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Narratives and Our Ways of Knowing Part I: Plato’s Dialogues

Mark T. Conard:

I posted this several months ago. It’s the first in a series that I still mean to complete. So stay tuned.

Originally posted on Mark T. Conard:

Narratives and Our Ways of Knowing Part I: Plato’s Dialogues

The question of knowledge is a very old problem, going back to the ancients. What we can know about the world, and how we know it, is a huge puzzle. Now, we all love to tell stories, to tell people about things that have happened to us—or even stuff that happened to others, if it makes for a good tale. More than that, story-telling seems to be hardwired in us. We have a deep need to construct narratives to make sense out of the world and our lives. So not only do we try to convey what we think we know through our stories, but those stories also reflect the issues and problems regarding our ways of knowing.

I’m going to write a series of posts concerning the history of story-telling and our problems concerning the ways of knowing. I’ll…

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Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir

This essay originally appeared in my The Philosophy of Film Noir volume.

 

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) was adapted from a novel by the hard-boiled writer, James M. Cain. The movie is interspersed with voice-over narration by the protagonist, Frank Chambers (John Garfield), indicating that he is recalling events in the past. Frank is a drifter who takes a job at a remote diner, owned by an older man, Nick (Cecil Kellaway), after getting a look at Nick’s stunning young wife, Cora (Lana Turner). There is a strong sexual attraction between Frank and Cora, and, after one aborted attempt, they succeed in killing Nick and making it look like a car accident, in order to be together. A suspicious D.A., however, hounds them and finally tricks Frank into signing a statement claiming that Cora murdered Nick. Cora beats the rap, and the lovers are bitterly estranged for a short period. In the end (after some other twists and turns), they come back together, knowing that they’re too much in love to be apart, knowing that they’re fated to be together. Ironically, they have a car accident in which Cora is killed. The D.A. prosecutes Frank for Cora’s murder, and Frank is convicted and sentenced to death. We learn at the end that he has been telling the story to a priest in his prison cell, awaiting execution.

Postman displays all the distinctive conventions of film noir: the noir look and feel, as well as a typical noir narrative, with the femme fatale, the alienated and doomed antihero, and their scheme to do away with her husband. It has the feeling of disorientation, pessimism, and the rejection of traditional ideas about morality, what’s right and what’s wrong. Further, a great many noir films were either adapted from hard-boiled novels or heavily influenced by them. Last, it’s told in flash-back form through Frank’s voice-over, another noir convention. Indeed, Postman is considered to be a quintessential film noir.

Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

But what does that mean? What exactly is film noir? Is it a genre (like a western or a romantic comedy)? Is it a film style constituted by the deep shadows and odd scene compositions? Is it perhaps a cycle of films lasting through a certain period (typically identified as 1941 to 1958)? Is noir a certain mood and tone, that of alienation and pessimism? Each of these answers, amongst others, has been given by one theorist or another as an explanation of just what film noir is. And, given that there is widespread disagreement about what film noir is, there is likewise disagreement about which films count as film noir. Clearly, Postman is a film noir, but is Citizen Kane (1941), for example? Or, perhaps more pointedly, are Beat the Devil (1953) or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) noir films? Like The Maltese Falcon (1941), both films star noir legend Humphrey Bogart, and both were directed by John Huston, but, whereas The Maltese Falcon is considered to be a noir film, indeed a classic noir, the other two movies are often not so regarded.

In this essay, I’ll give a brief history of the various attempts at defining film noir. I’ll then discuss Nietzsche and the problem of definition, and I’ll conclude by making a modest proposal for a new way of looking at film noir and the problem of its definition.

 

Socratic Definition

Before examining the various, proposed definitions of film noir, I want to look at one approach to the question of definition generally, namely Socrates’. As a philosopher, Socrates’ central concern was ethics: he wanted to know how to live his life, and he believed that the key to living well was knowledge, specifically knowledge of the virtues. If he’s going to be pious or just, Socrates believes, he has to know what piety and justice are. So, in Plato’s dialogues, in order to achieve the knowledge he wants, Socrates searches for the form of these virtues.

Plato’s theory of forms is a theory of universals and essences. A universal is the category into which things fall. So, for example, individual, physical chairs or desks are what philosophers call “particulars,” whereas the category, “chair,” or “desk,” is the universal or the species, under which those physical items are organized. Particulars are concrete, individual things; whereas universals are abstract categories. So, if the form is film noir, then the particulars would be the individual films which fall into that category: Out of the Past (1947), The Maltese Falcon, and so on.

But, more than this, the notion of the forms is the cornerstone of Plato’s metaphysics, his theory about the nature of reality. For Plato, the continuously changing everyday world of physical objects and events, the particulars, which we see and hear around us is not ultimate reality; it is a pale imitation, like a shadow on a cave wall (to use Plato’s famous analogy). Ultimate reality is not what we perceive with our five senses. Rather, it’s what we grasp with our minds, the universals. The forms are intelligible rather than sensible, they lie outside space, time, and causality, and they’re eternal and unchanging. Further, the forms are the essences of the particulars: they’re what make the individual, physical objects and events what they are. If someone wants to know what this individual thing made up of plastic, metal, and fabric is, you mention the form: chair (or “chairness,” the essence of any physical object of that type). The individual object comes into existence, changes and decays, and ultimately is destroyed. The form, on the other hand, remains the same throughout. So, even if every chair in the world were destroyed, what it means to be a chair—that essence and form—would still be the same, Socrates believes.

So when Socrates asks for a definition, he is not asking for a dictionary definition, which tells us the way we use a word. Rather, he wants a description of the form. He wants to know what real, essential properties these virtues (in his case) have. And if we can do that, articulate the form, then we’ll know exactly what we’re talking about, and we’ll be able to identify anything of that type.

So is there a way of identifying the “form” of film noir? Can we pick out its essential properties and articulate that in a definition?

 

Defining Film Noir 1: It’s a Genre

There is now a relatively long history of discussion about film noir and, as I mentioned above, a continuing debate about what noir really is. One of the central issues in defining film noir is whether or not it constitutes a genre. So, what’s a genre? Foster Hirsch says: “A genre…is determined by conventions of narrative structure, characterization, theme, and visual design…” And, as one of those who argues that film noir is indeed a genre, he says that film noir has these elements “in abundance”:

Noir deals with criminal activity, from a variety of perspectives, in a general mood of dislocation and bleakness which earned the style its name. Unified by a dominant tone and sensibility, the noir canon constitutes a distinct style of film-making; but it also conforms to genre requirements since it operates within a set of narrative and visual conventions…Noir tells its stories in a particular way, and in a particular visual style. The repeated use of narrative and visual structures…certainly qualifies noir as a genre, one that is in fact as heavily coded as the western.

So, film noir is a genre, Hirsch says, because of the consistent tone, and story-telling and visual conventions amongst the movies. We see all of these, for example, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, as I mentioned above: the tone of dark cynicism and alienation; the narrative conventions like the femme fatale and the flash-back voice-overs; and the shadowy black and white look of the movie. These are the conventions running through the classic noir period, Hirsch says, which define film noir as a genre.

James Damico likewise believes that noir is a film genre, and precisely because of a certain narrative pattern. He describes this pattern as the typical noir plot in which the main character is lured into violence, and usually to his own destruction, by the femme fatale. Again, this is exactly the pattern of Postman: Frank is coaxed into killing Cora’s husband and is ultimately destroyed by his choices and actions.  Damico, unlike Hirsch, however, denies that there is a consistent visual style to the films: “I can see no conclusive evidence that anything as cohesive and determined as a visual style exists in [film noir].”

 

Defining Film Noir 2: It’s Not a Genre

Those who deny that film noir is a genre define it in a number of different ways. In the earliest work on film noir (1955), for example, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton define noir as a series or cycle of films, whose aim is to create alienation in the viewer: “All the films of this cycle create a similar emotional effect: that state of tension instilled in the spectator when the psychological reference points are removed. The aim of film noir was to create a specific alienation.”

Andrew Spicer also identifies noir as a cycle of films, which “share a similar iconography, visual style, narrative strategies, subject matter and characterisation.” This sounds a good deal like Hirsch’s characterization of noir, but Spicer denies that noir can be defined as a genre (or in most other ways, for that matter), since the expression, “film noir” is “a discursive critical construction that has evolved over time.” In other words, far from being a fixed and unchanging universal category, like one of Plato’s forms, “film noir” is a concept which evolved as critics and theorists wrote and talked about these movies, and is an expression which they applied largely retroactively, to movies in a period of cinema that had already passed.

The Maltese Falcon

Further, in arguing against Damico’s version of noir’s essential narrative, Spicer points out that “there are many other, quite dissimilar, noir plots” than the one Damico describes. Classic examples might include High Sierra (1941) and Pickup on South Street (1953), neither of which includes a femme fatale who coaxes the protagonist to do violence against a third man. In Pickup, for example, pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) steals classified microfilm from a woman, Candy (Jean Peters), on the subway. She’s carrying it for her boyfriend, who is—unbeknownst to her—passing government secrets along to the Communists. The story, then, concerns the efforts of the police to get McCoy to turn the film over to them—which would mean admitting that he’s still picking pockets, thereby putting him in the danger of becoming a three-time loser; and it concerns the efforts of the conspirators to retrieve the film from McCoy by any means necessary, including killing his friend and information dealer, Moe (Thelma Ritter). This is a classic example of a film noir, but doesn’t follow Damico’s narrative pattern.

Spicer goes on to say:

“Any attempt at defining film noir solely through its ‘essential’ formal components proves to be reductive and unsatisfactory because film noir, as the French critics asserted from the beginning, also involves a sensibility, a particular way of looking at the world.”

So, noir is not simply a certain plot line or a visual style achieved by camera angles and unusual lighting, Spicer says. It also involves a “way of looking at the world,” an outlook on life and human existence.

In addition to a series or cycle of movies, film noir is often identified by, or defined as, the particular visual style, mood, tone, or set of motifs characteristic to the form. Raymond Durgnat, for example, says that: “The film noir is not a genre, as the western and gangster film, and takes us into the realm of classification by motif and tone.” The tone is one of bleak cynicism, says Durgnat, and the dominant motifs include: crime as social criticism; gangsters; private eyes and adventurers; middle class murder; portraits and doubles; sexual pathology; psychopaths, etc.

Paul Schrader likewise denies that noir is a genre. He says: “[Film noir] is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood.” He thus rejects Durgnat’s classification by motif, and focuses his definition on the important element of mood, specifically that of “cynicism, pessimism and darkness.” He goes on to say that “film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness.”

In a classic essay, Robert Porfirio says that “Schrader was right in insisting upon both visual style and mood as criteria.” The mood at the heart of noir, says Porfirio, is pessimism, “which makes the black film black for us.” The “black vision” of film noir is one of “despair, loneliness and dread,” he claims, and “is nothing less than an existential attitude towards life…” This existentialist outlook on life which infuses noir didn’t come from the European existentialists (like Sartre and Camus), who were roughly contemporaneous with the classic American noir period, says Porfirio. Rather, “It is more likely that this existential bias was drawn from a source much nearer at hand—the hard-boiled school of fiction without which quite possibly there would have been no film noir.” The mood of pessimism, loneliness, dread and despair are to be found in the works of, e.g., Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and David Goodis, whose writings were a resource for and had a direct influence upon those who created noir films in the classic period, as I mentioned above. I’ll have more to say about Porfirio and the existentialist outlook of noir films below.

Last, R. Barton Palmer likewise rejects the definition of noir as a genre, calling it instead a “transgeneric phenomenon,” since it existed “through a number of related genres whose most important common threads were a concern with criminality…and with social breakdown.” The genres associated with noir include: “The crime melodrama, the detective film, the thriller, and the woman’s picture.” In other words, whatever the noir element in a film noir is, it can be expressed through a number of genres, melodrama, thriller, etc., and so film noir is not itself a genre. It’s “transgeneric.”

 

Defining Film Noir 3: It Can’t be Defined

Another writer, J. P. Telotte, focuses his discussion of film noir’s definition on the issue of genre, and he, perhaps prudently, somewhat sidesteps the issue of whether or not any of these characterizations of film noir do in fact establish it as a genre. The element of noir films that Telotte claims unites them—without necessarily providing a basis for a calling it a genre—is their rejection of traditional narrative (story-telling) patterns. More than any other type of popular film, Telotte says, “film noir pushes at the boundaries of classical narrative…” This classical narrative would be a straightforward story told from a third-person omniscient point of view, which assumes the objective truth about a situation, involves characters who are goal-oriented and whose motivations make sense, and which has a neat closure at the end (boy gets girl, etc.). Telotte goes on to say that “[noir] films are fundamentally about the problems of seeing and speaking truth, about perceiving and conveying a sense of our culture’s and our own reality…” So what’s common to noir films, Telotte says, is unconventional or non-classical narrative patterns, and these patterns point to problems of truth and objectivity and of our ability to know and understand reality. Some of the techniques which underpin or establish these non-traditional patterns are: 1) Non-chronological ordering of events, often achieved through flashback. As we saw, this is the technique used in Postman, but the best example of this is perhaps The Killers (1946), which brilliantly weaves together Jim Reardon’s (Edmond O’Brien) investigation of Ole Andersen’s (Burt Lancaster) death with flashbacks which tell the story leading up to the murder. 2) Complicated, sometimes incoherent, plot lines, as in The Big Sleep (1946), for example; and 3) Characters whose actions aren’t motivated or understandable in any rational way. For example, why does Frank agree to go ahead with the second (and successful) attempt on Nick’s life in Postman, when it’s such a poor plan and sure to get them caught?

Whereas Telotte sidesteps the issue of definition, James Naremore puts his foot down and concludes that film noir can’t be defined. “I contend that film noir has no essential characteristics,” he says. “The fact is, every movie is transgeneric…Thus, no matter what modifier we attach to a category, we can never establish clear boundaries and uniform traits. Nor can we have a ‘right’ definition—only a series of more or less interesting uses.” Part of the reason film noir can’t be defined, Naremore says, is that—as mentioned above—the term is a kind of “discursive construction,” employed by critics (each of whom has his own agenda), and is used retroactively. The other reason has to do with the nature of concepts and definitions generally. Most contemporary philosophers believe that we don’t form concepts by grouping similar things together according to their essential properties—the technique employed by Socrates and seemingly by most film theorists in talking about noir. Rather, says Naremore, we “create networks of relationship, using metaphor, metonymy, and forms of imaginative association that develop over time.” In other words, our concepts are not discrete categories, but are rather networks of ideas in complex relationships and associations, which we form with experience. Consequently, “categories form complex radial structures with vague boundaries and a core of influential members at the center.” This certainly seems to describe film noir: we all agree that there is a core set of films in the noir canon, such as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Maltese Falcon; but there is a fuzzy boundary, such that we disagree about a great many films and whether or not they fall into the canon, e.g., Casablanca (1942), Citizen Kane, or King Kong (1933).

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past

So Naremore argues that film noir can’t be defined, that it has no essential characteristics. On the other hand, there are those, like Nietzsche, who would argue that this doesn’t just apply to these movies, but rather that there’s something problematic about truth and definition generally, even beyond the issues Naremore points out about Socratic definition. Before I can go on to say something about what noir is, I want to examine briefly Nietzsche’s position on these issues.

 

Nietzsche and the Problem of Truth and Definition

Nietzsche holds a version of what we might call a “flux metaphysics,” the idea that the world, everything, is continually changing, and nothing is stable and enduring. Consequently, he argues, any concept of “being”—something which remains the same throughout change, like Plato’s forms, God, or even the self or ego—is a fiction. Interestingly, he argues that language is one of the primary sources of this fiction. That is, it’s impossible to grasp and articulate a world that’s continually in motion, in which nothing ever stays the same. Thus, “understanding” the world and articulating that understanding becomes a matter of “seeing” parts of the flux as somehow enduring and stable, i.e., it means falsifying what our senses tell us.

One of these falsifications is the subject/predicate distinction that’s built into language. For example, we say “lightning flashes,” as if there were some thing or subject “lightning,” which somehow performs the action of flashing. Similarly, we say “I walk,” “I talk,” “I read,” as if there were some stable ego, self, or subject which was somehow separate from those actions. Nietzsche says: “But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” In other words, in a world in flux, you are what you do. Further, the “doer” or subject created by language, Nietzsche argues, is the source of the concept of being—a stable, unchanging, permanent reality, behind the ever-flowing flux of the world:

“We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of ‘thing.’ Everywhere ‘being’ is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows and is a derivative of, the concept of ego.”

