by James Ellroy
Steve went to San Francisco State. He stalked Jill Warner in Frisco--more successfully than I stalked her in L.A. He graduated and sold insurance. He went into his old man's wholesale candy and tobacco biz. He made a mint off high-interest CDs in the gogo years and bought a car wash and a marketing business. He did custom framing for model homes and design work for restaurants and coffee shops. He went into the sports lithograph field and lost a mint in the Bush recession. He was working on Mint #2 now. Credit card processing was hot, hot, hot. He had two sons--one from Wife #1 and one from Wife #2. Wife #2 had a son from Husband #1. Wives, kids, mints--life could be worse.
Steve and I became friends. We shared a similar take on Camelot and rehashed the time and place in two-hour phone talks. We debated John Hunt as sadist or man-on-moral-mission. We dissected "Kampus King" Tony Shultz and Tony Blanldey--now a big cheese with Newt Gingrich. Steve stayed in L.A. He didn't lockJ.B. in a time-vault. He retained a few friendships and had a handhold on the slenderJ.B. grapevine. He provided rumors and facts and a necrology.
Howard Swancy--allegedly a cop. Jamie Osborne--dead in Vietnam. Mark Schwartz--dead--possibly a dope-related homicide. Eric Hendrickson--murdered in Frisco. Laurie Maullin-- dead of cancer. Steve Schwartz--heroin O.D. Steve Siegel and Ken Greene--dead.
Lots of attorneys--the law attracted bright kids who didn't know what else to do with their lives. Josh Trabulus--doctor. Lizz Gill--TV writer. The Great Berko--Berko'd out somewhere unknown. Cynthia Gardner--last seen as a Mormon housewife. Leslie Jacobson--allegedly a shrink.
Steve lent me his "Burr" yearbooks. The photos served as synaptic triggers. My backlog of faces and events expanded fiftyfold.
Howard Swancy almost trades blows with Big Guy Huber. LeslieJacobson twirls to the "Peppermint Twist." JayJaffe wins a penny stomp that leaves a half-dozen kids bloody. Herb Steiner rags the folk song craze at the Burr Frolics. I disrupt a classroom postmortem on the Bay of Pigs invasion. I contend that JFK should A-bomb Havana. Kids bomb me with wadded-up paper. I dig the attention and launch a counterattack. The teacher laughs. The same teacher laughed when Caryl Chessman got fried.
Steve and I deconstructed Camelot. We conceded the predictable nature of fifty-year-olds looking back. We traced the known arc ofJ.B. lives and the mass reconstellation at Berkeley in the late '6o's. We tagged it as predictably emblematic and explored it as a cliché and an issue of enduring ideals. We questioned J.B. as a substantive endeavor or a freeze-frame from some ditzy teen flick. I categorized it as an auspicious L.A. lounge act.
We opened strong. The curtain went down before we had to take it any further.
Steve said, "Let's get some motherfuckers together."
I said, "I'll fly out."
The Pacific Dining Car defines my L.A. continuum.
It's a swank steak house west of the downtown freeway loop. It's been there since 1921. It's open twenty-four hours, every day of the year. It's dark, cavelike, and lushly contained in the middle of a poverty zone. I was born in the hospital half a block south. I met my wife at the Dining Car and married her there.
Steve found most of the people. A private eye found the rest. The RSVP list tallied in at 99%. One dinner turned into three.
Steve and I attended them all. The Dining Car fed groups of thirteen, twelve, and nine. We convened at the same long table in the same dark room. I can't break down the specific guest lists. The whirl of laughter and reminiscence ran seamless over three nights.
Camelot redux.
There's Berko and Jaffe. There's Donna Weiss in a new pageboy. Howard Swancy--a preacher instead of a cop. Helen Katzoff, Lorraine Biller, Joanne Brossman--bright faces out of a big crowd thirty-six years back. Lizz Gill and Penny Hunt from Hancock Park. A big Kosher Kanyon kontingent that I knew by name and yearbook photo only. Josh Trabulus--a small boy, a tall man. More lawyers than an ABA convention. Jill Warner, in your face a la 1960. Steve Price with the same fucking grin. Tony Shultz in saddle shoes. Leslie Jacobson sans bouffant and the Peppermint Twist.
