Fate interceded-in the form of LAPD.
I got eighty-odd pages in. Park bench reads by daylight, box reads by night. I met the two shanghaied cops and liked them. Ian Campbell-doomed to die young. A Scots-American bagpiper. Brainy, a bit mournful. Dislocated in '58 L.A. Become a policeman?-sure. Stand tall, touch the wild side, and rake in five yards a month. Karl Hettinger-Campbell's partner. A dry wit, surface cynicism, stretched nerves underneath. Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith-a salt-and-pepper team. They're parolees. White man Powell's the alpha dog. He's a skinny-ass, long-necked stone pervert. Black man Smith's a hype. He's playing lapdog and pork-ing Powell's bitch on the side. They're out heisting liquor stores. Campbell and Hettinger are working felony-car nights. The four-man collision occurs. Character is fate. It goes shit-your-pants, all-the-way bad.
Knock, knock-nightstick raps on my Goodwill-box door.
It's Officer Dukeshearer and Officer McCabe-Wilshire Division, LAPD. They've popped me before. It's a plain-drunk roust this time. Someone saw me hop in my box and buzzed the fuzz. Dukeshearer and McCabe treat me with the expansive courtesy that cops reserve for the pathetic. They note my copy of The Onion Field and praise my reading taste. I go to Wilshire Station. Copy Number One of The Onion Field disappears.
I got arraigned the next morning. I pled guilty. The judge gave me time served. This did not mean instant courtroom kick-out. It meant county-jail intake and release from there.
The intake took sixteen hours. Cavity searches, chest X-rays, blood tests, delousing. Intensive exposure to various strains of indigenous L.A. lowlife-all possessed of greater machismo and street panache than me. A Mexican drag queen named "Peaches" squeezed my knee. I popped the fucking puto in the chops. Peaches went down, got up and kicked my ass. Two deputies quelled the fracas. It amused them. Some inmates applauded Peaches. A few hooted at me.
I wanted to be back to my box. I wanted to be back on Crime Time. I wanted to get down with Ian and Karl and the killers.
I processed in and out of jail within twenty hours. Crime Time became Wambaugh Time. I stole a pint of vodka, got bombed and walked to Hollywood. I hit the Pickwick Bookstore and stole Copy Number Two of The Onion Field. I read some park-bench pages and hit my box at twilight. I was now 150-odd pages in.
Knock, knock-nightstick raps on my Goodwill-box door.
It's Officer Dukeshearer and Officer McCabe-Wilshire Division, LAPD. Kid, you hopped in that box. Someone saw you. Jesus, you're reading that Wambaugh book again.
It's the same process. The same plain-drunk roust. The same judge. The same time served. The same intake and outtake, twenty-plus hours strong.
Vexing. Exhausting. Wholly fucked-up. Lunacy defined: doing the same stupid shit over and over, but expecting different results.
I wanted to get back to that book. I was strung out on Wambaugh Time and juiced with Wambaugh-inflicted remorse.
You're a Scot like Ian Campbell. But: you can't play the bagpipes, because that takes discipline and practice. And: you're knock-kneed and bony-legged, and would look ridiculous in your ancestral kilt.
Yeah, but you're not scum like Powell and Smith. No, but you steal to survive. Yeah, but you're not vicious. No, but you lack the plain guts to rob liquor stores. A bantamweight faggot kicked your ass.
Wambaugh Time. Wambaugh-inflicted remorse. Learn from it? Change your life?-no, not just yet.
I got out of jail. I stole a pint of vodka, got bombed and walked to Hollywood. I hit the Pickwick Bookstore and stole Copy Number Three of The Onion Field. I read some park-bench pages and curled up behind a bush near my box. I was now 250-odd pages in.
Poke, poke-nightstick jabs on my legs.
It's two new cops-Wilshire Division, LAPD. It's the near-same process again.
I lose Copy Number Three. I go to Wilshire Station. I go to court and see the same judge. He's tired of my theatrics. My raggedy ass offends him. He offers me a choice: six months in county jail or three months at the Salvation Army "Harbor Light" Mission. I vibe the options. I opt for hymns on skid row.
