The Hilliker Curse, Part II

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PART I

want to hold your hand. That was the conclud­ing shtick. You sat through

the drunk-and-dopealogues and laced up for the Lord's Prayer. Ninety minutes of con­fession for 20 seconds of skin. I had to reconstruct my life. That felt like drudge work. The dykey redhead beside me felt like momentary payoff.

My first AA meeting. Mon­day, August 1, 1977.

I was 29. I survived the seven-year run of inhaler wads and psychoses. I quit booze, weed and pharmaceutical uppers. My new regime was abstinence. It boded horrific. I quit shoplifting and break­ing into houses. I had not had a spiritual awakening. An inhaler-inflicted lung abscess constituted a death scare. My compulsive appetite had hung a 180. The straight and narrow beckoned. A ruthless self-interest defined my apostasy. I wanted women. I wanted to write novels. Sobriety meant efficiency. I couldn't advance my agenda in my current raggedy-ass state.

The meeting dragged on. Most people smoked. The fumes tickled my heal­ing lung tissue. An AA guy called the redhead Leslie. She looked like a low-rent Marcia Sidwell. Aaah, Marcia: our chaste Brief Encounter. The hand-holding ended. Leslie never glanced at me. You came that far for this?

xxxxx

Things weren't that bad. My chronic cough was cured. I was young and heroically resilient. I had a caddy gig at Bel-Air Country Club. I had a $20-a-week hotel room. The com­munal bathrooms and shower were down the hall. The in-room sink was a pissoir.

A new Beethoven poster loomed above my bed. I played the Master's soaring psalms on an eight-track con­traption and brooded. A late-blooming moral sense kept me from peeping. I peered now. I roamed Westwood Village, stared and stopped short of approach. I possessed

no notion of a social code. The world was still hazy. The sexual revolution applied to other folks. The permissive­ness of the era belonged to the cute and the glib. I was a tenuously reformed pervert, adrift.

Sex had almost killed me. It was drug driven and solitary. It was a still memorable blur of women's faces. I credited God with the save and pondered His mission for me. It came down to write books and find The Other. That was 32 years ago. The faces swirl inside me decades later. The women remain as images seeking a narrative thread. They did not know who I was then and do not know who I am now. Real women have joined them. Real experience and active dis-

course have in no way dissolved the blur. My lustful heart has expanded to keep them all in.

I attributed my near death to The Curse. It was divine pun­ishment and collateral damage to the death I had caused. My mother was 19 years dead. Her murder was still unsolved. I car­ried no love for her and ignored my debt to her. I feared her power and nullified it by ban­ishing her from my mind.

My hotel room was narrow and underfurnished. I kept it spotlessly clean. I rarely turned the lights on. I played Beethoven and talked to women, dead sober.

The Hancock Park girls from my childhood were there. The wish-named Joan from Santa Monica appeared often. I men­tally aged her to 38 years and reveled in her power as a shape-shifter and predictor. She had preannounced the real Joan. I knew I would meet her someday. The real Joan turned 12 that year.

I created a visual palette with a newly urgent soundtrack. I heard women's confessions in AA. I weighed their depic­tions of gender bias and sexual

trauma sans judgment or male bias. I conversed with them in the dark. I was consoler, interlocutor, friend. Lives of thwarted hunger led us to that first kiss.

The fantasy was endlessly repetitive and easily trans­ferred. I went face-to-face in search of transcendent sex and probity. I embraced woman images discerningly and abandoned them callously. Sobriety enhanced my fanta­sist's prowess and fucked with my powers of suppression. I felt voodooized. It was a crybaby crisis and punch-the-wall fury fit. It drove me to the point of action.

With the knowledge that women would not read my mind and thus detect my prayerful condition.

With the knowledge that my moral intent appeared to them as pure lust.

With the knowledge that women did not view me as a savior and were quite often afraid of me.

I lurked in bookstores near the UCLA campus. I read women's faces for character and a sense of humor that might mark them as susceptible to my charm. My pickup lines all pertained to books and were all levied on women who appeared to be self-assured and brainy. They had survived the stringent first cut: no heavy makeup, no nail polish, no sexy chick affect or rock-and-roll trappings. I

was seeking a blend of wholesomeness and hot passion. I was looking for a fellow autodidact oblivious to trend.

The first run of women rejected me fast. I betrayed myself instantly. Conversation sandbagged me. My mouth twitched, my beady eyes burned, my jerky body set off alarms. My glasses slid down my nose. I displayed stubby teeth caused by losing fistfights and poor dental care. I was an SOS call. Women knew it immediately. The brush-offs convinced me to readjust my criteria and up the ante spiritually.

Only lonely and haunted women would grok my gravity. They were sister misfits attuned to my wavelength. Only

they grooved internal discourse and sex as sanctified flame. Their soiled souls were socked in synch with yours truly.

