| Working Daze, #2 |
[26 Jun 2008|03:04pm] |
"Today the argument against sin and the means of losing it - the quest for the true spirit. This should be a good sharp section."
- John Steinbeck, "Working Days," Entry #4, June 2, 1938, Thursday
No giant moral arguments for me, at least not yet. Today's work - tonight actually - is chapter 3. Jace at home after a long shift wherein an inmate has a problem in medical and we get foreshadowings of the underpinning of the book.
Chapter 3, then. Short, sharply delineated (I hope). She's scared to sleep, scared of the dreams; leftovers from the psychological aftermath of Book One. Though the books are desert-set, this section should have the oppressive feel of the hot and humid, almost like being able to see the humidity hanging in the air. Should feel as oppressive as the Louisiana bayou. Hell, maybe I'll just ask James Lee Burke to write it for me. Should have long sentences and long paragraphs, almost painful to read because of her fear of sleeping.
No Gramma and none of The Coots. This is all Jace. But short because I've already strung out the initiating murder too long. Too much navel-gazing already. But then, pacing never works for me until deep near the end. That's the only time I can look back and see what's what.
But like what became the middle part of "Grapes" chapter 4, this should be good and sharp. We'll see.
And the quest for the true spirit? It may be corny, but there are no other quests. Everything dances to that particular rhumba.
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| Uh...what...? |
[24 Jun 2008|01:14pm] |
"Get some Gold-Bond. It's like air-conditioning for your balls."
A fellow officer, giving his two cents worth on the chafing problem my crappy polyester pants give me during the hot, humid summer months.
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| Working Daze, #1 |
[24 Jun 2008|12:51pm] |
"It seems to be necessary to write things down. Can't stop it."
John Steinbeck, "Working Days," Entry #1, February 7, 1938, Monday.
It is a marvelous book, Steinbeck's "Working Days." It is not one of the novels - the short, kiss-in-the-dark sweetness of "Of Mice and Men," nor the sprawling "East of Eden." Neither is it one of the volume of letters like "Steinbeck: A Life in Letters," or "Journal of a Novel, the East of Eden Letters."
It is Steinbeck's attempt to "map the actual working days and hours of this novel."
It is a diary of his time spent writing "The Grapes of Wrath."
And it is, quite simply, an amazing book.
I am very much into discovering and exploring the creative process. I want to see your painting, yes, but I also want to know why precisely that color in precisely that place. I want to see what you did with the lighting scheme for "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern," but I also want to know why that green at that moment.
"Working Days," is an almost daily account of the writing of Grapes. The struggles as to tone and pace, the battles as to timbre and situation. But also, it allows the reader to see how in hell he got the book done given everything else that was going on in his life at that time.
I am not so bold.
But I am just cheeky enough to believe I could do something similar. My Working Daze, however, won't be as disciplined or as regular. He wrote his as a daily warm up to writing. I, because of my work schedule, no longer write every day. Instead, I write every day I'm off. And my writing time is so limited that if I tried to keep Working Daze constantly up to date, I'd never work on the novel.
So my scope is much more limited than his.
I will try, as best I can, to put down what it's like to write a novel. I will explore the artistic struggles of tone and timbre, pace and plot. In short, I will navel gaze with the intensity of someone who is self-involved to the nth degree when it comes to his writing.
I already know, to a degree, what's coming. I've written books before and there will be days where I am nothing short of the single best writer what ever walked the planet. And there will be days where I want to throw the computer out the window and take up knitting.
Maybe it'll fun and maybe it'll suck, but I'm gonna give it a whirl and see what happens. The trick, of course, is to explore the writing of the book without giving the book away. Hell, if I put it all down in the journal, there would never be any reason for you to go plunk down $25 for it, would there?
The book, by the by, is the second in a brand new series centering on a female sheriff's deputy. In book one, we see her at the beginning of her career. I mean the very beginning - day one - and we go from there. The first book is called "Slow Bleed" and you haven't seen or heard of it yet because I only finished it a few months ago and am waiting for my agent to read it. After him, hopefully, publishers. After that, hopefully, enough sales to fund a two-month trip to St. Thomas.
Steinbeck said something else in that initial entry back in '38. He wrote, "I don't know whether I could write a decent book now. That is the greatest fear of all. I am working at it but I can't tell."
It is the greatest fear of us all. So we'll see what happens. And do, please, post your comments. I'd love to know how you do things, how you explore your creativity.
And what your favorite Steinbeck book is.
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| CopStories: King Booze |
[23 Jun 2008|10:40am] |
"So what's going on?"
His eyes darted side to side, up and down the empty, gravel road. "Uh...nothing. Just out walking, I do that a lot."
We were on Marquette Bottom Road, a dirt road that winds along the north shore of the Illinois River where it bends from north-south to east west on its way to Chicago. It's 10 miles of absolutely nothing. No homes, no business, nothing but river land and forest. I patrol down there lots and lots and lots, and usually, there is something going on. Booze or drugs or fights or whatever. I love it down there.
