James Ellroy - Silent Terror

My P.O. was a woman named Elizabeth Trent. She was stylishly liberal, and gushed instant empathy as she laid down the terms of my probation: don’t steal, don’t fraternize with criminals, don’t use drugs, hold down steady employment and report to her in person once a month. Aside from that, she told me to “party hearty,” “reap good karma” and “call if you need anything.” Leaving her office after our initial conference, I pegged the woman as a post-hippie with man trouble, someone who meddled good-naturedly in the affairs of others to alleviate her own personal turmoil. Probation would be easy.

Employment was even easier than my one hour a month making nice with Liz Trent. From ’70 to ’74 I held down a series of menial jobs undertaken from one criterion: their potential to keep me mentally aroused without fantasy adornments. I was, by turns:

A deliveryman for “Pizza Soopreem,” my territory a West Hollywood area rife with unemployed artists, Writers and actors who sent out for pizza and beer 24 hours a day; night manager of a pornographic bookstore across the street from the notorious open-all-night Hollywood Ranch Market; dishwasher at a singles bar/restaurant in Manhattan Beach; shipping clerk at a mail-order house specializing in bondage attire.

All the jobs allowed me to observe lives caught off guard in small moments of flax. While working Pizza Soopreem, pizza orderers of both genders came to the door nude; and, occasionally, impoverished ones offered themselves to me for the tab. My gig at Porno Villa was a doctoral degree in the machinations of sexual guilt and self-loathing — the men who purchased beaver and fuck-and-suck books were pitiful negative exemplars of the strength to be gained from total abstinence.

Big Daddy’s Disco was “Candid Camera” gone x-rated and tragicomic. The kitchen boss had bored a hole through the dish-room wall into the ladies powder room, and when the Playboy calendar that covered it was lifted, you had a squint-eyed view of the makeup mirror and one toilet stall. The whole kitchen crew would take turns watching and giggling, but I always waited until they went home at 1:00 A.M. and I was left alone to clean up. Then I watched and listened; then I saw an array of young women tingle at the thought of coming assignations or cry at the mirror after a long night of barside rejections. Women discussed men in explicit terms, and I picked up their stylized lexicon; they snorted cocaine to give themselves courage, then smoothed the facial hollows it caused with powder. With one eye through the wall I became the mental chronicler of small-scale desperation, and it felt like tamping down my self-containment with a velvet hammer.

I was an object of assimilation and interpretation, and I coveted the touch of other sleek objects. Hearkening back to Shroud Shifter and my youth, I filled my apartment with brushed steel — pencil sharpeners and siding samples and cookery and Swiss Army knives with sharp blades that I brushed myself with industrial steel wool. As the years passed, my collection of knives grew, until I possessed the entire Swiss Army catalog, mounted on my living-room wall at angles that I changed on whim. Then I became interested in guns.

But hand guns were what I desired, and as a convicted felon I was forbidden by law to own them. They were also expensive — more so if illegally procured — and the thought of violating my precious invisibility to obtain one was frightening, a potential apostasy that I knew would lead me back to ail my old dangerous drives.

I had just begun work at Leather N’ Lace, the bondage mail-order house, when the gun infatuation hit me. My job entailed opening the incoming envelopes containing checks and orders for whips, chains, dog collars, dildoes, dungeon equipment and the like, logging the orders while the checks cleared, then shipping them out when the front office gave the word. The mail room was packed to the rafters with perverse goodies made in Tijuana, most of the devices constructed out of cheap black leather and low-grade alloy metal. The ugly objects glared at me all day, and to keep fantasies at bay I put my mind to the task of turning them into something useful. No ideas took hold, and I used up my spare time reading handgun catalogs. The longing I felt perusing glossy pictures of Colts and Smith & Wessons and Rugers was awful, compounded by how the sex fools were constantly sending cash in their envelopes, the heft of coins a dead giveaway. I could steal the money, and the thefts would be attributed to the post office; I could obtain fake ID from criminal sources and use the stolen money to buy a big magnum or .45 auto; or I could steal more money and buy a street weapon. The more I thought about it, the more it moved me — and the more frightened I got.

So I did nothing, and nothing did me back.

Everywhere I went, ugly objects stared me down. When I took long walks at night, corrugated metal trash cans screamed, “Coward!”; neon signs blipped the penal code numbers of enticing offenses. It was as if my most suppressed brain area had suddenly developed the ability to run movies without my consent.

So I continued to do nothing, and nothing continued to do me back.

I kept my job at Leather N’ Lace, and resisted the desire to fantasize and steal incoming cash. In March of ’74 my probationary term ended, and Liz Trent cut me loose with the admonishment, “Find something you really like, and do it really well.” Those words gave me a temporary “something” that quickly backfired.

I was shipping orders the following day when I noticed the tubing on Leather N’ Lace catalog item #114 — “Anal Annie’s Love Bench.” I saw that the circumference was slightly larger than the muzzle specification of an S&W magnum I was particularly fond of, and remembered a jail rap on the construction of homemade silencers. Knowing it was a quasi-legal antidote to nothing, I bought the necessary tools and did it “really well.”

A hacksaw, a mound of metal fiber used for air-conditioning insulation, a metal pipe threader and a short length of iron tubing joined seven inches of “Anal Annie” in my living room, and with my Swiss Army knives I went to work. First I sawed and cut and assembled the pieces; then, with an “exact replica” toy magnum as my guideline, I cut thread for the muzzle. When I saw that I had a snug fit, I crimped large wads of fiber into the length of tubing, then rammed the smaller iron “bullet passage” straight through the middle of it. The passage would, I judged, carry a .357 hollow point with 1/32 of an inch to spare, causing it to “tumble” toward its target. With the basic assembly completed, I held the silencer to the floor and hammered the front of the tubing around the end of the bullet passage until only a little hole protruded.

It was the most beautiful object I had ever seen.

But with that “something” behind me, “nothing” hit harder and harder, reminding me that without the magnum my silencer was no more than a paperweight. I carried it with me as a talisman on late-night walks; and now if trash cans glared at me I kicked them over; and if parked cars offended me with their garish colors I used the silencer to cut S.S. on their sides. It was callow rebelliousness and hollow rage, but holding that hand-fashioned piece of cheap metal was the only thing that kept the hallucinogenic 187 P.C.’s from devouring me.

I came to believe that a change of locale would make things better. LA’s very familiarity was dangerous, and if I could escape its web of nostalgia and self-destructive temptation, then I would be safe. Living in a different city would infuse me with caution and quash the criminal fantasies that were attempting to destroy me. I made up my mind to get out, setting a strict departure deadline three weeks in the future — April 12 — the day after my twenty-sixth birthday.