We toasted the dead and the missing. Wallet photos went around. Nobody asked the childless people why they didn't breed. We all agreed that J.B. was a blast. Anecdotes passed as insight into why. We decided to throw a mass reunion early next year and elected a steering committee.
One person in ten remembered me. I recalled every name and face and could have picked half the people out of a thousand slot lineup. It told me how hungry and lonely I was then. It confirmed everything I'd come to believe about my cut-rate Camelot.
We agreed that we were all observers. We all superimposed our shaky psyches against the boss bods we wanted and wished we had and came up way short. We punted then. We conformed or got raucous to cut the edge off the pain.
Everyone came off prosperous and well cared for. We looked like a prophecy of affluence fulfilled. I didn't detect much smugness. The braggarts boasted too hard and vibed Naked more than middle-aged Dead. I picked out two functioning drunks. I judged as I laughed and observed. It didn't mar my enjoyment or subvert my affection one bit.
I listened more than I talked. I table-hopped and found the people I carried around in my head. They told me their stories and filled in that big gap in time.
Jay Jaffe played baseball at USC and went to the College World Series. He batted .306 and had a three-night tryout with the San Diego Padres. They expressed interest and never called him back. He went to law school and gravitated to the criminal defense field. He liked the combat and the mix of people in trouble. He liked to explore motive and mitigation. He'd handled some big cases. He won the celebrated "Burrito Murder Case." The LAPD tried to shaft an innocent Mexican kid. Jay got him off.
He was still hungry. He loved his work the way he loved baseball.
Lizz Gill wrote TV movies. She fell into it. People told her she was funny and urged her to get her shit down on paper. She had a bad run with booze and cleaned up in '75.
She knew the Big Joke then. She still knew it. Other people sensed her gift and pointed her on her way.
Berko Berkowitz went to Vietnam. He defecated in his pants quite a few times. He returned to the States and got strung out on booze and dope. He ran a string of businesses into the ground and cleaned up twelve years ago. He made a big wad in real estate and watched it grow. He works as a homeless advocate and digs on his wife and two kids.
Jill Warner was a teacher up in Oakland. She had a daughter with her ex-husband. I told her I used to stalk her. She applauded my good taste and asked me if I defaced her house in 1963. I said, No. Jill laughed and got up in my face like she did atJ.B.
Howard Swancy played all-city sports at L.A. High School. He tried to get on the LAPD and Sheriff's Department and flunked the screening process. He sold TV ad time for seventeen years and became a minister. He had a congregation in Carson.
Howard looked hungry. He still had alpha dog eyes. He liked to run the show. The raw language at the table torqued him the wrong way.
I spent some time with Donna Weiss. I described the Big Stakeout of 1961 and the unrequited crush that inspired it. Donna praised my stalking prowess. She never spotted me--a 6-foot, 13year-old boy-on a candy-apple bike.
I was invisible then. The world was out to ignore me.
Donna spent time in Spain and studied at the University of Madrid. She learned the language and came back to L.A. She taught in the city school system and spent three years down in South Central. Some Chicano kids were stranded in an all-black school with no English language skills. Donna got the little fuckers fluent.
She quit teaching and went into real estate. She's been at it twenty years. Her husband's a voice coach and the locally lauded "Cantor to the Stars."
My crush burned out thirty-seven years ago. Donna's presence did not resurrect it. I was irrevocably in love with my wife.
Tony Shultz starred in the first New York stage run of Grease. He worked as an actor for twenty-plus years and burned out behind the inherent frustrations. He sold real estate now. H
is turf bordered Donna's.
Leslie Jacobson went to Berkeley and lived two blocks down from Tony. She became an antiwar activist and street agitator. She got a teaching credential.
