James Ellroy - The Best American Crime Writing 2005

The severed-penis boy. The double amputee wino bragging that his dick hits the ground. Officer Charlie Bogardus, dying of cancer, short of twenty years on the job. His family needs his pension. He needs to die on duty. He blind-charges a burglary suspect and takes two in the pump.

Ian and Karl. The Onion Field. The funeral and bagpipe wail.

The transy whore on Chenshaw. His first Vice bust. He-she pinches his thighs beyond black and blue. Pain off the charts-let's kill him-no, let's don't.

The pool-hall caper. The cat with the shotgun. The orange flame and pellets over his head. Fred Early's his partner. Fred traps the cat and nails him between the horns. The cat's dead. Fred's shot and killed ten years later. It's still unsolved.

Jesus, the ride. The homos, the hookers, the hugger-muggers, the heist men. The wineheads, the wienie waggers, the pill poppers, the pachucos, the Jailbait Jills and the jittery junkies. The lazy daywatch tours, the late-nite losers, the lessons.

He brought fear to the job. It was the informed fear of the intelligent and imaginative. He surmounted his fear in repeated context. He learned that you never quash your fear for good. Cop work is always the next context.

He learned that boredom incites rage that leads to chaos and horror.

He learned that the strongest human urge is the simple urge to survive. He learned that this urge mutates. He learned that it induces pity in good people. He learned that it inspires brutal willfulness in the bad.

He learned that crime is a continuing circumstance. He learned that a cop's split-second choices poised him a heartbeat close to laurels and dishonor.

Joe Wambaugh. LAPD: '60 to '74.

He should have stayed longer. He couldn't. He had to write. He had to transpose his lessons. He had to share the ride in all its power.

He turned informal on-the-job notes into sketches and short stories. He submitted them to magazines. An editor at the Atlantic Monthly advised him to shape them into a novel. He wrote The New Centurions and sold it for a modest advance. The book was a critical sensation and a big best seller. He got packaged and somewhat pigeonholed as this anomalous cop-writer. The book portrayed policework as a troubling and morally ambiguous journey. Some cops hated the message. Most respected the inherent truth. The LAPD high command disapproved. That was a fucking heart-breaker.

The Blue Knight, The Onion Field. Big bestsellers, big bucks rolling in, big-time acclaim. Big movie sales, big hoo-haw, the dis-juncture that big recognition always brings.

He wrote The Choirboys. It was scheduled for mid-75 publication. The job pulled him one way. The craft pulled him in reverse. The craft was the job. That consoled him somewhat. He shut down the ride.

My ride waned. Outdoor living and booze and dope sent my health south. Jails, hospitals, rehabs. The nadir of early '74 to mid-'75.

I read The Choirboys late that summer. I stole the book from a Hollywood bookstore. It was Wambaugh's finest work. The locale was Wilshire Division. A group of nightwatch cops unwind in Westlake Park. They call their soirees "Choir Practice." It's kicks and chicks for a while. An undercurrent sets in. They're too stimulated and tweaked by the job. The job sates their curiosities. They're public servants and voyeurs. The job gives them a steel-buffed identity. They're macho-maimed and frail underneath. They brought a surfeit of fear and hurt to the job. They're overamped and stressed and more than a little crazy. They're in over their heads. Crime as continuing circumstance claims them. Their collective fate is madness.

The book tore me up and oddly consoled me. It reindicted my moral default. It diminuitized my street-fool status. It put me at one with some guys as high up on a ledge as I was.

It forced me into a corner. It jabbed my imagination and made me cough up portents of a story. It was a potential novel. I knew I had to write it. I knew I had to change my life first.

I did it. I'll credit God with the overall save. I'll cite Joe Wambaugh and Sex as secondary forces.

I knew a couple named Sol and Joan. Sol sold weed, played the sitar, and pontificated. He was a gasbag hippie patriarch. Joan loved him heedlessly. I was in love with her. She haunted my head. I placed her in fantasy contexts with the cops from The Choirboys. She leaped from Wambaugh's pages to my prospective pages. She haunted my first novel four year later.

I was at their pad. Joan sat to my left. She wore jeans and a man's white dress shirt. She reached for a cigarette. Her shirt gapped. I saw her right breast in pure profile.

Oh, shit-you must change your life. No shit, you did.

That was almost thirty years ago. Joe Wambaugh's sixty-eight. I'm fifty-seven. I'm at that elegiac, debt-acknowledgment moment. My debt to Joe stands out brightly.

Joe and I are friends. We're cordial, but not close. He's a tough nut to crack. We share the same film agent.

He's thirty-one years gone from the LAPD. His book career sits at age thirty-five. He has produced a legendary body of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novels portray exile. Aging ex-cops roam affluent settings. They fall prey to odd temptations and reach for the fortitude that fueled their cop days. Joe left the job early. He's always looking back. It isn't regret. It isn't nostalgia. It's something sweeter and deeper.

It's hushed visitation. It's the faint heartbeats of our lost ones. It's a feminine stirring in our male-crazed world. It's a woman's breath in ellipsis. Joan. The white-shirt moment. Another Joan nearing forty, dark hair streaked with gray. Joan.

I might visit Joe next month. I might cohost his screenwriting class at University of California, San Diego. We might sit around and talk, arriviste to arriviste. I can see it. I can hear it more. We're two word guys from Jump Street.

Joe's Catholic. I'm Protestant. I'll confess to him anyway. I'll urge him to forego exile and return to Then. I'll tell him my head is still full of fucked-up and magnificent shit. I'll describe the breadth of his gift. You granted me vision. You unlocked the love and dutiful rage in my heart.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

"The Ones That Got Away," by Robert Draper (GQ, January 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Robert Draper. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Silver Thief," by Stephen J. Dubner (The New Yorker, May 17, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Stephen J. Dubner. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.

"Mysterious Circumstances," by David Grann (The New Yorker,De-cember 13, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by David Grann. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Family Man," by Skip Hollandsworth (Texas Monthly, February 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Emmis Publishing LP, dba Texas Monthly. Reprinted by permission of Texas Monthly.

"Anatomy of a Foiled Plot," by Craig Horowitz (New York magazine, December 6, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by New York Magazine Holdings LLC. Reprinted by permission of New York magazine.

"To Catch an Oligarch," by Justin Kane and Jason Felch (San Francisco Magazine, October 2004). Copyright © by Justin Kane and Jason Felch. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

"Social Disgraces," by Debra Miller Landau (Atlanta magazine, October 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Atlanta magazine. Reprinted by permission of Rebecca Burns, editor-in-chief, Atlanta magazine.

"The Girls Next Door," by Peter Landesman (New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Peter Landesman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Punch Drunk Love," by Jonathan Miles (Men's Journal,July 2004). Copyright © by Jonathan Miles. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.