The Hilliker Curse, Part III

PURSUIT Of UJ0IDO

PART

f he women's faces evap­orated. The march of Them stopped at Her. She was sui

generis. I took immediate note.

She slid into a booth at the Pacific Dining Car. Her jour­nalist ex-boyfriend was inter­viewing me. I was jet-lagged and raw. My L.A. trips always scared me and confirmed my retreat. Helen said she felt sur­real. Four tooth extractions and a painkiller buzz. She said God had spoken to her—you must begin your life's work.

She was 33. She was small and fit. She wore slick-soled shoes and moved with deft pivots. She had light brown hair and blue eyes. Her glasses were too big. Her clothes were cut too trim.

I talked about myself. Helen hadn't heard of me. The ex-boyfriend tried to brief her. Helen acted bored. She wore too much lipstick. Take off your glasses and dig on me, please.

The ex-boyfriend gobbled his steak. I ignored my food and eyeballed Helen. She com­plained about her teeth. She took off her glasses and rubbed her jaw.

There's the softness. There's the God sense. There's the pro­portionate hurt and pizzazz.

I concocted some one-liners. Helen said she had to split. She cited a boyfriend and sore gums. I stood up and thanked her for coming. Helen studied me.

xxxxx

The brood den was fall-winter cozy. I was completing a new novel and sharing bed space with my ex-dog. My ex-wife got custody. Barko bunked with me weekends. Women weren't calling. My recent marriage had created a phone slump. I talked to my ex-wife's dog in the dark.

I miss Barko and look for­ward to our heavenly reunion. He was a homicidal bull ter­rier with an evil yen for human females. I gave him a veeery deep voice. We sprawled together and dis­cussed Helen Knode.

Her ex-boyfriend had fed

HE FINOS HER AT LAST. THE ONE.

AMERICAN TABLOID HITS BIG-TIME. 1.4.

CONFIDENTIAL FILLS THEATERS. CRACKS

DEVELOP. GHOSTS RUSH BACK IN.

IN THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR'S THIRD INSTALLMENT OF HIS MULTI­PART MEMOIR. HE GETS ALL HE EVER WANTED AND PAYS WITH HIS SANITY

me the info. Barko and I riffed off the established facts.

She wrote for the LA. Weekly. It was a counterculture rag fueled by lovelorn singles postings and prostitution ads. Helen's gig was bad-girl critic. She reviewed films, wrote features and penned a memoir column entitled Weird Sister. It was tell-all/polemic. Attack the right, decry gender bias, ballyhoo sex as politics.

Her people were Texans in the oil biz. She was the eldest of four. Dad squandered the family fortune and pushed Mom to Splitsville. Helen spent her late teen years in Kansas City and Lawrence. She lettered in tennis at KU. She got a master's degree at Cornell and plaved cowgirl

cutup. Paris was next. Woo! Woo! It's Hurricane Helene!

She's rug-burned from rambunctious ruts and sordid sorties at the Sorbonne! She's fragging frisson-frazzled frogs en masse! She wears a black beret and mainlines espresso! Four guys in one night? I dug it, but didn't want to believe it. Barko tor­mented me with that.

I was less than obsessed and much more than tweaked. Work obsessed me. I was reliving L.A., '58. My corrupt-cop hero was torqued on a murderous carhop. She was equal parts ex-girlfriend Glenda and Swedish soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. I stared at a poster of the mesmeric mezzo and time-warped her to my book. Barko consid­ered this pursuit unmanly.

Helen's ex-boyfriend said she was reading my books and was digging their romantic sweep. I read Helen's feature work and memoir mishigas. She was sig­nificantly good. God wanted her to jump-start her life's work. I knew what that was.

Marry me. Write a righteous crime novel. Co-opt the L.A.

hipster-journalist scene. Critique present-day Holly­wood and media culture. Portray your hatred for your boozed-out dad and your as yet undiscovered love for me. I'm God's conduit.

Spring '91. Cold nights and consoling darkness. The silent telephone. The demonic talking dog. Anne Sofie's lush lieder, sung directly to me. Helen Knode—raucous on my mind.

My book neared completion. Helen's ex-boyfriend requested another interview. I said, I'll fly out now. He said the magazine won't cover it. I said, / will.

Helen moved first.

She'd read my last three books. The Black Dahlia wrecked her. The wantonness-versus-love motif did it. She grokked my weird-ass feminism. It inspired an idea: Write a Dahlia-based cover piece for the LA. Weekly. Her move: Will you show me around the sites?

She looked different that day. She was fresh scrubbed and even more intent. L.A. was rain-damp. Helen wore jeans and boots. We toured the Dahlia dump site and the Hollywood locations. Storm clouds brewed. I wanted to sit in Helen's car and wait out the longest thunderstorm

in world history. I knew our heads and hearts would trans­port us solar-system-wide.

It stayed dry. We trekked Beachwood Canyon, side by side. We talked. We monologued at similar length and rarely interrupted. My book on a dead woman gave us this world. I never said "Jean Hilliker" or "my mother." Helen went to abstraction as I held to anecdote. It challenged me. It made me ascribe meaning to my most-repeated tales. We discussed romanticism. Helen described the lit­erary precedents. I ran down symphonic music. Content must dictate form. Form must be recognizable. Passion must never be squalid. Love must run in precise counter-

point to loss and death. Helen said it first: All drama is a man meets a woman.

It had never been like this. I knew it then. Helen knew it in exact proportion.

We talked ourselves out on big ideas. We got lunch at a pita pit on Sunset. I calculated our age gap: nine years, four months, 12 days.

We were fried. Helen yawned and rubbed her eyes. Pro­saic shit hovered. I had two more days in L.A. Helen's ex-boyfriend was throwing a bash the next night. Helen and her current boyfriend were invited. It vibed train wreck. I knew I'd create a scene. I sensed Helen sensing it.

