My Dark Places - James Ellroy [52]
They let me into their clique. I became their subaltern, court jester and stooge. They thought I was a big-time laugh riot. My raunchy home life shocked and delighted them.
We rode our bikes to movies in Hollywood. I always lagged a hundred yards behind—my Schwinn Corvette was just that heavy and hard to propel. We listened to music and spritzed on sex, politics, books and our preposterous ideas.
I couldn’t hold my own intellectually. My sense of discourse was internally directed and channeled into narrative. My friends thought I wasn’t as smart as they were. They teased me and ragged me and made me the butt of their jokes.
I took their shit and kept coming back for more. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl had a keen instinct for weakness and were skilled at male one-upmanship. Their cruelty hurt—but not enough to make me drop their friendship.
I was resilient. Small slights would make me cry and undergo intense grief for ten minutes maximum. Emotional thrashings left my wounds cauterized and ready to be reopened.
I was a case study in teenage intransigence. I held an ironclad, steel-buffed, pathologically derived and empirically valid hole card: the ability to withdraw and inhabit a world of my own mental making.
Friendship meant minor indignities. Raucous laughs with the guys meant assuming a subservient role. The cost felt negligible. I knew how to reap profit from estrangement.
I didn’t know that costs accrue. I didn’t know that you always pay for what you suppress.
I graduated from junior high in June ’62. I read, stole, masturbated and fantasized my way through the summer. I enrolled at Fairfax High School in September.
The old man insisted on Fairfax. It was 90-odd-% Jewish and safer than Los Angeles High School—the joint I was supposed to attend. L.A. High was full of tough Negro kids. The old man figured they’d kill me the first time I opened my mouth. Alan Sues lived a few blocks from Fairfax. The old man borrowed Alan’s address and plopped his Nazi son down in the heart of the West L.A. shtetl.
It was a dislocating cultural experience.
John Burroughs Junior High felt safe. Fairfax felt dangerous. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl were matriculating elsewhere. My Hancock Park acquaintances were off at prep school. I was a stranger in a strange fucking land.
Fairfax High kids were ferociously bright and sophisticated. They smoked cigarettes and drove cars. I parked my Schwinn Corvette on the first day of school and got roundly razzed.
I knew that my act wouldn’t fly here. I retreated and scoped out the turf long-distance.
I attended classes and kept my mouth shut. I ditched my Ivy League threads and aped the sartorial style of Fairfax hipsters: tight slacks, alpaca sweaters and pointy-toe boots. The makeover didn’t work. I looked like a frightened child cum lounge-singer-manque.
Fairfax High seduced me. Fairfax Avenue seduced me. I dug the insular Yiddish vibe. I dug the oldsters yakking it up in a wild-assed guttural language. My reaction confirmed the old man’s theory: “You only talk that Nazi shit to get attention.”
I worked hard at school and tried to assimilate. The methodology eluded me. I knew how to rile, provoke, act like a buffoon and generally make a spectacle of myself. The concept of a simple social contract between equals was completely foreign to me.
I studied. I read shitloads of crime novels and went to crime movies. I fantasized and tailed girls home from school on my bike. The assimilation bit grew stale. Magnanimity ate shit. I was tired of being an anonymous Wasp in Jewville, U.S.A. I couldn’t stand being ignored.
The American Nazi Party established an outpost in Glen-dale. The American Legion and Jewish War Vets wanted them out. I rode my bicycle to their office and bought 40 dollars’ worth of hate goodies.
I got a Nazi armband, several