by James Ellroy
“Then let’s get literal. I’ve confided in you. You confide in me. Tell me something about yourself. Something dark and secretive that you’ve never told anyone.”
She considered this and said, “It’ll shock you. I like you and I don’t want to offend you.”
“You can’t shock me. I’m immune to shock. Tell me.”
“All right. When I was an undergrad in San Francisco I had an affair—with a married man. It ended. I was hurt and I started hating men. I was going to Cal Berkeley. I had a teacher, a woman. She was very beautiful. She took an interest in me. We became lovers and did things—sexual things that most people don’t even guess about. This woman also liked young boys. Young boys. She seduced her twelve-year-old nephew. We shared him.”
Sarah backed away from where we stood together, almost as if fearing a blow.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“All of it?”
“Yes! I won’t get graphic with you. I loved that woman. She helped through a difficult time. Isn’t that dark enough for you?”
Her anger and indignation had peaked and brought forth in me a warm rush of pure stuff. “It’s enough. Come here, Sarah.” She did and we held each other, her head pressed hard into my shoulder. When we disengaged, she looked up at me. She was smiling, and her cheeks were wet with tears. I wiped them away with my thumbs. “Let me take you home,” I said.
We undressed wordlessly, in the dark front room of Sarah Kefalvian’s garage apartment on Sycamore Street. Sarah was trembling and breathing shallowly in the cold room, and when we were naked I smothered her with my body to stanch her tremors, then lifted her and carried her in the direction of where the bedroom had to be.
There was no bed; just a mattress on a pallet covered with quilts. I laid her down and sat on the edge of the mattress, my long legs jammed up awkwardly. A shaft of light from a streetlamp cast a diffuse glow over the room and let me pick out shelves overflowing with books and walls adorned with Picasso prints and labor activist posters from the Depression.
Sarah looked up at me, her hand resting on my knee. I stroked her hair, then bent over and placed short dry kisses on her neck and shoulders. She sighed. I told her she was very beautiful, and she giggled. I looked for imperfections, the little body flaws that speak volumes. I found them: a small growth of dark hairs above her nipples, an acne cluster on her right shoulder blade. I kissed these places until Sarah grabbed my head and pulled my mouth to hers.
We kissed hard and long, then Sarah opened up yawningly and arched to receive me. We joined and coupled violently, strongly, muscles straining in our efforts to stay interlocked as we changed positions and thrashed the quilts off the mattress. We peaked together, Sarah sobbing as I mashed my face into her neck, rubbing my mouth and nose in the little rivulets of our combined sweat.
We lay still for a long time, gently stroking odd parts of each other. To talk would have been to betray the moment; I knew this from experience, and Sarah from instinct. After a while she pretended to sleep, a silent, loving way to ease the awkwardness of my departure.
I dressed in the dark, then reached over and brushed back her long dark hair and kissed the nape of her neck, thinking as I left that maybe this time I had given as much as I had taken.
I drove home and got out my diary. I wrote of the circumstances of my meeting Sarah, what we had talked about, and what I learned. I described her body and our lovemaking. Then I went to bed and slept long into the afternoon.
2
“Getting laid, Freddy?”
Wacky and I were pulling into the parking lot at Rancho Park Municipal Golf Course very early the following Saturday morning. I was hungry for golf, not masculine banter, and Wacky’s question felt like a knife in the side. I ignored it until Wacky cleared his throat and started to speak in verse:
“Whither thou, O pussy-hound, O tireless fiend for Venus Mounds, O noble cop, you’ll never stop…”
I set the hand brake and stared at Wacky.
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said.
I sighed: “The answer is yes.”
“Great. What’s it costing you?”
“Very little. I go to bars only as a last resort.” I hauled my clubs out of the back seat and motioned Wacky to follow me. As I slung my golf bag over my shoulder and locked the car, Wacky gave me one of his rare cold sober looks.
“That wasn’t what I meant, Fred.”
“What did you mean, Wacky? I came here to hit golf balls, not write my sexual memoirs.”
