fruitness. Those dreams were scarier than my worst Black Dahlia nightmares.
I quit hanging out with my friend. A few weeks went by. My friend called me and asked me to take his Sunday-morning paper route—he wanted to go to Lake Arrowhead with his family.
I agreed. I slept late Sunday morning, rode over to his house and dumped his stack of
I accepted his challenge to fight. I stipulated a six-round bout—with boxing gloves, referee and judges. My friend agreed to the terms.
We scheduled the fight for the following Sunday. Our will to mayhem proved we weren’t fruits.
I recruited a ref, three judges and a timekeeper. Ellie Beers’s front lawn served as a ring. A few spectators showed up. It was
My friend and I wore twelve-ounce gloves. We were both stick-skinny and over six feet tall. We possessed no boxing skills whatsoever. We heaved, lurched, thrashed, flailed and powder-puff-punched the shit out of each other for six three-minute rounds. We ended up dehydrated and falling-down dizzy and unable to lift our arms.
I lost via split decision. The fight occurred around the time of the second Emile Griffith-Benny “Kid” Paret bout. Griffith beat Paret dead. Griffith allegedly hated Paret. Paret allegedly went around calling Griffith a fruit.
I knew I wasn’t a fruit. The fight proved it. Nobody was tapping into my brainwaves. It was a stupid fucking notion.
I lived by notions—stupid and otherwise. I soaked up crackpot ideas wholesale. Books and movies fed me storylines to revise from a warped perspective.
My mind was a cultural sponge. I was devoid of interpretive powers and possessed no gift for abstraction. I took in Active plots, historical facts and general minutiae—and built a crazy worldview from odd bits of data.
Classical music got my brain perk-perk-perking. I got lost in Beethoven and Brahms. Symphonies and concertos hit me like complex novels. Crescendos and soft passages formed narrative through lines. Alternating fast and slow movements sent me into mental freefall.
The nightly news gave me facts. I wove them into a sweeping form and contextualized them to suit my momentary fancy. I connected non sequitur events and anointed heroes on perverse whim. A liquor-store heist might play into Nazis picketing the film
I hijacked popular culture and furnished my inner world with the clutter. I spoke my own specialized language and viewed the outside world with X-ray eyeglasses. I saw crime everywhere.
CRIME linked my worlds—inside and outside. Crime was clandestine sex and the random desecration of women. Crime was as banal and rarefied as a young boy’s brain perk-perk-perking.
I was a committed anti-Communist and a somewhat more tenuous racist. Jews and Negroes were pawns in the worldwide Commie Conspiracy. I lived by the logic of sequestered truth and hidden agendas. My inner world was obsessively realized and as curative as it was debilitating. It rendered the outside world prosaic and made my daily transit in that world passably bearable.
The old man ruled my outside world. He ruled permissively and kept me in line with occasional outbursts of scorn. He thought I was weak, lazy, slothful, duplicitous, fanciful and painfully neurotic. He was unhip to the fact that I was his mirror image.
I had his number. He had mine. I started shutting him out. It was the same extrication process I utilized with my mother.
Some neighborhood kids got my number and let me into their clique. They were outcasts with good social skills. Their names were Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl.
Lloyd was a fat boy from a broken home. His mother was a Christian wacko. He was as foulmouthed as I was and loved books and music just as much. Fritz lived in Hancock Park. He dug movie soundtracks and Ayn Rand novels. Daryl was an ass-kicker, athlete and borderline Nazi of half-Jewish parentage.
They let me into their clique. I became their subaltern, court jester and stooge. They thought I was a big-time laugh riot. My raunchy home life shocked and delighted them.
We rode our bikes to movies in Hollywood. I always lagged a hundred yards behind—my Schwinn Corvette was just that heavy and hard to propel. We listened to music and spritzed on sex, politics, books and our preposterous ideas.
I couldn’t hold my own intellectually. My sense of discourse was internally directed and channeled into narrative. My friends thought I wasn’t as smart as they were. They teased me and ragged me and made me the butt of their jokes.
I took their shit and kept coming back for more. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl had a keen instinct for weakness and were skilled at male one-upmanship. Their cruelty hurt—but not enough to make me drop their friendship.
I was resilient. Small slights would make me cry and undergo intense grief for ten minutes maximum. Emotional thrashings left my wounds cauterized and ready to be reopened.
I was a case study in teenage intransigence. I held an ironclad, steel-buffed, pathologically derived and empirically valid hole card: the ability to withdraw and inhabit a world of my own mental making.
Friendship meant minor indignities. Raucous laughs with the guys meant assuming a subservient role. The cost felt negligible. I knew how to reap profit from estrangement.
I didn’t know that costs accrue. I didn’t know that you always pay for what you suppress.
I graduated from junior high in June ’62. I read, stole, masturbated and fantasized my way through the summer. I enrolled at Fairfax High School in September.
The old man insisted on Fairfax. It was 90-odd-% Jewish and safer than Los Angeles High School—the joint I was supposed to attend. L.A. High was full of tough Negro kids. The old man figured they’d kill me the first time I opened my mouth. Alan Sues lived a few blocks from Fairfax. The old man borrowed Alan’s address and plopped his Nazi son down in the heart of the West L.A. shtetl.
