Erika Schickel - The Big Hurt: A Memoir

I knew he was waiting for me, stretched out on his long leather couch, the back of his wrist pressed to his third eye, his elbow a pale antenna, searching for my signal.

I stepped on the gas. It was all too easy to drive away from my life and the book I was trying to write about what happened to me in high school. I turned north on Rossmore and the Ravenswood came into view. The 1930s Art Deco landmark announced itself from a half mile away in red vintage neon. The N and the D in the sign were burned out, so it read the RAVE SWOO , and I thought that was the perfect name for what Sam Spade did in that old building, beneath those sputtering neon tubes: rave and woo.

Spade never suffered writers block. Books poured out of him. Imitate the virtue you wish to achieve, he told me, which meant, sit down and work. I knew what that looked like. It looked like my father, hunched over his IBM Selectric, cigarette ash between the keys, cold coffee in his mug, firing off movie reviews and film biographies like a turret gunner.

It wasnt work I was afraid of. It was the story itself. The story of what happened to me in high school. Every time I probed it for some hilarious anecdote about my bad girl past, it spat venom at me. It hissed truths at me that I didnt want to face, much less describe on the page.

The whole thing was terrifying, and running into the arms of a predator I barely knew felt like a safer plan, or at least a familiar one. My interest in my painful past was no match for the fascination of the present with Sam Spade.

The electric crackle over the buildings intercom evoked a Pavlovian response in my cunt. All I wanted these days was this moment, the moment when I was about to see him again: Sam Spade, author, lothario, famously sober, son of a murdered woman.

The Ravenswood had an ancient sarcophagus of an elevator that moved too slowly, so I took the wide, smooth stairs two at a time, the wrought-iron railing slipping beneath my damp palm. The halls were dimly lit and reeked of microwaved meats and Bubba Kush. As I approached the third floor, the smell shifted. A distinct twang of coffee crept in. As I walked down the hallway to Apartment 301 the smell intensified, and other notes were added: leather, oatmeal, sweat. The smell of Spade surrounded me before I was even within knocking range of his door. I paused for a moment to deeply inhale the sweetly bitter tang of him.

It had only been a month since my first visit to his apartment. Its a brood den, he had said when he opened the door to me. The dcor was death chic. The walls were painted scab red. An animal hide lay on the floor. His coffee table was a hewn slab of tree mounted on a hospital gurney. On the kitchen wall was a framed vintage morgue photo of a murdered woman. She looked like a sleeping hippie, but she had died thirty-five years before Woodstock and hers was a dirt nap. Every wall had photographs of stiffs, crooks, DOAs, and in the bathroom, a black-and-white photo of 1940s cops in a mens room, standing at a long sink, washing their hands of it all. Sin and absolution. This was the home of a Lutheran.

Spades office had two more dead people on the wall, the Black Dahlia and his redheaded mother, perched on a fence in jodhpurs. But in general, this room was more alive. It was brightly functional in a way the other rooms were not. There was a stair climber in the corner, upon which Spade performed his daily exertionsstaggering ever forward, sweating and panting, the digital readout giving him illuminated proof of his virility and endurance. Occupying the center of the room was an enormous desk upon which he wrote enormous works of historic political murder fiction. The desk was bare but for a blotter and a gooseneck lamp. He pointed to the lamp. I used to have a Post-it note stuck to the shade that read, No sports cars. No married women. We laughed. He had an M5 parked in the basement. My husband thought I was at yoga.

The office window looked out over the community pool. The building was tenanted by Hollywood hipsters and their purse dogs. They gathered around the pool on weekends, playing house music, clad in scanties that showed off their tattoos. Spade watched them like a bird of prey from his third-floor aerie, observing interracial shenanigans through the slats of his Venetian blinds. He told me he had called the cops once and had a black guy arrested because he just didnt like the mans looks from a distance. When I expressed horror at this, he said no, he didnt really do that. Later, when we fought, that was one of the stories he would change to either infuriate or placate me. But I didnt know any of that yet. I just looked out at the pool and saw my kids splashing in it some sunny Saturday in a happy, impossible future.