The fiction begins as merely a stable self, the idea that the ego is something enduring and unchanging and separate from its actions (as opposed to being constituted by those actions), but soon is translated into being; that is, for example, into Plato’s forms and a divinity. Nietzsche says: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”

Nietzsche

This falsification introduced by reason and language certainly makes truth, objectivity, and indeed definition problematic, to say the least. In an early and influential essay, Nietzsche says: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions…” Elsewhere, he says: “[A]ll concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.” Nietzsche here seems to be agreeing with Socrates: a definition must capture the essence of the thing, that which doesn’t change and thus has no history. The catch here is that, as we’ve seen, Nietzsche denies that there is any such thing, and so he’s denying that anything at all can really be defined. This is a radical position and seems not to bode well for the project of defining film noir. However, and perhaps ironically, I think it’s Nietzsche who will help us better understand what noir is.

 

What is Noir?

To discover what makes a film a film noir, i.e., what the noir element in the film is, it might be instructive to look briefly at noir literature, and especially so if it’s through the hard-boiled literature that noir films get their existential, pessimistic outlook, as Porfirio says. I’ll take as an example of this literature a work by David Goodis, who was the author of Dark Passage, which was later made into a film starring Bogart and Bacall. The first paragraph of Goodis’ Night Squad reads:

“At 11:20 a fairly well-dressed boozehound came staggering out of a bootleg-whiskey joint on Fourth Street. It was a Friday night in mid-July and the humid heat was like a wave of steaming black syrup confronting the boozehound. He walked into it and bounced off and braced himself to make another try. A moment later something hit him on the head and he sagged slowly and arrived on the pavement flat on his face.”

We instantly recognize here the clipped, gritty phrasing of the hard-boiled school; the dirty gutter setting; and the down-on-his-luck character.   The boozehound is being mugged by three men, while a fourth man, Corey Bradford—who turns out to be the protagonist—watches from the other side of the street. Bradford is a former dirty cop and forces the muggers to give him the boozehound’s money. He keeps most of it for himself, but returns a dollar to the boozehound for cab fare home. Instead of going home, however, the boozehound takes the dollar—his only money—and goes back into the bootleg-whiskey joint for another drink. Before he does, he mutters, “The trouble is, we just can’t get together, that’s all.” Bradford interprets this to mean, “we just can’t get together on what’s right and what’s wrong.”

The story largely takes place in a Philadelphia neighborhood called “The Swamp,” where Bradford grew up. The area is just as run-down, dirty, and crime-infested as its name implies. In an interior monologue about the neighborhood, Bradford reflects on how tough the place is, and he has nothing but good things to say about the prostitutes. They’re “performing a necessary function,” like the sewer workers and the trash collectors. He says:

“If it wasn’t for the professionals, there’d be more suicides, more homicides. And more of them certain cases you read about, like some four-year-old girl getting dragged into an alley, some sixty-year-old landlady getting hacked to pieces with an axe.”

If the denizens of the swamp couldn’t vent their violent and sexual impulses with the prostitutes, they’d take them out on little girls and old ladies. So it’s a good thing we have the pros.

Last, I’ll mention in passing that the femme fatale of this story, Lita, is married to the gangster who runs The Swamp. When Bradford first meets her, Goodis describes her thus: “She was of medium height, very slender. Her hair was platinum blonde. Contrasting with her deep, dark green eyes.” And she’s holding a book: “Corey could see the title on the cover. He didn’t know much about philosophy but he sensed that the book was strictly for deep thinkers. It was Nietzsche, it was Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

What we see here, and what makes this story noir, is the tone and mood, and the sensibility, the outlook on life, that the critics and writers mentioned above discuss. We see bleak cynicism (Durgnat), for example, in the protagonist saving the boozehound from getting mugged, only to keep the latter’s money for himself. We witness the loss and lack of clear priorities (Schrader) in the same scene, and in the Bradford’s appraisal of the prostitutes. Alienation is clearly present (Borde and Chaumeton); the whole story is one of a man adrift, a man who has lost balance and the meaning and value of his life. And we see existential pessimism (Porfirio). This is clearly evident in the image of the boozhound going back into the bar to spend his last dollar on another drink; and in the dark picture of human nature that Goodis paints when he discusses the need for prostitutes to vent our violent urges.

One other thing, which is related to all these other elements, and which some writers discuss, but which I want to emphasize, is what we might call the inversion of traditional values, and the loss of the meaning of things. That is, at the heart of the noir mood or tone of alienation, pessimism, and cynicism is, on the one hand, the rejection or loss of clearly defined ethical values (we can’t “get together on what’s right and what’s wrong”); and, on the other hand, the rejection or loss of the meaning or sense of human existence. In essence, I think Porfirio is on the right track in talking about the noir sensibility as a kind of “existential outlook” on life.

Further, I’m agreeing with those who say that what makes a film a film noir is a particular mood, tone, and sensibility, an outlook on life. This is clear because it’s that tone and sensibility which, as I said, links the literature and the films. Thus, I think that the narrative elements (story-telling conventions), and the filmmaking techniques (oblique camera angles, deep focus, low-key lighting, etc.), are secondary to the mood and sensibility. They are used to communicate that mood and sensibility, but it’s the latter which makes the film a noir.

 

The Death of God and the Meaning of Noir

As I mentioned, Nietzsche can help throw light on what film noir is, despite his skepticism about truth, essences, and definition. One of Nietzsche’s most infamous and provocative statements is that “God is dead.” What he means by this is that not only Western religions, but metaphysical systems such as Plato’s, have become untenable. Both Platonism and Christianity, for example, claim that there is some permanent and unchanging other-worldly realm or substance, Plato’s forms or God and heaven, respectively. This unchanging other-worldly something is set in opposition to the here and now, the changing world around us (forms vs. particulars; heaven vs. earth, etc.); and it’s the source of, or foundation for, our understanding of human existence, our morality, our hope for the future, amongst other things.

Again, Nietzsche says that the fiction of being is generated originally through the falsifications involved in reason and language. This concept of being is exposed as a fiction beginning in the modern period, Nietzsche argues, when natural empirical science begins to replace traditional metaphysical explanations of the world. We cease to believe in the myth of creation, for example, and modern philosophers tend to reject Plato’s idea of other-worldly forms. Thus, throughout the modern and into the contemporary period, religion and philosophy—as metaphysical explanations of the world—are supplanted by natural science. At the same time, we try to hold onto our old understanding of human existence, our ethics, an ever-more-feeble belief in an afterlife, etc. What finally, and gradually, dawns on us, says Nietzsche, is that there’s no longer any foundation or justification for these adjuncts of metaphysics, once the latter is lost. We realize more and more the hollowness and untenability of our old outlook, our old values.

The result of this is devastating. We no longer have any sense of who and what we are as human beings; there’s seemingly no foundation any longer for the meaning and value of things, including ethical values, good and evil; there’s no longer any hope for an afterlife—this life has to be taken and endured on its own terms. Before the death of God, as good Platonists or Christians (or Jews or Moslems), we knew who and what we were, the value and meaning our lives had, what we had to do to live a righteous life; and now we’re set adrift. We’re alienated, disoriented, off-balance; the world is senseless and chaotic; and there’s no transcendent meaning or value to human existence.

This death of God, then—the loss of permanence, a transcendent source of value and meaning, and the resulting disorientation and nihilism—leads to existentialism and its worldview. Porfirio characterizes existentialism as:

“an outlook which begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused world that he cannot accept. It places its emphasis on man’s contingency in a world where there are no transcendental values or moral absolutes, a world devoid of any meaning but the one man himself creates.”

As a literary/philosophical phenomenon, set in its particular place in history, existentialism is continental Europe’s reaction to the death of God.

My proposal, then, is that noir can also be seen as a sensibility or worldview which results from the death of God, and thus that film noir is a type of American artistic response to, or recognition of, this seismic shift in our understanding of the world. This is why Porfirio is right in pointing out the similarities between the noir sensibility and the existentialist view of life and human existence. Though they are not exactly the same thing, they are both reactions, however explicit and conscious, to the same realization of the loss of value and meaning in our lives.

 

A (Slightly) Different Approach

Seeing noir as a response or reaction to the death of God helps explain the commonality of the elements that thinkers have noted in noir films. For example, it explains the inherent pessimism, alienation and disorientation in noir. It affirms that noir is a sensibility or an outlook, as some say. It explains the moral ambiguity in film noir, as well as the threat of nihilism and meaninglessness that some note.

As I said, the death of God doesn’t just (or even necessarily) mean the rejection of religion. For Americans, our belief in what Nietzsche is calling “God,” the sense, order and meaning of our lives and the world, is encapsulated in American idealism: the faith in God, progress, and the indomitable American spirit. Consequently, as Palmer notes, “Film noir…offers the obverse of the American dream.” Most argue that the sources of this obversion or reversal are (or include): anxiety over the war and the postwar period; the Communist scare; the atomic age; the influx of German immigrants to Hollywood; and the hard-boiled school of pulp fiction. Indeed, it’s via these influences that an awareness or a feeling came upon us, seeped into the American consciousness, that our old ways of understanding ourselves and the world, and the values that went along with these, were gone or untenable. We lost our orientation in the world, the meaning and sense that our lives had, and clear-cut moral values and boundaries.

The similarities between European existentialism and film noir are apparent, as Porfirio points out in his essay. In the classic existentialist work, The Stranger, for example, Camus depicts the alienation and disorientation of a post-Nietzschean world, one without transcendent meaning or value. In the book, the main character reacts little to his mother’s death; shoots and kills a man for no good reason; and seems indifferent to his own trial and impending execution.

Similarly, when Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) shrugs off his partner’s murder, or turns his lover, Bridgid (Mary Astor), over to the police in The Maltese Falcon; or in The Killers when Ole Andersen passively awaits his assassins, even after being warned that they’re coming, we get a sense of the same alienation, and lack of sense and meaning. And, since film noir is a visual medium, these noirish elements are also conveyed through the lighting and camera techniques. So, for example, extreme close-ups of Hank Quinlan’s (Orson Welles) bloated face in Touch of Evil (1958), or the tilted camera shot of Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in a hospital bed in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), further serve to express alienation and disorientation.

Finally, considering noir to be a response to the death of God also verifies J. P. Telotte’s claim that noir films are “fundamentally about the problems of seeing and speaking truth,” since it’s in a post-Nietzschean world, in the wake of the death of God, that seeing and speaking the truth become problematic. Consequently, and ironically, what makes truth problematic, and what makes definition impossible, according to Nietzsche—the abandonment of essences, the resulting flux metaphysics, rejection of anything permanent and unchanging in the universe, i.e., the death of God—is the same thing that makes noir what it is. That is, the death of God is both the meaning of noir, and—if we’re to believe Nietzsche—also what makes noir impossible to define.

 

The relationship between Plato and Socrates is somewhat complex. Socrates never wrote anything. He much preferred to engage people in conversation. Plato was one of Socrates’ friends and pupils. Most of Plato’s writings are in the form of dialogues, they’re narratives, and Socrates is very often the main character. Consequently, when we talk about Socrates saying something, we’re most of the time referring to one of Plato’s dialogues.

See Plato’s cave allegory in Republic, Book VII (514a – 517d).

For a discussion of Plato’s theory of forms see his Phaedo, 65d, or Republic, 475e – 476a.

There are many other ways of thinking about definition, both ancient and contemporary. I mention Socrates because his is a classic approach to the issue, and because he makes a nice foil for Nietzsche.

I’m not pretending that the history I’m giving is complete or that it mentions every important work or statement on the topic. I merely want to provide the reader with a flavor of the discussion and point out some of the definitions provided in some of the canonical works on noir.

Wes D. Gehring, in the Introduction to Handbook of American Film Genres, says a genre in film studies “represents the division of movies into groups which have similar subjects and/or themes.” Wes D. Gehring, “Introduction,” Handbook of American Film Genres,” ed. by Wes D. Gehring, Greenwood Press, 1988, p. 1.

Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, Da Capo Press, 1981, p. 72.

See James Damico, “Film Noir: A Modest Proposal,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. by Alain Sliver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1996, p. 103.

Ibid., p. 105. This is in contrast to those like Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, who explicitly identify noir as a visual style (see their essay, “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,” in the same volume). In Somewhere in the Night (Henry Holt and Company, 1997), Nicholas Christopher also argues (though less explicitly than Damico) that film noir is a genre because of a certain narrative pattern. See p. 7 – 8.

Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” trans. by Alain Silver, in Film Noir Reader, p. 25.

Andrew Spicer, Film Noir, Pearson Education Limited, 2002, p. 4.

Ibid., p. 24.

The term “film noir” was coined by French film critics, unbeknownst to American filmmakers during the period of classic film noir (i.e., while they were making these movies), and wasn’t part of the American film vocabulary until after that classic period had ended.

To be fair, Damico calls his plot description simply the “truest” or “purest” example of film noir, and admits that there are other noir plots. However, the sheer number and variety of the other plots would seem to undermine his argument.

Ibid., p. 25.

Raymond Durgnat, “Paint it Black: the Family Tree of the Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, p. 38.

Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, p. 53.

Ibid., p. 58.

Robert Porfirio, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, p. 78.

Ibid., p. 80

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 82 – 83.

R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir, Twayne Publishers, 1994, p. 30.

Ibid., p. x.

“This overview of film noir’s main narrative techniques should come with a warning: like the films themselves, this taxonomy provides but a partial, although valuable, view of their workings, while it points toward, if it never quite satisfactorily resolves, the question of noir’s generic status.” J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir, University of Illinois Press, 1989, p. 31.

Ibid., p. 12.

Ibid., p. 31.

James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, University of California Press, 1998, p. 5.

Ibid., p. 6.

Ibid., p. 5.

Ibid., p. 6. Amongst others, Naremore has Ludwig Wittgenstein in mind here. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that there isn’t a set of essential properties or necessary and sufficient conditions that link games together (how are football and tic tac toe related?); rather there is only a loose network in which each game is connected to at least one other by a “family resemblance.” This would seem to be the case, too, with noir.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Press, 1989, p. 45.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Reason in Philosophy,” from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin, 1976, p. 483.

Ibid.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Paperback Library, 1979), 84.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 80.

I choose Goodis because not only is he one of my favorite hard-boiled authors, but also because he’s much less well-known than Chandler or Thompson, e.g., and undeservedly so, I think.

David Goodis, Night Squad, First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992, p. 3. Admittedly, Night Squad is a later work of Goodis (1961), and so comes after the classic film noir period. However, it is still representative of Goodis’ work and of hard-boiled pulp literature generally.

Ibid., p. 8.

Ibid., p. 11.

Ibid., p. 44 – 45.

In film noir “Good and evil go hand in hand to the point of being indistinguishable,” say Borde and Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” p. 25.

As Porfirio says: “This sense of meaninglessness is…not the result of any sort of discursive reasoning. Rather it is an attitude which is worked out through the mise en scène and plotting.” “No Way Out,” p. 89.

This is first expressed in a passage called “The Madman,” in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. (See Walter Kaufmann’s translation: Vintage Books, 1974, p. 181.)

“No Way Out,” p. 81.

Hollywood’s Dark Cinema, p. 6.

Voices in the Dark, p. 31.

WHY I WRITE

“Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit.” –Nietzsche.

This is my entry for a blog hop (sounds like a drunk frog) called “Why I Write.” It was Drew Chial who tagged me in his excellent entry, so you can blame him.

Origins
I do two kinds of writing: academic (philosophical essays, though this extends into my work in popular culture and philosophy, so it’s also popular) and fiction-writing, specifically suspense novels.
As so many of us, I started writing some very bad poetry and some prose pieces when I was a teen. Once I fell in love with philosophy and started into grad school, I began my career in academic writing. I have a great attention to detail, and I’m very analytical and can focus intently. Further, I make copious notes, and I outline thoroughly, and I never start an essay until I’m sure of exactly what I’m going to say and argue; so my academic writing is quite rigorous, and my skills at the craft of prose writing have developed over the years.
During my grad days I started doing a kind of journaling and writing stream-of conscious prose pieces, but I did so when I was drunk and depressed, so that stuff’s kind of interesting to read, but it didn’t amount to much.
I started writing crime/suspense by accident. I started working on a screenplay in grad school with a friend of mine over many, many beers. When we began, we didn’t have any particular genre in mind; we just wanted to come up with a story, and it turned out to be a suspense/mystery. We came up with the outline of the plot and some character sketches, and he left it to me to put it into screenplay format, which I didn’t know how to do. I left it sit in my desk drawer for a couple of years, then decided one summer to turn it into a novel. I wrote, rewrote, edited, read in the genre (I’d never read any suspense or crime literature until I started writing it), and finally came up with a complete draft. I enjoyed the process so much, that I started right away on a second one, and I never stopped.
In suspense, the influences I always name are: Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, James Ellroy, and Jim Thompson. So at first I wrote a Jim Thompson novel, and then an Elmore Leonard novel, and then a James Ellroy novel. I started looking for a literary agent—though as I would later discover, it was too early to do so. When that went nowhere, I started sending out queries to small, independent presses, and it was thus that I found a publisher for my fourth novel written, Dark as Night.

