Detecting a Note of Jealousy in a Hard-Boiled Writer

Well, here it is the last day of the year, and a chance to clean out all the leftovers in the drawers to start 1993 afresh. Which is another way of saying I’m flailing about for a column because I’ve spent the whole day stuck in a James Ellroy detective novel.

It’s great, impelling, impossibly slimy stuff, the second of Ellroy’s books I’ve read in the past week.

And for much of that week the brutal doings of corrupt, compromised cops in 1950s’ L.A. have seemed more real to me than all the holiday bustle and cheer, household matters and all the year-end workload, the latter having been made all the more frustrating in the context of these detective novels, because we aren’t allowed to beat confessions out of the people we interview:

“Tell me about your new album,” I asked, my beefy left hand warming up the leather sap in my pocket.

Effecting a bravado as false as his hair implants, the aging rocker blandly stated, “I think it’s my most challenging effort to date, and. . .” The words became lost in a cloud of rouge as the sap thudded home.

“Can it. You know it’s lyrically derivative of Dylan’s ‘New Morning’ period and you pried half the licks out of Guitar Slim’s cold dead hands. Now give!”

“OK. I’ll talk! I’ll talk!”

That I’d get so lost in the pages of a book suggests either that Ellroy is one hell of a storyteller, or that we all find our ways of checking out of reality sometimes, and the shadings of hard-boiled noir do look pretty good compared to the holiday blues.

They say TV is addictive, but I’ve just read 90 small-print pages between writing that last paragraph and this one, and for writing this sentence I well may reward myself with another chapter.

There, I just did, and since Ellroy just killed off the book’s hero, and the guy picking up the baton gets snuffed in the first chapter of his subsequent book, which I read before this one, maybe I can pull away from it for a while.

I used to read all night. I’d read in class at college, making sure the book in question was of sufficient literary heft that the instructor would be embarrassed to make me put it down merely to listen to his boring spiel. I’d read while I drove, and only quit that because the speed-bumps kept me from concentrating sufficiently on the narrative.

I’d read Sartre, Robert E. Howard berserker pulps, dental trade magazines. I’d read the little instruction manuals in the condom boxes, hoping for a trace of literary style or humor, maybe something on the order of “Caution: Emits shower of sparks.”

About the only treatment for a reading addiction--short of the horrible aversion training of enduring a John Irving novel--is to get a newspaper job.

Though it clearly isn’t a permanent cure, I found when I became an ink-stained wretch that my reading input went way down, and I’ve seen that’s also true of several of my co-workers.

It isn’t so much that we get sick of seeing words all day. Rather, we get sick of seeing other writers paid heap big bucks for writing them.

If they wrote book jacket blurbs with newspaper writers in mind, they’d say things like: “You’ll seethe with resentment!” and “Using smaller words than you do, this author just earned more than you could if you poured your life’s earnings into the Kentucky Derby and won!”

Then they’d picture the author by the beach in a sporty Windbreaker, appearing to look thoughtful, while we know the thought is: “Ha ha. You pale chumps! I get to go the the beach all day. I own it! Ha ha ha!”

Meanwhile, on any random Saturday or holiday you’d find our offices here full of the usual suspects chained to our work stations, with the sickly luminescent “terminal tan” that comes from going through life attached to a word processor.

I’ve thought it might make a great commercial to have a camera slowly pan across a wheezing roomful of us journalists squinting at our screens, with the caption, “Let us be your guide to weekend entertainment.”

Small wonder, then, that the world of detectives and spies can seem so appealing (I just finished the Ellroy book, by the way). Sometimes I think existence in general would be livelier if we all went through life thinking we were secret agents.

Imagine how much more attention you’d pay to the small details of everyday life if you had to be on the lookout each instant for a silencer-equipped rifle barrel pointing your way, while twangy electric guitar soundtracks played in your head. Unless you’re Woodward and Bernstein, newspaper writers don’t see too much of that.

About the only fun livening up our office days is the arrival of hate mail, for which all work stops as we gather around to admire the mean missives. Speaking of Woodward and Bernstein, my latest post-marked maledictions resulted from a recent column I did criticizing the library of their old sparring partner, Dick Nixon.

One letter came from Nixon library director John H. Taylor, who griped that it was whiners like me who made it so hard for Nixon’s Administration to accomplish all it did.

In light of the recent Nixon tape revelations in the New Yorker, I feel particularly chastised.

Could it have been my high school whinings that hindered Nixon in his plot to smear his presidential rival in 1972 by having his goons conduct a burglary to plant false evidence to show George Wallace’s attempted assassin as a George McGovern flunky? Did my mewlings distract him from his plans to shake down ambassadorial appointees for cash?

Perhaps Mr. Taylor missed these recent news items, since I imagine it takes some time to make the signature “John H. Taylor” come out looking like “Richard Nixon,” as his eerily seems to.

The other letter I got was unsigned, rich in scatological suggestions, and suggested that I shouldn’t spend my time tearing down such institutions. Perhaps the writer is right.

A colleague here more constructively suggests that instead, we should get a plot of land across from the Nixon library and open The Real Richard Nixon Library.

He suggests filling a building with all the dirt on the Stubbly One’s career. But I think a deep, dark pit would suffice.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I think I’ll go dodge silencer barrels for a while.