My rationale was that con­voluted. My love seeking was that mystical and predatory. I threw myself at a second run of record-store women. They possessed less than stel­lar world-standard looks and were stunningly unsvelte. I dug them and wanted them. / got them. They all blew me off. My opening salvos all pertained to Beethoven. They were all perusing classical-music LPs. I flopped again. Their alarms scree-screed. A Beethovian principle was at work here. Beethoven was the only artist in history to rival the unpub­lished Ellroy. He was a fel­low brooder, nose picker and ball scratcher. He yearned for women in silent solitude. His soul volume ran at my shriek­ing decibel. You and me, kid:

Her. She, the Immortal Beloved/The Other. Conjunc­tion, communion, consecra­tion and the completion of the whole. The human race advanced and all souls salved as two souls unite. The sacred

merging of art and sex to touch Cod.

Those women could not have read my heart. My heart would have terrified them.

/ want to crawl up inside you and offer you the same comfort. Cup my ears. I'll do the same for you. The scream of the world is unbearable, and only we know what it means.

I put that out to total strangers. My botched repar­tee was the scream. It was the high-note dissonance in Beethoven's late quartets. Jean Hilliker told me the facts of life in early '58. She said, "The man puts his penis in the woman's vagina." It was a shallow and clinical precis then, as it remains. My mother undermined her power. She could not have predicted The Curse and the arc of our fates.

xxxxx

That death scare kept me focused. The dutiful part of my nature got buttressed all day every day. I was guilt racked and devoutly religious at my core. AA offered me absolutism and a compatible latitude in my faith. Half of my sober comrades were women. I studied them and tore through unrequited crushes at great speed. They joined me (continued on page 100)

THE HILUKER CURSE

(continued from page 50) in the dark. I reconstructed the words they spoke in meetings and altered the meaning of their lives to spotlight their fictive love for me.

It was all about recognition. The dia­logue ran 50/50. We shared the truth of our lives on an equal basis and kissed. We stepped back from the brink of precipitous passion, pledged monogamy and made love. I masturbated then. That part of my sojourn ended abruptly. Whew!—now we can talk about what it all means.

Soft-focus pix scrolled along with the pillow talk. Women never seen naked appeared in the buff'beside me. Melinda D. folds a breast back to burrow closer in. I touch the acne scars on Pat J.'s neck to tell her it's okay. She shakes her head, removes my hand and goes, Hush now. Moonlight beams through my dive-hotel window. Laurie B.'s got tears in her eyes. I'm smiling because she just said, "I love you." She laughs and tugs at my gro­tesque little teeth.

It was like that. It was over 30 years ago— and I cannot let go of one moment of it.

Deep talk, lovemaking, deep talk. Sweat and nicotine breath back when classy women still smoked. The pledge of a shared future. The common cause of Us. The analysis of our shared pasts to vouch­safe a Utopian future. Their real stories and my reinterpretation. My disingenu­ous omission of the dead woman hovering. My savior shtick and their capitulation to it. Their vow to assuage my big hurt. My vow to kick the shit out of every male being who had ever done them wrong. Our cer­tainty that we would never cheat and that it would always be this gooooooooood.

Deep talk, lovemaking, deep talk. On a transferably monogamous nightly basis, with any woman who might be Her.

Crazy boy, all mental tricks, artist manque.

This fever consumed a full year. Shift­ing soul currents defined it. My physical anguish increased. The real world called to me again.

"I will take fate by the throat." Beethoven's shout at his advancing deaf­ness. The Master's chaste solitude and my retrospective conviction: Art is this dia­logue with untouchable spirits—and what you grasp for you can write.

xxxxx

My stimulation index exploded. Hookers invaded the Sunset Strip en masse.

It was '78. The Hillside Strangler panic had raged and subsided. No more Holly­wood abductions. The fucker had vanished. My prayers for his capture went unan­swered. I observed the upshot.

Prostitutes swarmed Sunset for solid miles. Some wore skeevy whore threads and garish makeup. Most dressed like nor­mal women. They seemed to represent a new love-for-sale lifestyle. If they were sell­ing, I was buying.

I knew some cops from AA. They gave me the lowdown. The women were "week­enders." Some were "actresses" looking to score extra bread. Most were office workers and schoolteachers, branching out from dumps like Bakersfield and San Berdoo. They jungled up in motels and found safety in numbers. Sure, they looked normal. But—no normal chick peddles her ass for gelt.

The appearance of normalcy jazzed me. I sensed individual stories shaped by spe­cious social codes. One cop cited cocaine. One cop cited rogue feminism. One cop

cited greed. Shake yo booty—the limes, they are a-changin'.

The women seemed real. I borrowed cars, cruised the Strip and scanned faces. I read their eyes, sensed what brought them there and what would convince them to stop. The women clogged the sidewalk from eight rm. on. I made dozens of recon circuits. I scanned for wholesome faces and evidence of cracking facades. 1 detoured then. I drove Sunset east to Bunker Hill. I staked out the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Symphony concerts ended around 10 RM. Women with violins and cellos scooted out rear exits. I was a tongue-tied stage-door johnny. Most of the women met their husbands and boyfriends. They wore tight black orchestra gowns with cinched waists and plunging necklines. They looked anx­ious to shuck them, belt a few and talk music. Single women walked out, lugging heavy instruments. I offered to help several of them. They all said no.

