My one great fantasy theme was CRIME. My one great hero was myself, transformed. I mastered marksmanship, judo and complex musical instruments in a microsecond. I was a detective—who just happened to be a violin and piano virtuoso. I rescued the Black Dahlia. I zoomed around in sports cars and bright red Fokker triplanes. My fantasies were richly anachronistic.
And sex-saturated.
Jean Ellroy-type women craved me. I took 40-ish redheads glimpsed on the street and gave them my mother’s body. I plowed through them in the course of my adventures. I settled into marriage with the last schoolgirl to goose my heartbeat. I always left the Jean Ellroy substitutes bereft.
My fantasies were persistently one-note. They were a hedge against schoolday boredom and my wretched home life.
I had my father’s number now. At 141 was taller than him. I figured I could kick his ass. He was a weakling and a bullshit artist.
We were bound by a sticky kind of need. “We” were all we had. The “we” thing made my father all gooey. I bought the “we” thing in weak moments and bridled at it most of the time. The old man’s love for me was cloying and at odds with his profane take on life. I loved him when he called President Kennedy “a Catholic cocksucker” and hated him when he wept at the national anthem. I dug his fuck-pad-hotel riffs and squirmed when he embellished his World War I exploits. I couldn’t acknowledge a simple truth: The redhead was a better single-parent proposition.
The old man’s health was fading. He was coughing up lungers and weaving behind dizzy spells. He’d make a small bundle at tax time, laze around the pad and deplete his roll. He’d look for drugstore work when he got down to his last ten scoots. His get-rich-quick fervor raged on.
He managed a stage show at the Cabaret Concerttheatre. The show featured young comedians and singers. My father got tight with a comic named Alan Sues.
The show bombed. My father and Alan Sues opened a hat shop. Sues designed the hats. My father kept the books and flogged the hats by mail order. The venture went bust quicksville.
My father segued to sporadic drugstore gigs. He was pushing sixty-five. He guzzled Alka-Seltzer for his ulcers at the same rate my mother downed bourbon. We were dead-assed broke throughout most of ’62.
I conned coin out of Aunt Leoda. The “I need dental work” pitch worked wonders. Fifty-dollar handouts floated us for weeks. I stole from my father to augment my private income.
He sent me to the store to buy our food. I shoplifted a good portion of it and pocketed the price of the items. I carried a wad of one-dollar bills in a Vegas-style money clip.
I rode my top-heavy bike up to Hollywood and out to the beach. I rode it to the downtown public library. I liked to ride and sync my fantasies to street scenes. I liked to cruise by the places where Jill, Kathy and Donna lived.
I thieved as I rode. I copped books at the Pickwick Shop and boosted school supplies from Rexall Drugs. I stole without hesitation or shudders of remorse.
I cut a wide two-wheeled swath. I was a geeky minor miscreant-about-town. I stood 6?1? and scaled in at 130 pounds. Pimples comprised the bulk of my weight. My super-customized bicycle drew jeers and catcalls.
L.A. at large meant freedom. My neighborhood meant self-restriction. My immediate outside world was still rigidly circumscribed: Melrose to Wilshire to Western to Rossmore. That world was packed with my baby-boom peers.
I wanted to be with them. I knew a few from school and a few from neighborhood collisions. I knew all their names and most of their reputations. I craved their friendship and degraded myself to get it.
I tried to buy their affection with Jap surplus Tote Seats—and got laughed out en masse. I invited a few kids to my pad—and watched them recoil at the stench of dogshit. I tried to conform to their standards of normal behavior and betrayed myself with foul language, poor hygiene and expressed admiration for George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.
My exhibitionist flair was purely self-destructive. I couldn’t tone down my act. I was programmed to grandstand and alienate. My efforts to adapt triggered an internal backlash. I cut myself off at the pass and remained a teenage leper.
Other lepers dug my act and fell in behind my banner. I ruled my leper colony imperiously. I didn’t respect the kids who thought I was cool. My school friendships burned out quick. Most of my buddies were Jewish and predisposed to distrust my Nazi shenanigans.
My friendships began with nihilistic bonhomie and ended with ineffectual fistfights. I won kids over with shock tactics and blew them out with my overall loser vibe. The pattern was endlessly repetitive.
I made friends with a neighborhood kid. We started jacking each other off. It was my first sexual contact. It was shameful, exciting, loathsome and motherfucking scary.
We jacked each other off at his pad and at my pad and on apartment-house rooftops. We spread
I knew I wasn’t a homo. My fantasy life proved it. I sought out the Kinsey Report for validation.
Doc Kinsey called youthful fag activity commonplace. He failed to address my real fears:
Can mutual jackoffs turn you into a fruit? Does the mere indulgence stigmatize you in recognizable ways?
I was a horny little shitbird. Mutual jackoffs were better than self-propelled jackoffs. My friend and I jacked each other off several times a week. I loved it and hated it. It was driving me fucking crazy.
I was afraid my father would catch us. I was afraid I’d start emitting fruit vibes. I was afraid that God would turn me into a fruit—just punishment for all my years of stealing.
My fear escalated. I felt people boring into my mind. I turned up the heat on my heterosexual daydreams—a strategy to thwart the people tuning in to my brainwaves.
I was afraid I’d talk in my sleep and alert the old man to my fruit potential. I dreamed that I was on trial for
