Children’s Paradise straddled some prime west-side real estate. A dirt yard jammed with play equipment faced Wilshire Boulevard. The yard was three times the size of the main classroom building. A swimming pool was positioned at the west flank.
I daydreamed my way through the third and fourth grades there. My reading skills eclipsed my retarded comprehension of arithmetic. I was a big kid. I flaunted my size and bluffed my way through minor kid confrontations. It was the genesis of my efficacious “Crazy Man Act.”
I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and female adults. My fear derived from my apocalyptic fantasy apparatus. I knew that all things went chaotically bad. My empirical training in chaos was unassailably valid.
My Crazy Man Act got me the attention that I craved and warned aggressors not to fuck with me. I laughed when nothing was funny, picked my nose and ate my snot, and drew swastikas all over my school notebooks. I was the poster boy for the If-You-Can’t-Love-Me-Notice-Me chapter in all child psychology textbooks.
My mother was drinking more. She’d crank highballs at night and get pissed off, maudlin or effusive. I found her in bed with men a couple of times. The guys had that ’50s lounge-lizard look. They probably sold used cars or repossessed them.
I told my father about the men. He said he had private eyes tailing my mother. I started scanning my blind side everywhere I went with her.
My mother quit Packard-Bell and hired on at Airtek Dynamics. My father worked drugstore jobs free-lance. I continued my education at Children’s Paradise. My Crazy Man Act kept me tenuously afloat.
My parents were unable to talk in a civil fashion. They did not exchange words under any circumstances. Their expressions of hatred were reserved for me: He’s a weakling; she’s a drunk and a whore. I believed him—and wrote her accusations off as hogwash. I was blind to the fact that her broadsides carried a greater basis in truth.
’57 faded out. My mother and I flew to Wisconsin for Christmas. Uncle Ed Wagner sold her a spiffy red-and-white Buick. We drove it home the first week of ’58. We settled back into our work and school routine.
My mother sat me down late in January and cozied me up for a big lie. She said we needed a change of scenery. I was almost ten years old, and I’d never lived in a house. She said she knew a nice place called El Monte.
My mother lied poorly. She tended to formalize and overstate her lies and often embellished them with expressions of parental concern. She always laid out her major lies half-drunk.
I was a good lie decoder. My mother did not credit me with this gift.
I told my father about the move. He found the notion dubious. He said El Monte was full of wetbacks. It was a skunk place by any and all standards. He figured my mother was ditching some West L.A. stud—or was running to some El Monte shitbird. You don’t uproot and move 30-odd miles for no goddamn reason.
He told me to stay alert. He told me to report my mother’s round-heeled stunts.
My mother wanted to show off El Monte. We cruised out there on a Sunday afternoon.
My father got me predisposed to hate and fear the place. He’d portrayed it accurately.
El Monte was a smoggy void. People parked on their lawns and hosed down their cars in their underwear. The sky was carcinogenic tan. I noticed lots of evil-looking pachucos.
We went by our new house. It was pretty on the outside— but smaller than our pad in Santa Monica.
We talked to our new landlady, Anna May Krycki. She was nervous and chatty and darty-eyed. She let me pet her Airedale dog.
A yard enclosed the Kryckis’ house and our house. My mother said we could get a dog of our own. I told her I wanted a beagle. She said she’d get me one for my birthday.
We met Mr. Krycki and Mrs. Krycki’s son from a previous marriage. We walked through our new house.
My room was half the size of my room in Santa Monica. The kitchen was no more than a crawl space. The bathroom was narrow and cramped.
The house justified the move. It cosmetically vouched my mother’s Big Lie.
I knew it at the time.
We moved out early in February. I enrolled at Anne LeGore Elementary School and became my father’s full-time spy.
My mother was drinking more. The kitchen smelled like her Early Times bourbon and L&M cigarettes. I sniffed the tumblers she left in the sink—to see what the allure was. The syrupy odor made me gag.
She didn’t bring men home. My father figured she was shacking up on the weekends. He started calling El Monte “Shitsville, U.S.A.”
I made the best of a bad place.
I went to school. I got friendly with two Mexican kids named Reyes and Danny. They shared a reefer with me once. I got dizzy and goofy ecstatic and went home and ate a whole box of cookies. I passed out and woke up convinced that I would soon become a heroin addict.
School was a drag. My arithmetic skills were subzero and my social skills were subpoor. Reyes and Danny were my only pals.
My father visited me at noon recess one day—a divorce decree violation. A kid shoved me for no reason. I kicked his ass in full view of my father.
My father was proud of me. The kid snitched me off to Mr. Tubiolo, the vice-principal. Tubiolo called my mother and suggested a conference.
They met and talked. They went out on a couple of dates. I reported the details to my father.
My mother got me a beagle puppy for my tenth birthday. I named her “Minna” and smothered her with love.
My mother laid a mind fuck on me in conjunction with the gift. She told me I was a young man now. I was old enough to decide who I wanted to live with.
I told her I wanted to live with my father.
She slapped me in the face and knocked me off the living-room couch. I banged my head on a coffee table.
I called her a drunk and a whore. She hit me again. I made up my mind to fight back next time.
I could brain her with an ashtray and negate her size advantage. I could scratch her face and ruin her looks so men wouldn’t want to fuck her. I could smash her with a bottle of Early Times bourbon.
She pushed me over a very simple line.
I used to hate her because my father did. I used to hate her to prove my love for him.
She just bought my own full-tilt hatred.
El Monte was prison camp. Weekends in L.A. were brief paroles.
My father took me to movies on Hollywood Boulevard. We caught Vertigo and a string of Randolph Scott westerns. My father laid out the straight dope on Randolph Scott: He was one notorious homo.
He took me by the Hollywood Ranch Market and gave me a crash course in homos. He said fruits wore mirrored shades to measure crotch bulges covertly. Fruits served one good purpose. Their presence expanded the pool of available women.
He wanted to know if I liked girls yet.
I told him I did. I didn’t tell him that full-blown women jazzed me more. Divorced mothers were more precisely my type.
Their bodies had these neat imperfections. Heavy legs and bra-strap markings drove me crazy. I liked pale-skinned, red-haired women especially.
The concept of motherhood excited me. I was up-to-date on the facts of life and was titillated by the fact that motherhood began with fucking. Women with kids had to be good at it. They were practiced. They developed a taste for sex during holy matrimony and couldn’t live without it when their ordained unions went kaput. Their need was dirty, shameful and thrilling.
Like my curiosity.
Our bathroom in El Monte was tiny. The bathtub faced the toilet at a right angle. I caught a glimpse of my mother drying off after a shower one night.
She saw me looking at her breasts. She told me that the tip of her right nipple got infected after my birth and had to be removed. Her tone was in no way provocative. She was a registered nurse explaining a medical fact.
I had pictures in my mind now. I wanted to see more.
I spent hours in the bathtub, feigning interest in a toy submarine. I saw my mothe
r half-nude and nude and stripped to her slip. I saw her breasts sway. I saw her good nipple pebbled up from the cold. I saw the red between her legs and the way steam made her skin flush.
I hated her and lusted for her.
Then she was dead.
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 o
ff. 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.