by James Ellroy
Pedigreed goys and big-ass homes to the east. Hard-scrabbling Jews in duplex pads and stucco huts to the west. A legacy of entrenchment and a prophecy of powerful emergence. A contentious demographic. Two gene pools programmed to spawn swift kids.
J.B. was red brick and built to last. The main building and north building were contiguous and joined at an L-shaped juncture. Offices and classrooms covered two floors linked by wide stairwells.
The main building adjoined a large auditorium. A blacktop athletic field stretched south to Wilshire. Shop bungalows and two gyms abutted the main and north buildings perpendicularly. They enclosed the "Lunch Court"--a paved space dotted with benches and green-and-gold trash cans.
J.B. was named after a dead guy who fucked around with plants or soybeans. Nobody stressed his accomplishments or gave him much play as an icon. He was stale bread.
The student body was 8o% Jewish. I didn't know from Jews. My father called them "Pork Dodgers." My Lutheran pastor called them complicit in the famous Jesus Christ homicide.
Fifteen percent of the kids hailed from Hancock Park. Their parents preferred J.B. to prestigious prep schools. My guess: they wanted their kids to compete with Jews so they'd grow up tough and kick ass in business.
The final component: Gentile riffraff and a few Negro kids who escaped restrictive housing laws and certain death at Mount Vermin.
There's J.B., '59. I storm Camelot on my steed--a two-wheel taco wagon.
I'm tall. My dog shits on my living-room floor. I pick my nose with gusto. I stick pencils in my ears and excavate wax in full view of other kids.
I'm afraid of all living things. I pull crazy-man stunts to attract attention and deter kid predators. My psycho act is now in its third or fourth school year. The performance lines are starting to blur. I can't tell when I'm putting people on and when I'm not.
It's '59. Performance Art has not been conceptualized. I'm prescient and avant-garde and unaware that I just got lucky. Art requires an audience. Camelots play out on stages--large and small. I hit the one place that would tolerate and occasionally laud my amped-up and wholly pathetic act.
I didn't know it going in. J.B. was regimented and rule-bound.
A dress and appearance code was strictly enforced. Jeans, Capri pants, and T-shirts were banned. Boys kept their hair neatly trimmed--under threat of swats on the ass. Girls wore oxford shoes and maintained low hemlines.
The boys' vice-principal ran J.B. His name was John Hunt. He was a short, blustery man. He had bloodshot eyes and ruptured veins and strutted like a low-rent Il Duce.
Hunt stressed hard work, hard play, and physical reprisals for fuckups. He addressed Boy's League assemblies and got borderline bawdy. He said shit like "You're young men now, soon you'll discover that broads should be broad where they ought to be broad," and "I know you're studying hormones in science class. You know how you make a hormone? Don't pay her."
Hunt dispensed swats with a space-age paddle. Air shot through holes on the downswing. He made you drop trou. The aftermath exceeded the impact. The welts, blood dots, and sting lingered loooooong.
Hunt had a teacher/goon named Arthur Shapero. Hunt was 56". Shapero was 64. He looked like Lurch and Renfield from Dracula. I kept waiting for him to say, "Master, I come!"
Shapero hulked around the lunch court. Hunt kept him on a long choke chain. He ran the Space Cadets, Space Legion, and Solarons--kiddie cops empowered to cite other kids for littering and dress-code infractions.
The little shits abused their power. Hunt and Shapero backed them up. It was minidrama worthy of a mini-Camelot--and as futile as JFK's attempts to suppress Fidel Castro.
You couldn't quash the exuberance oftheJ.B. rank-and-file kid. You could infiltrate his imagination and hope your lessons took. The J.B. rank-and-file teacher knew this. He knew he was up against a big ego and a spongelike mind eager to soak up the latest and greatest knowledge--if it was sold in a boredom-proof package. He learned to digress off his basic curriculum and work in topical angles. He never played down to his kid audience.
I had my act. The teachers had theirs. We shared the same audience.
I infiltrated it as aJ.B. student. I stood apart from it as a grandstanding leper afraid of his peers.
It's fall I hitJ.B. I scope out the turf and rule out assimilation. I'm a stranger in a strange fucking land. Ike is still in the White House. I don't know from Camelot. I don't know that I'm about to embark on my first and most formative season of discourse.
