Free James Ellroy by The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women Page A

off the train, walked down the platform and stood by Marge’s window. She pressed her hand up to her side of the glass. I placed my hand over it.
    The brood den enclosed me. Caddy gigs and chump jobs kept me borderline solvent. I wrote and chased.
    The sex-fiend cop became a hardback trilogy. The feminist poet was supplanted by a brainy call girl and the cop’s resurrected ex-wife. The woman-with-a-cello book stayed in print. Ditto the my-mom-got-whacked-and-I’m-in-flight epic.
    I was happy. I was grateful. I wrote books for minor remuneration and got minor acclaim. I was too circumspect to self-immolate and too tall and good-looking to lose. All my crazy shit stayed suppressed.
    New York in the ’80s. Jesus—what a fucking ride!!!!!
    The stories and sustained sobriety saw me through. The stories were all a man meets a woman and now he moves on. They reflected my life as a minor artist and self-absorbed failure in love. New York City was felicitously female. It was a dizzying disproportion. The face pool was bottomless and bottomlessly reflecting. I kept seeing myself.
    My prescience had deserted me. My spiritual aptitude had gone south. I had seen three brilliant women within moments early on. One had given me a precious vignette before her own vanishing. I saw women less discerningly now. Creative contentment had induced callousness. My psychic holes were patched with my books on shelves and the wound of Jean Hilliker stitched. The Curse had been roadblocked by hard work and a curt dismissal of the debt. I was out looking for women looking back and up at me.
    My watcher’s lifetime ran nearly four decades. My debilitating hunger was vaulted and lockboxed. I believed that it had given me mastery and an endless ticket to ride. Unbodied sex had almost proved fatal. I had sought death to prove my love to a ghost. It was the unconscious courting of reunion. I wanted to expunge our disparities and unite us as a whole.
    I went at women because they were there and I wanted them. My revised standards denoted my flight from and back to the vault.
    The stories I wrote controlled this self-phenomenon. I acceded to the strictures of the hard-boiled school and honed my craft. I perfected the art of womanizing simultaneously. I felt the weight of horrible circumstance upon me. It was huge. It did not justify my predation. I once scanned faces for rectitude. Now I read them for susceptibility to male charm.
    One-night stands, short-term deals, longer-term girlfriends. Sex and no sex, brood sessions and phone calls. “No” was still “No”—but I heard it less and less. I was
that
attuned to female discontent.
    I was a ruthlessly attuned listener and self-serving confidant. I was adept at dissecting devolving relationships and merciless in my critique of feckless men. Interrogator, interlocutor, pal. Rebuker of male weakness. The murdered mother’s son. The feminist with the right-wing chivalry code. The demonizer of all misogynistic men. The guy who always wanted to get laid. The guy who always let the women lean in for the first kiss.
    Fuck—the phone rang a lot. I kept a C-note tucked away for late-night cabs to the Apple. They were all decent women. No STDs, no coke-dealer boyfriends, no Glenn Close with a knife. They
loooved
my I-want-a-wife-and-daughters spiel. It was abstractly true. It was specifically and equally true that I didn’t want it with
them
. I knew itgoing in. I shouldn’t have lied. I’d possessed greater honesty in my unlaid and mystical state. I never bought their Let’s-see-how-shit-plays-out routine. That permissive jive got kicked out of me in L.A. I capitulated to the notion for more sex and softness. I rejected it in my heart of hearts—and my heart of heart cradles my conscience.
    If sex is to be everything, then so She must be
. God kept saying that to me.
I did not bring you this far to drop you in an inappropriate bedroom. These women do not possess your ferocity. You’ll know her if and