The Dahlia day wound down. Our big talk cut through small talk to no talk. I did not deliver God's plan for Helen. I resisted the urge to propose.

Our good-byes were brusque. It was telepathy. We knew this: To address the day would be to affirm it and change our lives forever.

I slept poorly that night. The moon did funny things. I'd called my landlady back East. She said Barko attacked the

poster of Anne Sofie von Otter. I predicted Helen Knode's next three actions.

I knew she'd call me and bail on the party. I knew she'd cite her boyfriend. I knew she'd say, Where is this going?

I said, I'll write you a letter on the airplane. She said, I'll write you back.

Vows affirmed, call to honor, sacred pledge.

xxxxx

The correspondence began. We were constrained by dis­tance and work commitments. Helen dumped her boy­friend. We were reinvesting in sex. Our letters set a lofty tone. We were comrades on a mission of unvanquish-able love. That concept defined all our musings. Helen crafted the notion of BCE and ACE. They meant "before the common era" and "after the common era." The Black Dahlia Day formed the dividing line. We viewed life as our private adventure. Our preceding round-heeled stunts were auditions for a sizzling monogamy. We explored the gestalt of a-man-meets-a-woman. We riffed on films, books, music and politics. Helen refused to pigeonhole me as a right-wing mystic. I poked at her bad-girl Marxism and got her to concede that (continued on page 108)

THE HILUKER CURSE

(continued from page 50) she'd outgrown the pose. Our letters were breathless with what it all meant.

Nightly phone calls complemented our written texts. The banal-chat quotient ran zero. Sex was our low voices cloaked in collusion. The coastal gap allowed me to finish my new novel and yearn for Helen alone in the dark.

I bought a new Anne Sofie von Otter poster and kept Barko away from it. I brooded on Helen to the exclusion of all other women. I reread her letters and cali­brated new responses. We spoke for hours at a pop. I laid out portentous epigrams. Helen cut loose with scattergun insight. She was smarter than me. I lost my men­tal grounding and flailed for bright things to say. God threw us together. 1 believed it then and believe it no less vigorously now. I downplayed my religiousness and

stressed a reluctant egalitarianism Helen was a brain-broiler. I was a caffeine-cooked autodidact in over his head. One thing consoled me: I knew God"s big plan for Helen before she did.

We collided at the airport. Our embrace scorched baggage claim. Helen's hair looked darker. Tears washed her eyes an even paler blue.

We kissed in her car. Airport cacophony drowned out my heartbeat. I was tantricly tapped and two-months tumescent. L.A. looked all new. It was our town more than my town now. I reserved us a suite at the Mondrian Hotel. It was my favorite local brood spot. I wanted to desaturate my images of all other women with Helen Knodc right there.

The valet-park guys knew me and dug me. I overtipped and exuded big-white-bwana savoir-faire. I laid on the largesse.

The guys called me Jeff. The desk fag whizzed us upstairs.

Helen whooped at the suite and yukked at my gauche while-trash glee. We gobbled honor-bar almonds and ran to the bed. It wasn't anything I had pre­dicted, fantasized, soundtracked or brain-screened before. Helen's hands on my face refrained my whole life.

Draped windows darkened us and eclipsed the Sunset Strip. Time did a lust-bunker thing. Locations and climates merged, l.ovemaking and talk got twisted into a slow-burning fuse. My mind went blank as I counted the moles on Helen's back. We tossed a pillow on the bedside clock. Street noise subsided to a purr.

We found robes and cracked the cur­tains for some face-reading light. Dusk backlit Helen in mid-laugh. I said, "Will you marry me?" Helen whooped and said, "Yes, I will."

xxxxx

So you found Her.

What does it mean?

Where does it take you ?

// means everything. It takes you everywhere. You follow her lead.

My credo: Expect nothing, risk every­thing, give all. Helen's rejoinder: Yes, assume risk. You will gain or lose, commen­surate with your deepest consciousness and the purity of your intent.

I felt cleansed. Helen's joy was emancipa­tion. She stamped the deed to The Curse paid in mil. and dared me to dance to her tune.

Lover, confidante, sacred comrade. Sati­rist and funny motherfucker.

Nobody had ever reallllh gotten me. Nobody had ever reallllh gotten her. Our imaginations merged. Our zests for life overlapped. Helen Knode and James Ellroy—that's entertainment!

We looked gooooood together. We exem­plified yuks and fucks with refinement. We were fuuuuunny. We were always concoct­ing hilarious shit.

Helen messed with my memory. She de-genderized it. I forgot female faces seen and recalled, girls stalked and B&E'd. Helen recast iconic figures and demoted them to bit roles. Marcia Sidwell and the wish-named Joan?—now synaptic flotsam. Helen's message: I'm here, they're not. Let's make love and laugh.

We scheduled our wedding for fall '91 and rented a house in Laurel Canyon. Helen bowed to my desire for a Christian service and stipulated a female pastor. The woman told Helen that our union would not last—because I had darly eyes.

I met Helen's family. I liked them fine and dominated them with a bul­lying exuberance. I didn't know from families. Their social codes and clash of egos vexed me. I ballyhooed myself and extolled Barko's antics. Barko porked human women and sold dope in south-side L.A. The Knodes laughed through their shock and did a "Boy, Helen's met her match" number. Helen kicked me when my shtick failed to fly.

Issues percolated. I had a sweet three-book deal and wanted to glom a pad in Connecticut. I loved the East Coast and

craved more access to Barko. Helen was reluctant. The East reeked of the deep tsuris of her Cornell grad-school days. L.A. was her town now. / couldn't live in that ghost zone. Helen agreed to the move. It invigorated me. I delivered God's plan for her.

