Title:My Dark Places
Author(s): James Ellroy
Publisher(s): Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages: 427
Year: 1997
Format: EPUB
Language: English
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The random article:
My father found out that I’d been through his clippings. He gave me his pet theory: My mother balked at a three-way with the Blonde and the Dark Man. It was part of a larger riddle: Why did she run to El Monte?
I wanted answers—but not at the expense of my mother’s continued presence. I diverted my curiosity to kid’s crime books.
I stumbled onto the Hardy Boys and Ken Holt series. Chevalier’s Bookstore sold them for a dollar apiece. Adolescent detectives solved crimes and befriended crime victims. Murder was sanitized and occurred off-page. The kid detectives came from affluent families and tooled around in hot rods, motorcycles and speedboats. The crimes went down in swanky resort locations. Everybody ended up happy. The murder victims were dead—but were implicitly having a blast in heaven.
It was a literary formula preordained directly for me. It let me remember and forget in equal measure. I ate those books up wholesale and was blessedly unaware of the internal dynamic that made them so seductive.
The Hardy Boys and Ken Holt were my only friends. Their sidekicks were my sidekicks. We solved perplexing mysteries— but nobody got hurt too severely.
My father bought me two books every Saturday. I went through them fast and spent the rest of the week suffering withdrawal pangs. My father held the line at two a week, no more. I started shoplifting books to fill my reading gaps.
I was a sly little thief. I wore my shirttail out and stuck the books under my waistband. The folks at Chevalier’s probably thought I was a cute little bookworm. My father never mentioned the size of my library.
The summer of ’58 sped by. I rarely thought about my mother. She was compartmentalized and defined by my father’s current indifference to her memory. El Monte was an aberrant non sequitur. She was gone.
Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses.
I didn’t know it then. I doubt if my father knew it. He was scheming his way through the summer with his redheaded demon in the ground.
He bought ten thousand Jap surplus “Tote Seats” at ten cents apiece. They were inflatable cushions to sit on at sporting events. He was convinced he could sell them to L.A. Rams and Dodgers organizations. The first batch would get him going. He could get the Japs to churn more Tote Seats out on a consignment basis. His profits would zoom from that point on.
The Rams and Dodgers brushed my father off. He was too proud to hawk the Tote Seats street-vendor style. Our shelves and closets were crammed with inflatable plastic. You could have blown the cushions up and floated half the county out to sea.
My father wrote off the Tote Seat venture and went back to drugstore work. He put in crash hours: noon to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. He let me stay alone while he was gone.
Our pad was un-air-conditioned and soaked in summertime heat. It was starting to smell—Minna defied housebreaking and urinated and defecated all over the floors. Dusk cooled the place off and diffused the stink a little. I loved being alone in the apartment after dark.
I read and skimmed the TV dial for crime shows. I looked through my father’s magazines. He subscribed to Swank, Nugget and Cavalier, They were full of nifty pictures and risqu? cartoons that went over my head.