The Hilliker curse Part I

PART

women will love

1 It ^m ^r It defines my life

^^ from my 10th birth-

day on. I invoked The Curse half a century ago. The near-immediate results have kept me in near-continuous dialogue and redress. I write stories to console her, 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 my mother dead. Women give me the world and hold the world tenuously safe for me. I cannot go to Them to find Her much longer. 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 along with the hunger. It's been a fever dream. I must decorously decode it. If I address them with candor, they'll cut me loose of the fury. They'll find me alone and talk to me in the dark.

I.

The numbers don't matter. It's not a body count, a scratch­pad list or a boast. 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 voyeur's eye pre-honed it. I lived a kiddie version of the twisted heroes I created 30 years hence.

We're looking. We're eye­ball-arched and orbing in orbit. We're watching women. We want something enor­mous. My heroes don't know

PURSUIT OF MEI)

it yet. Their virginal creator has not a clue. We don't know that we're reading personae. We're looking so that we can stop looking. We crave the moral value of one woman. We'll know Her when we see Her. In the meantime, we'll look.

A document establishes my early fixation. It's dated 2/17/55. It predates The Curse by three years. It's a play­ground shot in Kodak black and white.

A jungle gym, two slides and a sandbox clutter the fore­ground. I'm standing alone, stage left. I'm Lurch-like big and unkempt. My upheaval is evident. A stranger would mark me as a fucked-up child in everyday duress. I have beady eyes. They're fixed on four girls, huddled stage right. The photo is rife with obiects and children in liqhthearted movement.

I'm coiled in pure study. My scrutiny is staggeringly intense. I'll re-read my mind then, 54 years back.

These four girls stand in as The Other. I'm a pious Lutheran boy. There can be only one. Is it her, her, her or Her?

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

The photo is a window-sill carving. I was still too young to roam unfettered and press my face up to the glass. My parents sep­arated later that year. Jean Hilliker 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 mv

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 to peeping. He said he peeped to assess my mother's 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.

xxxxx

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 world's laziest white man. He had a 16-inch schlong. It dangled out of his shorts. All his friends talked about it. This is not a wacked-out child's 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-eye glasses. I saw them advertised in a comic book.

He yukked and said okay. He sent a buck in through the U.S. mail. I couldn't track the sale. I had to trust the manufacturer's honor and efficacy.

It was 1957. Things moved slooow then. I waited.

It's the Season of My Discombobulation. It's winging into the Withering Winter of My Dipshit Discontent. I was agitated. I sat in my mother's clothes closet. I loved the smell of her lingerie and nurses' uniforms. I was dreading Christmas. My mother had scheduled a trip to Madison, Wisconsin. We were going to see her sister. Aunt Leoda had married a Catholic. My dad thought she was Red.

The X-ray-eye glasses arrived.

I unwrapped the package and put them on. I squinted through turquoise-colored cel­lophane.

The walls didn't melt. I couldn't see the criss­crossed beams under the plaster. My dad laughed at me. Sandra Danner's house was three blocks away. I sprinted there, full tilt.

Sandy and her mom were stringing up Christ­mas lights. I put my glasses on and stared at them. They laughed at me. Sandy touched her head and twirled a finger. It was '5Os-speak for He Craaaaazy.

The glasses were a shuck. I ran back to the pad. My dad was still laughing. I ripped the glasses into shreds of cardboard and cello­phane. My dad gave me my consolation prize: a new baseball. I chucked it out thp window Mv dad

yukked and told me to shake a leg. We were going to a movie up in Hollywood. My flight back east was tonight.

The flick was called Plunder Road. Psycho losers loot a train loaded with gold bullion. Two of the guys had zaftig girlfriends. They wore tight blouses and pedal pushers. The theater was near-empty. I moved closer for a better orb on the chicks. My dad lobbed Jordan Almonds at my head and chortled.

The heist went bad. The Main Loser and the Main Babe welded the bullion to the front bumper of her car and chrome-plated it. They headed out to TJ on the Hollywood Freeway. Malign fate intervened. The Main Loser and Main Babe got in a fender bender. An alert cop noticed the gold underplating and wasted the Main Loser's ass. The Main Babe pitched some boo-hoo. Her big chi-chis shook.

The movie spooked me. My wig was loose. I didn't want to fly to Dogdick, Wisconsin. My dad strolled me down Hol­lywood side streets and cut north on Cherokee. He installed me on the front steps of a building. He said he'd be inside for an hour. He gave me a comic book and said don't roam.

I was a dirty-minded-child-with-a-religious-streak. My shit detector clicked in, resultantly. I heard my dad use the term fuck pad. I concluded this: (continued on page 106)

THE HILLIKER CURSE

(continued from page 58) He's porking the Main Babe from the movie.

I noticed a half-full jug of cheap wine by the mailbox bank. I guzzled it and got goofy and euphoric. I'm tanked at age nine. I go window peeping. I've done it a few times before. It feels essential now.

Cherokee north of the Boulevard. Span­ish apartment houses and bungalow courts. Windows ringed with Christmas lights. Low first-floor windowsills. Perch spots for a tall little boy hot to LOOK.

