# Read the first page of Widespread Panic by James Ellroy Read the opening of Widespread Panic by James Ellroy free, no signup. A dead Hollywood fixer confesses his 1950s sins. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/widespread-panic-james-ellroy - Genre: Noir - Year: 2021 - ISBN: 9780593319352 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780593319345&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780593319352 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780593319352 ## The opening I've spent twenty-eight years in this fucking hellhole. Now, they tell me I can memoir-map my misadventures and write my way out. All that religious shit I disdained and disobeyed has played out true. There's Heaven for the good folks, Hell for the beastfully baaaaaad. There's Purgatory for guys like me—caustic cads that capitalized on a sicko system and caused catastrophe. I've sizzled in my sins for two decades plus. I've relived my earthly life in dystopian detail. My cunning keepers are currently dangling a deal: Record your jaundiced journey. Trumpet the truth, triumphant. Hop to Heaven, and hit that high note. Baby, it's time to CONFESS. Purgatory is shitsville. You're stuck with the body you had on Earth when you died. You eat nothing but coach-class airplane food. There's no booze, no jazzy intrigue, no wilt-your-will women. Violated victims bop by my cell. They remind me of my many misdeeds and jab me with red-hot pokers. Gay gauchos hurtle down from Heaven and scold me for outing them back in the homo-hate ’50s. It was my job. I entrapped soiled celebrities and putzo politicos, and cornholed them in Confidential. I sold my soul to that maladroit magazine. Now, I’m sordidly SORRY. So what? Sorry’s for limp-dick losers. Confession salves the savage self and rips it to righteous redemption. Hear my plaintive plea, O watchful world: Get me the fuck out of here!!!!! My keepers have poised me with pen and paper. They’ve compiled a complete run of Confidential. My synapses soar with a million malignant memories. Freddy Otash, 1922–1992. I’m a rogue cop, a private eye, a shifty shakedown artist. I’m the demonic deus ex machina of my tattered time and place. I’m the hellhound who held Hollywood captive. I’m the man with the sex-scorched secrets you irksome earthlings want to hear. Confidential presaged the infantile Internet. Our gobs of gossip were repugnantly real. Today’s blowhard bloggers and their tattle texts? Pussyfooting punks all. We stung the studios. We popped the pooh-bahs. We hurled the hurt, wholesale. We voyeur-vamped America and got her hooked on the shivering shit. WE CREATED TODAY’S TELL-ALL MEDIA CULTURE. We crazily crafted a lurid language and made it our own. It’s the lexicon of the lowdown. It’s the dialogue of the dish. It’s the slithering slur and the thrill of the threat. I think and write in algorithmic alliteration. Language must lambaste and lay on the lash. Language liberates as it offends. Confidential taught me that. My confession will make this dizzy dialect divide you in two. There’s Sin and Atonement, fuckers—there’s nothing else. Purgatory’s a punitive proposition. Montgomery Clift pitch-forked me yesterday. Confidential labeled him “the Lavender Lilliputian” and “Princess Tiny Meat.” JFK followed Monty: I dumped the dish on his dope habit and call-girl cavalcade. Marilyn Monroe penance-poked me next. Marilyn was a snout trout. She dispensed head to rogue pharmacists, XXX-exclusive. They dispensed noxious Nembutal back. Maybe I shouldn’t have tattled the tale—but I was within my First Amendment rights!!!!! I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW. I was working Hollywood Vice in ’51. We got word on a fuck pad, operating out of a crib at the Villa Elaine. I hotfooted it over there.” We’re bopped back in my booth. There’s my audience: four showbiz machers in worse shape than me. Walkers, canes, and oxygen tanks clog the aisles to the kitchen. Fractious Freddy O.’s holding court. It’s late summer, ’92. I’m seventy and in baaaaad fucking shape. I’ve consumed scads of scotch and sucked three packs a day since I shot out the chute. I’ve got emphysema and a bum pump. I’m aching to make eighty. It’s a lunar-looped long shot. Sol Sidell said, “Get to it, Freddy. You roll to the pad, and then what?” ## Books with a similar feel - [He Died with His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond](https://uncovered.ink/read/he-died-with-his-eyes-open-derek-raymond.md) - [The Song Is You by Megan Abbott](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-song-is-you-megan-abbott.md) - [Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto](https://uncovered.ink/read/galveston-nic-pizzolatto.md) - [The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-big-sleep-raymond-chandler.md) - [The Long Shadow by Liza Marklund](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-long-shadow-liza-marklund.md) - [Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King](https://uncovered.ink/read/dolores-claiborne-stephen-king.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.