Dark as Night

I recall that it was when I was working on novel #6 or #7 (and after as many years or more) that I found my voice. That’s what I mean when I say I went looking for an agent too soon. I’ve become a big believer in the rule of thumb that you should put in about ten years or so of writing before you even think about trying to get published (if ever). Most of us don’t know how bad we are at it at first, so I understand the temptation to want to get your stuff out there; but, trust me, you don’t want to rush it. I always compare the craft of writing to singing: those who sing off key don’t know they’re doing it. You have to learn to hear your writing, to hear your mistakes, and that takes a great deal of time and experience.
I eventually did find a respectable agent, and he shopped my manuscripts around for a few years, until in 2013 Adam Chromy offered me the opportunity of publishing two of my books as e-novels via The Rogue Reader. One was a reprint of Dark as Night, and the other was a complete rewrite of the first novel I wrote, now entitled Killer’s Coda. I only discovered then that my agent has died (which well explains why I hadn’t heard from him in a while).

Killer’s Coda

Why I write

None of the above exactly explains the topic at hand, why I write, but it provides the background for giving an answer.
I write philosophy essays because philosophy is the love and passion of my intellectual life. What I didn’t mention above was that it was as a depressed teen that I discovered philosophy (after having dropped out of one college and changed majors), and it spoke to me in a very deep and personal way. I’d always been looking for some kind of depth, some kind of intellectual guidance. I somehow intuitively knew there were big questions, big ideas out there that someone, somewhere was talking about, and I finally found the conversation and joined it immediately. So writing philosophy essays is indeed part of my job; it’s part of what I get paid to do for a living (which is remarkable in itself), but it’s also my way of making a small contribution to that ongoing conversation of great ideas. I can’t imagine doing anything else, can’t imagine a better job (well, okay, if they paid me a whole lot more, that’d be pretty cool).

The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers

With regard to fiction writing, the answer is perhaps less clear. I take a great deal of satisfaction from writing novels—it’s fun and rewarding. But I think in general there’s something deeply human and very important about story-telling, about constructing narratives. We all have a deep desire to make sense of our lives, to think that there’s some point, some overarching meaning to them, and in a way living is constructing the narrative of your own life. We tell stories to help ourselves make sense of the world and our lives. I think we capture a lot by referring to a human being as “the story-telling animal.” It pegs us as language-users, for whom our lives and events in our lives matter, and who have a deep need for communication—that is, a deep need for community, being with others. Further, it implies in at least an oblique way what I mentioned above: The question of our existence, and the meaning of our existence, is of profound importance to us: we need to make sense of it all.
Consequently, I write stories about guys trying to shoot each other…

Coda

For a very long time the two sorts of writing I did were completely separate; I had philosophy on the one hand, and fiction on the other. At one point or another, I attempted to integrate some philosophical content or ideas into my stories, but the attempt always failed. The ideas always felt tacked on (which they were, really). It’s only very recently that I’ve learned to bring these two passions of mine together in, for me, a very exciting way. In large part, I accomplished this by expanding upon the genre I was writing in. I had to move beyond straightforward suspense tales in order to do it (by incorporating some of what might be identified as sci fi or dystopic elements). But the whole thing has come together also because of some of my recent revelations about storytelling itself. That all began when I started reading books on screenwriting (I’m particularly indebted to Robert McKee’s invaluable book, Story). But I’ve had some further revelations that I’ll talk about in a future post.
For the purposes of this blog hop, then, I’m passing the baton to:

Cool guy Alex Nader, who’s novel Beasts of Burdin I’m currently reading. Follow Alex on Twitter: @AlexNaderWrites, and check out his blog, “Alexander Nader–Wordsmith.”

And

My Twitter soul mate, Jess West. Follow Jess on Twitter: @West1Jess, and have a look at her excellent blog, “Write this Way.”

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Symbolism, Meaning, and Nihilism in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction

I was just interviewed by Brian Turnof for his radio show The Mind’s Eye on www.ztalkradio.com. It’s the 20th anniversary of the release of Pulp Fiction (if you can believe it), and, given my work on Tarantino, Brian wanted to hear my thoughts on the film and its legacy. It was a fun interview, and I appreciate the opportunity to have done it. In light of the anniversary and the interview, I thought I’d post my original essay on Pulp Fiction. It appeared first in Philosophy Now, but you can also find it in my The Philosophy of Film Noir. Enjoy!

The Philosophy of Film Noir

 

“Symbolism, Meaning, and Nihilism in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction“

Nihilism is a term which describes the loss of value and meaning in people’s lives. When Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is dead,” he meant that Judeo-Christianity has been lost as a guiding force in our lives, and there is nothing to replace it. Once we ceased really to believe in the myth at the heart of Judeo-Christian religion, which happened after the scientific revolution, Judeo-Christian morality lost its character as a binding code by which to live one’s life. Given the centrality of religion in our lives for thousands of years, once this moral code is lost and not replaced, we are faced with the abyss of nihilism: darkness closes in on us, and nothing is of any real value any more; there is no real meaning in our lives, and to conduct oneself and one’s life in one way is just as good as another, for there is no overarching criterion by which to make such judgments.

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is an odd film. It’s a seemingly complete narrative which has been chopped into vignettes and rearranged like a puzzle. It’s a gangster film in which not a single policeman is to be found. It’s a montage of bizarre characters, from a black mobster with a mysterious bandage on the back of his bald head to hillbilly sexual perverts; from henchmen dressed in black suits whose conversations concern what fast food items are called in Europe to a mob problem-solver who attends dinner parties early in the morning dressed in a full tuxedo. So, what is the film about? In general, we can say that the film is about American nihilism.

The Vignettes

First, a quick run-down of the film:

Part I: Ringo and Honeybunny decide to rob a coffee shop. Jules and Vincent discuss what a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is called in France. They collect a briefcase which belongs to Marsellus Wallace from Brett, Marvin, et. al. Before Jules kills Brett, he quotes a passage from the Old Testament. Marsellus has asked Vincent to take out Mia (Mrs. Marsellus Wallace), and Vincent is nervous because he heard that Marsellus maimed Tony Rocky Horror in a fit of jealousy. Vincent buys heroin and gets high, then takes Mia out to Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a restaurant which is full of old American pop icons: Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, Ed Sullivan, Elvis; they win a dance contest. Mia mistakes heroin for cocaine and overdoses, and Vincent has to give her a cardiac needle full of adrenaline to save her.

 PART II: Butch agrees to throw a fight for Marsellus Wallace. Butch as a child receives a watch from his father’s friend, an army comrade who saved the watch by hiding it in his rectum while he was in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. Butch double crosses Marsellus and doesn’t throw the fight; his boxing opponent is killed. Butch must return to his apartment, despite the fact that Marsellus’ men are looking for him, to get his watch; he kills Vincent. Butch tries to run over and kill Marsellus; they fight and end up in a store with Zed, Maynard and the Gimp, hillbilly sexual perverts. The perverts have subdued and bound Butch and Marsellus, and the perverts begin to rape Marsellus. Butch gets free and saves Marsellus by killing a hillbilly and wounding another with a Samurai sword.

PART III: Returning to the opening sequence, one of the kids Jules and Vincent are collecting from tries to shoot them with a large handgun; he fails, and Jules takes this as divine intervention. Jules and Vincent take Marvin and the briefcase; Marvin is shot accidentally, and the car becomes unusable. Jules and Vincent stop at Jimmy’s, and Marsellus sends Winston Wolf to mop up. Jules and Vincent end up in the coffee shop which Ringo and Honeybunny are robbing. Ringo wants to take the briefcase, but Jules won’t let him. Jules quotes the Biblical passage again to Ringo and tells him that he would quote this to someone before he killed that person. This time, however, Jules is not going to kill Ringo. Ringo and Honeybunny take the money from the coffee shop; Jules and Vincent retain the briefcase.

Pulp Fiction DVD

Transient Symbols

As I said, in general, the film is about American nihilism. More specifically, it is about the transformation of two characters: Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Butch (Bruce Willis). In the beginning of the film, Vincent (John Travolta) has returned from a stay in Amsterdam, and the content of the conversation between Jules and Vincent concerns what Big Macs and Quarter Pounders are called in Europe, the Fonz on Happy Days, Arnold the Pig on Green Acres, the pop band Flock of Seagulls, Caine from Kung Fu, tv pilots, etc. These kinds of silly references seem upon first glance like a kind of comic relief, set against the violence that we’re witnessing on the screen. But this is no mere comic relief. The point is that this is the way these characters make sense out of their lives: transient, pop cultural symbols and icons. In another time and/or another place people would be connected by something they saw as larger than themselves, most particularly religion, which would provide the sense and meaning that their lives had and which would determine the value of things. This is missing in late 20th (and now early 21st) Century America, and is thus completely absent from Jules’ and Vincent’s lives. This is why the pop icons abound in the film: these are the reference points by which we understand ourselves and each other, empty and ephemeral as they are. This pop iconography comes to a real head when Vincent and Mia (Uma Thurmon) visit Jack Rabbit Slim’s, where the host is Ed Sullivan, the singer is Ricky Nelson, Buddy Holly is the waiter, and amongst the waitresses are Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield.

The pop cultural symbols are set into stark relief against a certain passage from the Old Testament, Ezekiel 25:17:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Jules quotes this just before he kills someone. The point is that the passage refers to a system of values and meaning by which one could lead one’s life and make moral decisions. However, that system is missing from Jules’ life and so the passage becomes meaningless to him. Late in the film he tells us: “I’ve been saying that shit for years, and if you heard it—that meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant, I just thought it was some cold blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass.”

The Hierarchy of Power

The absence of any kind of foundation for making value judgments, the lack of a larger meaning to their lives, creates a kind of vacuum in their existence which is filled with power. With no other criteria available to them by which to order their lives, they fall into a hierarchy of power, with Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) at the top and themselves as henchmen below. Things come to have value in their lives if Marsellus Wallace declares it to be so. What he wants done, they will do. What he wishes becomes valuable for them and thus becomes the guide for their actions at the moment, until the task is completed by whatever means necessary. This is perfectly epitomized by the mysterious briefcase which Jules and Vincent are charged to return to Marsellus. It is mysterious because we never actually see what’s in it, but we do see people’s reactions to its obviously valuable contents. The question invariably arises: what’s in the briefcase? However, this is a trick question. The answer is really: it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference what’s in the briefcase. All that matters is that Marsellus wants it back, and thus the thing is endowed with worth. If Jules and Vincent did have an objective framework of value and meaning in their lives, they would be able to determine whether what was in the briefcase was ultimately of value, and they would be able to determine what actions were justified in retrieving it. In the absence of any such framework, the briefcase becomes of ultimate value in and of itself, precisely because Marsellus says so, and any and all actions required to procure it become justified (including, obviously, murder).

In addition to the pop iconography in the film, the discourse on language here concerns naming things. What is a Big Mac called? What is a Quarter Pounder called? What is a Whopper called? (Vincent doesn’t know; he didn’t go to Burger King.) When Ringo (Tim Roth) calls the waitress “garçon,” she informs him: “‘garçon’ means ‘boy.’” Also, when Butch’s girlfriend refers to his means of transportation as a “motorcycle,” he insists on correcting her: “It’s not a motorcycle, it’s a chopper.” And yet—and here’s the crux—when a lovely Hispanic cab driver asks Butch what his name means, he replies: “This is America, honey; our names don’t mean shit.” The point is clear: in the absence of any lasting, transcendent objective framework of value and meaning, our language no longer points to anything beyond itself. To call something good or evil renders it so, given that there is no higher authority or criteria by which one might judge actions. Jules quotes the Bible before his executions, but he may as well be quoting the Fonz or Buddy Holly.

Objective Values

I’ve been contrasting nihilism with religion as an objective framework or foundation of values and meaning, because that’s the comparison that Tarantino himself makes in the film. There are other objective systems of ethics, however. We might compare nihilism to Aristotelian ethics, for example. Aristotle says that things have natures or essences and that what is best for a thing is to “achieve” or realize its essence. And in fact whatever helps a thing fulfill its nature in this way is by definition good. Ducks are aquatic birds. Having webbed feet helps the duck to achieve its essence as a swimmer. Therefore, it’s good for the duck to have webbed feet. Human beings likewise have a nature which consists in a set of capacities, our abilities to do things. There are many things that we can do: play the piano, build things, walk and talk, etc. But the essentially human ability is our capacity for reason, since it is reason which separates us from all other living things. The highest good, or best life, for a human being, then, consists in realizing one’s capacities, most particularly the capacity for reason. This notion of the highest good, along with Aristotle’s conception of the virtues, which are states of character which enable a person to achieve his essence, add up to an objective ethical framework according to which one can weigh and assess the value and meaning of things, as well as weigh and assess the means one might use to procure those things. To repeat, this sort of a framework, whether based on religion or reason, is completely absent from Jules’ and Vincent’s lives. In its absence, pop culture is the source of the symbols and reference points by which the two communicate and understand one another; and without reason or a religious moral code to determine the value and meaning that things have in their lives, Marsellus Wallace dictates the value of things. This lack of any kind of higher authority is depicted in the film by the conspicuous absence of any police presence whatever. This is a gangster film, in which people are shot dead, others deal and take drugs, drive recklessly, etc., there are car accidents, and yet there is not a single policeman to be found. Again, this symbolizes Marsellus’ absolute power and control in the absence of any higher, objective authority.

Jules

Pulp Fiction is in part about Jules’ transformation. When one of his targets shoots at him and Vincent from a short distance, empties the revolver, and misses completely, Jules interprets this as divine intervention. The importance of this is not that it really was divine intervention, but rather that the incident spurs Jules on to reflect on what is missing. It compels him to consider the Biblical passage that he’s been quoting for years without giving much thought to it. Jules begins to understand—however confusedly at first—that the passage he quotes refers to an objective framework of value and meaning that is absent from his life. We see the dawning of this kind of understanding when he reports to Vincent that he’s quitting the mob, and then (most significantly) when he repeats the passage to Ringo in the coffee shop and then interprets it. He says:

“I’ve been saying that shit for years, and if you heard it—that meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant, I just thought it was some cold blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this morning that made me think twice. See, now I’m thinking, maybe it means: you’re the Evil Man, and I’m the Righteous Man, and Mr. 9mm here—he’s the Shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean: you’re the Righteous Man, and I’m the Shepherd; and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. Now, I’d like that, but that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is: you’re the Weak and I’m the Tyranny of Evil Men. But I’m trying Ringo, I’m trying real hard to be the Shepherd.”

 

Jules offers three possible interpretations of the passage. The first interpretation accords with the way he has been living his life. Whatever he does (as commanded by Marsellus) is justified, and thus he is the Righteous Man, with his pistol protecting him, and whatever stands in his way is bad or evil by definition. The second interpretation is interesting and seems to go along with Jules’ pseudo-religious attitude following what he interprets as a divine-mystical experience (he tells Vincent, recall, that he wants to wander the earth like Caine on Kung Fu). In this interpretation, the world is evil and selfish, and apparently has made Jules do all the terrible things he’s done up to that point. He’s now become the Shepherd, and he’s going to protect Ringo (who after all is small potatoes in mob terms, robbing coffee shops, etc.) from this evil. But that’s not the truth, he realizes. The truth is that he himself is the evil that he’s been preaching about (unwittingly) for years. Ringo is weak, neither good enough to be righteous, nor strong enough to be as evil as Jules and Vincent. And Jules is trying to transform himself into the shepherd, to lead Ringo through the valley of darkness. Of course, interestingly, the darkness is of Jules’ own making, such that the struggle to be the shepherd is Jules’ struggle with himself not to revert to evil. In this struggle, he buys Ringo’s life. Ringo has collected the wallets of the customers in the coffee shop, including Jules’, and Jules allows him to take fifteen hundred dollars out of it. Jules is paying Ringo the fifteen hundred dollars to take the money from the coffee shop and simply leave, so that he (Jules) won’t have to kill him. Note that no such transformation has taken place for Vincent, who exclaims: “Jules, you give that fucking nimrod fifteen hundred dollars, and I’ll shoot him on general principle.” The principle is of course whatever means are necessary to achieve my end are justified, the end (again) most often determined by Marsellus Wallace. This attitude of Vincent’s is clearly depicted in his reaction to Mia’s overdose. He desperately tries to save her, not because she is a fellow human being of intrinsic worth, but because she is Marsellus’ wife, and he (Vincent) will be in real trouble if she dies. Mia has value because Marsellus has made it so, not because of any intrinsic or objective features or characteristics she may possess.

