My Dark Places

26

My mother said she saw the Feds gun down John Dillinger. She was a nursing school student in Chicago. Dillinger was killed on 7/22/34. Geneva Hilliker was 19 then. My father said he was Babe Ruth’s trainer. He had a display case full of medals he didn’t really win. Her stories were always more plausible. He was more desperate and anxious to impress. She lied to get what she wanted. She understood the limits of verisimilitude. She could have been three blocks away from the Biograph Theater. She could have heard gunshots. She could have made the jump from sound to sight through pure imagination. She could have filled in the details over bourbon highballs and convinced herself that they were true. She could have told me the story in good faith. She was 19 then. She could have been saying, Look how bright and hopeful I was.

My father was a liar. My mother was a fabricator. I knew them for six years together and four years apart. I spent seven more years with my father. He brought my mother up and shot her down. His stories were self-inflated and spiteful. His stories were suspect. He defamed my mother at leisurely whim for the last seven years of his life.

I stayed in touch with my aunt Leoda. She told me things about Geneva. She praised Geneva. She lauded her. I couldn’t remember a thing she said. I hated Leoda. I was the con man and she was the mark with the cash.

I had lies to build from. I couldn’t discount them. I wanted to build perception from contradictory viewpoints. I had my own memory. It was in sound working order. I test-fired it after the Beckett trial. I remembered the names of old classmates. I remembered every park and jail I ever crashed out in. I had my chronological life with my mother mapped out year by year. I remembered the names of old dope connections and all my junior-high teachers. My mind was sharp. My memory was strong. I could counter synaptic failures with fantasy riffs. I could run alternative scenes in my head. What if she did this. Maybe she did that. She might have reacted thusly. The literal truth was crucial. It might come in limited quantities. My memory wasn’t repressed. My memory might lack resiliency.

I had no family photographs. I had no pictures of her at 10, 20 and 30. I had pictures of her at 42 and on her way down and pictures of her dead. I didn’t know much about our ancestry. She never mentioned her parents or her favorite aunts and uncles.

I had a strong mental will. I remembered my thoughts from light years ago. I could strip-mine my brain and replay my old thoughts about her. My imagination might help me. It might hinder me. It might shut down at lustful junctures. I had to get explicit. I owed her that. I had to take her further.

Bill was up in L.A. He was waiting out the Beckett verdict. I told him I wanted to get lost for a while. He said he understood. He had Tracy Stewart on the brain bad.

I was test-fired and ready. I unplugged the phone and turned the lights off. I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes.

She came from Tunnel City, Wisconsin. Tunnel City was a railroad stop and not much else. She moved to Chicago. She moved to San Diego. My father said he met her at the Del Coronado Hotel. He said it was 1939. He said they heard the second Louis-Schmeling fight together. The fight occurred in ’38. She was 23 then. He was 40. He dressed to the nines. He wore prewar suits all the time I knew him. They looked incongruous in 1960. They got more and more raggedy as our living standard declined. They were au courant in ’38. He looked good. She fell hard. He had a hot girl-woman he thought he could control forever. He probably took her to the bullfights down in T.J. He spoke fluent Spanish. He ordered all her food in Spanish. He took her to Mexico to woo her and control her. They drove down to Ensenada. She took me to Ensenada in 1956. She wore a white off-the-shoulder dress. I watched her shave her underarms. I wanted to kiss her there. He got her torched on margaritas. She wasn’t a drunk yet. He poured salt and squeezed lime juice on her hand and licked it off. He was desperately attentive. She didn’t have his number yet. She got it over time. I worked on a time-lost/time-regained dynamic. She viewed her lost time as unregainable. She pinned her loss on my father. She lowered her sights. Bourbon highballs made machine-shop studs controllable and alluring. She never asked herself why she craved weak and cheap men.

She had superb carriage. She seemed taller than the recorded height on her autopsy report. She had big hands and feet. She had delicate shoulders. I wanted to kiss her neck and smell her perfume and cup her breasts from behind. She wore Tweed perfume. She kept a bottle on her nightstand in El Monte. I poured some on a handkerchief once and took it to school with me.

She had long legs. She had stretch marks across her stomach. The autopsy pictures were shocking and instructive. Her breasts were smaller than I remembered. She was slender throughout her upper body and thick from the hips down. I memorized her body early on. I reworked her dimensions. I altered her contours to match my taste for lustily built women. I grew up with that nude vision and accepted it as fact. My real mother was a much different flesh-and-bones woman.

My parents got married. They moved to L.A. He said they had a pad at 8th and New Hampshire. She got a nurse gig. He went Hollywood. They moved to 459 North Doheny Drive. It was Beverly Hills. The address was ritzier than the pad. My mother said it was just a small apartment. My father snagged a job with Rita Hayworth. I was born in March ’48. My father handled Rita’s marriage to Aly Khan. The Hayworth stuff was true. I saw my father’s name in two Hayworth biographies.

We moved to 9031 Alden Drive. It was over the West Hollywood line. We lived in a Spanish-style building. Eula Lee Lloyd and her husband lived there. A spinster lady lived there. She idolized my mother. My father said she was a dyke. He had dykes on the brain. He said there was a dyke bounty out on Rita Hayworth. I allegedly met Rita Hayworth at a hot dog stand. It was ’50 or ’51. I allegedly spilled a grape drink all over her. Rita was allegedly a nympho. My father had nymphos on the brain. He said all the big actors were fags. He had fags on the brain. Rita fired my father. He started sleeping all day. He slept on the couch like Dagwood Bumstead. My mother told him to get a job. He said he had pull. He was waiting for the right opportunity. My mother hailed from rural Wisconsin. She didn’t know from pull. She pulled the plug on her marriage.

