Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 4

THE MANY WORLD(S) OF DUNE: PART II

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

I am often sluggish in delivering promises -- or threats -- but slow delivery is not the same as no delivery, so here we are. Some time ago I began a dive into Frank Herbert's DUNE, one of the most influential novels of all time, which spawned not only a slew of sequels but also numerous cinematic adaptations, culminating most recently in Dennis Villaneuve's highly successful film series, which is still ongoing. You may recall that I wrote an incoherent rant in these very pages denouncing DUNE PART ONE as a "dumbed down" version of Herbert's universe. Specifically, I attacked the dialog, which I thought especially weak and insipid.
In the frenzy of my attack I neglected to mention that I actually rather liked the movie itself. It was by no means great, but it showed promise, and there were touches which were quite inspired and even brilliant. DUNE PART TWO was far better in almost every respect, which is a double accomplishment, because the world Herbert built in his novel is so complex, so rich with lore, so dependent upon internal monologue and numerous points of view, that for decades it has been deemed "untranslatable" to the screen.

My first exploration of Herbert's universe was not an analysis of the novel but rather a review of David Lynch's ill-fated but highly spirited 1985 adaptation of the book, which I likened to bad opera: it's a slog, and often ridiculous, but it is unquestionably and seductively lavish, and there is so much craft in the effort one cannot help but appreciate the final result. Actually, one of the factors which makes Lynch's take on DUNE such a mess is the quite admirable decision he made to cram as many of Herbert's complexities and nuances into the movie as humanly possible. Instead of streamlining the massive storyline and slimming the concepts into digestible form, he simply dumps the entire mass onto our heads, which I grant you showed an impressive trust in the intellectual capacity of the audience, but ended up carrying us away on a tide of ideas.

Villanueve's approach to the tangle that is DUNE was much more practical if less idealistic. He did not attempt, as Lynch did, to cook the whole cow on a kitchen stove, but rather to serve as much meat as possible without choking us to death. In the first film he went rather overboard keeping things simple. In the second he corrects course to a degree that left me almost completely satisfied. DUNE PART TWO is not a perfect film, it is not even a "great" film with a capital "G," but it is very good and also very respectful of its source material. As my brother remarked after we watched it, it is ultimately just one man's take on Herbert's dizzying ideas, but it does not follow the odious Hollywood habit of trying to "improve" upon the originator's vision. This begs the question, "What was that vision? And why is it important?"

DUNE is not merely a science fiction novel, any more than LORD OF THE RINGS is merely a fantasy. It is an almost incredibly sophisticated analysis of the forces which move humanity -- politics, economics, and religion chiefly among them. In the world of DUNE, Herbert created a universe which is feudal in nature. The galaxy is ruled by an emperor whose army, the Sardaukar, are considered by all to be invincible, though everyone is more or less intriguing against him anyway. His imperium is made up of individual worlds, each ruled by Great Houses, noble families each with their own military and their own ambitions and bitter rivals. The most valuable commodity in existence is the spice melange, which not only vastly extends life, but allows a form of space travel called "folding" which makes distances immaterial. This spice is found on only one planet in the universe, the desert planet of Arrakis a.k.a. Dune, and cannot be artificially reproduced, making this obscure and hostile world the axis of civilization even though it is regarded as a hostile wasteland. Because the religion of the imperium forbids artificial intelligence, humans have developed "schools of thought" to replace computers, and one of these schools, the Bene Gesserit, has for thousands of years been conducting a breeding experiment designed to produce what amounts to a superhuman being. The story's protagonist, Paul Atreides, is the end result of this millennia-long effort, but he does not know it, and DUNE is to some extent an exploration of Paul's often contradictory attempts to both escape from, to exploit, and to rise above his own destiny.

It is said that J.R.R. Tolkien hated DUNE because it takes the view that all of humanity's regulating systems -- government, economics, politics, religion, philosophy, and even morality -- are essentially secular control mechanisms. That morality is in essence a construct, and that it can be adjusted according to who is in power. When Paul finds himself in the hands of a band of dangerous desert nomads called the Fremen, and begins to grasp that these are the warriors who might be able to defeat the Sardaukar and unseat the emperor who betrayed his family, he and his witch mother embark on a course of using the Fremen to gain revenge and ultimately seize power; but this course involves a tremendous level of conscious manipulation and deceit. Paul exploits his unnatural abillities to assume a messianic role among the Fremen, becoming a combination of Jesus and Joan of Arc, and unleashes a "holy war" which shakes the universe to its foundations, and threatens to turn Paul into a much worse villain than his various nemeses.

This is, of course, only the most superficial and cursory explanation of Herbert's creation. To fully analyse DUNE would take a book nearly as long as DUNE itself, so we will content ourselves with saying that the story is a study of power, which makes it rather similar at a glance to GAME OF THRONES, but unlike GoT it is also a fully conscious examination of humanity itself, and the various means by which we humans regulate our existence. Dennis Villenueve succeeds with his films in very large part because he sticks closely to this idea -- the way the Emperor motivates his soldiers through a carefully crafted warrior religion which is deeply cultic in nature, and the way Paul motivates his warriors in an eerily similar way. And by "motivates," I mean, and Villenueve means, "exploit." Because at its core, DUNE is also about the way our regulatory systems, be they called government (patriotism, nationalism), religion (fanaticism, jihad), or even psychology and anthropology (manipulation of the masses through dear or dark empathy), are simply devices engineered to get people to do whatever the hell those in power desire. The Atreides are the "good guys" of the story, but their leader, Duke Leto (Paul's father), is in his own way just as ruthless, cunning and manipulative as any of his enemies, if only by sheer necessity. He too can only stay in power if he "keeps his knife hand ready and his shield at full charge."

In DUNE, the House of Atriedes' greatest rival is House Harkonnen, who are unquestionably evil, though driven by the same basic motives as everyone else. The Harkonnens ultimately join forces with the Emperor to destroy the Atreides, who the Emperor see as a long-term threat to his power. The Emperor uses the Harkonnens as a tool, but the Harkonnes are also using the Emperor to position themselves to become greater threats to his position. And Villenueve rightly explores how the Harkonnens manipulate their own people with a combination of terror, gladiatorial games, and appeals to nationalism and greed, in their war against the Atreides. Likewise, the Bene Gesserit witches are master manipulators, using their knowledge of genetic engineering as well as their command of "the voice" (a way of overriding human will) and other tricks to shape events in a way that conforms to their own ambitions. This is true all down the line. Indeed, every one of the power blocks Herbert creates in DUNE and its sequels -- the Emperor, the Great Houses, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Tleilax, etc. -- are united in their desire to use force, fraud, intrigue, and any other methods which may come to hand to protect their own position and to improve it. This conforms precisely to Realpolitik right here on Earth, and it can be bewildering and depressing, because none of us truly wants to believe that our national identity, race-ethnicity, sexuality, religious and philosophical beliefs, etc. are simply tools by which we are controlled by others. Nor do we wish, in our hearts, to reduce life itself to a mere struggle for power. Writers like Tolkien approach the problem of good versus evil in a more literal and clear-cut manner, in which the good are unquestionably good (though prone to temptation) while the evil are questionably evil, an exception like Gollum more or less proving the rule, since Gollum, who was redeemable, ultimately chose not to redeem himself. In DUNE, the Atreides are "good" because they cling to a code of honor which distinguishes them from their opponents, but on a larger scale they also play by the cruel and cynical rules of the universe they inhabit. Paul, however, tilts increasingly away from the Atreides code as the book progresses into the "cruel and cynical" vein. Through his powers of prescience, sees that by manipulating the Fremen to serve his own goals -- first survival, then revenge, then finally power -- he may very well unleash a force upon the universe far more evil than the Emperor or the Harkonnens; yet he is content to take the risk to satisfy his ambitions. In the end, Paul is himself manipulated by the historical forces that circumstances, including his own existence, have unleashed. Unlike LORD OF THE RINGS, where the good characters are occasionally pushed along in their quest by divine intervention, or GAME OF THRONES, which it could be argued is a contest between different gods using human tribal groupings as proxies, the world of DUNE recognizes no controlling master intelligence behind events. Rather -- and here it has some resemblance to the universe of Azimov's FOUNDATION series -- humanity is half-governed by the conscious manipulation of human agencies, and half by historical necessities which occur because the general trend of events presses that way whether the agencies in question want them to or not. The Bene Gesserit are by far the most farseeing, capable, and manipulative of all the various agencies in DUNE, but they too are ultimately helpless in the face of these historical earthquakes or floods. They created Paul, but in the end they find they cannot control him, just as Paul eventually discovers he cannot control the religious fervor of the Fremen or what it will do to the universe.

To bring this back to Villaneueve, I do believe that with DUNE PART II, he hit upon the essential elements of the DUNE story. In PART I we get an unforgettable and terrifying glimpse of the way in which the Sarduakar are conditioned to do the Emperor's dirty work. In PART II, we see Paul systematically condition the Fremen to do his work which is just as dirty, using a mirror-image of the Emperor's methods. If these DUNE films are simplified versions of Herbert's novel, they have the saving grace -- minus the weak dialog of the first movie especially -- of not conflating simplicity and stupidity. What Herbert had to say about humanity and the way it regulates itself may not be pretty and may not be completely accurate, but it was necessary, it was brilliant, and so long as anyone can read or think for themselves it will continue to evoke the sort of passionate debate which science fiction and fantasy seem to be capable of sparking perhaps more than any other genre.

AS I PLEASE XXVII: UNBEARABLE JUDAS EDITION

It's funny how the people you'd take a bullet for are the same ones who pull the trigger on you.

I took a brief hiatus from this blog to handle some personal business, and now that I've returned, I have a lot to say about a lot, so it's time for yet another entry of "As I Please." Let's get into it.

* I have recently undergone a profound personal betrayal. A very close friend of mine, someone I trusted enough to give a key to my home, someone I loved enough to place their photo upon my wall, someone with whom I have exchanged the sort of deep, dark secrets that only trusted pals hand over to each other for safekeeping, decided it would be momentarily expedient to sink a couple of daggers between my shoulder blades. Now, in my life I have gone through a great deal good and bad, but I have surprisingly little experience with betrayal. Sitting here now, I had to think long and hard to the last time someone turned on me so thoroughly and unexpectedly, and to my surprise, I had to go back to elementary school, when my good pal M.C. turned on me violently without any explanation whatsoever. (The betrayals I experienced in Los Angeles were unpleasant but also unsurprising, so they don't really count: see the old cliche about dogs and fleas.) I would say this long streak of "trust rewarded" has just been my good fortune, but the truth is that I have generally been quite selective in who I admit to my inner circle. When you have been subjected to the sort of bullying I experienced when I was in my tweens (a brief but extremely formative period in my life), you adopt a correspondingly low opinion of human nature, and the unexpected upside of this outlook is that you do not lower your guard easily. That tendency, coupled with the years I spent in law enforcement and the writerly necessity of studying human nature down to a granular level, ensured that I have generally chosen my friends and confidants with great care. This time my instincts failed me -- not once, but twice -- and the cost was extremely high. I am revealing this not because I want to complain, and certainly not because I want to name names that would be meaningless to you or go into sordid details you wouldn't be interested in anyway, but because this shabby treachery has yielded an unexpected dividend. Not only have my actual friends rallied around me to a degree I would not have believed possible, culminating, last night, in a kind of impromptu happy hour, I find that I have very little desire to exact revenge upon this person. I am intellectually angry, but emotionally my feelings are limited to disgust. I think I will be content to let the lying, the snitching and the gaslighting I was subjected to, which is now common knowledge, lead to its own independent consequences and take no hand them myself. This feeling represents a fairly enormous leap from my old, vindictive mind-set, and shows all the tedious lectures I've given in this blog ("life lessons") have not just been blather and bullshit. Yep, I actually try and practice what I preach, and sometimes I even succeed (!). In this particular case the person involved has exposed themselves as a rat not merely to me, but to almost everyone she works with, and my spies tell me she is painfully well aware of it. But whether she feels remorse, or self-pity, or even that weird form of anger that guilty parties usually direct at their victims after screwing them over, makes no difference to me now. This was addition by subtraction -- painful subtraction to be sure, but in the end, still a positive. No group of apostles benefits from a Judas, and in the long run I truly believe that Sherlock Holmes was correct when he said "her offenses carry their own punishments." Sometimes in life it's necessary to right those who have wronged you, if the wrong be egregious enough: other times, as Sun Tsu once noted, all you have to do is wait by the river long enough, and their bodies will go floating by.

