The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women

by James Ellroy

  Stop now. Pray. You have your work and God’s work to do. Call Helen. Conjure Anne Sofie and the airplane woman. Monitor the mole and suppress its growth mentally.

  I did it. I did not second-guess the madness. I eyeballed the mole in mirrors from 30 to 60 times each day. My will interdicted the malignant cells. I believed it. Helen was meeting me in New York City. Publishers were lining up for her book. She knew my body intimately. She would view the mole and determine its status. Her informed opinion would determine a treatment plan.

  Prognosis upcoming. Holland, Spain and Great Britain first.

  I got through it. I got through it in stunning form—on no sleep, blip sleep and mini-comas, twilight-twined. I was always scared. I willed myself to out-endure a lunacy entirely self-created. I utilized prayer and the native strength of Helen Knode. I employed a mezzo-soprano whom I had never met and a plain-featured woman I’d seen on an airplane. I found a new cavalcade of faces to hold me upright for the moments I glimpsed them and keep my implosion at bay.

  Glimpses. Shutter-stop moments. Faces half-hidden by signboards and lost in blinks.

  Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid. London, the British hinterlands, London again.

  It was getting worse. Free fall veered into plummet. My smash book and jaw-dropping mixed reviews meant nothing to me.

  But They were always there. And They never caught me looking at Them and never felt endangered under my gaze. There was something sure and kind about each and every one of Them. They all embodied goodness and rectitude.

  They all imparted insight and courage, within a raindrop’s span. I swear this is true.

  11

  Helen viewed the mole and pronounced it benign. I believed her.

  It looks the same as it always has. Big Dog, you’ve been imagining things.

  The Intercontinental Hotel, New York City. Two-day rest stop. 31 cities to go.

  Helen killed the mole fixation. My anxiety increased. I was wired for movement, performance and fantasy. My wife and a hotel room? I don’t know what to do.

  The first U.S. reviews were out. All praise was undercut with caveats. The book was difficult and intimidating. It was an impressive, but bullying work of art.

  I would have preferred fawning magnanimity. The assessment I got?—satisfactory. The bully in me dug it. The book was moving hotcake-fast. Helen took off to meet with her potential publishers. My rest stop was all deep breaths and head trips. I went back on the road.

  It got worse.

  I didn’t look bad. The tall and gaunt thing has always worked for me. My internal clock was de-sprung, re-sprung and un-sprung. My brain stuttered, sputtered, sparked and always caught ignition. The cities blurred by.

  I kept looking in my mouth. I saw bumps and toothscrape marks and anointed them cancer. My tongue played over saliva cysts and made them metastasize. I ran to mirrors and checked my mouth 50 times a day.

  Cities swerved by. I fell into a fugue state. The book went on the New York Times best-seller list. The critical consensus held firm as megalomania. My pass-out sleep was worse than no sleep. The bed fell out from under me and took the world with it. I looked at women on airplanes and had sobbing fits. People started looking at me.

  I did bookstore events every night. I performed introductory shtick, read from my novel and took questions. I was electrifyingly good in the middle of a meltdown. I always played to one woman in the audience.

  I made it to Toronto. The book stayed on the list. Women caught me staring at them and looked away. It horrified me. I willed my eyes elsewhere. The effort made me light-headed. I lost track of where I was.

  Evil lad. You always thought you never hurt them. Now they see you.

  I got to Chicago. The tour was halfway done. I went to dinner with colleagues and walked to the can. The walls tumbled and compressed. I retained my balance and walked toward a restaurant in Toronto.

  It wasn’t there. I ran outside and recognized Chicago. I ran back inside and found my colleagues.

  It got worse. The cancer-cell migration moved through my mouth. I made it to Milwaukee. I weaved into an elevator at the Pfister Hotel. Three very tall black men evil-eyed me. I weaved and mimicked them.

  I made it to the penthouse floor, intact. Reporters were waiting there. I thought they were Ellroy fans. I was wrong. Basketball play-offs were raging. The black guys were Milwaukee Bucks.

