by James Ellroy
My northern roaming flank was topographically diverse. I liked to watch the view decline wrest to east. Odd blocks were nicely tended. Odd blocks were dirty and run-down. I liked the Polar Palace Skating Rink at Van Ness and Clinton. I liked the El Royale Apartments—because they sounded like “Ellroy.” The Algiers was thrilling. Every woman walking in and out was potentially a hooker.
I liked my northern roaming flank. Sometimes it scared me—kids riding by on their bikes would swerve my way or flip me the finger. Small confrontations would drive me south for days.
My southern roaming flank stretched from Western to Rossmore and Beverly to Wilshire Boulevard. The eastern edge had one draw: the public library at Council and St. Andrews. It was negligible prowl turf.
I loved to prowl due south and southwest, Ist Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, 4th Street, 5th Street, 6th Street, Wilshire. Irving, Windsor, Lorraine, Plymouth, Beachwood, Larchmont, Lucerne, Arden, Rossmore.
Hancock Park.
Large Tudor houses and French chateaus. Spanish mansions. Broad front lawns, trellised arbors, tree-lined curbsides and an air of time-warp containment. Perfectly circumscribed order and wealth a few blocks from my shit-encrusted home.
Hancock Park hypnotized me. The landscape held me spellbound.
I roamed Hancock Park. I walked and gawked and strolled and trolled. I cinched Minna to her leash and let her pull me down Irving to Wilshire three or four times a day. I prowled the shops on Larchmont Boulevard and boosted books at Chevalier’s.
I developed crushes on houses and girls glimpsed in windows. I constructed elaborate Hancock Park fantasies. My father and I would crash Hancock Park and make it our own kingdom.
I did not covet Hancock Park from any kind of aggrieved perspective. I owned the place with my imagination. It was enough—for a while.
The summer of ’58 ended. I enrolled in the sixth grade at Van Ness Avenue Elementary School. My roaming jaunts were drastically curtailed.
Van Ness Avenue School was genteel. Nobody offered me marijuana. My teacher pampered me a little. She probably knew my mom was a murder victim.
I was becoming quite a large kid. I was foulmouthed and spouted profane lingo on the schoolyard. My father’s favorite expression was “Fuck you, Fritz.” His favorite expletive was “cocksucker.” I mimicked his language and reveled in its shock value.
I was refining my Crazy Man Act. It kept me miserably lonely and sealed up in my own little head.
My reading tastes were growing more sophisticated. I’d gone through all the Hardy Boys and Ken Holt books and was tired of pat plots and simple closures. I wanted more violence and more sex. My father recommended Mickey Spillane.
I stole some Spillane paperbacks. I read them and got titillated and scared. I don’t think I followed the plots very well— and I know it didn’t hinder my enjoyment. I dug the shooting and the sex and Mike Hammer’s anti-Communist fervor. The total package was just hyperbolic enough to keep me from getting too frightened. It wasn’t rock-bottom blunt and horrific— like my mother and the Blonde and the Dark Man.
My father was permitting me more freedom. He told me I could go to the movies by myself and take Minna out for her late walks.
Hancock Park by night was another separate world.
Darkness made colors recede. Corner streetlamps put out a nice glow. Houses became backdrops for window lights.
I stood out in the darkness and looked in. I saw draperies, blank walls, blips of color and passing shapes. I saw girls in private-school uniforms. I saw some beautiful Christmas trees.
Those late-night walks were spooky and enticing. Darkness reinforced my claim on the turf and pumped up my imagination. I started prowling backyards and looking in back windows.
The prowling was a thrill in itself. Back windows gave me intimate views.
Bathroom windows were the best. I saw half-dressed women and women and girls in robes. I liked to watch them putter in front of their mirrors.
I found a catcher’s mitt on a picnic table. I stole it. I found a real leather football behind another house. I stole it and cut it open with a pocket knife to see what was inside.
I was still preadolescent. I was a thief and a voyeur. I was headed for a hot date with a desecrated woman.
8
She came to me in a book. An innocent gift burned my world down.