* About twelve years ago, I made a point of turning off social media six months before any large-scale political election. In those days this was a very effective means of shutting out the hateful noise I saw spewing from friends of mine who were otherwise rational human beings regardless of their affiliations. Unfortunately it is no longer 2012, and this sort of self-imposed incommicado is no longer really possible. Notwithstanding social media, I cannot turn on the radio in my kitchen, or in my car, or use any music app which runs commercials, or jump on YouTube, or drive anywhere, or even use my phone, without being bombarded into a kind of shell-shocked dismay by political attack ads of the ugliest possible type, by automated polls, by robo-calls, by unwanted text messages, by endless yard signs, all concerning either the upcoming gubernatorial or presidential elections. I would like to believe this nonsense is merely a by-product of our deeply corrupt and ugly electoral system, which runs on money and nothing but money, and always plays to the worst instincts in voters, but I am tempted to wonder if it isn't all part of a truly sinister master plan, one designed to fill the perspective voter with so much disgust at the entire sordid process that they simply refuse to vote at all. If this is not actually the case, it is certainly the actual effect even if there is no controlling intelligence behind the squalor. I have never met anyone of any political stripe, no matter how extreme, who didn't regard the American election season as tedious, ugly and unbearable, and it seems to be worse now than it has ever been. The radio ads I heard just moments ago when cooking in my kitchen exult in exploiting the rape of a five year old child in hopes of provoking the sort of anger, fear, and bigotry which have characterized our political process for way too many years now. We desperately need the most severe possible election reforms in this country, and as with most of what we desperately need from a political perspective, we are 100% not going to get it. This is the face of modern democracy.

* I spent last weekend in a cabin in the woods up on the Pennsylvania - New York border. I drank beer, chopped wood, swam in very cold water, sat by an ever-blazing firepit, ate steak and eggs, shot guns at targets which were largely safe from my bullets, and did a lot of talking with two old friends, neither of whom I see very often. I cannot tell you what good this did my soul after the backstabbing I so recently endured, but what really struck me about the experience was how natural it felt. I live downtown, in a small city, I haven't fired a gun in 20 years, and haven't handled an axe in probably close to 25 or more, and while I won't say I did these things particularly well, the actions themselves felt almost entirely comfortable. I was reminded of some horseback riding I did a long time ago. I had never ridden a horse in my life, and yet when I took my fractious mount, named Satan (believe it or not, that was the horse's name, and a very apt handle it was) to a full gallop, I felt as cool as a cucumber despite a loose saddle and a lack of health insurance. I don't believe this was courge, rather ancestral memory. It just goes to show you that you can take the man out of nature, you can separate him from his tools, you can soften him with air conditioning and other comforts, but you can't entirely eliminate the pleasure he feels at connecting with the Y in his chromosomes.

* Today I received a check from the book signing I held on September 7. I had quite forgotten that the venue that was kind enough to host this effort had sold a quantity of my books at the counter prior to the event itself, and only charged me the 4% credit card fee off each transaction. In this day and age of electronic transfers, where money is reduced to an idea rather than something tangible, it was immensely satisfying to see the sum, small in relative terms but not negligible by any means, printed on that pale blue-gray paper. I will, of course, deposit the check electronically, but I may frame it just to remind me that writing, while not yet my sole source of income by a longshot, is not just my hobby, either.

* In addition to unbearable political ads, I have been reminded recently, in ways both personal-petty and not, that bureaucracy, while certainly necessary to maintain this clanking vehicle we call civilization, is also infuriating and has probably killed more people than bullets and bombs together. On the petty personal level, I have had to take my car in to two different garages a half-dozen times to get it past emissions, not due to any catastrophic shortcoming but rather a loose hose in the engine which was causing the warning lights to flare unnecessarily; that and a spot of rust on the exhaust so small you couldn't have slipped a dime through it. I have also had to wait for a new driver's license for something like 45 - 60 days, forcing to me drive with the expired one until, after God knows how much time and effort, I finally got the new one in hand (the picture is, admittedly, very good for a change). This doesn't matter in the scheme of things, of course; it's just exasperating and reminds one that the government is like a set of huge wheels that rolls with impercepitble slowness but immense weight. Which brings me to the story of NFKRZ, one of my favorite YouTubers. NFKRZ, a.k.a. Roman, is a Russian expat who fled his native land rather than get sucked into Putin's war in Ukraine, and for the last two years I have watched him deteriorate spiritually and mentally as he has battled his way through nests of red tape in one European country after another. I understand that in wartime, moreso than in what we laughably refer to as peacetime, refugees are a problem for which there is often no easy solution; but these "problems" are also human beings whose suffering is terribly real. Roman seems like a good man; he is certainly funny enough, and detests racism, nationalism, ethnic prejudice, war, and all the rest of it, which means he has no place in Putin's half-fascist, half-Mafia state. But he also seems to have no place anywhere in Europe, and thanks to the robot bureaucracy of YouTube itself, he is being demonitized thanks to his stateless condition and may soon run out of money as well as visa. It's easy for us to speak so generally about "illegal immigrants" and "refugees" as if they were weather conditions or species of insects, and hard to keep in mind that but for the grace of whatever god you may pray to, they could be us -- just ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances, trying to be seen as people and not digits.

* CAGE LIFE, my first novel, which I released in 2016, was recently named a Readers Favorite bronze medal winner, an accolade which lands atop its previous laurels of Zealot Script "Book of the Year" and Best Indie Book Award Winner for Mystery / Suspense, among others. I do confess disappointment that it wasn't a silver or a gold, and that its stablemate, KNUCKLE DOWN, did not win or place in the contest (both were rated Readers Favorite 5 Stars), but it's nice to know that my first horse still has some legs despite being so long out of the gate.

* I had plans to go see a baseball game tonight, but it is once again raining. Though I was able to get to three or four games this season, that number would have doubled if not for the fact that every goddamn time I want to go to a game, it fucking well rains on me. This is not just perception. If you were bored enough to compare the schedule of York Revolution "home" games with the days it has rained during this minor league baseball season, you'd find the numbers correspond about 1:1. Indeed, one of the games I did attend was rained out 3/4 of the way through, and another aborted before the first inning after we all sat in the damp stands for an hour and a half, drinking vastly overpriced beer and eating vastly oversalted popcorn. I mention this because someone told me yesterday (it was raining again then, too) that "we need this rain because it's been such a dry summer" and I refrained from killing him, which also shows vast personal growth on my part (I kid because I love).

And that about wraps up this much-overdue entry on a drizzly Friday I spent getting my car inspected for the fifth time. At least it was successful this go-round. In the coming days and weeks I will be posting a review of Carly Rheilan's disturbing novel A CAT'S CRADLE, writing another entry in "Memory Lane" and seeing to two moldy old promises I made here -- the first, to continue my examination of Frank Herbert's DUNE series (the books and the films), and the second, to take a deep dive into one of the best-written television series of all time, Chris Haddock's DA VINCI'S INQUEST.

BOOK REVIEW: P.G. WODEHOUSE'S "THE INIMITABLE JEEVES"

Intimitable: so good or unusual as to be impossible to copy; unique.

P.G. Wodehouse (1881 - 1975) was one of the most prolific and famous writers of the twentieth century, creating a slew of characters who became cultural bywords in his home country of Britain and in English-speaking countries everywhere; he was also a noteworthy presence in Hollywood for many years, and his stinging criticisms of the film industry's stupidities and excesses are just as timely today as they were a century ago when he made them. His fame has dimmed considerably with time, particularly on this, the Americas, side of the Atlantic, but his most enduring character, the farseeing, all-knowing butler Jeeves, is still referenced today by countless people who have never heard of Wodehouse. He remains one of the very few authors whose fictional creations have achieved the level of immortality where knowledge of the context is totally irrelevant.

I came to my knowledge of Wodehouse sideways, by reading George Orwell's essay "In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse." The writer had been captured by the Nazis in 1940 when they conquered France, and was accused of collaboration with them, a charge which lingered over him for many years and led him to live the balance of his life in America. It was a charge which was largely unfair, and such legitimacy as it possessed stemmed more from Wodehouse's combination of political naivete, an indifference to the age in which he was living, and an utter inability to work up any belligerent feeling against foreigners. Wodehouse was a humorist, his lens was comedic, and he seems to have been both unwilling and unable to look up from it.

"The Intimitable Jeeves" is a loosely assembled series of farcical incidents involving the narrator, a useless young Englishman of means named Bertie Wooster, and his all-knowing, impreturbable, implacable butler, Jeeves. Wooster personifies the idle rich man of the Edwardian Era, someone who has no real morals, convictions, intellect or substance of any kind, but -- to paraphrase Orwell -- possesses the reflexes of a gentleman. He is fairly harmless himself, but is continually being dragged into moronic situations by his old school friend, the even more useless Bingo Little, who is forever falling into romantic or economic disaster and demanding that Wooster get him out of Dutch. Wooster is, of course, incapable of this -- he is incapable of anything, really, except eating copious breakfasts -- but when his own well-intentioned but clumsy efforts inevitably fail, Jeeves steps in with equal inevitability, and pulls the strings in young master's favor. Jeeves is at once a counselor, confidant, friend, father figure, and confessor, but he is also the brain Wooster lacks, and what's more, he acts as a kind of reinforcing rod on Wooster's wobbly sense of propriety, ever nudging him toward what Jeeves perceives as "correct" behavior. The book's humor relies primarily on the inventiveness with which Bingo gets his long-suffering friend into trouble, and the greater inventiveness with which the omniscient, omnipotent Jeeves gets him out of it. Also in gentle if steady ridicule of the English society, both its upper classes and its more radical, pro-Marxist elements.

It would be a mistake, I think, to presume that Wodehouse is himself any type of social critic. His tone is not on that level, and it was said of him by the Germans who captured him when they overran France that he "lacked any political sense." Its true he mocks the stupidity of the narrator, and therefore the narrator's entire class, without mercy; but this mockery is also without cruelty, or any indication that he thinks society could or should be any different. Indeed, he pokes fun at the would-be revolutionists and feminists of the era with just as much quiet abandon: for example, one would-be Lenin is only too eager to stuff himself to bursting at the table of a lord, all the while denouncing the nobility. If there is a central theme to this novel, it is that there is always a man behind the throne: Wodehouse never once suggests what the reader already knows, to wit: that Jeeves ought to be the one with the money and the societal standing. But since Jeeves already has all the power, including the power to withhold his genius when young master does something he disapproves of like buying spats in the wrong colors, such trappings are unnecessary. Indeed, Jeeves himself is the most ferocious guardian of the social class which employs him and defines his horizons.

I am perhaps reading more into a lightweight period English comedy novel than I ought; this book is meant to make you laugh, and it is funny if you enjoy watching wealthy people make asses of themselves, especially when Jeeves ever-so-tactfully sees fit to remind Wooster that it is he, Jeeves, who is the true master. Take, for example, the incident where Wooster insists on wearing spats in the garish colors of his old university: the conservative Jeeves mightily disapproves, leading to a cold war between them. But when Jeeves saves Wooster for the umpteenth time from one of Little's idiocies, we get the following, conciliatory exchange:

"Jeeves...those spats?"
"Yes, sir?"
"You really dislike them?"
"Intensely, sir."
"You don't think time might induce you to change your views?"
"No, sir."
"All right then. Say no more. You may burn them."
"Thank you very much, sir. I have already done so. Before breakfast this morning. A quiet grey is far more suitable, sir. Thank you, sir."

This was my first exposure to Wodehouse and the plane of light comedic fiction upon which he spent his entire life and career. It was light, silly, and modestly engaging. It is the sort of fiction that does not make any pretense whatever at being more than it is, which in a day and age as pretentious and hollow as ours, was quite refreshing.