I was blitzed. It was 51 years ago. I know I didn't see the Main Babe or my dad in the saddle. I know I saw a fat guy flipping burg­ers. I know I saw a skinny lady watching TV.

It all blurred then. Booze blackout— age nine.

I recall a queasy cab ride. I'm back at my mom's pad in Santa Monica. I'm in my church suit. We're on an airplane. Jean Hil-liker's wearing a blue serge dress and hold­ing an overcoat. Her red hair is cinched by a tortoiseshell barrette. She's drinking a highball and smoking a cigarette.

I leaned close. She misunderstood my intent and ruffled my hair. I wanted to nuzzle her and taste the bourbon. She didn't know that.

I dozed off. Jean Hilliker dozed off. I woke up and watched her sleep. She was 42 now. She was boozing more. It showed on her face. She went back to Hilliker, post-divorce decree. It stigmatized me. Her pride, my bifurcated identity. I killed off the dregs of her highball and ate the cherry. It gave me a residual jolt. I saw a woman enter a lavatory at the rear of the plane.

I traipsed over and perched near the door. Passing adults ignored me. Women used the facility. I hovered and heard the door locks click. The women exited and scowled at me. I read biblical censure on their faces. One woman forgot to lock the door. I barged in accidentally on purpose. The woman shrieked. I saw sheer nylon stockings and some skin.

Madison, Wisconsin was lake-bound and penguin-shit cold. A snow-covered field flanked Aunt Leoda's house. I got into a snowball fight the first day. An ice-crusted ball busted up my face and loosened some wobbly teeth. I holed up in a back bedroom and brooded.

My cousins were off being happy-kids-at-Christmas. Jean Hilliker was off with plain-Jane Aunt Leoda and porky Uncle Ed. Uncle Ed sold Buicks. My mother purchased a red-and-white sedan from him. The plan: drive the fucker back to L.A. after New Year's.

I brooded. I did it obsessively then, as I do now. My mouth hurt. The fucking snow­ball sliced my lips.

The adults came home. My mother brought me a library book. It was whole­some kids' fare, full of mystical shit. It per­tained to witchcraft, spells and curses. My mother turned the bedroom lights on. I had to read rather than brood.

The book jazzed me. I tore through it Quicksville. It felt like it was written to me. The mystical shit derived from my inbred

homeland of Bumfuck, Great Britain. Magic potions abounded. Warlocks guzzled secret brews and had visions. This wowed the incipient boozehound and dope fiend in me. The overall text buttressed religious lore I believed in then and believe in today.

There's a world we can't see. It exists separately and concurrently with the real world. You enter this world by the offering of prayer and incantation. You live in this world wholly within your mind. You dispel the real world through mental discipline. You rebuff the real world through your enforced mental will. Your interior world will give you what you want and what you need to survive.

I believed it then. I believe it now. My many years in the dark have confirmed it as a pri­mary article of faith. I was nine then. I'm 60 now. The real world has frequently intruded on my spells in the dark. That book formally sanctioned me to lie still and conjure women. I did it then. I do it still. That book described the destructive power of formal invective. The notion of a curse was not prophetic in late 1957. It was simply more license to fantasize.

I have a superbly honed memory. My time in the dark has enhanced my process of minutely detailed recollection.

My mental ruthlessness asserted itself early on.

I needed a Curse a few months later. I was very well prepared.

xxxxx

The new Buick was a full-dress road hog. It had wide whites and more chrome than the Plun­der Road death sled. I wanted to zoom it back to L.A. and see my dad. I wanted to resume my fantasy life back on my home turf.

The adults went nightclubbing on New Year's Eve. A German immigrant girl baby-sitted my cousins and me. She was 17 or 18, acne-addled and plump. She wore a rein­deer-print blouse and a flannel skirt with a pink embroidered poodle. She emitted Hitler Jugend vibes.

She tucked me in last. The bedroom door was shut. Her fluttery presence felt un-kosher. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted me. The vibe devolved. She pulled down the covers and sucked my dick.

I dug it and recoiled from it in equal measure. I withstood 30 seconds and pushed her off. She talked a kraut blue streak and bolted the room. I killed the lights and brooded out the bad juju.

I didn't feel assaulted. I felt sideswiped. I knew the term blow job from school. I recalled the magic-spell book. I figured I could brew a blank-memory elixir. I could create X-ray-eye powder at the same time. I got bilked on those glasses. My secret eye­ball blend would set that straight.

I fell asleep in '57 and woke up in "58. The watershed year of my life kicked in, un-be-fucking-knownst to me. Jean Hillikerand I split Madison in snow flurries. It worsened a few hours in. We crossed the Iowa border. The road froze. The snow turned to ice. My mother pulled over and bundled me in the backseat. Cars lost traction and brodied on the highway. Wheels slid on slick blacktop. Low-speed collisions multiplied. Fool driv­ers smoked their tires down to bare tread and skittered into cornfields.

Jean Hilliker winked at me. I've got the moment shutter-stopped. She wore a tartan

scarf over her hair and a brown overcoat. She pulled back onto the road.

