My Dark Places

14

I flew out to L.A. to see my mother’s murder file. My motives were ambiguous at best.

It was March ’94. Jean Ellroy was 35 years and 9 months dead. I was 46 years old.

I was living in high-line Connecticut. I had a big house like the ones I used to break into. I flew out a day early and got a suite at the Mondrian Hotel. I wanted to hit the file with a clear head and a cold heart.

It started six weeks back. My friend Frank Girardot called me. He said he was writing a piece on old San Gabriel Valley murders. The piece would be published in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Pasadena Star-News. It would spotlight five unsolved killings—my mother’s included. It would spotlight the L.A. Sheriff’s Unsolved Unit.

Frank would view my mother’s file. He would read the reports and see the crime scene photos. He would see Jean Ellroy dead.

It hit me immediately. It hit me hard and fast and on two distinct levels.

I had to see the file. I had to write about the experience and publish the piece in a major magazine. It would stir up publicity for my next novel.

I called my editor at GQ and pitched him. He jumped on the idea and talked to his boss. The boss green-lighted me. I called Frank Girardot and asked him to brace his men at Sheriff’s Unsolved. Frank contacted Sergeant Bill McComas and Sergeant Bill Stoner. They said I could view the file.

I made travel arrangements. The big L.A. earthquake hit and diverted me for weeks. The Hall of Justice was condemned. Sheriff’s Homicide moved out. Their files were stuck in transit. The delay gave me some time to dance with the redhead.

I knew it was time to confront her. An old photograph told me why.

My wife found the picture in a newspaper archive. She bought a duplicate copy and framed it. I’m standing at George Krycki’s workbench. It’s 6/22/58.

You can’t discern my state of mind. I might be bored. I might be catatonic. I’m not giving anything up.

It’s my life at ground zero. I’m too stunned or relieved or lost in calculation to evince signs of simple grief.

That picture was 36 years old. It defined my mother as a body on a road and a fount of literary inspiration. I couldn’t separate the her from the me.

I like to hole up in hotel suites. I like to turn off the lights and crank the AC. I like temperature-controlled and contained environments. I like to sit in the dark and let my mind race. I was set to meet Bill Stoner the next morning. I ordered a room-service dinner and a big pot of coffee. I turned out the lights and let the redhead take me places.

I knew things about us. I sensed other things. Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts. She taught me self-sufficiency by negative example. I possessed a self-preserving streak at the height of my self-destruction. My mother gave me the gift and the curse of obsession. It began as curiosity in lieu of childish grief. It flourished as a quest for dark knowledge and mutated into a horrible thirst for sexual and mental stimulation. Obsessive drives almost killed me. A rage to turn my obsessions into something good and useful saved me. I outlived the curse. The gift assumed its final form in language.

She hot-wired me to sex and death. She was the first woman on my path to the brilliant and courageous woman I married. She gave me an enduring puzzle to ponder and learn from. She gave me the time and place of her death to extrapolate off. She was the hushed center of the fictional world I’d created and the joyful world I lived in—and to date I had acknowledged her in an altogether perfunctory manner.

I wrote my second novel—Clandestine—in ’8o. It was my first confrontational swipe at Jean Ellroy. I portrayed her as a tortured drunk with a hyperbolically tortured past in hick-town Wisconsin. I gave her a nine-year-old son and an evil ex-husband who physically resembled my father. I threw in autobiographical details and set the bulk of the book in the early ’50s to spotlight a Red Scare subplot. Clandestine superficially addressed Jean Ellroy. It was all about her son at age 32. The hero was an ambitious young cop. He was out to fuck women and ascend at all costs. I was an ambitious young writer. I was hot to ascend.

Ascension meant two things. I had to write a great crime novel. I had to attack the central story of my life.

I set out to do that. I implemented my conscious resolve in an unconscious fashion. Clandestine was richer and more complex than my first book. The mother and son were vividly etched. They failed only by real-life comparison. They were not my mother and I. They were surrogate fictions. I wanted to get them out of the way and move on. I thought I could paint my mother with cold details and banish her that way. I thought I could dump a few boyhood secrets and sign myself off. Jean Ellroy was not my preferred murder victim. Elizabeth Short was. I dumped the redhead for the Dahlia again.

I wasn’t ready for Elizabeth yet. I wanted to address her as a seasoned novelist. I wanted to extend my dialogue with women first.

I split L.A. in ’81. It was too familiar and too easy. AA was too easy. I wanted to ditch all the people hooked on therapy and 12-step religion. I knew I could stay sober anywhere. I wanted to blast out of L.A. and limit my L.A. intake to the fictional L.A. in my head. Brown’s Requiem was coming out in October. Clandestine was set to be published some time in ’82. I had a third book finished. I wanted to start over in a sexy new locale.

I moved to Eastchester, New York—20 miles north of the Apple. I got a basement apartment and a caddy gig at Wykagyl Country Club. I was 33. I thought I was extremely hot shit. I wanted to prove myself in New York. I wanted to get heavy with the Dahlia and find the transcendental real-life woman I knew I’d never find in L.A.

