My Dark Places

by James Ellroy

  My name brought me grief at school. Bullies knew the way to get my goat. They knew I was a timid kid. They didn’t know that hurled “Leroy”s turned me into Sonny Liston.

  There weren’t many bullies at John Burroughs Junior High School. A few punk confrontations killed the “Leroy” epidemic.

  John Burroughs was known as “J.B.” It stood at 6th and McCadden—the southwestern edge of Hancock Park. I honed my warped cognizance there.

  The student body was 80% Jewish. Rich Hancock Park kids and general kid riffraff formed the other 20%. J.B. had a hot reputation. A brilliant bunch of youngsters matriculated there.

  My father called Jews “pork dodgers.” He said they were smarter than regular people. He told me to stay alert—Jewish kids were competitive.

  I stayed alert in school. I manifested my alertness perversely.

  I teamed up with some fellow losers. We smuggled in skin magazines and jerked off in adjoining toilet stalls. We tormented a retarded kid named Ronnie Cordero. I gave oral book reports on books that did not exist—and hipped selected kids in my English class to the ruse. I took a controversial classroom stand on the capture of Adolf Eichmann. I compared Eichmann to the Scottsboro Boys and Captain Dreyfus.

  I coveted my Jew-baiter rep. I took my mother’s antipapist line and ragged John Kennedy’s presidential efforts. I cheered Caryl Chessman into the gas chamber. I urged my classmates to dig the atom bomb. I drew swastikas and Stuka airplanes all over my notebooks.

  My antics were meant to shock. They were inspired by the brightness and erudition I encountered at school. My reactionary fervor was kinship twisted inside-out.

  That brightness rubbed off on me. I got good grades with minimum effort. My accountant father did my math homework and prepared test crib sheets for me. I was free to read and dream away my off-school hours.

  I read crime novels and watched crime TV shows. I went to crime movies. I built model cars and blew them up with firecrackers. I stole books. I crashed a ban-the-bomb rally in Hollywood and chucked eggs at pinko placard wavers. I developed a big throbbing love of classical music.

  Dahlia nightmares came in intermittent bunches. My day flashes cohered around one image.

  Betty Short was pinned to a revolving target board. A man’s hand spun the board and slashed Betty with a chisel.

  The image was subjectively viewed. The image made me the killer.

  The Dahlia was always with me. Real girls vied for my heart. A killer was stalking all the schoolgirls I grooved on. Jill, Kathy and Donna lived in great peril.

  My rescue fantasies were richly detailed. My intercessions were swift and brutal. Sex was my only reward.

  I stalked Jill, Kathy and Donna around school. I lurked near their homes on the weekend. I never talked to them.

  My father was getting real action. His pal George told me he was fucking two check-stand girls at the Larchmont Safeway. I came home unexpectedly one day and caught him in the sack.

  It was a hot afternoon. Our apartment door was open. I walked up the outside stairs and heard groaning. I tiptoed inside and peeped through the bedroom doorway.

  My father was pouring the pork to a zaftig brunette. The dog was on the bed with them. She was dodging legs and trying to sleep on a bouncing mattress.

  I watched for a while and tiptoed back outside.

  I was wising up to my father. If he really won all those medals, he’d be as famous as Audie Murphy. If he had real drive and talent, we’d be living fat in Hancock Park right now. He was too proud to hand-sell his ten thousand Tote Seats—but not too proud to scam money off my mother’s insurance policy.

  My teeth needed straightening. I hit my Aunt Leoda up for orthodontic treatment money and overquoted the amount required. My father paid the dentist’s initial bill and pocketed the balance. He fell behind on his maintenance payments and paid a cut-rate oral surgeon 20 bucks to cut the hardware off my teeth.

  Aunt Leoda was easily conned. I snow-jobbed her regularly. I was trashing my college education fund. The thought didn’t faze me one iota.

  I hated Ed and Leoda Wagner and my cousins Jeannie and Janet. My father hated the Wagner clan big-time. My hatred was his hatred carbon-copied.

  Leoda thought my father killed my mother. My father got a kick out of the notion. He told me Leoda suspected him from the start.

  I dug the Dad-as-killer concept. It subverted my awareness of my father’s passive nature and gave the man some panache. He killed my mother to gain custody of me. He knew that I hated her. He was a killer and I was a thief.