I watched. She chain-smoked as she maneuvered. She worked the pedals in her stocking feet and gained ground in low gear. Cars caromed, bumped and rolled backward all around us. Jean rode the slow-lane and sliced mud with her right tires. Ice shards bombarded the windshield. Jean ran the defroster and melted the ice on contact. The car was steam-room hot. Jean ditched her overcoat. She wore a short-sleeved blue blouse underneath it. I noticed how pale and lovely her arms were.

We skidded in and out of mud troughs. We clipped rural fence posts and sheared off our right rearview mirror. She gripped the steering wheel loosely and braced it with her left knee. She smoked cigarettes, white-knuckled.

The weather shifted. The ice mulched and set the road traversable. We turned into an auto court and got a room for the night. It featured timber walls inset with plaster molding. My mother found a string quartet on the radio. We were sweat soaked from her boffo play with the defroster. I showered first and put on pajamas.

She felt different that night. Her Hilliker eyes were tight and gray-flecked some new way. She smiled and went "oops" every time she banged a mailbox.

I pretended to sleep. She walked out of a steam cloud and toweled herself off, naked. I slitted my eyes and memorized her body for the 10 zillionth time. She never hid her nakedness. She never flaunted it. She was a registered nurse. She wanted me to ask her facts-of-life questions. She wanted to vouch her stance as an enlightened mother and the first Hilliker to attend college. I didn't want abstract responses. I wanted to know about Her and sex in an enticing manner with a mystical bent.

I saw her in bed with men before. This geek Hank Hart was her first post-divorce squeeze. I got some of the mechanics down and stood back from the doorway. Hank Hart lost a thumb in a drill-press mishap. My mother lost the tip of one nipple to a post-childbirth infection. The other guy was a botched window view. I didn't get the close-ups or the male amputation. I skimmed the Bible and my dad's scandal rags for a sex-with-missing-body-parts parlay. I got adul­tery condemned and Sinuendo. I went back to eyeballing women for my answers.

We cleared the storm zone the next day and turned right in Texas. I scoped out girls in passing cars and scratched my balls on the sly. My mother said we might move in February. She was hipped to a house in the San Gabriel Valley. Our gelt was running thin. We were splurging on cheeseburgers and rustic motels. The Buick slurped high-test gas through a four-barrel carburetor. We laid up in Albuquerque and went to a movie. It was a seagoing turkey called Fire Down Below. The stars: Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon and Rita Hayworth.

I pointed to Hayworth's name on the screen. My mother glared at it. My dad went back with La Rojti Rita. It predated his circa '40 hookup with Jean. Rita was half Anglo, half Mex aristocrat. My dad was working as a croupier in TJ. Rita's father hired him

to watchdog Kita and deter mashers. My dad told me he slipped Rita the schnitzel. I cannot verify this assertion. My dad did enjoy a long run as Rita's chief stooge. Rita sacked his lazy ass, circa '50. Jean Hilliker won the War of the Rapture-Wrapped Red­heads. That meant she got her heavy-hung hubby's fast-buck jive full-time.

They both sanitized their backstories and packed me with pap. I tracked a trail of the truth, post-parental mortem. Jean Hilliker hit L.A. in late '38. She won a beauty contest, tanked a screen test and returned to Chicago. She lived in a big pad with four other nurses. A beefy bull dyke ruled the roost. Jean got pregnant, tried to scrape herself and hemor-rhaged. A doctor chum undid the damage. She had an affair with him, dumped him and married a rich stiff. Marriage number one fizzled pronto. Jean remembered how good L.A. looked and caught a bus. A friend knew a ginch named Jean Feese. Jean F. was wed to a hunky drifter named Ellroy.

They met and shacked up in my pre-war birthplace. My dad dumped Jean Number One. Jean Number Two got pregnant in '47. They got married in August. A trou­bled pregnancy foretold my rapturously troubled and memoir-mapped life.

1 never got Rita Hayworth. She was plucked, lacquered, varnished, injected and enhanced. She shitcanned my dad before the Hilliker-Ellroy marriage imploded. She was my dad's defaulting deus ex machina. He had a sweet deal with Rita. She blew it—not him. There were more sweet deals ahead. Other Ritas were out there. He could glom himself one.

It was loser shtick. I was a seven-year-old predisposed to believe it. I heard it expressed plaintively, whiningly and disin­genuously. Jean Hilliker heard it shrieked, sobbed and bellowed—behind bedroom doors closed to me. She underestimated my ability to eavesdrop and extrapolate. She did not credit me with a knack for decoding sighs. She went at my father with restraint and less volume. I watched her sadness and fury build from the inside out. I never heard her say it. I watched her think it and suppress it from the outside in.

You're weak. You live off of women. I won't let you take much more of me.

I knew it was true—then.

I sided with him—then.

I hated her then. I hated her because he was me, and once he was gone I'd be alone with the breadth of my shame. I hated her because I wanted her in so many unspeak­able ways. I hated her because I knew that you lived for women then, as I know that you live for women now. My mother had expressed a moral distinction: You don't feed off women ever.

