Ellroy, James - Crim..

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I'm from L.A. My parents made the migration and spared me the grief of making the jaunt on my own. I
possess certain L.A. migrator tendencies. I migrated east to enact them. I'm sure that my parents would
have understood the move.
My father arrived in the mid-'3os. He was a tall, handsome guy with a gigantic schvantz and an inspired
line of bullshit. He had won a few medals during World War I and hyperbolically embellished his exploits.
He jumped on every woman who'd let him and firmly believed that every woman who didn't let him was
a lesbian. He landed in L.A. with a flash roll and some snazzy threads and gravitated toward the movie
biz. His career as a Hollywood bottom feeder topped out in the late '40s. He got a gig as Rita
Hayworth's business manager and allegedly poured the pork to Rita on many auspicious occasions.
My mother won a beauty contest and flew to L.A. in December of'3 8. She was a 23-year-old
registered nurse from the Wisconsin boonies and the Elmo Beauty Products' newly crowned "America's
Most Charming Redhead." She toured L.A. with the most charming blonde, brunette, and gray-haired
winners, took a screen test, and flew back to her job in Chicago with $i,ooo in prize money. L.A. kicked
around in her head. She learned she was pregnant, aborted herself, and hemorrhaged. A doctor
acquaintance fixed her up. She got the urge to start over in a sexy, new locale. She took a train back to
L.A., found a pad and a job and met a schmuck who may or may not have been an heir to the Spalding
sporting-goods fortune. She married the guy and divorced him within a few months. She met my father in
'40 and fell for his good looks and line of bulishit. My father deserted his wife and shacked up with my
mother. They were married six years into their shack job and seven months before my birth.
They told me stories, took me to movies, and encouraged me to read books. They force-fed me
narrative lines. I grew up in the film noir era in the film noir epicenter. I read Confidential, Whisper, and
Lowdown magazines before I learned to ride a two-wheel bike. My father called Rita Hayworth a
nympho. My mother wetnursed dipsomaniacal film stars. My father pointed out the twoway mirrors at
the Hollywood Ranch Market and told me they were spy holes to entrap shoplifters and disrupt
homosexual assignations. I saw Plunder Road and The Killing and learned that perfectly planned heists
go bad because daring heist men are selfdestructive losers playing out their parts in a preordained
endgame with authority.
Johnnie Ray was a fruit. Lizabeth Scott was a dyke. All jazz musicians here hopheads. Tom Neal beat
Franchot Tone halfdead over a blonde cooze named Barbara Payton. The Algiers Hotel was a glorified
"fuck pad." A pint-size punk named Mickey Cohen ran the L.A. rackets from his cell at McNeil Island.
Rin Tin Tin was really a girl dog. Lassie was really a boy dog. L.A. was a smog-shrouded netherworld
orbiting under a dark star and blinded by the glare of scandal-rag flashbulbs. Every third person was a
peeper, prowler, pederast, poon stalker, panty sniffer, prostitute, pillhead, pothead, or pimp. The other
two-thirds of the population were tight-assed squares resisting the urge to peep, prowl, poon stalk,
pederastically indulge, pop pills, and panty sniff. This mass self-denial created a seismic dislocation that
skewed L.A. about six degrees off the central axis of planet Earth.
I knew an inchoate version of this at age 9. I knew it because I came from L.A. and my parents told me
stories and lies. I knew it because I read books and went to movies and eschewed the gospel of the
Lutheran Church in favor of a scandal-rag concordance. I knew it because my mother was murdered on
June 22, 1958, and they never got the guy who did it.
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