10

The army cut me loose in July. I got a general discharge “Under Honorable Conditions.” I was free, white and 17. I was draft-exempt just as Vietnam started to percolate.

My fellow trainees were headed for advanced infantry training and probable Vietnam duty. I dodged their bullet with Method-actor aplomb. I spent my last month at Fort Polk wolfing down crime novels. I stuttered and lurked around the Company A mess hall. I scammed the entire U.S. Army.

I flew back to L.A. and beelined to the old neighborhood. I found a one-room pad at Beverly and Wilton. The army sent me home with five hundred dollars. I forged my father’s name to his last three Social Security checks and cashed them at a liquor store. My bankroll increased to a grand.

Aunt Leoda promised to shoot me a C-note a month. She warned me that my insurance money wouldn’t last forever. She signed me up for Social Security and VA benefits—surviving-child stipends that would terminate on my 18th birthday. She urged me to go back to school. Full-time students could collect the coin up to age 21.

She was glad my father was dead. It probably assuaged her grief for my mother.

School was for geeks and spastics. My motto was “Live Free or Die.”

The dog was kenneled up. My old apartment was locked and boarded. The landlord had seized my father’s belongings in lieu of back rent. My new crib was great. It featured a bathroom, tiny kitchenette and 12’ x 8’ living room with a Murphy bed. I papered the walls with right-wing bumper stickers and Playmate of the Month foldouts.

I strutted around in my uniform for a week. I stood over my father’s grave and flaunted my army greens replete with unearned regalia. I boosted a new wardrobe from Silverwoods and Desmonds’. It was pure Hancock Park: madras shirts, crew-neck sweaters, thin-wale cord pants.

L.A. looked bright and beautiful. I knew I’d pursue some kind of swinging fucking destiny right here in my own hometown.

I stuck my roll in the bank and looked for work. I got a job passing out handbills and quit from boredom one week later. I got a busboy job at L.A.’s flagship Sizzler steakhouse and got fired for dropping shitloads of dishes. I got a kitchen job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint and got fired for picking my nose in front of customers.

I ran through three jobs in two weeks. I shrugged my failures off and opted for a work-free summer.

Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl rediscovered me. I had a pad of my own now. This made me a viable flunky.

They let me back into their clique. A brilliant kid named George made us a fivesome. Fritz and George were USC- and Caltech-bound. Lloyd and Daryl were stuck with another year of high school.

The clique met at my place and George’s place. George’s father, Rudy, was a highway patrolman and a certified right-wing crackpot. He got drunk every night and defamed liberals and Martin Luther Coon. He dug my Boat Tickets to Africa and took a fatherly interest in me.

It was great to have friends. I blew my thousand-dollar roll taking them out to steak dinners and movies. We bombed around in Fritz’s ’64 Fairlane. Bicycle jaunts were behind us.

I stole most of my food. I was on an all-steak diet and filched T-bones and rib-eyes at nearby supermarkets. Two clerks jumped me outside the Liquor & Food Mart early in August. They held me down, plucked a steak out of my pants and called the fuzz.

The LAPD arrived. Two cops drove me to the Hollywood Station, booked me for shoplifting and turned me over to a juvenile officer. The guy wanted to contact my parents. I told him they were dead. He said kids weren’t allowed to live alone prior to age eighteen.

A cop drove me down to the Georgia Street Juvenile Facility. I called Lloyd and told him where I was. The cop processed my arrest papers and dumped me in a dormitory filled with hardcased juvies.

I was scared. I was the biggest kid in the dorm—and recognizably the most defenseless. I was seven months shy of legal age. I figured I’d be stuck here all that time.

Tough Negro and Mexican kids sized me up. They asked me about my “beef” and laughed at my answers. They talked gang-sterese and ridiculed me for not speaking their language.

I stayed calm until lights-out. Darkness jump-started my imagination. I put myself through a string of jail horrors and cried myself to sleep.

Rudy got me out the next day. He cooked up a deal to get me six months probation and “emancipated juvenile” status. I could live solo—with Rudy as my informal guardian.

It was one sweet deal. I needed a ticket out of jail and Rudy needed an audience for his tirades. Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl heard him out reluctantly. I soaked up his shit with abandon.

Rudy was tight with a bunch of crazy cop ideologues. They passed around mimeographed copies of “The Nigger’s 23rd Psalm” and “Martin Luther Coon’s Welfare Handbook.” Rudy and I yukked it up for a string of consecutive nights. The Watts riot interrupted us.

L.A. was burning. I wanted to kill all the rioters and turn L.A. into Cinder City myself. The riot thrilled me. This was crime writ large—crime on a big plot-extrapolatable scale.

Rudy was called to duty. Lloyd, Fritz and I skirted the periphery of the riot zone. We carried BB pistols. We mouthed racist jive and cruised south until some cops made us go home.

We did it again the next night. Live history was groovy. We watched the riot from the Griffith Park telescopes and saw strips of Los Angeles sizzling. We drove out to the valley and saw some rednecks burn a cross in a Christmas-tree lot.

The riot fizzled out. It reconflagrated in my head and ruled my thoughts for weeks.

I ran stories from diverse perspectives. I became both riot cop and riot provocateur. I lived lives fucked over by history.

I spread my empathy around. I distributed moral shading equitably. I didn’t analyze the cause of the riot or prophesy its ramifications. My public stance was “Fuck the niggers.” My concurrent narrative fantasies stressed culpable white cops.

I never questioned the contradiction. I didn’t know that storytelling was my only true voice.

Narrative was my moral language. I didn’t know it in the summer of 1965.

Rudy didn’t care what I did. My probation officer ignored me. I continued to steal and dodge work.

I craved free time. Free time meant time to dream and cultivate my sense of potent destiny. Free time meant time to fall prey to impulse.

