Crime Wave

by James Ellroy

  I said, "Money."

  Dot drowned her doughnut in Drambuie-drenched coffee. "He said 'money."

  Lansing lanced a ladyfinger and sunk it into Sambuca. "He certainly did."

  I said, "Cut the comedy, cuties." I framed the line a la Frigidaire Frank at his frostbitten best.

  Dot pulled a packet of pix from her purse and popped them my way. I snared the snapshots out of the air and snagged myself in a snafu.

  Danny Getchell--film-fucked forever.

  I'm humping the Hush-Hush--hated Helen Gahagan Douglas-- the Lewd Lady of the L.A. Left. I'm jabbing some jailbait in the gym at Hollywood High. I'm ecstatically entwined with Ethel Rosenberg--somewhere in Sedition City. I'm holed up with Hattie McDaniel at the height of my fatty phase. I'm liquored up and looking longingly at Lassie and her luscious littermate. I'm skunk drunk in a skid-row dive. I'm passed out on a putrid pallet. A filthy filly is fellating me. FUCK--it's a dreg-like drag queen draped dramatically!

  Dot dunked her doughnut and doused me with John Donne:

  "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

  I hit my knees hard. I concentrated on a karmic counterattack. I couldn't cough one up.

  I whimpered. I wailed. I keened and keeled over. I cried and cringed, and crawled into an abyss of abasement.

  White light wafted in. I shot to my feet on a shimmering shaft. His voice vibrated off an old Victrola vaulted in my head. It yipped through me victoriously.

  I vowed to roll with the punch and reign on ring-a-ding.

  February, March 1999

  OUT OF THE PAST

  Half-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed: L.A., my hometown, in the 'sos. Most are just brief synaptic blips, soon mentally discarded. A few transmogrify into fiction: I sense their dramatic potential and exploit it in my novels, memory to moonshine in a hot second.

  Memory: a symbiotic melding of then and now. For me, the spark-point of harrowing curiosities.

  A man gyrating with an accordion--pumping his "stomach Steinway" for all it's worth.

  My father pointing to the TV. "That guy's no good. He's a draft dodger."

  The accordion man in a grade-Z movie, clinching with the blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads.

  The accordion man is named Dick Contino.

  "Draft dodger" is a bum rap--he served honorably during the Korean War.

  The grade-Z flick is Daddy-O--a music/hot-rod/romance stinkeroo.

  Memory: the juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutiae.

  In June 1958, my mother was murdered; the killing went unsolved. I saw Dick Contino belt "Bumble Boogie" on TV noted my father's opinion of him, and caught Daddy-O at the Admiral Theater a year or so later. Synapses snapped: A memory was formed and placed in context. Its historical perspective loomed dark: Women were strangled and spent eternity unavenged.

  I was 10 and 11 years old then; literary instincts simmered inchoately in me. My curiosities centered on crime: I wanted to know the WHY? behind hellish events. As time passed, contemporaneous malfeasance left me bored--the sanguinary '6os and '70s passed in a blur of hectic self-destruction.

  I drank, used drugs, and did a slew of ten-, twenty-, and thirtyday county-jail stints for preposterous and pathetic misdemeanors. I shoplifted, broke into houses, and sniffed women's undergarments. I jimmied hinges off Laundromat washers and stole the coins inside. I holed up in cheap pads and read hundreds of crime novels. My life was chaos, but my intellectual focus never wavered: L.A. in the '50s/corruption/crime. A '50s sound track accompanied my musings: golden oldies, Dick Contino on the accordion.

  In 1977, I got sober and segued into hyper-focus: writing crime novels. Dick Contino back-burner brain boogied as I attempted to replicate Los Angeles in the 1950s.

  In 1980, I wrote Clandestine--a thinly disguised, chronologically altered account of my mother's murder. The novel is set in 1951; the hero is a draft dodger whose life is derailed by the Red Scare.

  In 1987, I wrote The Big Nowhere. Set in 1950, the book details an anticommunist pogrom leveled at the entertainment biz.

  In 1990, I wrote White Jazz. A major subplot features a grade-Z movie being filmed in the same Griffith Park locales as Daddy-O.

  Jung wrote: "What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate."

  I should have seen Dick Contino coming a long time ago.

  I didn't. Fate intervened, via photograph and black-and-white videocassette.

