My Dark Places

7

Monday, June 23rd, 1958. A bright summer day and the start of my sunny new life.

A nightmare woke me up.

My mother did not appear. Tony Curtis and his black stump-guard did. I shook the image off and let things sink in.

The boo-hoo stuff was behind me. I spilled some tears on the bus—and that was that. My period of mourning lasted half an hour.

I’ve got the look of that day memorized. It was incandescent powder blue.

My father told me the Wagners were coming out in a few days. Mrs. Krycki had agreed to look after my dog for a while. The funeral was next week—and my attendance was not mandatory. The Sheriff’s Crime Lab was set to shoot him the Buick. He planned to sell it for my mother’s short-term equity—if the provisions of her will did not bar the sale.

Mrs. Krycki told my father that I stabbed her banana trees to death. She demanded restitution—pronto. I told my father that I was just playing a game. He said it was no big thing.

He was coming off somber. I could tell he was really happy and in some state of serendipitous shell-shock. He was closing out his ex with postmortem minutiae.

He told me to amuse myself for a while. He had to go downtown and identify the body.

The Wagners arrived in L.A. a few days later. Uncle Ed was composed. Aunt Leoda was near distraught.

She worshipped her big sister. A style gap separated the Hilliker girls—Jean had the looks, the red hair and the sexy career. Her husband was superficially dashing and hung like a mule.

Ed Wagner was fat and stolid. He brought home the bacon. Aunt Leoda was a Wisconsin hausfrau. She was slow to rile and a good grudge holder. Her sister lived an alternative life that she found compelling. The explicit details of that life would undoubtedly shock her no end.

My father and I saw the Wagners several times. No discernible Ellroy-Wagner hatred surfaced. Ed and Leoda chalked my calm emotional state up to shock. I kept my mouth shut and let the adults do the talking.

The four of us drove out to El Monte. We stopped at the house and took a last walk through it. I hugged and kissed my dog. She licked my face and pissed all over me. My father goofed on the Kryckis—he thought they were geeks. Ed and Leoda picked up my mother’s personal papers and memorabilia. My father tossed my clothes and books into brown paper bags.

We stopped at Jay’s Market on our way out of town. A checker fussed over me—she knew I was the dead nurse’s kid. My mother started a fight with me in that market just a few weeks back.

Something got her going on my poor scholastic progress. She wanted to show me my potential fate. She hustled me out of the market and drove me down to Medina Court—the heart of the El Monte taco belt.

Mexican punks were out walking that slick walk I admired. There were no houses—just shacks. Half the cars lacked axles and wheels.

My mother pointed out harrowing details. She wanted me to see what my lazy ways would get me. I didn’t take her warnings seriously. I knew my father would never let me turn into a wetback.

I didn’t go to the funeral. The Wagners went back to Wisconsin.

My father took possession of the Buick and sold it to a guy in our neighborhood. He managed to pocket my mother’s down payment. Aunt Leoda became the executrix of my mother’s estate. She held the purse strings on a fat insurance policy.

A double-indemnity clause boosted the premium up to 20 grand. I was the sole beneficiary. Leoda told me she was putting the money in trust for my college education. She said I could extract small amounts for emergencies.

I settled in to enjoy my summer vacation.

The cops came by a few times. They quizzed me on my mother’s boyfriends and other known associates. I told them all I knew.

My father kept some newspaper clippings on the case. He told me the basic facts and urged me not to think about the murder itself. He knew I had a vivid imagination.

I wanted to know the details.

I read the clippings. I saw a picture of myself at Mr. Krycki’s workbench. I nailed down the Blonde and Dark Man scenario. I got a spooky feeling that it was all about sex.

My father found out that I’d been through his clippings. He gave me his pet theory: My mother balked at a three-way with the Blonde and the Dark Man. It was part of a larger riddle: Why did she run to El Monte?

I wanted answers—but not at the expense of my mother’s continued presence. I diverted my curiosity to kid’s crime books.

I stumbled onto the Hardy Boys and Ken Holt series. Chevalier’s Bookstore sold them for a dollar apiece. Adolescent detectives solved crimes and befriended crime victims. Murder was sanitized and occurred off-page. The kid detectives came from affluent families and tooled around in hot rods, motorcycles and speedboats. The crimes went down in swanky resort locations. Everybody ended up happy. The murder victims were dead—but were implicitly having a blast in heaven.

