1968

Are we worse — or just dumber?

And you look like 1968

Or was it ’69?

When I heard you caught a bullet

Well I guess you’re doing fine

And you speak of revolution

Like it’s some place that you’ve been

Well you’ve been a long time gone

Good to see you, my old friend

— “1968” Turnpike Troubadours

I’ve been living in the 1960s for the past couple of weeks. Blame James Ellroy. The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction is releasing a new novel this week, Red Sheet, set in Los Angeles c. 1962. Marilyn Monroe has just OD’d in Brentwood, Richard Nixon’s campaign for California governor is unraveling, and nefarious doings are afoot in the City of Angels…

The Demon Dog is getting white around the muzzle — but based on excerpts, it looks like his teeth are still sharp. His 1995, novel American Tabloid, centered around the lead-up to the JFK assassination is one of my top-five novels, a searing, propulsive purgative for the myth of American innocence. Other works have been hit-and-miss for me, but there’s no one quite like him when he’s on a hot roll. And Red Sheet looks like a return to form.

Anyways…

Setting the mood for a dive into this 544-page tome led me back down the mean streets of my old hometown. LA has always been a frontier town; it was the most violent frontier city in America in the 1850s and ’60s. It was going through another spasm in the early 1990s when my wife Marilyn and I decamped and headed north to Sisters.

My perambulations through LA history led me to the night of June 4, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy won the Democratic Party’s California primary. A few minutes after delivering a victory speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, he walked into a kitchen and was shot in the head. He lingered for about 24 hours, dying early on the morning of June 6.