My father made me his co-defiler. His mantra was "She's a drunk and a whore." I cravenly acceded to the dictum. He told me he had private eyes tailing my mother. I believed it then. I know it was hoo-ha now. It didn't matter then. Cherchez lafemme. The imagined detectives led me to women.

All solitary men were detectives. All male pedestrians were detectives. All men hid­ing behind newspapers were specifically tailing me. My dad employed at least one whole detective agency. An equal number

of gumshoes were stalking my mother.

My father was out discovering the next Rita Hayworth. He was tapping some unmentioned windfall. He scored the big bowl of bread that Sergeant Bilko and the Kingflsh fell short of in pratfalls and greed. Private fuzz ran pricey. My dad loved me that much. A flatfoot fleet safeguarded me. Fleet Number Two tailed the round-heeled redhead to juke joints and hot-sheet motels. Moral turpitude was a tough sell. Kiddie-court judges usually sided with the mom. My dad had clout from his film-biz days. He had the lowdown on bribable Jew judges. He just slipped Perry Mason a fat retainer.

That wowed me. I watched the Perry Mason show every week. My case might wind up on TV.

My school was on Wilshire and Yale. My pad was off Broadway and Princeton. Santa Monica had semi-brisk foot traffic. I walked to school most days and dawdled home indirectly. My roaming range was two miles in circumference. Wilshire was dotted with cocktail caves and auto courts. I grooved the Broken Drum, the Fox and Hounds and the Ivanhoe. I loitered out­side and watched the detectives enter and split. I gave them perfunctory glances and shifted my gaze to any and all nearby women. I confirmed that my dad's goons were on the job and went wild with the adjoining scenery.

It's a 50-year-old blur in '50s film-process color. Some details remain ripe. I watch women enter rooms at the Ivanhoe. One woman is Italianate and picks at her stocking runs. Bus stops were good spots for repeat eyeball business. I saw the same detective at Santa Monica and Franklin several times. He was always chatting with a neighbor lady. She wore a dark-green dress one day and showed bocoo back. She told the man she worked in Beverly Hills. She carried a briefcase instead of a purse. I placed her age at Jean Hilliker's age. She always smoked a last cigarette and dropped it ahead of the right-front bus wheel.

I waited for her one evening. The west­bound bus dropped her across the street from the outgoing bus stop. I tailed her to a crib on Arizona. She opened the door and saw me. She gave me a schizy look and shut the door. I never saw her again.

It was surveillance within surveillance. I breezed through coffee shops, used the can and breezed out. I entered lounge lairs ver-boten to children and eyeballed the bar. I saw women reflected in above-the-bar mir­rors. I saw women twirl ashtrays and look pensive. I saw women dangle low-heeled shoes off one foot.

Samo High and Lincoln Junior High were close to my pad. Kids materialized on my block around 4:00 on school days. Boys and girls together. Older kids. The girls hugged

their schoolbooks and swerved their breasts. One girl rested her chin on her books and swayed as she walked. She always lagged behind the other kids. She was pale. She had long dark hair and wore glasses. She lived one courtyard over from me. I didn't know her name. I decided to call her Joan.

I spied on her bungalow. I saw her read­ing a few times. She sat in an easy chair crossways and wiggled her feet. I studied her family life. Her dad wore a Jew beanie and doted on her. Mom favored the doltish kid brother. I have thought about Joan and prayed for Joan for 51 continuous years. I considered her a prophet then. I was cor­rect. A real-named Joan appeared 46 years later. She was a sure and separate fulfill­ment of that wish-named girl.

Both Joans are gone now. The real-named Joan and I had two years together. She had stunning gray-streaked hair. It's been three years since I've seen her. I brood on her and talk to her in the dark. I heard she had a child. I wonder how much more gray has swirled through the black.

xxxxx

We made it back to L.A. on gas fiimes and a buck-98. The Buick was paint pocked and minus that right mirror. I returned to my roamings and ruminations. Jean Hilliker went back to bourbon and Brahms and her nurse gig at Airtek Dynamics.

I didn't think about the magic book or the Nazi chick and her aborted knob job. I didn't brew potions. I got pissed at my mother after church once. I told her to beware—my dad had hired Perry Mason to get custody of me. Jean Hilliker found this sidesplitting. She explained that Perry Mason was a TV Fiction. Moreover: That beetle-browed actor's a swish.

The old man kept bugging me to spy on

my mother. He kept calling the crib and driving her batshit. She kept bringing up the move to the suburbs.

She persisted, she insisted, she blathered, she cajoled, she lied. The suburbs: euphe­mism/propaganda/forked-tongue double­speak. The San Gabriel Valley was blast-oven exile. Renegade rednecks and waterlogged wetbacks. A shit-kicker Shangri-la.

Of course, we moved there.

Of course, she died there.

Of course, I caused her death.

Her body was found on June 22, 1958. Her murder brought me to crime.

I throw myself at women and talk to them alone in the dark. They always speak back to me. They have convinced me of my guilt.