AUTHOR'S LIFE: A PAGE FROM A BOOK SIGNING

Since Goodreads is a site devoted entirely to books, it's reasonable to assume that there is some level of curiosity among readers as to the life an author leads. Perhaps this is mere egotism on my part, but I myself have always been curious about the processes behind, for example, singing, songwriting, musicianship, comedy routines, art, dance, and so forth; the mechanical processes involved in the manufacture of art.

In the past I have described more or less jokingly the struggles writers endure, which include all manner of rejection, indifference, humiliation, and disappointment, to say nothing of the economic struggles and the emotional drama. The trope of the broken-down, alcoholic writer with his half-empty whiskey bottle, his overflowing ashtray, his stack of unpaid bills and voice mailbox full of editorial demands and messages from debt collectors and ex-wives, is really not very far from the truth. Even writers far more successful than myself endure these struggles, for the simple reason that writing awards mean nothing to the general public, and royalties often constitute nothing more than a glorified side-hustle. Nevertheless, the life of an author is not all rejection slips and visits to the pawn shop. It includes a fair share of triumph, though by necessity these triumphs are often more emotional than tangible.

Yesterday I was invited to discuss my WW2 novel SINNER'S CROSS with a local book discussion group, and afterwards I spent two hours at a table in a local coffeehouse/restaurant selling and signing copies of my various works. It's worth recording the entire experience here as an example of what a writer goes through during the act of self-promotion.

Writers are by often nature, and even more often by necessity, introverts. I myself am what is known as an "extroverted introvert" in that I require regular social interaction, but then need quantities of solitude to recharge my batteries afterward. Self-promotion is thus a little less odious to me than it is for many of my more closeted bretheren. Notice I say "a little less" because while I frankly enjoy attention and praise, I feel like a fool and a jackass when I pander for it. And self-promotion is literally pandering. It is not a passive wait for acclaim, it is the active hunt for it. And this is anethema for me. Anyone who actually knows me knows that self-depreciation is at the core of my sense of humor. In this I am more like the character of Xander Harris on BUFFY than any other character I've ever seen on television or in the movies. Indeed, I went to great lengths to make Nicholas Brendan's acquaintance when I was living in L.A. because it was important for me to tell him to his face how much it meant to me to witness his performance in that role. But irreverence and self-depreciation are not great sales techniques. Salesmen ultimately sell themselves and not whatever product they are hawking, and to do that, they must present themselves as something highly valuable and desirable and not undercut their image with shyness or jokes at their own expense. To assume such a shape is difficult for me, at least for extended periods: it simply runs contrary to my nature, which is easygoing until it's not.

In any event, the morning of the event, which had the advantage of taking place about four city blocks from my apartment, I drove two boxes of books, a banner, stands, and such-like over to the venue, parked in front of their door, bought a coffee and then walked back home. When I returned a few hours later, I set up at a trestle table on the second floor which had been reserved for the discussion group, only just avoiding the downpour which began as I was lugging the last of the books inside. The second floor of this establishment has huge picture windows overlooking the street and the buildings opposite, and also provides a grand view of a pounding rainstorm, which under the circumstances boded unwell for attendance at this little shindig. And indeed, after the head of the discussion group made her appearance, for an uncomfortably long time it was just the two of us, making chitchat over coffee. And if there is one thing a writer hates more than self-promotion, it is self-promotion which fails so miserably it leaves flop sweat glistening on their forehead and upper lip. My very first book signing was such a disaster, and while the subsequent one was a triumph in comparison, it left a bad taste in my mouth which was slowly starting to reassert itself upon my unwilling taste buds.

The situation quickly changed, however. One by one the discussion group members appeared until the chairs surrounding the trestle table were fully occupied; then another wave of people, partially composed of friends of mine who'd I'd invited to make an appearance, did just that, so that a double ring of faces half-filled the second floor. For the next hour, I answered questions about SINNER'S CROSS -- how it had come to be, the difficulties I'd encountered writing it, the research I'd performed, my own interpretations of the characters and themes versus those of the readers around me, and so forth. I was pleased by the praise but even moreso by the occasional criticism. I have never been one to take intelligent, non-malicious criticism personally: quite the contrary, I actually enjoy the thought people put in to making such criticisms, because if nothing else it shows they were paying attention and cared enough about what I'd produced to give it a critique. The discussion was supposed to last an hour but actually went about 90 minutes. This left less time for the book sale & signing, but as many participants of the group bought additional books besides the copies of SINNER'S CROSS they'd purchased from the restaurant or my online store, it didn't cost me any potential sales and quite frankly, after listening to me talk for an hour and a half, it was the least I could do for them.

We then set up downstairs, by the front counter, so that patrons could not escape seeing my wares displayed on stands above a white banner emblazoned with my name and images of the various awards I've won over the last eight years. Mercifully, enough people lingered to keep me company, and enough foot traffic shuffled to the cash register to lure a few of them over to make purchases. I sold out of two books -- THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER and WOLF WEATHER -- and came one copy short of selling out my stocks of SINNER'S CROSS. Several people bought bundles: three, four, even six books. By the end of the session, I realized I'd had my most profitable personal appearance to date, which I grant you is not saying all that much since I've only done three of them, but we all start something somewhere, nicht wahr?

It is true that awkwardness is a baked-in component of such appearances. One man, a weathered meth addict in recovery with his sobriety chips swinging from his belt, came in and spent about a half an hour talking to me and my friend Jeremy, who had come a very long way while rehabbing a knee wrecked in a jiu-jitsu tournament. He had so soft a voice, and the coffeehouse was noisy enough, that I couldn't understand a word he said, so I finally gave him two free books, went outside to shake hands with two of his friends from the recovery house down the way, and resumed my vigil by the cash register.

Just when I was about to pack up my things, a the bell over the door jangled once more and I was stunned to see my old, old friend Andrew walk in with his wife. I had not clapped eyes on Andrew in decades, probably not since I was still in college. We had grown up in the same neighborhood in Maryland, gone to the same high school, and our families were very close and remain in touch from a distance. He had driven two hours down the turnpike for 20 minutes of face time. I was very deeply moved by this. Indeed, the support I was shown, including a bombardment of texts and so forth from people who couldn't appear, was heartening. Writing, as I said before, is a solitary occupation and can make the writer feel isolated from human contact beyond even what an introvert would wish; but there is a difference between isolation and solitude and any blow struck against isolation is a victory for a writer's mental health.

When I came home, I confess I was a little high on endorphins. I'd sold a lot of books, made a respectable haul of cash, seen faces I hadn't seen in a long time and met a whole slew of new people. I'd had the opportunity to meet people who'd read my books and to discuss my fiction with them, which is not a common experience for authors. I graciously even allowed myself to be taken out for dinner and drinks by another old pal, Nate, who told me he was building a bookshelf in his rural cabin solely devoted to my works. "This is an investment," he said, patting a stack of my novels.

Of course, moments like this, valuable and memorable as they are, do not change anything materially for an author. They are not decisive and generally lack any resonance whatsoever, and its important to remember that the carriage returns to a pumpkin state come the midnight hour. I once walked the red carpet in Hollywood with a beautiful actress; the next morning I had to return the tuxedo, which seemed to symbolize that I was returning to poverty, obscurity and struggle as well. Book signings and interviews (just like awards ceremonies), can delude an author about their importance or the general trajectory of their career. So its important to savor the moment for what it is and not expect anything more. I prefer a carriage to a pumpkin, but I'm rather fond of pumpkins, too.

Today I am posting pictures of the event on social media, and after my ritual hike, will spend some time doing writerly things of a more prosaic nature. These are the mechanics I referred to above: the dull, complicated stuff writers have to do to achieve anything at all: editing manuscripts, compling e-mail lists, conducting website maintenance, making phone calls to discuss potential projects with other authors. Nobody sees how this sausage is made and I can't see any reason why they should want to, but authors periodically like to remind readers that the process takes place, because as J.K. Rowling once ascerbically noted, books do not simply write themselves no matter how badly studio executives wish they would. It's not sympathy we seek: its recognition that there are reasons you're gonna have to wait to, say, 2025 to read the third CAGE LIFE novel even though I finished the first draft months ago in this year of our lord 2024; and a lot of these reasons have nothing to do with the act of physically putting words on pages.

This at any rate is how this particular writer spent much of his weekend. It was a little stressful and very rewarding, and helped restore my morale, which after a week like the last one needed all the shoring-up it could possibly get. We independent and small-press authors often exist on mere crumbs, and sometimes even they are in short supply, so the occasional meal, however modest, does wonders to keep us going.

BOOK REVIEW: AGATHA CHRISTIE'S "AND THEN THERE WERE NONE"

From an early age I knew very strongly the lust to kill...

Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is often listed as mystery or mystery-suspense. Actually I'd call it and out-and-out horror novel. Why? Because horror is "the anticipation of a terrifying outcome" and that's precisely what this book aims to be.

The plot is fiendishly simple. Eight people are invited to remote Soldier Island for a party. Waiting for them are a maid and butler, who inform the guests that their mysterious hosts will be arriving shortly. In the mean time, each person is handed a copy of the infamously gruesome little poem "Ten Little Indians.*" While waiting, one of the guests plays a gramophone, but instead of music the recorded voice announces that each member of the party -- including the maid and butler -- have committed, and gotten away with, some terrible crime, and that punishment is now at hand. The guests believe it's all just some macabre practical joke...until the first one of them dies. And when they realize that there is no way to communicate with the mainland, no way off the island until the scheduled boat arrives days later...panic begins to set in...and paranoia. Are they trapped on the island with a murderer hiding in the shadows...or is the murderer hiding in plain sight among them? Either way, the bodies are piling up fast, and for the dwindling number of survivors, the "anticipation of a terrifying outcome" grows both more unbearable and more certain with each passing moment. There is, it seems, no way to outrun your sins on Soldier Island...

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is a startlingly good book. Christie uses clever writing technique to introduce a very large cast of characters quickly, and also establish just the vaguest trace of menace from the very first pages; also to create numerous "red herrings" and to misdirect the reader at every possible turn as to the killer's identity. Despite a shortish length and a lightning pace, the characters -- Lawrence Wargrave, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, General John Macarthur, Emily Brent, Anthony Marston, Dr Edward Armstrong and William Blore, and the maid-butler combo Thomas and Ethel Rogers -- are finely drawn and, in some cases, decidedly sympathetic because they actually regret their sins, which of course only makes the horror-suspense element of the novel all the more effective. The killer partially agrees, arranging the earliest deaths for those who are the least villainous, and the final ones for those who deserve to suffer agonies of suspense as they wait minute by minute for their own end to come.

This novel has quite a lot to say about human beings, none of which is good, but it manages to avoid the depressing cynicism of, say, a Stanley Kubrick film. The murderer is driven by a wonderfully conflicting motive: said individual has the above-quoted "lust for murder" found in serial killers, but is also consumed by a need for justice, making this baddie a Detxer-like figure decades before anyone envisioned Dexter: he wants to kill, but his killings must serve a higher purpose. As for the victims, they vary in the degree of sympathy they will evoke, but this is par for the course in any horror story -- and at the risk of repeating myself, this is a horror story before it is anything else. Christie begins with mild foreboding, proceeds to unease, and then swiftly turns the knob until the characters are boiling in a terror of their own manufacture. And it is precisely because they are all guilty of something, but not necessarily evil or even "bad" in their daily lives, that the terror is so effective. Judgment is a fearful thing, especially when wielded by someone with a sense of righteousness and very little mercy.

No book is perfect, and the main flaw here is the last part of the novel, which consists of a large set-up to letting the killer explain their motives. The set-up is quite unnecessary and overly expositive and a single sentence introducing the actual confession, such as "The following was recovered in a bottle which washed up on a beach in East Anglia" would have sufficed. I feel Christie went a bit too far "behind the curtain" here, but the flaw is relatively minor.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE was my first Agatha Christie book, but it won't be my last. Minor flaws aside, it's a terrific little novel that not only needs to be read, it needs to be read twice.

Note: When the book was originally published, the poem was actually called "Ten Little N*****s"...as was the book. Then it became TEN LITTLE INDIANS. When that too became politically unacceptable, the name was changed once more to AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. Hopefully this is the last change...but you never know.)

