The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women

by James Ellroy

  You know, I’m not you. Won’t you please lighten up?

  No, I will not.

  Penny had that married lover. She’d dropped details on occasion. I called him a “Jew cocksucker.” Penny kicked me. I boo-hooed and repented. Penny laughed and took me to bed.

  I was fighting a two-front war. There’s Penny. There’s my book and the woman with the cello. Beethoven had engaged in similar combat. There’s the “Immortal Beloved.” There’s comely piano students in the meantime. Embrace me, my darling. Later, babe—I gotta write the Fifth Symphony, and I can’t hear you anyway.

  The presence of the married guy sanctioned me to prowl. I went at it, full speed.

  I re-faced another set of women and melded them into my blur. They were real women. I met them, talked to them, courted them and had brief liaisons. My new self-confidence inured me to rejection. I jumped on “Yes,” tried again at “Maybe,” packed my tent at “No.” There were AA women and nude coffee dates at “Hot Tub Fever.” It was 1980. Java in the buff was risqué and less than a wolf call. I met women in restaurants and movie-theater lines. I got a lot of phone numbers and developed phone-talk relationships. I waited in the dark for the phone to ring. That’s still my nightly MO. The phone rings or doesn’t ring now. The phone rang or didn’t ring then. Dead air, vibelessness and swinging conversation.

  The women were indistinguishable and each and every one unique. They informed me that the world had turned a corner with sex and that it had become less mystical. I replied that I knew this. Experience had demystified me. Experience had not dampened my ardor or altered the goddess-worshiping scope of my quest.

  My telephone and dive pad were conduits. I worked at the golf course, wrote my book and waited for the phone to ring. The phone rang intermittently. Women called me back or dug out that note slip with my name and number. There was a good deal of sex and no sex and sex as a topic of discussion. I picked the women discerningly. I wanted women who could talk and interpose questions. The era was self-absorbed. Candor was a facet of the freewheeling lifestyle. Phone calls overlapped. Deep talk ensued. I zoomed to strange addresses to have sex or not have sex or roll around clothed. I took on a confessor role. There was a vampiric edge to it. I wanted the women to be fucked-up, so that they would need me.

  The counselor role came easy. I was actively pursuing my life’s mission and had empathy to burn. I was happy because I was writing a book and was engulfed by women. They got me out of myself and back into myself and returned me refueled to the woman with the cello. The story proceeded apace with my brooding sessions and phone calls. The fictive me is that breathless first-person detective. He’s been morally reawakened and sees the woman with the cello as his payoff. He will be with her tenuously and lose her in the end. He will be alone with her memory and wait for a new grail to seek. He will exist in a solitary and dark-roomed state. My first novel predicted the through-line of my life. I didn’t know it then.

  Calls came in, calls went out, I got numbers and distributed my number. Penny bombed through my life, unpredictably. She still had that married geek. She sensed my independent action and adopted a “Don’t ask” policy.

  Always the faces, always the blur, sometimes the faces bodied. I got demystified and remystified at the height of this new swirl. I knew I was looking for one face for one purpose. The phone-call women had validated my skewed propriety. They were good, solid humans. Their faces had played out true. I started Identi-Kit building from their physical pool. I wanted to finish my first book and start a new book quick. It would be set in 1951. I needed a face for the lonely and haunted woman in quintessence. I brain-bopped through my current life and my voyeur’s path to date and came up empty. A rainy-night dream gave her to me.

  She was tall and strong-featured. Her hair was near red and not blond. She wore crooked-fitting glasses and squinted without them. She came forward in laughter and nearly gasped in retreat. Mark me a prophet and recast my mysticism years later. She was my married lover Karen’s identical twin.

  I possess prophetic powers. Their composition: extreme single-mindedness, superhuman persistence and the ability to ignore intrusions inflicted by the real world. I believe in invisibility. It is a conscious by-product of my practical Christianity, honed by years spent alone in the dark. Faith magnetizes me. It allows me to adhere to the world as I trek a narrow path through it. I am most moved by what I sense coming and can in no way actually see. I pull stories out of thin air. I know that women I have summoned in dreams and mental snapshots will make their way to me. Divine presence forms the core of my gift. I knew the dream woman would materialize in her fully visualized form. I did not know that she was 17 years old in 1980 or that she was a Greek girl from Bumfuck, Queens. I was a solipsistic and chauvinistic prophet. I did not grant women the gift of conjuring. A 16-year-old girl named Erika lived one borough over from Karen. I did not know that she existed or that she was the sorceress who would ultimately summon me.