New York was pure crystal meth. It meshed with my dual-world lifestyle. I wrote in my pad and lugged golf bags for a maintenance bankroll. Manhattan was a heartbeat away. Manhattan was full of provocative women.

My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I dug stern character. I dug radical and nonprogrammatic world-views. I disdained dilettantes, wannabes, incompetents, rock & rollers, therapy freaks, weirdo ideologues and all women who did not exemplify a sane version of the midwestern-Protestant/profligate balance I inherited from Jean Ellroy. I dug handsome women more than women other men deemed beautiful. I dug punctuality and passion and considered the two equal virtues. I was a moralistic and judgmental zealot operating on a time-lost/life-regained dynamic. I expected my women to toe the hard-work line and submit to the charismatic force I thought I possessed and fuck me comatose and make me submit to their charisma and moral rectitude on an equitable basis.

That’s what I wanted. It’s not what I got. My standards were slightly unreasonable. I revised them every time I met a woman I wanted to sleep with.

I remade those women in the image of Jean Ellroy sans booze, promiscuity and murder. I was a tornado sweeping through their lives. I took sex and heard their stories. I told them my story. I tried to make a string of brief and more extended couplings work. I never tried as hard as the women I was with.

I learned things in the process. I never downscaled my romantic expectations. I was a chickenshit cut-and-run guy and a heartbreaker with a convincingly soft facade. I took the ax to most of my affairs. I dug it when women got my number and grabbed the ax first. I never axed my romantic expectations. I never took a soft line on love. I felt bad about the women I fucked over. I went at women less ferociously over time. I learned to disguise my hunger. That hunger went straight into my books. They got more and more obsessive.

I was burning a lifelong torch with three flames.

My mother. The Dahlia. The woman I knew God would give me.

I wrote four novels in four years. I kept my Eastchester and Manhattan worlds separate. I got better and better. I attracted a cult following and built up a four-star review scrapbook. My writing wages improved. I retired my caddy cleats. I locked myself up for a year and wrote The Black Dahlia.

The year flew by. I lived with one dead woman and a dozen bad men. Betty Short ruled me. I built her character from diverse strains of male desire and tried to portray the male world that sanctioned her death. I wrote the last page and wept. I dedicated the book to my mother. I knew I could link Jean and Betty and strike 24-karat gold. I financed my own book tour. I took the link public. I made The Black Dahlia a national bestseller.

I told the Jean Ellroy-Dahlia story ten dozen times. I reduced it to sound bites and vulgarized it in the name of accessibility. I went at it with precise dispassion. I portrayed myself as a man formed by two murdered women and a man who now lived on a plane above such matters. My media performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. They exploited my mother’s desecration and allowed me to cut her memory down to manageable proportions.

The Black Dahlia was my breakthrough book. It was pure obsessive passion and a hometown elegy. I wanted to stay in the ’40s and ’50s. I wanted to write bigger novels. I felt the call of bad men doing bad things in the name of authority. I wanted to piss on the noble-loner myth and exalt shitbird cops out to fuck the disenfranchised. I wanted to canonize the secret L.A. I first glimpsed the day the redhead died.

The Black Dahlia was behind me. My tour closed out a 28-year transit. I knew I had to surpass that book. I knew that I could return to L.A. in the ’50s and rewrite that old nightmare to my own specifications. It was my first separate world. I knew I could extract its secrets and contextualize them. I could claim the time and place. I could close out that nightmare and will myself to find a new one.

I wrote three sequels to The Black Dahlia and called the collective work “The L.A. Quartet.” My critical reputation and public profile snowballed. I met a woman, married her and divorced her within three years. I rarely thought about my mother.

I closed out L.A. in the ’50s and traded up to America in Jack Kennedy’s era. The jump goosed my geographic and thematic scope and pushed me halfway though a wild new novel. L.A. in the ’50s was behind me. Jean Ellroy wasn’t. I met a woman. She pushed me toward my mother.

The woman’s name was Helen Knode. She wrote for a lefty rag called the LA. Weekly. We met. We coupled. We wed. It was extravagant love. It was two-way recognition running at 6,000 RPM.

We flourished. It got better and better. Helen was hyper-brilliant. Helen was high rectitude and profane laughter. Our imaginations melded and collided.

Helen was obsessed with the whole perplexing man-woman question. She dissected it and satirized it and de- and reconstructed it. She played it for laughs and lampooned my melodramatic take on the subject.

She zoomed in on my mother. She called her “Geneva.” We concocted scenarios featuring my mother and some celebrated men of her era. We laughed our tails off. We put Geneva in bed with Porfirio Rubirosa and critiqued misogynist America. Geneva turned Rock Hudson straight. Geneva pussy-whipped JFK and turned him monogamous. We riffed on Geneva and my dad’s monolithic whanger. We wondered why the fuck I didn’t marry a redhaired woman.

Helen found that picture. Helen urged me to study it. She was my mother’s advocate and agent provocateur.

She knew me. She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.

She wanted me to know my mother. She wanted me to find out who she was and why she died.