James Ellroy - Silent Terror

On that prophetic note, my father stuck out his hand. We shook, and five minutes later he walked out the door. I never saw him again.

All my mother required was that I maintain a reasonable degree of silence and not burden her with questions about what she was thinking, Implicit in that was her desire for me to remain moderate in school, at play and at home. If she considered the dictate to be punishment, she was wrong: I could go anywhere I wanted in my head.

Like the rest of the neighborhood kids, I went to Van Ness Avenue Elementary, obeyed, and laughed and hurt at silly things. But other children found their hurt/joy in outside stimuli, while I found mine reflected off a movie screen that fed from what surrounded me, edited for my own inside-the-brain viewing by a steel-sharp mental device that always knew exactly what I needed to keep from being bored.

The screenings ran this way:

Miss Conlan or Miss Gladstone would be standing by the blackboard, unctuously proclaiming. They would start to fade visually commensurate with my growing boredom, and involuntarily, my eyes would start to trawl for something to keep me mentally awake.

The taller children were seated at the back of the room, and from my far left-hand corner desk I had a perfect forward/diagonal viewing path, one that allowed me profile shots of all my classmates. With teacher sight/noise reduced to a minimum, the faces of the other children blurred together, forming new ones; snatches of whispered conversations came together until all manner of boy/girl hybrids were declaring their devotion to me.

Being loved in a vacuum was like a reverie; street noise sounded like music. But abrupt movement from within the room, or the clatter of books on the hallway outside would turn it all bad. Pieter, the tall blond boy who sat next to me grades three to six, would go from adoring confidant to monster, the noise level determining the grotesqueness of his features.

After long frightened moments, I would seize the front of the room, zero in on either the blackboard writing or the teacher’s monologue, and if I thought I could get away with it, interject some sort of comment. This calmed me and elicited full-face looks from the other children, sparking a part of my brain that thrived on producing swift, cruel caricature. Soon pretty Judy Rosen had Claire Curtis’s big buck teeth; booger-eating Bobby Greenfield was feeding snot balls to Roberta Roberts, dropping them over the cashmere sweaters she wore to school every day, regardless of the weather. I would laugh to myself, only occasionally out loud. And I kept wondering how far I could take it — if I could refine the device to the point where even bad noise couldn’t hurt me.

As for hurt: only other children were then capable of making me feel vulnerable, and even as early as eight or nine that queasy sense of being captive to irrational needs for union was physical — a prescient jolt of the terror and despair that sexual pursuits result in. I fought the need by denial, by sticking to myself and affecting a truculent mien that brooked no nonsense from other kids. In a recent People magazine article, a half-dozen of my old neighborhood contemporaries offered comments on me as a child. “Weird,” “strange” and “withdrawn” were the adjectives used most frequently. Kenny Rudd, who lived across the street from me, and who now designs computer basketball games, came closest to the truth: “The word was: Don’t with Marty, he’s psycho. I don’t know, but I think maybe he was more scared than anything else.”

Bravo, Kenny, although I’m glad you and your cretinous comrades didn’t know that simple fact when we were children. My strangeness revulsed you and gave you someone to loathe from a safe distance — but had you sensed what it was hiding, you would have exploited my fear and tortured me for it. Instead, you left me alone and eased my discovery of my physical surroundings.

From 1955 to 1959, I charted my immediate topography, coming away with an extraordinary collection of facts: the red brick apartment house on Beachwood between Clinton and Melrose had a pet burial ground in back; the strip of recently constructed “bachelor hideaways” on Beverly and Norton were built out of rotted lumber, cut-rate stucco mix and “beaverboard”; the apocryphal “fuck pad” was in reality a bungalow court on Raleigh Drive, where a U.S.C. prof took college boys for homosexual liaisons. On trash-collection days, Mr. Eklund up the street switched his gin bottles with the sherry bottles from Mrs. Nulty’s trash two doors down. The reason for the switch eluded me, although I knew they were having an affair. The Bergstroms, Seltenrights and Monroes had a nude pool party at the Seltenright house on Ridgewood in July of ’58, and it sparked an affair between Laura Seltenright and Bill Bergstrom — Laura rolling her eyes to heaven at her first glance of Bill’s outsize bratwurst.

And the projectionist at the Clinton Theatre sold “pep pills” to members of the Hollywood High swim team; and the “Phantom Homo” who had cruised the neighborhood for young boys for over a decade was one Timothy J. Costigan of Saticoy Street in Van Nuys. The Burgerville stand on Western served ground horse in its chili — I heard the owner talking to the man who delivered it one night when they thought no one was listening. I knew all these things — and for a long time just knowing them was enough.

Years came and went. My mother and I continued. Her silence went from stunning to mundane; mine from strained to easy as my mental resourcefulness grew. Then, in my last year of junior high, school officials finally noticed that I spoke only when spoken to. This led them to force me to see a child psychiatrist.

He impressed me as a condescending man with an unnatural attraction to children. His office was filled with a not-too-subtle arrangement of toys — stuffed animals and dolls interspersed with plastic machine guns and soldier sets. I knew immediately that I was smarter than he.

He pointed to the toys as I sat down on the couch. “I didn’t realize what a big fella you are. Fourteen. Those playthings are for little kids, not big fellas like you.”

“I’m tall, I’m not big.”

“Same difference. I’m a short fella. Short fellas got different problems than tall fellas. Don’t you agree?”

His questioning was easy to follow. If I said “yes,” it would be an admission that I had problems; if I said “no,” he would launch a spiel about everyone having problems, then share a few of his own in a cheap empathy ploy. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said.

“Fellas who don’t care about their own problems usually don’t care about themselves. That’s a heck of a way to be, don’t you agree?”

I shrugged, and gave him one of the blank-eyed stares I used to keep other kids at bay, and soon he was fading to a pinpoint as my mind zeroed in on a teddy bear off to my right. Within a split second the bear was aiming a plastic bazooka at the shrink’s head, and I started to giggle.

“Daydreaming, big fella? Want to tell me what’s so funny?”

I did a perfect segue from my brain-movie to the doctor, smiling as I accomplished it. I could tell he was disconcerted. My eyes caught g stuffed Bugs Bunny toy, and I said, “What’s up, Doc?”

“Martin, young people who are very quiet usually have lots of things on their minds. You’ve got a swell mind, and the grades in school to prove it. Don’t you think it’s time to tell me what’s bothering you?”

Bugs Bunny started waggling his eyebrows and taking playful nips at the headshrinker’s neck. “The price of carrots,” I said.

“What?” The shrink took off his horn-rims and cleaned the lenses with his necktie.