It was a hot day in mid-September. I got an urge to get drunk.

I walked down to the Liquor & Food Mart and stole a bottle of champagne. I took it over to Robert Burns Park, popped the top and guzzled the whole thing.

I went ecstatic. I went hyper-effusive. I crashed a group of Hancock Park girls and told them crazy lies. I blacked out and woke up on my bed drenched in vomit.

I knew I’dfound something.

The discovery thrilled me. I started stealing booze and experimenting with it.

Heublein premixed cocktails were good. I dug sweet Manhattans and tart and tangy whisky sours. Beer quenched your thirst—but lacked the blastoff potential of hard liquor. Straight scotch was too strong—it burned going down and brought up bile in its wake. I avoided straight bourbon and bourbon highballs. Bourbon reminded me of the redhead.

Vodka and fruit juice was great. You got a fast push out of the gate with minimum gag action. Gin, brandy and liqueurs induced dry heaves.

I drank for stimulation. Booze sent me stratospheric.

It jacked up my narrative powers. It gave my thoughts a physical dimension.

Booze made me talk to myself. Booze made me spritz my fantasies aloud. Booze made me address scores of imaginary women.

Booze altered my fantasy world—but did not change the basic subject matter. Crime remained my dominant obsession.

I had a big crime backlog to embellish.

The Watts riot was recent and hot. The Ma Duncan case was a slick golden oldie. I walked Ma to the gas chamber a hundred fantasy times.

Doc Finch and Carole Tregoff were rotting in prison. I saved Carole from jailhouse dykes and made her my woman. I snuck into Chino and snuffed Spade Cooley. Ella Mae got her vengeance at last. I committed Stephen Nash’s murders and pulled B&Es with Donald Keith Bashor.

Booze gave me prime verisimilitude. Details blipped off my brain pan in vivid new colors. Narrative twists emerged unexpectedly.

Booze gave me crime hyperbolized and rendered more subtle. It gave me the Black Dahlia on a broad historical scale.

I drank by myself and screened crime and crime-sex fantasies for hours. I drank with Lloyd and got him hooked on the Dahlia. We discussed the case at great length. My occasional Dahlia nightmares ceased altogether.

I stole most of my liquor and found an adult to purchase some for me legally. He was a Negro wino living under a freeway embankment. He called himself Flame-O. He said the cops dubbed him that because he tended to torch himself when he got drunk.

Flame-O bought me bottles. I paid him in short dog jugs of Thunderbird wine. He told me I was wino bait myself. I didn’t believe him.

Lloyd and Fritz reintroduced me to weed. I dug it ferociously. It added a surreal edge to my fantasies and made food a rich sensual pleasure. I knew it wouldn’t turn me into a junkie. That was strictly a 1958 illusion.

1965 faded out. It was one motherfucker of a year.

Rudy kissed me off. He figured out I was worthless and not a sincere right-winger. I turned 18 in March ’66. I was now a street-legal adult.

And an unemployed petty thief about to lose his government handout.

I unkenneled the dog and brought her home. She went to work on the floors immediately. I pondered my future. I concluded that I couldn’t live without my survivor’s dole.

I had to go back to school to keep the dough coming. Lloyd was going to a freako Christian high school. The freight was $50 a month. My dole came to $130. I could attend a few classes and retain a net profit of 80 bucks monthly.

Lloyd and I discussed the matter. He told me I’d have to take a convincing dive for Jesus. I memorized some Bible verses and went in to see the principal of Culter Christian Academy.

I put on a good show. I strutted my new faith in high histrionic style. I believed what I was saying for the length of time I was saying it. I possessed a chameleon soul.

I enrolled at Culter Academy. The place was packed with born-again psychos and doper malcontents. I attended secular classes and Bible study groups. It was brain-deadening rebop straight down the line. I knew I couldn’t take this shit five days a week.

I attended school sporadically. The Culter staff cut me some slack—I was a tormented but sincere young Christian. I stiffed them for two months’ tuition and dropped out completely. My brief conversion netted me $260.

My government benefits stopped. My income dropped to a C-note a month. My rent was $60. I could stretch the remaining $40—if I stole all my food and liquor and scrounged dope off my friends.

I did it. I extended my shoplifting range and hit markets and liquor stores way north and way west. I was bone-skinny. I jammed steaks and bottles under my pants and did not display telltale bulges. I wore my shirttails out. I bought small items to justify my presence in stores.

I was a pro.

Lloyd, Fritz and Daryl could score dope. I couldn’t. I had an adult-free pad they could kick back in. They supplied me with grass and pills.

I didn’t like Seconal and Nembutal. They made you goofy and near-catatonic. LSD was okay—but the attendant transcendental message left me cold. Lloyd and Fritz popped acid and went to see epics like Spartacus and The Greatest Story Ever Told. I went with them a few times and ditched the movies midway through. Sandals and resurrection—Snoresville. I sat in the lobby and hallucinated on candy-counter girls.

Fritz knew some Dr. Feelgoods who dispensed amphetamines. The stuff kept him hyper-focused during long study sessions. USC was tough going. Fritz said the uppers gave him an edge.

He dumped his excess stash on me. Dexedrine and Dexamyl jacked my fantasy life up six levels.

My narrative skills expanded sixfold. Speed-induced palpitations kineticized the whole process.

Speed highs went through my brain and lodged in my virgin genitalia.

Speed was sex. Speed gave my sex fantasies a new coherent logic. Speed gave me 40-ish redheads and Hancock Park girls. Speed gave me epic jackoff sessions.

I pounded my pud for 12 to 18 hours straight. It felt so gooooood. I’d lie on my bed with the dog asleep beside me. I’d slam the ham with my eyes shut and the lights out.

