My Dark Places - James Ellroy [64]
I spent it all on booze, dope and pizza. I moved to a better place—a bachelor pad at 6th and Cloverdale. I got hopped up on some women there and followed them around the neighborhood.
My insurance money ran out. My mailroom thefts more than covered the loss. I got in a fender bender with the company van and had to admit I had no driver’s license. KCOP fired me. I got some short-term temp gigs and lived ultra-cheap. I got desperate. I broke into Missy’s house and broke a cardinal rule.
I stole all the money in her mother’s purse. There was no going back to that sweet house at 1st and Beachwood.
My pad prowls were starting to scare me more than thrill me. I felt the law of chance on my tail. I’d broken into places maybe twenty times total. My jail stint taught me things that fed my sense of caution.
House burglary was first-degree burglary. It was a penitentiary offense. I knew I could handle county jail time. Prison time would eat me up whole.
The Tate-LaBianca snuffs occurred in August. I felt the ripples all through Hancock Park.
I noticed some tape around Kathy’s windows. I saw more private patrol cars out trawling. I saw security-service signs on front doors.
I stopped B&E’ing cold turkey. I never did it again.
I spent the next year in fantasy limbo. I held down temp gigs and a job at a pornographic bookstore. Hard-core packaged smut was now legal. Unpainted hippie girls were spread out nude in full-color magazines.
The girls didn’t look jaded or degraded. They looked like they were posing for chuckles and some bread. They were engaged in an ugly pandering business. They betrayed their awareness of it with little frowns and glazed eyes.
They reminded me of the Black Dahlia—sans heavy makeup and noir baggage. The Dahlia choked on movieland illusions. These girls were deluded on some junk metaphysical plane.
They bored straight into my heart. I was the porno bookstore clerk out to save them from pornography and take his reward in sex. I hoarded their pictures the way Harvey Glatman hoarded pix of his victims. I gave my girls names and prayed for them every night. I sicced the Dahlia killer on them and saved them as his blade descended. They spread their legs and talked to me when I flew on Benzedrex inhalers.
I didn’t fall for ones with perfect shapes and pert faces. I loved the smiles that didn’t quite work and the sad eyes that couldn’t lie. Mismatched features and oddly shaped breasts hit me hard. I was looking for sexual and psychological gravity.
I stole that bookstore blind. I examined every sex mag that came in and ripped out pictures of the most wrenching women. I worked midnight to 8:00 a.m., tapped the till and went to a bar that screened beaver flicks all day. I got drunk and looked at more hippie girls—and I always studied their faces more than their bodies.
My pornographic season passed too quickly. The bookstore boss got hip to my thefts and fired me. I went back to temp work, built up a surplus roll and went on a gargantuan two-month bender.
I socked in a case of vodka, a load of steaks and a load of inhalers. I gorged myself on fantasy, fantasy sex, cholesterol, and the work of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and some junk crime writers. I stayed inside for days running. I lost and gained and lost weight and worked myself into a near-insane frenzy.
I stiffed my landlord for two months’ rent. He started banging on my door and talking eviction. I didn’t have enough money to muzzle him. I had enough to secure a cheaper pad for a month.
I found a place by the Paramount Studio. It was a genteel dive called the Green Gables Apartments. A small bachelor rented for 60 a month—very cheap for 1970.
Lloyd helped me move. I packed my stuff into his car and pulled a classic late-night rent dodge. I got squared away at the Gables and looked for work.
I didn’t find any. The low-skill job market was soft. I took a series of inhaler