It was a dislocating cultural experience.
John Burroughs Junior High felt safe. Fairfax felt dangerous. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl were matriculating elsewhere. My Hancock Park acquaintances were off at prep school. I was a stranger in a strange fucking land.
Fairfax High kids were ferociously bright and sophisticated. They smoked cigarettes and drove cars. I parked my Schwinn Corvette on the first day of school and got roundly razzed.
I knew that my act wouldn’t fly here. I retreated and scoped out the turf long-distance.
I attended classes and kept my mouth shut. I ditched my Ivy League threads and aped the sartorial style of Fairfax hipsters: tight slacks, alpaca sweaters and pointy-toe boots. The makeover didn’t work. I looked like a frightened child cum lounge-singer-manque.
Fairfax High seduced me. Fairfax Avenue seduced me. I dug the insular Yiddish vibe. I dug the oldsters yakking it up in a wild-assed guttural language. My reaction confirmed the old man’s theory: “You only talk that Nazi shit to get attention.”
I worked hard at school and tried to assimilate. The methodology eluded me. I knew how to rile, provoke, act like a buffoon and generally make a spectacle of myself. The concept of a simple social contract between equals was completely foreign to me.
I studied. I read shitloads of crime novels and went to crime movies. I fantasized and tailed girls home from school on my bike. The assimilation bit grew stale. Magnanimity ate shit. I was tired of being an anonymous Wasp in Jewville, U.S.A. I couldn’t stand being ignored.
The American Nazi Party established an outpost in Glen-dale. The American Legion and Jewish War Vets wanted them out. I rode my bicycle to their office and bought 40 dollars’ worth of hate goodies.
I got a Nazi armband, several issues of
I wore the armband around my pad. I painted swastikas on the dog’s water dish. My father started calling me “Der Fuhrer” and “you Nazi cocksucker.” He got ahold of a Jewish beanie and wore it around the pad to bug me.
I rode up to Poor Richard’s Bookshop and purchased an assortment of far-right-wing tracts. I mailed them to the girls I was obsessed with and stuck them in mailboxes all over Hancock Park. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl booted me out of their clique. I was just too weird and pathetic.
My father was knee-deep in a work slump. We fell behind on the rent and got booted out of our apartment. The landlord said the pad would have to be fumigated. A five-year accumulation of dog effluvia had rendered the place uninhabitable.
We moved to a cheaper crib a few blocks away. The dog went to work on it. I debuted my Nazi act at Fairfax High School.
Classroom declarations earned me scorn and quite a few laughs. I talked up my intention to establish a Fourth Reich in Southern California, deport all jigaboos to Africa and genetically engineer a new master race with my own seed. I was not perceived as a threat. I was one ineffectual Fuhrer.
I kept it up. A few teachers called my father and ratted me off. The old man told them to ignore me.
Spring ’63 marked my blitzkrieg. I disrupted classes, passed out hate tracts and sold Boat Tickets to Africa for ten cents a pop. A big Jewish kid cornered me in the rotunda and kicked my ass soundly. I got one decent shot in —and sprained all the fingers in my right hand.
The beating validated my act and left me undeterred. I would not be ignored.
The summer of ’63 passed in a blur. I read crime novels, went to crime movies, concocted mental crime scenarios and stalked Kathy around Hancock Park. I stole books, food, model airplane kits and “Hang-Ten” swimming trunks to sell to rich-ass surfers. My Nazi hard-on abated. It was no fun without a captive audience.
My mother was five years dead. I rarely thought about her. Her murder had no place in my crime pantheon.
I still had occasional Black Dahlia nightmares. I still obsessed on the Dahlia. She was the heart of my crime world. I didn’t know that she was the redhead transmogrified.
School reconvened in September. I went back to my Nazi routine. It played to a bored audience.
The gap between my inner world and outside world was stretching. I wanted to ditch school forever and live out my obsessions full-time. Formal education was worthless. I was destined to become a great novelist. The books I loved were my real curriculum.
The
It was mass-market noir. A doctor was running from a trumped-up murder charge and the electric chair. He hit a different town every week. The coolest woman in the town fell in love with him, unfailingly. A prissy psycho cop was chasing the doctor. Authority figures were corrupt and twisted by their power. The show sizzled with sexual longing. The female guest stars grabbed my gonads and did not let go.
They were 30-ish and more handsome than pretty. They responded to male stimulus with wariness and hunger. The show reeked of real sex just around the corner. The women were troubled and complex. Their desires carried psychic weight. TV gave me Jean Ellroy every Tuesday night at 10:00.
The fall of ’63 progressed. I came home from school on November Ist and found my father sitting in a pool of urine and feces. He was twitching and weeping and babbling and drooling. His taut musculature had gone slack in the course of a day.
It was a horrifying sight. I started crying and babbling myself. The old man just looked at me. His eyes were huge and way out of focus.
I cleaned him up and called his doctor. An ambulance arrived. Two medics hustled my father out to the Veterans Administration Hospital.
I stayed home and cleaned up the remains of his mess. A doctor called me and told me my father had suffered
