James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Robert Willard Borgie ruined Evanston for me, and I got out a month after my one-and-only routine police questioning. I drove West then, Illinois plates on the blue Deathmobile, no Ross or Shroud Shifter advising me, only an awful sickly-sweet smell clinging to my person. I felt perilously close to self-annihilating revelations, and as I sped across brutally long and flat and hot stretches of farmland, I schemed and daydreamed and even ran old brain-movies to keep them pushed down. Troubling thoughts broke out anyway:

Borgie was subhumanly intelligent, and he wanted you that way—

You fixed on him as your brother, and didn’t plan to kill him, even though he looked just like you—

He made you cry—

If he made you cry out of empathy then your will is slipping—

If he made you cry for yourself, you’re finished.

I ended that long and hot and flat leg of my journey in Lincoln, Nebraska, renting a boxlike, cramped and hot bachelor apartment on the city’s north side. I found a night watchman job, and was assigned to sit in the foyer of a downtown office building from midnight to eight each morning, wearing a gold-braided uniform and a mace gun and handcuffs in a plastic scabbard. Aside from rounds of the hallways once an hour, my time was my own. The former night man had left a dozen cartons of magazines behind, and rather than go stir-crazy brooding over dead retards and what they boded, I devoured copies of Time and People and Us.

It was a complete new education at age thirty-one. Years had passed since I last explored the written word, and the culture I had moved through had changed dramatically — changes lost on me as I maneuvered with tunnel vision. Between June and late November of ’79 I read hundreds of magazines cover-to-cover. Although the snippets of information I sucked in detailed disparate events, one theme dominated.

Family.

It was back, it was strong, it was “in,” it had never gone away. It was the antidote to new strains of sexually transmitted virus, to Communism, to booze and dope addiction, to boredom and malaise and loneliness. Androgynous musicians and Fascist preachers and muscle-bound black buffoons with Mohawk haircuts and gold chains proclaimed that you were fucked without it. Pop philosophers said that the years of rootlessness were over in America, and the nuclear family was the new-old constituency, period. Family was what you yearned for, worked for, bled for and sacrificed for. Family was what you came home for. Family was what you had while certain scum roamed around the country having nightmares and killing people and weeping when mirror-image idiots offered them blow-jobs for a dollar. Lack of family was the root of all hurt, all evil, all death.

My anger simmered, sizzled, bubbled and stewed all those reading months, and Ross popped up periodically, offering comments like a Greek chorus:

“Martin, if I thought it’d help you out, I’d be your family... but you know... blood is thicker than water.”

“The thing about family is, you can’t choose your own.”

“The thing about being alone like you is that you can take anything you want from anybody.”

“Awww, poor Marty’s mommy was a doper and his daddy took off and the nasty retardo made Marty cry. Awwww.”

“Didn’t I tell you back in January to get yourself a new ID?”

I started looking for a genealogy to usurp. People magazine said that bars were “The new meeting places for singles seeking to become duos,” and since I wanted to connect with a man to kill, it was only fitting to go to bars where single men were seeking to become duos with other men. Christian Times magazine called such places “dens of sexual depravity that should be banned by a constitutional amendment,” and somewhere between the two statements the truth probably hid. I didn’t care either way, and the idea of gay-bar-hopping for a new ID was my antidote for a slipping will to murder. So I read men’s fashion magazines, bought myself a slick new wardrobe and jumped will-first into the scene.

Which in Bible Belt Lincoln consisted of two bars, side by side on the east edge of the industrial district. I gave myself a strict timetable: four nights of searching only, out of the bars by 11:30 and at my job by 12:00 the first three nights, after-hours prowling only allowed on the fourth night — Friday, my work night off. If no one suitable materialized during the four nights, I would abandon the plan. A newspaper article I had read mentioned that college boys sometimes cruised “Fag Row” looking for bar patrons’ cars to deface, so I would park Deathmobile II a half-mile away and walk over. No leaving fingerprints on bar tops or glasses, my face to be kept averted from everyone but possible hits.

I was well programmed for caution and control, but I wasn’t prepared for the distractions I met, the variations on Ross and blondness. “Tommy’s” and “The Place” were simply dingy rooms with long oak bars, tiny wrought-iron tables and jukeboxes: disco-blaring dives where conversation was next to impossible. But they were packed with blonds cloned from the Ross Anderson style: compact muscles that only hard work could have developed, short hair, toothbrush mustaches and tight-fitting “he-man” clothes — Pendleton shirts, faded Levi’s and work boots. It took me two nights of drinking club soda at the bar, eyeballing for tall, dark-haired men like me, to figure it out: I was in the middle of blue-collar homosexuals at play — hod-carrying, meat-packing, truck-driving men, the blonds among them most often Eastern European types with high cheekbones and ice-blue eyes. It was a subculture that neither my travels nor my recent reading spurt had prepared me for, and as a dark-haired WASP in a polo shirt and crewneck sweater, I felt completely anomalous. Expecting swishy types who would be drawn to me like moths to a flame and just as easily snuffed out, I found shit-kickers who would be exceedingly tough mano a mano.

So for two nights I drank club soda, the nonsexual wallflower at the homosexual prom. The tall, dark haired men I spotted tended to run too lean or too young to be me; my constantly trawling eyes were rebuffed when I made contact with others; the Ross and blondness clones kept me nervous, fingering my glass for something to do with my hands. I had been prepared to be frightened and angry and possibly tempted, but now something else was settling on me, like an undercurrent in the constantly throbbing music. It was a weight that felt like regret. The men surrounding me, frivolous but masculine, made me feel old and numbed by my history of brutal experience.

Early on the third night of my mission I found out why I was being avoided. I was washing my hands in the restroom at Tommy’s when I heard voices just outside the door.

“... I tell you, he’s a cop. He’s been hanging out here and next door for the past couple of nights trying to look oh so cool, and you can just tell.”

“You’re just being paranoid because you’re on probation.”

“No, I’m not! God, slacks and a sweater, how tacky! He’s L.P.D. Vice, baby, so hit on him at your own risk.”

There was a giggle. “You think he’s got handcuffs and a big gun?”

“Yes, baby, I do. And a wife and three kids and an entrapment quota.”

The two voices joined in laughter, then trailed off. Thinking of Ross and how he would have reacted to the conversation, I walked back to my seat at the bar. I was wondering about the feasibility of continuing my mission when I felt a tentative hand on my elbow. I turned around, and there I was.

“Hi.”

It was the voice of my admirer. I stepped off the stool, saw that he was within an inch of my height, ten pounds of my weight and two years of my age. By squinting, I picked up brown eyes. Turning away from him, I wiped the bar top and my glass with my sleeve, then pivoted back with male-model grace. “Hi,” I said.