November 7, 2009
 

I really love this movie. It’s a period piece (which I love to begin with) set in 1959, and revolves around the death of the actor who played Superman on TV, George Reeves. This work gives us an ultimately sad portrait of the Hollywood lifestyle, in spite of the unholy fun, and even asks us solemnly, and convincingly, to grow-up by the end. All the performances are great, the sets are perfect, and the script is a labor of love, so detailed, so rich in inspiration, so nicely paced, so intertwined in its plot like a Jane Austen novel, it can only be marveled at.

Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a private investigator, is hired to look into the death of George Reeves. But while the official story called it a suicide, certain irregularities have been unearthed by Simo and lead him to the conclusion it was actually murder. He encounters considerable resistance for this conclusion along the way from the LAPD and the studio executives. It’s tough going: he gets beaten up a couple of times, his girlfriend cuckolds him, his ex-wife shuns him, his young son of about five withdraws further and further from him, and a separate client in a separate case murders his own wife, leaving Simo shattered emotionally. It’s a constant struggle for Mr. Louis Simo against the world.

Brody plays Simo as an in-your-face tough guy, a gum-chewing, gum-spitting-out, cigarettes-addicted, wife-cheating, seedy, 24-hour-stubbled sharp-dressing rogue with a heart of gold. Brody pulls it off perfectly, and captures the imagination. Ben Affleck, too, is great in his portrayal of George Reeves. Affleck gives us a very moving, evocative, poignant, and even elegant picture of an actor who never made the really big-time and who despises himself for it. Affleck’s portrait is plausible and well-done.

Diane Lane plays the September half in her May-September romance with Reeves. She provides a perfect illustration of the insecurity and pain of loving someone completely who unfortunately doesn’t feel quite as passionate in return. Lane gets the jealousy and the anguish of romantic abandonment just right. For example, in one scene, she’s arguing about career stuff with Reeves, and she tells him basically that he’s out of shape. She then taps him under the chin to demonstrate his growing portliness, and she does it a little harder than necessary to make the proximate point. If Reeves so much as talks casually to another woman, Lane writes that pain on the face of her character.

The movie ultimately belongs to Simo/Brody, however. His investigation leads him further and further into a cascade of revelations that disillusion and embitter him. Even the very purpose of the investigation loses its meaning: his original client in the case has made an utter fool of him. In addition, he suffers several emotional upheavals in his personal life during the case. Every so often, Simo runs through in his mind another of the various possibilities as to the manner of Reeves’ death. By the end, however, he seems to consider that suicide, in spite of the murderous depravity of the Hollywood world he finds himself in, is actually just as plausible an explanation as the several murder scenarios. He realizes he’ll never prove the corrupt studio-head (played perfectly by Bob Hoskins), has murdered Reeves in some kind of bizarre revenge for Reeves’ having left Diane Lane.

Simo has become a more sober and better man by the end. He overcomes self-absortion and its convincing lures, and gets in touch with the reality of how deeply he’s been hurting people he cares about by his manner of living and attitude. He realizes, in spite of his ability to charm women, that he has not even begun to live up to the responsibilities of manhood. He realizes that he is a part of the very decadence that he’s investigating! His reward is that he finally regains innocence through these insights into himself and the world.

In this regard, then, this movie is a bit like The Hustler, wherein Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) finds grim redemption in solitary, unbearable suffering and moral reformation after the grisly suicide of his girlfriend. For this commitment to growth, both these movies are valuable and irreplaceable. Hollywoodland, however, is ultimately not as tragic as The Hustler, since the protagonist hears the voice of doom in time.

October 16, 2009

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The Lost One

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LAST NIGHT I WAS CROSSING CRENSHAW BOULEVARD on foot to go back to Ralph’s from the bank ATM for some ice cream. A little boy, about four years old, totally and incongruously alone, was hopelessly distraught on the other side of Crenshaw, standing on the sidewalk close to the street. He looked about ready to run right into the ferocious, unyielding traffic. He was yelling continuously and incomprehensibly in a loud, guttural outpouring of anguish, made all the more poignant by the ghoulish lighting of the street lamps. I thought he had lost his mother, but it turned out to be his father. It was just plain bizarre to see so young a child alone like that in so dangerous a place.

I jogged across the crosswalk when I had the green to get to him before he did something rash. It was a spacious, well-lighted area up on the sidewalk, safe enough if you stay put, but I’ve never felt someone as dependent on me in my life as I did in that moment. One felt as though any second he would be dead. He looked in every direction as if ready to start running. I arrived and asked him if he had lost his mother. He nodded “yes” and kept up the outpouring.