Wacky clapped me on the back and waggled his eyebrows. “Are you still planning on being chief of police someday?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Then I hope you realize that the commission will never appoint a bachelor pussy-fiend as chief. You know that they’re going to get to you, don’t you?”
I sighed again, this time angrily. “Exactly what are you talking about?”
“Price, Freddy. The dames are going to start to get to you. You’re going to get tired of one-nighters and go loony romantic and start searching for some tomato you screwed back in ’48. The woman, who’ll never be able to compete with the thrill of one-nighters. You’ll be screwed both ways. You make me damn glad I’m not big and handsome and charming. You make me damn glad I’m just a poet and a cop.”
“And a drunk.” I regretted saying it immediately and fished around for something to make it right.
Wacky preempted me: “Yeah, and a drunk.”
“Then you watch the price, Wack. When I’m chief of police and you’re my chief of detectives I don’t want you croaking of cirrhosis of the liver.”
“I’ll never make it, Fred.”
“You’ll make it.”
“Shit. Haven’t you heard the rumors? Captain Larson is retiring in June. Beckworth is going to be the new top dog at Wilshire, and I’m going to Seventy-seventh Street—N———land, U.S.A. And you, Beckworth’s golf avatar and fair-haired boy, are going to Vice, a nice assignment for a cunt-hound. I have this on very good authority, Freddy.”
I couldn’t meet Wacky’s eyes. I had heard the rumors, and credited them. I started thinking of stratagems I could use to keep Beckworth from transferring Wacky, then suddenly realized I was supposed to meet Beckworth at seven o’clock that morning at Fox Hills for a lesson. I dropped my bag to the ground in disgust. “Wacky?” I said.
“Yes, Fred?”
“Sometimes you make me wish that I were the drunk and the fuck-up in this partnership.”
“Will you elaborate on that?”
“No.”
* * *
—
The driving range was deserted. Wacky and I dug our stash of shag balls out of their hiding place in a hollowed-out tree trunk and settled in to practice. Wacky warmed up by chugalugging a half pint of bourbon, while I did deep knee bends and jumping jacks. I started out hitting seven-irons—one seventy with a slight fade. Not good. I shifted my stance, corrected the fade and gained an additional ten yards in the process. I was working toward my optimum when Wacky grabbed my elbow and hissed at me: “Freddy, psst, Freddy!”
I slammed the head of my club into the dirt at my feet and pulled loose from Wacky. “What the fuck is wrong now?”
Wacky pointed to a man and woman arguing nearby on the putting green. The man was tall and fat, with a stomach like an avocado. He had wild reddish-brown hair and a nose as long as my arm. There was an appealing ethnic roguishness to him, broad laughter lines around his mouth, his whole face spelling out fifty-five years of good-natured conniving. The woman was about thirty, and obese—probably close to two-seventy-five. She bore the man’s long nose and reddish hair, then did him one better by sporting a distinct downy mustache. I groaned. Wacky was only nominally interested in women, and fat ones were the only kind that arou
sed him. He pulled a fresh half pint from his back pocket and took a long pull, then pointed to the couple and said, “Do you know who that is, Freddy?”
“Yeah. It’s a fat woman.”
“Not the tomato, Freddy. The old guy. It’s Big Sid Weinberg. He’s the guy who produced Bride of the Sea Monster, remember? We saw it at the Westlake. You went bananas for that blond with the big tits?”
“Yeah. And?”
“And I’m gonna get his autograph, then I’m gonna sell him ‘Constituency of the Dead’ for his next picture.”
I groaned again. Wacky was a horror movie fanatic, and “Constituency of the Dead” was his attempt to capture Hollywood’s monster madness in prose. In his poem, there was a world of the dead, existing concurrent with the real world, but invisible to us. The inhabitants of this world were all wonder addicts, because they had all been murdered. I considered it one of his poorer efforts.
Wacky waggled his eyebrows at me. “One thing, partner,” he said, “one thing I promise.”
“What’s that?”
“When I’m a big-time Hollywood screenwriter I’ll never high-hat you.”