We left right before Valentine's Day. I slid a card embossed with a big red heart under Joan's door. I bought the real-named Joan a Valentine's card and a blouse 48 years later. We made love in a hotel suite and planned our wedding.

Our union ended soon after. My stabs at friendship were clumsy and self-serving. I'm alone with Joan now. We speak every night. I'm watching her age and grow stronger. She's inside me with all of the oth­ers, each and every one distinct.

1.

My dad got me. He alleged fluke provi­dence. He didn't have to retain Perry Mason or bribe Jew judges. We were both relieved and gratified. My mother's mur­der went unsolved. I dodged the issue of my complicity and breezed through a sea­son of adult solicitude. Nobody blamed me. There, there. Isn't he brave and cute?

Alas, no.

The Curse worked. Summer '58 unfurled smoggy and powder blue. I stalked girls at Lemon Grove Park. I stole a chemistry set,

my potions with Kool-Aid. I watched the Criswell Predicts TV show devotedly. Criswell was a fruity guy with a cape. He foresaw the future and spoke portentously. He exempli­fied the shuck of self-confidence. 1 studied him and honed my act under his boob-tube spell. The Mighty Ellroy has decreed: You will drink this sacred elixir and disrobe!

It didn't work. The caustic chemicals out-wafted the Kool-Aid. No girls put their lips to my cups. I dodged murder-one indict­ments again. Credit me with avant-garde panache: My shtick preceded the Jim Jones massacre by decades.

I lived to read, brood, peep, stalk, skulk and fantasize. My reading focus zeroed in on kids' crime books and lingered there all summer. Rich kids from happy families solved murders. Ordered worlds got res­urrected, and nobody got too fucked-up. Formulaic pap. My sublimated dialogue on the Jean Hilliker snuff. Triage therapy that prepared me for Mickey Spillane.

Mike Hammer was a chick magnet and a commie-snuff artiste. He pistol-whipped left-wingers and bit women's necks. He was duti­fully dichotomized. He brutalized bad men and saved virtuous women. Mike Hammer's quest became my moral credo. There was one major sticking point that vexed me.

Not all women expressed virtue. Some women were shrill and usurious. One woman was really a man with an implied donkey dick. Society women were one-worlders and com-symps. Mike Hammer slapped bad women around. Mike Hammer shot the big-dick he/she in cold blood. I could not read those passages. I could not endure depictions of violence on women. The same dynamic held with TV and film fare. / could not see it. I had to shut my eyes. I banished injured women from my purview. I insisted diat my maimed women remain off-page and offscreen. It was a bedrock of empathy within my overall kiddie-noir predation.

Ravaged women brought me back to Her. Mental tenacity kept my guilt suppressed. I was a sex-crazed little boy before the death I mandated. Puberty boded. My hormones hosannaed. The stimulus of all women all the time forced me to contain the obsession. I started telling myself stories to rein it in.

Savior-of-women fantasies. Romantic tableaux set against history. Mike Hammer sans misogynist text.

I got hopped up on the Black Dahlia murder case. Starstruck girl hits L.A. and winds up severed and dumped. It's another unsolved woman snuff. It's L.A. '47, again in i'/nemascope.

I saved the Dahlia, alone in the dark. I killed her killer and resuscitated her with magic potions. I time traveled. I wasn't a skinny kid with emergent acne. I was Zach-ary Scott with that cool mustache and my dad's giant dick. The sexual mechanics were virgin-boy fantasia. A filtering process came and went and often shut down my narrative stream. I would see my mother in bed with Hank Hart. I would blot the image out and pray it away.

1 denied the Dahlia's martyred kinship with Jean Hilliker. A morbid subtext slammed me

to Dahlialand. The same death-sense shocked me and boomcranged me to my present-day world. I created stirring unions with local girls and their mothers.

I lived in a hotbox dive adjoining swank Hancock Park. Ritzy houses were arrayed in three directions. My dad and I owned a baleful beagle. She was my mother's 10th-birthday gift. She defied housebreaking. She turned our pad into a dog-dung demimonde. The scent socked itself in and accreted. I took the dog for long late-night walks and peeped I lancock Park windows.

The girls went to posh private schools. They wore pastel uniform dresses by day and prepped-out civvies in the evenings. Madras shirtwaists and tartan kilts. Gingham button-downs inherited from big brothers. Sherbet-shade gowns for cotillions.

I took the girls home with me and talked to them in the dark. They spoke back to me in candid whispers. 1 concocted kid stories suffused with social-class struggle and love-conquers-all elation. My girls were never stan­dard pretty or comely in prescribed ways. I was always looking for the physical flaw or distinction that marked gravity. I looked in window after window at face after face. I was looking for one face. There can be only one.

Voyeur. Pious Protestant boy. Fatuous seeker.

I took the girls home. Their mothers pushed me into walls, threw me down and had me. Their hunger was my hunger expressed through their haunted aggres­sion. They squeezed my face. Their hands hurt me. Our mouths clashed. Our teeth scraped. Our nakedness was blurred by a shutter-slop inside me. I was frail and unequal to their bounty. It scared me then. The roughness unhinged me. The absence of a narrative line left me weightless. I didn't know what it meant then. I'll ascribe meaning now. They wanted me because I sensed who they were and went at them with that raging instinct. A dead woman fed me the knowl­edge. They were indistinguishable and each and every one unique. My moral intent was gender-wide and paid for in blood—frail boy bound credible and ghasdy deep.