Amphetamine comedowns terminated my fantasies. The dope passed through my system and left me depressed and sleep-deprived. I drank myself into a nether world then. Booze ascended while speed receded. I always passed out grasping for some woman.

Fritz lost his speed connection. I lost mine by default. I got gnawingly hungry for real love and sex.

I wanted a girlfriend and unlimited poontang. Fritz’s sister set me up with her friend Cathy.

Cathy went to Marlborough—an exclusive Hancock Park girl’s school. She was plain-featured and chubby. We went to see The Sound of Music on our first date. I lied and told Cathy that I really liked the movie.

Cathy was socially dense and love-starved. I found it appealing. She disdained formal date activities. She craved park-the-car make-out action.

Which meant hugging and kissing sans tongues.

We “made out” several weekend nights running. The no-tongue/no-skin policy drove me insane. I begged for more contact. Cathy refused. I begged some more. Cathy threw a big diversion at me.

She planned a string of get-togethers with her school chums. The diversion got me inside looks at several juicy Hancock Park pads.

I liked the plush furnishings. I liked the big rooms. I liked the wood panels and oil paintings. This was my old voyeur prowl world—close-up and intimate.

Cathy introduced me to her friend Anne. Anne was 6′1″, blond and strapping. She never got dates.

I called Anne up and asked her out. We went to a movie and necked in Fern Dell Park. She shot me some tongue. It was gooooood.

I called up Cathy and broke our thing off. Anne called me and told me to stay out of her life. I called Fritz’s sister Heidi and asked her out. She told me to buzz off. I called Heidi’s friend Kay and asked her out. She told me she was a committed Christian and only went out with saved guys.

I wanted more love. I wanted sex with no schoolgirl limits. I wanted to see some more Hancock Park pads.

Fritz maintained a little room adjoining his garage. He kept his records and stereo shit there. It was his hideout. He never let his parents or sister in. Lloyd, Daryl and I had keys.

The room was 20 yards from the main house. The house tantalized me. It was my favorite sex-fantasy backdrop.

I broke in one night. It was late ’66.

Fritz and his family were out somewhere. I got down on the ground beside the kitchen door and stuck my left arm through a pet-access hole. I tripped the inside latch and let myself in to the house.

I walked around. I kept the lights off and prowled upstairs and down. I checked the medicine cabinets for dope and filched a few painkillers. I poured myself a double scotch and popped the pills right there. I washed the glass I used and put it back where I found it.

I walked through Heidi’s bedroom. I savored the smell of her pillows and went through her closet and drawers. I buried my face in a stack of lingerie and stole a pair of white panties.

I left the house quietly. I didn’t want to blow a shot at reentry. I knew I’d touched another secret world.

Kay lived directly across the street. I broke into her house a few nights later.

I called the house from Fritz’s back room and got no answer. I walked over and checked entry points.

I found an open window overlooking the driveway. It was covered by a screen secured with bent nails. I pried two bottom nails loose, removed the screen and vaulted into the house.

It was strange turf. I turned a few lights on for a second to acclimate myself.

There was no liquor cabinet. There was no good shit in the medicine chests. I hit the refrigerator and stuffed myself with cold cuts and fruit. I explored the house upstairs and down— and saved Kay’s bedroom for last.

I looked through her school papers and stretched out on her bed. I examined a clothes hamper stuffed with blouses and skirts. I opened dresser drawers and held a table lamp over them for light. I stole a matching bra and panties.

I replaced the window screen and bent the nails back to hold it in place. I walked home very7 high.

Burglary was voyeurism multiplied a thousand times.

Kathy lived in a big Spanish house at 2nd and Plymouth. She was my longtime secret love.

She was tall and slender. She had dark brown hair, brown eyes and freckles. She was intelligent, sweet-natured and altogether gracious. I was afraid of her for no justifiable reason.

I broke into her house. It was a very cold night in early ’67.

I called her number and got no answer. I walked over to the house and saw no lights on and no cars in the driveway. I walked around to the back and tried to slide some windows open. The third or fourth one was unlatched.

I pulled myself inside. I stumbled around the first floor and turned lights on for a split second. I found a liquor sideboard and guzzled out of every bottle on it. I got a slam-bang-heavy booze rush and walked upstairs.

I couldn’t tell whose bedroom was whose. I lay down on all the beds and found female undergarments in an armoire and chest of drawers. The sizing on the bras and panties confused me. I stole two sets to make sure I had Kathy’s.

I found some prescription downers in a medicine chest. I stole three and chased them with a weird-ass liqueur. I went out that back window, weaved home and passed out on my bed.

I kept doing it. I went at it with uncharacteristic restraint.

I quit popping pills at the scene. I only stole fetishistic booty. I went back to Heidi’s, Kay’s and Kathy’s houses at odd intervals and stayed inside no more than 15 minutes. I aborted my mission if I found my entry points secured.

The thrill was sex and other worlds briefly captured. Burglary gave me young women and families by extension.

I burglarized my way through ’67. I never strayed outside Hancock Park. I tapped the homes of my dream girls exclusively.

Heidi, Kay and Kathy. Missy at 1st and Beachwood. Julie three doors down and across the street from Kathy. Joanne at 2nd and Irving.

Secret worlds.

Daryl moved up to Portland in early ’68. Fritz transferred to UCLA. Lloyd was attending L.A. City College. He was almost as booze-and-dope-addled as I was.

Lloyd possessed the balls that I lacked. He had a bent for tortured women hooked up with abusive men. He tried to rescue them and got into fights with dope-dealer sleazebags. He had a big heart and a big brain and a wickedly nihilistic sense of humor. He lived with his religious-nut mother and her second husband—a produce merchant with a couple of fruit stands out in the valley.