My father gave me the book for my eleventh birthday. It was a nonfiction ode to the Los Angeles Police Department. The title was The Badge. The author was Jack Webb—the star and brains behind the Dragnet TV show.
The show derived from LAPD case files. The cops talked in monotones and treated suspects with brusque contempt. The suspects were cowardly and bombastically verbose. The cops bought none of their bullshit.
Dragnet was the saga of dead-end lives up against authority. Suppressive police methods insured a virtuous L.A. The show talked a stern game and oozed subtextual self-pity. It was the epic of isolated men in an isolating profession, deprived of conventional illusions and traumatized by their daily contact with scum. It was ’50s-style male angst—alienation as a public-service announcement.
The book was the TV show unchained. Jack Webb detailed police procedures and whined about the LAPD’s white male burden at great length. He compared criminals to Communists without irony. He served up real-life anecdotes to illustrate the terrors and prosaic satisfactions of police work. He ran down some snappy LAPD cases—free of TV censorship strictures.
The Club Mecca firebomb job was a scorcher.
Four creeps were ejected from a neighborhood tavern on April 4, 1957. They returned with a Molotov cocktail and torched the joint to the ground. Six patrons died. The LAPD tracked the killers down within a few hours. They were tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
Donald Keith Bashor was a pad burglar. He hit small apartments in the Westlake Park District. Two women interrupted his pad crawls. Bashor beat them dead. He was captured, tried and convicted. He went to the gas chamber in October ’57.
Stephen Nash was a gap-toothed psychopath. He was pissed off at the world. He beat a man to death and slashed a ten-year-old boy under the Santa Monica Pier. The LAPD nabbed him in ’56. He copped to nine more murders and tagged himself “the King of the Killers.” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
The stories were deadpan horrific. The villains looked stupid and nihilistically inclined.
Stephen Nash killed on impulse. His murders lacked a quality of calculation and were not perpetrated with an eye for full-blown horror. Nash did not know how to harness his rage into symbolic gestures and inflict them on a living human being. He lacked the will or inclination to commit murders that inspired great public fascination.
The Black Dahlia killer knew what he didn’t. He understood mutilation as language. He murdered a beautiful young woman and thus insured his anonymous celebrity.
I read Jack Webb’s account of the Black Dahlia murder case. It sent me way off the deep end.
The Black Dahlia was a girl named Elizabeth Short. Her body was found in a vacant lot in January 1947. The dump site was four miles due south of my apartment.
Elizabeth Short was cut in two at the waist. The killer scrubbed her body clean and left her naked. He placed her two inches off a city sidewalk with her legs spread wide.
He tortured her for days. He beat her and sliced her with a sharp knife. He stubbed cigarettes out on her breasts and cut the corners of her mouth back to her ears.
Her suffering was horribly attenuated. She was systematically abused and terrorized. The killer probed and rearranged her internal organs postmortem. The crime was pure misogynist insanity—and thus ripe for misinterpretation.
Betty Short died at twenty-two. She was a flaky kid living out flaky kid fantasies. A reporter learned that she dressed solely in black and named her “The Black Dahlia.” The tag nullified her and vilified her and turned her into a sainted lost daughter and a slut.
The case was a huge news even
t. Jack Webb steeped his twelve-page summary in the ethos of the time: Femme fatales die hard and are complicitous in attracting death by vivisection. He didn’t understand the killer’s intentions or know that his gynecological tampering defined the crime. He didn’t know that the killer was horribly afraid of women. He didn’t know that he cut the Dahlia open to see what made women different from men.
I didn’t know those things then. I did know that I had a story to run to and run from.
Webb described the Dahlia’s last days. She was running to and from men and stretching her mental resources schizophrenically thin. She was looking for a safe place to hide.
Two photographs accompanied the story.
The first one showed Betty Short at 39th and Norton. Her legs were half visible. Men with guns and pocket notebooks were standing over her body.
The second one showed her in life. Her hair was swept up and back—like a 1940s portrait shot of my mother.
I read the Dahlia story a hundred times. I read the rest of The Badge and stared at the pictures. Stephen Nash, Donald Bashor and the firebomb guys became my friends. Betty Short became my obsession.
