My Dark Places

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 clandestine 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.

I was resilient. Small slights would make me cry and undergo intense grief for ten minutes maximum. Emotional thrashings left my wounds cauterized and ready to be reopened.

I was a case study in teenage intransigence. I held an ironclad, steel-buffed, pathologically derived and empirically valid hole card: the ability to withdraw and inhabit a world of my own mental making.

Friendship meant minor indignities. Raucous laughs with the guys meant assuming a subservient role. The cost felt negligible. I knew how to reap profit from estrangement.

I didn’t know that costs accrue. I didn’t know that you always pay for what you suppress.

I graduated from junior high in June ’62. I read, stole, masturbated and fantasized my way through the summer. I enrolled at Fairfax High School in September.

The old man insisted on Fairfax. It was 90-odd-% Jewish and safer than Los Angeles High School—the joint I was supposed to attend. L.A. High was full of tough Negro kids. The old man figured they’d kill me the first time I opened my mouth. Alan Sues lived a few blocks from Fairfax. The old man borrowed Alan’s address and plopped his Nazi son down in the heart of the West L.A. shtetl.

It was a dislocating cultural experience.

John Burroughs Junior High felt safe. Fairfax felt dangerous. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl were matriculating elsewhere. My Hancock Park acquaintances were off at prep school. I was a stranger in a strange fucking land.

Fairfax High kids were ferociously bright and sophisticated. They smoked cigarettes and drove cars. I parked my Schwinn Corvette on the first day of school and got roundly razzed.

I knew that my act wouldn’t fly here. I retreated and scoped out the turf long-distance.

I attended classes and kept my mouth shut. I ditched my Ivy League threads and aped the sartorial style of Fairfax hipsters: tight slacks, alpaca sweaters and pointy-toe boots. The makeover didn’t work. I looked like a frightened child cum lounge-singer-manque.

Fairfax High seduced me. Fairfax Avenue seduced me. I dug the insular Yiddish vibe. I dug the oldsters yakking it up in a wild-assed guttural language. My reaction confirmed the old man’s theory: “You only talk that Nazi shit to get attention.”

I worked hard at school and tried to assimilate. The methodology eluded me. I knew how to rile, provoke, act like a buffoon and generally make a spectacle of myself. The concept of a simple social contract between equals was completely foreign to me.

I studied. I read shitloads of crime novels and went to crime movies. I fantasized and tailed girls home from school on my bike. The assimilation bit grew stale. Magnanimity ate shit. I was tired of being an anonymous Wasp in Jewville, U.S.A. I couldn’t stand being ignored.

The American Nazi Party established an outpost in Glen-dale. The American Legion and Jewish War Vets wanted them out. I rode my bicycle to their office and bought 40 dollars’ worth of hate goodies.

I got a Nazi armband, several issues of Stormtrooper magazine, a record called “Ship Those Niggers Back” by Odis Cochran and the Three Bigots, a few dozen racist bumper stickers and two hundred “Boat Tickets to Africa”—a gag item entitling all Negroes to a one-way trip to the Congo on a leaky barge. I was delighted with my new swag. It was hilarious and cool.

I wore the armband around my pad. I painted swastikas on the dog’s water dish. My father started calling me “Der Fuhrer” and “you Nazi cocksucker.” He got ahold of a Jewish beanie and wore it around the pad to bug me.

I rode up to Poor Richard’s Bookshop and purchased an assortment of far-right-wing tracts. I mailed them to the girls I was obsessed with and stuck them in mailboxes all over Hancock Park. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl booted me out of their clique. I was just too weird and pathetic.

My father was knee-deep in a work slump. We fell behind on the rent and got booted out of our apartment. The landlord said the pad would have to be fumigated. A five-year accumulation of dog effluvia had rendered the place uninhabitable.

We moved to a cheaper crib a few blocks away. The dog went to work on it. I debuted my Nazi act at Fairfax High School.

Classroom declarations earned me scorn and quite a few laughs. I talked up my intention to establish a Fourth Reich in Southern California, deport all jigaboos to Africa and genetically engineer a new master race with my own seed. I was not perceived as a threat. I was one ineffectual Fuhrer.

I kept it up. A few teachers called my father and ratted me off. The old man told them to ignore me.

Spring ’63 marked my blitzkrieg. I disrupted classes, passed out hate tracts and sold Boat Tickets to Africa for ten cents a pop. A big Jewish kid cornered me in the rotunda and kicked my ass soundly. I got one decent shot in—and sprained all the fingers in my right hand.