“It’s okay,” I said, “we’ll find her.”

“Okay,” he said, but didn’t quiet down; he kept up that unceasing, heart-rending wail. He held a cup of forgotten ice cream in one hand, and the white stuff was all over his face.

“Is she in there?” I pointed down at Ralph’s, fifty yards away. He responded with a long, tortured syllable, shaking his head and pointing the other direction up Crenshaw, saying “he” was over there. There were houses up there, to be sure, but the access to them wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to get rid of me with a red herring. But maybe not: it could just be the direction in general where they lived. I looked through the darkness in the direction he pointed, but only saw a woman on the other side that waited to cross towards us. It wasn’t the likeliest chance that she was the mother, since she was of another race than the boy.

I was trying to think fast about how to reunite him with his father. I looked all around. The boy never stopped the incredible, inconsolable caterwaul. In the midst of all this, I looked down the wide, sloping sidewalk along Crenshaw leading back to Ralph’s. Suddenly, and thankfully, a man and a young girl emerged past the thick green hedge parallel with Crenshaw and which lined the parking lot. They were about fifty yards away. They were laden with those white plastic grocery bags. I felt it was a match, like Coriolanus.

“There he is!” I said to the boy. He shot a look in the direction I was pointing, turned silent for a moment, then recognized his dad and older sister. He ran weeping and yelling in a scolding tone towards the advancing figures. He didn’t drop the ice cream. The woman in the crosswalk had arrived by then, and she was as unnerved as I was.

“I thought he was going to run into the street,” she said to me, astonished at the whole thing.

“I know, I thought he was gonna have a heart attack,” I responded. I was a bit shaken up by the experience. It had taken less than a minute, but it was heartbreaking to see a child so unhinged and vulnerable as to be scared out of his mind, seemingly on the verge of suicide. Fortunately he hadn’t run into traffic to get away from me. I could only take a deep breath with the woman, both of us shaking our heads in disbelief, half-nervous, half-chuckling.

Afterwards, I felt sure I had had a significant experience. I felt I knew clearly what really mattered in life, and that I had inadvertently found myself – this is what’s important to me, so this is who I am. Who’s to say I was wrong about that? In the end, I just went to Ralph’s and got the ice cream I had been angling for. Then I jotted this down.

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October 10, 2009
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A LOT OF HOT AIR? The sidebar reads: “Bomb kills 49 in Pakistani market,” while the big color photo shot through the window of the Oval Office shows Obama on the phone smiling broadly. This is the front page of today’s L.A. Times here in La La Land. But what could better exemplify the cluelessness of the Scandinavian Nobel Committee and of Obama’s foreign policy than this above-the-fold juxtaposition?
 

Obama’s “post-American-world” foreign policy, along with his apology tour and the misguided Cairo speech about Islam, all evince in the mind the image of a man who has little contact with the world’s reality. The world is far more dangerous, violent, incorrigible, and totalitarian than he is willing to admit, and his A-mea-rica culpa philosophy will help those renegade forces. I feel apprehension about a global shift in power during his administration, much as we saw take place during the administration of Jimmy Carter.

The Nobel Committee (not a group of people known for detailed contact with reality, mind you) has done something cheap and irresponsible in awarding the Peace Prize to someone for what he merely intends to do, or for what the Committee would wish him to do, as if the prize were a bribe for future services rendered. (Jean-Paul Sartre won the Nobel for Literature in the sixties, but refused to accept lest he be compromised in his future work.)

Well…..it’s obvious that the Peace Prize is now completely motivated by a political agenda, and that the Committee has given a tawdry, discredited patina to their own once-magnificent prize. First they give it to Rigoberta Menchu, a clear fraud who made things up, and now they give it to a man simply because they want him to grow into it, to deserve it in the future. I think the Land of the Midnight Sun needs to start wearing a hat.

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October 3, 2009

I wrote this a few years ago:

Comes the sunset of my soul,

With heavy gloom and heavy toll.

I plow my share in rage,

My unfeeling heart think not to gauge.

My sandy footsteps are effaced by the tide,

Just as time imperils vanity and pride.

Can I ply my oars with unlamenting will,

Or is invincible resentment never to be still?