Butch

The other transformation in the film is that of Butch. There is a conspicuous progression in the meaning and relevance of the violence in the story. In the beginning, we see killings that are completely gratuitous: Brett and his cohorts, and particularly Marvin, who is shot in the face simply because the car went over a bump and the gun went off. There is also the maiming of Tony Rocky Horror, the reason for which is hidden from all, save Marsellus. Again, this is evidence that it is Marsellus himself who provides the meaning and justification for things, and his reasons—like God’s—are hidden from us. (This may in fact be what the bandage on his head represents: the fact that Marsellus’ motives and reasons are hidden to us. Bandages not only help to heal, they also hide or disguise what we don’t want others to see.) The meaninglessness of the violence is also epitomized in the boxing match. Butch kills his opponent. When the cab driver, Esmarelda Villalobos (Angela Jones), informs him of this, his reaction is one of complete indifference. He shrugs it off. Further, when Butch gets into his jam for having double-crossed Marsellus, he initially decides that the way that he is going to get out of it is to become like his enemy, that is, to become ruthless. Consequently, he shoots and kills Vincent, and then he tries to kill Marsellus by running him over with a car.

The situation becomes interesting when Butch and Marsellus, initially willing to kill one another without a second’s thought, find themselves in the same unpleasant situation: held hostage by a couple of hillbillies who are about to beat and rape them. I noted earlier the conspicuous absence of policemen in the film. The interesting quasi-exception to this is the pervert, Zed. Marsellus is taken captive, bound and gagged. When Zed shows up he is dressed in a security guard’s uniform, giving him the appearance of an authority figure. He is only a security guard, and not a real policeman, however, and this is our clue to the arbitrariness of authority. In the nihilistic context in which these characters exist, in the absence of an objective framework of value to determine right, justice and goodness, Marsellus Wallace is the legislator of values, the ultimate authority. In this situation, however, his authority has been usurped. Zed holds the shotgun now, and he takes his usurpation to the extreme by raping Marsellus.

Butch’s Transformation

Just as Jules’ transformation had a defining moment, namely, when he is fired upon and missed, so too Butch’s transformation has a defining moment. This is when he is about to escape, having overpowered the Gimp, but returns to save Marsellus. As I said, initially the violence is gratuitous and without meaning. However, when Butch returns to the cellar to aid Marsellus, the violence for the first time has a justification: as an act of honor and friendship, he is saving Marsellus, once his enemy, from men who are worse than they are. Note that Butch gets out of his jam not by becoming like his enemy, i.e., ruthless, but in fact by saving his enemy.

Butch’s transformation is represented by his choice of weapons in the store: a hammer, a baseball bat, a chainsaw, and a Samurai sword. He overlooks the first three items and chooses the fourth. Why? The sword clearly stands out in the list. First, it’s meant to be a weapon, while the others are not, and I’ll discuss that in a moment. But it also stands out because the first three items (two of them particularly) are symbols of Americana. They represent the nihilism that Butch is leaving behind, whereas the Samurai sword represents a particular culture in which there is (or was) in place a very rigid moral framework, the kind of objective foundation that I’ve been saying is missing from these characters’ lives. The sword represents for Butch what the Biblical passage does for Jules: a glimpse beyond transient pop culture, a glimpse beyond the yawning abyss of nihilism to a way of life, a manner of thinking, in which there are objective moral criteria, there is meaning and value, and in which language does transcend itself.

Butch’s Paternal Line

In contrast to the (foreign) Samurai sword, the gold watch is a kind of heirloom that’s passed down in (American) families. It represents a kind of tradition of honor and manhood. But let’s think about how the watch gets passed down in this case. Butch’s great-grandfather buys it in Knoxville before he goes off to fight in World War I. Having survived the war, he passes it on to his son. Butch’s grandfather then leaves it to his own son before he goes into battle during World War II and is killed. Butch’s father, interned in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, hides the watch in his rectum, and before he dies—significantly—from dysentery, he gives it to his army comrade (Christopher Walken) who then hides it in his own rectum. After returning from the war, the comrade finds Butch as a boy and presents him with the watch. The way in which Butch receives the watch is of course highly significant. His father hides it in his rectum. The watch is a piece of shit; or, in other words, it is an empty symbol. Why empty? For the same reason that the Biblical passage was meaningless: it is a symbol with no referent. That to which it would refer is missing.

The sword is also significant because it, unlike the gold watch (an heirloom sent to Butch by a long-absent father, whom he little remembers), connects Butch to the masculine line in his family. The men in his family were warriors, soldiers in the various wars. Choosing the sword transforms Butch from a pugilist, someone disconnected who steps into the ring alone, into a soldier, a warrior, one who is connected to a history and a tradition, and whose actions are guided by a strict code of conduct in which honor and courage are the most important of values.

Note also how Butch is always returning. He seems doomed to return, perhaps to repeat things, until he gets it right. He must return to his apartment to get his watch. This return is associated with his decision to become his enemy. There’s his return to the cellar to save Marsellus, when he transcends his situation and begins to grasp something beyond the abyss. There’s also his return to Knoxville. Recall that the watch was originally purchased by his great-grandfather in Knoxville, and it is to Knoxville that Butch has planned to escape after he doesn’t throw the fight. After he chooses the sword and saves Marsellus, Butch can rightfully return to Knoxville, now connected to his paternal line, now rightfully a member of the warrior class.

Note finally that Butch’s transformation is signified by the motorcycle—excuse me, chopper—which he steals from Zed, and on which he and Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) make their escape to Knoxville. The chopper is named “Grace,” indicating that Butch has at last found his redemption.

 

See Friedrich Nietzsche,  “The Madman,” section 125 in The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) p. 181.

Actually, Nietzsche means something broader than this: by saying that God is dead, he means that any notion of objective, absolute values or truth is lost, not just those inherent to Judeo-Christianity, but it is the latter which concerns Tarantino, so I’m restricting my discussion to it.

With one very important exception, to be noted below.

The quote is a paraphrase of the Biblical passage and comes from the Sonny Chiba movie, The Bodyguard (1973). Chiba’s version ends: “And you will know my name is Chiba the Bodyguard when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

All the passages I cite here are directly from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).

Cinematically, the briefcase is a reference to Robert Aldrich’s classic noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), in which the characters (notably the protagonist, Mike Hammer) chase after a box which contains some mysterious, glowing contents, believing it to be wildly valuable. Ironically, it turns out to be radioactive material, and once released it unleashes an apparent nuclear holocaust.

I wish to thank Lou Ascione and Aeon Skoble, who helped me clarify and refine my ideas about the film in discussions we’ve had.

Earlier versions of this essay appeared in Philosophy Now (No. 19, Winter 1997/98), and on metaphilm.com: http://metaphilm.com/philm.php?id=178_0_2_0.

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Shakespeare, Bitches!

By popular demand on Twitter I started posting again Shakespeare quotations with a small addition: the word “bitches” at the end. (At least somebody besides me finds this funny…)

Below are some of the recent offerings. Enjoy!

 

Bitches!

 “Screw your courage to the sticking place, bitches.”

“Our little life is rounded with a sleep, bitches.”

“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, bitches.”

“The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge, bitches.”

“Love is a devil, bitches.”

“Life’s but a walking shadow, bitches.”

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, bitches.”

The Bard himself

“What’s past is prologue, bitches.”

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, bitches.”

“Ignorance is the curse of God, bitches.”

“I have Immortal longings in me, bitches.”

“Now the hungry lion roars, bitches.”

“Where’s my serpent of old Nile, bitches?”

“I could have better spared a better man, bitches.”

“What light through yonder window breaks, bitches?”

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath, bitches.”

“The prince of darkness is a gentleman, bitches.”

“I am not in the roll of common men, bitches.”

Guy talking to a skull

“While you live, tell truth, and shame the devil, bitches.”

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, bitches.”

“There are few die well that die in a battle, bitches.”

“We cannot hold mortality’s strong hand, bitches.”

“It is war’s prize to take all vantage, bitches.”

“Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold, bitches.”

“Nature teaches beasts to know their friends, bitches.”

“Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall, bitches.”

Liz Taylor as Cleopatra

“We have some salt of our youth in us, bitches.”

“Tis pity Love should be so tyrannous, bitches.”

“A man I am, cross’d with adversity, bitches.”

“Come not within the measure of my wrath, bitches.”

“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage, bitches.”

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, bitches.”

“Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores, bitches.”

“Thou art the Mars of malcontents, bitches.”

“So quick bright things come to confusion, bitches.”

“I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice, bitches.”

“A lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing, bitches.”

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Inspirational Quotes and Shit Volume III

I went on a mission a while back to try to expose just how banal inspirational quotes are. My most successful effort was to add “and shit” to the end of traditional quotations. E.g., “Religion is the opiate of the masses, and shit.” (Marx)

In no way did this motivate people to stop and think about the banality of what they were doing in posting quotes, but it was a lot of fun.

So I’ve put together a third partial list of the “and shit” quotes that I’ve posted on Twitter. (Click here for the first list, and here for the second.)

I always add a comma before the “and shit” to mark the end of the actual quote, whether that comma is actually needed or not.

Enjoy!

AND SHIT!

“If a story is in you, it has to come out, and shit.” (William Faulkner) #AndShit.

“Creativity takes courage, and shit.” (Matisse) #AndShit.

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see, and shit.” (Paul Klee) #AndShit.

“All truth is a species of revelation, and shit.” (Coleridge) #AndShit.

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth, and shit.” (Thoreau) #AndShit.

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company, and shit.” (Twain) #AndShit.

“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship, and shit.” (Aquinas) #AndShit.

“Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord, and shit.” (Plutarch) #AndShit.

“God is dead, and shit.”
Nietzsche

“War is the father of all, and shit.” (Heraclitus) #AndShit.

“I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry, and shit.” (Beaumarchais) #AndShit.

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and shit.” (Whitehead) #AndShit.

“Become the one you are, and shit.” (Pindar) #AndShit.

“It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong, and shit.” (Bismarck) #AndShit.

“For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes, and shit.” (Diderot) #AndShit

“While the sick man has life, there is hope, and shit.” (Cicero) #AndShit.

“To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature, and shit.” (Voltaire) #AndShit.

“God has given us this ease, and shit.” (Virgil) #AndShit.

“Sensual passions are your first enemy, and shit.” Buddha

“It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God, and shit.” (Thomas Paine) #AndShit.

“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it, and shit.”  (Epictetus) #AndShit.

“Withdraw into yourself and look, and shit.”  (Plotinus) #AndShit.

“Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly, and shit.” (Plutarch) #AndShit.

“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish, and shit.” (Michelangelo) #AndShit.

“Space is the breath of art, and shit.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) #AndShit.

“Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth, and shit.” (Thomas Huxley) #AndShit.

“I have always been afraid of banks, and shit.” (Andrew Jackson) #AndShit.

“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest, and shit.” (William Blake) #AndShit.

“Do something wonderful, people may imitate it, and shit.” (Albert Schweitzer) #AndShit.

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character, and shit.” (Stendhal) #AndShit.

THE KING OF SOUTH PHILLY PART V

KING RALPHIE AND THE TURK

I.

Ralphie rode in the back of Pete’s Chevy Impala, while Pete steered, and Quentin sat in the front seat next to him. They drove up and down the streets of South Philly, slow, keeping an eye on things.
The sun sat on the horizon, below the row homes, casting deep shadows in the neighborhood.
“I need a refill,” said Ralphie, handing his empty glass to Quentin.
Quentin grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the footwell and poured a double into Ralphie’s glass, and handed it back to him.
“I’m hungry,” said Pete. “You want to get a cheesesteak, Ralphie?”
“Not now,” said Ralphie.
“What kind of cheese do you like on your steak?” said Pete, looking at Ralphie in the rearview mirror. “Whiz, or provolone, or something else?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Ralphie.
“Me, I love Whiz,” said Pete. “I won’t eat a steak any other way.”
“You know why they call it Whiz, don’t you?” said Ralphie.
Pete shook his head. “No, why?”
“’Cause it’s got piss in it.”
Quentin looked back at Ralphie over his shoulder, and Ralphie winked at him.
“What?” said Pete.
“Yeah,” said Ralphie. “You know when you want to take a piss, sometimes you say, I got to take a whiz? Well, that’s where they get the name from.”
“No, shit?” said Pete.
“Yeah, why do you think it’s so yellow?” said Quentin.
“Oh, man,” said Pete. “Well, I ain’t going to eat that no more!”
Ralphie and Quentin broke out laughing.
Pete started laughing with them.
“Goddamn,” said Quentin. “That’s the funniest thing I ever heard.”
“Yeah!” said Pete. “I ain’t going to eat it no more!”
Ralphie frowned. He reached forward and slapped Pete on the back of the head.
“You dimwit,” he said. “That’s not why we’re laughing.”
“It ain’t?” said Pete.
“No, you idiot,” said Ralphie. “We’re laughing ‘cause there ain’t no piss in Cheez Whiz.”
“I don’t get it,” said Pete.
Ralphie let out a sigh. “Just drive, will you?”
The car hit a bump, and whiskey splashed out of Ralphie’s glass and onto his pants.
“Jesus, Pete,” he said. “Watch where the fuck you’re going.”
“Sorry, Ralphie. I was just trying to avoid hitting a kid on a bike.”
“Well, fuck him,” said Ralphie. “You made me spill good whiskey.”
“Right,” said Pete. “Good whiskey.”
At the next corner on South Fourth Street, a young guy in jeans and a black t-shirt flagged down the car. Pete pulled over.
“See what he wants,” said Ralphie.
Quentin rolled down his window.
“What do you want?” he said to the guy.
“I want to talk to Ralphie about a problem I got,” he said.
“Who is he?” said Ralphie.
“Tom from the neighborhood,” said Quentin. “I know him.”
Ralphie took a sip of Jack Daniel’s and rolled down his window. He waved to Tom, and Tom approached the rear door.
“What’s the problem?” said Ralphie.
“I got robbed,” said Tom. “Somebody broke into my house and stole all my money.”
“Why don’t you call the cops?”
“’Cause I stole it from somebody else,” said Tom.
Ralphie nodded. “So what do you want me to do about it?”
“Well, I know who done it,” said Tom. “Can you get the money back for me, and maybe, you know, beat the guy up some?”
Ralphie let out a sigh, thinking about it.
“You’d have to pay me in advance,” he said.
The guy, Tom, screwed up his face. “Well, I don’t have no money, ‘cause this asshole stole all of it.”
“I guess you’re out of luck,” said Ralphie.
He pushed the button and rolled the window back up.
Quentin looked back at Ralphie over his shoulder.
“Hey, Ralphie,” he said. “He’s got a really hot sister.”
“Tom does?” said Ralphie.
“Yeah,” said Quentin. “Great tits, really nice face. And she has a stud in her tongue. Those are for giving blowjobs. You ever have a tongue-stud blowjob, Ralphie?”’
“No. No, I haven’t,” said Ralphie.
“Me, I’d sure like to try one,” said Quentin.
“Me, too!” said Pete.
Ralphie nodded and rolled the window back down. The guy, Tom, had retreated from the car, and Ralphie waved him back over.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” said Ralphie. “But I want your sister to blow me.”
Tom frowned. “My sister?”
“Yeah, tomorrow night at the bar,” said Ralphie.”
“Well, she won’t like that,” said Tom.
“That’s okay,” said Ralphie. “Just make sure she’s there tomorrow night.”
Tom nodded, and Ralphie hit the button to raise the window again.
“Let’s go get that cop,” Ralphie said.
Pete drove them to Bigler Street in the southern most part of South Philly. They parked across the street from the address they had for Officer Steve Dickson.
“This is it,” said Quentin.
Pete turned in the seat to look back at Ralphie.
“Oh, Ralphie,” he said. “Can I do it? Can I kill the cop? After all, I’m the one he busted.”
Ralphie took a sip of whiskey.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think, Quentin. Should I let Pete do it?”
“That’s a lot of responsibility,” said Quentin. “Think you can handle it, Pete?”
Pete nodded. “I know I can, guys. I promise. I’ll do it good.”
“I’m afraid you might fuck it up,” said Ralphie.
“I swear I won’t,” said Pete. “I ain’t done it before, but I’ll do it right.”
“Ain’t done what?”said Ralphie. “Killed a cop?”
“Yeah,” said Quentin. “You ain’t killed a cop before?”
“No,” said Pete, shaking his head. “I ain’t killed nobody before.”
Ralphie sat forward in the seat.
“You’re fucking shitting me,” he said. “All this time I’ve known you, and you ain’t killed nobody?”
“No, never,” said Pete.
“I’ll be damned,” said Quentin.
“I beat a dog to death with a shovel once,” said Pete. “But I never killed a person.”
“Far as I can tell,” said Ralphie, downing the rest of his whiskey. “There ain’t much of a difference.”
He climbed out of the car, and Pete and Quentin followed him.
The three of them walked to the house, climbed up onto the stoop, and Ralphie motioned for Pete to stand to the side. Ralphie banged on the front door. Quentin stood next to him. They saw a light come on in the living room¸ and the door opened. Dickson appeared in the doorway wearing a red cotton track suit with stains on it.
“Yeah?” said the cop.
“Officer Dick-son?” said Ralphie.
Pete snickered, standing next to him in the shadows.
“That’s right,” said Dickson, looking back and forth between Ralphie and Quentin. “And I know who you are, Ralphie McNear. What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you,” said Ralphie. “About my buddy, Pete.”
“Who the hell is Pete?”
“I am!” said Pete, stepping into the doorway. He had a gun in his hand.
Dickson’s eyes grew wide, as he backed into the house. Pete followed him in, pointing the gun at the cop.
Ralphie and Quentin stepped into the living room, and Quentin shut the door behind them.
“What the hell’s this about?” said the cop.
Pete shot him twice in the chest. The cop stumbled backwards and fell to the floor. He quivered and gasped for a moment, and fell still.
“Jesus, Pete,” said Quentin.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Ralphie.
“You said I could kill him,” said Pete.
Ralphie put his hands on his hips.
“Goddamn it, Pete,” he said. “We were going to torture him first. Didn’t you know that?”
Pete shook his head. “No, sorry, Ralphie. I didn’t.”
“Man, you’re really dumb,” said Quentin.
“You should at least tell the guy why you’re killing him,” said Ralphie.
“That’s really the way to do it,” said Quentin.
Ralphie pointed to the cop, laying unconscious on the floor.
“Look at this asshole,” he said. “He can’t hear us now. He probably won’t come to. You can’t tell him shit.”
Pete hung his head. “I’m really sorry, you guys,” he said.
“Well, you might as well go ahead and finish him off,” said Ralphie.
Quentin nodded. “Yeah, might as well,” he said.
“Okay,” said Pete. “I’ll finish him off. Might as well.”
They all looked at the cop laying on the floor, a blood stain covering the front of his track suit.
“You want me to get you a shovel?” said Ralphie.
The three of them broke out laughing.
“Yeah, I’ll use a shovel!” said Pete. “Like with the dog!”
The three of them laughed even harder, thinking about Pete killing the guy with a shovel.