With:
Little sharpsters with hungry eyes and paperbound copies of Exodus in their hip pockets. Jokesters who said, "Did you know Abraham Lincoln was Jewish? He was shot in the temple." Twelve-year-olds who'd read more books than I had and could recite baseball stats back to the time the Nazis ran Mom and Dad out of Poland. Hancock Park surfers who dry-surfed the main building on slick-soled penny loafers. Girls with stunning big features die-cast for sex appeal generations back in the shtetl. Girls bred breathtakingly blonde and raised refined by the back nine at Wilshire C.C. Kids with their own acts. Kids who could spiel, spritz, run shtick, and perform without hocking their soles.
I settled in.
I listened. I learned. I performed.
I observed.
Formal learning came easy. I read fast and retained well. My father did my math homework and supplied me with crib sheets. I gave oral reports on real books and books that I concocted extemporaneously. I hipped a few kids to my ruse and watched them howl. No teacher ever busted me for book-report fraud.
J.B. had some très hip teachers. Lepska Verzeano was Henry Miller's ex. I asked my father what this meant. He waggled his eyebrows at me.
Walt Macintosh killed Reds in Korea. His gun barrel melted during a Red death charge. He doped out the '60 campaign and held a classroom election. The Jewish kids backed JFK. The Hancock Park kids backed Nixon. I backed Tricky Dick--because my father said that JFK took his orders from Rome.
Laurence Nelson got me hooked on classical music. Beethoven wrote the sound track for myJ.B. years.
I fell for an English teacher named Margaret Pieschel. The kids called her Miss "Pie-Shell." She was dark-haired and slender. She had bad acne. The J.B. boys considered her a dog. I sensed her inner torment and caught her sex vibe full on. It was Beethovian. I stared at her and tried to zap her telepathically. I tried to tell her, I know who you are. I looked at her and knew what it was like to love a lonely woman to death.
J.B. teachers were classifiable and divisible by two. Call them the Quick and the Dead.
The Quick contingent swung hip. They dug the Peace Corps, cool jazz, and Mort Sahl. The Dead contingent swung limp--as in elderly and sincere and content to rest on J.B.'s hot rep. The Deads were a needle stuck in the groove of a looooong-play record. The Quicks faced a Camelotian dilemma: whether to toil for chump change in the L.A. school system or strike out and try to make it in the real world.
J.B. kids were classifiable and divisible by two. Call them the Naked and the Dead.
The Dead contingent swung square--as in no spiel, spritz, shtick, or performance capability and no sexy angst. The Deads did not know from discourse. The Deads accepted J.B.'s social stratification--regardless of their status. The Naked contingent swung hungry--as in voluble, argumentative, hormonally unhinged, and hip to the fact that the world rocked to a Rat Pack beat and lots of people got fucked in the ass. The Nakeds faced a Camelotian dilemma: whether to accede to the realities of social stratification and capitulate to appearances as eveiything and deny your own hunger and seek contentment in conformity and tone down your spiel, spritz, shtick, and performance capability and rework it to suit a mainstream audience-or go iconoclastic all the way and fuck this overweening adolescent urge to BELONG.
The Nakeds formed the bulk of the J.B. student body. I was an uber-Naked. I was genetically programmed for self-destructive kid iconoclasm. I expressed it in a buffoonish manner that marked me as harmless. My antics amused on occasion. My antics re
minded the rank and file that they weren't as whacked-out as I was. I made them feel secure. They rewarded me with tolerance and a few pats on the back. I listened to their spiels, spritzes, and shticks. I performed impromptu or on command. My three-year J.B. discourse was rarely interactive.
I went for my own jugular. I trashed liberal pieties and ragged JFK. I trashed Jewish pieties and yelled, "Free Adolf Eichmann!" I listened to sincerely fevered classroom debates, measured their value, and voiced ridiculously reasoned opinions calculated to agitate and spawn belly laughs. I inspired a few sad-assed guys with no riffs of their own. We became friends. We dissected the J.B. boys and stalked theJ.B. girls that we craved.
I bopped around the lunch court with my stooge, Jack Lift. We lurked, loitered, listened, and leched.
