women craved me. I took 40-ish redheads glimpsed on the street and gave them my mother’s body. I plowed through them in the course of my adventures. I settled into marriage with the last schoolgirl to goose my heartbeat. I always left the Jean Ellroy substitutes bereft.
My fantasies were persistently one-note. They were a hedge against schoolday boredom and my wretched home life.
I had my father’s number now. At 141 was taller than him. I figured I could kick his ass. He was a weakling and a bullshit artist.
We were bound by a sticky kind of need. “We” were all we had. The “we” thing made my father all gooey. I bought the “we” thing in weak moments and bridled at it most of the time. The old man’s love for me was cloying and at odds with his profane take on life. I loved him when he called President Kennedy “a Catholic cocksucker” and hated him when he wept at the national anthem. I dug his fuck-pad-hotel riffs and squirmed when he embellished his World War I exploits. I couldn’t acknowledge a simple truth: The redhead was a better single-parent proposition.
The old man’s health was fading. He was coughing up lungers and weaving behind dizzy spells. He’d make a small bundle at tax time, laze around the pad and deplete his roll. He’d look for drugstore work when he got down to his last ten scoots. His get-rich-quick fervor raged on.
He managed a stage show at the Cabaret Concerttheatre. The show featured young comedians and singers. My father got tight with a comic named Alan Sues.
The show bombed. My