James Ellroy - The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women

ALSO BY JAMES ELLROY

The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy

American Tabloid
The Cold Six Thousand
Bloods A Rover

The L.A. Quartet
The Black Dahlia
The Big Nowhere
L.A. Confidential
White Jazz

Memoir
My Dark Places

Short Stories
Hollywood Nocturnes

Journalism/Short Fiction
Crime Wave
Destination: Morgue!

Early Novels
Browns Requiem
Clandestine
Blood on the Moon
Because the Night
Suicide Hill
Killer on the Road

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2010 by James Ellroy

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work previously appeared in slightly different form in Playboy.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellroy, James, [date]
The Hilliker curse : my pursuit of women / by James Ellroy.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59432-7
1. Ellroy, James, 1948Relations with women. 2. Novelists, American20th centuryFamily relationships. 3. MothersDeathPsychological aspects. I. Title.
PS3555.L6274Z46 2010
813.54dc22

[B] 2010022583

v3.1

To Erika Schickel

I will take Fate by the throat.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

So women will love me.

I invoked The Curse a half century ago. It defines my life from my tenth birthday on. The near-immediate results have kept me in near-continuous dialogue and redress. I write stories to console her as a phantom. She is ubiquitous and never familiar. Other women loom flesh and blood. They have their stories. Their touch has saved me in varying increments and allowed me to survive my insane appetite and ambition. They have withstood my recklessness and predation. I have resisted their rebukes. My storytelling gifts are imperviously strong and rooted in the moment that I wished her dead and mandated her murder. Women give me the world and hold the world tenuously safe for me. I cannot go to Them to find Her much longer. My obsessive will is too stretched. Their story must eclipse Hers in volume and content. I must honor Them and distinguish each one from Her. My pursuit has been both raw and discerning. The latter comforts me now. There were always grace notes in with the hunger.

Its been a fever dream. I must decorously decode it. They are all gone now. Im unbodied without them. If I address them with candor, theyll cut me loose of the fury. My grasp may recede to a touch in retrospect. Ill find the answer in dreams and waking flashes. Theyll find me alone and talk to me in the dark.

The numbers dont matter. Its not a body count, a scratchpad list or a boast. Statistics obscure intent and meaning. My toll is therefore ambiguous. Girlfriends, wives, one-night stands, paid companions. Chaste early figures. A high-stat blitz later on. Quantity means shit in my case. Culminated contact means less than that. I was a watcher at the get-go. Visual access meant capture. The Curse incubated my narrative gift. My voyeurs eye pre-honed it. I lived a kiddie version of my twisted heroes thirty years hence.

Were looking. Were eyeball-arched and orbing in orbit. Were watching women. We want something enormous. My heroes dont know it yet. Their virginal creator has not a clue. We dont know that were reading personae. Were looking so that we can stop looking. We crave the moral value of one woman. Well know Her when we see Her. In the meantime, well look.

A document denotes my early fixation. Its dated 2/17/55. It predates The Curse by three years. Its a playground shot in Kodak black & white.

A jungle gym, two slides and a sandbox clutter the foreground. Im standing alone, stage left. Im lurchlike big and unkempt. My upheaval is evident. A stranger would mark me as a fucked-up child in everyday duress. I have beady eyes. Theyre fixed on four girls, huddled stage right. The photo is rife with objects and children in lighthearted movement. Im coiled in pure study. My scrutiny is staggeringly intense. Ill re-read my mind from 55 years back.

These four girls bode as The Other. Im a pious Lutheran boy. There can be only one. Is it her, her, her or Her?

I think my mother took the picture. A neutral parent would have cropped out the freako little boy. Jean Hilliker at 39: the pale skin and red hair, center-parted and tied backmy features and fierce eyes and a sure grace that I have never possessed.

The photo is a windowsill carving. I was still too young to roam unfettered and press my face up to the glass. My parents split the sheets later that year. Jean Hilliker got primary custody. She put my dad on skates and rolled him to a cheap pad a few blocks away. I snuck out for quick visits. High shrubs and drawn shades blocked my views en route. My mother told me that my father was spying on her. She sensed it. She said she saw smudge marks on her bedroom window. I read the divorce file years later. My father copped out to peeping. He said he peeped to indict my mothers indigenous moral sloth.

He saw her having sex with a man. It did not legally justify his presence at her window. Windows were beacons. I knew it in my crazed-child rush to The Curse. I entered houses through windows a decade hence. I never left smudge marks. My mother and father taught me that.

She had the stones. He had the bunco-artist gab and the grin. She always worked. He dodged work and schemed like Sergeant Bilko and the Kingfish on Amos n Andy. The pastor at my church called him the worlds laziest white man. He had a sixteen-inch schlong. It dangled out of his shorts. All his friends talked about it. This is not a whacked-out childs reconstruction.

Jean Hilliker got bourbon-bombed and blasted the Brahms concertos. Armand Ellroy subscribed to scandal rags and skin magazines. I got two days a week with him. He let me stare out his front window and fuck with his binoculars. My ninth birthday arrived. My mother got me a new church suit. My dad asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted a pair of X-ray eyeglasses. I saw them advertised in a comic book.

He yukked and said, Okay. He sent a buck in through the U.S. mail. My wait was grindingly attenuated. I made lists of all the school and church girls that I could see naked. I concocted ways to tape the glasses to my toy periscope. It would provide instant window access.

I waitedMarch, April, May, 57. Late spring through the summer. I couldnt track the sale. I had to trust the manufacturers honor and efficacy.

The wait derailed my fantasy life. I spun out in new directions. I sat in my mothers clothes closet. I loved the smell of her lingerie and nurses uniforms. I swiped my dads binoculars and spied on a neighbor lady. I saw her reach under her blouse and pluck at her bra strap.

Fall 57. The Long Wait. Mickey Spillane wrote a book with that title. Spillane was the king of the anti-Commie thriller. My dad had a special shelf for his Spillane tomes. He said I could read them on my tenth birthday.

Its the Season of My Discombobulation. Its winging into the Withering Winter of My Dipshit Discontent. I was agitated. The TV news scared me. The Russians launched Sputnik. Colored kids caused chaos at Central High School. I was dreading Christmas. My mother had scheduled a trip to Madison, Wisconsin. We were going to see her sister. Aunt Leoda married a Catholic. My dad thought she was Red.