And my symbiotic stand-in for Geneva Hilliker Ellroy.
Betty was running and hiding. My mother ran to El Monte and forged a secret weekend life there. Betty and my mother were body-dump victims. Jack Webb said Betty was a loose girl. My father said my mother was a drunk and a whore.
My Dahlia obsession was explicitly pornographic. My imagination supplied the details that Jack Webb omitted. The murder was an epigram on transient lives and impacted sex as death. The unsolved status was a wall I tried to break down with a child’s curiosity.
I applied my mind to the task. My explication efforts were entirely unconscious. I simply told myself mental stories.
That storytelling worked counterproductively. My daytime tales of death by saw and scalpel gave me terrible nightmares. They were devoid of narrative lines—all I saw was Betty being cut, slashed, poked, probed and dissected.
My nightmares had a pure raw force. Vivid details burst out of my unconscious. I saw Betty drawn and quartered on a medieval torture rack. I saw a man drain her blood into a bathtub. I saw her spread-eagled on a medical gurney.
Those scenes made me afraid to sleep. My nightmares came steadily or at unpredictable intervals. Daytime flashes complemented them.
I’d be sitting in school. I’d be bored and prey to odd mental wanderings. I’d see entrails stuffed in a toilet bowl and torture gadgets poised for business.
I did not willfully conjure the images. They seemed to spring from somewhere beyond my volition.
The nightmares and day flashes continued through the spring and summer. I knew they were God’s punishment for my voyeur prowls and thievery. I stopped stealing and peeping Hancock Park windows. The nightmares and day flashes continued.
I went back to stealing and watching. A man caught me in his yard and chased me out. I quit voyeurizing altogether.
The nightmares and day flashes continued. Their power dwindled through sheer repetition. My Black Dahlia obsession assumed new fantasy forms.
I rescued Betty Short and became her lover. I saved her from a life of promiscuity. I tracked down her killer and executed him.
They were strong, narrative-based fantasies. They took the queasy edge off my Dahlia fixation.
I was set to enter junior high in September ’59. My father told me I should start taking buses by myself. I exploited that new freedom in the name of formal Dahlia research.
I took bus trips downtown to the Main Public Library. I read the 1947 Herald-Express on microfilm rolls. I learned all about the life and death of the Black Dahlia.
Betty Short came from Medford, Massachusetts. She had three sisters. Her parents were divorced. She visited her dad in California in 1943. She got hooked on Hollywood and men in uniform.
The Herald called her a “playgirl” and a “party girl.” I decoded the terms to read “whore.” She wanted to be a movie star. She was concurrently engaged to several army flyboys. A guy named Red Manley drove her up from San Diego a week before her death. She had no fixed Los Angeles address. She’d been bouncing around between rooming houses and cheap apartments for months. She frequented cocktail bars and cadged drinks and dinners off strange men. She told whopping lies routinely. Her life was indecipherable.
I instinctively understood that life. It was a chaotic collision with male desire. Betty Short wanted powerful things from men—but could not identify her needs. She reinvented herself with youthful panache and convinced herself that she was something original. She miscalculated. She wasn’t smart and she wasn’t self-aware. She recast herself in a cookie-cutter mold that pandered to long-prescribed male fantasies. The new Betty was the old Betty bushwhacked by Hollywood. She turned herself into a cliché that most men wanted to fuck and a few men wanted to kill. She wanted to get deep dark down and cozy with men. She sent out magnetic signals. She met a man with notions of deep-dark-down-and-cozy cloaked in rage. Her only complicitous act was a common fait accompli. She made herself over for men.
The Herald ran the Dahlia story for 12 solid weeks. It played up the massive investigation rife with fruitless leads and weirdo suspects. False confessions and other tangential offshoots got front-page coverage.
The lesbian theory was hot for a while: Betty Short might have traveled in dyke circles. The smut-picture theory had a good run: Betty might have posed for pornographic snapshots.
People ratted their neighbors off as the killer. People ratted off lovers who jilted them. People went to psychics and sought out the Dahlia’s spirit. Elizabeth Short’s death inspired a minor hysteria.