There's David Friedman. He pulled in a bundle for his bar mitzvah and laid it down on blue-chip stocks. There's Bad John and his fat sidekick, "Hefty." The word: they pour glue and glass shards on cats and blow them up with cherry bombs. There's Tony Blankley--a weird kid with a British accent. He's some kind of child actor--catch him in that Bogart flick, The Harder They Fall. There's Jamie Osborne. Check his British accent. He says he's James Mason's nephew.
There's Leona Walters. She's a tall Negro girl. I danced with her at "Co-Ed": the mandatory gym class hoedown held on Friday mornings. Negro kids are accepted magnanimously. They rate high on the Coolometer. Teachers and kids dig their victim status and try not to act condescending. I told my father that I danced with Leona and blushed the whole time. He said, "Once you've had black, you can't go back."
Howard Swancy is the alpha dog in J.B.'s black litter. He's abrupt and outspoken and a great athlete. He's always scoping out weakness in white kids. He's a dancing motherfucker. He did the Twist with Miss Byers--this redheaded English teacher with wheels like Cyd Charisse. The other twisters froze and watched. The boys' gym dance was never the same.
Steve Price is a little Lenny Bruce manqué. He's the spritz personified. He's always trawling for straight men. He knows how to mine current events for big yocks.
Jay Jaffe is any doppelganger. He's a popular kid with edgy nerves and some kind of wild hunger. He's socially deft and a great baseball player. He's got the stuff to get by on laced in with some crazy shit. I observe him obsessively. If I could bite his neck and mix his DNA with mine, I could remake myself and not cede my own essence.
Lizz Gill is a pixielike Hancock Park girl. She works for wholesome laughs. She knows the BigJ.B. Kid Truth: Sex is the ridiculous, consuming thing that life is all about. There's something subversive in her pedigree. She probably wouldn't judge me for the dog shit on my living-room floor.
Richard Berkowitz refers to himself in the third-person. He says, "I, the Great Berko have decreed" and "The Exalted Berko welcomes you" routinely. He doesn't talk much beyond that. He's a restrained shtickmeister in a frenetic crowd. His stated ambition: to serve as the towel boy in the girls' gym forever.
The girls' gym adjoined the boys' gym. There were no secret passageways between them. They were separate outposts of Camelot. The boys' gym was a comedy club. Monomania reigned. The one joke was sex and the breathlessly close proximity of the girls' gym. One shtick lasted three whole years. Boys fluffed out their pubic hair and crooned, "Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb!"
The standard J.B. romantic form was the serial crush. Love affairs came and went sans physical contact or mutual acknowledgment. Crush objects rarely knew that they were crushed on. It was all decorous and voyeuristic and abetted by intermediaries.
Crushers crushed on crushees and detailed their lust to their crush confidantes. I cranked my crushes and confidant duty up to sustained surveillance.
There's Leslie Jacobson. She's willowy. Her black bouffant bounces and shines. My stooge, Dave, loves her. He tracks her across the lunch court. I run point and linger near her in food lines. She's the quintessential Teen Fox. Dave can't get it up to address her. We discuss her and beat every aspect of her into the ground. Dave's crush fizzles out and reignites on a new girl. He carves her initials on his right arm and gets up the guts to show her. She flees in horror.
I torched my way through Camelot. I burned flames for Jill Warner, Cynthia Gardner, Donna Weiss, and Kathy Montgomery.
Jill's an in-your-face little blonde. She'll talk a blue streak to anyone. Her accessibility marks her as fatally flawed and thus a kindred spirit. She's hard to stalk. She keeps spotting me. She starts intimidating conversations and forces me to respond. Jill rates high on spunk and low on hauteur. I crave mystery and elusiveness in my women. It flips my fantasy switch and gives me groovy shit to talk about with my stalking buddies.
Cynthia, Donna, and Kathy radiated wholesome beauty and hinted at stern character. I stalked them inside and outside of school and across a big patch of L.A.
Jack Lift backstopped my surveillance. He lived across the street from Cynthia's pad at 6th and Crescent Heights. We shined shoes around the corner at the Royal Market and used it as our stakeout point. We tailed Cynthia around on our bikes the whole Summer of '61.
I knew my love was doomed. I knew the Berlin Wall thing would escalate to World War III at any moment. L.A. was scared. J.B. kids stocked up on goods at the Royal Market. We discussed the crisis and concluded that our time was running out. I told the kids that I was hot for Armageddon. They said I was nuts. Jack and I fucked up their shoes under the guise of free shines.
