My Dark Places

by James Ellroy

  I’d walk.

  Wilshire Boulevard cut straight to the beach. I’d walk it out and back in the course of one inhaler trip. I had to keep moving. Traffic noise deflected the Voices. Lack of movement made the Voices cacophonous.

  I walked five years away. They went by in a slow-motion blur. My fantasies ran through them at fast-forward counterpoint. Street scenes served as backdrops for the Voices and my own internal dialogue.

  I didn’t babble or betray my state of mind overtly. I always shaved and wore dark cords to hide accumulated grime. I stole shirts and socks as I needed them. I doused myself with cologne to kill the stench of outdoor life. I showered at Lloyd’s place occasionally.

  Lloyd was headed nowhere at a nice sedate rate. He was drinking, using drugs and making stabs at college. He flirted with danger and lowlife and kept his mom’s house as a backup option.

  Lloyd walked me through some bad dope withdrawals. He disrupted me with little jolts of the truth. The LAPD disrupted me and force-fed me jail time.

  They hassled me and arrested me. They popped me for plain drunk, drunk driving, petty theft and trespassing. They detained me as a suspicious late-night pedestrian and kicked me out of deserted houses and Goodwill bins. They held me at various station houses and shot me to the Sheriff’s for an aggregate total of four to eight months county time.

  Jail was my health retreat. I abstained from booze and dope and ate three square meals a day. I did push-ups and worked trusty details and got a little muscle tone going. I hung out with stupid white guys, stupid black guys and stupid Mexican guys— and swapped stupid stories with them. We had all committed daring crimes and fucked the world’s most glamorous women. An old black wino told me he flicked Marilyn Monroe. I said, “No shit—I fucked her too!”

  I worked the trash-and-freight detail at the New County Jail and the library at Wayside Honor Rancho. My favorite jail was Biscailuz Center. They fed you big meals and let you read in the latrines after lights-out. Jail was no big Ricking traumatic deal.

  I knew how to ride short stretches. Jail cleaned out my system and gave me something to anticipate: my release and more booze and dope fantasies.

  Crime fantasies. Sex fantasies.

  The redhead was 15 years dead and somewhere far away. She ambushed me in the summer of 1973.

  I was living in a dive hotel. I took inhaler trips in a communal bathtub down the hall from my room. I ran warm water and hogged the tub for hours. Nobody complained. Most of the tenants took showers.

  I was in the tub. I was jacking off to a cavalcade of older women’s faces. I saw my mother naked, fought the image and lost.

  I jerry-rigged a story straight off.

  It was ’58. My mother didn’t die in El Monte. She wasn’t a drunk. She loved me woman to man.

  We made love. I smelled her perfume and cigarette breath. Her amputated nipple thrilled me.

  I brushed her hair out of her eyes and told her I loved her. My tenderness made her cry.

  It was the most impassioned and loving story I’d ever perpetrated. It left me ashamed and horrified of what I had inside me.

  I tried to live the story again. My mind wouldn’t let me. All the dope in the world couldn’t bring the redhead back.

  I abandoned her one more time.

  I blew my rent money and lost my hotel room. I moved back to Burns Park.

  I took inhaler trips and fought a war within myself. I tried to conjure up my mother and devise a way to let her stay. My mind failed me. My conscience shut the whole business down.

  The Voices got very specific. They said you fucked your mother and killed her.

  I had a huge prophylhexedrine tolerance. It took ten to twelve cotton wads to get me off the ground. The shit was fucking up my lungs. I woke up congested every morning.

  I developed chest pains. Every breath and heartbeat doubled me over. I took a bus to the County Hospital. A doctor examined me and told me I had pneumonia. He admitted me and put me on antibiotics for a week. They killed my infection dead.

  I left the hospital and went back to outdoor life, booze and inhalers. I got pneumonia again. I got it cured. I went on a year-long T-Bird-and-inhaler run and ended up with the DTs.

  Lloyd was living in West L.A. I camped out on the roof of his building. The first hallucinations hit me in his bathroom.

  A monster jumped out of the toilet. I shut the lid and saw more monsters seep through it. Spiders crawled up my legs. Little blobs hurled themselves at my eyes.

