My Dark Places - James Ellroy [96]
New York was pure crystal meth. It meshed with my dual-world lifestyle. I wrote in my pad and lugged golf bags for a maintenance bankroll. Manhattan was a heartbeat away. Manhattan was full of provocative women.
My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I dug stern character. I dug radical and nonprogrammatic world-views. I disdained dilettantes, wannabes, incompetents, rock & rollers, therapy freaks, weirdo ideologues and all women who did not exemplify a sane version of the midwestern-Protestant/profligate balance I inherited from Jean Ellroy. I dug handsome women more than women other men deemed beautiful. I dug punctuality and passion and considered the two equal virtues. I was a moralistic and judgmental zealot operating on a time-lost/life-regained dynamic. I expected my women to toe the hard-work line and submit to the charismatic force I thought I possessed and fuck me comatose and make me submit to their charisma and moral rectitude on an equitable basis.
That’s what I wanted. It’s not what I got. My standards were slightly unreasonable. I revised them every time I met a woman I wanted to sleep with.
I remade those women in the image of Jean Ellroy sans booze, promiscuity and murder. I was a tornado sweeping through their lives. I took sex and heard their stories. I told them my story. I tried to make a string of brief and more extended couplings work. I never tried as hard as the women I was with.
I learned things in the process. I never downscaled my romantic expectations. I was a chickenshit cut-and-run guy and a heartbreaker with a convincingly soft facade. I took the ax to most of my affairs. I dug it when women got my number and grabbed the ax first. I never axed my romantic expectations. I never took a soft line on love. I felt bad about the women I fucked over. I went at women less ferociously over time. I learned to disguise my hunger. That hunger went straight into my books. They got more and more obsessive.
I was burning a lifelong torch with three flames.
My mother. The Dahlia. The woman I knew God would give me.
I wrote four novels in four years. I kept my Eastchester and Manhattan worlds separate. I got better and better. I attracted a cult following and built up a four-star review scrapbook. My writing wages improved. I retired my caddy cleats. I locked myself up for a year and wrote The Black Dahlia.
The year flew by. I lived with one dead woman and a dozen bad men. Betty Short ruled me. I built her character from diverse strains of male desire and tried to portray the male world that sanctioned her death. I wrote the last page and wept. I dedicated the book to my mother. I knew I could link Jean and Betty and strike 24-karat gold. I financed my own book tour. I took the link public. I made The Black Dahlia a national bestseller.
I told the Jean Ellroy-Dahlia story ten dozen times. I reduced it to sound bites and vulgarized it in the name of accessibility. I went at it with precise dispassion. I portrayed myself as a man formed by two murdered women and a man who now lived on a plane above such matters. My media performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. They exploited my mother’s desecration and allowed me to cut her memory down to manageable proportions.
The Black Dahlia was my breakthrough book. It was pure obsessive passion and a hometown elegy. I wanted to stay in the ’40s and ’50s. I wanted to write bigger novels. I felt the call of bad men doing bad things in the name of authority. I wanted to piss on the noble-loner myth and exalt shitbird cops out to fuck the disenfranchised. I wanted to canonize the secret L.A. I first glimpsed the day the redhead died.
The Black Dahlia was behind me. My tour closed out a 28-year transit. I knew I had to surpass that book. I knew that I could return to L.A. in the ’50s and rewrite that old nightmare to my own specifications. It was my first separate