It was a literary formula preordained directly for me. It let me remember and forget in equal measure. I ate those books up wholesale and was blessedly unaware of the internal dynamic that made them so seductive.

The Hardy Boys and Ken Holt were my only friends. Their sidekicks were my sidekicks. We solved perplexing mysteries— but nobody got hurt too severely.

My father bought me two books every Saturday. I went through them fast and spent the rest of the week suffering withdrawal pangs. My father held the line at two a week, no more. I started shoplifting books to fill my reading gaps.

I was a sly little thief. I wore my shirttail out and stuck the books under my waistband. The folks at Chevalier’s probably thought I was a cute little bookworm. My father never mentioned the size of my library.

The summer of ’58 sped by. I rarely thought about my mother. She was compartmentalized and defined by my father’s current indifference to her memory. El Monte was an aberrant non sequitur. She was gone.

Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses.

I didn’t know it then. I doubt if my father knew it. He was scheming his way through the summer with his redheaded demon in the ground.

He bought ten thousand Jap surplus “Tote Seats” at ten cents apiece. They were inflatable cushions to sit on at sporting events. He was convinced he could sell them to L.A. Rams and Dodgers organizations. The first batch would get him going. He could get the Japs to churn more Tote Seats out on a consignment basis. His profits would zoom from that point on.

The Rams and Dodgers brushed my father off. He was too proud to hawk the Tote Seats street-vendor style. Our shelves and closets were crammed with inflatable plastic. You could have blown the cushions up and floated half the county out to sea.

My father wrote off the Tote Seat venture and went back to drugstore work. He put in crash hours: noon to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. He let me stay alone while he was gone.

Our pad was un-air-conditioned and soaked in summertime heat. It was starting to smell—Minna defied housebreaking and urinated and defecated all over the floors. Dusk cooled the place off and diffused the stink a little. I loved being alone in the apartment after dark.

I read and skimmed the TV dial for crime shows. I looked through my father’s magazines. He subscribed to Swank, Nugget and Cavalier, They were full of nifty pictures and risqué cartoons that went over my head.

I stared at my father’s World War I medals—miniatures encased in glass. The aggregation marked him one big hero. He was born in 1898 and was three months shy of 50 when I was born. I kept wondering how much time he had left.

I liked to cook for myself. My favorite meal was hot dogs scorched on a coil burner. My mother’s canned spaghetti dinners were nowhere near as good.

I always watched TV with the lights off. I got hooked on Tom Duggan’s Channel 13 gabfest and tuned in every night. Duggan was half hipster, half right-wing blowhard. He abused his guests and talked about booze constantly. He portrayed himself as a misanthrope and a lech. He struck a deep chord in me.

His show ended around 1:00 a.m. My summer ’58 rituals got scary then.

I was usually too agitated to sleep. I started imagining my father’s death by homicide and car crash. I waited up for him in the kitchen and counted the cars that went by on Beverly Boulevard. I kept all the lights off—to show that I wasn’t afraid.

He always came home. He never told me that sitting in the dark was a strange thing to do.

We lived poor. We had no car and relied on the L.A. bus system for transport. We consumed an all-grease-sugar-and-starch diet. My father did not touch alcohol—but compensated for it by smoking three packs of Lucky Strikes a day. We shared a single bedroom with our malodorous dog.

None of this bothered me. I was well fed and had a loving father. Books provided stimulation and a sublimated dialogue on my mother’s death. I possessed a quietly tenacious ability to exploit what I had.

My father gave me free run of the neighborhood. I explored it and let it fuel my imagination.

Our apartment building stood at Beverly Boulevard and Irving Place. It was the edge of Hollywood and Hancock Park— a significant juncture of styles.

Small stucco houses and walk-up apartment buildings ran to the north. They ended at Melrose Avenue and the Paramount and Desilu Studio lots. The streets were narrow and grid-straight. Spanish-style facades dominated.

Beverly to Melrose. Western Avenue to Rossmore Boulevard. Five blocks north to south and seventeen blocks east to west. Movie studios to modest houses to a row of stores and cocktail pits to the Wilshire Country Club. Half of my wandering turf—about half the size of El Monte.

The eastern edge featured wood-framed houses and garish new apartment dumps. The western edge was a mid-L.A. Gold Coast. I dug the high-rise Tudor fortresses with doormen and wide entry ports. The Algiers Hotel-Apartments stood at Ross-more and Rosewood. My father said the place was a glorified “fuck pad.” The bellboys ran a string of good-looking hookers.

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.