by James Ellroy
We scheduled our wedding for fall ’91 and rented a house in Laurel Canyon. Helen bowed to my desire for a Christian service and stipulated a female pastor. The woman disliked me. She told Helen that our union would not last—because I had darty eyes.
I met Helen’s family. I liked them fine and dominated them with a bullying exuberance. Helen was complicit. I brought out the class clown in her. I didn’t know from families. Their social codes and clash of egos vexed me. I ballyhooed myself and extolled Barko’s antics. Barko sold dope to the brothers in southside L.A. Barko edited Snout magazine. Barko whacked JFK and got Jackie all for himself. The Knodes laughed through their shock and did a “Boy, Helen’s met her match” number. Helen kicked me when my shtick failed to fly.
Issues percolated. I had a sweet three-book deal and wanted to glom a pad in Connecticut. I loved the East Coast and craved access to Barko. Helen was reluctant. The East reeked of the deep tsuris of her Cornell grad school days. L.A. was her town now. I couldn’t live in that ghost zone. Helen agreed to the move. It invigorated me. I delivered God’s plan for her.
She got it. The crime novel, the female journo in duress. The hated father, a botched patricide, the cop-lover redolent of me. Brilliant Helen: she heard me out and started popping plot points within minutes. I knew she’d excel at the task.
Summer ’91. Warm nights and the overfurnished love shack. The moment I turned 43 years, two months and seven days of age and outlived Jean Hilliker.
Helen said I would outlive her influence. Our union was proof positive. I had chosen to forsake traumatic drive and compulsion for joy. I had fictionally replicated the redhead. My cast of ’50s women were of her and served her as vessels of acknowledgment. My job now: seek groovy happiness—with H. M. Knode.
Which I did.
I dubbed Helen the “Cougarwoman.” She was sleek, tawny and indigenous to the western plains. She was conversant with outré religions and grokked their animal worship. She called me “Big Dog,” because I loved dogs and bayed extemporaneously. My dog-den mentality unnerved her. I lived to be alone with her or plain alone in tightly structured spaces. I craved containment. I viewed other people as interlopers and den crashers. I wanted to contain our relationship and four-wall it. It was wild-ass one-on-one. The exclusive nature sandbagged my long-standing fixation with having a brood of daughters. Helen didn’t rule out children. It was put on indefinite hold. Passion ruled our immediate moments.
Summer ’91. Weekend jaunts to Santa Barbara. We always ate at a joint called Paul Bhalla’s Cuisine of India. It was always empty or close to it. That gored me. The place felt talismanic and linked to our fate. I did not want that restaurant to tank or close. We had to be able to go back and thwart the passage of time there. Helen always sat to my left. She always took her glasses off and made her eyes kaleidoscopes. Fear slammed me then. I must never lose this woman. Please, God. Don’t let her die or let anything rip us apart.
Our wedding: 10/4/91. Two rooms at the Pacific Dining Car.
Helen wore a pink-peach ’40s vintage dress. I wore my ancestral kilt. Helen looked stunningly cougarlike and hip/feral. The pastor performed our hybrid vows. I got Christian lip service and Helen got lots of New Age woo-woo. The pastor glared at me, but did not mention my darty eyes. I tagged her as a pissed-off dyke.
Helen’s family flew in from Kansas and Texas. My publishing friends flew in from New York. Some old buddies from AA showed. The toasts ran heartfelt and slightly off-color. Helen tossed out zingers like “hot cougar love” and quoted Doris Lessing: “Marriage is sex and courage.” I threw out a mock-impromptu rock song, replete with lurid lyrics. Helen whooped and busted me to the guests. “That’s a retread, Big Dog! You wrote that for one of your ex-bitches!”
Steak dinners off the menu and a custom wedding cake. Cross-table chitchat while Helen worked the room and I withdrew into my head. I brain-tripped. Jean Hilliker would have been 76 years, five months and 19 days old had she lived.
Helen pirouetted, her dress swirled, a few of her male friends whistled. I got evil mad and sent out shitty looks. Helen caught my eye, smiled and brought me down in a heartbeat.
Please, God, don’t let this end.
Please, God, let us ascend to you at the same instant.