BOOK REVIEW: ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S "ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES"

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Historian Charles Whiting once remarked that Ernest Hemingway's novel "Across the River and Into the Trees" was "bitter, irrational, and cynical." This view was in keeping with its critical reception upon its release in 1950, which was overwhelmingly negative -- the first Hemingway novel ever to take a critical drubbing. And in truth it is not a very good novel, though like nearly everything Hemingway wrote, it contained more-than-occasional flashes of profundity and what might be called observational genius. But it seems to me that calling a Hemingway piece "bitter, irrational and cynical" is like calling a bomb heavy, noisy and destructive. It's an accurate description, but not an intelligent one. Nearly everything Hemingway ever wrote was bitter and cynical, and his characters seldom if ever acted in a rational manner: that was part, if not nearly all, of his literary signature. The flaws that cripple "Across the River" are not bitterness, cynicism or irrationality, but aimlessness and repetition.

The story is extremely simple. In the immediate aftermath of WW2, an aging professional soldier in the U.S. Army named Richard Cantwell (who is referred to simply as "The Colonel") travels to Venice to meet with old friends and his young paramour, the 18 year-old Countess Renata. Cantwell is dying of heart disease and believes his demise is imminent, so he wishes to spend his last day hunting, dining and romancing young Renata, who is as infatuated with him as he is with her. The book details Cantwell's final day, but much of the story revolves around a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue the Colonel is having about his own past -- his service in Italy during WW1, his failed marriage, and the terrible experiences he had as a regimental and assistant divisional commander during the European campaign during WW2. Cantwell is a man trying to come to terms, it seems, not only with imminent death, but with regrets about his life.

As a novelist, Hemingway was always very strong coming out of the gate but -- I'm sorry to say this -- often not worth much coming down the stretch. A superb short-story writer, the rigidity of his style, which was based around brevity, simplicity and implication (rather than description), did not work anywhere near as well for full-length books. "Across the River" suffers acutely from this weakness; though shorter than many of his other works it "reads heavy" in second and third acts, and is full of the infuriating shallowness and ugliness that makes it so damned difficult to care about his characters. (It would be interesting to count the number of times the characters exchange sappy, sophomoric "I love yous" or how many times Renata asks her bitter old beau to be "kind.") As always, we get long passages about Hemingway's obsession, the city of Paris, and as always, there is a great deal of talk about food and drink and a lot of facetious and somewhat sophomoric banter, which is amusing in small doses but almost intolerable in the long run. I'm not exaggerating when I say the exchanges between Cantwell and Renata are almost unreadable after awhile. Doubtless this is the way Hemingway spoke to his lovers -- his biographer and friend Ed Hotchner made that clear in his book, PAPA -- but it isn't the way anyone else on the planet spoke to theirs, and it comes off as self-indulgent, creepy and boring. I am again forced to conclude that the Hemingway who wrote this book was out of touch in more ways than one, and perhaps did not grasp the degree to which his famous literary style could turn into a pastiche of itself if not handled with self-awareness and skill. His hand is simply too heavy.

The book is at its strongest when Cantwell recalls the two wars in which he has served. Hemingway served in Italy during the '14 - '18 war and as always, whenever he touches upon that time of his life his prose comes alive in a way it seldom does at any other time. I was greatly amused -- and many must have been outraged at the time -- at the "bitterness and cynicism" Cantwell displays about WW2 and the top Allied brass, especially Eisenhower, Montgomery, Leclerc, Patton, and Bedel "Beetle" Smith. After the war the deification of the top Allied leaders was in full swing and it must have come as a great shock to the readership to learn that many combat soldiers despised and even hated the public's top military idols for their venality, egotism and, yes, incompetence. Hemingway has performed a service by scraping away some of that whitewash here, and I wish he had reined in his pathological tendency to ramble and blather and written more clearly and fully on a subject he was in quite a good position to talk about. Overall I can't really say I'd recommend this novel to anyone except Hemingway fans -- those who have no experience with his work would best start somewhere else (with his short-stories, perhaps) and work their way toward this exercise in "bitterness, cynicism and irrationality." They may find it more palatable once they are warmed up to his style than they would going in cold.

In closing, I'd like to say that Hemingway's greatest strength was his ability to compress huge, profound life-truths and life-lessons into single sentences of roughly poetic simplicity, and "River" has a number of these, but not quite enough to salvage it. It's a promising book in many ways -- all of Hemingways' books contain some level of genius -- but even at its modest length it feels too long, talks too much and says too little. By this point in his career Hemingway was almost a god to many in the public, and perhaps had grown too lazy or self-satisfied for his own good. It is therefore comforting to know that despite this stumble, some of his greatest works still lay ahead of him, as anyone who has ever read A MOVEABLE FEAST or THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA can attest.

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE - 2024

The following is a work in progress. Very, very slow progress.

FOREWARD: A CANDID DEPICTION OF A FEARLESS TIME

The following is not a novel, an autobiography or a memoir. Nor is it a work of fiction. It is not even a story in the conventional sense. It is merely a series of recollections. There is no plot, no character development, no moral, no real resolution. There is not even a narrative, except to the degree that everything described occurred in a particular place during a specific era of my life. In that sense there is at least a theme, probably, but theme is not what I was after when I sat down to write it. Your boy was hunting different game.

Everyone who reads my books knows that if I fail at everything else I attempt on a literary level, the one place I can be sure to succeed is in the creation of atmosphere. Even the notoriously snarky Kirkus Reviews granted me this. Now, before you start to roll your eyes, please understand that I am not boasting. If one has green eyes, to mention that one's eyes are green is not bragging. Well, I do have green eyes, and I'm also damned good at making my readers feel as if they are physically present within my stories. When I sat down to write The Road to Nowhere I did so with the very conscious intention of recapturing the atmosphere of York College of Pennsylvania during my rather extended time there. I did this because, as I am dragged kicking and screaming and cursing into middle age by Father Time, I feel a need to record, with all the stylistic powers at my command, exactly what it was like to be at that particular school at that time in history. Part of this is simple hubris, the desire to set down some of my own memories in a format that will survive me; but most of my desire finds its roots in a need to record the world as it was, in those final years before it lost its sense of adventure, its love of mischief. Before the twinkle went out of its collective eye.

Now, before you roll your eyes again, please don't misunderstand me. I am not yet one of those crusty old bastards who groans, “In my day....” and then proceeds to tell his bored Millennial and Gen Z co-workers that he had it so much harder than they do because he grew up without same-day shipping. No, sir. This is not that sort of book. I'm not telling those who came after me that they are "less than"; I am reminding my own generation that we were more. Not morally, not physically, not mentally or emotionally, but in terms of the freedom we were allowed. In this sense alone we were More: once upon a time anyway, before the internet, before cell phones, before social media, and most importantly, before political correctness smothered everything that allowed the young to be young, and to make all of youth's attendant mistakes. Because, you see, it is precisely the mistakes we make – the blunders, the miscalculations, the wrongly-held opinions, the soft bigotries, the humiliating and disgusting fuck-ups – that serve not only as our greatest teachers but also as a source of many of our most important memories. And what is a human being, really, but the sum of their memories?

Not long ago, when the pandemic still had us all tightly clenched within its diseased fist, I was having a late-night drink with old fraternity brothers of mine, and our talk, not surprisingly, turned to the past. We were all getting gray in the muzzle, and gray-muzzled wolves like to reminisce. What's more, reminiscing about happier days during a period of quarantine took some of the edge off our fear, our uncertainty, and our lockdown-induced loneliness. It seemed to cast a warm, firelit glow over a shadowy situation. On this occasion, however, that rather predictable path took a different direction: I was asked when I was going to publish something about our school days, a question I get asked more frequently than you would probably believe.

As always, I tried to explain that this was a much more difficult task than it appeared to the untrained eye. Our long-ago follies still had the power to humiliate, discomfit, and perhaps even damage the modern-day lives of their perpetrators. Old wounds could be opened, sterling reputations retroactively tarnished, lifelong friendships damaged. Besides, there was such an enormity of material to draw from, how I was I supposed to sort through it all, and decide what was to be recorded, and what left unwritten? Those included might be angry, while those left out might be insulted. And in any event, who the hell would believe any of it? Standards have cratered. The age we live in is one where clicking “like” on a Facebook post is considered “political activism,” where people gain millions of followers on social media platforms not for what they actually do, but for what they say, or how they look. The definition of things like “boldness” and “recklessness” has become soft coin inded. The Wild West show that was our college life – replete not only with farce, hijinks, mischief, and emotional supernovae, but with explicit sex and brutal violence – has no analog in the present. Technology and current social mores would make such behavior impossible. And what is impossible today is usually judged to have been impossible for all times. I finished by saying, "It's hell to tell the truth and get called a liar for your trouble."

Looking at me over the rim of his glass with the expression of a man determined to see his point through any hazard, he said calmly:

Miles, a candid depiction of a fearless time is just what a world needs that is sheltering in place.

In that one very eloquent sentence (yes, he really does talk that way, at least when he's drunk) all my arguments and all my reluctance dissolved like shadows before sunlight. Truth has a way of doing that, and I know truth when I hear it. My book did not need a plot, nor did it need a structure in the strictest sense. It simply needed to be itself.

A candid depiction of a fearless time.

Some would argue that what I'm doing here is simply glorifying a lot of bad behavior. To that I can only reply, “Perhaps.” Perhaps college students should not prostitute themselves in massage parlors, or shoot up basements with semi-automatic weapons, or engage in wild 1950s-style street rumbles, or have sex in laundromats, or steal police cars and drive them into rivers. Perhaps they should not fall through skylights into strangers' beds while jumping rooftops at three in the morning, or miss final exams because they are in county prison, or blast fire extinguishers into each others' open mouths. Perhaps letting six-foot Burmese rubber pythons loose into the sewer system is always going to be a bad idea, as will be setting fire to oneself for the amusement of others, or holding “let's destroy the” house parties that leave said domicile a blackened heap of broken glass and sparking electrical wire. But the fact remains: all of this happened. All of this and much more. And because I am now staring own the barrel of fifty years, I feel that now is the time to get these squalid, silly, sophomoric, and yet strangely joyful shenannigans down on paper, while they are still sharp and clear within my mind.

So here it is. A random sampling of my youth – and possibly yours. Names have been changed to protect the guilty, and believe me, we were all guilty.

Time has pardoned us.

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
by Miles Watson

I was looking back on my life
And all the things I've done to me
I'm still looking for the answers
I'm still searching for the key
The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me
It just won't leave me alone
I still find it all a mystery
Could it be a dream?
The road to nowhere leads to me

“Sometimes I thought about what Margaret said. About how a person can just drift through life like they're not connected to anyone or anything. You look around - all those characters trying to kill time. Going around in circles. Even if a person wanted to break free, they could find out they've got nowhere else to go.” -- Iris Chapman, Clockwatchers


1.

On Nowhere Road, called by some Jackson Street, there is a particular house which stands in spite of everything. It stands in spite. It has survived blizzards and floods, infestation by vermin, the privations wrought by world wars and the desolating effects of time – a great deal of time, by American standards, for the house is 112 years old. For a large portion of those years, longer than anyone can remember, in fact, it has been rented out exclusively to college students, who in their own way are very much like vermin, at least as far as their effect on property values. It is because of them that the road is called Nowhere, because, let's face it, that is precisely where most of them seem to be going.

If asked, the students would insist that Nowhere is not where they are going but where they are. That the town of Axis, in which Keystone State University is located, is an absolute shithole, forsaken by man and cursed by each and every one of the gods; and that it's a great pity that Nazis, Reds, Islamic terrorists or whoever we're fighting this week did not locate and destroy it when they had the chance. Yes, many a student of K.S.U. has stood sweating in a stone-walled party basement, inhaling cigarette smoke and watching asbestos drift down like snow into beer which is mostly foam, and made remarks like:

Christ I wish Adolf or Osama or somebody had laid waste to this place before I ever saw it.

To which someone would reply:

You shouldn't talk like that, Miles.

To which they would reply:

Admit it, you want to see it fucking destroyed too. Goddamn motherless shithole. I mean, go outside and what do you see? A row of guys pissing on the fence. Girls squatting in the bushes. Puke an inch deep in the alley. Garbage everywhere. Broken crack pipes and spent shell casings in the gutters. Fights in the middle of the streets. Welfare queens on every porch. The houses are all a piece of shit, the downtown looks like Dresden in 1945, and it's worth your life to walk through Penn Park after six if you're white.