  A friend sent me the photo. Dig: It's me, age 10, on June 22, 1958. An L.A. Times photographer snapped the pic five minutes after a police detective told me my mother had been murdered. I'm in minor-league shock: My eyes are wide, but my gaze is blank. My fly is at half-mast; my hands look shaky. The day was hot: The melting Brylcreem in my hair picks up flashbulb light.

  The photo held me transfixed; its force transcended my many attempts to exploit my past for book sales. An underlying truth zapped me: My bereavement, even in that moment, was ambiguous. I'm already calculating potential advantages, regrouping as the officious men surrounding me defer to the perceived grief of a little boy.

  I had the photograph framed and spent a good deal of time staring at it. Spark-point: late-'50s memories reignited. I saw Daddy-O listed in a video catalogue and ordered it. It arrived a week later; I popped it in the VCR.

  Fuel-injected zooom. . .

  The story revolves around truckdriver/drag racer/singer Phil "Daddy-O" Sandifer's attempts to solve the murder of his best friend while laboring under the weight of a suspended driver's license. Phil's pals Peg and Duke want to help, but they're ineffectual--addled by too many late nights at the Rainbow Gardens, a post-teenage doo-wop spot where Phil croons gratis on request. No matter: Daddy-O meets slinky Jana Ryan, a rich girl with a valid driver's license and a '57 T-Bird ragtop. Mutual resentment segues into a sex vibe; Phil and Jana team up and infiltrate a nightclub owned by sinister fat man Sidney Chillas. Singer Daddy-O, cigarette girl Jana; a comely and unstoppable duo. They quickly surmise that Chillas is pushing Big H, entrap him, and nail the endomorph for the murder of Phil's best friend. A hot-rod finale; a burning question left unanswered: Will Daddy-O's derring-do get him back his driver's license?

  Who knows?

  Who cares?

  It took me three viewings to get the plot down, anyway. Because Dick Contino held me spellbound. Because I knew-- instinctively--that he held important answers. Because I knew that he hovered elliptically in my L.A.-in-the-'5os novels, a phantom waiting to speak.

  Contino onscreen: a handsome Italian guy, late twenties, big biceps from weights or making love to his accordion. Dreamboat attributes: shiny teeth; dark, curly hair; engaging smile. He looks good, and he can sing; he's straining on "Rock Candy Baby"--the lyrics suck, and you can tell this up-tempo rebop isn't his style-- but he croons the wah-wah ballad "Angel Act" achingly, full of baritone tremolos, quintessentially the pussy-whipped loser in lust with the "noir" goddess who's out to trash his life.

  The man oozes charisma.

  He's the flip side, subtext and missing link between my conscious and unconscious fixations.

  I decided to find Dick Contino.

  I located a half-dozen of his albums and listened to them, reveling in pure Entertainment.

  "Live at the Fabulous Flamingo," "Squeeze Me," "Something for the Girls"--standards arranged to spotlight accordion virtuosity. Main-theme bombardments; sentiment so pure and timeless that it could sound-track every moment of transcendent schmaltz that Hollywood has ever produced. Dick Contino, showstopper on wax: tapping two keyboards, improvising cadenzas, shaking thunderstorms from bellows compression. Going from whisper to sigh to roar and back again in the length of time it takes to think: Tell me what this man's life means and how it connects to my life. I called my researcher friend Alan Marks. He caught my pitch on the first bounce. "The accordion guy? I think he used to play Vegas."

  "Find out everything you can about him. Find out if he's still alive
, and if he is, locate him."

  "What's this about?"

  "Narrative detail."

  I should have said containable narrative detail--because I wanted Dick Contino to be a pad-prowling/car-crashing/moonhowling/womanizing quasi-psychopath akin to the heroes of my books. I should have said, "Bring me information that I can control and exploit." I should have said, "Bring me a life that can be compartmentalized into the pitch-dark vision of my first ten novels."

  "What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate."

  I should have seen the real Dick Contino coming.

  Richard Joseph Contino was born in Fresno, California, on January 17, 1930. His father was a Sicilian immigrant who owned a successful butcher shop; his mother was first-generation Italian American. Dick had two younger brothers and a sister; a maternal uncle, Ralph Giordano, a.k.a. Young Corbett, was a former professional welterweight fighter.

