James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 19

Ejido Eréndira

Part III of Lockhart’s novel Exposure finds the diminutive Sheri Ballin scouring the Baja California coast for a sign of her boyfriend Rudy Spavik, thrown overboard when their boat sailed into a hurricane and then was hijacked by local drug runners. Every location in the novel was meticulously photographed and documented during the scribbling, from this Chiapan mother and daughter waiting for a bus in Ejido Eréndira to the lobster taco special at the café in El Rosario. Any excuse to while away a week wandering the exotic Baja California wasteland with camera in hand.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Mexico, Travel

Oklahoma!

Lockhart has never visited the State, nor even seen the musical (this picture is from Wyoming and probably looks nothing like the place), but wonders if we should think about replacing the national anthem with this show-stopper. Every time the movie production company breaks out into the song, he gets goosebumps. No idea why…

There’s never been a better time to start in life.

It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late!

Starting as a farmer with a brand new wife,

Soon be living in a brand new state!

Brand new state–gonna treat you great!

Gonna bring you barley, carrots and potatoes,

Pasture for the cattle, spinach and tomatoes,

Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom,

Plenty of air and plenty of room,

Plenty of room to swing a rope!

Plenty of heart and plenty of hope.

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain,

And the waving wheat can sure smell sweet,

When the wind comes right behind the rain.

Oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and I,

Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk

making lazy circles in the sky.

We know we belong to the land

And the land we belong to is grand!

And when we say

Yeeow! Ayeyipayeyay!

We’re only saying

You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!

Oklahoma O.K.!

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain

And the waving wheat can sure smell sweet

When the wind comes right behind the rain.

Oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and I

Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk

Makin’ lazy circles in the sky.

We know we belong to the land

And the land we belong to is grand!

And when we say

Yeow! Ayeyipayeyay!

We’re only saying

You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!

Oklahoma O.K.

Okla-homa-Okla-homa-Okla-homa

Okla-homa-Okla-homa-Okla-homa…

We know we belong to the land

And the land we belong to is grand!

And when we say

Yeow! Ayeyipayeyay!

We’re only saying

You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!

Oklahoma

O. K. L. A. H. O. M. A.

Oklahoma!

Yeow!

–Lyrics courtesy of Oscar Hammerstein.

Lockhart challenges anyone who knows Richard Rogers’ melody to get it out of their head for at least the rest of the day.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Oklahoma, Travel, Wyoming

Screenplays

Lockhart never seriously considered producing the movies or even working in Hollywood, but loved the form and saw it as an excellent tool for sharpening his plotting and characterization skills. As in all things, Lockhart allowed the mental exercise to carry him away, and before he knew it, had seven professional-strength stories all dressed up with nowhere to go. But at least he had all kinds of fun along the way.

The following are some of the more polished efforts:

900 Miles

A Family History

A mother, son, and daughter walk 900 miles through France to escape the holocaust. Sixty years later, their heirs still deal with the consequences.

Rachel Blaustein is a lonely old woman living in a hotel in Switzerland, estranged from her daughter Marnie, and an unknown quantity to her grandchildren, Jake and Allie. She discovers that she’s going to die and realizes that she first needs to make peace with her family.

The ensuing reunion is anything but peaceful. Marnie is the mirror image of her mother, with the same unfortunate blend of anger and cold steel. They hate the loss of each other, but the issues that divide them remain huge. And those issues boil down to what happened to Rachel in the war.

In 1940, the Jewish Rachel escaped the Nazis by walking 900 miles with her mother and brother from Belgium to Switzerland. Along the way, Rachel stumbled into the Dunkirk evacuation, was lost, imprisoned, and released, shot at by soldiers and fighter pilots, nearly executed as a looter, and almost killed in a car wreck. And all before her fifteenth birthday.

The deprivations that wore down Rachel’s mother and brother transformed her instead into a young woman of astonishing strength—and hardness. The final betrayal at the Swiss border forever changed her relationship with the brother she once idolized and sent her rocketing inevitably into a thirty-year collision course with her daughter.

Rachel understands that the only way into her daughter’s heart lies through her grandchildren. Yet those children, naïve and sheltered though they might be, have as much to teach their mother and grandmother as they have to learn about who they are and where they come from.

Click on cover to read an excerpt.

Milk and Cookies

An Intermittently Romantic Comedy

The girl of our looniest dreams saves the lamb of hers from a nightmare of mob family values.

When it comes to falling in love, Tammy Whinot will stop at nothing. No matter that she meets Mr. Perfect just as he’s robbing and shooting it out with a Chechen convenience store owner. Or that five minutes later, her poor Joe Lamb takes a leap over a speeding Porsche into a coma and a stint in a wheelchair. Or that the fixer-upper Tammy buys Joe contains a family of ghosts trapped in a purgatory of puzzling tribulations. Or that tribulato numero uno is the mobster Tony Ten Finger’s obsession with recovering the $9.5 million cash those ghosts embezzled from him.