  I ran into the living room and turned the lights out. The little blobs went fluorescent. I raided Lloyd’s liquor stash and drank myself senseless. I woke up on the roof—dead scared.

  I knew I had to quit drinking and taking inhalers. I knew they’d kill me in the fucking near future. I stole a short dog and hitchhiked to the County Hospital. I killed my bottle on the front steps and turned myself in.

  A doctor processed me into the drunk ward. He said he’d recommend me for the Long Beach State Hospital program. Thirty days there would boil me clean and set me up to live sober.

  I wanted it. It was that or die young. I was 27 years old.

  I spent two days at the drunk ward. They zonked me out on tranquilizers and sedatives. I didn’t see any monsters or blobs. I wanted to guzzle booze as much as I wanted to kick it. I tried to sleep around the clock.

  Long Beach said they’d take me. I was slated to go down there with three guys on the ward. They were old drunks with years on the rehab circuit. They were professional alcoholic recidivists.

  We went down in a hospital van. I liked the look of the place.

  Men and women bunked in separate dorms. The cafeteria looked like a restaurant. The rec rooms looked like something out of summer camp.

  The program featured AA meetings and group therapy. “Rap” sessions were not mandatory. The patients wore khakis and numbered wristbands—like the trusties in the L.A. County Jail system.

  Antabuse was mandatory. Eagle-eyed nurses made the patients take it every day. You got deathly ill if you drank on top of it. Antabuse was a scare tactic.

  I started to feel better. I rationalized the DTs away as a freak non sequitur. I was dormed-up with drunks from all walks of life. The men scared me. The women turned me on. I started to think I could beat booze and dope on my own terms.

  The program commenced. I daydreamed in the AA meetings and ran my mouth during group therapy. I invented sexual exploits and directed my tales to the women in the room. It hit me a week or so in: You’re just here for three hots and a cot.

  I went along with the program. I ate like a pig and put on ten pounds. I spent all my spare time reading crime novels.

  I was coughing a lot. A staff nurse braced me about it. I told her I’d had a recent string of lung ailments.

  She had a doctor check me out. He shot me up with a muscle relaxant and stuck a tube with a penlight attached down my throat. He peered down a scope device and wiggled the little beam around my lungs. He said he didn’t see anything wrong.

  My cough persisted. I endured the program and wondered what I’d do for an encore. All my options scared me.

  I could find a crummy job and stay clean with Antabuse. I could stay off booze and inhalers and use other drugs. I could smoke weed. Weed goosed your appetite. I could put on some weight and build muscle. Women would dig me then. Weed was my ticket to a healthy, normal life.

  I didn’t really believe it.

  Inhalers were sex. Booze was my fantasy core. Weed was strictly for giggles and hot dates with doughnuts and pizza.

  I completed the program. I stayed on Antabuse and moved back to Lloyd’s roof with thirty-three days sober.

  My cough was getting worse. My nerves were shot and my attention span topped out at three seconds. I slept for ten-hour stints or tossed all night.

  My body wasn’t mine.

  The roof landing was my refuge. I had a nice perch by the fire door. It went all-the-way bad right there.

  It was mid-June
. I got up from a nap and thought, “I need some cigarettes.” My mind went dead then. I couldn’t recall or retrieve that one simple thought.

  My brain hit blank walls. I couldn’t say the thought or visualize it or come up with words to express it. I spent something like an hour trying to form that one simple thought.

  I couldn’t say my own name. I couldn’t think my own name. I couldn’t form that one simple thought or any thoughts. My mind was dead. My brain circuits had disconnected. I was brain-dead insane.

  I screamed. I put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes and screamed myself hoarse. I kept fighting for that one simple thought.

  Lloyd ran up to the landing. I recognized him. I couldn’t come up with his name or my name or that simple thought from an hour ago.

  Lloyd carried me downstairs and called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived and strapped me to a gurney.

  They drove me to the County Hospital and left me in a crowded hallway. I started hearing voices. Nurses walked by and yelled at me telepathically. I coughed and bucked against my restraints. Somebody stuck a needle in my arm—

  I woke up strapped to a cot. I was alone in a private hospital room.