II.

A week later, on a Saturday evening, Ralphie sat at his booth in the back of Johnny’s Place, drinking whiskey out of a straight glass. The regulars had started to fill the bar, many of them occasionally looking over at Ralphie to see what he was doing or who he was talking to.
The past few nights people from the neighborhood had started bringing gifts to Ralphie’s table, some of them asking for help, and some not. They brought cakes and cookies, bottles of booze, flowers, stuffed animals. Women brought naked pictures of themselves. An auto mechanic left a fan belt and a 30% off coupon for brake alignment. One man brought his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter. Ralphie sent the two of them away, but he did write down the girl’s phone number.
Quentin walked into the room, glanced at the pile of stuff beside the table, and sat down across from Ralphie.
“Pete’s upset,” said Quentin.
“I really don’t give a shit,” said Ralphie.
“He’s upset because everybody thinks you killed that cop, Dickson, and not him.”
“Well, what the fuck does he want me to do about it?” said Ralphie. “Announce it in the fucking Daily News?”
Quentin shrugged. “I’m just telling you he’s upset, that’s all.”
Ralphie reached down and grabbed a bottle of expensive bourbon someone had brought him.
“Here,” he said, handing it to Quentin. “Give this to him. He’ll feel better.”
Quentin pointed. “I bet he’d also like that teddy bear.”
“Take all that shit,” said Ralphie. “I don’t fucking care.”
A commotion started at one of the other booths. A woman stood over the table, while a man sitting there tried to push her away.
“Leave me alone!” said the man.
“Hey, fuck you!” said the woman.
She left the table and walked towards Ralphie and Quentin.
“It’s Sister Rachel,” said Quentin.
“I see her,” said Ralphie.
“Hey Ralphie, hey Quentin,” said the nun, stepping up to the table. “Buy me a drink, and I’ll suck your cock.”
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you,” said Ralphie. “You’re a fucking nun.”
“Not anymore,” she said, slurring her words. “I renounced my vows.”
“Why’d you do that?” said Quentin.
“Because of Ralphie,” she said, leaning over the table. “He convinced me I didn’t know what I was talking about before. I didn’t know anything about vice or Jesus, or being thy neighbor’s keeper, any of that shit.”
“You didn’t have to turn into a drunken whore,” said Ralphie.
“Plus, I haven’t been fucked in so long I can’t stand it!” said the nun. “Not since Father Doherty in the rectory, and that was so long ago!”
Ralphie laughed. “Father Doherty, that old child molester!”
“He doesn’t just like little boys,” said Sister Rachel. “He gets a lot of pussy, too.”
“Good for him,” said Ralphie.
“So, what do you think?” said the nun, winking at them. “Either of you boys want to do me?”
“Fuck no,” said Ralphie, with a wave of his hand. “Get lost.”
Sister Rachel shrugged and walked to another table.
Ralphie held up his empty glass.
“I need another drink,” he said.
Quentin seemed distracted, looking around.
“Hey,” said Ralphie, shoving his glass at Quentin. “I need a refill.”
“Yeah, sure, Ralphie,” he said. “Only…”
“Only what?”
“Well…I’d kind of like, you know…”
“No, what?” said Ralphie.
Quentin shrugged. “Sister Rachel?”
Ralphie scowled at him. “You got to be kidding me? You want to fuck the nun?”
“It’s like we said before,” said Quentin. “She’s got a pussy, same as any other woman. Only it’s special, ‘cause it’s nun-pussy.”
“Not anymore,” said Ralphie. “You heard her, she renounced her vows.”
Quentin shrugged. “That doesn’t really matter to me. I can still picture her as a nun.”
“I don’t care what you do,” said Ralphie. “Just get me another drink first.”
Quentin scooted out from the booth and walked to the front bar.
The blond prostitute who once asked Ralphie to be her pimp appeared at his table.
“Hi, King Ralphie,” she said. “Can I talk to you a second?”
“King?” he said.
“Sure, that’s what everybody calls you now.”
He grinned and leaned back in the seat.
“What do you want?” he said.
“You remember me?” she said.
“Sheri-Lynn something.”
She smiled. “That’s right! Sheri-Lynn Hudley.”
“What do you want?” he said again.
“I just wanted to say how much I appreciate it that you killed that cop for me.”
“For you?”
She nodded. “Yeah, after the awful way he treated me.”
“First, I ain’t admitting I killed anybody,” he said. “And second, why do you think I did it for you?”
“Just on account of how you said you’d handle it if somebody was bothering me.”
“I didn’t know he was bothering you.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “Anyways, I’d still like to show you my appreciation. Can I give you a header?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t want a header from you.”
She nodded and turned away from the table.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and she looked back at him. “Since you’d like to show your appreciation, I want you to be nice to my friend Pete, give him whatever he wants. You know him? Really dumb guy hangs around with me? He’ll be in later tonight.”
She smiled again. “Okay, sure, Ralphie. I’m happy to do it!”
He waved his hand to get rid of her, and she left.
Quentin came hurrying back to the table.
“You better come to the front, Ralphie,” he said.
“What’s going on?” said Ralphie.
“It’s Marcie and Annie. They’re fighting.”
“Shit,” said Ralphie, sliding out from the booth.
He walked to the front of the bar, where the crowd had formed a circle around the two women, as they clawed and smacked one another, each of them shouting insults. People cheered them on.
“You fucking bitch!” said Marcie, pulling on Annie’s hair.
“You stupid cunt!” said Annie, digging her fingernails into Marcie’s cheek.
The crowd parted to allow Ralphie through. He stepped up to the two women and pulled them apart. Silence fell over the room.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said.
“Nothing,” said Marcie, wiping blood off her cheek.
“Yeah, nothing,” said Annie.
“They was fighting over you, Ralphie!” said Pat the Boozehound.
“Is that right?” said Ralphie, looking back and forth between the two of them.
“She started it!” said Annie.
“Bullshit,” said Marcie.
They started leaping at one another, and the crowd began murmuring again. Ralphie struggled to keep them apart.
“Stop it!” said Ralphie.
He wrapped his left arm around Annie, pulling her to his side, then wrapped his right arm around Marcie, pulling her to his other side. He looked at the people surrounding the three of them.
“Shut up, all of you! Shut up!”
People began shushing one another.
“Quiet everybody!” said Pat the Boozehound. “Ralphie wants to speak.”
“King Ralphie is speaking!” said Charlie the Bartender.
“That’s right!” said Ralphie. “I’m the king around here, and I’m making a ruling.”
“A royal decree!” said Pat the Boozehound.
“Right,” said Ralphie with a nod. “I command by the power vested in me by South Philly, and all you assholes, that from now on these two hot girls will put aside their differences and be friends.”
Everyone cheered. Al, Pat, and Dickie started chanting “Ralphie! Ralphie!”
“Come on, you two,” said Ralphie, loosening his grip on them. “I want you to kiss and make up.”
Marcie shrugged and started grinning. Annie seemed reluctant.
“What do you say?” said Marcie.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Annie.
Marcie stepped forward, leaned in, and gave Annie a peck.
“Come on,” said Ralphie, pushing the two of them together. “You can do better than that.”
The crowd continued to cheer. Marcie looked around, then grabbed Annie in her arms and kissed her full on the mouth.
“That’s more like it!” said Ralphie. “Now, to put the seal on my ruling, make it official and all that shit, we’re going back to my place to have a three-way!”
The crowd cheered harder. People clapped and stepped aside to let Ralphie and his girls pass by. Some patted him on the back as the three of them crossed the room and went out the door.

III.

People from the neighborhood packed Johnny’s Place. Ralphie sat in his back booth alone, drinking whiskey. Music played loud on the jukebox.
A fat man, along with his fat wife and fat kid, all of them wearing shorts and Birkenstocks, stepped up to Ralphie’s table.
“Can we take a picture with you?” said the fat man.
“What?” said Ralphie, looking over at them.
“You’re King Ralphie, aren’t you?” said the fat wife.
“We’d love to get a picture of you,” said the fat man. “We’re visiting from Michigan, and we heard all about you from someone at the Starbucks near our hotel.”
“Fuck off,” said Ralphie.
“Oh, my gosh,” said the fat wife, her hand covering her mouth. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah!” said the fat man. “It’s just like in the movies.”
“Just like the movies,” said the fat kid. “Fuck off!”
The three of them laughed as they walked away.
Ralphie let his head sink into his hands, as Quentin slid into the booth across from him.
“You okay, Ralphie?” said Quentin.
“Yeah, I’m just beat,” said Ralphie, looking up. “It’s fucking Marcie and Annie. For three days straight now, all they want to do is fuck. I fuck them ‘til I’m empty, go out for a cigarette, and come back to find the two of them going at it again.”
Quentin frowned. “Is that a problem?”
“It’s not a problem like skin cancer’s a problem,” said Ralphie. “But it’s an issue, believe me. I’m fucking worn out.”
“Me, I got this ex-nun who keeps calling me,” said Quentin. “She won’t leave me alone. I got to change my number.”
“I told you not to get involved with her,” said Ralphie.
“I didn’t get involved,” said Quentin. “I just fucked her twice, three times if you count when I didn’t come, and she blew me three or four times. But that’s it. I guess she took it serious or something.”
“I fucking hate it when they get serious,” said Ralphie.
“Don’t I know it,” said Quentin. He let out a sigh. “At least Pete’s happy, I guess.”
“Not that I care,” said Ralphie. “But why’s he happy?”
“He’s been hanging out with that blond prostitute, the one from Delaware.”
“She’s not from Delaware. She’s from the South,” said Ralphie. “And she’s only hanging out with him ‘cause I told her to.”
They both looked up to see Pete coming through the crowd towards the table.
“Hey guys,” said Pete, as he slid into the booth next to Quentin.
“You know that girl you’re seeing, the prostitute?” said Quentin. “Ralphie says she ain’t from Delaware.”
“She’s not?” said Pete. “You told me she was.”
“I kept thinking she was, for some reason,” said Quentin. “But I guess she ain’t.”
Pete propped his elbows up on the table.
“So, guess what happened,” he said. “I fucking wrecked the Impala. Can you believe that?”
“How’d that happen?” said Quentin.
“Me and Sheri-Lynn was going to get some cheesesteaks, and she started going down on me, right there in the car!”
“Road header,” said Quentin, nodding.
“Yeah, I always loved a good road header,” said Ralphie.
“Yeah, sure it was great,” said Pete. “Except when she was doing it, I lost control and crashed into some old lady’s car. She’d stopped in the middle of the road to drop off her groceries or some shit like that. They had to take her away on a stretcher.”
“What about the Impala?” said Ralphie. “Is it drivable? We’ve got shit to do, places we got to be, and you have to take us.”
“It’s all fucked up,” said Pete. “But don’t worry. I borrowed my mother’s minivan.”
“Minivan?” said Quentin.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Ralphie. “We’re not riding around in some minivan.”
“Tell you what else,” said Quentin. “That old lady shouldn’t have parked in the middle of the street.”
“Just what I thought!” said Pete.
“I’d track her down and make her pay for the damage to the Impala,” said Quentin.
“Forget about the old lady,” said Ralphie. “She ain’t important. What matters is, we got to get a car.”
“Hey, I tell you what,” said Quentin. “We got that money from the other night, the cash we recovered for Tom. We could use that to buy a car. It’s plenty.”
“Good idea,” said Ralphie, nodding. “Now you’re thinking.”
“I forgot to tell you, Ralphie,” said Pete. “There was some guy asking questions about you.”
“What guy?” said Ralphie. “A cop?”
Pete shook his head. “No, he ain’t no cop. He calls himself The Turk.”
“The Turk?” said Ralphie. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”
Pete shrugged. “I don’t know. I was thinking maybe he likes turkey. You know, from the deli.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” said Quentin.
“That’s him now,” said Pete, nodding. “The Turk.”
The three of them looked over to see a young guy coming towards them. He wore black trousers, a black shirt, and a black leather jacket. A few feet away from the table, he pulled out a revolver and aimed it at Ralphie.
Quentin and Pete jumped out of the booth towards him.
The Turk fired off a shot, hitting Ralphie in the shoulder, and then another that hit Ralphie in the side. The reports were loud in the small room.
People scattered and ducked for cover. A girl screamed.
Quentin and Pete tackled the Turk to the ground, knocking the gun out of his hand, and started beating him.
Ralphie felt the searing pain in his arm and gut. He pressed a hand against his side, and blood began to seep through his fingers.
Ralphie scooted to the edge of the booth, leaving droplets of blood on the seat. He grimaced and climbed to his feet with effort.
“Stop, stop,” he said to Pete and Quentin, who were smashing the Turk in the face and kicking him in the ribs.
“Stop,” Ralphie said louder.
The two of them stepped back, both breathing hard from the effort. The Turk lay on the floor, his face bloodied.
People started coming back into the room, and they appeared from under the tables where they’d hid.
“He shot Ralphie!” someone said.
“King Ralphie’s been shot!”
“He tried to assassinate Ralphie.”
“Call for an ambulance!” said Pat the Boozehound.
“Shut up,” said Ralphie, and everyone quieted down.
Blood continued to seep through his fingers. He could feel it dribbling into his trousers and down his leg.
“You, Turk,” said Ralphie, nudging the kid on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “You hear me?”
The Turk nodded. “I hear you.”
“I know you?”
“No.”
“You got a grudge?”
“No,” said the Turk, still lying on the floor.
Ralphie took a breath. “So you thought you could make a name for yourself if you shot me.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Thought you could become the new King of South Philly.”
“Yeah,” said the Turk.
“Kill him!” someone said.
“Yeah, Ralphie, kill the bastard!”
Ralphie gritted his teeth from the pain, and shut his eyes for a moment.
“Somebody help Ralphie,” said Al. “Somebody give him a hand.”
Ralphie shook his head. He opened his eyes again.
“Quentin,” said Ralphie. “Pick up the kid’s gun.”
Quentin took a step to where the pistol lay on the floor, and he bent over and picked it up.
“Give it to me,” said Ralphie.
Quentin handed over the revolver, and Ralphie turned it around in his hand. The metal felt hot against his skin. Wincing, he lifted it to his face and sniffed the barrel. He kissed the gun.
Ralphie looked around at the faces in the crowd circling him.
“Who’s the fucking King of South Philly?” he said.
“You are!” said Dickie.
“King Ralphie!” said Pat the Boozehound.
“Ralphie’s the King!”
“Hear that Turk?” said Ralphie, raising his voice. “I’m the fucking King of South Philly. I am!”
Ralphie wobbled, lost his balance, and fell to one knee. Quentin and Pete rushed to help him. They each grabbed an arm and got him to his feet.
“Fuck off,” said Ralphie.
Quentin and Pete let him go and stepped back.
Ralphie shuffled towards the Turk, still laying on the floor, and pointed the revolver at him.
“Do it!” said Pat the Boozehound. “Kill him!”
“Shoot him, Ralphie!” said Al.
Some of the girls turned away.
The Turk put up a hand in defense.
“Bang,” said Ralphie in a weak voice. “You’re fucking dead.”
He dropped the revolver onto the floor next to the Turk. It landed with a thud.
Ralphie started hobbling away from the Turk, towards the front of the bar. Blood had run down his leg, so he left a trail as he went. People stepped aside to let him through.
“Any time you want to, kid,” Ralphie said over his shoulder, “go ahead and take another shot at me.”
“What?” said the Turk, behind him.
Ralphie paused and looked back. “You heard me,” he said. “Take your shot any time.”
“What’re you doing, Ralphie?” said Pat the Boozehound.
“King Ralphie’s invincible!” said Dickie.
Ralphie smirked and grimaced. “I ain’t invincible,” he said.
“Then why’re you doing it?” said Al.
“Why?” said Ralphie, looking around the room at the faces staring at him.
“Yeah, why’re you giving the kid another shot?” said Dickie.
Ralphie cocked his head to the side and spit blood onto the floor.
“’Cause I just don’t give a shit,” he said.
Ralphie pressed his hand harder to his side. He limped towards the exit and went through the door, and into the South Philly night.