This particular night, one of the first patrols of my new assignment (nights, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.), I had stumbled across a truck and a tall, lanky 17-year old kid.
At first, I thought it was illegally dumping garbage. Then I realized he had just cracked open a beer. And I mean JUST cracked it. In fact, the pull tab wasn't even all the way open yet, he hasn't had a single swig, and there I am, all Ramboed up and official.
"Yeah?" I asked. "Whose beer?"
"Uh...my friend's."
"Yeah? Where is he?"
"Uh...he took a walk." The kid pointed vaguely behind him.
"Yeah? Cracked a beer and then took a walk? Didn't even take his brew with him?"
The kid shrugged, but dutifully handed over his license.
"Okay, no sweat. Tell you what, I'm going to check your license, make sure you're not a wanted hatchet murderer or anything, and why don't you see if you can find your friend for me."
He nodded and headed in the direction his friend had taken.
And I just watched. Sitting in the front seat of the cruiser, license check long since done, I just watched him. He made it about ten feet past his truck, didn't even bother actually looking into the gathering darkness, shrugged, and came back to the truck.
I'm thinking: if you're about to get arrested for illegal consumption, or at the very least illegal possession of alcohol, and said alcohol is your friends? Get your ass down the road and find him. Hang him up in the hoosegow, rather than yourself.
Ah, my friends are thinking now, a clue to Trey's personality. Cut the friends loose and save himself.
Well...yeah. Momma didn't raise no fool.
Anyway, the booze was his and I cut him a break. I took his beer and sent him on home. Actually, I felt sorry for him. First of all, how bad is life for a 17-year old when he's drinking alone? That's gotta suck.
But then, before he takes a drink, before he even gets the beer open, BOOM, here are the cops, giving him grief, taking his crap, and pouring it out right in front of him.
To be honest, there was a part of me that just wanted to hand the kid the open beer and say, "Kill it quick, lonely boy."
I called this entry King Booze because that six pack wasn't all I had that weekend. I found another last six out of a twelve pack at one of the canal locks. Just sitting there, no one around. I assume it was kids drinking and they didn't want to take a chance on getting pulled over with beer in the car.
Then I had five teenagers at another canal lock with three cases of really cheap beer. When I got there, the beer was all in the water. No like in the water to stay cold, but more like "Heave! (splash!) What? I have no idea what you're talking about, Officer."
So in the course of three days, I found three cases of cheap beer. And let's not forget the nearly finished fifth of Beam I found in the possession of a 16-year old.
Jim Beam? I almost arrested her for drinking crappy whiskey. If, at 16, you're going to finish the better part of a fifth in less than a night, make it Jack Daniel's.
King Booze, indeed.
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| CopStories |
[10 Jun 2008|12:38pm] |
So, in honor of completing my first year on the road, the Bureau County Sheriff's Office gave me...?
Another cow call.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, a bovine interception call. It wasn't at 3:00 in the morning, like the first one a year ago was, nor was it cows wandering the roadway, as it had been then. (And yeah, I remember, with heart-stopping shock, the old man who we called to come get his cows. He walked up to one, stared it dead in the face, then turned to me and said, "Ain't mine," and promptly left.)
This was much better than wandering cows or cows hit by cars or trucks or cows stuck on a fence. This was cows...gone. Just gone. No fuss, no muss, no forwarding address.
"My babies are gone," the lady said.
"They break through the fence?" I asked.
She showed me. No break.
"Someone let them out?" I asked.
Didn't look like it.
"Checked with all the neighbors?"
"Absolutely," she said.
"So, the Grays come get them?" I wanted to ask.
Now, I realize I don't know anything about cows other than that they're great with a slightly tangy but not too sweet, full-bodied red sauce after having been cooked over an open pit flame, but I wasn't sure it was possible for 11 head of cattle to simply disappear. And this woman, poor thing, was absolutely bananas about them. She was in tears about her cows.
And it wasn't just because we were talking about roughly $15,000. It was because her cows were gone. You know...like my dogs are gone...or my child got snatched. Her cows were GONE and what in the hell was the Bureau County Sheriff's Office, the Illinois State Police, the FBI, the ATF, ICE, and Homeland Security prepared to do about that?
She was CRAZED about it. Tears and drama and hyperventilation. I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance to give her some tranquilizer or something.
"You have to find them," she said.
"I'll do my best."
At her demand, my best was going to include walking - slowly and with a crime scene kit - the entire fence line. All the way around her fifteen or twenty acres or whatever it was. I, on the other hand, offered to drive it and see what was what.
"How can you see trace evidence from your car?"
Apparently she didn't want me, she wanted Gil Grissom. Grissom would catch them (because I was obviously an idiot and not up to the task) and she would cheerfully hang them herself at the courthouse square.
She actually used some language that I'd never heard, some colorful variations on curse words that made ME blush...and you know that's going some.
I felt for her but at the same time, there was part of me, terrible though it is to say, that assumed the deputies at the office had set up a camera somewhere and were watching all this via monitor and laughing their asses off.
Then, as I'm really unsure what to do next, her son comes strolling over from next door.