She got it. The crime novel, the female journo in duress. The hated father, a botched patricide, the cop-lover redolent of me. Brilliant Helen: She heard me out and started popping plot points within minutes. I knew she'd excel at the task.

Spring '91. Warm nights and the overfur-nished love shack. The moment I turned 43 years, two months and seven days of age and outlived Jean Hilliker.

Helen said I would outlive her influence. Our union was proof positive.

I dubbed Helen the Cougarwoman. She was sleek, tawny and indigenous to the Western plains. She was conversant with outre religions and grokked their animal worship. She called me Big Dog, because I loved dogs and bayed extemporaneously. My dog-den mentality unnerved her. I liked to be alone with her or plain alone in tightly structured spaces. 1 craved con­tainment. I viewed other people as den crashers. I wanted to contain our relation­ship and four-wall it. It was wild-ass one-on-one. The exclusive nature sandbagged my long-standing fixation with daughters.

Helen didn't rule out children. It was put on indefinite hold. Passion ruled our imme­diate moments.

Summer '91. Weekend jaunts to Santa Barbara. We always ate at a joint called Paul Bhalla's Cuisine of India. It was always empty or close to it. The place felt talismanic and linked to our fate. I did not want that restaurant to tank or close. We had to be able to go back and thwart the passage of time there. Helen always sat to my left. She took her glasses off and made her eyes kaleidoscopes. Fear slammed me then. / must never lose this woman. Please, Cod. Don't let her die or let anything rip its apart.

Our wedding: 10/4/91. Two rooms at the Pacific Dining Car.

Helen wore a peach-pink '50s vintage dress. I wore my ancestral kilt. Helen looked stunningly cougarlike and hip/feral. The pastor performed our hybrid vows. I got Christian lip service and Helen got lots of new-age woo-woo. The pastor glared at me, but did not mention my darty eyes.

Helen's family flew in. My publishing friends flew in from New York. The toasts ran heartfelt and slightly off-color. Helen tossed out zingers like "hot cougar love" and quoted Doris Lessing: "Marriage is sex and courage." I threw out a mock-impromptu rock song, replete with lurid lyrics. Helen whooped and busted me to

the guests. "That's a retread. Big Dog! You wrote that for one of your ex-bitches!"

Steak dinners oftthe menu and a custom wedding cake. Cross-table chitchat while Helen worked the room and 1 withdrew into my head. 1 brain tripped. Jean Hilliker would be 76 years, live months and 19 days old had she lived.

Helen pirouetted. 1 watched her dress swirl.

Please, God, don't let this end.

Please, God, let us ascend to you at the same instant.

xxxxx

Helen recharted my brainscape. She was flat-out alive. Jean Hilliker was the entomber. My mother ghost-danced through dark rooms and encouraged me to scroll faces. Helen cracked the blackout curtains and let me glimpse the light outside.

We moved to New Canaan, Connecticut. My ex-wife and ex-dog lived a few miles away. Helen dug the greenbelt aspect and hated the surrounding urbanism. I bullied her there. Our tidal-wave courtship came with a price. The move ripped her away from her family and friends. It dumped her in a hostile but b with a family-less man and a talking ex-dog. I levied a jive male mandate. We have to live here, that's the bottom line, you'll get used to it. The fucked-up subtext: A wan's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

New Canaan was Hancock Park East. I lured Helen to a reconstructed memory zone. She subverted my relationship to my past as we lived a re-creation of it.

She was homesick. She ragged New Canaan as she torch-songed L.A. She moved for a man. It rankled her feminism. Manhattan brought back her wild days as an Kast Village journo. She was past all that kid shit now. The East torqued her as it cradled me.

We settled in. Helen began work on her novel. I compiled notes on a political epic. It was my first non-L.A.-set fiction. I saw L.A. as a dark room I couldn't revisit. I wanted to compartmentalize my geographical his­tory. I viewed my marriage as a legal docu­ment that expunged our collective past. We were united in pursuit of a divine efficacy. Our purpose was to sustain each other and create big art.

That was my mission statement. It was not Helen Knode's. I did not inflict it upon her as a philosophy or a step-by-step task. I saw it as a logical expression of our great rapport. There was She, there was Me, there was Women relinquished as Obses­sion. Helen was considerably more flex­ible and viewed my agendas as liberating in intention and often restricting in prac­tice. I lived with the woman who was and is the great love of my life. She was inher­ently delightful. It sugarcoated her cri­tique of my abysmal social skills, barnyard table manners and household helplessness. Helen was hilarious—even when pissed off. She called me Big Dog with love and Zoo Animal in exasperation.

I was impervious, imperious, oblivi­ous. The manifestations were all prepos­terously male. I could earn big dough, but not read credit card bills or balance checkbooks. I dug good chow, but refused to cook. I made exultant animal sounds in the John and treated the place as my personal trough. I grandstanded at family gatherings or skulked off to brood in the dark. Social gigs left Helen frayed-wire tense. I pulpit-pounded and baited her left-leaning friends. I seized up around other men and dominated them with glares, right-wing barbs and general ran­cor. Helen nursed that low fury and blew up on occasion. I repented on occasion and reneged on my vows to change.

It was easy to repent and easier to renege. I saw Helen's beefs as small when com­pared to the big blast of US. I was blithely disrespectful. It dishonored our marriage. I know it now. I didn't know it then.

The Big Blast was all-encompassing. I tinned Helen on to boxing and watched her become a rabid fan. We went to piano recitals at Carnegie Hall. Helen fed me drafts of her personal wisdom and watched me work them into my worldview. We went to films and further anthropomorphized Barko—New Canaan's K-9 King.