Back to the Strip. Back to reading faces. Back to the honing of my Iet's-buy-sex aesthetic.

I liked the women older than me. I thought they might be more grateful for my biz and more responsive. I liked the women with glasses. I liked the women with creased brows that said, "Hooking might not be kosher."

It took two dozen drive-bys and blow-offs from the L.A. Philharmonic. 1 saved up some coin, borrowed a car and pounced.

It was midweek. It was cold. Rainstorms had blown through L.A. The Strip was packed. The women wore puffy wind-breakers and buckskin dusters. I noticed a solitary pro upside Hollywood High. She wore granny glasses. She was rangy and fair-haired. She wore a slinky dress under a toggle coat. It was affectless and sweet. It was a geek's idea of sexy attire. She was seven or eight years older than me and appeared to be nervous. I extrapolated her life story instantly and to my mind adroitly. College prof on the skids. A his­tory of weak men. A disengaged notion of prostitution as a lab experiment.

I pulled to the curb. She walked to the car and leaned in the passenger-side win­dow. I said, Hello. She asked me if I was a cop. I asked her why she thought that.

She mentioned my short hair. I justi­fied the close-cropped style and told her I worked at a golf course. She said. You just want to be different.

The perception delighted me. She had a flat Midwestern voice. She said it was 20 for French and 30 for half-and-half. I said I had a C-note and just wanted a decent stretch of her time. She looked at her watch and asked me if I wanted something spe­cial. 1 said, Just some time with you. Her look said. Oh—you're one of those.

She directed me to a motel, four blocks away on La Brea. The room was twice the size of my room and still small. She locked us in and pointed to the dresser. I laid five 20s down.

The room was warm. My legs fluttered and dripped sweat. She took off her coat and tossed it on a chair. She had soft arms for such a slender woman. An image hit me: Vera Miles as a cocktail-lounge artiste

in The Fugitive. She scooped the money into her purse. I said, We don't have to do it. She said, I'll kick you out if you cry.

I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes. She told me not to make it into such a big deal. I opened my eyes. She unbut­toned her dress. I asked her where she was from. She said, Fullerton.

An Orange County college town. My theory validated. I started to say some------

She unhooked her bra. I saw her breasts and smiled. She said, That's better. I took her right hand and kissed her arm above the elbow. She jiggled my hand and said, Lighten up, okay?

Deep breaths tamped my rev down. She kicked off her shoes and kept her socks on. She pulled off her dress and underwear and stood there.

She said, Okay?

The room tumbled.

It was rushed after that. It was rushed because she wanted it to be over and I didn't want to embarrass or displease her.

She didn't want to talk.

She dodged my questions.

She wouldn't let me hold her.

I don't know how long it all lasted. It felt like the world revealed.

xxxxx

So I did it repeatedly—with weirdo intu­ition and horny-pastor's-kid intent.

The count was high, overpayment kept me broke, my criteria were unique. The swirl of available faces kept on coming.

Borrowed pervmobiles got me to the Strip and home again, laid and unsated. Runs by the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion counterbalanced and ratched up my rev. I aroused suspicion at both locations. The Hillside Strangler was a fresh local horror. I cruised the same turf. Why are you offering me extra money? No, I don't need you to carry my cello.

I understood the distinctions between the two professions and treated both sets of women the same. I looked for a cultural component in the hookers and a brusque wantonness in the string players. I got action from the former and zilch from the latter. My extreme acuity was delusional and acutely self-serving. I read faces for signs of the worthiness of love and demanded reciprocated love instandy. It was all crude male barter: money and mock-impromptu favors. I came in with prepared text and crumbled at the first sign of improvisation. Prostitutes did not want to hear my ratio­nale for buying their body. Violinists did not want my loser ass—they wanted the tall guy in the Guarneri Quartet or a straight Sviatoslav Richter. Both groups saw me as a zealot with a smoke-screened agenda.

The prostitutes put faith in the banality of sex and trusted fuck-me-pay-me men on that basis. I could not accept the implied dictum. The musicians viewed sex as a sig­nificant, but not exclusive aspect of their lives in search of refinement. That idea was just as restrictive. The proper answer is Sex is everything—so show me the faces and I'll write the story.

My agenda was women as muse. The Strip to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and back again. My selection process. A C-note offered for this: Can we get naked and talk a bit?

I logged three refusals. It worked four times. It depressurized the girls. It got me softness, taxed sighs and conversation. The thrill was the undressing and the staged tableaux. I heard stories of bad dads, cheating hubbies at Camp Pendleton and freaky Uncle Harold who groped them. They were tired and pleased to find a low-exertion John. I studied them as I pressed close. They were saving bread to open a boutique. They needed coin for a retarded kid's schooling. They were postsex or above sex. They were feminist pragmatists

hopped up on some paperback doctrine. They pooh-poohed the idea of sex as the biggest deal on earth. They gave me a pin­point moment of their lives and were grate­ful that I granted it importance.

I learned to chat a little. I learned a few sensual tricks. Do this or this—you might have a girlfriend one day. You're a sweet guy, get your teeth fixed, don't stare so much. What's going on in that weird head?

