James Ellroy - Silent Terror

A more farsighted person in my situation would seize this narrative opportunity and bend it toward the manipulation of the mental-health profession and liberal legal establishment — people susceptible to cheap visions of redemption. Since I have no expectations of ever leaving this prison, I will not do that — it is simply dishonest. Nor will I cop a psychological plea by juxtaposing my acts against the alleged absurdity of twentieth-century American life. By passing through conscious gauntlets of silence and will, by creating my own vacuum-packed reality, I was able to exist outside standard environmental influences to an exceptional degree — the prosaic pain of growing up and being American did not take hold; I transmogrified it into something more very early. Thus I stand by my deeds. They are indigenous solely to me.

Here in my cell, I have everything I need to bring my valediction to life: world-class typewriter, blank paper, police documents procured by my agent. Along the back wall there is a Rand-McNally map of America, and beside my bunk a box of plastic-topped pins. As this manuscript grows, I will use those pins to mark the places where I murdered people.

But above all, I have my mind; my silence. There is a dynamic to the marketing of horror: serve it up with a hyperbolic flourish that distances even as it terrifies, then turn on the literal or figurative lights, inducing gratitude for the cessation of a nightmare that was too awful to be true in the first place. I will not observe that dynamic. I will not let you pity me. Charles Manson, babbling in his cell, deserves pity; Ted Bundy, protesting his innocence in order to attract correspondence from lonely women, deserves contempt. I deserve awe for standing inviolate at the end of the journey I am about to describe, and since the force of my nightmare prohibits surcease, you will give it to me.

Guidebooks misrepresent Los Angeles as a sun-kissed amalgam of beaches, palm trees and the movies. The literary establishment fatuously attempts to penetrate that exterior and serves up the L.A. basin as a melting pot of desperate kitsch, violent illusion and variegated religious lunacy. Both designations hold elements of truth based on convenience. It is easy to love the place at first glance and even easier to hate it when you get to sense the people who live there. But to know it, you have to come from the neighborhoods , the inner-city enclaves that the guidebooks never mention and artists dismiss in their haste to paint with broad, satiric strokes.

These places require resourcefulness; they will not give up their secrets to observers — only to inspired residents. I gave my youthful stomping ground such implacable attention that it reciprocated in full. There was nothing about that quiet area on the edge of Hollywood that I didn’t know.

Beverly Boulevard on the south; Melrose Avenue on the north. Rossmore and Wilshire Country Club marking the west border, a demarcation line between money and only the dream of it. Western Avenue and its profusion of bars and liquor stores standing sentry at the east gate — keeping undesirable school districts, Mexicans and homosexuals at bay. Six blocks from north to south; seventeen from east to west. Small wood-frame and Spanish-style houses; tree-lined streets without stoplights. A courtyard apartment building rumored to be filled with prostitutes and illegal aliens; an elementary school; the debatable presence of a “fuck pad” where U.S.C. football players brought girls to watch ’50’s-vintage porno films. A small universe of secrets.

I lived with my father and mother in a salmon-colored miniature of the Santa Barbara Mission, two stories with a tar-paper roof and a mock mission bell. My father worked as a draftsman at an airplane plant and gambled cautiously — he usually won. My mother clerked at an insurance company and spent her leisure hours staring at traffic on Beverly Boulevard.

I realize now that both my parents had furious, and furiously separate, mental lives. They were together for the first seven years of my life, and early on I remember designating them as my custodians and nothing else. Their lack of affection, to me and to each other, registered inchoately as freedom — dimly I perceived their elliptical approach to parenthood as a neglect that I could capitalize on. They did not possess the passion to abuse me or to love me. I know today that they armed me with the equivalant of enough childhood brutality to fuel an army.

Early in 1953, the air-raid sirens stationed throughout the neighborhood went off accidentally, and my father, convinced that a Russian A-bomb attack was imminent, led my mother and me up to the roof to await the arrival of the Big One. He brought a fifth of bourbon with him, because he wanted to toast the mushroom cloud he expected to rise over downtown L.A., and when the Big One never appeared, he was drunk and disappointed. My mother made one of her rare verbal offerings, this one to allay her husband’s depression over the world not being blown to hell. He raised his hand to hit her, then hesitated and slugged down the rest of the bottle. Mother went downstairs to her traffic-watching chair, and I started checking science books out of the library. I wanted to see what mushroom clouds looked like.

That night signaled the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage. The air-raid scare created a bomb-shelter boom in the neighborhood, and my father, disgusted by the backyard construction, took to spending his weekends on the roof, drinking and observing the spectacle. I watched him get angrier and angrier, and I wanted to ease his pain, make him less of a pent-up observer. Somehow I got the notion to give him the “Wham-O” stainless steel slingshot I had found on a bus bench at Oakwood and Western.

My father loved the gift, and took to shooting ball hearings at the above-ground sections of the shelters. Soon his aim became excellent, and seeking more challenging targets, he started assassinating the crows who perched on the telephone wires that ran along the alley in back of our house. Once he even caught a scurrying rat from forty-six feet and eight inches away. I recall the distance because my father, proud of the feat, paced it off in yards, then calibrated the remainder with a metal drafting rule.

Early in ’54, I learned that my parents were going to get divorced. My father took me up to the roof to tell me. I had seen it coming, and knew from the “Paul Coates Confidential” T.V. program that many “Post war marriages” were headed for Splitsvilie.

“Why?” I asked.

My father toed the gravel on the roof; it looked like he was tracing A-bomb clouds. “Well... I’m thirty-four years old, and your mother and I don’t get along; and if I give her much more time I’ll have shot my good years; and if I do that I might as well pack it in. We can’t let that happen, can we?”

“No.”

“That’s my Marty. I’ll be moving to Michigan, but you and your mother will keep the house, and I’ll be writing to you, and I’ll be sending money.”

I knew from the Coates show that divorce was an expensive proposition, and sensed that my father must have had a big stash of gambling money put away to facilitate his move to Splitsvilie. He seemed to pick up my thoughts and added, “You’ll be well looked after, don’t you worry about that.”

“I won’t worry.”

“Good.” My father took a finger sight on a fat bluejay sitting atop our next-door neighbor’s garage. “You know your mother is, well... you know.”

I wanted to scream “nutty,” “crazy,” “fruitcake” and “couch case,” but didn’t want him to know I knew. “She’s sensitive?” I ventured.

My father shook his head slowly; I knew he knew I knew. “Yeah, sensitive. Just try to take her with a grain of salt. Get a good education and try to be your own man, and you’ll make yourself heard from.”