Helen attacked the discipline of the crime novel with cougarlike tenacity and Knodeian konviction. It thrilled me and vouched my great faith in her. She never took my name. She remained a Knodc and not an Ellroy. I'm a matriarchalist now. I wasn't then. I wasn't yet a Hilliker in my soul. I watched Helen write her way out of

my shadow—as I worked triple overtime to make that shadow- grow.

The political novel incubated pre-Helen. It derived from my conscious decision to dump L.A. as my sole fic­tional locale. The preceding L.A. Quar­tet was my hometown elegy and another giant contain-Jcan Hilliker compartment. Those books were all Bad Men in Love With Strong Women.

I was obsessed with women then. The emotional text was preordained. I was in love with one woman now. My whole world swerved. 1 got de- and re-compartmental­ized. Helen rendered all other women ster­ile. My all-new novel got d<--sexualized.

And more sophisticated and colder. And more about ruthless men and self-seeking solitude.

I know it now. I didn't know it then.

My life was blessedly contained. I had a safe place to work and brood. Containment means suppression. Suppression festers and explodes in the end. Helen bought me time. It allowed me to go insane at a slow and highly productive pace.

Crazy boy, you still don't know, no woman can save you.

». You're working loo hard.

Helen kept saying it. I kept calling my energy a by-product of US. One woman instead of women. You have to dig that.

Helen was skeptical. We're not making love like we used to. You've become disembodied. You're always off in your head.

Helen's candor unnerved me. I felt like I'd trashed our romantic code and abridged our marital vows. Sex was every­thing. We both believed it. We were two years in. I rejected the old marriage-as-complacency saw. Helen rejected it with the same fervor. I stonewalled Helen's sug­gestion of looming dysfunction. There's trouble in paradise. Don't tell me this.

Shit, there's seepage. One compartment's fissured now. Fuck, I'm happy. I'm writing a new novel. I'm living big history at a trillion RPMs. I'm devotedly in love with you. I may be approaching contentment. Please don c hit me with this—yet.

That was my rationale. It was halfway true. The other half was more problem­atic. I was a cut-and-run guy pre-Helen. I never got to this point before. This is where we confront and surmount. Please don't make me do it—yet.

And I'm tired of chasing and seduc­ing. And my erotic fire has embered and weirdly reflamed. My book is a scorching blaze. Now sex is power and power is fic­tion and fiction has replaced sex. Darling, it's all tangled. I only want to be with you. Let's not broach this—yet.

The men in my new novel were power mad. They were dissemblers and comparl-mentalizers. They were me sans all con­science and the guidance of Helen Knode. Helen Knode personified an exponential shift in my thinking. Helen Knode's coun­sel led me to write a new kind of book. Helen Knode saved me from my gender-wide crush on women. Helen Knode got to the truth before I did in most cases. Now she got me to this.

Please. Cougar—not yet.

I ran, I postponed, I diverted, I crawled back in my head. Infrequent liaisons sealed the compartment. The fissures contracted and held.

American Tabloid was the private night­mare of public policy. The infrastructure was power grab in place of love as redemp­tion. Women veered through the book in subordinate roles. I wanted to write an all-new kind of novel and incinerate my ties to L.A. The former was laudable, the latter was not. L.A. made me. Jean Hilliker was killed there. I met Helen Knode a block from where I was born. The book was almost finished. Helen kept saying, You're working too hard.

Christmas '93 approached. Helen had written a draft of her book and gave me pages to read. They were impressive and unstylized by my inflated standards. I ladled on a line edit and Ellroyized the prose. Helen laughed at the loony lan­guage loops and tossed the pages back in my face.

The toss-back was loving. We laughed about it then. I cut Knodeisms and juked the text with macho-maimed mishigas. It did not feel rancorous then. I'll postdate and dissect my animus now.

1 was running from the marriage. I was back in my dark-room mode. I was the shirker and Helen was the confronter. Our domestic drama was starting to swerve along standard gender lines. I found that repellent. My job was to pull back from my productive mania and give Helen all of myself once again.

I couldn't do it.

I didn't know how to do it.

I didn't know that I should do it and had to do it—yet.

Then The Curse took an all-new form and Jean Hilliker bought us some time.

xxxxx

We exchanged gifts Christmas morning. I gave Helen a cashmere sweater and a

blazer. Helen gave me a bomber jacket. Barko got a shitload of bones.

Helen pointed to the last package. It was rectangular and festively wrapped.

She said the gift required some research. She expressed trepidation. She said, I hope you won't be upset.

I unwrapped the package. I felt the frame and saw black-and-white flickers behind glass. I instantly knew what it was.

The L.A. Times photo. Quickly dismissed in '58. Unheralded that Christmas. Fre­quently reproduced and perhaps over-scrutinized now.

I'm a doofus 10-year-old. I'm wearing a plaid shirt and light-colored pants. My zip­per is prophetically half down. The cops just said, "Son, your mother's dead.'

Helen always cuts to the punch line. She asked me what I was thinking then and what I was thinking now.

I said, "Opportunity."

xxxxx

I had a magazine-feature gig within weeks and a book deal a month later. My first job: View Jean Hilliker's murder file and describe the jolt. My second: Hire a homi­cide cop and attempt to solve the case. Write an investigative autobiography.

The Curse was a formal summons of death. This new codicil empowered me to again exploit misfortune. I had to encapsulate the Hilliker-Ellroy journey as a crime tale. It was a specious task at the get-go. Jean Hilliker and I comprise a love story. It was born of shameful lust and shaped by the power of invective. Our ending was not and could never be the apprehension of a killer and a treatise on the victim-killer nexus. My precocious sexuality foreshadowed The Curse and preordained the resolution as my over­weening desire for women.