  My wrists were raw and bloody. Most of my teeth felt loose. My jaw hurt and my knuckles stung from little abrasions. I was wearing a hospital smock. I’d pissed all over it.

  I reached for that one simple thought and caught it on the first bounce. I remembered my nigger-pimp name: Lee Earle Ellroy.

  It all came back. I recalled every detail. I started crying. I prayed and begged God to let me keep my mind.

  A nurse came into the room. She undid my restraints and walked me to a shower. I stayed under the water until it turned cold. Another nurse dressed my cuts and abrasions. A doctor told me I’d have to stay here a month. I had an abscess on my left lung the size of a big man’s fist. I needed thirty days of intravenous antibiotics.

  I asked him what went wrong with my mind. He said it was probably “post-alcohol brain syndrome.” Sober drunks went through it sometimes. He said I was lucky. Some people went crazy for good.

  My lung condition might or might not be contagious. They were isolating me to be sure. They hooked me up to a drip gizmo and started pumping me full of antibiotics. They fed me tranquilizers to lull down my fear.

  The tranks kept me woozy. I tried to sleep all day every day. Normal waking consciousness scared me. I kept imagining permanent brain malfunctions.

  Those few insane hours summarized my life. The horror rendered everything that went before it irrelevant.

  I reprised the horror all my waking hours. I couldn’t let it go. I wasn’t telling myself a cautionary tale or gloating over my survival. I was simply replaying the moments my entire life had worked toward.

  The horror stayed with me. Nurses woke me out of blissful sleep to fuck with my drip gadget. I couldn’t run my mind in long-prescribed fantasy patterns. The horror wouldn’t let me.

  I imagined permanent insanity. I punished myself with my now splendidly functioning brain.

  The fear got unbearable. I checked out of the hospital over my doctor’s protests and caught a bus to Lloyd’s place. I stole a pint of gin, guzzled it and passed out on his floor. Lloyd called the paramedics again.

  Another ambulance arrived. The paramedics woke me out of my stupor and led me down to it. They drove me straight back to the hospital. I was readmitted and placed in a four-man room on the lung ward.

  A nurse hooked me up to another drip gadget. She gave me a big bottle to spit sputum in.

  I was afraid I’d forget my name. I wrote it on the wall behind my bed as a reminder. I wrote “I will not go insane” beside it.

  11

  I spent a month hooked up to a needle. A respiration therapist beat on my back every day. It loosened big globs of sputum. I spat them in the jar by my bed.

  The abscess went. My fear stayed.

  My mind was functioning normally. I played memory games to test-fire it. I memorized magazine ads and slogans on milk cartons. I was building mind muscle to fight potential insanity.

  I went insane once. It could happen again.

  I couldn’t let the fear go. I fed on it all day every day. I didn’t analyze why I drove myself to the point of brain malfunction. I addressed the problem as a physical phenomenon.

  My brain felt like an external appendage. My lifelong plaything was in no way indigenous to me. It was a specimen in a bottle. I was a doctor poking it with a stick.

  I knew that booze, drugs and my tenuous abstention from them caused my brain burnout. My rational side told me that. My secondary response derived straight from guilt. God punished me for mentally fucking my mother.

  I believed it. My fantasy was just that transgressive and worthy of divine intervention. I tortured myself with the concept. I exhumed the midwestern Protestant ethic my mother tried to outrun—and used it for self-flagellation.

  My new mental kick was mental self-preservation. I did mental tricks to keep my mind limber. It fed my fear more than it buttressed my confidence.

  My lung abscess healed completely. I checked out of the hospital and cut a deal with God.

  I told him I wouldn’t drink or pop inhalers. I told him I wouldn’t steal. All I wanted was my mind back for keeps.

  The deal jelled.

  I went back to Lloyd’s roof. I didn’t drink or pop inhalers or steal. God kept my mind in sound working order.

  The fear stayed.

  I knew it could happen again. I understood the preposterous aspect of all divine contracts. Booze and inhaler residue could lurk in my cells. My brain wires could sputter and disconnect without warning. My brain could blow tomorrow or in the year 2000.