"Mom," he said. "They're at Teddy's."
"What?"
"Teddy has them. They're in his pen."
"Oh." So then she looked back at me and shrugged. "Never mind."
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| Mayhem Random Commets |
[26 May 2008|09:56am] |
"I grew [my hair] out because I'm married and I'm successful and I don't have to impress anyone anymore."
A writer on his newly long hair.
"The .357 is like a kiss...the .45 is like getting ass-fucked."
A writer on the difference in recoil between two of the guns we were shooting.
"What Louisiana beer do you have?"
"Well, we have St. Paulie Girl."
An exchange between a writer and a waitress at a Cajun restaurant.
"You didn't get invited because you have a pussy, now shut up and go away."
A writer on why a female writer he was talking to didn't get invited to what the commenting writer thought was a male-only writing convention.
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| Shootin' Up The Mayhem |
[26 May 2008|09:01am] |
Okay, truth in advertising. I didn't actually shoot up Mayhem In The Midlands, but we did do some serious shooting.
At an indoor range, rather than the indoor writers' convention...though there were at least three moments when, if I'd been strapped, I'd have shot the crap out of a particular writer...not three writers during three moments, but the same writer over and over and over again.
Mayhem is a delightful little convention in Omaha I've been attending the last few years. Sean Doolittle, one of the two or three most underrated writers in America today, lives there and I head over to hang with him for a few days.
Sean is, in fact, the shooting buddy. There are always some other people along, but it's got a core of me and Sean, blasting away for an hour or so, burning through ammo and targets like we're made of freakin' money. And in and around the shooting sessions, we have conversations about things like point of view narrative and the big reveal versus the little reveal and realistic violence versus stylized violence. So yeah, we're writer geeks, but we're writer geeks with guns.
I usually participate in a couple of discussion panels and I did this year. Some are always good and some always blow industrial chunk, and mine this year were about evenly split between good and total bullshit. The crap panel was supposed to be - we were told - on short stories. Instead, the moderator decided it was better to offer the attendees 'entertainment' rather than answer their questions on the topic. Who gives a crap what my favorite short story of my own is? And I would bet most people couldn't give two hoots what my favorite food is.
Honestly, I don't go much for the panels. I've been going to conventions long enough that mostly I've seen all of them and all their recycled cousins too many times to count. So I go for the comeraderie (is that even spelled right? What'choo want, I'm'a writer...spelling is for the editors). What that actually means is drinking too much, eating too much, bitching too much, gossiping entirely too much, but doing it with other writers so it can be written off on my taxes.
And, in this moment of truth between just you and I, I can admit that I love being there for the trainwrecks. Hehehehe...that's sometimes better than everything else. Though the trainwrecks were minor this year, they did include watching a writer introduce himself to a writer he'd never met before by throwing himself to the floor when invited to have a seat, then stroking his newly longish hair and saying, "I grew it out because I'm married and I'm successful, I don't have to impress anyone anymore."
Bite my ass, moron.
The other of note was watching a writer who claimed to have once been a hugely successful trial attorney go completely blank when another writer and I (him a former NYPD copper) talked about 'making a case.' The former attorney had no clue what that meant.
Uh...what?
I met some interesting new people, including JT Ellison, author of "All The Pretty Girls," and Twist Phelan. Saw some regular compatriots, too: Libby Fischer Hellmann and Sue (who in my memory never has a last name) and Lance Who Knows Lori (and who, again, never seems to have an actual last name).
But the over-arcing highlight was Craig Johnson. I've been a fan of his Walt Longmire series for a while (set in rural Wyoming with the county sheriff) and being able to spend some time with him and his wife was nothing short of a gas. Craig is, like me, a fan of writing (it sounds goofy, I know, but there are lots of writers who aren't actually fans of good writing...they're fans of good contracts and lots of press coverage, but not the actual writing), and to have a lunchtime conversation with him (also Sean, Anthony Neil Smith, Judy Johnson, and Twist Phelan) about good writing was possibly the most relaxing hour of the entire weekend.
For me, conventions are usually 50/50 - that is, 50% inspirational and 50% toxic. I love how talking to writers and reading pieces of current projects and buying newly published projects so completely inspires me to reach higher and harder on my own work, but they are also toxic in that I hate seeing how absolute fucking idiots who have no clue about good writing and who, in fact, couldn't write their way out of a bad episode of 'Blossom,' or who have not a single human social skill end up with big, fat contracts which they then tell me all about while blowing stale beer breath in my face.
Mmmmm...delicious.
Those people are the ones, in fact, I usually shoot while at the range. I don't see a silhouette, I see -
hehehehe, no names today.
So that was Mayhem for this year. And like either Ah-nold or Herpes, I'll be back.
My favorite food, by the by, is hot links from Johnny's Barbeque in Midland, Texas.
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| I'm'a edacated...sorta. |
[15 May 2008|04:26pm] |
One down...eleven to go.
This was such a stupid idea. At this rate, I won't be finished until well into President Obama's second term.