  My father harped on Aunt Leoda’s suspicions. He enjoyed the implicit drama. He pushed me back to that stack of newspaper clippings.

  I reread them. I matched my father’s face to a police sketch of the Dark Man. There was no resemblance whatsoever. My father did not murder my mother. He was with me when the crime occurred.

  Spade Cooley beat his wife to death in April ’61. He was hopped up on amphetamines. Ella Mae Cooley wanted to ditch Spade and join a free-love cult. She wanted to screw younger men.

  I followed the case. Spade Cooley copped a plea and beat the gas chamber. Ella Mae got fucked out of a just vengeance.

  I was 13 years old. Dead women owned me.

  9

  I lived in two worlds.

  Compulsive fantasies ruled my inner world. The outside world intruded all too often. I never learned to hoard my thoughts and hold them for private moments. My two worlds clashed continually.

  I wanted to crash the outside world. I wanted to wow the outside world with my sense of drama. I knew that access to my thoughts would make people love me. It was a common teenaged conceit.

  I wanted to take my thoughts public. I possessed exhibitionist flair—but lacked stage presence and control of my effects. I came off as a desperate clown.

  My performing repertoire mirrored my private obsessions. I liked to spiel on crime and Nazi fiends in hiding. “Kiddie Noir” was my metier.

  My forums were classrooms and schoolyards. I ran my spiels to doofus kids and exasperated teachers. I learned an old vaudeville truth: You hold an audience only as long as you make them laugh.

  My fantasies were dark and serious. My audiences had a low tolerance for vivisected women. I learned to topically digress for yucks.

  The early ’60s were good comic fodder. I took contrary stands on the A-bomb, John Kennedy, civil rights and the Berlin Wall brouhaha. I yelled “Free Rudolf Hess!” and advocated the reinstatement of slavery. I did wicked JFK imitations and stumped for the nuclear annihilation of Russia.

  A few teachers took me aside and told me my shtick wasn’t funny. My classmates were laughing at me—not with me. I caught their implied message: You are one fucked-up kid. They caught my message up-front: Laugh at me or with me—just laugh.

  My fantasies made for marginal stand-up routines. My fantasies were a schizoid bridge between my two worlds.

  I fantasized endlessly. I got up a head of fantasy steam and rode my bike through red lights. I sat in theaters and ran fantasy riffs off the movies I was seeing. I turned boring novels into enthralling ones by adding extemporaneous subplots.

  My one great fantasy theme was CRIME. My one great hero was myself, transformed. I mastered marksmanship, judo and complex musical instruments in a microsecond. I was a detective—who just happened to be a violin and piano virtuoso. I rescued the Black Dahlia. I zoomed around in sports cars and bright red Fokker triplanes. My fantasies were richly anachronistic.

  And sex-saturated.

  Jean Ellroy-type women craved me. I took 40-ish redheads glimpsed on the street and gave them my mother’s body. I plowed through them in the course of my adventures. I settled into marriage with the last schoolgirl to goose my heartbeat. I always left the Jean Ellroy substitutes bereft.

  My fantasies were persistently one-note. They were a hedge against schoolday boredom and my wretched home life.

  I had my father’s number now. At 141 was taller than him. I figured
I could kick his ass. He was a weakling and a bullshit artist.

  We were bound by a sticky kind of need. “We” were all we had. The “we” thing made my father all gooey. I bought the “we” thing in weak moments and bridled at it most of the time. The old man’s love for me was cloying and at odds with his profane take on life. I loved him when he called President Kennedy “a Catholic cocksucker” and hated him when he wept at the national anthem. I dug his fuck-pad-hotel riffs and squirmed when he embellished his World War I exploits. I couldn’t acknowledge a simple truth: The redhead was a better single-parent proposition.

  The old man’s health was fading. He was coughing up lungers and weaving behind dizzy spells. He’d make a small bundle at tax time, laze around the pad and deplete his roll. He’d look for drugstore work when he got down to his last ten scoots. His get-rich-quick fervor raged on.

  He managed a stage show at the Cabaret Concerttheatre. The show featured young comedians and singers. My father got tight with a comic named Alan Sues.