The beating validated my act and left me undeterred. I would not be ignored.

The summer of ’63 passed in a blur. I read crime novels, went to crime movies, concocted mental crime scenarios and stalked Kathy around Hancock Park. I stole books, food, model airplane kits and “Hang-Ten” swimming trunks to sell to rich-ass surfers. My Nazi hard-on abated. It was no fun without a captive audience.

My mother was five years dead. I rarely thought about her. Her murder had no place in my crime pantheon.

I still had occasional Black Dahlia nightmares. I still obsessed on the Dahlia. She was the heart of my crime world. I didn’t know that she was the redhead transmogrified.

School reconvened in September. I went back to my Nazi routine. It played to a bored audience.

The gap between my inner world and outside world was stretching. I wanted to ditch school forever and live out my obsessions full-time. Formal education was worthless. I was destined to become a great novelist. The books I loved were my real curriculum.

The Fugitive TV show debuted in September. I got hooked on it fast.

It was mass-market noir. A doctor was running from a trumped-up murder charge and the electric chair. He hit a different town every week. The coolest woman in the town fell in love with him, unfailingly. A prissy psycho cop was chasing the doctor. Authority figures were corrupt and twisted by their power. The show sizzled with sexual longing. The female guest stars grabbed my gonads and did not let go.

They were 30-ish and more handsome than pretty. They responded to male stimulus with wariness and hunger. The show reeked of real sex just around the corner. The women were troubled and complex. Their desires carried psychic weight. TV gave me Jean Ellroy every Tuesday night at 10:00.

The fall of ’63 progressed. I came home from school on November Ist and found my father sitting in a pool of urine and feces. He was twitching and weeping and babbling and drooling. His taut musculature had gone slack in the course of a day.

It was a horrifying sight. I started crying and babbling myself. The old man just looked at me. His eyes were huge and way out of focus.

I cleaned him up and called his doctor. An ambulance arrived. Two medics hustled my father out to the Veterans Administration Hospital.

I stayed home and cleaned up the remains of his mess. A doctor called me and told me my father had suffered a stroke. He wasn’t going to die and he might well recover. His left arm was partially paralyzed and his speech was indecipherable for now.

I was afraid he’d die. I was afraid he’d live and kill me with those big wet eyes.

He started to recover. His speech capability improved within days. He got some movement back in his left arm.

I visited him every day. His prognosis was good—but he wasn’t the same man.

He used to be a virile bullshit artist. He became a soft child in a week’s time. The transformation ripped my heart out.

He had to read kiddie primers to get his tongue and palate working in sync. His eyes said, “Love me, I’m helpless.”

I tried to love him. I lied about my progress in school and told him I’d support him when I scored big as a writer. My lies cheered him up the way his lies cheered me up years back.

His condition continued to improve. He came home on November 22nd—the day JFK bought it. He went back to smoking two packs a day. He went back to Alka-Seltzer. He talked his old raunchy talk with just a slight slur—but his fucking eyes gave him away.

He was terrified and defenseless. I was his shield against death and a slow fade in a charity nursing home. I was all he had.

The old man went on Social Security. We downscaled our lifestyle accordingly. I stole most of our food and cooked most of our high-salt, high-cholesterol meals. I ditched school most of the time and flunked the eleventh grade.

I knew my father was a dead man. I wanted to care for him and see him dead simultaneously. I didn’t want him to suffer. I wanted to be alone in my all-pervasive fantasy world.

The old man was now stiflingly possessive. He was convinced that my mere presence could divert strokes and other acts of God. I chafed at his demands. I ridiculed his slurred speech. I stayed out late riding around L. A. with no destination in mind.

I couldn’t get away from his eyes. I could not fucking negate their power.

I got busted for shoplifting in May ’64. A floorwalker caught me boosting six pairs of swimming trunks. He detained me and hassled me for hours. He jabbed me in the chest and made me sign a guilt waiver. He cut me loose at 10:00 p.m.—way past my prescribed time to be home.

I rode to the pad and saw an ambulance in front of the building. My father was strapped in the back. The driver told me he just had a mild heart attack.

My father zapped me with his eyes. They said, “Where were you?”

He recovered and came home. He went back to smoking and sucking down Alka-Seltzer. He was hellbent to die. I was hellbent to live my way. Life was the Lee Ellroy Show. It played to unimpressed and vexed crowds in and out of school.