See, what I done is...I started a Master's Program. Why? Who the hell knows. Sounded like a good idea at the time? Uh...thought it might make me more attractive to my wife ("Hey, you hunka-hunka burning intellect, what's the square root of pi cubed?") Don't want to paint my office walls so I thought I'd use the paper of a degree.
Pick your reason.
The main question friends have asked is: will this get you a promotion or a raise?
Fuck no.
Come on, I work for Bureau County. I'll get a pat on the head and they'll move on to new business. Most of the county board of supervisors care not a single whit for education and my Sheriff's Office is too small to move up the chain. It's not like we have a forensics lab or a fugitive warrant section or an air division or homicide squad or whatever. We have radio, we have jail, we have road, we have investigations. That's pretty much it.
So I did this for myself. Because I dig education and I believe everyone ought to learn as much as they can, that they ought to keep improving themselves.
It's a twelve course program, done on-line at Aspen University. I'm doing it with Officer Friendly (the inimitable Ben Atkinson) and we just finished our first course, Criminal Law.
It was pretty cool, actually. There were eight modules and for each one, there were five questions that had to be answered. School rules said answer them in 200-300 words each.
Hah. When was the last time I wrote 200-300 friggin' words? My theory has always been never use ten words where a hundred will suffice.
My first batch of essay answers ran about 12 pages. My second to last batch ran about 25 pages.
Hehehehehehe...200 words. Whatever. Kiss my Texas behind.
The instructor never sent Vito the Chopper to the front door with a note scribbled in blood, "Too much, boy," so I didn't worry about it.
Along the way, I realized that I believe American society is overcriminalized and that there actually are massive double standards in what we criminalize versus what we done and that there are victimless crimes (at least by the double standard of what is 'moral' and what isn't.)
So I guess the class was a good one, 'cause it taught me stuff real good.
Next up, Criminal Procedure. I'll do that one in August. Had to take some time off because I was burning myself at both ends (supply your own joke to that one).
Plus, the time off will give me a chance to get started on the second book in my new series. I finished the first one back in February and sent it up the food chain (first readers, agents, editors, publishers, etc). Still waiting for word to come back down the food chain.
So the next book is percolating and I'll probably start writing next week. Then I'll head to Mayhem in the Midlands in Omaha, drink beer and dismiss young writers with that pompous and sanctimonious tone I do so well.
Oh, yeah, I got a new job. I'm working part time in Walnut, Illinois. Spent most of my first night in the rain, talking to a drunk and looking for the wallet he stole.
Good times, baby, good times.
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| Thanks for the help.... |
[15 May 2008|04:21pm] |
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...too busy, the fucker said. Yeah, thanks for that. Kiss my ass.
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| ...uh...what? |
[14 May 2008|02:28pm] |
"I have to see if the babysitter's drunk."
As said to me a few days ago by a Princeton copper. Turned out the babysitter wasn't drunk but did have a pissed off acquaintance.
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| CopStories |
[22 Apr 2008|02:49pm] |
There was a little girl.
Then there was heroin.
Now she's dead.
And no one - absolutely no one - was at all surprised.
"You've got to send me to prison," she told a local copper a few weeks ago.
"We can't just send you to prison."
"You have to, it's the only place I can stay clean."
But the officer said no so she called him back and said she was going to hurt herself. That forced him to go see her. When he did, she had her entire H-works strewn out on the bed.
"Now can I go to prison?"
She did come to the county jail that night, but hadn't yet been sentenced for the paraphernalia.
There are those dealers and users who I don't give a shit about. To put it less charitably, if they OD, I figure it's one less idiot breathing my air and using my planetary resources. Shitty outlook, I know, but that's how I see it. I have no sympathy for dealers hooking up the weak and the vulnerable. I have slightly more sympathy for the weak and vulnerable as long as they - at some point - take some responsibility.
But she was different. Every time I dealt with her in the jail, she was beautiful. Not physically, although she had once been a good looking girl. She still had a piece of her heart somewhere deep inside her. All those friends' who hung with her simply to get hold of some of the massive wad of cash her grandfather had bequeathed her hadn't yet cut her heart out completely.
There was a sliver hidden deep and when she came to jail and stayed long enough to get clean, you could see it. An infectious laugh, a generous smile; not quite bubbly (rarely found in jail) but very nearly giddy...I suspect because the jail forced her clean.
All of us jailers gave her jobs constantly. Folding the laundry, sorting and cleaning up the rolling library, sometimes mopping (though she didn't care for that as much), sometimes helping outside in the sally port. She seemed genuinely thankful for those opportunities.
But when she'd walk outta the cross-bar hotel, when she'd go back to the house she bought with her inheritance, those friends would be there, waiting with their mouths drooping open and their forearm veins as hungry for H as baby birds for the worms Momma would fly back to the nest.
She tried rehab two...three...ten times. The number of times didn't really matter. It never worked and probably was never going to. She'd survive rehab and come straight back home to the vultures at her house.