The program was simple and rigidly enforced. Take the drug Antabuse. It allegedly deters the consumption of alcohol. You get righteously ill if you imbibe. Share a room with another drunk. Attend church services, feed bums, and pass out Jesus tracts all over skid row.
I did it. I took Antabuse, fought booze-deprivation shakes and stayed dry. My sleep went sideways. I kept brain-screening conclusions to The Onion Field text. I shared a room with a rummy ex-priest. He'd quit the church to roam, drink, and chase poontang. He was a big reader. He disdained my crime-books-only curriculum. He didn't know Joseph Wambaugh from Jesus or Rin-Tin-Tin. I tried to tell him what Wambaugh meant. My thoughts spilled out, inchoate. I didn't really know myself.
My blood bank was three blocks from the mission. Two plasma sales earned me book money. I walked to a downtown bookstore. I bought Copy Number Four of The Onion Field and read it through.
Ian dies. Karl survives, shattered. Jimmy and Greg exploit the legal system conwise and escape their just fate of death. Wambaugh's outrage. Wambaugh's terrible compassion. Wambaugh's clearly defined and softly muted message of hope at the end.
The book moved me and scared me and rebuked me for the heedlessness of my life. The book took me tenuously out of myself and made me view people at a hush.
I split the mission early. I wanted to roam, read, and booze. I went off Antabuse and retoxified my system. I fell in with an old buddy from high school. He had a right-on, can't-miss, criminal plan.
He had a pad south of Melrose. The Nickodell Restaurant was just across the street. The bar was rife with affluent juicers. I would waylay and sap drunks in the parking lot. I would run across Mel-rose and be at the pad in sixteen seconds flat.
I refused to do it. You do not wantonly raise your hand to another human being. My childhood in the Lutheran Church did not teach me that. Joseph Wambaugh did.
Books and I went back. My old man taught me to read at age three-and-a-half. I bloomed into a classic only child/child-of-divorce autodidact.
My first love was animal stories. This reading arc tapped out quick. My love for animals was wrenchingly tender and near-obsessive. Animals suffered cruelty and died in animal books. I couldn't take it. I moved on to sea stories. I dug the vastness of the sea and the specialized nomenclature of ships. I overdid this reading arc and got mired down in the unabridged Moby Dick.
Words and phrases baffled me. The narrative was hard to grasp. I grokked a fair portion of the text and rooted for Moby. Fuck Captain Ahab. He was this pegged-leg psycho cocksucker. He was fucking with Moby and trying to stick harpoons in his ass. The story got tedious. My old man finished the book for me. He said the ending got schizzy. Moby rammed the boat and only one guy lived. Moby caught some harpoons and skedaddled.
Sea stories, adieu. On to kid westerns. Cattle drives, gunfights, redskin ambushes. This reading arc ran concurrent with a bumper crop of western TV shows. Gunsmoke, The Restless Gun, Wagon Train. Frontier justice and dance-hall girls flashing cleavage. My book fixation up to the drum roll of fate on June 22, 1958.
Now she's dead. She's Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, age forty-three, farm girl from rural Wisconsin. She's my mother. She's a drunk. She's a registered nurse-the sexy archetype female profession. She's a gooood/looking redhead/she's got film-noir qualities/she's my kid-sex stand-in for all women.
She betrothed me to CRIME. My reading focus zoomed there instantly. I moved in with my old man. He catered to my newly wrought reading arc and bought me two kids' crime books a week.
I gobbled them, started shoplifting books to fill reading gaps and exhausted the kid-crime-book canon quicksville. I graduated to Mickey Spillane and cold-war psychoses. Crime was sex, sex was crime, fictional crime and sex was a sublimated dialogue on my hated and lusted-for mother. My old man got me Jack Webb's book The Badge. It lauded the LAPD and detailed their most notorious cases. Joe Wambaugh joined LAPD the next year. He was a kid-cop with an English degree. He stood a decade short of his writer apotheosis.