  The Presidential Suite. Mine for one night. History was my oyster. The JFK that my characters killed had shacked up right here.

  Brutha, you de Man.

  I walked through the suite. Fuck, it was huge. The floor rolled. I walked into the world’s largest gilt and marble bathroom and walked back out.

  The world flew off its axis. Lights throbbed and dimmed as I collapsed in slow motion and hit a silk-brocade bed.

  Home.

  Kansas City in a heat wave that I knew would never stop.

  I bailed on the tour. I knew I’d go insane if I stayed out. My upcoming gigs were canceled. I checked into my Hancock Parkesque manse and shut the world out.

  Helen was all love. She knew that the bailout was imperative and praised my persistence up to that point. The diffident Dudley knew that something was wrong and stuck close to his negligent dad.

  I surrendered. I thought I’d crash in exultant relief and gain the peace born of a prudent relinquishment. I was mistaken. It just got worse.

  I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t capitulate to sleep. I thought I’d go into seizures and fall out a window. I thought I’d shoot myself in my sleep. I tossed all the ammunition for the guns in the house and still held on to the fear. I examined my shit for signs of occult blood. I got a knife, pierced a bump on my arm and squeezed cancer cells out. I blackout-curtained my office, sat there and sobbed. I was afraid to think of women. I knew that Helen could read my mind and decode my evil thoughts.

  I stayed in the house. I froze out the heat and draped out the light. I walked from room to room, jittered and stuporous. Jaunts outside tore me up. I saw children with their toys and pets and started weeping. All my compartments had crumbled. Everything I’d pushed out rushed straight in. I was 53 years old. It was the sum total of a life lived at warp speed.

  Helen looked after me and urged me to get help. Rage played counterpoint to her solicitude. I ran from the marriage. I ran straight into a crack-up. She’d just landed a sweet two-book deal with a prestige publisher. She did not believe that it brought me great joy and that I was moved by her conquest of a very difficult craft. I had devolved from flesh and blood lover to sanitarium guest. She went from lover to crazy man’s nurse and stood before me, depleted and furious.

  She shamed me into seeking help. I did restorative yoga and got acupuncture. I got zero-balance massage and shiatsu massage. It didn’t do shit. I went to a swami’s health retreat in rural Iowa. I got slathered with healing oils and learned transcendental meditation. It didn’t do shit. I saw a medical doctor, got a complete checkup and learned that I was in fine health. The doctor prescribed anti-depressant pills. They did not chill my anxiety or calm my nerves. They enhanced my libido as they shriveled my dick. I drove around K.C., staring at women. I visited my Anne Sofie von Otter poster, stashed up in the attic. I looked at it and cried.

  I sat in dark rooms. The Kansas City summer blazed. Helen played nursemaid and Dudley ignored me. The doctor prescribed sedatives and sleeping pills. I resisted them, succumbed to them and slowly became addicted.

  I sought oblivion the way I had once sought stratospheric stimulation. I assaulted my sleep deficit and tried to halt my fifty-year sprint. The sleeping pills knocked me out. They did not provide me with serenity upon awakening. The sedatives slightly re-plugged my voltage and let me walk the world sans tremors and tears.

  Helen and I built separate compartments and slept in separate beds. The dog sided with her. I put the new novel on hold. I wrote movies and TV shows and earned good dough. I never wrote under the influence. The challenge of constructing narrative sust
ained me. My paid-work narrative paled beside my internal monologues.

  They were wholly about WOMEN. They were about WOMEN and nothing else.

  They featured Anne Sofie von Otter and the airplane woman. They featured the wish-named Joan appropriately aged and the real Joan foretold and misunderstood. I employed the same story line with all of the women. It was the tale of Helen Knode and me—but this time I did not fuck it up.

  We moved to the mid-California coast. It was summer ’02. We dumped the swank K.C. pad for a profit and brought a swank Carmel pad. Helen did all the relocation work. It infuriated her. I was zoned out, sleeping or working. I was out staring at women or off on some loony love trip in my head.