They never left and she just couldn't find the strength of self to toss their asses into the street in front of a bus. Even when she was in jail or prison, they were there, stripping her house clean and waiting waiting waiting for her to get back; waiting for her next check. That check came every three months and you could tell when it was time because the yard would suddenly fill up with nomadic junkies.
And God bless her - and maybe God damn her, too - she'd always help them. She'd always make sure there was enough Horse around to keep the people fed. Miss Antoinette gave the people cake, she gave her people heroin.
See, her mother died and her grandfather died and her sister moved to Italy and there was pretty much no one for her. But even when her mother had been around, it was obvious she was going to have to work her ass off to avoid the madness and chaos of her genetic coding.
And didn't we help. Deputies and cops and jailers and dispatchers and the Sheriff. We all helped in one way or another. One of the first nights I was on the road, I came across her in Princeton. One of the friends had 'borrowed' her car and she needed to get back to the small town near here where she lived. All she wanted was a ride. Was that okay?
Then, when the money fell on her head, deputy after deputy after deputy made appointment after appointment for a financial adviser for her. She made one...maybe two...meetings, then just kind of faded away. The most recent rumor was that her sister had put a big chunk of what was left in a trust that was payable at two moments in her life: when she was 35 and when she was 45.
LuAnn met her once. I don't remember where, exactly, but she said to LuAnn, "I used to live with Trey."
Threw LuAnn for a bit of a twist. "Huh?"
"I lived with him." A quick nod toward the jail and LuAnn understood.
Everyone knew it was coming, this death. It was like a train that had left a station hundreds of miles away but that we already felt rumbling along our tracks. And the tracks just got bigger and bigger and the train kept rumbling and however many times we tried to tear up those tracks, they just fixed themselves.
We all knew it was coming and we all did what we could to stop it from coming and, in the end, we all failed.
One of the dispatchers said the next day, "I just feel like if I'd done just a little more."
I think we all felt that way. Just a little more. Just one more intervention or one more meeting with the financial planners or one more roust of the assholes sucking her financial teats and leaving their bloody needles all over her house.
Just one more whatever, and we might have saved her.
But I don't think we could have. I think she had already bought that particular ticket - knowingly - and was just marking time until the train got here.
There are a few lines in Metallica's "Sweet Amber" that keep running through my head. They belong to the band and are, I believe, Hetfield's romp through alcoholism, but maybe he won't mind if I quote them.
"Chase the rabbit, fetch the stick
She rolls me over 'till im sick
She deals in habits, deals in pain
I run away, but i'm back again.
"Ooh then she holds my hand
And i lie to get a smile
And she squeezes tighter
I still lie to get a smile.
"Ooh sweet amber
How sweet are you?
How sweet does it get?
It's never as sweet as it seems."
She was asleep when the train arrived, which I guess is a small miracle. Rather than the violently painful OD we all expected, it was quiet. Shoot the Horse, drink the amber, go to sleep.
Just like that.
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| (3)...the final few pages...until the next chapter |
[17 Apr 2008|03:50pm] |
Okay, so there are some of you who probably don't know it yet but...I love kids.
I really do. They're so cute and cuddly and blah blah blah.
Okay, I hate kids. Can't stand the ankle biters. I mean, for propogation of the species (hehehe, almost wrote spices) they're okay. But individually, can't stand 'em.
So it's my lot in life to be constantly dealing with them. At the theater in Denver, I was in charge of the part of summer camp that had between 20 and 30 eight to twelve year olds for nine - NINE - solid weeks.
They loved me.
I taught classes at the theater for young kids who wanted to learn tech.
They loved me.
I'm a certified juvenile officer. The kids I've dealt with?
They love me.
So when LuAnn did a hardcore analysis of the bookstore and decided to keep it open, I thought...well, okay, you're store, I guess.
Yeah, guess what....
A fucking kid's store.
Are you kidding me with this? A store specializing in children's books and children's toys and parenting and all manner of crap that has to do with kids.
I just want to scream "Calgon take me away!"
LuAnn had a bunch of meetings with all kinds of people - bankers and Chamber of Commerce types and merchants and a rep from the Small Business Administration - and decided she hadn't tried everything she could to keep the store open.
She did an analysis of each and every department and they had all fared and guess what? Only the kids' department went up every year. Even during the shitty years, it kept going up. Everytime she'd expand that department, it would sell through.
So we're keeping the store open and already the customer base has expanded. There have been people in who've we've never seen before, dropping money and asking to special order books (we're still doing any special order anyone wants, not just kids' books) and the whole bit.
Makes me crazy. Why? Not 'cause the store's still open. Not 'cause LuAnn will continue to have that "I'm the Boss" OCD thing going.
'Cause it's kids.
Why in hell did it have to be kids?
I feel like Indiana Jones in teh first flick. "Snakes...why'd it have to be snakes? I hate snakes."
Yeah, substitute kids and you're pretty much floating on the same boat I'm stuck on. The store'll be full of kids and their parents and their grandparents and everybody'll be laughing and singing and having a grand ol' time and it'll drive me bugfuck. All that happiness...yeeech.