I told a few. I said I want to write nov­els. I love crime fiction and classical music. My brain is overamped. I walk to work and dawdle to look at women. Drama is a man meets a woman. Violent events intercede. The man and woman are swept away by catastrophic corruption. They confront a series of morally unhinged people who need to be interdicted and quashed. The man and woman cannot run from this malfeasance. The moral point of struggle is to overcome it and change. It scares me to think that real-love sex flatlines and dies over time. I want real love and will find real love and will not let it numb my imagi­nation. You're drawing me little pictures. We're here to tell each other special things. I don't care if you're just trying to be nice and I'm paying you for it. Women take me someplace thunderous and hang me out to dry. I want to write from that romantic per­spective. You rewire my heart and show me how shit works. You talk to me and listen to me. It's the world in a pop-up book I can understand.

Yeah, but I'm naked.

Well, I'm naked, too.

You're not going to ask for something creepy?

No, I'm not.

I had that conversation four times. Stunned looks and soft looks followed. The last woman and I talked up to two a.m. She was a ranch worker from Kern County. She kept her hands laced behind her head. I kissed her underarms at pause points in my mono­logues. It seemed to delight her. We didn't have sex. We faded out and slept together. She leaned into me and held my left wrist.

I.

Women fall asleep first. Penny taught me that. Lover's insomnia—a primer.

She's right beside you, she's naked, you've already made love. It's a trillion sce­narios replicated. She's insensate. You're wired. You're talking to her. She's oblivi­ous. You didn't pay her to listen. She's not talking back.

Penny's bed was short and narrow. I was long-limbed and love-looped and liked to sprawl. Penny had perfected her sleep-with-men posture. She rolled away on her side and created a gap. It was symbolic. She reposed within inches. It was somewhere off Planet Earth.

I scooted closer. I let my foot brush her leg. I had reinstigated contact. Then I started talking to her in the dark.

About her, about me, about Us. About her law-school studies and my book in prog­ress. I spent occasional weekend nights at her whim. Penny would sleep in. I got up predawn and zoomed to the golf course.

The bed was a minefield. I never slept.

I craved more contact. I ran breathlessly

anxious. She never said she loved me. The relationship was tenuous and unpredict­able. I laid there and anticipated move­ment. A knee tucked my way marked confirmation. I clenched my bladder until five a.m. I fantasy-talked to Penny. I fantasy-talked to other women and felt guilty about it. Turnovers filled me with gratitude. Pull-aways filled me with dread. She's your first sober love, and she won't say the words. It's not supposed to be this way. You had it all planned out.

We met in June '79. I was six months off of the whore patrol and five months into the book. I rocked with a sense of destiny and exuded a raucous panache. My clergy­men ancestors streaked through my soul and anointed me with their calling. They had pulpits. I had my book and AA lec­terns. I had two stories to tell.

I told my life story to a captive audience. I was an accomplished public speaker at the get-go. Years of mental rehearsal had pre­pared me. An unconscious resolve shaped my testimony. I turned my journey to death's door into comedy.

No murdered mother. No bloody cough­ing fits. The jack-off man and his loony lust—that's picaresque.

It got me laughs from the AA folks. The book gave me my life's composite woman. She sprang from faces studied over my watcher's lifetime.

My hero meets her in a park I used to sleep in. She's poised on a bench with her Stradivarius. My hero hears strains of Dvorak and goes batshit.

I meet Penny in a supermarket check­out line. She's buying her nephew a hula hoop.

I got her phone number and called her. I blathered and tried to make a sound impression. I mentioned classical music in due haste. Penny's reaction was, Fuck that shit—I dig rock and roll.

She was 26 years old and from Brook­lyn, New York. She had an East Coast

accent and a slight lisp. She was Jewish. That appealed to me. It would force me to atone for prior anti-Semitism. She was a big knock-kneed woman with auburn hair and brown eyes. She was wary and warm at oddly equal intervals. She"d been through a string of boyfriends in a '70s manner and seemed amused by me. She had a married lover stashed someplace. Don"t be bummed by this. Don't be so intense. You can be my main squeeze.

Equivocation, mitigation, compromise at the gate. The suggestion of inimical values. A thorny personality. Better socialized than me. Respectful of my wild-ass path and in no way floored by it. Offering communion on her terms—take it or leave it.

Well....

We kissed on our first date. We were in Penny's car. It was a classic mutual lean-in. That part conformed to my script. Penny pulled away and said, No—like this.

I almost ran. The correction racked me. She had a car, I didn't. She would become a lawyer. I might write an unpublished book.

My self-assault outrevved her words. I leaned away, leaned back in and kissed her the right way. We kissed three more times. I understood that Kiss #4 might be rejected. I said good night before Penny could.

Date #2 was delirious. I snowed up at Penny's pad with flowers. She noticed my erection, rolled her eyes and yukked. She wanted to rent bicycles and ride a path at the beach. I hated all antic activities. My reaction showed. Penny mollified me and tried not to act impatient.