[This story originally appeared on TheRogueReader.com]
[contact-form]

The Wisdom of the Ages Updated

Recently I posted on Twitter what I called “The Wisdom of the Ages updated for the 21st Century,” for Friday Phrases (#FP). These are philosophical quotations that I slightly altered to reflect contemporary thinking and culture. Immediately below are the updated quotes, and then below that you’ll find the original quotes with some discussion about the meaning or importance of them.

 

Updated Wisdom

“I tweet, therefore I am.” (Descartes 21C) #FP

“The unexamined tweet is not worth posting.” (Socrates 21C) #FP

“To tweet is to be perceived.” (George Berkeley 21C) #FP

“You cannot tweet the same post twice.” (Heraclitus 21C) #FP

“Man is the measure of all tweets.” (Protagoras 21C) #FP

“What doesn’t kill me makes me tweet more.” (Nietzsche 21C) #FP

“This is the best of all possible tweets.” (Leibniz 21C) #FP

“In the state of nature, the tweets of man are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (Hobbes 21C) #FP

“All men by nature desire to tweet.” (Aristotle 21C) #FP

“Tweeting is the opiate of the masses.” (Marx 21C) #FP

“Tweets should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” (William of Ockham 21C) #FP

“A tweet is knowable, harmonious, and good.” (Plotinus 21C) #FP

“Whereof one cannot tweet, thereof one must be silent.” (Wittgenstein 21C) #FP

“One original tweet is worth a thousand mindless quotings.” (Diogenes Laertius 21C) #FP

“You tweet so truly, Lord my God, that You cannot even be thought not to tweet.” (Anselm 21C) #FP

 

 Original Quotations

 “I think, therefore I am.” (Descartes, 1596 – 1650 AD)

Descartes is looking for one absolutely certain truth, something that is beyond all doubt, and discovers that it’s the fact that, if he’s thinking, he must exist as a mind in order to do the thinking.

 

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates, 469 – 399 BC)

One of Socrates’ most memorable quotes at his trial for heresy and corrupting the youth.

 

“To be is to be perceived.”
(George Berkeley, 1685 – 1753 AD)

Berkeley is what’s called an idealist: he believes that only minds and ideas (perceptions) are real. There is no material reality beyond our perceptions of things. The world is an idea in God’s mind.

 

“You cannot step into the same river twice.” (Heraclitus,  c. 535 – c. 475 BC)

Heraclitus held a flux metaphysics: He believed that everything in the universe is continually changing and nothing ever stays the same. Thus it’s not the same river the second time you go to step into it; nor, for that matter, is it the same you.

 

“Man is the measure of all things.” (Protagoras, c. 490 BC – c. 420 BC)

There’s some controversy over this, but it’s usually taken to be an early statement of relativism: there is no objective truth.

 

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” (Nietzsche, 1844 – 1900 AD)

Rock on.

 

“This is the best of all possible worlds.”

(Leibniz, 1646 – 1716 AD)

Since Leibniz believed in God and believed that God created the world, he believed it followed that the world that God created had to be perfect. It’s incoherent to think that a perfect creator being would create something less than perfect.

 

“In the state of nature, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (Hobbes, 1588 – 1679 AD)

This is one of the fundamental elements of Hobbes’ political philosophy. On our own, we’re subject to the tyranny and violence of nature, so we form societies to help us secure a better life for ourselves.

 

“All men by nature desire to know.” (Aristotle, 384–322 BC)

First line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

 

“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” (Marx, 1818 – 1883 AD)

Religion helps dull our senses to our plight, our alienated human condition (brought on by the forces of capitalism).

 

“Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” (William of Ockham, c. 1287 – 1347 AD)

Ockham believed in parsimony or economy in developing theories. This is known as “Ockham’s Razor,” which states that among competing theories the one with the fewest assumptions ought to be chosen.

“The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.”

(Plotinus, c. 204/5 – 270 BC)

 

Plotinus was an ancient Greek philosopher in the Neoplatonic tradition (thinkers who carried on in the tradition of Plato).

 

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Wittgenstein, 1889 – 1951 AD)

Wittgenstein believed that all the facts about the world could be expressed in language, which is strictly governed by its logical form. What this means is that a great many judgments (statements/claims) that we make about a great many things in our lives (ethical statements or aesthetic judgments, e.g.) are, according to Wittgenstein, nonsensical. They shouldn’t even be uttered.

 

“One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.” (Diogenes Laertius, c. 3rd century AD)

Diogenes wasn’t a philosopher, but a biographer of philosophers. I find this quote to be perfect for Twitter.

 

“You exist so truly, Lord my God, that You cannot even be thought not to exist.” (Anselm, c.1033 – 1109 AD)

Part of Anselm’s Ontological Argument for God’s existence, which argues that it’s part of the essence or nature of God to exist; that is, given the kind of being God is, it’s impossible for him not to exist.

 

[contact-form]

THE KING OF SOUTH PHILLY PART IV

SHERI-LYNN HUDLEY

I.

Walking across the airport motel parking lot, Sheri-Lynn spotted two girls. She recognized them as Chrystal and Champagne, regulars at the motel. They both seemed like nice girls, Sheri-Lynn thought, even though Champagne was black.
Sheri-Lynn originally hailed from North Carolina, but she’d come up north six years ago. At the time, she thought it would be nice to have a change of scenery.
“Hi, Sheri-Lynn,” said the two girls.
They leaned up against an old Ford Escort, underneath a streetlamp. They looked sexy in their cut-off jeans and halter tops.
Sheri-Lynn said hi to them.
Chrystal said, “Where you been?”
“Oh, I had an office call,” said Sheri-Lynn. “You know that insurance salesman, the one with the funny hair, calls himself Snarky?”
“Ooh,” said Champagne, crinkling her nose. “He’s gross.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” said Sheri-Lynn.
“We were just going to have a little smoke,” said Chrystal, holding up a joint. “Care to join us?”
“Sure,” said Sheri-Lynn.
Champagne held out the lighter and lit the joint for Chrystal. She took a hit, and passed it to Champagne.
“How’ve things been around here?” said Sheri-Lynn.
“Slow,” said Chrystal, letting out the smoke. “Real slow. Some college boys wanted to pull a train, and then Mr. Allen, works for the Eagles—you know him?”
Sheri-Lynn nodded, taking the joint from Champagne.
“He had me come to his office once, after hours,” said Sheri-Lynn. “It was pretty neat being there, but the place was kind of spooky when it was deserted, and he wanted to do it on the desk. That was uncomfortable. His stapler kept poking me in the butt.”
“You have such a cute accent—‘it was pretty neat being there’,” Chrystal said, trying to imitate Sheri-Lynn.
She and Champagne laughed.
Sheri-Lynn shrugged. “I guess. I know I don’t talk like you city girls.”
“Anyways, that’s all we seen tonight,” said Chrystal. “Hardly worth leaving the house for. Might as well have stayed home and watched the Home Shopping Network.”
“Me, I like game shows,” said Sheri-Lynn.
She took a hit of the reefer, then passed it back to Chrystal.
Breathing out the smoke, Sheri-Lynn said, “Wheel—Of—Fortune!”
Champagne laughed and said, “We were talking earlier about how we got started hooking. How’d you get into it, Sheri-Lynn?”
Sheri-Lynn shrugged again. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was just born for it.”
“Why don’t you quit and do something else?” said Chrystal.
“I guess I just don’t know what else to do with myself. I don’t really have no ambitions to do anything in particular, so I might as well do this. Better than nothing, I guess.”
“You could be a waitress, or maybe even a hostess at a restaurant,” said Chrystal.
“Oh, shoot, I don’t think I could do anything like that,” said Sheri-Lynn.
“Maybe you could get Vanna White’s job turning letters.”
The three of them started laughing, and Sheri-Lynn blushed.
Champagne said, “Did your father love you?”
“He sure did,” said Sheri-Lynn. “He was a good Christian and tried to make me into a good Christian, so he beat me something awful, on account of my bad disposition. He beat me, and I pretended like I didn’t care any when I was younger, but I really hated it. He even broke my arm this one time. I understand now why he did it. He loved me, and there was just nothing else he could do with me. I mean, what do you do with a girl with a naturally bad disposition? You got to at least try to set her right. But, unfortunately, it didn’t take. I’ll never be a good Christian. I know that.”
“My father used to rape me,” said Champagne. “Then he’d give me presents afterwards, so I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“What kind of presents?”
“Oh, different things,” she said. “Cute little jewelry, or bags of candy. But one time he bought me a new bike.”
“Wow,” said Chrystal. “That must’ve been nice.”
“It was,” said Champagne. “It was really nice, but it turned out to be stolen, so the cops came and took it away.”
“Shoot!” said Sheri-Lynn. “Did your daddy get in trouble?”
“Oh, no. He just told the cops that I stole it. That was the first time I got arrested.”
“Too bad about the bike,” said Chrystal.
Champagne nodded.
A car pulled into the parking lot, and its headlights lit up the three girls and the Escort. It was a newish-looking Buick with out of state license plates. It parked two spaces away from the Ford.
“I guess I’m up,” said Chrystal, and she walked over to the driver’s side of the car and bent down to talk to the man.
“Neat car,” said Sheri-Lynn. “I like the color—green.”
“Yeah, and from Jersey,” said Champagne.
They watched Chrystal nod, as the man pointed towards Sheri-Lynn. Chrystal walked back to them.
“He wants you,” she said to Sheri-Lynn. “Partial to blonds, I guess.”
Sheri-Lynn walked to the car and bent down to get a look at the guy. She took him for a businessman on a trip. In his thirties, he wore glasses, had a round face, and looked nervous, like this might’ve been his first time.
“Hi, honey,” said Sheri-Lynn. “What’s your name?”
“John,” he said.
She snickered. “Well, that works out, now, don’t it?”
“No, it really is my name,” he said, trying to smile.
“Well, relax. You don’t need to be scared. What can I do for you tonight?”
“Well,” he said, lowering his voice. “I…”
“C’mon, now, don’t be shy,” she said. “You want the whole works? You want something fancy? You just want a header?”
He started nodding. “Yeah…Yeah, that’s what I want!”
“Okay, no problem at all,” she said. “That’ll cost you twenty—that okay with you?”
Normally, she’d only charge ten, but since he was out of state and probably didn’t know any better, she thought she’d see if he’d go for more.
“Oh, yeah, that’s…that’s terrific,” he said, hunching up to pull out his wallet. He handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
She put it into the little black purse she carried.
“Now scoot on over,” she said, opening the car door.
“No!” he said, pulling the door closed again. “Not here! Not out here! I paid for a room!”
She frowned. “Well, you didn’t have to go and do that. I could’ve taken care of you right here and saved you the money.”
“Well, it’s already paid for,” he said, showing her the key with the green plastic diamond attached to it. The plastic diamond read ‘10’ in white numerals.
“Ten’s right over here,” said Sheri-Lynn, pointing over her shoulder. “So just shut off your car and come with me.”
The man nodded, turned off the engine, and rolled up the windows. He locked the doors and stepped out of the car. He was shorter than Sheri-Lynn had expected, maybe five eight, just a little taller than she was. She tried to take his hand, but he pulled it away, looking around the parking lot and over at the other two girls. She grinned, and they walked to number 10.
He opened the door, and they went inside.
Sheri-Lynn turned on the bedside lamp. She hadn’t ever been in this particular room, but it looked like all the others she’d seen. A white brocaded bedspread covered the queen-sized bed. A TV sat on a stand opposite the bed, and an easy chair butted up against the corner. The bathroom sat off to the left. The room seemed clean enough, but it felt well-worn, with a threadbare carpet, and all the furnishings looked at least twenty years old.
“Why don’t you just sit down here,” said Sheri-Lynn, patting the edge of the bed. “And make yourself comfortable.”
She tossed her purse onto the armchair.
The man, “John,” locked the door, and, still in his overcoat, walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Sheri-Lynn knelt down in front of him, running her hands along his thighs.
“Now, honey, you just relax a little bit,” she said. “You seem awful uptight.”
He nodded at her, and she could tell he was nervous, though he was getting excited. His erection poked up at his trousers.
“Mmmm….honey,” she said, looking down. “I guess you ain’t too nervous!”
“What’s your name?” he managed to say in a thick voice.
“Sheri-Lynn,” she said. “Sheri-Lynn Hudley.”
She rubbed his cock through the material of his trousers.
“Is your name really John?”
He nodded, his eyes closed, head leaning back.
“That’s so cute,” she said. “You know, it’d be nice if we had a little music, but there ain’t no radio. Some of the rooms have them, but this one don’t. We could put on the TV, but that’s not quite the same.”
She continued to rub him through the fabric of his pants.
“Me, I like game shows on the TV,” she said. “Once in a while I’ll watch a cooking show or one of them day-time talk shows. I even—”
He cut her off then, by stopping her hand and unzipping his fly.
She grinned. “Well, I guess you are about ready, aren’t you, honey?”
She reached inside his open fly, grabbed his penis, and pulled it out. Smaller than she’d expected, it bent a little to the right. She pulled a condom out of her jeans pocket, tore open the package, and rolled it down over his cock. She began to stroke him with her hand.
John started saying, “Oh, God,” his eyes closed, head back.
Sheri-Lynn bent down, taking him into her mouth, tasting latex.
A loud bang erupted, and the door to the room burst open. Sheri-Lynn pulled her head up, and they both looked over.
A man in a police uniform came through the door. Chubby, he had black hair, and wore mirrored sunglasses, even though the sun had set a while ago.
“Philly PD,” he said, as he shut the door behind him. “This is a bust!”
“Oh, shit!” said John, zipping himself up.
Sheri-Lynn grabbed his hand, trying to comfort him. She’d been through this many times.
The cop paused a moment, looking at the two of them.
“Up off your knees, sweetheart,” he said.
Sheri-Lynn stood up. She got a look at his name tag. It read: “Dickson.”
He hooked his thumbs through his black gun belt.
“Get your ass in the bathroom, ” he said with a nod. “I’ll tell you when to come out.”
Sheri-Lynn gave him a smile. She grabbed her little black purse from the armchair and walked to the bathroom, stepped inside, and closed the door behind her. She had to pee anyway, so she didn’t mind being shut in there.
Through the door she could hear voices, mostly the officer talking, but she couldn’t really make out what he said. She thought she heard John whimpering, or maybe crying, and she felt bad for him.
She felt a little sticky and gross and thought she might like to take a shower, but she didn’t know how long she’d have to be there in the bathroom, and she didn’t want to piss off the officer, so she decided not to risk it.
After a few minutes, the door to the bathroom opened, and the cop said, “Come on out here.”
Sheri-Lynn walked out into the main room to see that John had left. She turned to face the cop, expecting him to read her her rights and handcuff her. But that’s not what he did.
He grabbed her by the arm and sat her down on the edge of the bed. He still wore the mirrored sunglasses, and now she could see the sweat stains under his arms.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Sheri-Lynn Hudley.”
“Well, Sheri-Lynn Hudley, you’re in a shitload of trouble.”
“Oh, I figured that,” she said. “I already know my rights, so you don’t need to bother—”
“Shut the fuck up,” he said, and he smacked her open-handed across the face.
It stung, and she lost her breath for a second.
“You got exactly the rights I say you got. Understand?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, here’s the deal. We’re going to have a regular meeting once a week or so at this motel, and you’re going to fuck me for free. If you don’t, or you tell anyone about this, I’m going to bust you on a possession charge.”
“But I don’t do no drugs—”
He smacked her on the side of the head, harder this time. Again it stung, bad.
“Shut the fuck up! You ain’t listening.”
Her ear was ringing. She nodded again.
“You’re going to fuck me whenever I want, and if you don’t, I got a nice little supply of smack I can say I caught you with. You’ll get sent away until you’re old and dried up. Get it?”
She couldn’t understand why he was going through all this. She would have given him freebies anyway, even if he didn’t threaten her. He was kind of cute in his uniform. All he’d have to do is ask.
“We’re going to start tonight,” he said. “Right here, right now, you’re going to get on your knees and suck my big hairy dick.”
“Okay,” she said, sliding off the bed.
She knelt down in front of him. Thinking about it, she looked up at him.
“So this is going to be a regular thing?” she said.
“You got that right, little girl.”
She unzipped his fly.
He reached down, yanked her hair, and smacked her across the face again.
“Get to it!” he said.
She sniffled back some blood and pulled out his cock. She glanced up at his face again, and then ran her hand under her nose, wiping away the blood, and she felt herself smiling.