I knew we would not find the killer. I knew my murder memoir would portray an arc of reconciliation and lockbox Jean Hilliker

anew. I was deliriously callow in 1994. 1 believed thai all resolutions could be prop­erly captured within narrative form. Helen knew otherwise. She gave me the picture so that 1 might view it in wonder and benefit in indefinable ways. She added mitigat­ing clauses to The Curse without knowing that The Curse existed. Helen contended then and still contends that 1 always write my way through to the truth. She believes that 1 rarely get it right the first time and that I often impose form at the expense of content. She knew that Jean Hilliker was more than a murder victim and less than a fount of rapturous worship. She sent me out to grasp at verisimilitude—in the hope it would sustain and enrich both of us.

I lived in Los Angeles for 15 months. I talked to Helen every night. We had sev­eral East Coast/West Coast reunions and got back fractions of sex here and there. I was always distracted. Sex had always been pursuit and the controlled performance of the act. Awareness does not equal sponta­neity in bed. My current task was to play detective and frame my mother safely within book pages.

I read ancient police Tiles and compiled notes. My partner and I interviewed scores of elderly barflies and ex-policemen. We got a great deal of TV and newspaper play. All our work got us nowhere. We lived the dead-end/unsolved-crime metaphysic. I brooded in the dark with Rachmani-nolf and Prokofiev. The music described romanticism's descent into 20th century horror. I knew we'd never find the killer. I took copious notes on my emerging mental relationship with my mother. I understood that the force of my memoir would derive from a depiction of that inner journey. I erred in that regard. I knew that recon­ciliation was the only proper ending as I signed my book contract. I learned very little about Jean Hilliker's death. I gained considerable knowledge about her life and structured my revelations in a salaciously self-serving manner.

I was her, she was me, we were doppel-gangers and mirrored souls in duress.

I believed it then. I consider it fraudulent and dramatically expedient now. I let the convenient theme of oneness stand as the truth. I did not acknowledge the calculated maliciousness of I he Curse or reveal that I would never know Jean Hilliker as long as I sought atonement in women.

The investigation continued. American Tabloid was published midway through. It was a smash. I book-toured and deftly segued from doomed mom to doomed JKK. The lease on the Connecticut pad expired. Helen and I considered our options and decided to move to Kansas City. She had family there. I dug the high-swank pockets around Ward Parkway. We flew in and pur­chased a six-bedroom Tudor crib. Woo— Hancock Park on growth hormones!

Helen did all the relocation shitwork. I wall zed in and wall/.ed back out to play cop. My absence enraged Helen. She teethed on it. Our daily phone talks were rife with her resentment and my half­hearted repentance.

The investigation was boring me. Jean Ililliker had been recast and realigned

with my current orbit. I was tapped out on her. My orbit shifted. I got realigned with the faces.

They came at me. I did not seek them out. It was an unconscious remigration. My exchange of marital vows carried a binding no-fantasy clause that rendered me mentally as well as physically faith­ful. I possessed two paramount spiritual goals and held them as unassailable: Loy­alty to my craft and to Helen Knode. I gave them my entire conscious focus. I underestimated the reflexive power of suppression and all the crazy shit that lies dormant inside your head.

The Faces.

The Women.

Them.

My marriage was compartments within

compartments, all starting to crack. I quadrupled my nightly prayers for Helen and grasped at the compartment of physical chastity with suffocating force.

It's all right, Cougar— there's only you—they're just spirits aflame.

There's Marcia Sidwell at the laun­dromat and Marge on the train. There's the wish-named Joan as she was then and might be now. She still feels prophetic. I'm still nine years away from the real Joan, with her stun­ning, gray-streaked hair. There's Cath­erine out of my circa-'8O rainy-night dream. She's more than a decade away in true life.

I secured a new Anne Sofie von Otter poster. I propped it up on my work desk and studied her face. It was arrogant and kind in an artist's proportion. She was blonde and fair. Her hair was square-cul

and severe and expressed the force of her will. She had rough skin and refused to disguise it. That displayed her composure, with a big gulp of diva's fuck you.

I bought some lieder recordings and went crazy with her voice. I cried. I got up close to the poster and hugged a pil­low. I couldn't understand her words sung in German. I improvised my own English love lyrics and studied her face. The poster was affixed beside my mother's murder file. I trembled and knocked it over sometimes.

The music, her picture, the meaning transposed.

/ was threatened Av her genius. She was threatened by mine. We were big and strong and full of lovers' fight. We were horrified by our

loneliness and appalled by our need and went out in the world with our crazy beauty just to get a touch of it back.

We burned down rooms. We knew what every­thing meant. We understood terror and fury as no one else had. It hurt to be together and hurt more to be apart. Our mouths clashed. Our teeth scraped. Our arms ached from the meld. We knew each other's smells and heard each other's voices and told each other things that no one else ever had.

Hear me, Helen. I was not disloyal. They're all sacred chords that play out faint and let me return to you, chaste.

You're working too hard.

Helen kept saying it. She said it first in '93. She kept it up through '99. No-sex simmered

as an issue, intermittently expressed.

Helen always broached it. I always said "Soon, babe" or "You know we'll gel it back." Helen jollied me or blank-faced let it rest. Her critique of my domestic forfeit assumed an edge. I was the VIP Guest. She was the Zoo Animal's Keeper.

Our life was outwardly sweet. Kansas City was the white-trash comfort zone I had always creamed for. I was a local celeb. Our new bull terrier, Dudley, possessed Barkoesque panache. My Dark Places was a best-seller and got a slew of year-end nods. The film L.A. Confidential reaped boocoo awards and got me big ink. Helen honed and rchoned her book. I read several drafts and did not intrude on the text. It was a bonaroo crime story set in a metaphysically

remapped L.A. Helen persisted. She was the Cougarwoman.

You're working too hard.

M>, not really.