What a girl needs in this dating hell we live in are great instincts, and Tammy has some of the finest. She can see past Joe’s suicidal tendencies to the pot of dull stability that lies beneath. She can charm a family of irritated ghosts into defending her to the—uh—death against a swarm of gangsters. She can spot the rose in a patch of weeds, the hope in a broken bicycle, the love in a mistreated child, and the courage in a frightened coward.

If the finest quality of an American hero is an absolute faith in humanity, Tammy makes the grade with powers to spare. Don’t misunderstand her—sooner or later everybody does something awful—Tammy herself isn’t above a little kidnapping, blackmail, and grand larceny—but the trick in love and life is to find someone who does bad things badly and ugly things worst of all.

Click on cover to read an excerpt.

The Perfect Moment

A Comedy in Spite of Itself

A writer races to scribble the perfect literary moment before an evil psychiatrist electro-shocks all of his characters into oblivion.

Alex is a failed writer whose mind see-saws through multiple levels of reality. At one level, he’s a grungy postal worker living in a ratty apartment and launching his characters into an unforgiving literary world. He loves his characters, but unfortunately, power corrupts, and Alex’s power over his creations corrupts absolutely. He forces them into behaving like rank clichés, but when they argue with him, they quickly find themselves on the wrong end of his literary forty-five.

On this same plane, Alex has a sweet, tolerant girlfriend Sally who works with him at the post office and wants him to move in. But a Marlene Dietrich look-alike upsets everything by hiring him to find her husband’s murderer. When Alex rebuffs her romantic advances, she frames him for murder and talks the police into shooting him full of holes.

Except the next morning, Alex wakes up in a lunatic asylum where Dietrich is the evil psychiatrist, Sally is the head nurse, and Alex’s fellow inmates surprisingly resemble his characters. Alex realizes that his failure as an artist is responsible for his incarceration. That failure can only be redeemed by writing real people. But Dietrich’s mission in life is to shock all the writer nonsense and out of Alex’s head so he can support the family that despises him.

When Alex finally starts to fight back with real characters, Dietrich ups the ante with a full frontal lobotomy. The question becomes: Can Alex and his creations put together the perfect literary moment before Dietrich finishes sharpening her knife?

Click on cover to read an excerpt.

The Last Man

A Pseudo-Comic Fairy Tale

A friendly lunatic and an angry Latina cruise the world picking up survivors after a global biological meltdown.

A Chinese accident and a clumsy American response set off a worldwide biological meltdown. At the Maryland Retreat for the Criminally Insane, Hudson finds out he’s the last human being alive. Fortunately, he’s misinformed. When he travels to Washington and moves into the newly available White House, he finds a gorgeous Latina named Sandy alive and stuck in an air lock down in the Situation Room.

Hudson and Sandy fall for each other, even though he has no principles and she has too many. Sandy is all about anger—she expects the world to live up to her standards, and when it doesn’t, she blows all fuses. Hudson is a disappointed romantic who immediately falls for Sandy’s finer qualities. She eventually responds, although, as she never fails to remind him, it doesn’t hurt Hudson’s chances that he’s the only man alive.

Hudson and Sandy fly off to Europe, where they find a French society dame, a singing Italian restauranteur, and a pudgy 16-year-old Nigerian genius. With these as the core of their new civilization, they return to Washington to find Augusto Pinochet, the supposedly dead ex-President of Chile, very much alive and installed in the White House. Pinochet has assembled a crack team of Bulgarian and Sri Lankan commandos (one of each) and invaded the United States. He fends off Hudson with a seemingly invincible political strategy–everyone can do whatever the hell they want, as long as he gets to hang onto the Oval Office and most of the weapons.

With Sandy’s help, Hudson overcomes Pinochet, finds 232 other survivors, and instigates the Great American Shootout, in which every weapon in America is found and exhausted. Over the years, Hudson rebuilds society in his own image—over-fed, over-sexed, happy-go-lucky, and deaf from all the explosions.

Click on cover to read an excerpt.

Selling Cars in America

An Original Screenplay

When a private-eye mom tangles with high-society corruption, her worried used-car-salesman husband finds a baby-sitter and motor-mouths to the rescue.

George Singer might just be the nicest guy on the planet. But when high society deviants start kidnapping and shooting at his wife Helen, even he finds it hard to keep his cool.

It all starts when Helen drops Gracie off at school and goes to work as a private-eye snapping lurid photos of the serial gigolo, Richard Allbright. Helen gets the photos and strikes a low blow for common decency, but then Felicity, the aggrieved wife and wealthy provider, decides to do nothing. End of story, right?