I mean, I'm excited about the store and the fact that I'll still get James Lee Burke and Sean Doolittle and James Crumley at a discount, but...come on.
Kids?
Damn.
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| ...uh...what? |
[03 Apr 2008|07:56am] |
"...six months of crust."
A comment made after a deputy and I did an initial strip search of a pair of particularly pungent prisoners. I thought they seemed kind of dirty. That was the response by my partner.
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| ...uh...what? |
[24 Mar 2008|01:18pm] |
I've decided to start a new section of the journal: odd, random comments. I get people saying really bizarre things to me all the time. Good, bad, and really ugly.
Today, for the first, we have this:
"I wanted to keep my midget porn classy...so that's why it's on the small screen."
Said to me at a St. Patty's Day party that included - on a tiny, five-inch portable DVD player screen - midget porn in honor of leprechauns. On the giant, 50-inch screen was college basketball.
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| (2)...the final few pages. |
[06 Mar 2008|03:55pm] |
"It's a twenty-five percent discount, right?" the woman asked.
"Yes," I said. "Everything in the store is twenty-five percent off cover."
"Great."
Then she wandered away and started picking through our stock. About a half-hour later, she had quite the pile'o'books. I was pleasantly surprised....
...until she looked at me with a face that just said trouble.
"How about this?" She held out a Christmas book.
"How about it?"
"Well, I mean...it's a Christmas book."
"Yes, it is."
"So?"
"So...Merry Christmas?"
"But it's March."
"Yes, it is."
"It's not Christmas."
"No, it's not. But the Ides of March are upon us."
"Yes, but this book isn't about the Ides of March. It's about Christmas."
"Yes, it is."
"The discount's twenty-five percent?"
"Yes, it is."
"But shouldn't it be more?"
"Because it's not about the Ides of March?"
"Exactly. This book is out of season."
"Well, you know...seasons come and seasons go, but the discounts are always here. And right now, they're here at twenty-five percent."
And so, after all that work, she put it back on the shelf.
Welcome to the closing of the store. Whatever we're doing, it's not enough. The discount isn't deep enough, the selection isn't good enough, the hours aren't long enough.
Making me completely nutty.
But what's worse are the eight million people who have come in and said, in their sad voices with their sad faces, how upset they are we're closing. People neither LuAnn nor I have ever - EVER - seen.
Piss off. Don't come telling me how sad it is when you've never, ever bought anything from us and probably have never set foot in the store.
There's a book group that meets. One of the ladies in it has also never bought a book from us. Yeah, she comes and uses the store after hours but gets all her books from the library. I used to think she maybe didn't have much money, so that's understandable.
But last week, after their meeting, she plunked down better than $100...and was sad about us closing.
Kiss my Texas ass. How about that? How about, if you spend even as little as five or ten bucks every month when you guys meet, we might not be going out of business.
Auuughhh.
I'm sure I'll get over that kind of crap eventually. What's actually making me sad is the selling of the fixtures. When the books get sold and there is a hole, I just face out whatever's left, make it look good.
But when seats and lamps and bookshelves get sold, there's a hole in everything. Can't just move some shelves around to cover it. There is no way to hide a thinning out store.
And even though the closing is very real - obviously - seeing holes where fixtures once stood makes it somehow more real. Not sure why that is, but it is.
And here's the other maddening thing: special orders are through the roof. I mean hundreds of dollars of special orders - again from people who've never ordered through us - and there is no discount on that stuff. Those books are full price and people are flocking to buy them.
I don't get it. And anymore, I don't want to get it, I just want your money. Buy everything, get it out of my store, and leave your money on the counter.
And whoever the last person is, turn off the lights and lock the door.
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| (1)...the final few pages. |
[17 Feb 2008|06:10pm] |
The first book was Tom Piccirilli’s Grave Men.
Actually, we sold it the day before we opened. A woman came in the open front door and started looking around. I was standing at the computer, taking care of last minute inventory stuff and there she was.
She went to westerns and I put Tom’s book in her hand and that was that.
Six years later, that is that.
After years of smashing our heads against the bricks of a county long since Wal-Mart-anized, Green River Books is closing. Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of really great years in that run. But since 2006, the economy has been tough and fighting against an apathy toward downtown businesses – and a surprising apathy about reading - has been tougher.
One of the omens at the beginning that made both LuAnn and I smile was a neon sign at the high school that said, “Princeton Tigers Read!” We thought that was a great summation of what was going to be a grand adventure.
And yet, in spite of numerous attempts to connect with the high school, they never – as an organization – utilized us. Every year, they’d teach various classics of literature and never – not once – did they actually call us and tell us when the classes were starting or how many copies they’d need.
Apparently, Princeton Tigers read only when they have to.
Yes, I am bitter. Yes, I am angry. LuAnn has already gone through her twelve-steps of grief. She’s sad but ready to be done.
I am still pissed. I am still angry at the hordes of people we’ve seen in the shop since the sale started who we’ve never seen before. Hundreds of faces attached to hypocrites saying things like, “We’re so sad you’re closing.”