Postwar L.A. coalesced around the body of a dead woman. Hordes of people fell sway to the Dahlia. They weaved themselves into her story in bizarre and fantastical ways.
The story thrilled me and moved me. It filled me with a perverse sense of hope.
The Dahlia defined her time and place. She claimed lives from the grave and exerted great power.
Stephen Nash went to the gas chamber in August ’59. He spit some chewing gum at a chaplain right before they strapped him in. He sucked down the cyanide fumes with a big shiteating grin.
I enrolled at John Burroughs Junior High School a few weeks later. Harvey Glatman went to the gas chamber on September 18th. I hit my father up for a bicycle. We conned a C-note out of my aunt and bought a candy-apple-red Schwinn Corvette.
I customized that bike to the nines. I added gooseneck handlebars, plastic saddlebags, rhinestone-studded mud flaps and a speedometer that tapped out at 150 miles an hour. My father called my bike a “nigger wagon.” It was beautiful—but very heavy and slow. I had to walk it up hills.
I had a vehicle now. My new school was three miles from my pad. My roaming turf expanded exponentially.
I rode my bike down to 39th and Norton several times. Houses covered the vacant lot where Betty Short was found. I tore them down with my imagination. I laid bicycle skid marks on the sidewalk near that hallowed spot.
I still had Dahlia nightmares. I conjured the Dahlia up to combat schoolroom boredom. I kept rereading The Badge. It kept me zeroed in on L.A. crime.
1949: the Brenda Allen vice scandal. Call girls jungled up with corrupt cops. Colorful mobster Mickey Cohen. The 1951 “Two Tonys” snuff. Marie “the Body” McDonald and her fake kidnap caper. The “Bloody Christmas” police brutality scandal.
I was developing a tabloid sensibility. Crime jazzed me and scared me in roughly equivalent measure. My brain was a police blotter.
I followed the Ma Duncan case on TV. Ma Duncan had a possessive passion for her son Frank. Frank married a hot young nurse and made Ma jealous. Ma hired two Mexican winos to rub the nurse out. They abducted her on November 17, ’58. They drove her into the Santa Barbara hills and strangled her. Ma shortchanged the guys on their hit fee. Ma shot her mouth off and told a friend about the whole thing. The Santa Barbara fuzz busted Ma and the Mexicans. They
were currently embroiled in legal proceedings.
I followed the Bernard Finch/Carole Tregoff case. Finch was a playboy physician. Tregoff was his slinky girlfriend. Finch had a lucrative West Covina practice. His wife was filthy rich—and Finch was her sole heir. Finch and Tregoff faked a burglary and snuffed Mrs. Finch in July ’59. The case was a local sensation.
I followed Caryl Chessman’s fight to beat the gas chamber. My father told me Chessman bit a woman’s nipples off and drove her insane.
My father co-signed my crime obsession. He never tried to derail my one-track tendency. I could read what I wanted to and watch unlimited TV He talked to me like a pal. He shot me choice gossip gleaned from his years as a Hollywood bottom-feeder.
He told me Rock Hudson was a fag and Mickey Rooney would fuck a woodpile on the off-chance a snake might be inside. Rita Hayworth was a nympho—he knew that from personal experience.
We were poor. Our apartment reeked of dogshit. I ate cookies and milk for breakfast every morning and hamburgers or frozen pizza for dinner every night. I wore ratty clothes. My father talked to himself and told TV commentators to “fuck off” and “suck my dick.” We hung around in our undershorts. We subscribed to skin magazines. Our dog bit us occasionally.
I was lonely. I was friendless. I had a hunch that my life wasn’t quite kosher.
But I knew things.
My parents named me Lee Earle Ellroy. They sentenced me to a life of tongue-tripping l’s and e’s—and “Leroy”s by default. I hated my given names. I hated being called “Leroy.” My father conceded that the “Lee Earle” and “Ellroy” combo stunk. He said it was a nigger-pimp name.
He employed a part-time alias himself. He went by “James Brady” and worked some drugstore gigs under that name as a tax-evasion measure. I made up my mind early: Someday I’d ditch the “Lee Earle” and keep the “Ellroy.”