  The family was tight-knit, Catholic. Dick grew up shy, beset by wicked bad fears: the kind you recognize as irrational even as they rip you up.

  Athletics and music allowed him to front a fearless persona. High-school fullback, five years of accordion study--good with the pigskin, superb with the squeeze box. Dick Contino, age i ready for a hot date with history; a strapping six-foot gavonne with his fears held in check by a smile.

  Horace Heidt was passing through Fresno looking for amateur talent. His Youth Opportunity radio program was about to debut-- yet another studio-audience/applause-meter show, three contestants competing for weekly prize money and the chance to sing, play, dance, or clown their way through to the grand finals, a five-thou payoff and a dubious shot at fame. One of Heidt's flunkies had heard about Dick and had arranged an audition; Dick wowed him with a keyboard-zipping/bellows-shaking/mikestand--bumping medley. The flunky told Horace Heidt: "You've got to see this kid. I know the accordion's from Squaresville, but you've got to see this kid."

  December 7, 1947: Horace Heidt slotted Dick Contino on his first radio contest. Dick played "Lady of Spain," "Tico-Tico," and "Bumble Boogie" and burned the house down. He won $250; horny bobby-soxers swarmed him backstage. Horace Heidt hit first-strike pay dirt.

  Dick Contino continued to win: week after week, traveling with the Heidt show, defeating singers, dancers, trombone players, comics, and a blind vibraphonist. He won straight through to the grand finals in December '48; he became a national celebrity while still technically an amateur contestant.

  He now had 500 fan clubs nationwide--and averaged 5,000 fan letters a week.

  Teenage girls thronged his appearances, chanting "Dick-kie Cont-ino, we love you" to the tune of "Lady of Spain."

  Horace Heidt said years later, "You should have seen Dick play. If my show had been on television, Dick Contino would have been bigger than Elvis Presley."

  A Heidt tour followed the grand-finals victory. Other performers appeared with Contino--crypto lounge acts backstopping the newly anointed "Mr. Accordion." Heidt had his cash cow yoked to a punk twenty-five-grand-a-year, seven-year contract; Dick sued him and cut himself loose. Mr. Accordion flying high: record contracts, screen tests, top-liner status at the BIG ROOMS-- Ciro's and the Mocambo in L.A.; the El Rancho Vegas; the Chez Paree in Chicago. Dick Contino, age 19, 20, 21: soaking up the spoils of momentum, making the Squaresville accordion hip, unaware that public love is ephemeral. Too callow to know that idols who admit their fear will fall.

  Nineteen fifty-one: the Korean War heating up. Dick Contino goes from "Valentino of the Accordion" to draft bait. A selectiveservice notice arrives; he begs off his army induction, citing minor physical maladies. He's scared, but not of losing his BIG-ROOM status, big paydays, and big poontang potential.

  He's scared of all the baaad juju that could happen to you, might happen to you, will happen to you--shit like blindness, cancer, passing out onstage, your dog getting dognapped by vivisectionists. The army looms--claustrophobia coming on like a steam-heated shroud. Fear--BIG-ROOM fear--crazy stuff, bigtime diffuse. Crazy stuff he might have outgrown if he hadn't been too busy on the Heartthrob Tour, jump-starting adolescent libidos.

  Fear owned him now.

  Three army psychiatrists examined him at the induction center and declared him psychologically unfit. The assessment letter was "lost"; Richard Contino was processed in anyway.

  April 195 i--Fort Ord, California. Dick's fear becomes panic-- he bolts the reception-station barracks and catches a bus to San Francisco. Now AWOL and a federal fugitive, he trains down to his parents' new house outside L.A. He confers with friends and a lawyer, gets up some guts, and turns himself in to the Feds.

  The incident got front-page publicity. The papers harped on the BIG-ROOM pay Dick Contino would be giving up if forced to serve as an army private. Dick's response: Then take away my accordion for five years.

  The Feds didn't buy it. Dick Contino went to trial for desertion; he fought his case with psychiatric testimony. Fear on trial, fear convicted--the judge hit Dick Contino with a $10,000 fine and six months in the federal joint at McNeil Island, Washington.