Helen recharted my brainscape. She heard all my stories and demanded new interpretations. She respectfully requested sex yarns. I recast all my previous lovers as buffoons and Knode wannabes. Helen was less disingenuous. She layered in the good sex and donkey-dicked dudes and got me angry and jealous. I wanted to control her life’s narrative. It had to be properly titillating and anoint Helen as saintlike. I pressed Helen for revisions and got the single one I craved: Before you, it was all puerile and trifling.
Ubiquity.
Helen was flat-out alive. Jean Hilliker was the entomber. My mother ghost-danced through dark rooms and encouraged me to scroll faces. Helen cracked the blackout curtains and let me glimpse the light outside.
We moved back to New Canaan, Connecticut. My ex-wife and ex-dog lived a few miles away. Helen dug the greenbelt aspect and hated the surrounding urbanism. I bullied her there. Our tidal-wave courtship came with a price. The move ripped her away from her family and friends. The move dumped her in a hostile burb with a familyless man and a talking ex-dog. I levied a jive male mandate. We have to live here, that’s the bottom line, you’ll get used to it. The fucked-up subtext: A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
New Canaan remained Hancock Park East. My ex-wife remained a composite of the prep school girls I’d prowled and peeped years back. I lured Helen to a reconstructed memory zone. She subverted my relationship to my past as we lived a re-creation of it.
She was homesick. She ragged New Canaan as she torch-songed L.A. She’d moved for a man. It rankled her feminism. Manhattan brought back her wild days as an East Village journo. She was past all that kid shit now. The East torqued her as it cradled me.
We settled in. Helen began work on her novel. I compiled notes on a political epic. It was my first non-L.A.-set fiction. I saw L.A. as a dark room I couldn’t revisit. I wanted all my memory spaces compartmentalized. I viewed my new marriage as a legal document that expunged our collective past. Special provisos allowed us to exploit it for dramatic purposes and titillation. I had misread women many times before. I had superimposed my single-mindedness and go-go ethos upon them. Helen possessed it already. I knew that then. She possessed a more refined version of my drive and could integrate the world within it. I know that now. She was attempting to provide me with a stable overall life and a balanced day-to-day existence. I rolled over for her charm, wit and passion. I resisted the moment-to-moment toil of domestic duty. I abrogated my responsibilities along gender lines. I could not wash dishes or vacuum floors and left those jobs to Helen. I saw no point in social outings. They entailed other people and often bid me to rude behavior. Helen was Her, She, The Other. She had countermanded Jean Hilliker adroitly. We were united in pursuit of a divine efficacy. Our purpose was to sustain each other and create big art. Our love would see us through the performance of our sacred duty. The more circumscribed our world, the more direct our point A to point B journey.
That was my mission statement. It was not Helen Knode’s. I did not inflict it upon her as a philosophy or a step-by-step task. I saw it as a logical expression of our great romantic adventure. Helen was considerably more flexible and viewed my agendas as liberating in intention and often restricting in practice. I lived with the woman who was then the great love of my life. I bopped in and out of My World and Our World on an ad hoc basis.
Helen’s physical presence and surety juiced my creative engine. My brain cells popped in an effort to keep up with her. My blinders fit more securely and cut off the female spirits always clouding my peripheral view. There was She, there was Me, there was Women relinquished as Obsession. Helen Knode was inherently delightful. It sugarcoated her critique of my abysmal social skills, barnyard table manners and househol
d helplessness. Helen was hilarious—even when pissed off. She called me “Big Dog” with love and “Zoo Animal” in exasperation. Low fury bubbled within her and occasionally popped into rage. She revered my maleness. She glimpsed dark domestic dimensions early on.
I was impervious, imperious, oblivious. The manifestations were all preposterously male. I could earn big dough, but not read credit-card bills or balance checkbooks. I dug good chow, but refused to cook. I made exultant animal sounds in the john and treated the place as my personal trough. I grandstanded at family gatherings or skulked off to read sports-car magazines and brood in the dark. Social gigs left Helen frayed-wire tense. I pulpit-pounded and baited her left-leaning friends. I seized up around other men and dominated them with glares, right-wing barbs and general rancor. Helen nursed that low fury and blew up on occasion. I repented on occasion and reneged on my vows to change.
It was easy to repent and easier to renege. I saw Helen’s beefs as small when compared to the big blast of US. I was blithely disrespectful. It dishonored our marriage. I know it now. I didn’t know it then.
