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My blood bank was three blocks from the mission. Two plasma sales earned me book money. I walked to a downtown bookstore. I bought Copy Number Four of The Onion Field and read it through.
Ian dies. Karl survives, shattered. Jimmy and Greg exploit the legal system conwise and escape their just fate of death. Wambaugh's outrage. Wambaugh's terrible compassion. Wambaugh's clearly defined and softly muted message of hope at the end.
The book moved me and scared me and rebuked me for the heedlessness of my life. The book took me tenuously out of myself and made me view people at a hush.
I split the mission early. I wanted to roam, read, and booze. I went off Antabuse and retoxified my system. I fell in with an old buddy from high school. He had a right-on, can't-miss, criminal plan.
He had a pad south of Melrose. The Nickodell Restaurant was just across the street. The bar was rife with affluent juicers. I would waylay and sap drunks in the parking lot. I would run across Mel-rose and be at the pad in sixteen seconds flat.
I refused to do it. You do not wantonly raise your hand to another human being. My childhood in the Lutheran Church did not teach me that. Joseph Wambaugh did.
Books and I went back. My old man taught me to read at age three-and-a-half. I bloomed into a classic only child/child-of-divorce autodidact.
My first love was animal stories. This reading arc tapped out quick. My love for animals was wrenchingly tender and near-obsessive. Animals suffered cruelty and died in animal books. I couldn't take it. I moved on to sea stories. I dug the vastness of the sea and the specialized nomenclature of ships. I overdid this reading arc and got mired down in the unabridged Moby Dick.
Words and phrases baffled me. The narrative was hard to grasp. I grokked a fair portion of the text and rooted for Moby. Fuck Captain Ahab. He was this pegged-leg psycho cocksucker. He was fucking with Moby and trying to stick harpoons in his ass. The story got tedious. My old man finished the book for me. He said the ending got schizzy. Moby rammed the boat and only one guy lived. Moby caught some harpoons and skedaddled.
Sea stories, adieu. On to kid westerns. Cattle drives, gunfights, redskin ambushes. This reading arc ran concurrent with a bumper crop of western TV shows. Gunsmoke, The Restless Gun, Wagon Train. Frontier justice and dance-hall girls flashing cleavage. My book fixation up to the drum roll of fate on June 22, 1958.
Now she's dead. She's Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, age forty-three, farm girl from rural Wisconsin. She's my mother. She's a drunk. She's a registered nurse-the sexy archetype female profession. She's a gooood/looking redhead/she's got film-noir qualities/she's my kid-sex stand-in for all women.
She betrothed me to CRIME. My reading focus zoomed there instantly. I moved in with my old man. He catered to my newly wrought reading arc and bought me two kids' crime books a week.
I gobbled them, started shoplifting books to fill reading gaps and exhausted the kid-crime-book canon quicksville. I graduated to Mickey Spillane and cold-war psychoses. Crime was sex, sex was crime, fictional crime and sex was a sublimated dialogue on my hated and lusted-for mother. My old man got me Jack Webb's book The Badge. It lauded the LAPD and detailed their most notorious cases. Joe Wambaugh joined LAPD the next year. He was a kid-cop with an English degree. He stood a decade short of his writer apotheosis.
Crime. The redhead and me. My Wambaugh rendezvous years hence.
My mother's death corrupted my imagination. I saw crime everywhere. Crime was not isolated incidents destined for ultimate solution and adjudication. Crime was the continual circumstance. It was all day, every day. The ramifications extended to the 12th of Never. This is a policeman's view of crime. I did not know it then.
My metier was kiddie-noir. It's summer '59. Dr. Bernard Finch and Carole Tregoff whack Bernie's wife for her gelt. Bernie's 40-plus. Carole's 19, stacked, and leggy. She's a redhead. Redheads and murder?-I'm there. It's May, '60. Caryl Chessman eats gas at Big Q. It's a Little Lindbergh bounce-kidnap with sex assault. Limo Liberals lay out lachrymose-big boo-hoo-hoo. Joe Wambaugh joins LAPD the same day.
Kiddie-noir was couched in a dual-world constellation. The outside world was the alleged real world. This meant home life and my enforced school curriculum. The inside world was CRIME. This meant crime books, crime flicks, crime TV shows. Every encapsulated drama offers a tidy solution. I know this is bullshit. The glut of book crime and filmic crime means no surcease from crime ever. Joe Wambaugh's a rookie cop now. He knows this more than me.
It's April, '61. Country fiddler Spade Cooley's deep in the shit. He's jacked up on be
The inside world was a fiend habituation. Racetrack touts, brain-damaged pugs, ice-cream vendors with kiddie-raper rackets. It's Winter '62. My old man takes me by the Algiers Hotel-Apartments. He says it's a "Fuck Pad." Whores work the rooms. It's a "Hot-Sheet Flop." Married guys bring their secretaries for noon-ers. I ditch school and surveill the Algiers. Every woman who enters is a siren, a temptress, a film-noir succubus. It's Summer '62. It's buy-school-clothes time. The old man takes me to the Wilshire May Company. Nature calls. I bop to a men's room stall to unload. There's a big hole in one wall. I wonder why. I find out toot-fucking-sweet.
A fruit sticks his dick through the hole and waggles it my way. I shriek, grab my pants, and lay tracks. My old man is equal parts aghast and amused. Joe Wambaugh works Wilshire Vice a year later. The May Company "Glory Hole" is a Fruit Mainstay, a Fruit Landmark, a Fruit Cup Supreme. He entraps fruits there. He writes a fruit-entrapment scene in The Choirboys years later.
It's March, '63. The Onion Field snuff occurs. It slipped through my radar then. Joe Wambaugh's working Wilshire. He gets obsessed.
Crime carried me through a failing school career and my old man's failing health. I read crime books, watched crime flicks, brain-screened crime fantasies. I neglected my schoolwork. I bicycle-stalked girls around my neighborhood. I peeped nighttime windows and grooved on stray women. I roamed L.A. I shoplifted books. I snuck into theaters to watch crime films. I grew into a big, geeky, acne-addled, morally-mangled teenage thief/scrounger. I craved mental thrills and sex stimulation. I boosted skin mags. I lurked. I leched. I ditched school. I called in bomb threats to other schools. I burglarized empty pop-bottle sheds behind local markets. I got kicked out of high school. I joined the army. The old man died. I faked a nervous breakdown and got discharged. I came back to L.A. It was Summer '65. I found a pad in the old neighborhood and a handball-passing gig. I was free, white, and seventeen. I figured I'd become a great writer soon. Logic demands that you write some great books first. This fact eluded me.
I started drinking, smoking weed, and eating amphetamines. My stimulation index exploded exponentially. I roamed L.A. I shoplifted. I got popped at a market and carted to Georgia Street Juvenile. It was July, '65. Joe Wambaugh worked there then. I might have glimpsed my all-time teacher.
A friend's dad bailed me out. I got a lecture and summary probation. My day in jail scared me and taught me just this: Steal more cautiously now.