  Fear kept me sober. Fear taught me no moral lessons. My days ran long and sweaty and anxious. I sold my plasma at a skid-row blood bank and lived off ten dollars a week. I haunted libraries and read crime novels. I memorized whole passages to keep my mind running strong.

  A guy in Lloyd’s building worked as a golf caddy. He told me it was good tax-free money. You could work or not work as you pleased. Hillcrest Country Club was high-class. The members tossed you some good coin.

  The gay brought me to Hillcrest. I knew I just got lucky.

  It was a prestigious Jewish club south of Century City. The golf course was hilly and deep green. The caddies congregated in a “caddy shack.” They drank, played cards and told obscene stories. Drunks, dopers and compulsive gamblers ruled the shack. I knew I’d fit in.

  Caddy jobs were called “loops.” Caddies were also called “loopers.” I knew jackshit about golf. The caddy master told me I’d learn.

  I started out packing one bag only. I stumbled through my first dozen loops and moved to two-bag duty. The bags weren’t that heavy. Eighteen holes of golf ran four hours. The standard two-bag fee was 20 dollars. It was good 1975 money.

  I worked Hillcrest six days a week. I made good daily pay and got myself a room at the Westwood Hotel. The place was equidistant to Hillcrest and the Bel-Air, Brentwood and Los Angeles country clubs. Loopers rented most of the rooms. The place was a caddy shack adjunct.

  Looping took over my life. The rituals deflected my fear and eased it into a fadeout.

  I loved the golf course. It was a perfectly self-contained green world. Caddy work was mentally undemanding. I let my mind wander and earned a living simultaneously.

  The milieu stimulated me. I invented back stories for Hillcrest members while I walked beside them, and ran gag riffs on lowlife loopers. The culture clash of wealthy Jews and caddies with one foot in the gutter was a constant laugh riot. I made friends with a smart young caddy going to college part-time. We discussed the Hillcrest membership and the caddy experience endlessly.

  I spent time with a diverse bunch of people. I listened to them and learned how to talk to them. Hillcrest felt like some kind of way station en route to the real world.

  People told me stories. I took a master class in country-club lore. I heard tales of self-
made men who clawed their way out of the shtetl and tales of rich drunks who succumbed to caddy life. The golf course was a picaresque education.

  Most of the loopers smoked weed. Weed didn’t scare me like booze and inhalers did. I kissed off four sober months with some Thai Stick.

  It was goooood. It was the best shit I’d ever smoked. I started buying it and smoking it all day every day.

  I figured it wouldn’t fuck up my lungs or shut down my brain. It wouldn’t spark incestuous fantasies and piss God off. It was the manageable and controllable drug of the 1970s.

  So I rationalized.

  I smoked weed for a year and a half. It was goooood—but not great. It was like trying to reach the moon in a Volkswagen.

  I didn’t drink or take inhalers. I sucked down marijuana and lived as a more subtle full-time fantasist.

  I took my fantasies outdoors. I took them to Hillcrest and other golf courses at night. I hopped the fence at L.A. Country Club and fantasy-walked the north course for hours.

  I played with my Hillcrest cast of characters and worked them into a crime story. I worked in an alcoholic hero. He hailed from the sad edge of Hancock Park. He nursed a lifelong obsession with the Black Dahlia case.

  I worked in the Club Mecca torch and classical music. I worked in the DTs. My hero wanted to find a woman and love her to death.

  My 18-year fantasy backlog telescoped into this one story. I began to see that it was a novel.

  I got fired from Hillcrest. A member’s son mouthed off to me in front of a good-looking woman. I decked him in full view of the putting green. A security guard escorted me off the premises.

  I was bombed on weed. Weed hit me unpredictably.

  I got a caddy gig at Bel-Air Country Club. The members and loopers there were just as seductive as the Hillcrest crew. The golf course was even more beautiful.

  I stayed bombed at Bel-Air. I bought a tape player for my room and spent hours jacked up on weed and the German Romantic composers. I roamed golf courses at night and wrestled with that one emerging story.