The Big Blast was all-encompassing. I felt safe and provided safety for a transcendent woman. Our daily rapport was astonishingly quick-witted and grounded in the big idea of the sacred ride of life. I turned Helen on to boxing and watched her become a rabid fan. We went to piano recitals at Carnegie Hall. Helen fed me drafts of her personal wisdom and watched me work them into my worldview. We went to films and further anthropomorphized Barko—New Canaan’s K-9 King.
We wrote books in separate rooms, under one roof. Helen attacked the discipline of the crime novel with cougarlike tenacity, native skill and Knodeian konviction. She pulsingly persevered. It thrilled me and vouched my great faith in her. She never took my name. She remained a Knode and not an Ellroy. I’m a matriarchalist now. I wasn’t then. I wasn’t yet a Hilliker in my soul. I watched Helen write her way out of my shadow—as I worked triple overtime to make that shadow grow.
The political novel had incubated pre-Helen. It derived from my conscious decision to dump L.A. as my sole fictional locale. The preceding L.A. Quartet was my hometown elegy and another giant contain–Jean Hilliker compartment. Those books were all Bad Men In Love With Strong Women. Those books reeked of A Man Meets A Woman—as historical L.A. intercedes and demands that they change. Four novels, one Beethovenian manifesto. Fictional infrastructures complementing large public events. Earthquake combustions of physical love defining everything therein.
I was obsessed with women then. The emotional text was preordained. I was in love with one woman now. My whole world swerved. I got de- and re-compartmentalized. Helen rendered all other women sterile. My all-new novel got de-sexualized.
And more sophisticated and colder. And more about ruthless men and self-seeking solitude.
I know it now. I didn’t know it then.
Helen took me in and provided shelter. My life was blessedly contained. It comforted me. The restrictions impinged on Helen. I had a safe place to work and brood. Containment means suppression. Suppression festers and explodes in the end. Helen bought me time. It allowed me to go insane at a slow and highly productive pace.
Crazy boy, you still don’t know, no woman can save you.
9
You’re working too hard.
Helen kept saying it. I kept calling my energy a by-product of US. Suburban life and blissful monogamy. The groovy ex-dog. One woman instead of women. You have to dig that.
Helen was skeptical. We’re not making love like we used to. You’ve become disembodied. You’re always off in your head.
I rebuffed her first few salvos. I denied the presence of sexual stasis and pledged instant redress. Helen’s candor unnerved me. I felt like I’d trashed our romantic code and abridged our marital vows. Sex was everything. We both believed it. We were two years in. I rejected the marriage-as-complacency saw. Helen rejected it with the same fervor. I stonewalled Helen’s suggestion of looming dysfunction. There’s trouble in paradise. Don’t tell me this.
Shit, there’s seepage. One compartment’s fissured now. Fuck, I’m happy. I’m writing a new novel. I’m living big history at a trillion rpms. I’m devotedly in love with you. I may be approaching contentment. Please don’t hit me with this—yet.
That was my rationale. It was halfway true. The other half was more problematic. I was a cut-and-run guy pre-Helen. I never got to this point before. This is where we confront and surmount. Please don’t make me do it—yet.
And I’m tired of chasing and seducing. And my erotic fire has embered and weirdly re-flamed. My book is a scorching blaze. Now sex is power and power is fiction and fiction has replaced sex. Darling, it’s all tangled. I only want to be with you. Let’s not broach this—yet.
The men in my novel were power-mad. The men in my novel were dissemblers and compartmentalizers. They were me sans all conscience and the guidance of Helen Knode. Helen Knode personified an exponential shift in my thinking. Helen Knode’s counsel led me to write a new kind of book. Helen Knode saved me from my gender-wide crush on women. Helen Knode got to the truth before I did in most cases. Now she got me to this.
Please, Cougar—not yet.
I ran, I postponed, I diverted, I crawled back in my head. Infrequent liaisons sealed the compartment. The fissures contracted and held.
American Tabloid was the private nightmare of public policy. The infrastructure was power grab in place of love as redemption. Women veered through the book in subordinate roles. This was emblematic of the early ’60s. I wanted to write an all-new kind of novel and incinerate my ties to L.A. The former was laudable, the latter was not. L.A. made me. Jean Hilliker was killed there. I met Helen Knode a block from where I was born. The book was almost finished. Helen kept saying, You’re working too hard.