  The show bombed. My father and Alan Sues opened a hat shop. Sues designed the hats. My father kept the books and flogged the hats by mail order. The venture went bust quicksville.

  My father segued to sporadic drugstore gigs. He was pushing sixty-five. He guzzled Alka-Seltzer for his ulcers at the same rate my mother downed bourbon. We were dead-assed broke throughout most of ’62.

  I conned coin out of Aunt Leoda. The “I need dental work” pitch worked wonders. Fifty-dollar handouts floated us for weeks. I stole from my father to augment my private income.

  He sent me to the store to buy our food. I shoplifted a good portion of it and pocketed the price of the items. I carried a wad of one-dollar bills in a Vegas-style money clip.

  I rode my top-heavy bike up to Hollywood and out to the beach. I rode it to the downtown public library. I liked to ride and sync my fantasies to street scenes. I liked to cruise by the places where Jill, Kathy and Donna lived.

  I thieved as I rode. I copped books at the Pickwick Shop and boosted school supplies from Rexall Drugs. I stole without hesitation or shudders of remorse.

  I cut a wide two-wheeled swath. I was a geeky minor miscreant-about-town. I stood 6′1″ and scaled in at 130 pounds. Pimples comprised the bulk of my weight. My super-customized bicycle drew jeers and catcalls.

  L.A. at large meant freedom. My neighborhood meant self-restriction. My immediate outside world was still rigidly circumscribed: Melrose to Wilshire to Western to Rossmore. That world was packed with my baby-boom peers.

  I wanted to be with them. I knew a few from school and a few from neighborhood collisions. I knew all their names and most of their reputations. I craved their friendship and degraded myself to get it.

  I tried to buy their affection with Jap surplus Tote Seats—and got laughed out en masse. I invited a few kids to my pad—and watched them recoil at the stench of dogshit. I tried to conform to their standards of normal behavior and betrayed myself with foul language, poor hygiene and expressed admiration for George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.

  My exhibitionist flair was purely self-destructive. I couldn’t tone down my act. I was programmed to grandstand and alienate. My efforts to adapt triggered an internal backlash. I cut myself off at the pass and remained a teenage leper.

  Other lepers dug my act and fell in behind my banner. I ruled my leper colony imperiously. I didn’t respect the kids who thought I was cool. My school friendships burned out quick. Most of my buddies were Jewish and predisposed to distrust my Nazi shenanigans.

  My friendships began with nihilistic bonhomie and ended with ineffectual fistfights. I won kids over with shock tactics and blew them out with my overall loser vibe. The pattern was endlessly repetitive.

  I made friends with a neighborhood kid. We started jacking each other off. It was my first sexual contact. It was shameful, exciting, loathsome and motherfucking scary.

  We jacked each other off at his pad and at my pad and on apartment-house rooftops. We spread Playboy magazines out and looked at them while we labored. We knew we weren’t fags. Our mutual-masturbation limits were easily adhered to.

  I knew I wasn’t a homo. My fantasy life proved it. I sought out the Kinsey Report for validation.

  Doc Kinsey called youthful fag activity commonplace. He failed to address my real fears:

  Can mutual jackoffs turn you into a fruit? Does the mere indulgence stigmatize you in recognizable ways?

  I was a horny little shitbird. Mutual jackoffs were better than self-propelled jackoffs. My friend and I jacked each other off several times a week. I loved it and hated it. It was driving me fucking crazy.

  I was afraid my father would catch us. I was afraid I’d start emitting fruit vibes. I was afraid that God would turn me into a fruit—just punishment for all my years of stealing.

  My fear escalated. I felt people boring into my mind. I turned up the heat on my heterosexual daydreams—a strategy to thwart the people tuning in to my brainwaves.

  I was afraid I’d talk in my sleep and alert the old man to my fruit potential. I dreamed that I was on trial for fruitness. Those dreams were scarier than my worst Black Dahlia nightmares.

  I quit hanging out with my friend. A few weeks went by. My friend called me and asked me to take his Sunday-morning paper route—he wanted to go to Lake Arrowhead with his family.

  I agreed. I slept late Sunday morning, rode over to his house and dumped his stack of Heralds in a trash can. My friend braced me at school the next day.

  I accepted his challenge to fight. I stipulated a six-round bout—with boxing gloves, referee and judges. My friend agreed to the terms.