I laughed: “Watch out, Wack. Hollywood producers are notorious shit-heels. Go for the daughter instead. Maybe you can marry into the family.” Wacky laughed, and trotted away, while I returned to the blessed solitude of golf.
I was at it for over an hour, savoring the mystical union that takes place when you know that you’re a gifted practitioner of something much greater than yourself. I was crunching three-hundred-yard drives with fluid regularity when I gradually became aware of eyes boring into my back. I stopped in mid-swing and turned around to face my intruder. It was Big Sid Weinberg. He was lumbering toward me almost feverishly, right hand extended. Taken aback, I extended mine reflexively, and we exchanged names in a mutual bone-crusher. “Sid Weinberg,” he said.
“Fred Underhill,” I said.
Still grasping my hand, Weinberg eyed me up and down like a choice piece of meat. “You’re a six, but you can’t putt, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Okay, you’re a four, and you can hit the shit out of the ball, but your short game stinks. Right?”
“Wrong.”
Weinberg dropped my hand. “So you’re—”
I interrupted: “I’m a hard scratch, I can drive three hundred yards, I’ve got a demon short game, I can putt better than Ben Hogan and I’m handsome, charming, and intelligent. What do you want, Mr. Weinberg?”
Weinberg looked surprised when I mentioned his name. “So that lunatic was right,” he said.
“You mean my partner?”
“Yeah. He told me you two guys were cops together, then he tells me some lunatic story about a city of stiffs. How the hell did he ever make the force?”
“We’ve got lots of crazy guys, only most of them hold it better.”
“Jesus. He’s reading his stuff to my daughter now. They’re soul mates; she’s as crazy as he is.”
“What do you want, Mr. Weinberg?”
“How much do you make with the cops?”
“Two hundred ninety-two a month.”
Weinberg snorted. “Spinach. Peanuts. Worse than that, popcorn. The ducks in the lake at Echo Park make more moolah than that.”
“I’m not in it for the money.”
“No? But you like money?”
“Yeah, I like it.”
“Good, it ain’t a crime. You wanna walk across the street to Hillcrest and play a class-A kosher course? Scramble? The two of us versus these two ganefs I know? We’ll slaughter ’em. C-note Nassau? What do you say?”
“I say you put up the money, and my partner comes with us to read our greens. He gets twenty percent of our action. What do you say, Mr. Weinberg?”
“I say you musta been Jewish in a previous life.”
“Maybe in this one.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I never knew my parents.”
Big Sid raised his head and roared: “Ha-ha-ha! That’s par for the course, kid. I got two daughters and I don’t know them from a hill of beans. You got yourself a deal.”
We shook hands on it, sealing the last carefree alliance of my youth.
Hillcrest was only a block away geographically, but it was light-years away from Rancho in every other respect: lush, manicured fairways, well-tended, strategically placed bunkers and sloping greens that ran like lightning. There were eight of us in the group: Big Sid and I, our opponents, two caddies, and our giggling, moonstruck gallery—Wacky and Big Sid’s gargantuan daughter, Siddell. Those two seemed to be rapidly falling into lust, swaying into each other as they trudged fairway and rough, holding hands surreptitiously when Big Sid had his back to them.
And Sid was right; it was a slaughter. Our opponents—a Hollywood agent and a young doctor—were pitifully mismatched; shanking, hooking, slicing into the trees and blowing their only decent approach shots. Big Sid and I played steadily, conservatively, and sunk putts. We were well-aided by Wacky’s superb green reads and the club selections and yardage calls of our short-dog–sucking wino caddy, “Dirt Road” Dave.
“Hey, hey, shit, shit,” Dave would say. “Play a soft seven and knock it down short of the green. It breaks left to right off the mound. Hey, hey, shit, shit.”
Dave fascinated me: he was both sullen and colloquial, dirty and proud, with an air of supreme nonchalance undercut by terrified blue eyes. Somehow, I wanted his knowledge.
The match ended on the fourteenth hole, Big Sid and I closing our opponents out 5–4. Nine hundred dollars changed hands, four hundred and fifty for Big Sid, four hundred and fifty for me. I felt rich and effusive.