I was brooding up the sequel to Ameri­can Tabloid. It was conceived as my massive take on the American '60s. I had a feature-magazine contract. It mandated hours of daily work and near-constant travel. I hustled some choice screenwriting gigs and stretched myself ultrathin. I worked, worked and worked.

Film and magazine work boinged me to L.A. and back. I stayed in the high-end hotels I drooled for in my childhood. I cut the lights and conjured Anne Sofie.

We talked. She always stretched out on my left and tossed a leg over me. I kissed her arms and shoulders. She told me

things I never knew about music. 1 told her things she never knew about books. She said. You're work­ing too hard.

I admitted it. I was more candid with my fantasy lover than I was with my wife. Anne Sofie described my symptoms. She lay entwined with me. She felt my skewed chemistry.

You sleep poorly, you mumble, you take shallow breaths. You're always check­ing your limbs for cancer bumps that aren't there. You stare into mirrors and count the flecks in your eyes. Liebchen, they're just natural flaws. You're not going blind.

The work kept pressing, the phone kept ringing, I kept saying Yes. My pace was Herculean. My focus was Dracu-lean. My design for the new novel was superplanetary. I read research briefs and compiled notes. The outline ran 345

pages. I foresaw a 1,000-page manuscript and a 700-page hardback.

America: four years of wild shit. Two hun­dred characters. Comparatively few women and a reduced romantic arc. An abbrevi­ated style that would force readers to inject the book at my own breathless rate.

I wanted to create a work of art both enormous and coldly perfect. I wanted my standard passion to sizzle in the mar­gins and diminish into typeface. I wanted readers to know that I was superior to all other writers and that I was in command of my claustrophobically compartmentalized and free-falling life.

Hubris, arrogance, isolation. The novel as sensory assault. The neglect of my dearly beloved wife.

Head tripper. Absentee husband. Furtive fantasist.

I had Anne Sofie. 1 had the wish-named Joan, aged to 50-plus. The real Joan turned 34 that Halloween.

My nerves accelerated and my insomnia increased. They were locked in sync with the pace of history fantastically revised. I wrote The Cold Six Thousand in 14 months. I was triumphantly exhausted. I completed the book and expected to feel a resultant buoyancy. I was mistaken. My nerves con­tinued to crackle at history"s mad pace.

My agent and publisher praised the book and considered it a crowning achievement. Helen disagreed. She called it overplot-ted and reader-unfriendly. She said it was jittery and frayed and approximated my spiritual state.

You're working loo hard, Big Dog. Get some rest now.

xxxxx

A mega book tour loomed. Five European countries and 32 U.S. cities, consecutively. Months away from home and continual travel. Interviews, press conferences and nightly bookstore events. A long stint as le grand froinage.

Prepublicity gigs loomed: long-lead mag­azine profiles, culture TV, an Ellroy cable doco. A big excerpt spread synced to pub date. It boiled down to a Brutha-you-de-Man moment. I wanted to ride it, rock it, roll it, groove it, grok it, grab it and grasp it for all it was worth.

I prepared for the ego onslaught. My sleep came and went. I fixated on benign skin lesions and prayed off fears of carci­nogenic assault. I went on long head trips with Anne Sofie. I spent hours perfect­ing my reading gigs and podium patter. I bought some snazzy new threads.

Helen's book was almost done. Her agent's plan was to auction it during my book-tour summer. My plan was to wring my tour dry and watchdog the sale of Helen's book. Then we would make time to reemerge as flesh-and-blood man and wife.

France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Great Brit­ain. Conquer the continent and annihilate the isles. Ambush America and traipse a triumphant trail to my wife.

Bon voyage. Big Dog. I won't say "Don't work too hard," just "Remember to rest."

Blooey.

It started instantly. A wave of discomfort hit me on the airplane. Short breaths, pins-and-needles poings, sweats. A business-class seat and good legroom. Claustrophobic compression at 30,000 feet.

I ignored the seat-belt sign and jammed to the John. I spent 20 minutes looking for rips and tears in my eyes. The stewardess knocked. I told her I was all right. I rolled up my sleeves and examined spots for metastasis. My bowels swelled. I defecated and became convinced that I had colon cancer. The stewardess knocked again and told me people were waiting. I tremble-walked out of the John. I was sweaty, my fly was down, passengers eyed me weird.

Six more hours to Paris.

Dinner gave me a task. 1 ate a third of my food and lost my appetite. 1 got an ancient brain signal to guzzle scotch and prayed it away.

Whoa, now. You're just overamped.

I shut my eyes and tried to relax. 1 opened my eyes and checked my arms for cancer signs. My panic wavered and flut­tered during a full-hour scan. I saw a gray-haired woman walk back to her seat.

She felt like a divine signal. I craned my neck and furtively watched her for the rest of the flight.

xxxxx

My publisher gave me my arrival day off. Paris in spring—who gives a shit? I holed up in my hotel suite. I pulled the curtains and got three hours of weird, pass-out sleep. I woke up, unrested. My publisher called with great news: The book zoomed to number two on the Le Monde best-seller list. I got a two-second joy jolt and started studying my arms.

Helen called. I ran down my symptoms and got her seal of good health. The Le Monde coup jazzed her. She wanted to dwell on it. I got bombarded by images of Anne Sofie and the airplane woman. I went with them contrapuntally—all day and all night.

1 couldn't sleep. I couldn't forge a truce with my monkey brain and simply rest. I started thinking. What if this doesn't stop?

xxxxx

It continued.

1 performed brilliantly throughout.

My book was a sales smasheroo and a critic's mixed bag. The smart frogs cau­tiously praised the book and echoed Helen Knode's doubts. The Ellroy-toady frogs culture-vultured them out. 1 jaunted through France with my editor, translator and publicist. I gave interviews, attended lunches and dinners and never missed a beat. Bookstore gigs and late meals went past midnight. I engaged the iron-willed pursuit of perfection and never publicly succumbed.