Lloyd had a taste for Hollywood lowlife. He knew how to talk to hoodlum types and hippies. I tagged along on a few of his Hollywood excursions. I met bikers, fruit hustlers and Gene the Short Queen—a 4′10″ transvestite. I stumbled around Hollywood, took weird drug combinations and woke up in parks and Christmas-tree lots.

The peace-and-love era was booming. Lloyd had one foot in that cultural door and one foot back on the edge of Hancock Park. He had his own dual-world scheme going. He postured and copped dope in Hollywood and came home to his crazy mother.

Hollywood scared me and vexed me. Hippies were faggot shitheads. They loved degenerate music and preached specious metaphysics. Hollywood was a pus pocket.

Lloyd disagreed. He told me the real world frightened me. He said I only knew a few square miles.

He was right. He didn’t know I supplanted my knowledge with things he’d never know.

I kept burglarizing. I went at it cravenly and cautiously. I kept reading crime novels and brain-screening crime fantasies. I kept stealing and eating an all-steak diet. I lived off a C-note a month.

The dog disappeared. I came home and found my door open and Minna long gone. I suspected my dog-hater landlord.

I searched for Minna and put a lost-dog ad in the L.A. Times. Nothing came of it. I blew two months’ rent money on dope and got locked out of my pad.

Aunt Leoda refused to advance me some coin. I spent a week crashed out in Fritz’s back room and got evicted by his father. I moved into Lloyd’s bedroom and got evicted by his mother.

I moved into Robert Burns Park. I stole some blankets from a Goodwill box and slept in an ivy patch for three weeks. A nocturnal sprinkling system doused me at irregular intervals. I had to gather up my blankets and run for dry spots.

Outdoor living ate shit. I went to the California State Employment Office and got some job referrals. A Serbo-Croatian psychic hired me as a handbill distributor.

Her name was Sister Ramona. She preyed on poor blacks and Mexicans and spread her message via mimeographed flyer. She healed the sick and dispensed financial advice. Poor people flocked to her door. She soaked the stupid cocksuckers for all they were worth.

Sister Ramona was a racist and right-wing fanatic. Her husband drove me to poverty pockets and dropped me off with newspaper bags full of handbills. I slid them under doors and stuffed them in mailboxes. Little kids and dogs followed me around. Teenagers laughed at me and flipped me the bird.

The husband gave me two bucks a day lunch money. I spent it on T-Bird and muscatel. Flame-O was right: I turned into a full-fledged wino.

I put a roll together and got my pad back. I quit my Sister Ramona job.

A high-school acquaintance introduced me to a woman who needed a place to stay. She said she’d devirginize me in exchange for a roof. I eagerly accepted her offer.

She moved in. She devirginized me under duress. I didn’t turn her on and my acne-scarred back repulsed her. She fucked me four times and told me that was all I was getting. I was crazy about her and let her stay anyway.

She bewitched me. She dominated me completely. She stayed with me for three months and announced that she was a lesbian. She’d just met a woman and was moving in with her.

I was heartbroken. I went on a long vodka bender and blew my rent money. My landlord evicted me again.

I moved back into Robert Burns Park and found a permanent dry spot by a toolshed. I started to think that outdoor living wasn’t that bad. I had a safe spot to sleep, and I could hang out with Lloyd and read in public libraries all day. I could shave in public restrooms and take occasional showers at Lloyd’s place.

I got my rationale straight and proceeded on that course. I switched my diet from steaks to luncheon meat and haunted branch libraries all over L.A. I drank in library men’s rooms and went through Ross Macdonald’s entire oeuvre my first few weeks on the street. I kept a change of clothes at Lloyd’s pad and bathed there occasionally.

It was fall ’68. I met a freak at the Hollywood Public Library. He told me about Benzedrex inhalers.

They were an over-the-counter decongestant product encased in little plastic tubes. The tubes held a wad of cotton soaked in a substance called prophylhexedrine. You were supposed to stick the tube in your nose and take a few sniffs. You weren’t supposed to swallow the wads and fly on righteous ten-hour speed highs.

Benzedrex inhalers were legal. They cost 69 cents. You could buy them or boost them all over L.A.

The freak said I should steal a few. I dug the idea. I could tap into a speed source without dope connections or a doctor’s prescription. I stole three inhalers at a Sav-On drugstore and hunkered down to chase them with root beer.

The wads were two inches long and of cigarette circumference. They were soaked in an evil-smelling amber solution. I gagged one down and fought a reflex to heave it back up. It stayed down and went to work inside half an hour.

The high was gooooood. It was brain-popping and groin-grabbing. It was just as good as a pharmaceutical-upper high.

I went back to my spot in Robert Burns Park and jacked off all night. The high lasted eight solid hours and left me dingy and schizzy. T-Bird took the edge off and eased me into a fresh euphoria.

I’d found something. It was something I could have at will.

I went at it willfully. I stole inhalers and flew every third or fourth day for a month. I chugged down inhalers in library men’s rooms and buzzed back to Burns Park with my head scraping the moon. The speed continuum gave me my most textured crime and sex fantasies. I stole a flashlight and some skin mags and worked them into my scene.

Outdoor life was good. I told Aunt Leoda to send my monthly C-note care of Lloyd. She thought I was bunking in with a buddy. I didn’t tell her I was now a perpetual camper.

I forgot to factor rain into my outdoor-life equation. Some drizzles sent me looking for shelter. I found a deserted house at 8th and Ardmore and moved in.

It was a two-story job with no interior lights and no running water. The living room featured a moldy faux-leather couch. The couch was good for sleeping and sustained jackoff action.

I settled into the house. I kept the front door unlocked and hid my stuff in a closet when I went out. I figured I was being discreet. I was mistaken.

It went down in late November. Four cops kicked my door in and charged me with shotguns.