The world survived. My crush on Cynthia Gardner didn't. I entered crush monogamy with Donna and Kathy and torched my J.B. days down to an ember.
Donna had big eyes and a pageboy hairdo. She lived at Beverly and Gardner--the heart of Kosher Canyon. I set up a voyeur spot by the Pan Pacific Theater and surveilled her after school and on weekends.
I watched her front door. I watched people enter the synagogues on Beverly. Jack said they were war refugees. I perched by the Pan Pacific and watched the parade go by. I time-tripped back to World War II. I saved the people with the funny beanies and top hats. Donna loved me for it--until I left her for Kathy.
I traded up to a freckled brunette and a big house at 2nd and Plymouth. I boosted some Ivy League clothes to look more Hancock Park. The makeover thrilled me. JFK never looked so good. I hit a growth spurt, popped over six feet, and rendered my new threads obsolete. My pincord pants bottomed out at my ankies and drew jeers at 2nd and Plymouth. I never got up the stones to playJack to Kathy's Jackie.
I was starting to get the picture:
Camelot was a private club and an inside joke--and I didn't know the password or the punchline.
I went to the J.B. graduation dance on 6/14/62. I wore my father's 1940-vintage gray flannel suit and drank some T-Bird with a neighbor kid en route.
I sweltered in gray flannel. I squeaked across the dance floor in brown canvas shoes. I asked Cynthia Gardner to dance. She accepted in the manner of nice girls worldwide. I sweated all over her and breathed Thunderbird wine in her face.
The class of Summer '62 passed into history. The 4oo-odd members dispersed to three local high schools. My season of craaazy discourse ended.
I didn't know what I walked away from. I left J.B. with no fanfare and no friendships intact. I didn't know what I'd learned about myself or other people. I didn't know that the inexorably destructive course of my life had been diverted and subsumed by a magical time and place. I didn't know that the seeds of a gift were nourished then and there or that the raucous spirit I carried away would influence my ultimate survival.
My life went waaay bad. I gave up fifteen years to booze, dope, petty crime, and insanity. I rarely thought about John Burroughs Junior High School. I stumbled past it and never acknowledged it with affection. I never thought about my stooges or Jay Jaffe and the Great Berko. I carried snapshots of the girls in my head and loved them in place of real women.
I almost died in '75 and cleaned up in '77. The act was reflexive and instinctive and tweaked by ambiguous forces that I didn't comprehend in the moment
. It was a blessed non sequitur. I didn't dissect the act or question its componentry. I didn't want to look back. I wanted to write books and look forward.
I did it. I moved east to expedite my forward momentum. I shut my unacknowledged Camelot in a time-locked vault and forgot the combination.
A series of external events clicked into place and inspired me to reinvestigate my mother's 1958 murder. I spent fifteen months in L.A. and wrote a book about the investigation. It forced me to walk backward in time and linger in Camelot.
My time lock blew. All the old players flew out of the vault.
There's Howard Swancy. There's Berko and Jaffe. There's the girls I stalked and all the Naked and the Dead in a jumble of faces and voices.
My memoir was published in November '96. I spent ten days in L.A. on the publicity tour. Kosher Canyon and Hancock Park took on a wild new sheen. I drove byJ.B. every chance I got. I sent up prayers for the faces and voices every time.
I designated J.B. as a formal phenomenon. I developed narrative lines on the players and began to view them as kids and middleaged men and women. They wore interchangeable masks. They moved between then and now in unpredictable ways. I fashioned their masks from memory and flattered them with their presentday faces. I did not know what they looked like now. I granted them beauty as a way to say, Thanks for the ride.
A year passed. My memoir was published in paperback. A tollfree number and e-mail address were listed at the back of the text. They were there to solicit leads on my mother's murder.
An old J.B. classmate read the book and contacted me. His name was Steve Horvitz. I didn't recall him. He remembered me vividly. He ran down a list of my antics and detailed his own life then to now.
His parents were L.A. kids. His old man came out of Boyle Heights, and his old lady went to Le Conte and Hollywood High. They broke up in '55--the same year my folks split the sheets. Steve lived at Olympic and Cochran. He hung out with Ron Stillman, Ron Papell, and JayJaffe--all lawyers now. Jaffe moonlighted as a TV pundit. He worked the Oj. Simpson trial for KCBS.