  I finished my first book and started my second book a month later. I was consumed with a hyper-feverish urge to tell stories. Jean Hilliker had been dead for 21 years and six months. My remystification had demystified The Curse. I was happy. I had nullified the red-haired girl from Shitsville, Wisconsin. Now I could trump her. Now I could write her story as fiction and quash The Curse flat.

  Heedless boy, how could you know?, fate calls you home late.

  My new hero was a womanizing cop. He had predatory instincts and my seeker’s rationale. Karen’s presaged twin showed up early in the text. Jean Hilliker showed up dead, under a pseudonym. A guy based on my dad killed my mom. The cop meets a lawyer based on Penny. A dipshit kid represents me at age nine. The cop and the lawyer rescue his sanitized ass.

  A family ripped asunder and a family reborn. Isn’t that sweet?

  It worked dramatically. It further entombed Jean Hilliker and postponed the rush of The Curse.

  I dedicated the second book to Penny. She swooned over the manuscript and declined to sleep with me that night.

  Both books were sold to a publisher. The combined advance was chump change. I decided to move to New York. L.A. felt old and constricting. Fewer phone calls were coming in. I sensed that the women had found real lovers. My time in the dark felt reductive. I was unstoppable and none of Them was Her, She or The Other. New York would provide me with a whole new swirl.

  I made some good-bye calls. None of the women called me back. Penny and I had a last nooner. The hookers had vaporized off the Sunset Strip. The Hancock Park houses looked the same. I checked for Marcia Sidwell in half a dozen phone books and didn’t find her. The real Joan turned 16 that year. Dream-woman Karen turned 18. Erika the sorceress turned 17.

  I looked Penny up in ’07. She was 54. She was married, had a teenaged son and lawyered for the state AG. She’d read most of my books. Our first phone chat was a catch-up.

  She asked me how many ex-wives and daughters I had. I said, Two and none. She asked me if I still sat in the dark by the phone. I confirmed it. She said, You’ll always do that.

  7

  Paperback writer.

  My first book was called Brown’s Requiem. It hit the stands in September ’81. It sold scant copies. There was no author photo and no woman with a cello represented. The cover sucked Airedale dicks. Fuck—a man with a gun and a golf course.

  I found a basement pad in Westchester County. I got a caddy job at Wykagyl Country Club. The Big Apple was a train hop south. I blew my book cash on Hancock Park threads gauged for cold weather. I dressed up for jaunts to Manhattan. I knew She’d be there.

  My book agent quit the biz and offered me some referrals. My third manuscript was white-hot and ready to unload. It was a sex-fiend cop versus sex-fiend killer turkey. Two male agents urged extensive rewrites. A female agent looooved the book and thought I was cute. New York, the go-go ’80s, a slinky woman of pedigree. She had hard brown eyes. She cleaned her glasses on her blouse tails and soft-focused her heart. We had dinner and a nig
htcap at her place. She played me a new record—the Pointer Sisters, with “Slow Hand.”

  It was sexy shit. I believed the message of make love now.

  The bedroom faced north. The Empire State Building filled the window. The spire was lit up red, white and green. The woman and I undressed. This ardent arriviste had arrived.

  The basement was my all-time darkest brood den. The lady upstairs was a conductor’s widow. Music kept lilting through my vents. She went too heavy on the Mozart and too light on the Liszt. I didn’t care. My publisher rejected my third novel. They found the sex-fiend cop and his feminist-poet girlfriend hard to believe. They were right. I wrote the book in a Let’s-ditch-L.A.-and-find-HER-in-New-York fugue state. My quasi-girlfriend agent sent the book to 17 other publishers. They all said nyet. My quasi-agent girlfriend dropped me as a client and pink-slipped me as a quasi-boyfriend. I owed her $150 for Xerox fees. I paid her off with extra golf-course bread.