I blew my roll on the rentals and a burger lunch. That meant extra work at the golf course. We rode the bikes single file. We couldn't talk. It was existential anguish and a macho-mangled loss of control. I got pulsingly paranoid. I thought 1 saw Penny checking out a black dude. Danger! Danger! Danger! I detoured to the Dick-Size Dias­pora. Penny might be a coal burner! What if she required a hard black yard?

Lunch was torture. My stomach churned, my eyes darted. I orbed to Penny's breasts and Penny's eyes. Was she trawling for dark meat or measuring baskets? She caught my eyeball track. She said. Don't be so intense. I said, Can we go someplace and talk? Penny said, Your place?

It was a first-time afternooner. It felt pre­cipitous. My movies never equaled their coming attractions.

The move-in was synchronous. I kissed per Penny's Date #1 instructions. My bed was as too-small as her bed would be. It was over too fast. A shared desire for release pushed us through. I wanted marriage, daughters and a crib in Brent-wood. Penny wanted companionship and an open-ended blast.

Okay, let's talk now. You go first. I'm here to listen.

Penny said she couldn't. She lisped those words and shook her head. She had to go home and study tort law.

xxxxx

Her slouchy scope moved me. Her clumsi­ness ripped me up. She chewed her nails. Her hands were as big as mine. She was both ill at ease and content in her body.

We loomed over people. She was five-ten, I was six-three. We were similarly awkward and bruised from bumps into fixed objects. Walking entwined was dicey. We kept trip­ping each other.

Late lessons unfolded. I was 31 and an unschooled zealot. I never questioned Penny's honor. I lived in fear of her conten­tiousness and a streak of emotional absence. It was a fight I had to win.

My mission was to grant her impor­tance. The Curse carried a debt of formal acknowledgement. She should allot herself more power as a woman and assume potent destiny as her birthright. My assumptions were a lover's perceptive gift and the shuck of a controlling maniac.

That's what gets me. That's how I misdi-agnose female personae. That's the twisted core of my love-starved generosity.

I recast Penny in my own image. I super­imposed my drive upon her—because / was delivered from self-destructive doom, and the corollary of exalted design sure as shit worked for me. That was my grave disser­vice, whatever my intent.

Penny was smart, funny, honest, kind and proficient. The dumbfounding truth in retrospect: She was different from me. She lived in the world. She had a fam­ily, friends, colleagues, classmates. Her intelligence was generously defined and without conceit. My brain was didactic and stupefyingly attuned to personal advancement.

And we had a groovy kid-lover time— when I eased up a little bit.

Sex was sweaty and clumsy. Long arms and legs flailed. Nightstands collapsed, bathroom fixtures caved, pictures fell off of walls. Debate was active. Penny yelled and sulked more than I did. My game was to apologize and re-seduce. Penny always offered forgiveness—because I always showed up.

She kept me high-wire tense. She with­held the love talk I craved. My anxiety

and desire sizzzzzzled. She believed in my self-expressed and unconfirmed talent. She never lied to me. She dumped me, lured me back and put out one-night-only calls that I always jumped at. No marriage, no daughters, no possessive pronoun. Constant heartache and no narrative line.

I stayed in the fight. I fixed on Penny's formative trauma and tried to salve her there. Her trauma was less hyperbolic than mine. She allotted her trauma a sane contemplation and not much more. She was not out to exploit her demons for public renown.

You know, I'm not you. Won't you please lighten up?

No, I will not.

Penny had that married lover. She'd dropped details on occasion. I called him a Jew cocksucker. Penny kicked me. I boo-hooed and repented. Penny laughed and took me to bed.

I was fighting a two-front war. There's Penny. There's my book and the woman with the Stradivarius cello. Beethoven engaged in similar combat. There's the "Immortal Beloved." There's comely piano students in the meantime. Embrace me, my darling. Later, babe—I gotta write the Fifth Symphony, and I can't hear you anyway.

The presence of the married guy sanc­tioned me to prowl. I went at it, full speed.

I re-faced another set of women and

melded them into my blur. They were real women. I met them, talked to them, courted them and had brief liaisons. My new self-confidence inured me to rejec­tion. I jumped on "Yes," tried again at "Maybe," packed my tent at "No." There were AA women and nude coffee dates at "Hot Tub Fever." It was 1980. Java in the buff was risque and less than a wolf call. I met women in restaurants and movie-theater lines. I got a lot of phone numbers and developed phone-talk relationships. I waited in the dark for the phone to ring. That's still my nightly MO.

Deep talk ensued. There was a good deal of sex and no sex and sex as a topic of discussion. I picked the women dis­cerningly. I wanted women who could talk and interpose questions. The era was self-absorbed. Candor was a facet of the freewheeling lifestyle. Phone calls overlapped. I zoomed to strange addresses to have sex or not have sex or roll around clothed. I took on a confes­sor role. There was a vampiric edge to it. I wanted the women to be fucked-up, so that they would need me.

The counselor role came easy. I was actively pursuing my life's mission and had empathy to burn. I was happy because I was writing a book and was engulfed by women. They got me out of myself and back into myself and returned me refueled to the fictive woman with

the cello. The story proceeded apace with my brooding sessions and phone calls. The book me is that breathless first-person detective. He's been morally reawakened and sees the woman with the cello as his payoff. He will be with her tenuously and lose her in the end. He will be alone with her memory and wait for a new grail to seek. He will exist in a solitary and dark-roomed state. My first novel predicted the through line of my life. I didn't know it then.