Well, it's worth your life to go to the East Side of town if you're black at any time of day. Half the town is in the fucking Klan. Every truck has a bumper sticker that says “I Have A Dream” and has a picture of the White House with a Confederate Flag flying over it. So there.

All right, so it's an equal opportunity shithole. If you're white the blacks hate you and if you're black the whites hate you and if you're neither everybody hates you. This only furthers my argument that the city should be destroyed. The smell of the paper mill alone is a crime against nature. Never mind giving all our bombs to the Israelis, we ought to save a missile for that fucking place. When I was in Jersey I drove by a hog-rendering plant down the road and it smelled like fucking Chanel No. 5 compared to that paper mill. I can practically feel the tumors growing in my lungs.

That's the cigarette you're smoking. Try smoking one with a fucking filter, dude.

I never smoked anything before I came here. I didn't even drink. It's this place. This place fucks up everything it touches. It's like Midas but in reverse.

Right, it's not you smoking and drinking of your own free will, it's the town making you do it.

Look, if you were possessed by a demon, they would burn you at the stake for your own good. It's the same with this town. Fire and fire alone will purify it.

And what will purify you, Miles?

After five years in this motherless shithole? Nothing. Now get me another beer.

This conversation, in some form or other, is repeated almost every day in Axis, at least among the collegiate population, much of which lives off campus on Nowhere Road. Certainly there are variations on this theme uttered everywhere on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, when the beer flows even more freely from the taps during the rest of the week; but it is not everywhere with which we are concerned, nor everyone. It is Nowhere. And in particular it is the domicile I mentioned above, Nowhere House, because it is in Nowhere House that I lived. And in a sense never left.

Nowhere House is three stories tall and solidly built. It has a flat tin-sheeted roof which lies beneath its uppermost windows, a wooden balcony that sways in every storm, and a small, discouraged-looking yard with an ancient barbeque pit so crammed with old bones it looks like the floor of an abandoned slaughterhouse. Like every house on Nowhere Road it has been subdivided into “apartments” which are in fact single rooms of appalling squalor, and which sit atop an enormous basement of rough-walled stone jammed with the detritus of many generations of occupants. If you had the time and were so inclined, you could find among all those half-rotted cardboard boxes pulp magazines from the 1950s, broken exercise equipment, suitcases stuffed with moth-eaten clothing, wormy old pieces of furniture, broken mirrors and moisture-bloated family albums full of yellowed photographs. It is notable that none of this shit is ever removed; it just sits there year after year, decade after decade, gathering dust and mold and cobwebs and providing affordable housing for the rats. Occasionally it is disturbed (kicked, overturned, rummaged-through, even smashed by baseball bats wielded by alcohol-fueled drunks) but it is never removed, and more junk accumulates over time, until at last, in some of the very oldest houses, you can't turn around in the basement anymore. This is what is known as a collegiate problem, and a collegiate problem demands a collegiate solution. Which is to lock the door at the top of the stairs and leave the whole fucking shebang it in permanent darkness, like an Egyptian tomb, with the exception that all the treasure inside is worthless. Nowhere House is not quite at that stage yet; you can still hold a party there, which is to say you can jam fifty drunks and a keg among the trash, rig a radio to one of the shelves, and work very hard to keep asbestos from falling into your beer. In wet weather – and it is always raining in Axis, or it least it seems that way – little white mushrooms grow in the long, straggling cracks in the cement floor, looking rather like the pimples around a teenagers' mouth. These mushrooms, unlike the junk, are never disturbed, and not merely because they are poisonous: they are considered to have squatter's rights. Indeed, there is a certain backhanded affection for them. Once, when I was pledging my fraternity, I got in trouble with the pledge-master for being out in the bars after curfew, and was dragged down into a basement of his house and locked in for the night. (Like the junk.) I dug the Zippo from my pocket and, amidst the flickering light and shifting shadows, had a conversation with the mushrooms, which is to say I spoke to them, though they did not condescend to respond. I can't remember most of what I said, on account of drunkenness, but I do remember the last words I slurred before all those mason jars of Rolling Rock sank me into sleep:

Just as Sauron left Shelob to her own devices in the mountains of Ephel Dúath on the borders of Mordor , verily – hic! – so I leave you undisturbed, for your evil predates mine.

At that time I frequently slogged past Nowhere House without realizing it was my destiny to live there. Sometimes, late at night, I would see a light burning in the third-story window that overlooked the intersection of Jackson and Manor Streets, and I was reminded of that lyric from R.E.O. Speedwagon's “Can't Fight This Feeling”:

And even as I wander
I'm keeping you in sight
You're a candle in the window
On a cold, dark winter's night
And I'm getting closer than I ever thought I might

But I did not realize the full irony of the last line. Did not realize that one day I would be living in that house, on that floor, and that the candle in the window was and would be a thirty-watt bulb in the ceiling of my landing that never, ever needed to be replaced (for all I know the same fucking bulb is still screwed into the same socket, always burning and never burning out, immortal and everlasting, amen). One day arrived, however, as it always does, and it became my home, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. Junk in the basement, cracks in the floor, the mushrooms of Mordor – all of it became the common property of myself and my six roommates. Had I reflected further upon the matter I might have realized that we had also become the common property of the house, but if consequences had entered into our heads we none of us would have elected to live in a place called Nowhere House, on a street called Nowhere Road.

2.

What the hell did you expect to find?
Aphrodite on a barstool by your side?
-- The Gin Blossoms

I think I mentioned that it is always raining in Axis. Now strictly speaking this is not true; sometimes it is sleeting, sometimes it is snowing and on rare occasions it hails. We know the sun exists, but only braggarts and liars claim to have seen it over the town. It may be found in the west, over Gettysburg, or up north, near Harrisburg, or to the east in Philadelphia, or to the south, across the state line, in Baltimore; but it isn't here, and it rarely visits at any point after the middle of October or before the beginning of May. Perhaps it knows something we don't.

I mention this merely to set the scene for a particular Thursday. I awake at about four o'clock in the evening to the familiar sound of rain pummeling the tin roof beneath my window. The room, lighted by a single lamp with a crimson bulb, smells like stale beer and damp clothes and yesterday's marijuana. I don't smoke much marijuana but lately I've been hitting the pipe a little to ease the pain I feel over losing a girl named Becky Branch. When I met Becky I suspected she was out of my league: I was right. But if I touch the flame of the Zippo to the bowl and incinerate the crushed powdered weed within and suck the resultant smoke into my lungs, this fact does not sting so much. In fact I can now recall the conversation I had with Brother Knowitall about her a few weeks ago with some melancholy amusement:

Miles, you fool, stay away from that girl. She'll eat you for breakfast. She'll wreck you to pieces. She'll leave you for dead.

Says who?

Says me. And I know women.

And you think I don't?

I think you know your right hand, which certainly does not qualify as a woman, and I think you know your left hand, which does not even qualify as a hand. And I think that porno from 1985 you have stuck in your VCR has little value except to prove that chest hair and big gold medallions went out of style for a reason. Run don't walk, my child.

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Miles, remember your basic biology. The wolf only mates with the she-wolf. The eagle does not mate with the sparrow, nor the praying mantis with the maggot. This school has an abundant supply of ordinary girls who you can date without any risk to yourself, provided you pack a Trojan Magnum in your holster.

You flatter me, sir.

I do not. The Magnum reference was necessary to complete the metaphor. Packing a magnum in a holster makes sense. A Trojan Magnum would probably fit you like a tent. Now, and if I may return to my original point, the girl you pine for is above your pay grade and will lead you to ruin.

But she's into me, man; she told me so.

The issue, Grasshopper, is not whether she is into you but how many guys want to get into her. There is a depressingly finite number of hotter-than-hot women on this campus and if you date one you will never be able leave her side, even to get her a beer, without having to fight your way back through a bristling mass of rival erections. You'll never be able to rest easy or lower your guard, not for one minute. A mobster in Witness Protection will sweat less than you. You cover the back door and they'll be coming through the windows; you cover the windows and they'll come up through the basement where the mushrooms grow. And if she notices you hovering she'll think you're jealous and weak and she'll dump you for that. But if you trust her sooner of later she'll have one too many at the bar when you're at your night class or away for the weekend and some other stud will move in for the kill. Heed me well, young fellow m'lad, for I know of what I speak.

Of course Brother Knowitall proved to be right. I could never relax around Becky, I always felt like a spring wound so tight it would break, I was forever giving the death-stare to smirking would-be Lotharios who formed around her like horny lichens whenever she paused long enough to gather them, and so the whole thing crashed and burned with that sudden, spectacular fury that only Soviet nuclear plants and collegiate relationships can achieve. Which was why, when I wake up from my nap, heavy-headed and foul-mouthed,
I drink half a stale, lukewarm American Lite that is sitting on my nightstand – just to cleanse my palate, you understand – and then reach for the Mary Jane, which is what I have beside me in bed instead of Becky Branch. When I am appropriately numb I eat the congealed taco lying in my mini-refrigerator, pull on my wet boots and heavy coat, and stumble out into weather last seen in Blade Runner. Twenty minutes later, winded, wet and high, I take my seat in Introduction to Africa, though the way I'm dripping and shivering it might have been Introduction to Antarctica instead.

The class is held in one of those faceless, horribly bright rooms high in the Mac Building on the furthest edge of campus – indeed, if I had to walk any fucking further I would be in Africa. I wouldn't mind it so much if the class were interesting, but it is taught by Professor Akintola, who might be the most boring human being ever to glaze over an eyeball. Certainly he is the worst teacher. He marches officiously into class at precisely five-twenty, closes and locks the door, and proceeds, silently and with little disapproving flicks of his pencil-stub, to take the roll. As soon as it is complete he switches on the overhead projector, places his lecture notes upon it, and then covers all but the opening line of the notes with a sheet of construction paper. He then reads the that line aloud three times. When he has done this he shifts the paper a half-inch and exposes the next sentence, which he also reads three times. He does this continuously from five twenty-five until six-fifty, when the class mercifully ends. Today is no different. Oddly enough, in taking this class for a month I have developed a kind of auto-writing ability which allows me to ignore everything Professor Akintola says while simultaneously transcribing it accurately into my notebook. My first words today are:

Today we will be studying the four ethnolinguistic supergroups of Africa, which are Afro-Asiatic, Niger Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Other, as well as the fifteen subgroups which comprise these four supergroups.

While my hand jockeys across the rain-dampened paper my brain is performing other calculations. There are three girls in my Africa class I want to sleep with, which I feel is a reasonable proportion considering the size of the class. The first sits in front of me, a redhead with a snubbed nose and a weak chin but a lovely body, and a glint of sexual mischief in her strangely maroon eyes. She is known as Jenny of the Baskervilles because, it is rumored, she howls like a hellhound when she hits orgasm, but I've yet to discover if this rumor is true. The second is on my right, a blonde who is the picture of classical beauty: crystal blue eyes, impossibly high cheekbones, bee-stung lips the color of rose petals, and a shimmering cascade of gold hair that pours over her lovely neck in a silken torrent. She's a haughty one and won't look at me, not even a glance, which seems fair enough, because surely she can detect in my green-eyed gaze the desire I have to see that magnificent head of hair flowing over my pillow. She is known simply, unimaginatively and accurately, as Golden Goddess. The last of the three is Mystery Girl Kathy, who sits on the opposite side of the room. I call her Mystery because her last name is just that; I'm not even sure she spells it with a k, it's just that a k seems to fit somehow. Kathy has a model's hairline, the kind with the little v-shaped dip in the center of the brow, and the hair itself is a lustrous brown with hints of other colors in its reaches; it reminds me of the wood in a very expensive dinner table, which has been lacquered and polished to such a gleam that it seems to have as much depth as water. Her skin is very white and smooth-looking and she has the heftiest set of breasts I've ever seen, at once enormous and curiously gravity-defying. I would very much like to get to know those breasts but Kathy and I have yet to exchange a word because who can get one in edgewise when Professor Akintola is talking?