My memories were running in a straight chronological line. My fantasies were running as adjuncts and outtakes. I thought I’d be criss-crossing the memory map. I thought I’d be stumbling over real-life minutiae. I was on the road to recollection. I’d conjured up Tweed perfume and some period snapshots. I was running a linear flowchart I already knew.

I downshifted. The redhead stripped. She had her real-life body and her 42-year-old face. I couldn’t take it any further.

I wasn’t afraid to. I just didn’t want to. It seemed unnecessary.

I let my mind wander. I thought of Tracy Stewart. I’d seen Daddy Beckett’s old apartment. I went out with Bill and Dale Davidson. I saw the key Beckett locations. I saw the living room and the bedroom and the steps down to the van. I walked Robbie and Tracy up those steps. I went from my mother nude to Robbie and Tracy within six heartbeats. Robbie walked Tracy into the bedroom. Robbie gave her to Daddy.

I stopped there. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I could make it horrifying. I didn’t think I could learn anything from it.

I let my mind wander. I went back to ’55. I had a time line going. I decided to let it ride.

My father was gone. It was her and me and nobody else. I saw her in white seersucker. I saw her in a navy blue robe. I put her in bed with some assembly line studs. I gave the guys pompadours and knife scars. They looked like Steve Cochran in Private Hell 36. I was working for hyperbole. I thought ugly details might resurrect ugly memories. I wanted to chart the redhead’s sex roll from my father to the Swarthy Man. My father was weak. He had a tough guy’s body and a candy-ass soul. My mother kicked him out of her life and went minimalistic. All men were weak and some men were weak and attractive. You could not control their weakness. You could limit your awareness of it and euphemize it past recognition. You could let men into your life in limited dosages. I did not see a male stampede to my mother’s door. I caught her in flagrante twice. My father said she was a whore. I believed him. I sensed her sexual bent. I filtered my awareness through my own lust for her. She lived with my father for 15 years. She succumbed to an image. She wised up. Disillusionment was enlightenment. She went at men from a disillusioned and wholly male perspective. Men were containable. Sex and liquor was the way to contain them. She flushed 15 years down the toilet. She knew she was passively complicit. She despised her own stupidity and weakness. She saw cheap men as her consolation prize. She saw me as her redemption. She sent me to church and made me study. She preached diligence and discipline. She didn’t want me to turn into my father. She didn’t smother me with love and turn me into a ’50s textbook faggot. She lived in two worlds. I marked the dividing line. She thought her dual-world scheme was sustainable. She miscalculated. She didn’t know that suppression never works. She had liquor and men over here. She had her little boy over there. She spread herself thin. She saw her worlds blur together. My father rubbed her honky-tonk world in my face. He out-propagandized her. He taught me to hate her every weekend. She scorned him every weekday. She fed me scorn with less virulence than he fed me hatred. She preached hard work and determination. She was a drunk and a whore and thus a hypocrite. The world she built around me did not exist. I had x-ray-eye access to her hidden world.

I caught her in bed with a man. She pulled a sheet up over her breasts. I caught her in bed with Hank Hart. They were naked. I saw a bottle and an ashtray on the nightstand. She moved us to El Monte. I saw a whore in flight. She might have fled to create a space between her two worlds. She said we were moving for my sake. I wrote it off as a lie. Say I was wrong. Say she ran for both of us. She ran too fast and misread El Monte. She saw it as a buffer zone. It looked like a good place for weekend revelry. It looked like a good place to raise a little boy.

She tried to teach me things. I learned them belatedly. I became more disciplined and meticulous and diligent and determined than she ever could have hoped for. I surpassed all her dreams for my success. I couldn’t buy her a house and a Cadillac and express my gratitude in true nouveau riche fashion.

We time-traveled. We covered our ten years together. We made irregular jumps back and forth. Old memories played out contrapuntally. Every Jean-the-profligate-redhead blip sparked a counterpoint image. There’s Jean drunk. There’s Jean with her ungrateful son. He fell out of a tree. She’s pulling splinters from his arms. She’s swabbing him with witch hazel. She’s holding a pair of tweezers under a magnifying glass.

We time-traveled. I lost track of real time in the dark. That counterweighted balance held. I ran out of memories and opened my eyes.

I saw my wall graph. I felt the sweat on my pillow.

I turned off my time machine. I didn’t want to take her anywhere else. I didn’t want to place her in fictional settings or wrap my revelations up and call them her life summarized. I didn’t want to write her off as complex and ambiguous. I didn’t want to shortchange her.

I was hungry and restless. I wanted to breathe fresh air and look at live people.

I drove to a mall. I walked to a food court and got a sandwich. The place was jammed. I watched people. I watched men and women together. I looked for seductions. Robbie courted Tracy in public. The Swarthy Man took Jean to Stan’s Drive-in. Harvey knocked on Judy’s door and made her feel safe.

I didn’t see anything suspicious.

I quit surveilling. I sat still. People crossed my line of sight. I felt buoyant. I was on some kind of oxygen high.

It hit me softly.

The Swarthy Man was irrelevant. He was dead or he wasn’t. We’d find him or we wouldn’t. We’d never stop looking. He was only a directional sign. He forced me to extend myself and give my mother her full due.

She was no less than my salvation.