Calls came in, calls went out, I got num­bers and distributed my number. Penny bombed through my life, unpredictably. She still had that married geek. She sensed my independent action and adopted a "Don't Ask" policy.

I wanted to finish my first book and start a new book quick. It would be set in 1951. I needed a face for the lonely and haunted woman in quintessence. I brain-bopped through my current life and my voyeur's path to date and came up empty. A rainy-night dream gave her to me.

She was tall and strong featured. Her hair was near red and not blonde. She wore crooked-fitting glasses and squinted without them. She came forward in laughter and nearly gasped in retreat. Mark me a prophet and recast my mysti­cism years later. She was my future lover Catherine's identical twin.

I finished my first book and started my

second book a month later. Jean Hilliker had been dead for 21 years and six months. I had nullified the red-haired girl from Shitsville, Wisconsin. Now I could trump her. Now I could write her story as fiction and quash The Curse flat.

Heedless boy, how could you know?, fate calls you home late.

My new hero was a womanizing cop. He had predatory instincts and my seeker's rationale. Catherine's presaged twin showed up early in the text. Jean Hilliker showed up dead, under a pseu­donym. A guy based on my dad killed my mom. The cop met a lawyer based on Penny. A dipshit kid represented me at age nine. The cop and the lawyer res­cued his sanitized ass.

A family ripped asunder and a family reborn. Isn't that sweet?

It worked dramatically. It further entombed Jean Ilillikerand postponed the rush of The Curse.

I dedicated the second book to Penny. She swooned over the manuscript and de­clined to sleep with me that night.

Both books were sold to a publisher. The combined advance was chump change. I decided to move to New York. L.A. felt old and constricting. Fewer phone calls were coming in. I sensed that the women had found real lovers. New York would provide me with a whole new swirl of faces.

I made some good-bye calls. None of the women called me back. Penny and I had a last nooner. The hookers had vaporized off the Sunset Strip. The Hancock Park houses looked the same. I looked Marcia Sidwell up in a half dozen phone books and didn't find her. The real Joan turned 16 that year. Catherine turned 18.

I looked Penny up in '07. She was 54. She was married, had a teenage son and lawyered for the state AG. She'd read most of my books. Our first phone chat was a catch-up.

She asked me how many ex-wives and daughters I had. I said, Two and none. She asked me if I still sat in the dark by the phone. I confirmed it. She said, You'll always do that.

7.

Paperback writer.

My first book hit the stands in Sep­tember '81. It sold scant copies. There was no author photo and no woman with a cello represented. The cover sucked Airedale dicks. Fuck—a man with a gun and a golf course.

I found a basement pad in Westchester County. I got a caddy job at Wykagyl Coun­try Club. The Big Apple was a train hop south. I blew my book cash on Hancock Park threads gauged for cold weather. I dressed up for jaunts to Manhattan. I knew She'd be there.

My book agent quit the biz and offered me some referrals. My third manuscript was white-hot and ready to unload. Two male agents urged extensive rewrites. A female agent looooved the book and thought I was cute. New York, the go-go '80s, a slinky woman of pedigree. She had hard brown eyes. She cleaned her glasses on her blouse tails and soft-focused her heart. We

had dinner and a nightcap at her place. She played me a new record—the Pointer Sisters, with "Slow Hand."

"Darling, don't say a word, 'cause I've already heard, what your body's sayin' to mine."

I believed it.

The bedroom faced north. The Empire State Building filled the window. The spire was lit up red, white and green. The woman and I undressed. This ardent arriviste had arrived.

xxxxx

The basement was my all-time dark­est brood den. The lady upstairs was a conductor's widow. Music kept lilt­ing through my vents. She went too heavy on the Mozart and too light on the Liszt. I didn't care. My publisher rejected my third novel. They found the sex-fiend cop and his feminist-poet girlfriend hard to believe. They were right. I wrote the book in a let's-ditch-L.A.-and-find-f/£/?-in-New-York fugue state. My quasi-girlfriend agent sent the book to 17 other publishers. They all said nyet. My quasi-agent girlfriend dropped me as a client and pink-slipped me as a quasi-boyfriend. I owed her $150 for Xerox fees. I paid her off with extra golf-course bread.

A male agent coerced me into a rewrite. I went at it, reluctantly. Win­ter hit. Caddy season ended. I worked dishwasher and stockroom gigs and lived u//racheap. Manhattan magnetized me. The faces popped out of dense sidewalk traffic. The women were overcoated, hat­ted and scarved. I couldn't see enough skin to read auras. Cold air and breath condensation. Voyeur prowls deterred.

I habituated coffee bars and got num­bers. I got callbacks at a low percentage of my L.A. rate. I lived in the burbs. That was declasse. You wrote a book. So? You schlep bags at a golf club. Stockbrokers are more my meat.

The burbs were sfxile. I kept hearing that. I lacked lifestyle loot. I kept hearing that. Publishing parties got me some clout and indoor access. I saw the first Her at a Murray Hill bash.