II.

Ralphie and Annie parked in the airport motel lot and climbed out of the car, Pete’s car, his Chevy Impala. He’d let Ralphie borrow it. Ralphie wore a leather jacket. Annie had on a jean skirt and a plain white t-shirt.
They walked to the manager’s office and asked for a room. Ralphie specifically requested number 8. No one else had taken it, so the manager gave it to them.
As they walked across the parking lot to the room, Annie said, “I don’t understand what we’re doing here. We could’ve fucked at home, Ralphie.”
“Yeah, I know that,” he said.
“Is it ‘cause fucking in a motel is exciting?”
“No, that ain’t it,” he said.
They reached number 8, and Ralphie unlocked it with the key with the green triangle attached to it. They stepped inside to find a dull but clean-looking room, with a queen-sized bed, a TV on a stand, and an easy chair in the corner.
“Well, why’re we here, then?” said Annie. “I mean, it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. I don’t mind being here with you. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Have a seat,” said Ralphie, pointing to the bed.
Annie sat down and folded her hands on her lap.
Ralphie let out a sigh. “Marcie’s jealous of you,” he said.
“Oh, is that why we’re here?” she said. “So Marcie won’t find out?”
He shook his head. “No, that ain’t the reason. It’s just something I thought of.”
“Yeah, well I knew she was jealous. I didn’t tell you, but she called me the other day and bitched me out.”
Ralphie frowned. “Well, fuck.”
Annie nodded. “I didn’t respond or anything, but I didn’t appreciate her talking to me like that.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell her not to do it again.”
“Thanks.”
Ralphie looked around the room. “My father used to bring me and Marcie to this motel when we were kids.”
“Your father?” said Annie. “The one everybody says you shot?”
“He’d lock me in the bathroom over there,” he said. “I thought it was some kind of a game, like him and Marcie were hiding something.”
“Was it a game?” said Annie.
“He’d let me out after an hour, and I always thought I’d have to hunt and find some treasure, or some kind of shit like that. But we’d always just climb back into the car and go home.”
“Well, that don’t sound like a game to me.”
Ralphie pulled the automatic pistol from its holster under his jacket.
“But then one time we came here, to this very room, number 8, I’ll never forget. There was a desk and chair in here then, and Howard dragged the chair out onto the porch.”
Ralphie waved the gun towards the front of the room and the door.
“He took me out there and told me he had a job for me to do. He said he wanted me to sit out front and keep watch. He wanted me to keep an eye on things and not let anybody in the room.”
“Did you do it, keep watch like that?”
Ralphie nodded. “Fuck, yeah, I did it. Man, I can’t tell you how good that made me feel. He was trusting me, you understand? He gave me a job to do, gave me responsibility and all that shit. I mean, before that he wouldn’t give me nothing, wouldn’t even pay attention to me. I kept asking him to let me help out around the barbershop, sweep the fucking hair off the floor, some shit like that. But he just ignored me. So him giving me responsibility like that changed me.”
“I think I understand,” said Annie.
Ralphie raised the gun and fired a round into the bathroom door. The report made Annie jump.
Ralphie swung his arm holding the pistol and fired two rounds into the easy chair. Annie put her hands over her ears.
Ralphie swung his arm again and fired two shots into the bed next to Annie, and she screamed.
He tossed the pistol onto the bed, and grabbed Annie and turned her over, so she bent over the side of the bed. He threw up her skirt to expose her bare ass, unzipped and pulled out his cock and mounted her. He pounded her hard, thrusting over and over, and she cried out.
A few more strokes, and he emptied himself inside her and pulled out.
Breathing heavy, he stood up, wiped off his dick, and put it away.
Annie rolled over onto her back, touching herself between the legs. “God, Ralphie,” she said. “It’s never been like that before. I think you made me bleed.”
“Get up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She stood and rolled down her skirt.
Ralphie holstered his pistol.
“Go on out to the car,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Annie crossed the room and went out the door.
Ralphie pulled a small can of lighter fluid and a disposable lighter out of his pocket. He squirted fluid on the bed and lit it on fire. He did the same with the drapes, lit them on fire.
The flames started to spread and climb the walls. Smoke filled the room.
Ralphie walked out the door and closed it behind him.

III.

Sheri-Lynn found Officer Dickson washing his car in front of his house on Bigler Street. He wore a loose-fitting blue cotton track suit, and he drove a Hyundai.
In the warm early evening, children played ball and rode bikes up and down the block. In one of the row homes the TV played loud.
Sheri-Lynn, wearing cutoffs and a tube top, grinned as she stepped up to the cop.
“Almost didn’t recognize you without your uniform,” she said.
Dickson frowned and dropped the soapy sponge in his hand.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said.
“Just wanted to see your place. Imagine my surprise to find you right here in South Philly. I thought maybe you’d live in Society Hill, or maybe some swanky suburb. But I guess it makes sense, you wanting to be amongst regular folks, since your job is to protect them and stuff.”
He glanced around at his neighbors’ houses. “What do you want?”
She shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d like to fuck me. Or else I could just give you another blow job.”
“You should get the hell out of here,” said Dickson, shooing her with his hand.
One of his next-door neighbors came out onto the porch, an elderly lady in a house dress.
Dickson waved to the old woman, and grabbed Sheri-Lynn by the arm.
“Come on,” he said. “Before anybody sees you.”
He dragged her across the sidewalk, up onto the stoop, and into his house.
The living room smelled musty. Dickson had left a pair of dirty socks on the floor, and several smut magazines lay on a brown vinyl sofa. A Chinese takeout carton with food still in it sat on the arm of an easy chair.
“This is nice,” said Sheri-Lynn. “But you should get yourself a housekeeper to clean up.”
Dickson clicked on a table lamp. He scooped up his pair of mirrored sunglasses sitting next to it, and put them on. He turned to face Sheri-Lynn, wiping sweat from his upper lip.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, grinning. “That’s more like the officer I know.”
He put his hands on his hips. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing,” he said. “But you shouldn’t have come here. That ain’t part of our deal.”
“I figured I’d save you the trouble of going to that motel,” she said, looking around. “So you like dirty magazines, huh? You probably look at them with all the different girls you got coming through here.”
“None of your fucking business,” he said.
He grabbed the magazine from her hand and tossed it back onto the sofa.
“I ought to bust you for coming here like this,” he said. “Send you up for prostitution and drug possession.”
“I know,” she said with a shrug. “Try not to be too mad at me. You can’t blame a girl like me for being curious about an important person such as yourself.”
“You fucking with me?”
“No, why? Did I say something stupid? I got a bad habit of doing that sometimes.”
He folded his arms. “Well, are you retarded then?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But you know how they say crazy people don’t know they’re crazy? Well, maybe being retarded’s the same thing. If you’re retarded, you don’t know you are. Maybe that’s the way it is with me.”
“Look, just shut up, will you?” said Dickson.
He went to the sofa and stacked the porn magazines, then picked the socks up off the floor and folded them.
“When it gets dark,” he said, “I want you to get the hell out of here.”
“Okay, sure,” she said.
“You’re going to go out the back way and make sure nobody sees you.”
She knelt down in front of him and started to undo the tie on his track suit pants.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said, swatting at her hand.
“Giving you a blow job,” she said.
She got his pants down around his knees, exposing his stained jockey shorts.
He grabbed her by the arm.
“Goddamn it, I’ll tell you when to blow me,” he said.
She pulled down the jockeys to find his dick limp.
“Oh, looks like you ain’t ready, honey.”
He smacked her open-handed across the face.
“I’ll tell you when I’m ready,” he said.
She took his limp cock into her mouth.
He smacked her in the head again, harder, and his dick flopped out of her mouth. Blood trickled from her nose, and she sniffed it back.
Dickson grabbed his penis and started stroking it, but it stayed limp.
“I understand why you got to punish me,” she said. “On account of my naturally bad disposition.”
“Shut up,” he said, and he punched her on the other side of the head.
She tumbled back against the sofa. She felt her ear ringing, and blood appeared on her lips. She dabbed it with the back of her hand.
“Now I don’t feel so good,” she said, examining the blood.
She pulled herself into a sitting position and felt wobbly.
“I think I should go home,” she said.
She started to get up, but he pushed her back down onto the floor.
“You’ll go when I tell you to go,” he said.
“But, honey, I think it’s close to being dark out now.”
“Shut up,” he said.
He kept stroking his dick, and it started to get hard. He knelt down in front of her, pulled down her tube top to expose her small breasts, and started pinching her nipple. He yanked on his dick the whole time.
“That hurts,” she said, pushing his hand away.
“Get your shorts off!” he said.
“I told you I don’t feel good,” she said.
“Get your fucking pants off!”
He started struggling with the button of her shorts with his free hand, while he continued to stroke himself.
She grabbed his arm and tried twisting away from him, but he kneeled on her as she lay on her side. She couldn’t move.
He made grunting noises as he started to come, rubbing his cock against her side. She lay still, as he shot his load onto her jean shorts.
He stroked himself a few more times, and fell back against the sofa, sitting on the floor, panting. He still had his dick in his hand, and the sunglasses sat crookedly on his face.
“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” she said, getting to her feet.
She grabbed his pair of dirty socks, unfolded them, and used one to wipe off the come.
“I’m going to have to wash these now,” she said, examining her shorts.
She pulled up her tube top to cover her breasts.
“You know,” she said. “For an important person, you’re kind of gross, if you’ll excuse my saying so.”
“Fuck…fuck you,” he said, still breathing hard.
“I thought before I’d like to give you freebies, but now I don’t think so.”
“You…you have to do what I say,” said Dickson.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “You can bust me if you want, but I’ll tell all your neighbors what you just did. Then we’ll be even.”
“What?”
“I’m going home now,” she said, walking towards the front door. “I want to take an Advil and lie down.”
Sitting on the floor, he struggled to get his underwear back up.
“Can I see you again?” he said.
She turned back to look at him.
“Only if you pay me,” she said.
She thought for a moment, glancing at the floor.
“And you have to take a shower first,” she said.

[An earlier version of this story appeared on TheRogueReader.com]

[contact-form]

THE KING OF SOUTH PHILLY PART III

Sister Rachel Armageddon

I.