They threw me to the floor and handcuffed me. They stuck those big 12-gauge pumps in my face. They threw me in a car, drove me to Wilshire Station and booked me for burglary.

My cellmate was a black guy popped for armed robbery. He held up a liquor store, got away clean and saw that he’d dropped his Afro comb at the scene. He went back to get it. The proprietor recognized him. The cops bagged his ass right there.

I was scared. This was worse than Georgia Street Juvie.

A detective interviewed me. I told him I was sleeping in the house—not burglarizing it. He believed me and knocked the beef down to plain trespassing. A jailer moved me over to the misdemeanor side of the tank.

My fear subsided a bit. My cellmates said trespassing was chickenshit stuff. I’d probably get cut loose at arraignment.

I spent Saturday and Sunday at the Wilshire holding tank. They fed us two TV dinners and two cups of coffee a day. I was in with a bunch of drunks and wife beaters. We all lied about our crime exploits and the women we’d fucked.

A Sheriff’s bus hauled us to court early Monday morning. It dropped us off at the Lincoln Heights Division—home of the famous Lincoln Heights drunk tank.

We waited to see the judge there. The tank was forty yards square and jam-packed with male lowlife. Deputies lobbed lunch sacks into the crowd. You had to fight for your food. I was tall enough to snag my chow straight out of the air.

The day stretched. A dozen winos suffered alcoholic seizures. We went before the judge ten or so at a time. The judge was a woman named Mary Waters. The guys in the tank said she was a nasty old cunt.

I stood before her and pled guilty. She said I looked like a draft dodger. I told her I wasn’t. She ordered me held without bail—pending a probation workup. I was due back in court on December 23rd.

It was December 2nd. I was headed for three weeks in stir.

I tamped down my composure. A deputy hooked me up to a 12-man shackle chain. Another deputy herded us out to a big black & white bus.

The bus took us to the Main County Jail. It was a huge facility a mile northeast of downtown L.A. The induction process took 12 hours.

Deputies skin-searched us and sprayed us with delousing solution. We traded our street clothes for jail denims. We got blood-tested and inoculated for various diseases. We spent hours moving from one barred pen to another. I got to my actual cell at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.

It was a four-man cell overpacked now to six. A deputy told me to slide my mattress under the left bottom bunk. I scooted down there and passed out from complete exhaustion.

I woke up for 6:00 a.m. chow. A deputy called off some names on an intercom—my name included. We were being “rolled up” to the Hall of Justice Jail.

An inmate said this was everyday stuff. You processed in at the “New” County and got rolled up elsewhere. The Hall of Justice Jail was known as the “Old” County.

A deputy shackled me to some guys. Two deputies herded us out to a van and drove us to the Old County. We elevatored up to a tank on the thirteenth floor.

My tier was packed to double capacity. A deputy said the new guys had to sleep on the catwalk. You had to roll your mattress up in the morning and drift between cells until lights-out.

I had twenty days of this coming. An inner voice hipped me to the basic gestalt.

You are big—but not tough. You commit crimes—but are not a real criminal. Watch how you act. Watch what you say. Be careful, be calm and hold your breath for twenty days.

I fed myself that message instinctively. I did not verbalize the thought. I didn’t know that my mere presence shouted: fool, chump, geek, ineffectual kid.

I kept my mouth shut. I programmed myself to be stoic. I tried not to betray my fear overtly. My fellow inmates laughed at the plain sight of me.

Most of them were felons awaiting trial in Superior Court. They understood and disdained male weakness.

They laughed at my twitchy walk and shortened my two names to the hated “Leroy.” They called me “the Nutty Professor.” They never put their hands on me. They considered me beneath that kind of contempt.

Lloyd visited me. He said he called my aunt and told her I was in jail. My insurance money was running out. The old girl was set to advance me 200 scoots anyway. Lloyd knew a flop I could get for 80 a month—the Versailles Apartments on 6th and St. Andrews.

I counted off my 20 days. A probation officer came to see me. He said Judge Waters was set to release me. I would get a suspended sentence and three years’ formal probation. I would have to get a job.

I said I’d look for work pronto. I promised that I’d walk the straight and narrow.

I kept my mouth shut on the tier—and listened. I learned that Romilar-CF cough syrup gave you a righteous high and that strips of tape along window panes denoted alarm systems. The guy at Cooper’s Donuts knew all the hot black hookers. You could score dope at three Norm’s Coffee Shops. The place at Melrose and La Cienega was called Fag Norm’s. The place at Sunset and Vermont was called Normal Norm’s. The place on the south side was called Nigger Norm’s.

Marijuana grew wild in certain parts of Trancas Canyon. Ma Duncan’s son was now a hot criminal lawyer. Doc Finch was up for parole soon. Carole Tregoff turned lez in the joint. Caryl Chessman was a punk—all the guys at Quentin hated him. That Susan Hayward flick I Want to Live was bullshit. Barbara Graham really did beat Mabel Monahan to death.

I listened and learned. I read a beat-up copy of Atlas Shrugged and came to the unsound conclusion that I was a superman. I stayed booze- and dope-free and added ten pounds of jail-food muscle.

Mary Waters released me two days before Christmas. I boosted some inhalers on my way back to Burns Park.

I got a one-room pad at the Versailles and signed up with a temp agency. They sent me out on some mailroom jobs. My probation officer found my work life satisfactory. He liked my short hair and Ivy League threads. He told me to avoid hippies. They were all strung out on mind-altering substances.

So was I.

I worked my temp gigs Monday to Friday. I killed a half-pint of scotch for breakfast and chased it with Listerine mouthwash. Cruise control got me through to lunch and some wine and/or weed. I got drunk every night and took inhaler trips on the weekends.