She married Husband #1. She entered the mental-health field. A colleague got raped. Leslie viewed the brutal aftermath and took it as a signal. She studied rape and post-rape trauma. She ran a rape crisis hotline and an innovative antirape program. She went out on rape calls with the Huntington Park PD and trained cops in rape awareness. She ditched Husband #1 and married Husband #2. He was a doctor.
Leslie became a psychotherapist. She built up a practice. She studied breast cancer and its ramifications and counseled afflicted women. She and her husband collaborate and stage breast-cancer seminars.
I listened to my old classmates. I felt the restrained warmth that you feel for decent people you shared a past with and don't really know. I observed thirty-four individuals over three nights. I detected one significant difference between them and me.
They came to reconnect with specific people and dig on a collective nostalgia. I came to honor them and acknowledge their part in my debt.
The debt was large. J.B. was my first testing ground. I learned to compete there. I nurtured a perverse self-sufficiency. My warped little world meshed with the real world--for "one brief shining moment."
L.A. was hot and smoggy. I was wiped out behind all my time travel and the clash of old/new people. I took a ride with Tony Shultz.
It felt like my seven-millionth hot L.A. day. Tony was digging it. He ran a riff on the NEW L.A.--immigrant cultures and wild cuisines and big rejuvenation.
We drove down to Howard Swancy's church. We made the noon service ten minutes early. The joint was jumping jubilantly high.
A six-piece combo backed up the choir. Sixty loud voices praised God. They soared over loud air-conditioner blasts and woke me up like six cups of coffee.
The church was SRO. Howard saved two pew slots near the altar. The congregation was 99.9 percent Black. The people were snazzily dressed and ran toward the plump side.
I hit the Pause button on my life. Fast-Forward and Rewind clicked off. I got choked up behind a big blast of gratitude.
The service commenced. I sang hymns for the first time since First Dutch Lutheran and shared smiles with Tony. I felt intractably Protestant and unassailably un-Christian. I grooved on John Osborne's Luther. He slayed the Papist beast because he was constipated and wanted to get laid.
The collection plate went around. Tony and I fed the kitty. Howard hit the altar and introduced us. We stood up and waved to the people. They waved back.
Howard launched into his sermon. He was main-room talent in a southside carpet joint.
He strutted. He stalked. He banged the pulpit and shouted over a four-octave range. The crowd went nuts.
He sustained a half-hour roar. He sweated up his vestments and blew out his lungs with the word on salvation.
Go, Howard, go!
It was a New Testament Greatest Hits medley. It was a deftly etched exposition of your alternatives: embrace Jesus or fry in Hell forever. It proclaimed the restrictive housing law in Heaven.
I wouldn't want to buy a tract in that development. They wouldn't sell to pork dodgers or skeptics or that Moslem guy at my favorite falafel stand. They'd exclude the bulk oftheJ.B. class of 1962.
Howard cranked it out. My mind wandered. I dipped thirty-six years back and thirty-six years into the future. I wondered how many bonds would rekindle and flourish in the wake of three effusive evenings. I thought about a survivors' bash in 2034. A collective senescence might color the proceedings and distort recollections for better or worse.
Let's Twist again, like we did that summer.
It's a teen dance party at the Mount Sinai Nursing Home. A boss combo rules the bandstand. It features all my old heartthrobs on skin-flute.
Jack and Jackie appear. The kids go nuts.Jack nuked Castro just last week. He's on a flicking roll.
Jack cuts a rug with Leslie Jacobson. He eyeballs Donna Weiss and Jill Warner. He can't commit to an image. He doesn't know whether to shit or go blind.
Somebody slips LSD in the punch. The J.B. dead resurrect. Jackie goes down on the Great Berko.
Howard cranked it out. I looked around the pews. I locked eyes with a tall black kid. He looked bored and agitated.
I winked. He smiled. The Apostolic Church of Peace turned into the Peppermint Lounge.
I sent up a prayer for the kid. I wished him imagination and a stern will and lots of raucous laughs. I wished him a wild mix of people to breeze through and linger with over time.
November 1998
