James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Landing in Sharon, Pennsylvania, I went verbal beyond my litany and took tight hold of my destiny. The color days had cleared my mind and had given me the courage to make certain admissions and arrive at conclusions as to how to restore order to my life. Wanting the prosaics of resettling out of the way before I formally stated the words to the summer air, I bought three rooms full of medium-priced furniture with Rheinhardt Wildebrand’s Visa card and rented a three-room apartment on the town’s west side, using the name William Rohrsfield. Juggling the two fake identities produced no moments of schizophrenia or disturbing euphoria, and when I was alone in my new home, I made my declaration:

Since Wisconsin you have been in flight from your own unique strain of sexuality, warrior in nature; you have been running from old fears and old indignities, experiencing near-psychotic hallucinations as a result; you have lost your will to kill coldly, brutally and with your hands; killing simply and anonymously has rendered you a nonentity, devoid of pride, slothful in your habits. You have become a comfort seeker of the most despicable sort, and the only way to reverse the above is to plan and carry out a perfect, methodical, symbolically exact set of sex murders.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

Tears of joy were streaming down my face when I finished my self-confrontation, and I wept against the nearest object available to hold — a cardboard box filled with dishes and cooking utensils.

Over the next four months I secured the symbolic accoutrements: airline posters and rock posters identical to the ones adorning the walls of Charlie Manson’s fuck pad back in ’69, a set of burglar’s tools and a theatrical makeup kit. Locksmith technology had improved since my burglary days, so I bought do-it-yourself door locks representing the new technological spectrum and practiced neutralising them at home. Hours of makeup practice in front of my bathroom mirror got me adept at working pancake and fake noses into non-Martin Plunkett visages, and as my steel-town summer wound down, all that remained was to find the perfect victims.

Easier said than done.

Sharon was a rough-hewn industrial city, Polish/Russian in its basic ethnic thrust, honky-tonk in its life-style. There were plenty of blonds out on the street projecting “kill me” auras, but an entire summer of cruising for an attractive blond-blonde couple brought me nothing but eyestrain. To combat the frustration and stay in reality while doing it, I went or another pop-culture jaunt, courtesy of People and Cosmopolitan.

“Family” was still big, as were religion, drugs and right-wing politics, but physical fitness seemed to be moving into first place among America’s fads. Health clubs were the newer “new meeting grounds” for singles; body awareness had spawned the “new narcissism”; and bodybuilding equipment and techniques had progressed to the point where one “new fitness” gum flatly stated that weight workouts were the “new religious service,” while muscle-toning machines themselves were “the new totems of worship, because they unleash the godhead physical perfection in all of us.” The entire craze reeked of a bottom line of people wanting to look good so that they could fuck with a higher class of partner, but if that was where the attractive ones were congregating...

Sharon had three health clubs — “Now & Wow Fitness,” “The Co-Ed Connection” and the “Jack La Lanne European Health Spa.” A battery of phone calls got me the rundown on their respective merits: Jack “La Strain” was for the serious iron pumpers, the Co-Ed Connection and Now & Wow were pick-up joints where men and women worked out on Nautilus equipment and took saunas together. All three bright-voiced phone people invited me to come down for a “free introduction workout,” and I took the latter two up on their offer.

Now & Wow Fitness was, in the words of the bored black man who handed me a towel and “gym kit” upon entering, “A fat farm. All Polack chicks lookin’ to get skinny so they can glom themselves a steelworker, then eat themselves fat again when they get married.” The two rooms full of chubby women in pastel Danskins confirmed his appraisal, and I walked back out immediately, returning my towel and gym kit still fresh. “I told you so,” the man said.

The Co-Ed Connection, a block away, had the feel of instant paydirt. The cars in the parking lot were all sleek late models, as were the instructors of both genders who waited in the foyer to greet prospective members. Again handed a towel and “workout kit,” I was led into a football-field-size room filled with gleaming metal equipment. Only a few men and women were straining under bars and pulleys, and the instructor noticed my look and said, “The after-work rush starts in about an hour. It’s wild.”

I nodded, and the sleek young woman smiled and left me at the entrance to the men’s locker room. The sleek young male attendant inside assigned me a locker, and I changed into gym shorts and a tank top emblazoned with the Co-Ed Connection logo — a sleek masculine silhouette and a sleek feminine silhouette holding hands. Checking my appearance in one of the locker room’s many full-length mirrors, I saw that I was more large than sleek, more blunt than stylish. Satisfied, I pushed through the door and started pumping iron.

It felt good, and I was pleased to know that I could still bench-press two hundred and fifty pounds twenty times. I moved from machine to machine, experiencing pleasant aches, getting in sync with the jar of metal, the hiss of pulleys, the smell of my own sweat. The room started filling up, and soon there were lines forming in front of the various contraptions. Bluff-hearty macho men were offering encouragement to pushing, pulling, squatting and lifting macho women all around me, and I felt like a visitor from another planet observing quaint earthling mating rituals. Then I saw THEM, eased my shoulder-press load down and said to myself, “Dead.”

They were obviously brother and sister. Both clad in purple satin instructor’s uniforms, both blond and superbly shapely in classic male/female modes, both slightly more than vacuously pretty, they breathed a long history of familial intimacy. Watching them explain the benching machine to a skinny teenage bey, I saw how their gestures accommodated each other. When he used a chopped hand for emphasis, she repeated the motion, only gently. When he brought flat palms up to show how the pulleys worked, she did it just a little bit slower. Staring hard at them, I knew that they had performed incest early on, and that it was the one thing they never talked about.

I dismounted from the shoulder-press machine and walked to the locker room. Sweating from exhilaration now, I discarded my gym outfit and put on my street clothes, then strode back through the workout area. The siblings were explaining muscle development to a group by the jogging treadmill, pointing out laterals and pectorals on each other, letting their fingers touch the places. Touching the same parts of myself, I felt my sore muscles throb, then beat to the word “Dead.” At the front of the area I noticed a picture roster of the club’s instructors. George Kurzinski and Paula Kurzinski smiled side by side at the top. I dated their death warrant nine months in the future — June 5, 1982, fourteen years to the day since I saw my first couple make love. Leaving the Co-Ed Connection, I turned on my mental stopwatch. Pleased with the sound of its spring-loaded movement, I let it run continually while I activated my plan one step at a time.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

September, 1981:

Learning that the Kurzinskis live together, sleep in separate bedrooms and visit their widowed mother at the sanitarium every Sunday. Tick tick tick tick.