  We still held out hope for the marriage. I concealed the extent of my addiction and talked a good game of change. Helen was indefatigably optimistic. It was, and is, a hallmark of her warrior’s soul.

  She didn’t know how badly I was strung out. She had always known me as a man indeterminately off in his head.

  It got worse.

  I cut down to L.A. for film-script meetings. I extended the trips to hole up at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I popped herbal uppers from a health-food store. I explored my newfound passion for a dead poetess.

  Anne Sexton: 1928–’74. Pillhead, profligate soul, neurasthenic icon. Dead at 45: self-inflicted carbon monoxide.

  Paperback covers. The woman with her knees against a swimming-pool ledge. The woman in a summer shift dress.

  Mother, I will never relinquish you. Mother, I will always seek your emblem. At least The Curse I inflicted on you gave me that.

  Priapic rites in a dark room. Two frayed book covers. One floor lamp to light my watcher’s path.

  It got worse. I slammed myself between sleep comas and ecstatic imagery. Helen and I pulled further apart. She realized the force of my secret inner life and grew astonished and then appalled. I overdosed and woke up in a Monterey nut ward. Helen bailed me out. I fled to a health farm in Arizona. I overdosed and woke up in a Tucson nut ward. Helen bailed me out. We returned to Carmel. I OD’d again. Helen demanded that I clean up now and forever. I entered a thirty-day program and did just that.

  It got worse.

  Because my options had run out.

  Because there was no place to run to.

  Because Helen Knode was all indictment.

  Early fall ’03. That plush house and coastal rainstorms.

  Nothing clicked inside me. Nothing felt right. All my apologies felt hollow. All my vows to change trailed out half-spoken and dead.

  I didn’t know what to do next. It was the first time in my life that had happened.

  We’d danced around it before. It was always abstract. A permissive ’70s concept. Repellent and seductive and ever euphemistic: a relaxed civil contract.

  We were sitting in the kitchen. Helen gave it a quivery real voice.

  Stay married/other people/be dignified and proper/“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Of course, I agreed.

  It was an opportunity.

  Now I know what to do next.

  PART IV

  GODDESS

  She kissed me at Coit Tower. San Francisco was summer cold. I underdressed for the walk and didn’t factor in high monuments and wind. The sun was up, the view was wide, tourists clucked and snapped photographs. I shivered. She rubbed my arms warm.

  Joan. The prophecy revealed. The real her, 46 years later.

  The kiss stunned me. I’d brain-scheduled it for the hotel later. Coit Tower rolled.

  My nerves still were shot. I was seven months into my Helen deal and nine months dope-free. Joan had rough hands and a tendency to stride ahead of me. I walked faster. She noticed that it was rude and held my arm to correct her pace.

  The kiss worked. A sun blast quashed my shivers. We found the fit and hit the right note of decorum. We disengaged simultaneous. Joan smiled to acknowledge it. She asked me if I was okay. I said, What do you mean? She said, It’s your eyes. You can’t tell if you’re angry or hurt.

  She was 38. Her gray hair and my smooth features subverted the age gap. My post-crack-up world looked garish. I was always tensed up to fight or run.

  We walked down Telegraph Hill. The short steps messed with my long legs. Joan steadied me.

  We knew our assignments already. We misread the cost at the start. My job was to fall. Her job was to catch me on the way down.

  12

  Helen hated me.

  She suppressed it through my crack-up. I ran from the marriage and bled her solicitude dry. I slept and brooded my way through the move west. Helen again did the shit work. I voyeur-perved women and full-time fantasized. Dudley died of a heart attack. Helen held a candlelight vigil and bid his soul heaven-bound. I ran from the sight of our beloved dog dead and passed out.

  Her fury was always checked by her love for me. I depleted her stores of goodwill and left her shell-shocked. My always-present self-absorption veered to vacancy. My insanity pushed Helen to a crazed psychic state. She watched her brilliant husband squander his internal solvency. She put her career on hold to play wet nurse. Our new house symbolized the worst of it.

  A beautiful thatched cottage in the Carmel hills. Allegedly Clark Gable’s ex-pad. A big price tag. Big upgrade expenses. A dream home–cum–life raft.