Romilar was a good B&E drug. It made common things seem surreal and full of hidden truth. I went on a righteous burglary run behind it. I hit Kathy’s house, Kay’s house and Missy’s house—and concentrated on the medicine chests. I popped every inviting pill I saw on top of my cough syrup. I blacked out and woke up on my bed two times out of three.

I liked appearing clean-cut and cosmetically wholesome. Every freak in ’69 L.A. was a fuzz magnet. They wore long hair and fruitcake clothes and sent out “Bust Me” vibes. I didn’t. I bopped around in my co-existing worlds with relative impunity. I was good at giving people what they wanted to see.

I turned 21 in March. I gave up my pad and moved to a cheap hotel in Hollywood. I got a long-term temp job at KCOP-TV

I worked in the mailroom. People responded to ads for shit like 64 Country Hits and sent folding money and coins in through the mail. The heft of quarters and dimes gave those envelopes away. I started raking in a lot of extra money.

I spent it all on booze, dope and pizza. I moved to a better place—a bachelor pad at 6th and Cloverdale. I got hopped up on some women there and followed them around the neighborhood.

My insurance money ran out. My mailroom thefts more than covered the loss. I got in a fender bender with the company van and had to admit I had no driver’s license. KCOP fired me. I got some short-term temp gigs and lived ultra-cheap. I got desperate. I broke into Missy’s house and broke a cardinal rule.

I stole all the money in her mother’s purse. There was no going back to that sweet house at 1st and Beachwood.

My pad prowls were starting to scare me more than thrill me. I felt the law of chance on my tail. I’d broken into places maybe twenty times total. My jail stint taught me things that fed my sense of caution.

House burglary was first-degree burglary. It was a penitentiary offense. I knew I could handle county jail time. Prison time would eat me up whole.

The Tate-LaBianca snuffs occurred in August. I felt the ripples all through Hancock Park.

I noticed some tape around Kathy’s windows. I saw more private patrol cars out trawling. I saw security-service signs on front doors.

I stopped B&E’ing cold turkey. I never did it again.

I spent the next year in fantasy limbo. I held down temp gigs and a job at a pornographic bookstore. Hard-core packaged smut was now legal. Unpainted hippie girls were spread out nude in full-color magazines.

The girls didn’t look jaded or degraded. They looked like they were posing for chuckles and some bread. They were engaged in an ugly pandering business. They betrayed their awareness of it with little frowns and glazed eyes.

They reminded me of the Black Dahlia—sans heavy makeup and noir baggage. The Dahlia choked on movieland illusions. These girls were deluded on some junk metaphysical plane.

They bored straight into my heart. I was the porno bookstore clerk out to save them from pornography and take his reward in sex. I hoarded their pictures the way Harvey Glatman hoarded pix of his victims. I gave my girls names and prayed for them every night. I sicced the Dahlia killer on them and saved them as his blade descended. They spread their legs and talked to me when I flew on Benzedrex inhalers.

I didn’t fall for ones with perfect shapes and pert faces. I loved the smiles that didn’t quite work and the sad eyes that couldn’t lie. Mismatched features and oddly shaped breasts hit me hard. I was looking for sexual and psychological gravity.

I stole that bookstore blind. I examined every sex mag that came in and ripped out pictures of the most wrenching women. I worked midnight to 8:00 a.m., tapped the till and went to a bar that screened beaver flicks all day. I got drunk and looked at more hippie girls—and I always studied their faces more than their bodies.

My pornographic season passed too quickly. The bookstore boss got hip to my thefts and fired me. I went back to temp work, built up a surplus roll and went on a gargantuan two-month bender.

I socked in a case of vodka, a load of steaks and a load of inhalers. I gorged myself on fantasy, fantasy sex, cholesterol, and the work of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and some junk crime writers. I stayed inside for days running. I lost and gained and lost weight and worked myself into a near-insane frenzy.

I stiffed my landlord for two months’ rent. He started banging on my door and talking eviction. I didn’t have enough money to muzzle him. I had enough to secure a cheaper pad for a month.

I found a place by the Paramount Studio. It was a genteel dive called the Green Gables Apartments. A small bachelor rented for 60 a month—very cheap for 1970.

Lloyd helped me move. I packed my stuff into his car and pulled a classic late-night rent dodge. I got squared away at the Gables and looked for work.

I didn’t find any. The low-skill job market was soft. I took a series of inhaler trips and started seeing and hearing things that might or might not be real.

The tenant next door smirked at me when we passed in the hall. He banged on my window when I inhaler-tripped. He knew what I was doing. He disapproved. He read my lips and deciphered all my dirty sweet nothings. He read my thoughts through the wall that separated us.

He hated my porno books. He knew I murdered my mother and killed my father with neglect. He thought I was a freak and a pervert. He wanted to destroy me.

I flew and crashed, flew and crashed, flew and crashed. My paranoia raged in proportion to the dope in my system. I heard voices. Sirens on the street sent me hate messages. I jacked off in the dark to deceive the man next door.

He knew me.

He put bugs in my icebox. He poisoned my wine. He hooked my fantasies up to his TV set.

I bolted midway through an inhaler trip.

I left my clothes and fuck books behind. I ran out of the apartment and fast-walked three miles northeast. I saw a For Rent sign in front of a building at Sunset and Micheltorena.

I rented a convenience room for $39 a month. The building was filthy and reeked of spilled garbage.

My room was half the size of a six-man jail cell. I moved in with the clothes on my back and a short dog of T-Bird.

I popped some inhalers the next morning. New voices assailed me. The tenant next door started hissing through my air vents.

I was afraid to leave my bed. I knew the heat coils in my electric blanket were microphones. I ripped them out. I pissed in the bed and tore the pillows apart. I stuffed foam rubber in my ears to muffle the voices.