Women were everywhere and nowhere. My dad hid his girlfriends. Our dog-shit dive deterred assignations there. I overheard his "Hey, baby" calls and inferred fuck-pad dates.

He had no family. Jean Hilliker's kin were back in Whipdick, Wisconsin. I went to school and church because I had to and because there were women there. It got me out of the dog den and into the fresh air. Human inter­action momentarily rewired my fantasy life. I was forced to sit, listen and talk. Matriculation led me to second-rung obsessions. American history and classical music started tearing through my head. They momentarily fogged my all-women mind-set. I co-opted them fast. My woman-savior tales took on verisimilitude and topical oomph. Beethoven wrote me scores. Our rhapsodies outjuiced the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets.

I had to talk to people. All people scared me. Women and girls scared me much more than men and boys. I addressed all males with braggadocio undercut with tight-throat fear. I ducked my head, made provocative statements and cut in and out of discourse quick. I could not talk to females beyond non sequiturs. I flopped at talking to boys about girls. Their chat was too graphic, too uninformed and jejune without my puer­ile grandeur. I stayed pent-up into raging adolescence. I grew tall and stayed com-mensurately unbodied. A neighbor boy introduced me to masturbation. I discov­ered it astoundingly late. That fact expli­cates my mental predisposition and horror of real sex. I reinvested sex and postponed sex ever)' time I saw a woman who might be The Other. I was a Scottish pastor's grand­son and the scion of farmers and clergymen who took to the bottle instead of the flesh. I would have it all in due time and nearly die from it. My mind and soul met my right hand at age 13. It all accelerated. Jean Hil-liker moldered in the backwash of fresh technique and constant stimuli.

Junior high was high-octane. The Berlin Wall fracas almost took the world down. I craved the easy out of nuke devastation. Sublimated guilt drove me nihilistic. Han­cock Park girls saved me. I loved Cathy and Kay and stellar window faces seen. I yearned for mental monogamy. I wanted one image captured for endless consolation and sex.

Cathy Montgomery was pure Hancock Park. Kay Olmsted was Hancock Park on a west-edge budget. The tall brunette. The shorter blonde with the hurricane-hurled hazel eyes. Villager shirtdresses for Cathy. A black beret for preppy beatnik Kay.

I hoarded paper-route money and sent

them both big bouquets. It was my Summer '62 D-day Assault. The D stood for "desper­ate" and "delirious." I got blow-off/thank-you notes back.

I snuck inside Cathy's house and Kay's house several years later. The notion to enter and prowl hadn't occurred to me yet. I still send women flowers obsessively. My florist's bill for '07 was more than 10 grand. I sent my married girlfriend six Gs' worth. Four Gs went to brief inamoratas. Alimony and floral gifts are tax deductions. I'm grateful for that.

My teenage life stood in arrears. My acceler­ation was all internalized. I struggled through junior high and into senior high. I had shilling cliques of loser friends and no friends. I taped pictures of Beethoven over my bed and pon­dered our genius. He composed his greatest music for his "Immortal Beloved." Her iden­tity remained as mysterious as The Other for me. Beethoven understood my deep loneli­ness and sorrow. His deafness inspired vision­ary thoughts unknown to mortal men. My deafness was voluntary. Beethoven dug that. I often played the adagio of the Hammerkla-vier Sonata before I went peeping. Beethoven approved more than condemned the practice. Sometimes he'd scowl at me and shake his fin­ger. He never quite told me to grow up and pull my head out of my ass.

I was deaf to the real world and any­thing that contradicted my monomaniacal private agenda. The 1960s social scene was pixelated newsprint and no more. I had my private agenda. It was sexual compulsion fueled by a terror of human contact and the forfeit of mental control. I could brood, peep, stalk, think and self-narrate. I could not act. I understood that conundrum in the moment. A conceit numbed the power of the revelation and pushed me further into a mystical state. I came to believe that certain women could read my aura and detect my prayerful condition. Fait accom­pli: Those women would find me. Our identical passion would then be unified.

I peeped a dance party at Second and Irving. Cathy Montgomery lived two blocks west. The party vibed earthquake epicen­ter. It was fall '63. I had a vague sense that The Twist was dead. Yes and no—dig those middle-aged stiffs doing it now.

Yes and no. The men were stiffs. The women weren't. The women married the stiffs and regretted it now. Every woman I

saw danced better than her male partner. There was more hip movement and less inhibition. There was a sense of gyration as a sexual substitute. They condescended to the silly music less and relinquished themselves to it more. It meant more to them because family duty had fizzled and Daddy-o was less than they thought. The dance party was a reprieve from the ennui and repressed ten­derness that would lead them to me.

It was their brief look at the faux-lush world I inhabited routinely. I saw hope in what they'd given up for Hancock Park. I denied the substance of their lives past the gestalt of the Peppermint Twist. I sensed sweetly what career womanizers know cold: Female discontent is opportunity.