  He did five months of the sentence, shaving four weeks off for good behavior. It could have been worse: He hauled pipes, did gardening work, and put on a prisoners' Christmas show. Inside, the big fears seemed to subside: The business of day-to-day survival kiboshed that part of his imagination where terror flourished. Five months in, out, the ironic kicker: He got drafted and sent to Korea.

  Where he served with distinction. Korea proved to be a mixed psychological bag: Dick's draft-trial notoriety won him friends, enemies, and a shitload of invitations to play the accordion. Duty with a Seoul-attached outfit, back to the States early in '54. Richard Contino: honorably discharged as a staff sergeant; while overseas, the recipient of an unsolicited presidential pardon signed by Harry S Truman.

  Dick Contino: back in the U.S.A.

  Back to derailed career momentum, a long transit of day-to-day survival behind him.

  The BIG-ROOM gigs were kaput. Momentum is at least 50 percent hype: It requires nurturing and frequent infusions of bullshit. Dick Contino couldn't play the game from McNeil Island and Korea. A bum-publicity taint stuck to him: "coward" and "draft dodger" throbbing in Red Scare neon.

  He worked smaller rooms and ignored catcalls; he cut records and learned to sing. A few journalists befriended him, but the basic show-biz take on Dick Contino was This guy is poison. Justifying yourself to the public gets old quick--"coward" may be the toughest American bullet to dodge.

  Dick Contino learned to sing, but rock and roll cut him off at the pass. He learned to act, top-lined a few B-films, and faded in the wake of heartthrobs with underailed momentum. In 1 956, he married actress Leigh Snowden, had three kids with her, and settled down in Las Vegas--close to his hotel-lounge bread and butter. He continued to get small-room gigs and played Italian festas in Chicago, Milwaukee, Philly, and other paisano-packed venues.

  Leigh Snowden Contino died of cancer in 1982. The Contino kids would now be 35, 32, and 30.

  My researcher's notes tapped out in '89. He said an obituary check turned up negative--he was certain that Dick Contino was still alive. A week later, I got confirmation. "I found him. He's still living in Las Vegas, and he says he'll talk to you."

  Before making contact, I charted the arc of two lives. A specific design was becoming clear--I wanted to write a novella featuring Dick Contino and the filming of Daddy-O, but a symbiotic pull was blunting my urge to get down to, business, extract information, and get out. I felt a recognition of my own fears binding me to this man: fear of failure, specific in nature and surmountable through hard work, and the very large fear that induces claustrophobic suffocation and causes golden young men to run from army barracks--the terror that anything might happen, could happen, will happen.

  A merging in fear; a divergence in action.

  I joined the army just as the Vietnam War started to percolate. My father was dying; I didn't want to stick around and watch. The army terrified me--I cal
culated plausible means of escape. James ElIroy, age i 7, fledgling dramatist: pulling off a frantic stuttering act designed to spotlight his unsuitability for military service.

  It was a bravura performance. It got me a quick discharge and a return trip to L.A. and my passions: booze, dope, pantie-sniffing.

  Nobody ever called me a coward or a draft dodger--the Vietnam War was reviled from close to the get-go, and extricating yourself from its clutches was held as laudable.

  I calculated my way out--and of course my fears remained unacknowledged. And I wasn't a golden young man sky-high on momentum and ripe for a public hanging.

  I've led a colorful and media-exploitable life; my take on it has been picaresque--a stratagem that keeps my search for deeper meaning channeled solely into my books, which keeps my momentum building, which keeps my wolves of nothingness locked out of sight. Dick Contino didn't use my methods: He was a man of music, not of words, and he embraced his fears from the start. And he continued: The musicianship on his post-army beef albums dwarfs the sides he cut pre-'51. He continued, and so far as I could tell, the only thing that diminished was his audience.

  I called Contino and told him I wanted to write about him. We had an affable conversation; he said, "Come to Vegas."

  Contino met me at the airport. He looked great: lean and fit at 63. His Daddy-O grin remained intact; he confirmed that his Daddy-O biceps came from humping his accordion.

  We went to a restaurant and shot the shit. Our conversation was full of jump cuts--Las Vegas to the Mob to serving jail time to L.A. in the '50S, fear and what you do when the audience dwindles.

  I told him that the best novels are often not the best-selling novels; that complex styles and ambiguous stories perplex many readers. I said that while my own books sell quite well, they are considered too dark, too densely plotted, and too relentlessly violent to be chart-toppers.