Crime. The redhead and me. My Wambaugh rendezvous years hence.
My mother's death corrupted my imagination. I saw crime everywhere. Crime was not isolated incidents destined for ultimate solution and adjudication. Crime was the continual circumstance. It was all day, every day. The ramifications extended to the 12th of Never. This is a policeman's view of crime. I did not know it then.
My metier was kiddie-noir. It's summer '59. Dr. Bernard Finch and Carole Tregoff whack Bernie's wife for her gelt. Bernie's 40-plus. Carole's 19, stacked, and leggy. She's a redhead. Redheads and murder?-I'm there. It's May, '60. Caryl Chessman eats gas at Big Q. It's a Little Lindbergh bounce-kidnap with sex assault. Limo Liberals lay out lachrymose-big boo-hoo-hoo. Joe Wambaugh joins LAPD the same day.
Kiddie-noir was couched in a dual-world constellation. The outside world was the alleged real world. This meant home life and my enforced school curriculum. The inside world was CRIME. This meant crime books, crime flicks, crime TV shows. Every encapsulated drama offers a tidy solution. I know this is bullshit. The glut of book crime and filmic crime means no surcease from crime ever. Joe Wambaugh's a rookie cop now. He knows this more than me.
It's April, '61. Country fiddler Spade Cooley's deep in the shit. He's jacked up on bennies. His wife wants to join a free-love cult. Spade beats her to death. Ella Mae Cooley vibed slow-burning fame. She had that "Oh, Baby" look my mom got with three highballs. Joe Wambaugh's twenty-four now. He's working University Division. It's all Negro and all trouble. The natives are always restless. Parking-lot dice games. Hair-process joints. Sonny Liston-manques sporting porkpies. Nightwatch bops to a tom-tom beat.
The inside world was a fiend habituation. Racetrack touts, brain-damaged pugs, ice-cream vendors with kiddie-raper rackets. It's Winter '62. My old man takes me by the Algiers Hotel-Apartments. He says it's a "Fuck Pad." Whores work the rooms. It's a "Hot-Sheet Flop." Married guys bring their secretaries for noon-ers. I ditch school and surveill the Algiers. Every woman who enters is a siren, a temptress, a film-noir succubus. It's Summer '62. It's buy-school-clothes time. The old man takes me to the Wilshire May Company. Nature calls. I bop to a men's room stall to unload. There's a big hole in one wall. I wonder why. I find out toot-fucking-sweet.
A fruit sticks his dick through the hole and waggles it my way. I shriek, grab my pants, and lay tracks. My old man is equal parts aghast and amused. Joe Wambaugh works Wilshire Vice a year later. The May Company "Glory Hole" is a Fruit Mainstay, a Fruit Landmark, a Fruit Cup Supreme. He entraps fruits there. He writes a fruit-entrapment scene in The Choirboys years later.
It's March, '63. The Onion Field snuff occurs. It slipped through my radar then. Joe Wambaugh's working Wilshire. He gets obsessed.
Crime carried me through a failing school career and my old man's failing health. I read crime books, watched crime flicks, brain-screened crime fantasies. I neglected my schoolwork. I bicycle-stalked girls around my neighborhood. I peeped nighttime windows and grooved on stray women. I roamed L.A. I shoplifted books. I snuck into theaters to watch crime films. I grew into a big, geeky, acne-addled, morally-mangled teenage thief/scrounger. I craved mental thrills and sex stimulation. I boosted skin mags. I lurked. I leched. I ditched school. I called in bomb threats to other schools. I burglarized empty pop-bottle sheds behind local markets. I got kicked out of high school. I joined the army. The old man died. I faked a nervous breakdown and got discharged. I came back to L.A. It was Summer '65. I found a pad in the old neighborhood and a handball-passing gig. I was free, white, and seventeen. I figured I'd become a great writer soon. Logic demands that you write some great books first. This fact eluded me.
I started drinking, smoking weed, and eating amphetamines. My stimulation index exploded exponentially. I roamed L.A. I shoplifted. I got popped at a market and carted to Georgia Street Juvenile. It was July, '65. Joe Wambaugh worked there then. I might have glimpsed my all-time teacher.
A friend's dad bailed me out. I got a lecture and summary probation. My day in jail scared me and taught me just this: Steal more cautiously now.
I did. It worked. I shoplifted food, booze, and books and rocked on, impervious. It's now August, '65. The Watts Riot goes down. Moral exemplar Ellroy is appalled, enraged, aghast, and racially threatened.
It's baaaad juju in Jungle Junction. I sense Commie influence. I get giddy and righteously riled. This beats crime books, crime flicks, crime TV shows. Nasty Negro Armageddon. The savage sack of my city. The Watts Riot-what a fucking blast!!!!
I huddled with some pals. We armed ourselves with BB guns. We were Mickey Spillane fans and rigorously anti-Red. What would Mike Hammer do? He'd fucking act.
We got bombed on weed and T-bird. We drove south at dusk. L.A. cringed under curfew. We violated it. We had meager firepower, but stern hearts. Smoke hazed up the southside. We hit trouble at Venice and Western.
Two white cops pulled us over. They checked out our arsenal and howled. They told us to go home and watch the show on TV. Hit the road-or we'll call your parents.
We obeyed. We got more bombed and watched news reports. Joe Wambaugh caught the show live.
He reported to 77th Street Station. He worked a four-man patrol car. They had sidearms and one shotgun. He went out into it. He caught the first shots fired.
Vermont and Manchester. Store windows shattered, alarms ringing, seven hundred to eight hundred fools in the street. A gun pops. Then another. Shots overlap in one long roar-and it never stops.
The cops barged through stores. They hurdled broken window glass and subdued rioter-thieves. Shots popped out of nowhere. Richochets ringed. They hauled suspects out of buildings and pulled them off the streets. Gunfire poured down. They couldn't make its origins. They couldn't dodge it for shit. They took their suspects to booking stations and Central Receiving. They got out of it. They went back into it. Wambaugh got scared, unscared, scared, unscared, scared. His adrenaline went haywire. The heat and flames and heavy riot gear leeched pounds off of him.
He held the moments close. He compiled notes later. He deployed them in his first novel.
The New Centurions tracks three cops for five years. The narrative covers 1960 to the riot. Policework vignettes force the action. It is crime as continuing circumstance and crime as defining circumstance writ intimately and large. The cops differ in temperament. Their worldviews converge along authoritarian lines and diverge in their need to touch darkness and disorder. The three posses near-disordered inner lives. They meet, subvert, interdict, and seek to contain crime every working day. The process serves to still their fears on an ad hoc basis and grants them a sometimes stable, sometimes troubled equilibrium. The novel concludes shortly after the Watts Riot. The riot has provided them with the context they have unconsciously sought since their first days as cops. They have aligned the opposing sides of their natures through enforced chaos. They have achieved momentary peace. That peace will die almost immediately. A non sequitur event, prosaic and deadly, will define them all in the end.
Crime as continuing and defining circumstance: '60 to '65. My own idiot crime life: '65 to '70.
I read crime books. I scoured Cain, Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald. I nurtured a fatuous sense of my own future literary greatness. I viewed crime flicks and crime TV shows. I enacted crime in my own inimitable and Mickey Mouse manner.