My colleagues saw me running gaunt and jaggedy. My public did not. No one saw me fixating on cell formations that microscopes could not detect. No one saw my hour-long eye exams. No one saw me run to mirrors to scrutinize eroding flesh.

I called Helen every night. She buoyed me and blitzed my fear for the moments that we spoke. I wrapped myself dark with Anne Sofie and the airplane woman. I rewrote the woman's life.

She was a Jewish college professor. She was as religious as I was in her own faith. She was divorced and had a daughter in college. The woman and I talked and made love. She tossed a leg over me, a la Anne Sofie.

The real Joan was Jewish and a college professor. I he real Joan and 1 wanted a daughter. The real Joan had a child with­out me, finally. 1 swear that I formally summoned her in curtain-dark bedrooms that spring. I swear that the summons was issued as an antidote to The Curse. I swear that (loci heard the summons as a prayer and sent Joan to me.

XXXXX

Adieu to France. Spring in Roma—who gives a shit? My publisher booked me a boss hotel suite and gave me the night off. I pulled the curtains and anchored them with heavy chairs. I had an epiphany and began reading the Gideon Bible placed in the nightstand drawer.

I got halfway through the Old Testament. Cancer cells started eating at me.

I ran to the bathroom and scratched my arms bloody. I doused them with rub­bing alcohol and intensified the sting. I convinced myself that caustic agents had killed all the cells. I read the Bible until

I passed out.

This madness was my whole world now.

I1 was entirely real as it transpired. I did not second-guess it or retreat from my duty.

I did interviews in a hotel salon and smiled for photo shoots. The cancer cells returned during my first-day lunch break. I slipped a bellman a C-nole. He drove me to a dermatologist Quicksville. The doctor

spoke English. He examined my arms and told me I didn't have cancer. He called it a minor rash exacerbated by scratching and prescribed a soothing skin cream.

The book was a smash in Italy. I charmed journalists and the book-buying public. My colleagues said, "Ciao, baby" and packed me off to Holland.

Amsterdam in spring?—truly Shitsville. Pot fumes wafting out coffeehouse door­ways and horseflies turd-bombing canals.

I checked into my hotel and curtain-wrapped my room. I felt a jumbo zit on my back. 1 pulled off my shirt and prepared to pop it in front of the mirror. I noticed a big black mole starting to pulse and seep.

Stop now. Pray. Monitor the mole and sup­press its growth mentally.

Helen was meeting me in New York City. Publishers were lining up for her book. She knew my body intimately. She would view the mole and determine its status. Her informed opinion would determine a treatment plan.

Prognosis upcoming. Holland, Spain and Great Britain first.

I got through it. I eyeballed the mole in mirrors 30 to 60 times a day. I was always scared. I was determined to out-endure a lunacy entirely self-created. I utilized prayer and the native strength of Helen Knodc. I employed a mezzo-soprano I had never met and a plain-featured woman I saw on an airplane. I found a new caval­cade of faces to hold me upright for the seconds I glimpsed them and keep my implosion at bay.

Glimpses. Shutter-stop moments. Faces half hidden by signboards and lost in blinks.

It was getting worse. My freefall veered into plummet.

But They were always there. And They never caught me looking at them or felt endangered by my gaze. There was some­thing sure and kind about each and every one of them. They all embodied goodness and rectitude.

They all imparted insight and courage, within a raindrop's span. I swear this is true.

II.

Helen viewed the mole and pronounced it benign. I believed her.

The Intercontinental Hotel, New York City. Two-day rest stop. Thirty-one cities to go.

First U.S. reviews were out. All praise was undercut with caveats. The book was diffi­cult and intimidating. It was an impressive, but bullying work of art.

I would have preferred fawning magna­nimity. The assessment I got?—satisfactory. The bully in me dug it. The book was mov­ing hotcake fast. Helen took off to meet with her potential publishers. My rest stop was all deep breaths and head trips. I went back on the road.

It got worse.

I didn't look bad. The tall-and-gaunt thing always worked for me. My internal clock was un-sprung. My brain sputtered, sparked, but always caught ignition. The cities blurred by.

I kept looking in my mouth. I saw bumps and tooth-scrape marks and anointed them cancer. My tongue played over saliva cysts .ind madt them metastasize. I ran to mirrors

and checked my mouth 50 times a day.

I fell into a fugue state. The book went on the New York Times Best-Seller List. The critical consensus held firm as megaloma­nia. My pass-out sleep was worse than no sleep. The bed fell out from under me and took the world with it. I looked at women on airplanes and had sobbing fits.

I did bookstore events every night. I was eleclrifyingly good in the middle of a melt­down. I always played to one woman in the audience. She always anchored me.

I made it to Toronto. The book stayed on the List. Women caught me looking at them and looked away. It horrified me. I willed my eyes elsewhere. The effort made me light-headed. I lost track of where I was.

Evil lad. You always thought you never hurt them. Now they see you.

I got to Chicago. The tour was halfway done. I went to dinner with colleagues and walked to the can. The walls tumbled and compressed. I retained my balance and walked toward the restaurant in Toronto.

It wasn't there. I ran outside and recog­nized Chicago. I ran back inside and found my colleagues.

I made it to Milwaukee. I weaved into

an elevator at the Pfister Hotel. Three very tall black men evil-eyed me. I weaved and mimicked them. A shorter guy covered with tattoos double evil-eyed me. I weaved and triple-eyed him back.

I made it to the penthouse floor, intact. Reporters were waiting there. I thought they were Ellroy fans. I was wrong. Bas­ketball play-offs were raging. The tall guys were Milwaukee Bucks. The tattooed guy was Allen Iverson.

The Presidential Suite. Mine for one night. History was my oyster. The JFK that my char­acters killed had shacked up right here.