Wrong. Richard wants his pictures back so he can get on with his debauchery. Gaston, the fired butler, has his own agenda and a blustery ruthlessness to match. Felicity’s bodyguards would sooner kill than lose their jobs. Felicity just wants is to bottle the whole thing up and doesn’t give a damn who dies along the way.

In the end, it takes all of George’s used-car-sales persuasive powers to talk everyone out of letting their histories destroy their futures. But as Richard puts it, “George! Give it a rest, will ya? There are some cars you just can’t f—ing sell!”

Click on cover to read an excerpt.

Filed under: Screenplays Tagged: Featured

Novels

Lockhart’s scribblings include novels, both published and still in the works, and a handful of screenplays languishing in the wings. Here are some of the more popular novel titles, written over the last four years:

Exposure

A Love Story

Sam Spaulding is a tough, violent former war photographer with a Pulitzer Prize and a dead brother Henry who at one time ran one of the ugliest gangs in Los Angeles. Sam finds out he has Stage III intestinal cancer and decides to go out spitting in the face of death. But he reckons without his wife Lydia, who takes on her husband’s fate with every ruthless weapon at her disposal. The skeletons in Sam’s closet hardly help, when they come back to haunt him in the foul-mouthed ex-junkie Rudy Spavik and his angry girlfriend Sheri Ballin. From Los Angeles to the Mexican Baja, this unlikely foursome careens between hell and redemption, never entirely sure which is which. Until a nasty spat with Abe Smullen, the most beautiful drug lord in history, welds them together into a reluctantly indestructible clan.

Click on cover to read an excerpt. Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Daddy’s Girls

A Near Thriller

All the widower George du Plessis wants to do is sit out on his California beachfront porch, daydream about his late wife Izzie, and not make a hash of raising their two beautiful daughters, Gisela and Adelaide. Yet for that plan to work, George would need a far less violent and convoluted family history. That history comes back to haunt him when he lets Richard Habermann, a seedy German businessman, and Sam Abercrombie, a wholesome, if pushy American agent, propel him to Paris, Lugano, New Orleans, London, and mysterious points in between. One thing George knows for sure—he’ll be damned if the sins of these fathers and mothers will be visited upon his innocent children. And so he might.

Click on cover to read an excerpt. Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

The Expatriate

A Novel

Mac Macleod always assumed that the grandiose plans he fulfilled would define his life, that he would live on past his time in the international company he built, the workers employed, the generations educated—all that wonderful, big-picture stuff of a self-made man’s dreams. But now he’s not so sure. And all it takes to turn his world upside down is a European divorce and a kidnapped 15-year-old daughter with a ridiculous ransom of just $200. By the time Mac chases down his children, Sandy, Joe, and Darcy, in Bruxelles, Paris, New York, and finally in a small Ohio town, he finds winning and losing hopelessly confused with each other in the non-stop wrangle of parenthood.

Click on cover to read an excerpt. Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

The Messenger

A Philosophical Fairytale

Meet Mike Miller, Messenger Extraordinaire, the man with the tightest lips in America. Mike has made millions in the hyper-secret, slightly seedy Messenger business. His gorgeous wife Tuesday is the hottest TV News personality in Los Angeles. Life bumps and grinds along, until Mike’s paid too much money to deliver a message to a Wyoming beauty queen who’s been dead twenty years. But posthumous message delivery turns out to be the only halfway sane assignment in this dangerous and convoluted job. Boston, Salt Lake City, Jackson Hole, Manhattan, San Pedro, and even Hong Kong zoom by in this zany romance-disguised-as-adventure.

Click on cover to read an excerpt. Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

The Quotidian

A Second Wave of the Wand

Three years later, Mike and Tuesday Miller are at it again–except as far as Tuesday’s concerned, they’re not at anything together. She’s ditched her husband and moved on to national network TV. When her reporter nose gets her in trouble—again!—Mike grumbles off to the rescue. And finds himself caught in a loony triangle between meddling saints, murderous mobsters, and his alleged ex-girlfriend Frankie Ciccone, the kindest, sweetest killer-for-hire on the planet. From Boston to New Orleans and New York, to a rural hideout in Virginia and a beach in San Pedro, California, Mike juggles saints and sinners in a hopeless attempt to avoid the dictates of an unforgiving conscience–a conscience named Tuesday, naturally.