  A male agent coerced me into a rewrite. I went at it, reluctantly. Winter hit. Caddy season ended. I worked dishwasher and stockroom gigs and lived ultra-cheap. Manhattan magnetized me. The faces popped out of dense sidewalk traffic. The women were overcoated, hatted and scarved. I couldn’t see enough skin to read auras. Cold air and breath condensation. Voyeur prowls deterred.

  I habituated coffee bars and got numbers. I got callbacks at a low percentage of my L.A. rate. I lived in the “burbs.” That was déclassé. You wrote a book. So? You schlep bags at a golf club. Stockbrokers are more my meat.

  The burbs were sexile. I kept hearing that. I lacked lifestyle loot. I kept hearing that. Publishing parties got me some clout and indoor access. I saw the first Her at a Murray Hill bash.

  She was a big preppy woman. She ran six feet and probably outweighed me. Tartan skirt, winter boots, burning eyes and freckles. She was THE OTHER, assuredly.

  I walked to the can, combed my hair and adjusted my necktie. I popped back to the party. She vanished—auf Wiedersehen.

  I prowled the surrounding blocks and didn’t see her. I went back to the bash and interrogated the guests. I came on too persistent. The host suggested that I leave. I flipped his necktie into his face and skedaddled.

  The night was cold. The moon was full. I walked up Fifth Avenue, baying. Passersby swerved around me. Dogs bayed back from swank apartments. I cut east on 43rd Street and hotfooted it toward Grand Central. I saw a woman hailing a cab just west of Madison. The Brooks Brothers’ windows golden-glowed her. She was blond. Her overcoat was mud-spattered. She wore red leather gloves. She was shivering. Her face was goose-bumped, her hair was askew, she’d chewed off her lipstick. Her nose was too big. Her chin was too strong. She was THE OTHER, uncontestably.

  I fast-walked toward her. An eastbound cab pulled by me. The woman opened the door and got in the backseat. I sprinted, slid on my feet and hit the rear bumper. The woman looked around and saw me. I winced. My knees got ratched from the collision. I smiled. It spooked the woman. She looked away. The cab turned northbound and brodied on hard snow.

  Easy come, easy go. It was cold. My knees hurt. I could relive the heavy heartache back at my pad. Douse the lights and spin the Chopin nocturnes. Baby, we were close. It should have been.

  I limped to Grand Central. The waiting room was crowded and overheated. I bought my ticket and walked onto the train. I saw the woman. She was THE OTHER, incontrovertibly.

  She was tall, sandy-haired and ten years older than I. She had grail-grabbing gray eyes and a gaunt and sweet face.

  She was carrying a cumbersome portfolio. I helped her hoist it to the rack above the seats. She thanked me. We sat down together and talked.

  Her name was Marge. She was a commercial artist. She’d been showing work samples at ad agencies all day. I asked her how it went. She said, Bad. She was in a dry spell. She inquired about my employment. I told her I’d written two published books and worked at a country club. Your family? I don’t have one.

  She smelled like wet wool and dissipating eau de bath. She sat on my right. Her damp hair brushed my jacket. She asked me where I detrained. I said, Bronxville. I said, Your destination? She said, Tarrytown.

  The train chugged through northern Manhattan and the Bronx. Milk-run stops slowed the passage and pressed time in on me. We talked and leaned toward each other. I tried to read Marge and sensed her reading me. It was soft-voiced. Small anecdotes made big points. We spoke contrapuntally and never interrupted. Our hands brushed. We retained the contact. The pact was synchronous.

  I said something funny. Marge laughed, displayed bad teeth and covered her mouth. I showed her my bad teeth. She laughed and held my chin to get a better look. I put my hand on her hand and steadied it. She said, Your teeth are worse than mine, and let her hand drop.

  We looked away and gave the moment a breather. The train jiggled. We bumped. I brain-scrolled the script.

  I instill confidence, she rebukes rashness, we consolidate our hurt. Dogs on the bed and warm nights in cold climates. Her older-woman status and insecurity. My assurance of how much I loved it. Her body’s ripening currents over time. That eau de bath caught first thing in the morning.

  The Bronxville stop approached. Marge and I shared a look. She said, I’m married.