I bolted the next morning. I headed straight for Robert Burns Park.

It went bad from there. It went bad with self-destructive logic.

It went bad slowly.

The Voices came and went. Inhalers let them in. Liquor and enforced sobriety stifled them. I understood the problem intellectually. Rational thought deserted me the second I popped those cotton wads in my mouth.

Lloyd called the voices “amphetamine psychoses.” I called them a conspiracy. President Richard M. Nixon knew I murdered my parents and ordered people to stalk me. They hissed into microphones wired to my brain. I heard the Voices. Nobody else did.

I couldn’t stop taking inhalers. I heard the Voices for five years.

I spent most of that time outside. I lived in parks, backyards and empty houses. I stole. I drank. I read and fantasized. I walked all over L.A. with cotton stuffed in my ears.

It was a five-year daily sprint.

I’d wake up outside somewhere. I’d steal liquor and lunch-meat. I’d read in libraries. I’d go into restaurants, order drinks and meals and ditch out on the check. I’d hit apartment-house laundry rooms, break into washers and dryers and steal the coins inside. I’d take inhalers and notch some nice moments before the Voices claimed me.

I’d walk.

Wilshire Boulevard cut straight to the beach. I’d walk it out and back in the course of one inhaler trip. I had to keep moving. Traffic noise deflected the Voices. Lack of movement made the Voices cacophonous.

I walked five years away. They went by in a slow-motion blur. My fantasies ran through them at fast-forward counterpoint. Street scenes served as backdrops for the Voices and my own internal dialogue.

I didn’t babble or betray my state of mind overtly. I always shaved and wore dark cords to hide accumulated grime. I stole shirts and socks as I needed them. I doused myself with cologne to kill the stench of outdoor life. I showered at Lloyd’s place occasionally.

Lloyd was headed nowhere at a nice sedate rate. He was drinking, using drugs and making stabs at college. He flirted with danger and lowlife and kept his mom’s house as a backup option.

Lloyd walked me through some bad dope withdrawals. He disrupted me with little jolts of the truth. The LAPD disrupted me and force-fed me jail time.

They hassled me and arrested me. They popped me for plain drunk, drunk driving, petty theft and trespassing. They detained me as a suspicious late-night pedestrian and kicked me out of deserted houses and Goodwill bins. They held me at various station houses and shot me to the Sheriff’s for an aggregate total of four to eight months county time.

Jail was my health retreat. I abstained from booze and dope and ate three square meals a day. I did push-ups and worked trusty details and got a little muscle tone going. I hung out with stupid white guys, stupid black guys and stupid Mexican guys— and swapped stupid stories with them. We had all committed daring crimes and fucked the world’s most glamorous women. An old black wino told me he flicked Marilyn Monroe. I said, “No shit—I fucked her too!”

I worked the trash-and-freight detail at the New County Jail and the library at Wayside Honor Rancho. My favorite jail was Biscailuz Center. They fed you big meals and let you read in the latrines after lights-out. Jail was no big Ricking traumatic deal.

I knew how to ride short stretches. Jail cleaned out my system and gave me something to anticipate: my release and more booze and dope fantasies.

Crime fantasies. Sex fantasies.

The redhead was 15 years dead and somewhere far away. She ambushed me in the summer of 1973.

I was living in a dive hotel. I took inhaler trips in a communal bathtub down the hall from my room. I ran warm water and hogged the tub for hours. Nobody complained. Most of the tenants took showers.

I was in the tub. I was jacking off to a cavalcade of older women’s faces. I saw my mother naked, fought the image and lost.

I jerry-rigged a story straight off.

It was ’58. My mother didn’t die in El Monte. She wasn’t a drunk. She loved me woman to man.

We made love. I smelled her perfume and cigarette breath. Her amputated nipple thrilled me.

I brushed her hair out of her eyes and told her I loved her. My tenderness made her cry.

It was the most impassioned and loving story I’d ever perpetrated. It left me ashamed and horrified of what I had inside me.

I tried to live the story again. My mind wouldn’t let me. All the dope in the world couldn’t bring the redhead back.

I abandoned her one more time.

I blew my rent money and lost my hotel room. I moved back to Burns Park.

I took inhaler trips and fought a war within myself. I tried to conjure up my mother and devise a way to let her stay. My mind failed me. My conscience shut the whole business down.

The Voices got very specific. They said you fucked your mother and killed her.

I had a huge prophylhexedrine tolerance. It took ten to twelve cotton wads to get me off the ground. The shit was fucking up my lungs. I woke up congested every morning.

I developed chest pains. Every breath and heartbeat doubled me over. I took a bus to the County Hospital. A doctor examined me and told me I had pneumonia. He admitted me and put me on antibiotics for a week. They killed my infection dead.

I left the hospital and went back to outdoor life, booze and inhalers. I got pneumonia again. I got it cured. I went on a year-long T-Bird-and-inhaler run and ended up with the DTs.

Lloyd was living in West L.A. I camped out on the roof of his building. The first hallucinations hit me in his bathroom.

A monster jumped out of the toilet. I shut the lid and saw more monsters seep through it. Spiders crawled up my legs. Little blobs hurled themselves at my eyes.

I ran into the living room and turned the lights out. The little blobs went fluorescent. I raided Lloyd’s liquor stash and drank myself senseless. I woke up on the roof—dead scared.

I knew I had to quit drinking and taking inhalers. I knew they’d kill me in the fucking near future. I stole a short dog and hitchhiked to the County Hospital. I killed my bottle on the front steps and turned myself in.

A doctor processed me into the drunk ward. He said he’d recommend me for the Long Beach State Hospital program. Thirty days there would boil me clean and set me up to live sober.

I wanted it. It was that or die young. I was 27 years old.