She was a big preppy woman. She ran six feet and probably outweighed me. Tartan skirt, winter boots, burning eyes and freck­les. She was THE OTHER, assuredly.

I walked to the can, combed my hair and adjusted my necktie. I popped back to the party. She vanished—auf Wiedersehen.

I prowled the surrounding blocks and didn't see her. I went back to the bash and interrogated the guests. I came on too persistent. The host suggested that I leave. 1 flipped his necktie into his face and skedaddled.

The night was cold. The moon was full. I walked up Fifth Avenue, baying. Passersby swerved around me. Dogs bayed back from swank apartments. I cut east on 43rd Street and hotfooted it toward Grand Central. I saw a woman hailing a cab just west of Madison. The Brooks Brothers windows golden-glowed her. She was blonde. Her overcoat was mud spattered. She wore red leather gloves. She was shivering. Her face

was goose bumped, her hair was askew, she'd chewed off her lipstick. Her nose was too big. Her chin was too strong. She was THE OTHER, incontestably.

I fast-walked toward her. An eastbound cab pulled by me. The woman opened the door and got in the backseat. I sprinted, slid on my feet and hit the rear bumper. The woman looked around and saw me. I winced. My knees were ratched from the collision. I smiled. It spooked the woman. She looked away. The cab turned north­bound and brodied on hard snow.

Easy come, easy go. It was cold. My knees hurt. I could relive the heavy heartache back at my pad. Douse the lights and spin the Chopin nocturnes. Baby, we were close. It should have been.

I limped to Grand Central. The wait­ing room was crowded and overheated. I bought my ticket and walked onto the train. 1 saw the woman. She was THE OTHER, incontrovertibly.

She was tall, sandy haired and 10 years older than me. She had grail-grabbing gray eyes and a gaunt and sweet face.

She was carrying a cumbersome portfo­lio. I helped her hoist it to the rack above the seats. She thanked me. We sat down together and talked.

Her name was Marge. She was a com­mercial artist. She'd been showing work samples at ad agencies all day. I asked her how it went. She said, Bad. She was in a dry spell. She inquired about my employment. I told her I'd written two published books and worked at a country club. Your family? I don't have one.

She smelled like wet wool and dissi­pating eau de bath. She sat on my right. Her damp hair brushed my windbreaker. She asked me where I detrained. I said, Bronxville. I said, Your destination? She said, Tarrytown.

The train chugged through north Man­hattan and the Bronx. Milk-run stops slowed the passage and pressed time in on me. We talked and leaned toward each other. I tried to read Marge and sensed her reading me. It was soft voiced. Small anec­dotes made big points. We spoke contra-puntally and never interrupted. Our hands

brushed. We retained the contact. The pact was synchronous.

I said something funny. Marge laughed, displayed bad teeth and covered her mouth. 1 showed her my bad teeth. She laughed and held my chin to get a better look. I put my hand on her hand and steadied it. She said, Your teeth are worse than mine, and let her hand drop.

We looked away and gave the moment a breather. The train jiggled. We bumped. 1 brain-scrolled the script.

I instill confidence, she rebukes rash­ness, we consolidate our hurt. Dogs on the bed and warm nights in cold climates. Her older-woman status and insecurity. My assurance of how much 1 loved it. Her body's ripening currents over time. That eau de bath caught first thing in the morning.

The Bronxville stop approached. Marge and I shared a look. She said, I'm married.

I touched her shoulder and got up. Our knees brushed. My knee spasmed from the stunt with the cab. I got off the train, walked down the platform and stood by Marge's window. She pressed her hand up to her side of the glass. I placed my hand over it.

xxxxx

The brood den enclosed me. Caddy gigs and chump jobs kept me borderline sol­vent. I wrote and chased.

The sex-fiend cop became a hardback trilogy. The feminist poet was supplanted by a brainy call girl and the cop's resur­rected ex-wife. The woman-with-a-cello book stayed in print. Ditto the my-mom-got-whacked-and-rm-in-flight epic.

I was happy. I was grateful. I wrote books for minor remuneration and got minor acclaim. I was too circumspect to self-immolate and too tall and good-looking to lose. All my crazy shit stayed suppressed.

New York in the '80s. Jesus—what a fucking ride!!!!!

The city was felicitously female. It was a dizzying disproportion. The face pool was bottomless and bottomlessly reflecting. I kept seeing myself.

My prescience had deserted me. The Curse had been roadblocked by hard work and a curt dismissal of the debt. I was out looking for women looking back and up at me.

My watcher's lifetime ran nearly four decades. My debilitating hunger was vaulted and loekboxed. I believed that it had given me mastery and an end­less ticket to ride. Doped-up self-sex had almost proven fatal. I sought death to prove my love to a ghost. It was the unconscious courting of reunion. I wanted to expunge our disparities and unite us as a whole. I went at women because they were there. My revised standards denoted my flight from and back to the vault. I started to think that almost any woman could save me—if I confessed hard enough.