Christmas ’93 approached. Helen had written a draft of her book and gave me pages to read. They were impressive and raw by my inflated standards. I ladled on a line edit and Ellroyized the prose. Helen laughed at the loony language loops and tossed the pages back in my face.
The toss-back was loving. We laughed about it then. I cut Knodeisms and juked the text with macho-maimed mishigas. I did not feel rancorous then. I’ll post-date and dissect my animus now.
I was running from the marriage. I wanted to parry Helen’s where’s the sex? routine. I was back in my dark-room mode, minus the constant Beethoven and chicks on the phone. I was the shirker and Helen was the confronter. Our domestic drama was starting to swerve along standard gender lines. I found that repellent. My tory feminism was playing out as a shuck. Helen had become the moral leader of our union. Her wisdom and courage superseded mine. My job was to retreat from my productive mania and give her all of myself once again.
I couldn’t do it.
I didn’t know how to do it.
I didn’t know that I should do it and had to do it—yet.
Then The Curse took an all-new form and Jean Hilliker bought us some time.
We exchanged gifts Christmas morning. I gave Helen a cashmere sweater and a tweed blazer. Helen gave me a fleece-lined bomber jacket. Barko got a shitload of beef-dipped bones.
Helen pointed to the last package. It was rectangular and festively wrapped.
She said the gift required some research. She expressed trepidation. She said, I hope you won’t be upset.
I unwrapped the package. I felt the frame and saw black-and-white flickers behind glass. I instantly knew what it was.
The L.A. Times photo. Quickly dismissed in ’58. Unheralded that Christmas. Frequently reproduced and perhaps over-scrutinized now.
I’m a doofus ten-year-old. I’m wearing a plaid shirt and light-colored pants. My zipper is prophetically half-down. A cop just said, “Son, your mother’s dead.”
Helen always cuts to the punch line. She asked me what I was thinking then and what I was thinking now.
I said, “Opportunity.”
I had a magazine-feature gig within weeks and a book deal a mont
h later. My first job: view Jean Hilliker’s murder file and describe the jolt. My second: hire a homicide cop, attempt to solve the case and write an investigative autobiography.
The Curse was a formal summons of death and a bidding to engage the world obsessed. This new codicil empowered me to again exploit misfortune. I had to contain the Hilliker/Ellroy journey as a crime tale. It was a specious task at the get-go. Jean Hilliker and I comprise a love story. It was born of shameful lust and shaped by the power of malediction. Our ending was not and could never be the apprehension of a killer and a treatise on the victim-killer nexus. My precocious sexuality pre-shaped The Curse and preordained the resolution as my overweening desire for women.
I knew we would not find the killer. I knew my murder memoir would portray an arc of reconciliation and lockbox Jean Hilliker anew. I was deliriously willful and callow in 1994. I believed that all resolutions could be contained within narrative form. Helen knew otherwise. She gave me the picture so that I might view it in wonder and benefit in indefinable ways. She added mitigating clauses to The Curse without knowing that The Curse existed. Helen contended then, and still contends, that I always write my way through to the truth. She believes that I rarely get it right the first time and that I often impose form at the expense of content. She knew that Jean Hilliker was more than a murder victim and less than a fount of rapturous worship. She sent me out to grasp at verisimilitude—in the hope it would sustain and enrich both of us.
I lived in Los Angeles for fifteen months. I talked to Helen every night. We had several East Coast/West Coast reunions and got back fractions of sex here and there. I was always anxious and distracted. Sex had always been pursuit and the performance of the task. My years with Helen had illuminated that and had pushed me tenuously past it. Awareness does not equal spontaneity in bed. My current task was to play detective and frame my mother within book pages.
I read ancient police files and compiled notes. I partnered up with a brilliant ex-cop named Bill Stoner. We interviewed scores of elderly barflies, East Valley riffraff and retired policemen. We got a great deal of TV and newspaper play. All our work got us nowhere. We lived the dead-end/unsolved-crime metaphysic. I brooded in the dark with Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. The music described romanticism’s descent into twentieth-century horror. It complemented my psychic state. I knew we’d never find the killer. I took copious notes on my emerging mental relationship with my mother. I understood that the force of my memoir would derive from a depiction of that inner journey. I erred in that regard. I knew that reconciliation was the only proper ending as I signed my book contract. I learned very little about Jean Hilliker’s death. I gained considerable knowledge about her life and structured my revelations in a salaciously self-serving manner.