Yeah? Then maybe you should have visited the shop once – ONCE – in the six years we’ve been open.
I had a customer come in and say, “You guys are closing? I didn’t even know Princeton had a book store.”
Are you fucking kidding me? Six years, thousands of dollars of advertising, nearly 50 authors doing signings, 20,000 visitors to downtown for the bookstore-organized Harry Potter parties, and you never heard of us?
We bought our fixtures from a bookstore that closed up in DeKalb (infamously where the NIU shooting was a few days ago) and that manager was a bitter and pissy and being horrible about his customers. I told myself that was a mistake on his part and promised I’d never be that person.
Yeah, let me introduce myself: Mr. Pissy Bitter Man.
My customers are not bad, understand that. My hardcore customers actually started coming in the day BEFORE the sale. They knew they’d pay full price and they didn’t care. They wanted to pay full price because they knew that would help the store more. Those customers are the greatest. They have supported this store with the kind of full-throated voice that usually only comes from massively partisan party activists.
I will always love those people.
But those people who shopped before the sale and left us with a daily sales average of $100 and who then came in after the sale started and left us with a daily sales of $1200 can bite my ass.
“Yeah,” they’re saying with that kind of support. “We want the books, but we’re sure as hell not going to pay full price for them.”
Late in the day Saturday, I had a woman plunk down a few books. Right now, the store is at 25% off. She handed me a book that she thought was “out of season” and asked if there were a deeper discount because of that.
Twenty-five percent, evidently, isn’t quite enough.
It was all I could do not to punch her in the throat, take $100 out of the cash register for bail money, and call the cops to tell them I battered a bimbo.
Oh, yeah, I am that bookstore manager in Dekalb. Oh, yeah, I am pissy and bitter and angry and vocally inappropriate (though I try to minimize that because now I’m in the position of needing everyone to buy EVERYTHING so I can’t really afford to antagonize even those customers who don’t quite have all their teeth).
I promise I will try to get over my anger. But not today.
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| CopStories |
[02 Feb 2008|10:32am] |
It came in as a possible overdose.
In a lonely farmhouse on the outskirts of a tiny hamlet.
There was an old man there when I arrived. He was anxious and fidgeted and kept looking back at the house. Two volunteer first responders were outside as well, though they looked a little unsure of themselves.
The old man started talking and eventually his words tripped over his sobs. All I could understand was that he was 85 years old and he was the caretaker.
Eighty-five. And he’s the caretaker.
I left him outside and as I headed inside, I realized there are actually four EMTs and they were rotating in and out.
And when I got in, I realized why.
I am not Pollyanna. I do not play the Glad Game. I have seen poverty and pain and even madness in my life.
I have seen houses with holes in the walls that let in the outside world. I’ve seen shacks with tarpaper roofs. I’ve seen trailers with bits of discarded plywood held up with tape to cover a window. Hell, when I was little, I even played in an abandoned house of the type that we would now call a crack house.
I’ve smelled cars that have housed whole families for days at a time; a Blazer that housed three idiot teenagers for four days during an ill-advised road trip from Denver to New York that limped to a stop in Princeton. I’ve smelled animals, dead and nearly-so, and I’ve smelled people, dead and nearly so.
But until that moment, when I stepped into this woman’s world, I had never even imagined a world like that could exist.
Try as I might, I will never be able to explain that house. I will never be able to get you to smell the ammonia so deeply that you almost taste it on your tongue; or realize the other stench was feces and again, you could almost taste it.
I am not writer enough to put the stink of the cats and dogs and her own excreta and body stench and rotted food in your clothes and nose the way it was in mine for days. And you’ll never understand how the reek of booze was foundational to every odor in the place, as though it were the concrete slab upon which the house was built.
I simply can not write that well.
She sat in an easy chair in the living room, a cat on her lap, two at her feet, and three small dogs on the couch. The room had no light, though there was a broken TV. Every inch of walking space was covered with cat or dog feces while every inch of every bit of furniture was covered in romance novels or hundreds of empty wine bottles.
And what I thought at the time, swear to God, was: “Well, at least she doesn’t drink her wine from a box…that would really be low-class.”
This poor woman, who looked nearly 100 years old, was barely 61. In between heavy, hard gasps for air, she managed to tell me she hadn’t eaten in five days. No wonder, as there was nothing edible in the house.
Which isn’t to say there wasn’t food.
But food almost wouldn’t have mattered because there was no place for it. No counter top to prepare it, no table upon which to eat it. All those spaces were covered in crap and filth the likes of which still leave me mumbling in shock. The dishes in the sink were covered with I have no idea how many months of crust.
The old man told me he checked on her twice a week and that she was a boozer and pill popper. His words. He showed me two pill bottles that had held 60 pills each and had been refilled on January 4. Both were generics for pain pills and both were empty when I arrived on January 12.
Eight days…120 pain pills.
But she swore to me she hadn’t taken any in a few days.
So…120 pills in…what…four days? Five days?
The EMTs finally got her out of the chair and she was pantless. In white underwear that was dulled down to gray and stained with a rainbow of yellows and browns and blacks. How much was hers and how much was the animals’ I have no idea.