Click on cover to read an excerpt. Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Cat Flight from Birdland

90 Days of Lies, Love, and Self-Discovery

Mama never did bake him cookies, but somewhere along the way, the beautiful underworld courier must have taught her son, Alec Durand, how to cover his tracks and flee from trouble. Handy skills for a Hollywood B-movie producer who responds to his partner’s double-cross by stealing their $9,999,900 in seed money. Especially when the Bulgarian mobster who provided the funds comes looking for him. And when the Bulgarian’s masters in The Consortium lose patience and start murdering everyone in sight. The action in this romance-disguised-as-adventure drives Alec and his misnamed cat-lover Nellie from Hollywood to Bruxelles, Lugano, Mexico City, Manhattan, and deep into the California desert.

Click on cover to read an excerpt. Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Filed under: Novels Tagged: Featured

Travels

Lockhart’s first solo voyage took him all of the way from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Columbus, Ohio, aboard a creaky DC-8 propeller jet. Mom and Dad handed him up the stairs to the flight attendants, and Granny was waiting for him on the tarmac when he arrived. He spent most of the trip in the pilot’s lap, ogling the heavens and listening avidly to the chatter on the headphones the crew handed him.

Since then, unfortunately, travel has changed, and so has Lockhart, but he has never lost his fascination with the eccentric human beings one meets along the road. Nearly all of the travel notes in this blog come from Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Other than that, it’s hard, at least for Lockhart, to find a pattern to these musings.

One of Lockhart’s all-time favorite travel books is Travels (available at Amazon), by Michael Crichton. The book, one of Crichton’s few non-fiction efforts, is as much about the traveler’s state of mind, as it is about the places the author visits. In one section, Crichton spends time in a Hopi community, where he proves the notion that the most fascinating explorations are those that take place in the mind.

Funnily enough, Lockhart was so enthralled by the book, that five years later, he spent an evening in a bar in Burbank, California, explaining the Hopi concept of auras to a group of fellow patrons. The story so caught the attention of one particularly smart and beautiful woman, that she and Lockhart fell into a deep conversation and forgot everyone else around them. Twenty-three years of marriage later, they’re still chattering away.

Another author that inspired Lockhart, both as a traveler and a writer, was Graham Greene. He could write in simple, direct terms about any corner of the planet, from Brighton to the Congo River, to Mexico, as if he had lived there his entire life. His novel Travels with My Aunt (at Amazon)is a classic illustration of how travel will open up even the narrowest of minds. Not to mention an astonishing plot resolution that any budding writer would envy.

At last count, Lockhart has lived in somewhere around 30 places, in five countries and six United States, and traveled to a bunch more. His novels are as much a record of these wanderings as anything else. Click on any place listed in the right column here for a random assortment of travel notes and novels associated with the location.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Featured

Los Angeles

Signs warn the unwary hiker of rattlesnakes and other dangers on the way up to the Hollywood sign. To even get this far, you have to negotiate a complicated route through the Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Klaxons and loudspeakers shriek to frighten you from coming any closer, but the secret truth is, the sign sits on public property, and there isn’t a damn thing the authorities can do to stop you from climbing to the sign.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: California, Travel

Tucson

Early jet fighters crowd the fields of the Boneyard, as this section of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is popularly known, in Tucson, Arizona. More than 4,200 war planes of every type and description have been retired here since World War II, making for a breathtaking illustration of the power (and waste of resources) at the heart of the military-industrial complex John Kenneth Galbraith and President Eisenhower warned us about.

Go here for more information on the Pima Air & Space Museum.

Go here to watch Eisenhower’s farewell speech.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Arizona, Travel

Roma

SPQR stands for the Latin phrase, Senatus Populusque Romanus and refers to the Senate and People of the ancient city of Rome. In the days of the Roman Republic, the acronym found its way onto everything from grand monuments and legionnaire standards to coins and pothole covers. The emblem can still be found all over the city today in the most unlikely places, where it serves as a thin connection to the long vanished past.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Italy, Travel

Milano

In one of the stranger juxtapositions Lockhart has ever seen, Native American musicians in full costume play New Age music with flutes, drums, and eerie recorded backup sounds on the Piazza del Duomo outside Milan Cathedral. The square is home to an enormous array of street entertainers and musicians, but this act is by far the most popular.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Italy, Travel

Half Moon Bay

A pair of visitors argue over the location of Maverick’s surf break in Half Moon Bay, a little ways south of San Francisco, California. It’s a reasonable question, since the break is well hidden out in the ocean off Pillar Point. Maverick’s surf break is one of the most famous Big Wave surf breaks in the world and without doubt the most dangerous. Because of the danger and the skills required, Big Wave surfing attracts only a small percentage of the world’s professional surfers. An even smaller group comes to Maverick’s every winter for Jeff Clark’s annual December to February contest. 24 world-class surfers sign up for an alert that gives them 24 hours to be in the water and ready to charge. Unfortunately, what put Maverick’s on the media map was the death on December 23, 1994, of surfing hero Mark Foo.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: California, Travel