After an hour about the ethnolinguic supergroups of Africa my hand is aching and my bladder fit to burst, because the Professor does not allow us to use the restrooms unless we raise our hands and ask permission, and I'll be goddamned if at the age of twenty-two I am going to ask anyone permission to take a piss; on top of this I'm no closer to knowing the pleasures of Kathy's bountiful bosom; furthermore my notebook is crammed with words like Bantoid, Sudanic and Malayo-Polynesian, which are meaningless to me and don't seem likely to land me a job if and when I ever graduate. At the same time as all of this I am possessed with a terrible thirst for beer. Surely no man dying the desert, no vampire freshly burst forth from the grave, no fish flopping on a dusty dock ever thirsted more than I am thirsting right now. I simply cannot stop fantasizing about a brimming pint glass of yellow lager, served so cold there are tiny fragments of ice glittering in the creamy head. I will need this medicament to wash down the hot wings which I am also fantasizing about along with Kathy's fulsome tits. I am wondering if I might pigeonhole Kathy after class and invite her to Murph's Study Hall for said repast, but when Akintola finally, reluctantly unlocks the door at six-fifty I realize if I don't get to the men's room I am going to burst, which would spoil my chances with Kathy and Jenny of the Baskervilles and the Golden Goddess, too. And of course when I finally emerge, she is long gone, because no one lingers after Introduction to Africa.

Well, if I can't have a woman I will go to the pub and act on my other fantasies. The rain is turning to sleet and it is cold as shit and pitch-black save for the glare of the lamps in the school parking lot but the beer and the wing sauce will warm me and now is the grand moment when the longest possible time exists before I have to return to Introduction to Africa – one hundred and twenty glorious hours. And perhaps the gods are with me after all, because when I push open the door into the dim and smokey air of Murphy's Study Hall, what to my wandering eye should appear but Kathy, standing there at the back bar? Our gazes meet and lock over her cigarette, and it doesn't even require any courage to go over and strike up a conversation because we have the bond of mutual suffering that is Professor Akintola. It's as if we the both of us opened the puzzle box in Hellraiser and know the secret agonies which lie within; except we do it twice a week from five-twenty to six-fifty. Fellow sufferer Kathy introduces me to a friend of hers, a fit but fleshy ash-blonde, with a ruddy face and red-painted fingernails, who is known as Jenny the Harp. When I ask her why she is called Jenny the Harp she says: Because my last name is Harp, and that is good enough for me.

Pints all around. I have forgotten my hunger for wings because I'm sandwiched between two girls who drink like sponges and don't mind standing close enough that we're hip-to-hip-to-hip, and you can't be hungry and horny at the same time. At least I can't. It's loud in the bar because in Axis, Thursday is the official-unofficial start to the weekend, and as usual some moron has put “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” on the juke at maximum volume, which ranks right up there with “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” and “Oh, What A Night” for songs I'd like to prohibit from public play on penalty of death; yet it doesn't matter that I can hardly hear a word, because we are in that peculiar rhythm where what is said is not anywhere near as important as the fact that we are staring into each other's eyes at a distance of about six inches while we say it. It is at times like these I find myself at my most witty and debonair.

Thump, thump, thump go the empty pint glasses on the beer-wet bar, and the glasses get refilled almost as fast as they go down. The girls are suitably impressed at how fast I command fresh libations when everyone else is waiting, dry-tongued, for their own refills. I inform them that the bartender is Brother Giganimus, who owes me $50 for a Redskins bet that went bad (for him) and in the hopes of sleazing his way out of payment he is plying us with alcohol instead. The girls say we fraternity boys are all right sometimes, maybe, tonight, yes I'd like another, and another, and one more, and one for luck, and one for the road, goddamn, and in the blink of an eye it's last call and the three of us stumble out to Kathy's little red car, glistening under its inch-thick coat of sleet. Our breath fogs the air and it must be about forty degrees and we can't feel it, not a goddamned thing. Jenny the Harp says, Into the garbage chute, flyboy, and grabs me by my ass and shoves me into the back seat of the car. Before I know it we're up in Wyndham Hills, because Kathy – I managed to glean this much by lip-reading while we were in the bar – is a townie who flunked out of some expensive college last year and has been forced by her parents to move home and attend Keystone State, just a stone's throw from her old front door and probably the absolute goddamn last place on earth she wants to be.

Because I have eaten nothing since noon but that half-fossilized taco and am now literally sloshing with beer at every sharp turn, I am so fuck-drunk that the movement of the car is like falling down a mine-shaft and landing on a roller-coaster. I keep willing myself not to puke because Kathy's car is very small and I must have a hundred ounces of lager in there and a good thirty more in my bladder and who knows where it will end if I start losing it now. They might throw me from the car while it is moving, and if the cops find my body by the roadside clad in a Keystone State fraternity jacket they will probably shrug and leave me for the rats. Besides, I have a reputation to uphold. Not that these girls really know me but I am trying to build a reputation with them and I doubt it will be a good one if they emerge from this car soaked by gallons of recycled brew.

Don't puke, I keep telling myself; don't puke don't puke don't puke oh crap I think I'm gonna puke. Kathy pull over I've gotta be sick. Nah, hold it like a man, she says, and Jenny the Harp laughs and says, Sick? You're gonna be sick? Men don't get sick, men barf.

The issue of whether men get sick or not is violently debated. So much so that I forget that I am sick and soon an expensive-looking house looms in the darkness; the three of us go inside and down into a spacious basement in which there is a fold-out couch and a very large television, about six feet wide and six feet deep. I am tripping over everything, including my own feet, and Kathy says, shhhhhhh, my mom is upstairs and asleep. So the three of us crawl under the covers of the fold-out bed with all our clothes on except our wet boots, which lay in a soldierly row at the foot of the bed, and Kathy puts on a movie. I'm lusting badly after Kathy but she seems indifferent to me now, and soon falls asleep on her side, facing away, which is probably just as well because ruddy-faced Jen is all over me. Evidently my rhetorical ability, placed in defense of a man's ability to get sick, has flipped her switch.

Her painted hands play my body like an instrument beneath my clothes but just like an instrument, when I'm played I make noise. And when I make too much of it Kathy stirs and rolls over and squints sleepily at us, either annoyed by the commotion or suspicious that it is taking place. Every time she slips back off into dreamland Jenny the Harp resumes her strumming. She smells very strongly of cigarettes and beer and chlorine, and I remember something about her being on the swim team but right now it doesn't seem very important. My jeans are down around my knees and the thing romance writers refer to as my manhood is buried in her fist, and that seems terribly important. Yet every time she's close to getting me where we both want me to go the harp that is me cries out, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, and Kathy stirs once more and says, sharply, What are you doing?

And before I can answer, Jenny says:

Nothing.

Except that she's got her hand around my manhood, which is a difficult thing to disguise even under the covers, especially when Kathy wrenches said sheets away to reveal everything, manhood, fist, bare knees, the whole guilty kaboodle, and shouts, in a voice so loud it hurts my eardrums,

BITCH.

Kathy's hand describes a sudden, violent ninety degree arc into Jenny's mouth, and the impact is as loud as a gunshot. In an instant the two girls are at each other like rabid wildcats, hitting and slapping and cursing with me in the middle, and never mind waking Kathy's mom. The whole thing might be funny if someone hadn't just rolled knee-first into my groin, which was not only exposed but in an unusually vulnerable condition. The knee upsets the delicate truce I had with my stomach and in an instant I'm fighting my way through a tangle if flying female limbs toward the basement bathroom. Unfortunately the pants around my ankles act as a sort of tripwire and I go down hard, face-first, onto a sheet of ice-cold linoleum tile. Behind me I hear an overlapping chorus of BITCH! SLUT! CUNT! delivered in drunken, rage-fueled sopranos fit to wake the dead, never mind Kathy's mom. A backward glance reveals that Kathy has gotten Jenny's baggy gray sweatshirt up over her head and is hockey-punching the bejeezus out of her. Now my head strikes doorway; this must be the bathroom. I wrench open the door and let fly. It's less that I am vomiting or barfing or being sick so much as I am turning inside out. Well, they say you don't buy beer, you rent it, and my hour is up. When at last the flood has exhausted itself I force open my eyes and, in the feeble gleam of the night-light, see that I have hit absolutely everything but the toilet.

I am glad that in my present position, on hands and knees, naked from waist to ankles, no longer erect but quite the opposite, I cannot see the mirror. I rest my forehead on the freezing porcelain toilet-rim and listen to my throbbing heartbeat over the sounds of the girls fighting until the sounds change: sobbing, running feet, a slamming door, a car-motor roaring to life, and then silence. Silence and silence and silence. I keep waiting for Kathy's mother, or the police, or the Pennsylvania National Guard, to come down the stairs and find me bare-assed on the floor with foam running out of my jaws, but nothing happens, and in time I manage to climb to my feet, pull up my pants, and rinse out my mouth with the Listerine resting on the edge of the sink. At least I hope it was Listerine; for all I can see through streaming eyes in five watts of light, it may have been a Massengill Disposable Douche.

The downstairs looks like a hand grenade went off in it but Kathy is back in bed, curled up beneath the sheets and blankets as if nothing has happened, snoring peaceably. I stand over her, swaying, tasting beer and vomit and what I pray is Listerine, and contemplate the ruin of my hopes for the evening. An hour ago I was thinking threesome, and now I'm thinking What will Kathy's mom do when she sees the bathroom? I wonder if I can slip out of the house and walk back to Nowhere Road before one of them wakes up and decides to hockey punch me. But it's three-thirty in the morning and I'm exhausted and drunk and I can hear the sleet hammering against the patio bricks through the sliding glass doors that open on the backyard, and I haven't the faintest idea where I am or how to get home. If I try and hoof it in this shit they'll find me by the roadside looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. So I do the only thing I can do. I crawl into bed beside her and fall asleep.

In the morning the sun finds us groggy and puffy-faced and foul-mouthed and we trudge in silence up the stairs, tugging at our clothing where it has left deep red marks on our flesh in the night, and we make coffee in the big spacious kitchen with its copper cookware catching the light the same alluring way Kathy's hair does, except that light is not alluring when you're hung over. Kathy's mother emerges, oyster-eyed, and Kathy explains quietly how the three of us had to crash here after a night of hard drinking and we all passed out in the basement, no big deal, nothing to see here. She doesn't say I caught Jenny the Harp playing with Miles' cock and beat the shit out of her, Mom. Kathy's mother nods and asks me if I want cream and sugar with my coffee but there is a look in her eyes which makes me deeply uncomfortable, as if what she's really saying is, I'll goddamned bet nothing happened, Christ a'mighty look at this boy, he reeks of beer and cigarette smoke and he's got the same look in his eye that your father had the night I got knocked up with you. And I think but don't say, Jumping Jesus, how many Manhattans did you have last night, Mystery Girl Kathy's Mom, that you didn't hear the riot taking place in your own basement? So there is a lot of things not being said in the beautiful kitchen, and I finish my coffee so fast I can no longer taste vomit or cigarette smoke on my tongue because I quickly develop second degree burns on my gums and tongue and the inside of my cheeks. Kathy slips into her fleece-lined acrylic pullover and fetches her keys and we slip into her little red car, away from mom's disapproving stare. Now that she's out of the house and driving she seems completely at ease. She lights up a cigarette and cracks the window to let out the smoke, and her voice is just a bit sultry when she speaks, like she's narrating a Victoria's Secret commercial. It seems strange that she's flirting with me now, after pummeling her good friend because she found said friend in possession of my penis, but I'm wise in the ways of women (never mind what Brother Knowitall says) and I know that they are all crazy, you can't make sense of what they say or do or when or why they say it or do it. Women, I've discovered, are like weather, and the best you can do with weather is dress for it.