Big Sid clapped me on the back. “It’s just the beginning, doll! You stick with Big Sid and the sky’s the limit! Va-va-va-voom!”
“Thanks, Sid. I appreciate it.”
“Va-va-va-voom, kiddo!”
I looked around. Wacky and Siddell had disappeared into the woods. Our opponents were heading back to the clubhouse dejected, their heads down. I told Big Sid I would meet him at the clubhouse, then went looking for Dirt Road Dave. I found him walking across the rough toward the eighteenth hole with Big Sid’s bag as well as mine slung across his bony right shoulder. I tapped him on that shoulder and when he turned around stuck a fifty-dollar bill into his callused, outstretched palm. “Thanks, Dave,” I said. Dirt Road Dave unhitched the bags, put the money into his pocket and stared at me. “Talk to me,” I said.
“About what, sonny boy?”
“About what you’ve seen. About what you know.”
Dirt Road Dave let my bag fall to the grass at my feet, then he spat. “I know you’re a smart-mouth young cop. I know that’s a roscoe and handcuffs under your sweater. I know the kind of things you guys do that you think people don’t know about. I know guys like you die hungry.” His finality was awesome. I picked up my bag and walked to the clubhouse—only to be ambushed by another madman en route.
It was Wacky, materializing out of a grove of trees, scaring the shit out of me. “Jesus!” I exclaimed.
“Sorry, partner,” Wacky whispered, “but I had to catch you out of earshot of Big Sid. I need a favor, a big-o-rooney.”
I sighed: “Name it.”
“The car—for an hour or so. I’ve got a hot date that won’t wait, passion pie in the great by-and-by. I’m eating kosher, partner. You can’t deny me.”
I decided to do it, but with a stipulation: “Not in the car, Wack. Rent a room. You got that?”
“Of course, I’m a cop. Would I break the law?”
“Yes.”
“Ha-ha-ha! One hour, Fred.”
“Yeah.”
Wacky disappeared into the trees, where his high-pitched laughter was joined by Siddell Weinberg’s baritone sighs. I walked to the clubhouse feeli
ng sad, and weighted down by strangers.
3
I figured that Wacky would be at least two hours late returning my car, and moreover that good taste dictated I remain to drink and shoot the shit with Big Sid. I wanted to take a run to Santa Barbara and look for women, but I needed my car for that.
I showered in the men’s locker room. It was a far cry from the dungeonlike locker room at Wilshire Station. This facility had wall-to-wall deep-pile carpets and oak walls hung with portraits of Hillcrest notables. The locker room talk was about movie deals and business mergers with golf a distant third. Somehow it made me uneasy, so I showered fast, changed clothes, and went looking for Big Sid.
I found him in the dining room, sitting at a table near the large picture window overlooking the eighteenth hole. He was talking with a woman; she had her back to me as I approached the table. Somehow I sensed she was class, so I smoothed my hair and adjusted my pocket handkerchief as I walked toward them.
Big Sid saw me coming. “Freddy, baby!” he boomed. He tapped the woman softly on the shoulder. “Honey, this is my new golf partner, Freddy Underhill. Freddy, this is my daughter Lorna.”
The woman swiveled in her chair to face me. She smiled distractedly. “Mr. Underhill,” she said.
“Miss Weinberg,” I replied.
I sat down. I was right: the woman was class. Where Siddell Weinberg had inherited the broadness of her father’s features, Lorna exhibited a refined version: her hair was more light brown than red, her brown eyes more pale and crystalline than opaque. She had Big Sid’s pointed chin and sensual mouth, but on a softer, muted scale. Her nose was large but beautiful: it informed her face with intelligence and a certain boldness. She wore no makeup. She had on a tweed suit over a white silk blouse. I could tell that she was tall and slender, and that her breasts were very large for her frame.
I immediately wanted to know her, and quashed a corny impulse to take and kiss her hand, realizing that she wouldn’t be charmed by such a gesture. Instead, I took a seat directly across from her where I could maintain eye contact.