Destination Read Online Free PDF Page B

puzzle-cube aspect of the novelist’s gift always stuns.
    Novelists mold memories and conceits. Their images replace colored blocks and click to cohesion. Plumb lines appear. They take what they need and what they were and sift it through what they’ve become. Their voices build off a mute state often nurtured in recklessness and privation.
    The novel is a daunting task. It takes some building up to. My prelude took fourteen years.
    I dawdled post–high school. I nursed an urge to blow town. My dad let me join the Army. My dad had a second stroke my second day in. I exploited his condition. I faked a nervous breakdown.
    The Army scared me shitless. I hated the discipline. I was a craven and seditious faux führer. I did not want to go to Vietnam.
    I got an emergency leave. I visited my dad on his deathbed. His last words to me: “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.”
    The Army cut me loose. I was parent- and draft-free at age 17. I got a jolt of destiny. Teenage orphans were fucked. I’d better become a great writer fast.
    â€œFast” is relative. Fourteen years runs relative against a lifetime. “Great” is relative. It’s often a self-bestowed or posthumous tag.

    Ellroy’s father, Lee.
(Photo courtesy
of James Ellroy)
    It was time to live and read. It was time to complete my picaresque education.
    I matriculated in L.A. I majored in booze and dope and minored in random desiccation. I read a shitload of crime novels and true-crime books and eschewed “mainstream” literature. I ate up plot, structural density and character development through implication. I judged books by their human content and authenticity. I made qualitative judgments and dropped further analysis. I possessed no gift to gauge abstraction. It was pure assimilation. I lived in a fictional criminal universe and brain-screened criminal fantasies. I committed petty crimes out of sloth and moral default. I shoplifted food, booze, and books. I stole empty pop bottles from reclamation bins. I broke into apartment-house laundry rooms and pried coins out of washers and dryers. I stalked Hancock Park girls, broke into their pads, and sniffed their underwear. I did county-jail time. I hobnobbed with other jejune jerkoffs and Mickey Mouse misdemeanants. We lied about our beaucoup bitches and criminal exploits. I honed my nascent narrative skills via jerry-rigged jailhouse jive.
    That was narrative output. Bullshit sessions rife with brag. I spritzed to cellmates and my nonjail pals. I chose my words deftly. I put the art in bullshit artiste. My themes were crime and my indigenous lunacy. I knew what I vibed. I did not try to undermine the perception. I knew that candor would hold my audience. I knew that macho posturing would discredit me. I understood the rules of verisimilitude. I worked off my outré appearance. I was 6′3″/140–60 pounds of it zits, and always the ripe snout pustule.
    Most kids riffed off machismo and politics. The era mandated topical discourse. Winning fistfights and Us-versus-Them—“the Establishment” as punching bag.
    I detailed my
losing
fistfights. John “the Whale” Blackman falls on me at John Costa’s pad. I enter a booze blackout. I wake up bruised in a Christmas-tree lot. There’s the Mex drag queen Peaches at the “New” County Jail. Peaches gropes my knee. I pop him. Peaches has heavy hands like Alexis Arguello. Peaches pounds me.
    â€œThe Establishment”? Fuck that. Counterculture rage denotes a new conformity. Every puerile street punk hates the Establishment. Their critique is short on analytical rigor and long on personal pique. Street punk Ellroy knows this. He can’t quite voice it epigrammatically. He’s a neoconservative crashing in parks and Goodwill bins. He craves women like then-unknown Peggy Noonan. He’s got a not-quite-acknowledged moral ace up his sheeve.
    Goofball Ellroy rarely