Eventually, the EMTs got her on a backboard and rushed her off to the hospital. I think at that point, everyone knew she hadn’t overdosed that day but that she desperately needed medical help.
Over the next few days, I spoke with the old man a number of times. I asked about her income (trying to decide if someone was taking a Social Security check and cashing it, then doling out ten or fifteen bucks to her to live on) and about family or friends.
He said she had a few bucks a month from an ex husband but that was it. She had had some money – had been a senior X-ray tech at Cook County Hospital, in fact. But that it was mostly gone. He gave her a few bucks every week and took her to eat sometimes.
She had been ambulatory, he said, until the last week or so. In fact, she had driven him around until the end. Her family – and sister and a daughter – and he had tried to get her to move to a larger town or to move in with someone, or just get the place cleaned up. They had tried to get her into rehab for the booze and pills but as with everything else, she had refused.
This was, he said, her choice.
I worked for three days trying to find a state agency to take wardship of this woman who obviously couldn’t take care of herself. To get that done, part of what I needed to know was when she left the hospital.
She never had.
She had exploratory surgery. During that, the doctors saw her colon was completely dead and had been for some time. They sewed up back up and made her as comfortable as they could.
She died a couple days later.
Back at her house, where the old man was taking care of her cats, dogs, and a beautiful horse in the barn until the family decided what to do, I found a handwritten note. In it, she talked about how sad she was at how her life turned out. She wrote about ups and downs and who she loved and not loved enough.
But she also wrote about the end of her life. She wanted, she wrote, no extraordinary measures taken to save her.
“Consider this my DNR,” she wrote.
Do Not Resuscitate.
And I found out she hadn’t paid the electric bill that last month.
It had been an overdose and a suicide. It just hadn’t happened the day I found her. It had been happening for days, maybe weeks – maybe a lifetime – before that.
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| CopStories - I Love The Mud |
[15 Jan 2008|10:37am] |
So, when it did happen, it went something like this:
I was doing a security check on a historic church in the middle of nowhere. Kids get in all the time and smoke and drink and light candles (arranged in a pentagram which drives the respectable folk around here bugfuck and just makes me laugh) and - obviously - screw.
There was a window open and so I parked the car to check it out. Went inside, did a check, found the candles and nothing else, and came back out.
See, the problem was, it had been raining in Bureau County for quite a few days. And before that, we had massive ice and snow that had all melted.
And the second problem was that I didn't notice the slope of the land when I parked on the grass.
It sloped down. Therefore, all the water was at my front tires. The ground was soup, which I finally noticed when I tried to drive away.
Yeah, went nowhere.
Absolutely dead stuck. Tires spun and spun and with each spin, sank me deeper into the muck. I worked for thirty minutes to get unstuck. I shoved old boards under the wheels, old branches. I tried to push the car sideways to get something solid underneath. Nothing worked.
So eventually, I had to make contact. If I hadn't, dispatch would have started getting worried. Or I would have gotten an emergency call and had to 'fess up. I called my Sergeant and bless his tired, old soul, he didn't laugh at me. Asked a few questions, and said he'd send a tow.
A tow. A friggin' tow! And everyone in the county with a radio (cops, city workers, street guys, hospitals, civilians, everyone who had a scanner) knew I was stuck in the mud.
When dispatch called me to tell me the tow was coming, what she actually said, over the air, was: "Bu 30, Joe's is coming to rescue you."
Great, thanks for that, I appreciate it.
The only saving grace was that the tow truck, when it was yanking me out, almost got stuck, too. So it wasn't just me. So there.
(here, insert a picture of me sticking my tongue out, sticking my thumbs in my ears, and waggling my fingers triumphantly)
In other words, while being proactive in my policing, while trying to protect the citizens of the county from the unstoppable scourge of corrupt and defiled youth, I had an embarrassing problem.
Hah, that'll teach me. Next time, I'll just stay in the frapping car and drive right on past. Piss on that open window.
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| AARP Card |
[01 Jan 2008|09:04pm] |
So, I'm officially old and here's how I know:
1) Three days ago, after visiting the chiropractor for the third time in two weeks, I had to buy a back support cushion for my office chair. Yeah, only old people do that.
2) I rented the movie "Superbad." One of the highest grossing movies of the year. Supposed to be excellent. It was an absolute turd on a plate. I love T and A movies and language doesn't bother me, but this bore absolutely no resemblance to funny.
3) I was at Wal-Mart in the music section (and no, I don't buy music from the Revelations Beast, but I do check it out sometimes) and there was a teen-aged girl going over things to buy with a Wal-Mart gift card. Her brother, help that he was, suggested a Styx CD. She said - and I friggin' quote - "Eeeewwww, Mom likes them."
Yeah, so does Trey, ya' teen-aged skank. In fact, I have THREE of their albums. And yeah, I used the word album. Do you even know what that is? The only saving grace was that she also looked at Metallica CDs and I did recently purchase two of those.
So, can one of you guys send me an AARP brochure?
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