The party lingered as an image bank. I roamed Hancock Park and saw a few of the women I'd seen dancing. They were decon-textualized and still breathlessly deep. I corralled one woman's runaway dog. We talked for a few moments. I was 15. She was 45-ish. She looked like my future lover and still-close friend Catherine.

The lightning-rod concept lingered. No for-real older women sought me out and proved it valid. Fall '63 extended. My dad had a severe stroke. I capitalized on his hospital stay, ditched school and ran wild.

I stole playboy magazines, second-line stroke books and nudist-colony photo jobs that showed female pubic hair. I taped pic­tures all over the pad and tacked the Play­mate of the Month up beside Beethoven. I roamed, peeped, shoplifted and brooded dusk to dawn.

My father came home from the hospital. He was needy and frail. It infuriated me. I had to remove all the skin pix. I considered reviving The Curse and decided against it. He was old. He'd be gone soon. I'd be free, white and 17.

J.

I woke up. I was naked, she was naked, I didn't know where I was.

We were under bedsheets. She was still asleep. I didn't know who she was.

I rubbed my face. It felt like a four-day growth. I was clean-shaven at my last recollection.

You sold blood plasma downtown. You hitchhiked to the beach. You met your pal Randy and started drinking. You argued with some hippies. You stood on the Pali­sades and fulminated. Your tory worldview appalled them. You stormed off then.

Booze blackout—age 23.

I was a fit 160. The woman weighed three bills easy. I looooved voluptuousness. My standards were permissive. These were curves I could not condone.

A memory burst hit me. I still had nine bucks left from the blood bank.

My clothes were on the bedside floor. My glasses and wallet were safe. Two 20s were tucked in the billfold.

The woman snored on. Maybe she paid me for it. That would mark a first.

I got up, got dressed and stealth-walked out of the pad. Stairs led down to a ground-floor landing. I stepped outside. I was on Fell Street in San Francisco.

Large Marge was the fourth. Keeping track was easy then. Susan was Number One. She was 29 to my 20. She needed a roof and fucked me in the spirit of revolution. She caught me jacking off on uppers the night RFK got shot. She defamed me as a perv, a bum lay and a fascist. She turned dyke for political reasons and the valid motive of inclination.

Charlotte was Number Two. It was late '69. She was an affluent Palos Verdes girl on post-college hiatus. My booze-brave approach charmed her. She bought my great-writer-in-waiting act for three months and wised up. Her inclination: postpone sex for marriage to a real man. Why I got it: The era mandated premarital sex as an experiment.

The experiment tanked. She gave me a withering look and skedaddled. The look has since become familiar. It means. You've lied to me, and you're not who \ou think you arr.

Christine was Number Three. She was a zit freak more than a sex freak. We coupled in early '71 and hooked up periodically. Chris was a poetess and a dermatologist manque. My acne-assaulted back delivered her delighted. She studied cross-sections of the human der-mis for hours. She popped my pimples and examined the pus under a microscope. She lectured me on my cellular formation.

My dad died in '65. I got kicked out of high school and psych-discharged from three months in the Army. I held down min­imum-wage jobs and flopped in dive hotels and parks. I shoplifted and full-time fanta­sized. The girls I loved and stalked were off in grad school or married to stiffs. They ful­filled the broken promise of their mothers at the dance party. I sensed their potential dur­ing my late-'60s housebreakings. Money and safety were horrible temptations. I knew it when I touched their things. They should have waited for me. I did lightweight jolts in the L.A. County jail system. 1 was too thin and was developing a chronic cough.

Booze and dope regulated my fantasy life. The theme had only intensified. I remained consumed by women. It was pushing me toward insanity and death.

Tenderness in no way marked my short liaisons. I grasped with suffocating force and trawled for the next enticing image with real women present. I couldn't let go of the hurt or stop telling myself stories. I couldn't stop looking at women and beseeching them to smash my stories and talk back to me.

The only love I knew was pornography self-created. The only lovers I desired radi­ated a distrust of men that would always exclude me. I succumbed to HER and had her for a few dope-depraved seconds and spent weeks recoiled in repentance. Evil boy, piety lost, unredeemable searcher.

The theme and the search had only inten­sified. The theme was as just as the search was deluded. Intensification was a sub-end in and of itself. A chemical provided the means.

Propylhexedrine. An amphetamine solu­tion found in inhaler wads. Toxic cotton that you swallowed. An ever tappable source of self-created sex—until it destroys your health or kills you. A stealable drug sold over the counter. Guaranteed hyperalertness and extended masturbation. The search engine for seven years of my life.

I consumed cotton wads in extreme quan­tity and prowled the streets that had enticed me since childhood. I knew all of the houses, many of the windows and the precise loca­tion of prior-seen faces. New windows alerted me to new women. I saw familiar faces older now and oddly grave. I retreated to hotel rooms and parks and got alone with them in the dark. I heard taunting voices in my head, noting the onset of psychoses. They accused me of inflicting The Curse and of unspeakably related transgressions. I stuffed cotton in my ears and heard the voices louder. 1 bolted my enclosed settings and walked to deflect the sound. I twitched, lurched and nakedly betrayed my mental state. People shied away from me. Women stared briefly and averted their eyes. 1

always tried to note their faces without scar­ing them. I know I always failed at this.