The stories I wrote controlled this self-phenomenon. I acceded to the strictures of the hard-boiled school and honed my craft. 1 perfected the art of womanizing

simultaneously. I felt the weight of hor­rible circumstance upon me. It was huge. It did not justify my predation. I once scanned faces for rectitude. Now I read them for susceptibility to male charm.

One-night stands, short-term deals, longer-term girlfriends. Sex and no sex, brood sessions and phone calls. "No" was still "No"—but I heard it less and less. I was that attuned to female discontent.

Fuck—the phone rang a lot. I kept a C-note tucked away for late-night cabs to the Apple. They were all decent women. No STDs, no coke-dealer boyfriends, no Glenn Close with a knife. They loooved my I-want-a-wife-and-daughters spiel. It was abstractly true. It was specifically and equally true that I didn't want it with them. I knew it going in. I shouldn't have lied. I possessed greater honesty in my unlaid and mystical state. I never bought their let's-see-how-shit-plays-out routine. That permissive jive got kicked out of me in L.A. I capitulated to the notion for more sex and softness. I rejected it in my heart of hearts—and my heart of hearts cradles my conscience.

If sex is to be everything, then so She must be. I did not bring you this far to drop you in an inappropriate bedroom. This woman does not possess your ferocity. You'll know her if and when you meet her. God is speaking to you.

Stand back now. Sex is the investing of your full soul and imagination.

I know it consciously now. The revela­tion often curtains my current time alone in the dark. I ached for the kinship of the body then. I wanted every touch, taste and breath I could have. I was too compromised to ever let it be just that.

xxxxx

I wanted an unnamed woman. It was the inextinguishable flame of my life. I wanted to write a woman's story. I knew her name: Elizabeth Short.

The Blturk Dahlia.

Factors postponed the book. John Greg­ory Dunne had brilliantly explored the case in True Confessions. I had to differenti­ate my book from Mr. Dunne's. I had to grant Betty Short a precious identity. An investigative saga. An obsessed narrator. An accretion of horror and a rich female spirit disinterred. A lonely detective's journey from wantonness to love.

I began microfilm research and stitched up the plot. I recognized Jean Hilliker as a sister phantom reborn and dedicated the book to her. Honor the debt and reseal the tomb. Tell the story on your best-selling book tour. Combine Jean and Betty and ignore the enveloping issue of women. Seek more recent phantoms who might assuage you or teach you or at least fall for your act.

Marcia Sidwell and Marge kept nudg­ing me. They played hell with my phone-call stints and stunts with present women. 1 called directory assistance once a week and tried to track Marcia. I had a friend post a note at that L.A. laundromat. I checked Grand Central station for Marge. I cruised the Tarrytown station and lurked by the tracks. My landlady told me about

the film Brief Encounter. It was a circa-'45 British weeper. A man meets a woman in a train station. She's married, he's not. They acknowledge their love and kowtow to propriety and circumstance. My land­lady said, You'd dig the soundtrack—it's all Rachmaninoff.

Bummer. You don't fold before circum­stance. You're a weak sack of shit if you do.

True in 1985. Still true today.

Things were getting better. Book money trickled and almost flowed in. I tossed my caddy cleats. I wrote Betty's story as the phone did or did not ring.

And it was just that good and just that acclaimed. And it sold just that well. And it honored Jean Hilliker—as a fount of male inspiration and an opportunity.

People magazine ran a feature. The pho­tos flattered me. I had a listed phone num­ber. Four women called out of the blue.

Women #1 and #2 sounded crazy. I got off the line quick. I kowtowed to circum­stance with the others. Beethoven grinned and scowled above us. Jesus, what a run! and You re a fucking scheisskopf!

I always get what I want. It comes slow or fast and always costs a great deal.

The world veered toward me. Acknowl­edgement and compensation flowed. I bought women I just met four-figure cash­mere sweaters. I overtipped waitresses to the verge of bankruptcy. I sent half the female universe flowers. Sex was there or was not there. I stayed in my dark basement with big bucks in the bank. The phone rang or did not ring. I wrote three more great fucking books. Joan and Catherine came of age a few miles south. They did not know each other or know me.

Propriety beckoned. Marriage and daughters became a fixation. I proposed to two women in short-term relationships. They vehemently declined. I proposed to a longer-term sweetheart. She said Yes. I ran from her as we said our vows and settled in Hancock Park East.

Our home was too spacious and airy. Marriage countermanded my mandate of seduce and explain. Cohabitation was constricting. My wife was in no way culpa­ble. My office was too bright. My yard was too big. My wife was probity defined. She-got me as much as women got me and played out her end of the string. I wanted out, so I got out. I had to be back in that dark hole, with a phone line plugged in.

Beethoven winked in welcome. Divorce was an exacting legal duty. Repentance came naturally. I saw the hasty union as atonable misconduct. My wife saw my departure as demons aswirl.

There's the dark, there's the phone, there's the Grosse Fuge.

"Take note of what you are seeking, for it is seeking you."

It's a paraphrase. Some swoony swami said it. Attribution doesn't matter, because it is true.

I always get what I want. I conjured her, so she came.

Lover, confidante, subverter, mighty soul and sacred comrade.

Hark the mime Helen Knode.