  I touched her shoulder and got up. Our knees brushed. My knees spasmed from the stunt with the cab. I got off the train, walked down the platform and stood by Marge’s window. She pressed her hand up to her side of the glass. I placed my hand over it.

  The brood den enclosed me. Caddy gigs and chump jobs kept me borderline solvent. I wrote and chased.

  The sex-fiend cop became a hardback trilogy. The feminist poet was supplanted by a brainy call girl and the cop’s resurrected ex-wife. The woman-with-a-cello book stayed in print. Ditto the my-mom-got-whacked-and-I’m-in-flight epic.

  I was happy. I was grateful. I wrote books for minor remuneration and got minor acclaim. I was too circumspect to self-immolate and too tall and good-looking to lose. All my crazy shit stayed suppressed.

  New York in the ’80s. Jesus—what a fucking ride!!!!!

  The stories and sustained sobriety saw me through. The stories were all a man meets a woman and now he moves on. They reflected my life as a minor artist and self-absorbed failure in love. New York City was felicitously female. It was a dizzying disproportion. The face pool was bottomless and bottomlessly reflecting. I kept seeing myself.

  My prescience had deserted me. My spiritual aptitude had gone south. I had seen three brilliant women within moments early on. One had given me a precious vignette before her own vanishing. I saw women less discerningly now. Creative contentment had induced callousness. My psychic holes were patched with my books on shelves and the wound of Jean Hilliker stitched. The Curse had been roadblocked by hard work and a curt dismissal of the debt. I was out looking for women looking back and up at me.

  My watcher’s lifetime ran nearly four decades. My debilitating hunger was vaulted and lockboxed. I believed that it had given me mastery and an endless ticket to ride. Unbodied sex had almost proved fatal. I had sought death to prove my love to a ghost. It was the unconscious courting of reunion. I wanted to expunge our disparities and unite us as a whole.

  I went at women because they were there and I wanted them. My revised standards denoted my flight from and back to the vault.

  The stories I wrote controlled this self-phenomenon. I acceded to the strictures of the hard-boiled school and honed my craft. I perfected the art of womanizing simultaneously. I felt the weight of horrible circumstance upon me. It was huge. It did not justify my predation. I once scanned faces for rectitude. Now I read them for susceptibility to male charm.

  One-night stands, short-term deals, longer-term girlfriends. Sex and no sex, brood sessions and phone calls. “No” was still “No”—but I heard it less and less. I was that attuned to female discontent.

  I was a ruthlessly attuned listener and self-serving confidant. I was adept at dissecting devolving relationships and merciless
in my critique of feckless men. Interrogator, interlocutor, pal. Rebuker of male weakness. The murdered mother’s son. The feminist with the right-wing chivalry code. The demonizer of all misogynistic men. The guy who always wanted to get laid. The guy who always let the women lean in for the first kiss.

  Fuck—the phone rang a lot. I kept a C-note tucked away for late-night cabs to the Apple. They were all decent women. No STDs, no coke-dealer boyfriends, no Glenn Close with a knife. They loooved my I-want-a-wife-and-daughters spiel. It was abstractly true. It was specifically and equally true that I didn’t want it with them. I knew it going in. I shouldn’t have lied. I’d possessed greater honesty in my unlaid and mystical state. I never bought their Let’s-see-how-shit-plays-out routine. That permissive jive got kicked out of me in L.A. I capitulated to the notion for more sex and softness. I rejected it in my heart of hearts—and my heart of heart cradles my conscience.

  If sex is to be everything, then so She must be. God kept saying that to me. I did not bring you this far to drop you in an inappropriate bedroom. These women do not possess your ferocity. You’ll know her if and when you meet her. Be assured that I love these less fierce women just as much as I love you.

  Stand back now. Sex is the investing of your full soul.

  I know it more consciously now. The revelation often curtains my current time alone in the dark.

  I ached for the kinship of the body then. I wanted every touch, taste and breath I could have. I was too compromised to ever let it be just like that.

  I wanted an unnamed woman. It was the inextinguishable flame of my life. I wanted to write a specific woman’s story. I knew her name: Elizabeth Short.

  The Black Dahlia.

  I had postponed the book. My debt to Betty Short intimidated me. I wrote six novels in breathless preparation. I owed her. I had to grant the woman a precious identity.