I spent two days at the drunk ward. They zonked me out on tranquilizers and sedatives. I didn’t see any monsters or blobs. I wanted to guzzle booze as much as I wanted to kick it. I tried to sleep around the clock.

Long Beach said they’d take me. I was slated to go down there with three guys on the ward. They were old drunks with years on the rehab circuit. They were professional alcoholic recidivists.

We went down in a hospital van. I liked the look of the place.

Men and women bunked in separate dorms. The cafeteria looked like a restaurant. The rec rooms looked like something out of summer camp.

The program featured AA meetings and group therapy. “Rap” sessions were not mandatory. The patients wore khakis and numbered wristbands—like the trusties in the L.A. County Jail system.

Antabuse was mandatory. Eagle-eyed nurses made the patients take it every day. You got deathly ill if you drank on top of it. Antabuse was a scare tactic.

I started to feel better. I rationalized the DTs away as a freak non sequitur. I was dormed-up with drunks from all walks of life. The men scared me. The women turned me on. I started to think I could beat booze and dope on my own terms.

The program commenced. I daydreamed in the AA meetings and ran my mouth during group therapy. I invented sexual exploits and directed my tales to the women in the room. It hit me a week or so in: You’re just here for three hots and a cot.

I went along with the program. I ate like a pig and put on ten pounds. I spent all my spare time reading crime novels.

I was coughing a lot. A staff nurse braced me about it. I told her I’d had a recent string of lung ailments.

She had a doctor check me out. He shot me up with a muscle relaxant and stuck a tube with a penlight attached down my throat. He peered down a scope device and wiggled the little beam around my lungs. He said he didn’t see anything wrong.

My cough persisted. I endured the program and wondered what I’d do for an encore. All my options scared me.

I could find a crummy job and stay clean with Antabuse. I could stay off booze and inhalers and use other drugs. I could smoke weed. Weed goosed your appetite. I could put on some weight and build muscle. Women would dig me then. Weed was my ticket to a healthy, normal life.

I didn’t really believe it.

Inhalers were sex. Booze was my fantasy core. Weed was strictly for giggles and hot dates with doughnuts and pizza.

I completed the program. I stayed on Antabuse and moved back to Lloyd’s roof with thirty-three days sober.

My cough was getting worse. My nerves were shot and my attention span topped out at three seconds. I slept for ten-hour stints or tossed all night.

My body wasn’t mine.

The roof landing was my refuge. I had a nice perch by the fire door. It went all-the-way bad right there.

It was mid-June. I got up from a nap and thought, “I need some cigarettes.” My mind went dead then. I couldn’t recall or retrieve that one simple thought.

My brain hit blank walls. I couldn’t say the thought or visualize it or come up with words to express it. I spent something like an hour trying to form that one simple thought.

I couldn’t say my own name. I couldn’t think my own name. I couldn’t form that one simple thought or any thoughts. My mind was dead. My brain circuits had disconnected. I was brain-dead insane.

I screamed. I put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes and screamed myself hoarse. I kept fighting for that one simple thought.

Lloyd ran up to the landing. I recognized him. I couldn’t come up with his name or my name or that simple thought from an hour ago.

Lloyd carried me downstairs and called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived and strapped me to a gurney.

They drove me to the County Hospital and left me in a crowded hallway. I started hearing voices. Nurses walked by and yelled at me telepathically. I coughed and bucked against my restraints. Somebody stuck a needle in my arm—

I woke up strapped to a cot. I was alone in a private hospital room.

My wrists were raw and bloody. Most of my teeth felt loose. My jaw hurt and my knuckles stung from little abrasions. I was wearing a hospital smock. I’d pissed all over it.

I reached for that one simple thought and caught it on the first bounce. I remembered my nigger-pimp name: Lee Earle Ellroy.

It all came back. I recalled every detail. I started crying. I prayed and begged God to let me keep my mind.

A nurse came into the room. She undid my restraints and walked me to a shower. I stayed under the water until it turned cold. Another nurse dressed my cuts and abrasions. A doctor told me I’d have to stay here a month. I had an abscess on my left lung the size of a big man’s fist. I needed thirty days of intravenous antibiotics.

I asked him what went wrong with my mind. He said it was probably “post-alcohol brain syndrome.” Sober drunks went through it sometimes. He said I was lucky. Some people went crazy for good.

My lung condition might or might not be contagious. They were isolating me to be sure. They hooked me up to a drip gizmo and started pumping me full of antibiotics. They fed me tranquilizers to lull down my fear.

The tranks kept me woozy. I tried to sleep all day every day. Normal waking consciousness scared me. I kept imagining permanent brain malfunctions.

Those few insane hours summarized my life. The horror rendered everything that went before it irrelevant.

I reprised the horror all my waking hours. I couldn’t let it go. I wasn’t telling myself a cautionary tale or gloating over my survival. I was simply replaying the moments my entire life had worked toward.

The horror stayed with me. Nurses woke me out of blissful sleep to fuck with my drip gadget. I couldn’t run my mind in long-prescribed fantasy patterns. The horror wouldn’t let me.

I imagined permanent insanity. I punished myself with my now splendidly functioning brain.

The fear got unbearable. I checked out of the hospital over my doctor’s protests and caught a bus to Lloyd’s place. I stole a pint of gin, guzzled it and passed out on his floor. Lloyd called the paramedics again.

Another ambulance arrived. The paramedics woke me out of my stupor and led me down to it. They drove me straight back to the hospital. I was readmitted and placed in a four-man room on the lung ward.

A nurse hooked me up to another drip gadget. She gave me a big bottle to spit sputum in.

I was afraid I’d forget my name. I wrote it on the wall behind my bed as a reminder. I wrote “I will not go insane” beside it.