  I was drowning. Helen was sternly afloat. I ignored the lines she tossed me. I tried to push her head under the water. I did not know it at the time.

  Nest, haven, safety zone. A road flare to mark resurrection.

  Helen marshaled artisans and workmen. Two-story beams were glazed and re-set. A river-rock fireplace was laid in, stone by stone. The kitchen featured a half-ton marble island. The master bedroom offered an ocean view. My office was two stories high and built on three levels. My desk was presidential-size. The walls were festooned with framed book jackets and award scrolls.

  I earned the money that paid for it. I did nothing else.

  I was checked out, AWOL, gone fishin’. Helen watched our bank balance evaporate. I popped uppers and downers. I eyeballed women at shopping malls. I stared at pictures of Anne Sexton and interdicted her suicide.

  Jean Hilliker would have been 88 on our housewarming date. The Hilliker Curse was 45 years old. I did not acknowledge it then.

  Sobriety was no cure-all. I glibly assumed it would be. We didn’t go broke. I pulled myself out of the shit again. God had more to do with it than I did. I believed it then and believe it more certainly now.

  I was frayed, fraught, french-fried and frazzled. I lost a bunch of dope-bloat pounds and started looking good once more. I perched at the door of Whew, we’re okay now. Helen would not let me in.

  I thought my sober state would cancel all debts and put us ahead of the game. Helen once quoted Clifford Odets and called me “a bullet with nothing but a future.” The epigram implied my ability to exploit my own past. I stood ready to resume my life’s trajectory. The preceding two and a half years were largely blurry. Fall ’03: Helen refills my memory bank.

  You drove around Carmel in shit-stained trousers. My friends heard you jacking off upstairs. You were vile to my family. You peeped women while you walked Dudley. You went to a network pitch meeting, bombed. You’d dribbled ice cream on your shirt. An executive asked you to describe your TV pilot. You said it was about cops rousting fags and jigs. You ran your car off the 101 and came home bloody. You got four speeding tickets and jacked up our insurance to ten grand a year. You were cavalier and oblivious while I forfeited my career momentum to save you from yourself. You became someone else as I watched helplessly and came to hate myself and doubt my own sanity for having stayed with you.

  My riposte was, I never cheated on you. Helen’s riposte was, It doesn’t matter—it’s all in your head anyway.

  Fall ’03. The dream house and coastal rainstorms. Helen’s hurt and rage. Helen’s open-union offer. My antennae twitching—no, not just yet.

  We got a new bull terrier and named her Margaret. Sh
e instantly swooned for Helen and evinced outrage for me. Margaret followed me through the pad, barking and growling. Margaret’s outrage remains, to this day.

  I couldn’t get past Helen’s grief. I couldn’t repent or atone. My old shtick crashed and burned. Helen rebuffed my vows with shrugs. I drove around Carmel and blasted Beethoven. I sat in espresso joints and watched women. I hurled myself at my office couch every night. I prayed for Helen and Margaret and asked God for signs. I crammed myself into plush upholstery and tried to will sleep.

  ’03 into ’04. The dream house, the separate lives, the feminist/separatist hound.

  I wrote three novellas to fill out a collection. They were sadly comedic. They detailed a fucked-up cop in love with a big-time actress. The cop narrated the stories from heaven. He was waiting for the woman, but he didn’t want her to die.

  The big cosmic joke. My life’s trajectory, retold for laffs.

  I always get what I want. It comes slow or fast and always costs a great deal. I have honed the conjurer’s art with an astonishingly single-minded precision.

  A friend asked me to give a speech at Cal Davis. I knew She’d be there.

  I said, “You remind me of someone.”

  She said, “Tell me about her.”

  “I never spoke to her.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid to.”

  “Why?”

  “I was a child. I was ashamed of the thoughts I’d been having.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was a fine person.”

  “How do you know that, if you never spoke to her?”

  “I spent a lot of time watching her.”

  “Was that a common childhood practice of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it remains one?”

  “Yes.”