The Big Somewhere by Steven Powell

Author:Steven Powell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781501331343
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the opening pages of The Black Dahlia, Officer Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert is driven by a troop carrier into the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Bleichert is one of a division of patrolmen assigned to police the ‘Zoot riots’: a series of racially charged attacks by US servicemen on Mexican Angelinos, which escalated into violent clashes between these groups and the police, in downtown LA, in May and June of 1943.

Hundreds of in-uniform soldiers, sailors, and marines descended on downtown LA, armed with two-by-fours and baseball bats. An equal number of pachucos were supposed to be forming … . Every Central Division patrolman was called in to duty, then issued a World War I tin hat and an oversized billy club known as a nigger knocker. At dusk, we were driven to the battleground in personnel carriers borrowed from the army, and given one order: restore order. (Ellroy 1987: 11)

Bleichert’s narration of the riots is the Quartet’s first description of Los Angeles, and it captures much of what is essential to Ellroy’s city as it appears in the series – an overtly historicized urban scene awash with racial violence, in which the detective is charged with the task of upholding the seemingly orderly imperatives of the state against the supposed threat of the non-white populace (the gang of pachucos who are ‘supposed to be forming’ remain unseen and purely suppositional here). In this latter respect, it is instructive that Ellroy’s retelling of the riots focuses on the militarization of the police, both in detailing their equipment (tin hats, personnel carriers), and in the language of Bleichert’s description, in which downtown LA becomes a ‘battleground’. This superficial resemblance signals a deeper alignment between the policemen assigned to ‘restore order’, and the military personnel ‘descend[ing]’ on the city in pursuit of racial violence – as do their tools of regulatory force, the ‘nigger knocker[s]’.

Nevertheless, Bleichert’s narration runs counter to this project of racial control, attesting to the inequity of the violence on the streets: ‘soldiers and jarheads overturned cars parked in front of a bodega while navy youths in skivvies and white bell-bottoms truncheoned the shit out of an outnumbered bunch of zooters on the sidewalk’ (Ellroy 1987: 12). Moreover, with ‘chaos … coming down from all sides’ (11), ‘gunshots and flaming palm trees’ (15), and ‘marines in dress blues systematically smashing streetlights’ (12), ‘it was’, as Bleichert relates the scene, ‘almost impossible to distinguish zooters from GIs’ (Ellroy 1987: 11–15). As the symbolic implication of this last detail suggests, the visual confusion of the scene registers the collapse of an assumed moral order in which racial difference may be relied upon as a marker of criminal disorder and moral wickedness – as Bleichert puts it, in a phrase that betrays its own starkly racist assumptions, ‘I was terrified because the good guys were really the bad guys’ (Ellroy 1987: 12). But when an elderly resident watching the chaos from his porch sympathetically observes that it’s ‘kinda hard to tell who to

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