  We scheduled the fight for the following Sunday. Our will to mayhem proved we weren’t fruits.

  I recruited a ref, three judges and a timekeeper. Ellie Beers’s front lawn served as a ring. A few spectators showed up. It was the neighborhood kid event of late spring ’62.

  My friend and I wore twelve-ounce gloves. We were both stick-skinny and over six feet tall. We possessed no boxing skills whatsoever. We heaved, lurched, thrashed, flailed and powder-puff-punched the shit out of each other for six three-minute rounds. We ended up dehydrated and falling-down dizzy and unable to lift our arms.

  I lost via split decision. The fight occurred around the time of the second Emile Griffith-Benny “Kid” Paret bout. Griffith beat Paret dead. Griffith allegedly hated Paret. Paret allegedly went around calling Griffith a fruit.

  I knew I wasn’t a fruit. The fight proved it. Nobody was tapping into my brainwaves. It was a stupid fucking notion.

  I lived by notions—stupid and otherwise. I soaked up crackpot ideas wholesale. Books and movies fed me storylines to revise from a warped perspective.

  My mind was a cultural sponge. I was devoid of interpretive powers and possessed no gift for abstraction. I took in Active plots, historical facts and general minutiae—and built a crazy worldview from odd bits of data.

  Classical music got my brain perk-perk-perking. I got lost in Beethoven and Brahms. Symphonies and concertos hit me like complex novels. Crescendos and soft passages formed narrative through lines. Alternating fast and slow movements sent me into mental freefall.

  The nightly news gave me facts. I wove them into a sweeping form and contextualized them to suit my momentary fancy. I connected non sequitur events and anointed heroes on perverse whim. A liquor-store heist might play into Nazis picketing the film Exodus. All murders were attributed to the Black Dahlia killer—currently stalking Jill, Kathy and Donna. I unraveled the hidden threads connecting seemingly disparate occurrences. I worked out of a Hancock Park mansion. I was surrounded by flunkies—say, Vic Morrow in Portrait of a Mobster or that tall British guy in Mr. Sardonicus.

  I hijacked popular culture and furnished my inner world with the clutter. I spoke my own specialized language and viewed the outside world with X-ray eyeglasses. I saw crime everywhere.

  CRIME linked my worlds—inside and outside. Crime was clandest
ine sex and the random desecration of women. Crime was as banal and rarefied as a young boy’s brain perk-perk-perking.

  I was a committed anti-Communist and a somewhat more tenuous racist. Jews and Negroes were pawns in the worldwide Commie Conspiracy. I lived by the logic of sequestered truth and hidden agendas. My inner world was obsessively realized and as curative as it was debilitating. It rendered the outside world prosaic and made my daily transit in that world passably bearable.

  The old man ruled my outside world. He ruled permissively and kept me in line with occasional outbursts of scorn. He thought I was weak, lazy, slothful, duplicitous, fanciful and painfully neurotic. He was unhip to the fact that I was his mirror image.

  I had his number. He had mine. I started shutting him out. It was the same extrication process I utilized with my mother.

  Some neighborhood kids got my number and let me into their clique. They were outcasts with good social skills. Their names were Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl.

  Lloyd was a fat boy from a broken home. His mother was a Christian wacko. He was as foulmouthed as I was and loved books and music just as much. Fritz lived in Hancock Park. He dug movie soundtracks and Ayn Rand novels. Daryl was an ass-kicker, athlete and borderline Nazi of half-Jewish parentage.

  They let me into their clique. I became their subaltern, court jester and stooge. They thought I was a big-time laugh riot. My raunchy home life shocked and delighted them.

  We rode our bikes to movies in Hollywood. I always lagged a hundred yards behind—my Schwinn Corvette was just that heavy and hard to propel. We listened to music and spritzed on sex, politics, books and our preposterous ideas.

  I couldn’t hold my own intellectually. My sense of discourse was internally directed and channeled into narrative. My friends thought I wasn’t as smart as they were. They teased me and ragged me and made me the butt of their jokes.

  I took their shit and kept coming back for more. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl had a keen instinct for weakness and were skilled at male one-upmanship. Their cruelty hurt—but not enough to make me drop their friendship.