Late on a Saturday afternoon, Ralphie and Quentin sat in a back booth at Johnny’s Place in South Philly, drinking whiskey out of straight glasses. They’d had to move to the back, since more and more the boozehounds who always hung around the bar had started to bug Ralphie and ask him for favors.
For a few minutes, Quentin had been trying to convince Ralphie of the superiority of the Beatles over the Rolling Stones.
“I really don’t give a shit,” said Ralphie.
“Both Lennon and McCartney were great songwriters,” said Quentin. “Either one of them could write a great tune, a great lyric, and it would be a hit song.”
“So the fuck what?”
“So what? So, I’ll tell you so what—the Stones are a one note band. All their songs sound the same—it’s fucking Mick Jagger prancing around, pretending like he’s some nigger, pouting his huge ugly lips, and whining.”
Ralphie sighed and took another drink of straight whiskey.
“I keep telling you,” he said, “I don’t give a fuck. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the fucking Beach Boys, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass for any of them. They all mean shit to me.”
Quentin winced like he’d tasted something terrible. “The Beach Boys? Are you kidding me? We’re talking about the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones. The Beach Boys don’t even enter the picture.”
“Let me make it plain,” said Ralphie. “I don’t give a shit.”
Quentin frowned and took a drink of whiskey. “You’re funny, Ralphie, you know it? You don’t like any of the things everybody else likes. You know what I was thinking? That you’re sort of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, only without the Dr. Jekyll part.”
“You say some stupid shit sometimes,” said Ralphie. “We’ve been friends a long time, but once in a while I just want to beat your fucking head in with a baseball bat.”
Quentin nodded. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I was talking about just now.”
Ralphie looked over to see a blond girl with whorish make up staring at him from across the room. She wore a jean skirt and a black tube top. Ralphie frowned.
“Who’s that?” he said to Quentin.
Quentin shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Why’s she staring at me?”
“I don’t know that either,” said Quentin.
Ralphie waved to her to come over to the table. The girl looked around, then pointed to herself. Ralphie nodded, and the girl started across the room.
“What’s your name?” said Ralphie, as she stepped up to them.
“Sheri-Lynn,” she said, and she had a cute Southern accent.
“Where you from?” said Quentin. “Delaware?”
She shook her head. “I was born and raised in North Carolina,” she said. “I been here a few years now.”
“What do you want?” said Ralphie.
“Well,” she said. “I heard you’re the guy to come to around here, you know, when you can’t go to the cops.”
Ralphie grinned and nodded and leaned back in the seat. “What if I am?” he said.
“I was kind of wondering,” she said, looking at the floor.
“Wondering what?” said Ralphie. “Spit it out.”
“I was wondering if you wanted to be my manager.”
“Manager?”
“You know, my pimp,” she said, glancing around.
“Shit,” said Ralphie, grinning wider. He looked at Quentin. “You imagine that? Me, a pimp?”
Quentin laughed. “Hell, yeah, you’d make a great pimp! Why don’t you do it, Ralphie?”
Ralphie looked back at the girl. “I don’t know anything about pimping.”
“There really ain’t nothing to it,” said the girl. “You just got to look out for me and make sure nobody takes advantage of me or hurts me, that kind of thing, and I give you a cut of my earnings.”
“Yeah?” said Ralphie. “How much?”
“That’d be up to you, but it’s usually about half.”
“Hey, that ain’t bad,” said Quentin.
“Plus, you get to fuck me whenever you want,” said the girl.
Ralphie looked her up and down. “Yeah, I don’t know.”
“And you can beat me if I get out of line,” she said.
“Yeah?” said Ralphie. “That’s part of the arrangement?”
She nodded. “Sure is. It’s part of the pimp/whore relationship. Has been for ages.”
“That sounds pretty good,” said Quentin.
“It’s tempting,” said Ralphie. “But I don’t think so. I got too much other shit to do right now.”
“Okay,” said the girl, hanging her head.
Ralphie let out a sigh, looking at her. “Tell you what.”
“Yeah?” she said, looking up at him.
“If anybody bothers you, just let me know. Maybe I’ll run them off for you.”
“Oh, thanks, Ralphie. Thanks.”
She hurried back to the front bar.
“I really think you ought to go into pimping,” said Quentin. “I’d give you a hand with it. I know Pete would love to help out, too.”
“Nah,” said Ralphie, waving his hand. “Too much trouble.”
“Uh-oh,” said Quentin, looking across the room. “Look who’s here.”
Ralphie glanced over to see a guy they grew up with, Sam, standing in the same spot the prostitute had been standing in, scanning the room. As soon as he spotted Ralphie, he came hurrying over.
In high school, Sam had been in the marching band and played chess, and the rumor had always been that the gym teacher sodomized him. Ralphie hated his guts.
“Hey Ralphie!” said Sam, walking up to the table.
Quentin jumped out of his seat and blocked Sam from getting any closer.
“Just hold up there, Sam,” he said.
“I want to talk to Ralphie,” said Sam.
“Well, maybe Ralphie don’t want to talk to you.”
“It’s important,” said Sam.
Ralphie drank down the whiskey in his glass.
“If you waste my time, Sam,” he said. “I’m going to beat the hell out of you.”
“I swear, it’s not a waste of your time,” said Sam.
“Okay,” said Ralphie with a wave of his hand. “Let him by.”
Quentin stepped aside, and Sam approached the table.
“It’s about a job,” said Sam. “You know my Uncle Ulysses, the pharmacist?”
“What about him?” said Ralphie.
“He’s got this extra large shipment of pain medication in his store right now. I forget what they’re called, but they’re popular on the street. He lives overtop the store, but he went to the Poconos this weekend, so I thought we could break in there and steal them, you and me. They’d be worth a lot of money!”
“I told you not to waste my time,” said Ralphie, sliding out of the booth.
He punched Sam in the face, sending him to his knees. Ralphie bashed him on the side of the head, and kicked him in the guts as he lay on the floor. Sam curled up in a fetal position, whimpering. Ralphie stomped on his hand, breaking several fingers.
Ralphie sat back down in the booth, breathing hard.
“Get him out of here,” he said to Quentin.
Quentin waved to Al, one of the boozehounds, to help him, and the two of them lugged Sam out of the bar.
Ralphie signaled to Charlie the bartender, and Charlie brought a bottle of whiskey to the table and refilled their glasses.
Quentin came back inside, rubbing his hands together, and sat back down at the table.
“Give Pete a call,” said Ralphie. “Tell him to get over here.”
“He’s supposed to be taking his mother to her doctor’s appointment,” said Quentin, taking out his phone.
“That’s okay,” said Ralphie. “He can do that later.”
“Why you want to get him over here?”
“We’re going to rob that pharmacy,” said Ralphie. “It’s a good idea, and I know a guy we can sell that stuff to and make a nice profit.”
“Great,” said Quentin.
“We’ll need Pete to drive us,” said Ralphie.
As Quentin phoned Pete, someone approached the table. Ralphie looked up to see Rachel Almaghetti, the nun. Everyone around the neighborhood called her Sister Rachel Armageddon.
The nun wore ordinary street clothes, a sweater and a pair of jeans, like she always did. No one had ever seen her in her nun’s habit outside of church. Thin and petite, she had chestnut hair that came down to her shoulders.
“I saw what you just did to poor Sam,” said Sister Rachel Armageddon.
“Fuck off,” said Ralphie.
“You boys are really cruel,” she said. “Sam’s had a hard life, the way he was molested in high school and everything.”
Ralphie hated the way she’d called them ‘boys’, since the nun was their age. She might even have been younger, still in her twenties. It was like she thought she was better than they were, like she had a calling in life, from God or the Pope, or one of those jerk offs, and she could lord it over you and tell you what to do.
“Fuck him,” said Ralphie. “If he comes around, bothering me, I’ll kick his ass.”
“Well,” said the nun, putting her hands on her hips. “You boys are unrepentant sinners, full of vice—that’s what you are, vicious characters, proud, slothful, angry…”
“Don’t forget lustful, covetous, envious, and gluttonous,” said Ralphie. He’d been to mass enough times as a boy to know the deadly sins.
“That’s right!” said the nun.
“Pete’s on his way,” said Quentin, turning off his phone. “You want another drink?”
Ralphie nodded, and Quentin got up and walked over to the bar.
“So you really think you know what vice is, huh?” Ralphie said to Sister Rachel.
“Of course I do,” said the nun. “As every good Christian should.”
“Bullshit,” said Ralphie. “I don’t think you have a fucking clue. I bet you’ve never really sinned in your life.”
“Maybe so,” said the nun, shaking her head. “But everyone knows what vice is.”
“Yeah?” said Ralphie, taking a drink of whiskey. “If you’re so sure you know what it is, then tell me.”
“I’d be happy to,” said the nun, and she grabbed a chair from another table and sat down next to the booth. “Vice is just what we said a minute ago—lustfulness, pride, sloth, and so on.”
Ralphie sneered. “I wanted to know what vice is,” he said, “and all you did was give me a list of vices. So, it’s like if you wanted to know what a pistol was, and I said, there are Smith and Wesson’s, and Brownings, and Colts, and there are revolvers and automatics, and shit like that. I wouldn’t have told you what you wanted to know.”
“I don’t think that’s the same thing,” said the nun.
“Sure, it’s the same fucking thing,” said Ralphie. “There are other vices besides the seven deadly sins, right?”
“Yes,” said Sister Rachel, nodding her head.
“So you got to know what vice itself is, so that if you run into some other kind, you can still know that it’s a vice. How the hell are you suppose to avoid wickedness, if you don’t even know what the hell it is?”
Quentin came back to the table and sat another glass of whiskey in front of Ralphie. Ralphie grabbed the glass, nodded at Quentin, and took a drink.
“So tell me what it is,” said Ralphie. “Prove to me you know what the fuck you’re talking about, or get the hell out of my face.”
“Okay,” said the nun. “You got it—it’s a kind of habit, or characteristic, part of your character, you know, to act in a certain way.”
She sat back in the chair, satisfied with her answer.
“It’s a habit of acting how?”
“You know,” she said, “to act lustfully, or proudly, or angrily…”
Ralphie laughed, shaking his head. “You dimwit,” he said. “You just said lust, pride, and anger are vices.”
“Yes, so?” she said, her cheeks reddening.
Ralphie looked at Quentin, and then back at the nun. “So your definition of vice is a tendency to act viciously?”
“Yeah? So what?” she said.
“You’re running in a circle and not telling me shit,” said Ralphie.
“I think you’re pulling my leg, Ralphie McNear!”
Quentin laughed out loud, spit flying from his mouth.
“No, I ain’t,” said Ralphie. “I wanted to know what vice is, and you haven’t told me dick.”
“Well, then, smart guy, you tell me what a pistol is,” said the nun, her cheeks burning.
Ralphie shrugged and he reached under his jacket and pulled out a blue-steel automatic pistol and laid it on the table in front of him.
“A pistol is a small firearm that was made to be held and discharged with one hand.”
He turned the automatic on the table until the barrel was pointed at Sister Rachel.
The nun swallowed hard, looking at the gun.
“I think you know exactly what vice is,” she said. “I think you know better than I do.”
“Of course I know,” said Ralphie. “I only said you got no clue about it.”
Sister Rachel Armageddon got up from the table, and backed away, without saying anything else.
“You know,” said Quentin, watching her. “I’d sure like to fuck her.”
Ralphie frowned at him, and put the pistol back in its holster under his jacket. “What the fuck are you talking about? She’s a goddamned nun.”
“I know,” said Quentin. “But, shit, she’s got a pussy, don’t she?”
Ralphie nodded, thinking about it. “You’re right. She’s got a pussy, same as any other woman.”
Quentin grinned. “Sure—it’s all pink on the inside!”
Ralphie laughed. “Yep—all pink on the inside!”
They clinked their glasses together and drank and laughed even harder, thinking about the nun and her pussy.
 
II.
 
On the afternoon of the next day, Ralphie and Quentin sat in the back of the bar, in the same booth, drinking whiskey, when the door to the bar opened and Pete came in. He spotted the two of them and walked over to the table.
“Jesus,” he said. “You won’t fucking believe what I’ve been through.”
“You’re late,” said Ralphie.
“Really late,” said Quentin. “Like a whole day late.”
“I know, I know all that,” said Pete. “You want to hear what happened, or not?”
“Not really,” said Ralphie.
“All we know is, you blew our deal,” said Quentin. “We were going to knock over a pharmacy and sell a bunch of medication, but now the pharmacist is back from the Poconos, and we can’t do it.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” said Pete. “Goddamn it, Charlie!” he said to the bartender. “Bring me a Wild Turkey—make it a double!”
Charlie the bartender nodded to him, and reached for a glass.
“I got fucking pulled over by a cop—for speeding, can you believe it?”
Ralphie and Quentin looked at each other, like they were trying to decide if Pete was telling the truth.
“He what?” said Quentin.
“Yes, no shit,” said Pete. “This cop, and he’s not even a real cop, he’s a traffic cop, if you can believe that. He fucking pulls me over for speeding, finds out with his stupid computer that my license is suspended, and then halls my ass to jail!”
“So what did you do?” asked Quentin.
Charlie walked up and set Pete’s double Wild Turkey on the table.
“Do? Nothing I could do,” said Pete, taking a sip. “I had to spend the fucking night in jail. My mother came and finally bailed me out this morning. She missed her doctor’s appointment.”
“Well, our whole plan was shot to hell,” said Ralphie, and he finished his drink.
“It’s not my goddamned fault!” said Pete.
“He’s right,” said Quentin. “It’s not his fault. It’s that goddamned cop’s fault.”
Ralphie thought about it for a moment.
“Shit, you’re right,” he said. “It is that fucking cop’s fault.”
“So what do we do, Ralphie?” said Pete.
“Yeah, what do we do?” said Quentin.
“We get that cop,” said Ralphie. “That’s what we do.”
“It’s decided then,” said Quentin.
“What’s his name?” asked Ralphie.
“Dickson,” said Pete. “Officer Dickson.”
“Dickinson?” said Quentin.
“No,” said Pete. “Not Dickinson. It’s Dickson.”
“What the fuck kind of a name’s that?” said Quentin. “Dickson?”
“Yeah,” said Ralphie. “I heard of guys called Dickinson before, but never Dickson. Shit, that’s just plain stupid.”
Pete laughed. “Yeah, what a stupid fucking name.”
He drank the rest of the Wild Turkey and let the glass slam against the table, then he belched.
“So what’re we going to do about this cop?” he said.
“First we got to find out where he lives,” said Ralphie.
“We could follow him home from work,” said Pete.
“Yeah, or we could just look in the fucking phonebook.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s a good…wait a minute, we don’t know his first name.”
“How many people have a stupid name like ‘Dickson’?” said Ralphie.
“Can’t be too many,” said Quentin.
“Hey, Charlie,” Ralphie said. “You got a phonebook?”
Charlie nodded and pulled the phonebook from under the bar. Pete got up from the table and walked over and took the book from Charlie. He set it down then started flipping through the pages.
“Hey guys,” he said. “Get this—there’s a guy named ‘Dick’! Arthur P. Dick—I’m not shitting you!”
Quentin said, “Let me see that.”
He grabbed the phone book.
“Well, I’ll be damned. He’s right—Arthur P. Dick. Art Dick—can you imagine? Look at this Ralphie.”
“I don’t give a shit,” said Ralphie. “Is Dickson listed?”
Quentin scanned further down. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s two of them: M. Dickson and Steve Dickson.”
“Either of those sound familiar, Pete?” said Ralphie.
“Nope, I didn’t hear his first name.”
Quentin said, “Well, we could just call up and ask if this is the Dickson who’s a cop, right?”
“Yeah,” said Ralphie. “Good idea. Don’t use your cell, though. Use the payphone. Who’s got a quarter for the call?”
“I do,” said Pete, digging into his pocket. He pulled out two quarters. “Look, this one’s from Delaware,” he said. “The other is an older one, before they started putting states on them.”
“Go on over to the payphone and call the number for M. Dickson,” said Ralphie. “Ask if he’s a cop.”
Pete stood up, taking the phone book from the table.
“And Pete?” said Ralphie. “For fuck’s sake, make sure you use the old quarter, not the Delaware quarter for the call.”
Pete looked at him, frowning, and looked down at the two quarters. He picked one, and put the other back in his pocket and walked over to the payphone.
“God, he’s dumb,” said Quentin.
“Yeah,” said Ralphie. “He’s really dumb.”
“I wonder sometimes if he didn’t fall on his head when he was a kid or something.”
“Yeah, or maybe his mother smoked a lot of dope when she was pregnant.”
“Not likely,” said Quentin. “She’s so fucking uptight she won’t even let Pete drink beer at home.”
“What the fuck?”
“Tell me about it,” said Quentin. “There’s just something fundamentally wrong with that.”
“Sounds like she’s just plain stupid,” said Ralphie. “So maybe Pete caught it from her.”
“Nah, she’s not dumb like him, at least not in the same way. She’s just uptight.”
Pete walked back over to the table. “There was nobody there except some old lady.”
“Did you ask her if her son or grandson was a cop?” said Quentin.
“I asked her if she knew Officer Dickson.”
“What’d she say?”
“She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Well,” said Ralphie, “I hope you left your name and number, so someone can call us back with that information.”
“Oh, shit,” said Pete. “I didn’t think of that.”
Ralphie and Quentin looked at one another and broke out laughing. Pete started laughing too.
“I was just fucking with you,” said Ralphie, still laughing.
“Shit,” said Quentin. “You really believed that! That’s the funniest fucking thing I ever seen!”
It took almost a minute for the three of them to stop laughing.
“Go on and call the other number,” said Ralphie.
Pete started back towards the phone, but turned around. “Ralphie—I only got that Delaware quarter left.”
“Well, just ask Charlie for some change,” said Ralphie.
“Oh, yeah,” said Pete. “Good idea.”
He walked to the bar, pulling out some bills.
“God, he’s dumb,” said Quentin.
“Yeah,” said Ralphie, nodding. “He’s really dumb.”
Pete called the number for Steve Dickson. No one answered, and he got the machine. In a moment, he hung up the phone and came back to the table.
“Steve Dickson is the guy,” he said.
“You sure?” said Ralphie.
Pete nodded. “I heard his stupid voice on the machine. That’s him all right.”
“Okay,” said Ralphie. “He’s the one we’re going to get.”
 
III.
 
Near closing time at Johnny’s Place, Sister Rachel Armageddon approached Ralphie, who sat alone at his back booth.
“You need to come with me,” said the nun.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Ralphie. “Come with you where?”
“To the back office,” she said, inclining her head towards the rear of the room.
“Why would I do that?”
The nun looked around. “It’s Marcie,” she said. “She needs you.”
Ralphie frowned. “Marcie’s not here. She went home.”
The nun laid her hands flat on the table. “I’m telling you, she’s in the office, and she needs you!”
“All right,” said Ralphie, sliding out of the booth. “But I don’t know why the fuck she didn’t just come out here and see me.”
The nun hurried him along to the office. They entered the room, Ralphie going in first. Sister Rachel followed him, clicking on the light, and closing the door behind her.
The office contained a desk and chair, two filing cabinets, and boxes of liquor stacked in the corner.
“What the fuck?” said Ralphie, turning to face the nun. “Where is she?”
“Marcie isn’t here,” said the nun, her back against the door.
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Ralphie. “What the fuck’s going on?”
“I needed to see you in private,” she said. “I’m worried.”
“Worried about what?”
“About the state of your soul!”
“Get the fuck out of here,” said Ralphie, stepping forward.
“No, don’t leave!” said Sister Rachel. “Just give me a few minutes. You never come to church, and you never let me talk to you about serious things.”
“Yeah, because I don’t want to listen to your bullshit,” said Ralphie.
“There’s still time,” she said. “Still time to save your soul, but you have to repent! You have to give yourself over to Jesus.”
Ralphie grabbed her by the shoulders, and started to push her aside, away from the door. She took hold of his arms and held onto him fast.
“You know what they call me?” said the nun.
“Yeah, Sister Rachel Armageddon.”
“No, no, no, that’s not what I mean,” said the nun. “Wait—who calls me that?”
Ralphie shrugged. “Everybody, as far as I know.”
“Well, that’s a terrible nickname.”
“Seems right to me,” said Ralphie.
“Anyway,” said Sister Rachel. “I meant what they call me in the church, officially? I’m called a Bride of Christ.”
“Yeah, so what?”
The nun still clung to him, her arms around his waist now.
“So I took a vow. I married our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
“Good for you,” said Ralphie, rolling his eyes.
“You knew me when I was a teenager,” she said. “I was having religious experiences at that time, glorious, ecstatic experiences. I would look at a picture of Jesus, and electric shocks ran through my body.”
“Probably just getting your period,” said Ralphie.
“I was so moved,” said the nun. “So transformed, that I had to give myself to Christ.”
“Look, you’re really starting to bore the hell out of me,” said Ralphie.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve felt those shocks,” said Sister Rachel.
Ralphie tried to push her aside, but she locked her arms tight around him.
“I’ve been feeling them again!” she said.
She reached up and kissed him with a wet, slobbery kiss, her tongue bouncing against his lips.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he said.
“I can save you,” she said.
She started rubbing her crotch against his leg. She let out a moan.
“Fucking stop that,” said Ralphie.
“You’re so much stronger than me, Ralphie,” she said. “You could overpower me so easily.”
He kept trying to push her away.
“I took a vow of celibacy,” she said. “But I know you want to have your way with me.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” said Ralphie.
“I see the way you look at me. You’re so strong! I can’t stop you!”
Ralphie twisted her arm hard, and she cried out and let go of him. He dropped her onto the floor, but she grabbed him around the legs.
“I’m helpless, Ralphie,” she said, her face pressed against his thighs. “There’s no way I could stop you from taking me!”
Ralphie smacked her hard against the side of the head. She let go of him and fell onto her side. He walked out of the office, slamming the door behind him.
Quentin stood by the back booth. “Where were you?” he said.
“You won’t fucking believe it,” said Ralphie, walking over to him. “But that idiot nun tried to get me to fuck her.”
Quentin raised his eyebrows. “No shit? Did you do it?”
“No, fuck no,” said Ralphie.
“Yeah, but we said it’s all pink on the inside,” said Quentin, scratching his head.
Ralphie shrugged.
“I changed my mind,” he said.
 

[An earlier version of this story appeared on TheRogueReader.com]
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