Brutha, you de Man.

I walked through the suite. Fuck, it was huge. The floor rolled. I walked into the world's largest gilt-and-marble bathroom and walked back out.

The world flew off its axis. Lights throbbed and dimmed as I collapsed in slow motion and hit a silk-brocade bed.

Home.

Kansas City in a heat wave chat I knew would never stop.

I bailed on the tour. I knew I'd go insane if I stayed out. My upcoming gigs were

canceled. I checked into my Hancock Park-esque manse and shut the world out.

Helen was ail love. She knew the bailout was imperative. The diffident Dudley knew something was wrong and stuck close to his negligent dad.

I surrendered. I thought I'd crash in exultant relief and gain the peace born of a prudent relinquishment. I was mistaken. It just got worse.

I couldn't sleep. I couldn't capitulate to sleep. I thought I'd go into seizures and die in my sleep or fall out a window. I thought I'd shoot myself in my sleep. I tossed all the ammunition for the guns in the house and still held onto the fear. I examined my shit for signs of occult blood. I got a knife, pierced a bump on my arm and squeezed cancer cells out. I blackout-curtained my office, sat there and sobbed. I was afraid to think of women. I knew that Helen could read my mind and decode my evil thoughts.

I stayed in the house. I froze out the heat and draped out the light. I walked room to room, stuporous and jittered. Jaunts outside tore me up. I saw children with their toys and pets and started weep­ing. All my compartments had crumbled. Everything I'd pushed out rushed straight in. I was 53 years old. It was the sum total of my life on overdrive.

Helen looked after me and urged me to get help. Rage played counterpoint to her solicitude. I ran from the marriage. I sprinted into a crack-up. She just landed a sweet two-book deal with a prestige pub­lisher. She did not believe that it brought me great joy or that I was moved by her con­quest of a very difficult craft. I had devolved from flesh-and-blood lover to sanitarium guest. She went from lover to crazy man's nurse and stood before me, furious.

She shamed me into seeking help. I did restorative yoga and got acupuncture. I got zero-balance massage and shiatsu massage. It didn't do shit. I went to a swami's health retreat in rural Iowa. I got slathered with healing oils and learned transcendental med­itation. It didn't do shit. I saw a medical doc­tor, got a complete checkup and learned that I was in fine health. The doctor prescribed antidepressanls. They did not chill my anxi-

ety or calm my nerves. They enhanced my libido as they shriveled my dick. I drove around K.C., staring at women.

I sat in dark rooms. The Kansas City summer blazed. Helen played nursemaid. The doctor prescribed sedatives and sleep­ing pills. I resisted them, succumbed to them and slowly became addicted.

I sought oblivion the way I once sought stratospheric stimulation. 1 assaulted my sleep deficit and tried to halt my 50-year sprint. The sleeping pills knocked me out. They did not provide me with serenity upon awakening. The sedatives slightly replugged my voltage and let me walk the world sans tremors and tears.

Helen and I built separate compartments and slept in separate beds. I put the new novel on hold. I wrote movies and TV shows and earned good dough. I never wrote under the influence. The challenge of constructing narrative sustained me. My paid-work narrative paled beside my inter­nal monologues.

They were wholly about WOMEN. They were about WOMEN and nothing else. They featured various women. It was the tale of Helen Knode and me—but this time I did not fuck it up.

xxxxx

We moved to the mid-California coast. It was summer '02. We dumped the swank K.C. pad and bought a swank Carmel pad. Helen did all the relocation work. It infu­riated her. I was zoned out, sleeping or working. I was out staring at women or off on some loony love trip in my head.

We still held out hope for the marriage. I concealed the extent of my addiction and talked a good game of change. Helen was born indefatigably optimistic. It was and is a hallmark of her warrior's soul. She didn't know how badly I was strung out. She had always known me as a man inde­terminately off in his head.

It got worse.

I cut down to L.A. for film-script meet­ings. I extended the trips to hole up at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I popped herbal uppers from a health-food store. I explored my newfound passion for a dead poetess.

Anne Sexton: 1928-74. Pillhead, prof-

ligalc soul, neurasthenic icon. Dead at 45: self-inflicted carbon monoxide.

Paperback covers. The woman with her knees against a swimming-pool ledge. The woman in a summer shift dress.

Mother, I will nex<er relinquish you. Mothsr, I will always seek your emblem. At least Tht Curse I inflicted on you gave me that.

Priapic rites in a dark room. Two frayed book covers. One floor lamp to light my watcher's path.

It got worse. I slammed myself between sleep comas and ecstatic imagery. Helen and I pulled further apart. She realized the force of my secret inner life and grew astonished and then appalled. I overdosed and woke up in a Monterey nut ward. Helen bailed me out. 1 lied to a health farm in Arizona. I overdosed and woke up in a Tucson nut ward. Helen bailed me out. We returned to Carmel. I OD'd again. Helen demanded that I clean up now and forever. I entered a 30-day program and did just that.

It got worse.

Because my options had run out.

Because there was no place to run to.

Because Helen Knode was all hurt and indictment.

Early fall '03. That plush house and coastal rainstorms.

Nothing clicked inside me. Nothing felt right. All my apologies felt hollow. All my vows to change trailed out half spoken and dead.

I didn't know what to do next. It was the first time in my life that had hap­pened to me.

We'd danced around it before. It was always abstract. A permissive '70s concept. Repellent and seductive and ever euphe­mistic: a relaxed civil contract.

We were sitting in the kitchen. Helen gave it a quivery real voice.

Stay married/other people/be dignified and proper/"Don't ask, don't tell."

Of course, I agreed.

It was an opportunity.

Now / know what to do next.

James Ellroy's new novel, Rlood'sA Rover,will be published in September by Alfred A. Knopf.