I provoked fights with smaller kids. I broke into the shed behind the Larchmont Safeway and stole 60 dollars’ worth of empty pop bottles. I made obscene phone calls. I called in bomb threats to high schools throughout the L.A. basin. I burglarized a hot-dog stand, stole some frozen meat and tossed it down a sewer hole. I went on kleptomaniacal missions and sulked, skulked and nazified my way through a second pass at grade 11.

I turned 17 in March ’65. I was now a full-grown 6′3″. My pantlegs terminated several inches above my ankles. My shirts were stained with blood and pus from cystic acne explosions. I wanted OUT.

The old man deserved a quick out himself—just like the redhead.

I knew he’d hang on and die slow. I knew I didn’t want to see it.

I threw a Nazi tantrum in English class and got suspended from school for a week. I went back and did it again. I got expelled from Fairfax High for good.

Faraway places beckoned. Paradise loomed just outside L.A. County. I told the old man I wanted to join the army. He gave me his permission and let me enlist.

The army was a big mistake. I knew it the moment I took the oath.

I called my father from the induction center and told him I was in. He broke down and sobbed. A little voice in my head said, “You killed him.”

I got on a plane with a dozen other enlistees. We flew to Houston, Texas, and caught a connecting flight to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

It was early May. Fort Polk was hot, humid and overrun with flying and crawling bugs. Hard-ass sergeants formed us into lines and harangued the shit out of us.

I knew that my freewheeling life was over. I wanted OUT immediately.

A sergeant got us squared away and settled into a reception center barracks. I wanted to say, “I changed my mind—please let me go home.” I knew I couldn’t take the hard work and discipline upcoming. I knew I had to get OUT.

I called home. The old man was incoherent. I panicked and buttonholed an officer. He heard me out, checked me out and walked me to the infirmary.

A doctor examined me. I was frantically agitated and into a performance mode already. I was afraid for my father and afraid of the army. I was calculating advantages in the middle of a panic attack.

The doctor shot me up with a high-powered tranquilizer. I weaved back to my barracks and passed out on my bunk.

I woke up after evening chow. I was woozy and my speech was slurred. A notion took tenuous hold.

All I had to do was crank my fear for my father’s safety up a few notches.

I started stuttering the next morning. I was convincing from the first tangled syllable on. I was a Method actor tapping into real-life resources.

My platoon sergeant bought the act. I was a stage ham—but not quite a scenery chewer. I wrote the sergeant a note and expressed grave concern for my father. The sergeant called him and told me, “He don’t sound good.”

I was assigned to a unit: Company A, 2nd Battalion, 5th Training Brigade. I was tagged as a probable nut case my first day in uniform. The company commander heard my tortured speech and said I was unfit for this man’s army.

Real fear shaped my performance. An innate dramatic sense honed it. I could have snapped for real in a hot second. My long twitchy body was a great actor’s tool.

I began basic training. I endured two days of marching and general army jive. My fellow trainees shined me on—I was a stuttering geek from Mars.

The company commander called me into his office. He said the Red Cross was flying me home for two weeks. My father just had another stroke.

The old man looked surprisingly good. He was sharing a room with another stroke victim.

The guy told me all the nurses were in awe of my dad’s jumbo whanger. They giggled about it and scoped it out while he was sleeping.

I visited my father every day for two weeks running. I told him I was coming home to take care of him. I meant it. The real outside world scared me back to loving him.

My furlough was a blast. I festooned my uniform with war surplus insignia and bopped around L.A. like I was King Shit. I wore paratrooper’s wings, the combat infantry badge and four rows of campaign ribbons. I was the most self-decorated buck private in military history.

I flew back to Fort Polk late in May. I resumed my stuttering act and ran it by an army psychiatrist. He recommended me for immediate discharge. His report cited my “overdependence on supportive figures,” “poor performance in stressful situations” and “marked unsuitability for military service.”

My discharge was approved. The paperwork would take a month to process.

I did it. I fooled them and duped them and made them believe me.

The Red Cross called a few days later. My father just had another stroke.

I saw him one last time. The Red Cross got me back right before he died.

He was emaciated. He had tubes in his nose and his arms. He was stuck full of holes and smeared with red disinfectant.

I held his right hand to the bed rail and told him he’d be fine. His last discernible words were, “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.”

A nurse hustled me into a waiting room. A doctor walked in a few minutes later and told me my father was dead.

It was June 4, 1965. He outlived my mother by less than seven years.

I walked over to Wilshire and caught a bus back to my motel. I forced myself to cry—just like I did with the redhead.