We arrive at Nowhere Road in just a few minutes and now the prodigal sun is up and brilliant and reflects in every puddle on the street and sidewalk, and the air is marvelously clean and cold and crisp. No trace of the paper mill, which I'd still like to vaporize with an air strike on general principles. I realize with horror there are too many people on the streets for a Friday morning and that today is one of those god-damned community cleanup days, when Greek organizations try to make up for a year's worth of their members destroying the property values of the neighborhood by picking up trash for forty-five minutes. Every one of my fraternity brothers is milling around my house with sleepy resentful hung-over faces and when they see me driven up to the doorstep by a woman they grin and wink and elbow each other. Some of them whistle and shout things which they wouldn't say if their mothers were present. Kathy seems unfazed and slightly amused by this, probably because she thinks she can hockey punch any of them into groveling broken-toothed submission, which may be true. Kathy says says she looks forward to hanging out with me again sometime. I agree that I too look forward to such a thing, though maybe it would be best if we left Jenny the Harp behind, and Kathy smiles and says, Oh, Jenny, as if their vicious battle for control of my cock was nothing worth mentioning, much less worrying about. (I hope this is no reflection on said cock.) And now I find myself rather eager to return to Introduction to Africa next Tuesday, which has got to be the first time anyone has experienced that particular desire. Including Professor Akintola.

I climb out of the car and tell everyone around me to fuck off, they can stick their community service deep in their collective digestive tract, I'm going to have a shower and a nap while they pick cigarette butts and condom wrappers off these wretched streets, but when I try to run for the stairs I'm tackled into a heap of dead leaves and slush and then frog-marched down Nowhere Road so that I can commence forking over my share of payment for a year's worth of sins.

It is a typical Friday morning.

3.

“Are you going to shoot up the basement again?” says Eileen.

“I don't know,” says I.

“Because if you are,” Eileen says, dragging on a cigarette. “I'd like a heads-up this time. I had some of my sisters over for a meeting and all of the sudden it's fucking World War Three down there, guns going off, glass breaking, and I had to act like it was normal.”

“It is normal. For this house.”

“A disturbing fact in its own right,” she says. As the only girl in a house with six boys, she is used to ever manner of grotesquerie and foolishness imaginable, but I doubt she ever imagined gunplay. “The girls were pretty freaked out.”

“I fail to see why a man can't shoot up his own basement when he feels the need.”

“Why do you feel the need?”

“Who can understand the male mind? Sometimes I just want to destroy things.”

“Can't you just get laid?”

“I got laid this morning. And very thoroughly, I might add.”

“You finally got the nurse to stay the night?”

“I finally got the nurse to stay the night.”

“I can't see as why you'd need to destroy the basement, then.”

“Again, we come back to the insoluble mystery of the male mind. My balls are empty. My mind is clear. I should be calm and relaxed. And yet I sit here, drinking this stale American Light and staring at my gun, fantasizing about shooting up the basement.”

“Can't you destroy it in some other way?”

“Eileen, do you know that old air conditioner down there? I shot that thing last week and it must have been full of freon, or C02, or whatever's in an air conditioner, because it fucking exploded like a can of shaving cream on a bonfire. It was immensely satisfying. But that's something only a gun can accomplish.”

“It won't explode twice though, will it?”

“True. Depressing, but true. It's also true I'm running out of ammunition.”

Eileen looks around my room for an ashtray, fails to find one, drowns the cigarette in one of the beer cans cluttering the bar, and leaves me with a parting shot from the doorway: “Then man the fuck up and do it with your bare hands, if you've got to do it at all.”

I sit on the edge of my bed and drum my fingers on the cold steel of the .380 PMK semi-automatic pistol I bought the previous summer. Intellectually, I know it is a deadly weapon and that owning it is a great responsibility. Emotionally, it is the greatest toy I have ever owned, and about once a week I take it into the basement and empty a seven-round magazine at anything that tickles my fancy. And I am not the only one in the house who has taken up this curious pastime. Brother Rebel owns a semi-automatic .22 rifle with an extended magazine, and once, when I was in the living room playing “Mike Tyson's Punch Out” and drinking a warm Meister Brau, he walked past me, clambered down the basement steps, emptied said magazine, walked into the kitchen, threw the rifle behind the refrigerator and then departed the house, stating, “If the cops come, I was never here.”

But of course the cops never come to our place. Never. We like to say it's because they're afraid to do so, but in reality, in our secret hearts, we know they just don't give a shit what we do. And in any event, it doesn't matter. I'm bored, I have too much energy, I dislike exercise for its own sake, and in my mind all that adds up to one thing.


I pull on my Timberlands and descend from my third-floor aerie to the second. Brother Shoes hears the distinctive clop-clop of my heels on the stairs and calls from his room:

“Gonna destroy the basement?”

“This time it's personal,” says I.

I hear his bedsprings creak as he rises. “Yeah, it's time we showed that fucking thing who's the boss.”

“You coming?”

“Yep, and hell's coming with me.”

“Hell's coming with us.” Brother Oliver says, emerging from his own room with a copy of Swank rolled into one fist and his fly in the downward position. We trample through the living room and down the final flight of steps, a small and solemn troop, like soldiers going to battle.

The basement is rock-walled and dank, lighted yellowly by a few naked bulbs of feeble wattage, and packed with all manner of junk I have mentioned previously. Brother Shoes switches on a sorry-looking radio with a coathanger antenna, and we are instantly rewarded with theme music appropriate to the occasion:

I AM AN ANTICHRIST
I AM AN ANARCHIST
DON'T KNOW WHAT I WANT BUT I KNOW HOW TO GET IT
I WANNA DESTROY THE PASSERBY
CAUSE I....
I WANNA BE....
ANARCHY!

There are plenty of tools and sports impedimentia on hand, and while they are no longer fit for the purposes God intended, they make handy weapons of war. I find a wooden baseball bat, someone else a rusty crowbar, someone else a shovel, and as we take up the lyrics with full-throated shouting, we begin a systematic orgy of mindless destruction that would have impressed the Mongols.

We knock the shelves off the walls, sending everything upon them tumbling to the bare cement floor. We toss glasses and plates into the air and smash them into flying clouds of debris. We cave in picture frames and explode broken old brass alarm clocks and knock the heads off porcelian garden gnomes. We kick holes in the plywood over the old bar and then tear the jagged, splintered sheet away from its nails. Someone produces a buck knife and goes all Jack the Ripper on a soiled old mattress, releasing clouds of synthetic feathers. In moments I feel blood trickling down my thumb: somehow I have cut the fucking thing, but I don't stop swinging the bat, even when the impacts threaten to knock the calluses off my palms. I must destroy. I must release my mindless masculine energy, the kind you can only release through violence. I'm panting, sweating, bleeding, destroying, and enjoying. I let the radio have it with the bat and Johnny Rotten's cry to FUCCCKING DESTROYYYYYY is cut off in mid-snarl.

And then it happens. Something, an old metal locker by the sound, is battered open, disinterring two large cylindrical objects which roll over the floor. We pause in mid-swing, and all seem to recognize them simultaneously. Somone yells:

“Fire extinguisher fight!”

Everyone jumps for the extinguishers simultaneously. A savage battle for control of the cylinders takes place, with no quarter asked and none given. I take a blow to the nose that makes my eyes water, but manage to seize one of them and yank the safety pin free, in precisely the same manner I have seen actors remove the safety pins of countless hand grenades in countless old war movies. I squeeze the handle and a jet of foam explodes over my victim, driving him cursing toward the stairs. I pursue, laughing hysterically, until I myself get blasted at point-blank range by an opponent I cannot even see, because the air is full of snowy particles that smell like a chemical fire and must be doing wonders for my lungs. I get hit again and stagger, coughing, halfway up the steps now, laying a smoke screen down behind me to confuse my assailant, and then finally kick open the door and emerge into the comparative sanity of living room. It is empty save for Brother Blue Eyes, who has arrived in the interim and is parked on the couch, drinking a Meister Brau and playing “Mike Tyson's Punch Out” with an intensity he has never once devoted to his homework. I stand in the doorway, gasping, spattered with foam, fingers slick with blood, surely a magnificent sight, but he's too goddamned busy trying to outbox Piston Honda to pay me the slightest attention.

“Brother?” I whisper at last, pointing the extinguisher at him.

“Don't distract me!” he shouts, his thumbs frantically clicking the buttons on his joy stick. “Don't fucking distract me!”

“Wouldn't dream of it, brother,” I say, and shoot him directly in the mouth.

BOOK REVIEW: LAWRENCE SANDERS' "THE THIRD DEADLY SIN"

Life once more became succession of swan pecks.

It is arguable that Lawrence Sanders never rose to greater heights as a prose stylist, suspense-writer or storyteller than he did with THE THIRD DEADLY SIN, the penultimate novel in his "deadly sin" series of books and the fourth of five to feature crusty, sandwich-obsessed Edward X. Delaney as a protagonist. Though once referred to as "Mr. Bestseller" and nearly as prolific in his day as Stephen King, Sanders seems to be forgotten now, except for his "McNally" series which was hardly representative of his best work; but at his best he was both compulsively readable and immensely satisfying, and this novel is both.

Zoe Kohler is the world's most boring woman. Hailing from a small town somewhere in the Midwest, divorced from a husband who treated her like she was invisible, virtually friendless, and stuck in a mindless, dead-end job in the security office of an old hotel in Manhattan, she worries incessantly about her health and indulges in only one hobby: murder. Sexing herself up every Friday night, Zoe picks up unsuspecting businessmen attending conventions in different hotels around town, and delivers to each the same grisly fate: a Swiss Army knife, first to the throat and then to the jewels. But because nobody ever notices the world's most boring woman, nobody suspects her, leaving Zoe free to indulge her hobby -- over and over and over again.

Edward X. Delaney used to be a cop -- and not just any cop, but the NYPD's Chief of Detectives. Now, of course, he's just a bored retiree, living in a Manhattan brownstone with this second wife. So when his former "rabbi" in the Department, Deputy Commissioner Ivar Thorsen, asks him to help investigate a series of baffling murders being committed in hotels around the city, Delaney agrees, but has little idea what he's getting into: a search for a faceless, motiveless "repeater" (1970s slang for serial killer) whose vicious talents with a short-bladed knife are wreaking havoc with New York's once-thriving convention trade. Acting as an unofficial adviser to the "Hotel Ripper" task force, Delaney begins to suspect that male prejudices, including his own, may be blinding his fellow detectives to the possibility of that the Ripper may not be a man. But he has no suspects, no witnesses, no fingerprints, and no hard evidence. Only instincts. And a growing pile of victims.

THE THIRD DEADLY SIN is a very attractive suspense novel for many reasons. Aside from Sanders prose style, which is beautiful, memorable and incredibly evocative, it works on multiple levels. Firstly, the character of Zoe Kohler. She is at once both a pitiable loser, struggling with health problems and sexist attitudes at work a burgeoning relationship with a sweet and unsuspecting man...and a remorseless, relentless killer, who hunts men for the sheer thrill of it. Second, Edward X. Delaney. This crusty, hard-nosed, sandwich-obsessed detective is neither sexy, flashy, nor gifted with any great deductive genius: he's simply like a boulder that, starting slowly, gathers investigative momentum until he crushes just about everyone in his path, yet at the same time possesses a sensitivity -- largely through his wife's softening influence -- that allows him more nuances than a typical, cigar-chewing, old school detective. And this leads me to the books third major strength, which is its examination of sexual attitudes, gender roles and (unintentionally) police procedure during the period it was written -- about 35 years ago. At that time the pathology of serial killers was scarcely understood, forensic science still in its infancy, and the idea of gender equality more of a punchline than a serious idea. Delaney, an aging Irish cop with flat feet, is both brimming with cheauvanistic, patronizing, old-school attitudes and open to the possibility that those attitudes may be wrong.

No novel is perfect, of course, and this one is no exception. Sanders sometimes makes small but basic errors in matters of police procedure, slang and etiquette; the sort of mistakes which are the result of never having been a cop himself. Occasionally he tries too hard to make characters colorful, giving them a contrived rather than a naturalistic feel; and sometimes his dialogue and description betray his overwhelming love of the English language and end up sounding pretentious or, coming out of the mouths of certain characters, simply unrealistic. (This also leads him to over-write scenes with minor characters, such as Zoe's doctor.) Most of the criticisms I can mount a this book, however, fall in the "nitpicking" category, and even when taken in the aggregate fail to outweigh all of its many pleasures.

