My Dark Places - James Ellroy [95]
You can’t discern my state of mind. I might be bored. I might be catatonic. I’m not giving anything up.
It’s my life at ground zero. I’m too stunned or relieved or lost in calculation to evince signs of simple grief.
That picture was 36 years old. It defined my mother as a body on a road and a fount of literary inspiration. I couldn’t separate the her from the me.
I like to hole up in hotel suites. I like to turn off the lights and crank the AC. I like temperature-controlled and contained environments. I like to sit in the dark and let my mind race. I was set to meet Bill Stoner the next morning. I ordered a room-service dinner and a big pot of coffee. I turned out the lights and let the redhead take me places.
I knew things about us. I sensed other things. Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts. She taught me self-sufficiency by negative example. I possessed a self-preserving streak at the height of my self-destruction. My mother gave me the gift and the curse of obsession. It began as curiosity in lieu of childish grief. It flourished as a quest for dark knowledge and mutated into a horrible thirst for sexual and mental stimulation. Obsessive drives almost killed me. A rage to turn my obsessions into something good and useful saved me. I outlived the curse. The gift assumed its final form in language.
She hot-wired me to sex and death. She was the first woman on my path to the brilliant and courageous woman I married. She gave me an enduring puzzle to ponder and learn from. She gave me the time and place of her death to extrapolate off. She was the hushed center of the fictional world I’d created and the joyful world I lived in—and to date I had acknowledged her in an altogether perfunctory manner.
I wrote my second novel—Clandestine—in ’8o. It was my first confrontational swipe at Jean Ellroy. I portrayed her as a tortured drunk with a hyperbolically tortured past in hick-town Wisconsin. I gave her a nine-year-old son and an evil ex-husband who physically resembled my father. I threw in autobiographical details and set the bulk of the book in the early ’50s to spotlight a Red Scare subplot. Clandestine superficially addressed Jean Ellroy. It was all about her son at age 32. The hero was an ambitious young cop. He was out to fuck women and ascend at all costs. I was an ambitious young writer. I was hot to ascend.
Ascension meant two things. I had to write a great crime novel. I had to attack the central story of my life.
I set out to do that. I implemented my conscious resolve in an unconscious fashion. Clandestine was richer and more complex than my first book. The mother and son were vividly etched. They failed only by real-life comparison. They were not my mother and I. They were surrogate fictions. I wanted to get them out of the way and move on. I thought I could paint my mother with cold details and banish her that way. I thought I could dump a few boyhood secrets and sign myself off. Jean Ellroy was not my preferred murder victim. Elizabeth Short was. I dumped the redhead for the Dahlia again.
I wasn’t ready for Elizabeth yet. I wanted to address her as a seasoned novelist. I wanted to extend my dialogue with women first.
I split L.A. in ’81. It was too familiar and too easy. AA was too easy. I wanted to ditch all the people hooked on therapy and 12-step religion. I knew I could stay sober anywhere. I wanted to blast out of L.A. and limit my L.A. intake to the fictional L.A. in my head. Brown’s Requiem was coming out in October. Clandestine was set to be published some time in ’82. I had a third book finished. I wanted to start over in a sexy new locale.
I moved to Eastchester, New York—20 miles north of the Apple. I got a basement apartment and a caddy gig at Wykagyl Country Club. I was 33. I thought I was extremely hot shit. I wanted to prove myself in New York. I wanted to get heavy with the Dahlia and find the transcendental real-life woman I knew