Seven years.

Of course, I didn't die. God has always had a job for me. I'm the guy who survives and tells you the story.

I met a woman in '73. We ran into each other at a coin laundromat. I was tailspinning as she was living upright. She was unaccount­ably kind to me.

Her name was Marcia Sidwell. She was a year younger than I and worked as a reg­istered nurse. She wore glasses and had reddish-blonde hair.

We had three conversations at one-week intervals. Marcia initiated the first. She was properly friendly and never flirtatious. I knew

.1 . -!-,„ L-J ciirmlrnr

that she had surmised my outdoor lifestyle and that she didn't judge me unduly. I dredged up a sem­blance of decorum in an effort to sustain her acquaintance.

Marcia spoke more than I did. We dis­cussed Watergate. Marcia thought my disdain for rock and roll was reflexive and peculiar. She had a somewhat dubious boyfriend. She was vexed by the general male reaction to her big breasts and com­mended me for not staring. She was not being coy or provoca­tive. I never men­tioned my red-haired nurse mother and her 15-year-old death. Marcia had stardingly bright blue eyes. I showed her my grimy Beethoven bust. She touched my arm for a second.

I showed up for a fourth chat. Marcia washed her clothes at the same time every week. I assumed that

she'd pull up in her Volkswagen.

She didn't show that day. I waited every day for a month. Marcia never showed up again.

It devastated me. 1 figured I'd said or done something wrong or betrayed my acute disso­lution. My self-absorbed guilty-boy logic was entirely specious. Marcia found a laundromat closer to home or opted for some other con­venience. Our acquaintanceship meant the world to me and not much to her.

She told me who she was and treated me justly. 1 wish I could have done something stunningly bold in return.

The San Gabriel Valley, March '58. The moment I always loop back to. The moment I always reinhabit and write toward. The moment I took fate by the throat.

She sat me down on the couch. She laid out a line of shit pertaining to my rite of passage. You're a young man now. You're old enough to choose. Would you rather live with your dad or with me?

I said, "My dad."

She hit me.

I fell off the couch and gouged my head on a glass coffee table. Blood burst out of the cut. I called her a drunk and a whore. She knelt down and hit me again. A shutter-stop blinked for her. She covered her mouth and pulled away from it all.

Blood trickled into my mouth. I recalled the book, I issued The Curse, I summoned her dead. She was murdered three months and 16 days later. She died at the apex of my hatred and equally burning lust.

Her crime was passionate and thus foreiv-

able. My punishment was callous and pre­meditated. She inflicted her own damage and repented in true haste. I parceled my rage and mysucally summoned a killer. We are as one in our hunger and rectitude. I owe her for every true thing that I am. I must remove The Curse I have placed on her and on myself. I must revoke her status as The Other.

4. Home again.

I returned to L.A. in '06. I spent 25 years in points north and east and plowed a return course. Two divorces and a crack-up were part of it. My survival sense played in. Joan dumped me in San Francisco. A mar­ried woman I'd met for two seconds last year lived in L.A. That ghost of a chance pushed me the rest of the way.

out. It was a critical and box-office dud and a paperback smasheroo. My publisher scheduled a reading at Skylight Books in East Hollywood.

I looked good and felt good and tingled with I'm Back! resurgence. Spirits were nudging me. Marcia Sidwell was on my mind in a big way. She came and went with insouciance. I never knew why.

I'd made stabs at finding her and always came up short. I spent dough on private eyes and deployed my cop pals. I wanted to see her and say thank you. I wanted to do something costly and large. Maybe she had a sick kid who needed my spare kidney.

Skylight was packed. I counted 200 peo­ple. A full third were female. A bookstore guy introduced me. My fans went nuts.

I walked to the lec­tern. I thought: Fuck it, let's try.

I said, "Stop me now. It's going to my head. I need a strong woman to tame me with her love and walk all over me in high black boots."

My fans dug it. A few women whistled. I read from my book, took questions and repeated the line four times. Get it? I'm scrounging affection.

It was a knockout performance by my own exalted stan­dards. I signed books for the folks after­ward. Seven women slipped me their phone numbers.

I called three of them. We had dinner dates on consecutive evenings. I told them I was between obses­sions and needed a friend. Is that offensive to you ?

All three were delighted. Instant intimacy evolved. The anticipation and hone were softer and

weightier than the acts.

I gave another reading the following week. I was played out and boffo irregard-less. The married woman hadn't called me. I brooded on her incessantly. I stretched out on my bed and talked to her. Beethoven glowered above me.

The bookstore crowd dispersed. I walked back to my car, dead-ass tired. I noticed a woman at a sidewalk cafe.

She was the right age. She had simi­lar glasses and coloring and identical deportment.

I caught her eye and said, "Marcia?"

She blinked and said, "No."

With undimmed force: so women will love me.