My Dark Places

Ascension meant two things. I had to write a great crime novel. I had to attack the central story of my life.

I set out to do that. I implemented my conscious resolve in an unconscious fashion. Clandestine was richer and more complex than my first book. The mother and son were vividly etched. They failed only by real-life comparison. They were not my mother and I. They were surrogate fictions. I wanted to get them out of the way and move on. I thought I could paint my mother with cold details and banish her that way. I thought I could dump a few boyhood secrets and sign myself off. Jean Ellroy was not my preferred murder victim. Elizabeth Short was. I dumped the redhead for the Dahlia again.

I wasn’t ready for Elizabeth yet. I wanted to address her as a seasoned novelist. I wanted to extend my dialogue with women first.

I split L.A. in ’81. It was too familiar and too easy. AA was too easy. I wanted to ditch all the people hooked on therapy and 12-step religion. I knew I could stay sober anywhere. I wanted to blast out of L.A. and limit my L.A. intake to the fictional L.A. in my head. Brown’s Requiem was coming out in October. Clandestine was set to be published some time in ’82. I had a third book finished. I wanted to start over in a sexy new locale.

I moved to Eastchester, New York—20 miles north of the Apple. I got a basement apartment and a caddy gig at Wykagyl Country Club. I was 33. I thought I was extremely hot shit. I wanted to prove myself in New York. I wanted to get heavy with the Dahlia and find the transcendental real-life woman I knew I’d never find in L.A.

New York was pure crystal meth. It meshed with my dual-world lifestyle. I wrote in my pad and lugged golf bags for a maintenance bankroll. Manhattan was a heartbeat away. Manhattan was full of provocative women.

My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I dug stern character. I dug radical and nonprogrammatic world-views. I disdained dilettantes, wannabes, incompetents, rock & rollers, therapy freaks, weirdo ideologues and all women who did not exemplify a sane version of the midwestern- Protestant/profligate balance I inherited from Jean Ellroy. I dug handsome women more than women other men deemed beautiful. I dug punctuality and passion and considered the two equal virtues. I was a moralistic and judgmental zealot operating on a time-lost/life-regained dynamic. I expected my women to toe the hard-work line and submit to the charismatic force I thought I possessed and fuck me comatose and make me submit to their charisma and moral rectitude on an equitable basis.

That’s what I wanted. It’s not what I got. My standards were slightly unreasonable. I revised them every time I met a woman I wanted to sleep with.

I remade those women in the image of Jean Ellroy sans booze, promiscuity and murder. I was a tornado sweeping through their lives. I took sex and heard their stories. I told them my story. I tried to make a string of brief and more extended couplings work. I never tried as hard as the women I was with.

I learned things in the process. I never downscaled my romantic expectations. I was a chickenshit cut-and-run guy and a heartbreaker with a convincingly soft facade. I took the ax to most of my affairs. I dug it when women got my number and grabbed the ax first. I never axed my romantic expectations. I never took a soft line on love. I felt bad about the women I fucked over. I went at women less ferociously over time. I learned to disguise my hunger. That hunger went straight into my books. They got more and more obsessive.

I was burning a lifelong torch with three flames.

My mother. The Dahlia. The woman I knew God would give me.

I wrote four novels in four years. I kept my Eastchester and Manhattan worlds separate. I got better and better. I attracted a cult following and built up a four-star review scrapbook. My writing wages improved. I retired my caddy cleats. I locked myself up for a year and wrote The Black Dahlia.

The year flew by. I lived with one dead woman and a dozen bad men. Betty Short ruled me. I built her character from diverse strains of male desire and tried to portray the male world that sanctioned her death. I wrote the last page and wept. I dedicated the book to my mother. I knew I could link Jean and Betty and strike 24-karat gold. I financed my own book tour. I took the link public. I made The Black Dahlia a national bestseller.

I told the Jean Ellroy-Dahlia story ten dozen times. I reduced it to sound bites and vulgarized it in the name of accessibility. I went at it with precise dispassion. I portrayed myself as a man formed by two murdered women and a man who now lived on a plane above such matters. My media performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. They exploited my mother’s desecration and allowed me to cut her memory down to manageable proportions.

The Black Dahlia was my breakthrough book. It was pure obsessive passion and a hometown elegy. I wanted to stay in the ’40s and ’50s. I wanted to write bigger novels. I felt the call of bad men doing bad things in the name of authority. I wanted to piss on the noble-loner myth and exalt shitbird cops out to fuck the disenfranchised. I wanted to canonize the secret L.A. I first glimpsed the day the redhead died.

The Black Dahlia was behind me. My tour closed out a 28-year transit. I knew I had to surpass that book. I knew that I could return to L.A. in the ’50s and rewrite that old nightmare to my own specifications. It was my first separate world. I knew I could extract its secrets and contextualize them. I could claim the time and place. I could close out that nightmare and will myself to find a new one.

I wrote three sequels to The Black Dahlia and called the collective work “The L.A. Quartet.” My critical reputation and public profile snowballed. I met a woman, married her and divorced her within three years. I rarely thought about my mother.

I closed out L.A. in the ’50s and traded up to America in Jack Kennedy’s era. The jump goosed my geographic and thematic scope and pushed me halfway though a wild new novel. L.A. in the ’50s was behind me. Jean Ellroy wasn’t. I met a woman. She pushed me toward my mother.

The woman’s name was Helen Knode. She wrote for a lefty rag called the LA. Weekly. We met. We coupled. We wed. It was extravagant love. It was two-way recognition running at 6,000 RPM.

We flourished. It got better and better. Helen was hyper-brilliant. Helen was high rectitude and profane laughter. Our imaginations melded and collided.

Helen was obsessed with the whole perplexing man-woman question. She dissected it and satirized it and de- and reconstructed it. She played it for laughs and lampooned my melodramatic take on the subject.

She zoomed in on my mother. She called her “Geneva.” We concocted scenarios featuring my mother and some celebrated men of her era. We laughed our tails off. We put Geneva in bed with Porfirio Rubirosa and critiqued