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.
10
The army cut me loose in July. I got a general discharge “Under Honorable Conditions.” I was free, white and 17. I was draft-exempt just as Vietnam started to percolate.
My fellow trainees were headed for advanced infantry training and probable Vietnam duty. I dodged their bullet with Method-actor aplomb. I spent my last month at Fort Polk wolfing down crime novels. I stuttered and lurked around the Company A mess hall. I scammed the entire U.S. Army.
I flew back to L.A. and beelined to the old neighborhood. I found a one-room pad at Beverly and Wilton. The army sent me home with five hundred dollars. I forged my father’s name to his last three Social Security checks and cashed them at a liquor store. My bankroll increased to a grand.
Aunt Leoda promised to shoot me a C-note a month. She warned me that my insurance
money wouldn’t last forever. She signed me up for Social Security and VA benefits—surviving-child stipends that would terminate on my 18th birthday. She urged me to go back to school. Full-time students could collect the coin up to age 21.
She was glad my father was dead. It probably assuaged her grief for my mother.
School was for geeks and spastics. My motto was “Live Free or Die.”
The dog was kenneled up. My old apartment was locked and boarded. The landlord had seized my father’s belongings in lieu of back rent. My new crib was great. It featured a bathroom, tiny kitchenette and 12’ x 8’ living room with a Murphy bed. I papered the walls with right-wing bumper stickers and Playmate of the Month foldouts.
I strutted around in my uniform for a week. I stood over my father’s grave and flaunted my army greens replete with unearned regalia. I boosted a new wardrobe from Silverwoods and Desmonds’. It was pure Hancock Park: madras shirts, crew-neck sweaters, thin-wale cord pants.
L.A. looked bright and beautiful. I knew I’d pursue some kind of swinging fucking destiny right here in my own hometown.
I stuck my roll in the bank and looked for work. I got a job passing out handbills and quit from boredom one week later. I got a busboy job at L.A.’s flagship Sizzler steakhouse and got fired for dropping shitloads of dishes. I got a kitchen job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint and got fired for picking my nose in front of customers.
I ran through three jobs in two weeks. I shrugged my failures off and opted for a work-free summer.
Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl rediscovered me. I had a pad of my own now. This made me a viable flunky.
They let me back into their clique. A brilliant kid named George made us a fivesome. Fritz and George were USC- and Caltech-bound. Lloyd and Daryl were stuck with another year of high school.
The clique met at my place and George’s place. George’s father, Rudy, was a highway patrolman and a certified right-wing crackpot. He got drunk every night and defamed liberals and Martin Luther Coon. He dug my Boat Tickets to Africa and took a fatherly interest in me.