The idea of the female serial killer, especially in the late 70s, was a true brainwave by the author. Female serial killers are almost unknown, the exception being the "black widow" types that murder for money. Examining Koehler and her motivations, Sanders shows astonishing depth and nuance to his writing and the thinking behind it: Zoe Koheler becomes a kind of tool for thoughtful discussions about misogny, feminism ("womens' lib" back in the day), and the effect an insensitive, masculinzed world can have on a woman's psyche, without ever coming off as a contrivance. The principal sin of today's storywriting, at least in film and television anyway if not necessarily (yet) the novelistic sphere, is the habit of violating Hemingway's maxim that an author should not create characters, he sould create people. With her various layers of loneliness, paranoia, humiliation, self-loathing, fear, dismay, feminine dignity, and even love, Zoe feels real, so real in fact that like Francis Dolarhyde in RED DRAGON, you pity her deeply without being invited to do so. Sanders never makes the mistake of shouting "sympathize!" He simply tells a tragic tale and lets us feel what we may. And he makes her victims real people too -- good, bad and ugly.

THE THIRD DEADLY SIN may or may not have been Sanders' best book (you could make a case for THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT or THE SECOND DEADLY SIN or THE ANDERSON TAPES or various others). It may not even be his best suspense novel. But for my money it is not merely a good read but equally satisfying upon each subsequent reading, which is about the highest praise I can give to an author's work. So: buy it, make yourself a sandwich, and sit down to this half-forgotten but deservedly remembered author. Murder and mayhem have never been so fun.

BOOK REVIEW: LEGS MCNEIL'S "THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD"

I'd sit in the middle of the theater, just fascinated by the whole process and I knew that one way or another, one day, I'd be doing that.

Oral histories are almost always highly readable books. At its best, this one is almost compulsively readable; but in my estimation it actually bites off more than it can chew. A lengthy examination of the history of the American pornography business, it covers about fifty years, from earliest days of the stag film and the "nudie-cutie" to the era of video, internet and celebrity porn, and stops along the way to examine the role of organized crime, drugs, tax evasion, obscenity charges, governmental harassment, AIDS and pretty much everything else you can think of even tangentially related to pornography. It's a fascinating look at "the other Hollywood," taken directly from the mouths of the producers, directors, distributors, performers, mobsters who made up the business...as well as the cops and FBI agents who often tried to stop them. It's also overly ambitious, too long, and eventually splits in too many different directions for the reader to comfortably follow.

When I moved to the San Fernando Valley (AKA "Porn Valley") in 2007, what struck me first was the blatancy of the pornography business, how overtly visible it was. From shooting notices posted on doorways and telephone poles to AIDS testing clinics to little windowless studios with sleazy-sounding names, to the bevy of hot yet trashy-looking women that lived in my apartment building (who had the names of their respective studios pasted in bumper stickers on their cars), porn was as visible as The Real Hollywood. Maybe moreso. It was just a big business operating in broad daylight -- witness Wicked Pictures, which tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people drive past every day on the 101 Freeway. But as the book describes, this is a relatively new phenomenon. For the first few decades of its existence, porn was an underground, fugitive business which operated deep in the fringes of society and was largely controlled by organized crime. Only gradually did it emerge from the shadows and "come into the light," and this book covers much of that trajectory. Among some of the topics covered are the way early forms of pornography were shot and sold in the 40s and 50s, the evolution of the "business" in the 60s, the story of the infamous film "Deep Throat," the saga of John Holmes and the Wonderland murders, the Traci lords scandal, the MIPORN undercover investigation, the Mitchell Brothers and the O'Farrell Theater, the transition from film to video, the mob's involvement and control of the industry, the "Killer 'n Filler" era, the AIDS crisis and the Marc Wallice scandal, and the rise of celebrity porn...just to name a few. As time passes, older "characters" fade out or are killed off; new ones come into the mix and meet the same fate. Porn is a meatgrinder, and those who manage to stick around for decades rather than years are very rare creatures indeed. This book is as much a cautionary tale as a history.

Obviously works like this are not for the faint of heart. A great deal of what is described here is disgusting, and not just physically. Many of the people involved are so utterly amoral that having to listen, so to speak, to their rationalizations and defenses is even more tiresome and repulsive than the idea of paying a woman to have sex with a dog. I am not a judgmental person by nature, and in particular not about sex, but there is something horrible -- in my mind anyway -- about the way the most natural act in the world short of breathing, eating, drinking or sleeping can be not only crassly commercialized but done so in a way which can be so utterly dehumanizing. The longer people stay in the business, it seems, the more numb people become, not merely to the act, but to their own sense of humanity. Some of those interviewed, Tom Byron and Chuck Traynor, for example, seem to lack any self-awareness of how loathsome they sound. I gave the book a three-star rating on Amazon not because of any aesthetic distaste, however, but because I feel the authors bit off more than they could chew by making this book one volume. The amount of information here is staggering, and HOLLYWOOD progresses slowly, especially during the 1970s -- the so-called Golden Age of Porn. By the time they reach the 90s, when porn was actually going somewhat mainstream and becoming more profitable than ever, the authors seem exhausted and unsure of how to wrap the book up. I would have preferred they divide the story into multiple volumes, which would have also allowed them to use a greater diversity of source material. Too many big names are left out of the mix. How, for example, do you write a history of pornography and leave out many of its most prolific actors and actresses? I know you can't include everyone, but the number of exclusions is startling. What's more, there seems to be some confusion as to whether the story is about porn or organized crime. I get that the story of the one is the story of the other, especially up to the early 90s, but I couldn't escape the feeling that the authors didn't know precisely where they wanted the emphasis to be. Much of THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD reads like a crime expose.

Having said that, in many ways this book is a remarkable achievement. It follows pornography from its rather silly origins in post-WW2 America to the multi-billion dollar industry it became, documenting tremendous amounts of drug use, money laundering, murder, suicide and debauchery which occurred along the way. Interestingly, one thing it is not is sexual. An aged vice cop once told me he had met thousands of prostitutes, from streetwalkers who would work for a hit off a crack pipe to thousand-dollar-an-hour call girls with exclusive clienteles, "and not one of them ever made me hard." After reading this, I can relate. There was not a single moment in the book, nor photograph included within it, that had any "effect" on me at all as a man. Porn is a business, and nearly everyone involved treats it like one. It seems the old adage that, when you make your passion your payday, a payday is all it eventually becomes, is sadly true.

BOOK REVIEW: MICHAEL MORIARTY'S "A GIFT OF STERN ANGELS"

Yes, words. But for words man would never be remembered.

THE GIFT OF STERN ANGELS is one of the strangest books I have ever read. It is also one of the most quotable, and the most honest. I found it fascinating and wish it were still in print. Then people wouldn't have to pay extortionate prices from greedy secondhand booksellers just to read it. I went on a quest to obtain this book that lasted two years, prowling online bookstores until I found a copy at something close to its original list price. I wish any who follow me better luck!

Now, to cases:

Michael Moriarty is a Tony, Golden Globe and x2 Emmy-award winning actor, classical composer, poet and jazz musician who, in the early-mid 90s, achieved fame playing prosecutor Ben Stone on the hit series LAW & ORDER. At the height of his success, he resigned from the show which was making him over a million dollars a year and embarked on a campaign against government censorship on television which severely damaged his career. THE GIFT OF STERN ANGELS is his explanation of why he embarked on this rather Quixotic quest.

What happened, according to Moriarty, is that Janet Reno (Attorney General of the United States) wanted to impose strict government censorship on television violence. When Moriarty's boss on L & O, show creator Dick Wolf, seemed to cave in to her demands, Moriarty demanded to be released from his contract and engaged in a protracted public attack on Reno, Wolf, various politicians, and a number of actors who he feels failed to stand up for artistic freedom, most especially Clint Eastwood, who Moriarty worked with on PALE RIDER. This campaign cost him dearly in both personal terms (his marriage eventually collapsed, and he lost the house he'd built in upstate New York, a place called Evergrowth) and professionally, as he was labeled "crazy" and "difficult to deal with" and put on a sort-of blacklist.

STERN ANGELS is not a memoir of these events, it is his in-real-time diary of them. It begins on January 7, 1994 and ends on or about January 27, 1995. Being a diary, it is almost uncomfortably intimate: Moriarty lays his soul absolutely bare, launching attacks in every direction, including at himself, and alternating between euphoria at his "freedom" and despair over his crumbling career prospects and financial and romantic uncertainty. It is bitter and caustic, uplifting and spiritual, philosophical and at times, engagingly sarcastic. Moriarty is a deeply religious man -- an ex-liberal who describes himself as a "Christ-bittern libertarian" -- and talks a great deal about his relationship with God, or as he puts it, The Word. But this is not a religious book in any conventional sense. It is a diary by a highly creative, principled, apparently very difficult man who wants to own himself and his destiny and stand up for what he believes is right in a world where having principles tends to be an act of self-destruction. To get through the storm he created by sticking to his ideals, he falls back on his connection to The Word -- to art, literature, jazz, classical music, building his house, and fighting for his beliefs while still trying to pay the bills and hold together his marriage.

I said STERN ANGELS is a quotable book. I wasn't kidding. Moriarty, while prone to go off the deep end on occasion with philosophical/religious dithyrambs, has a snappy prose style and a penetrating observational eye. This is man who takes a deep interest in the processes of life and the deeper questions of existence and approaches them in a usually very concise and readable way. I could quote hundreds of examples from the book but I'll just select a random few:

"Nothing beats the free, unique and independent human being who wishes to be nothing more than who he is."

"I don't think I'm the least bit paranoid just increasingly aware of the depth of people's fear of life."

"After watching Clint Eastwood in action over a real issue, I will never again mistake silence for strength."

"A producer is, by definition, a midwife that pretends to fatherhood."

"Institutions are by definition deaf to God."

"Evil is not an individual thing. It's the sum total of interlocking stupidities."

"Why is sex so intimidating? It is the most divinely powerful transmission between human beings. It has altered more destinies than thought. It has provoked more thought than war."

"Critics. Fathers without the strength, love or patience to raise a child in the first place."

That's just a sample of the gold I mined from this strange, fascinating, upsetting, uplifting book. There are times, reading it, when I thought him crazy as a loon, such as when he seriously considers running for President (the run is not what made me think him nuts; the fact he thought he could win did...although Trump died end up the White House, so perhaps Michael was right to think a strange, odds-off outsider could pull it off). At other times I thought him terribly pretentious, an actor who believes his every utterance and action has massive import. Certainly I could see he was "difficult to work with" in the Hollywood sense of the phrase, and I know for a fact that some of his L & O co-stars, such as Chris Noth (no angel himself), would wholeheartedly agree with this. By and large however, I liked him and wished him well in his fight. Of course in some ways, in retrospect, Moriarty's whole battle looks terribly Quixotic and futile. Dick Wolf was not destroyed by what Moriarty describes as his cowardice and double-dealing: quite the contrary, the LAW & ORDER brand is still going fairly strong even in 2024, and Wolf's net worth is 1.2 billion dollars. Janet Reno was never thrown out of office for demanding censorship (or ordering the murderous assault on the Koresh compound in Waco, for that matter). Many of Moriarty's enemies, in fact, went on to thrive, at least for a long time, while he lost his beloved dream house, his marriage and ended up in Canada as a self-imposed "political exile" -- still getting work, but no longer the golden boy of stage and screen. Yet the thing I most took away from the book is that the title is well chosen. Moriarty describes the trials, trevails and defeats of life -- even the humiliations and agonies -- as "gifts" brought to him by "stern angels" sent by God. He encourages himself and others to look for the deeper meaning and the silver lining in dark clouds, and he rebounds from every setback not with self-pity but a mixture of rage, righteousness, amusement and a sense of personal growth. He strives to live a life without fear where a human being can abide to their principles without being bullied by the government or the industry in which they work. It's a noble goal, and Moriarty goes about it in what I think is an honorable way, refusing to sell his soul simply for material success.

THE GIFT OF STERN ANGELS is, as I said, out of print, difficult to lay hands on, and it appears I was first person to even review it on Amazon despite the fact it was published in 1996-1997. But as Moriarty himself states: "It dawns on me that being published is secondary to the act of writing, so after the fact and unncessary...except for the pleasure of the possible reader."

As an actual reader I can say on that score: mission accomplished, Michael.