October 1, 2009  

It’s time for Roman Polanski to come in and take care of the situation. He has an opportunity here to show great moral leadership, and to show that he considers himself subject to the law. Otherwise, he’s out in the wilderness, and can’t be taken seriously as a moral agent. Socrates was given a chance to flee, but didn’t: he couldn’t accept a life of moral wandering and rootlessness. None of us is an unconditioned being, and therefore it’s only just that we not act in such a way that implies it.  
 

Polanski has been given great things by civilization and has also given great things in return, but the accord we all strike with that settled life is that we obey the strictures if we want the benefits. It’s disingenuous to proclaim the right to possess the good things of life, yet flaunt order. To be fully a member of his civilization, Polanski must demonstrate his commitment to the flip side of the coin.    

No one is morally perfect, myself included, but what he did was so lacking in moral compass, such an act of depravity, that it must be addressed, and not swept under the rug, even if Polanski is a genius. He must come before his society and face the punishment appropriate to his actions. I am certain that Polanski is no longer the man psychologically who committed the original crime, but he is definitely still the man who hasn’t come in from the moral cold.  

He needs to show us he feels remorse about what he did: you can’t unring the bell, to be sure, but you can absolutely ring the bells that still can ring (as Leonard Cohen wrote). That is, Polanski can ring the bell of mea culpa, and submit himself to the bar of justice. Those fighting extradition on his behalf, or signing petitions for him, or making this into a cause célèbre, portraying him as a victim, do him no favors. They feather their own nest at his expense.  

Some say he should be left alone because it’s been thirty-two years, and enough is enough. But I don’t believe Polanski has that argument available to him. The reason why this has gone on so long is simply Polanski himself, remaining voluntarily in the outback of moral life. To say Polanski should be left alone is to claim that none of us should be morally noble, and that we should, rather, just do what we wish and avoid the consequences. To aver that Polanski should be left alone is to have a certain moral vision of humanity, sure, but a vision asserting only the smallest of human motives as its zenith.

September 29, 2009  

A Joe Downing Mystery
 

The following is fiction:  

PART THREE: I STOPPED IN FOR SOME LUNCH AT HAL’S 24/7 BURGER TEEPEE IN SOUTH PASADENA AFTER THE MEETING
WITH MRS. B. I looked around as I entered into the icy air. This Hal’s was nicer than the one in Rancho Verde — more neon, more shiny stuff, more babes. The sound of plates clinking importantly and silverware tinkling merrily filled the whole busy, hurrying place. Young men and ladies in yellow or white long-sleeve dress shirts continually whisked plates laden with hot food off the raised counter under the heat lamps, taking them to their ultimate destination and ultimate fate of your table and your big pie-hole. The front window of the place boasted an “A” grade from the County Coroner as you came in (whoops! I meant to say the County Health Department, sorry…..).  

Good to know the place was clean, though, all kidding aside. A long, straight, pristine white counter for the single people ran longitudinal to the main axis and then took a ninety-degree turn, whereupon it crashed neatly into the wall. I sat down there so I could lean back lazily and look out onto California Boulevard. (I’m so enthralled with traffic continuously going by, you see.) I ordered a bowl of chili and lemonade from Uma Thurman and sat back and waited.  

Presently an older black man appeared, but not quite like the black man who was the witness in The Great Gatsby, however, and he was slowly making his labored way through the two sets of double doors. He was clearly a regular (what a sharp eye!), and was picking up some take-out stuff, like burgers and onion rings. Gwyneth Paltrow was cheerfully taking his order for a free cup of coffee while he waited.

This gave me a chance to see him: he was gray and wizened, but perhaps not unlike like a sturdy, battered, hollowed-out old oak tree refusing, steadfast in the drear wood, to surrender to the depredations of Father Time. He wore a dusty, grimy, sable-colored old Stetson rather jauntily, having it pushed back, Clark-Gable-in-The-Misfits-style, upon his white hair. He sported a full grayish-whitish curly beard, stark and low against his smooth dark skin, making him appear like a Greek god about to reach yet again for a thunderbolt or two to hurl down at the mortals on the Peloponnesus. Long navy-blue pants of the Dickies type covered his legs, and these were complemented nicely with rugged black work boots and white socks.  

Furthermore, his dark green, opened, waist-length nylon jacket partially covered a soiled, brown-and-white checkered flannel shirt, which was itself opened to about the fifth button, just above his navel, and which consequently formed an unfortunate big “V” across his hairless, flat chest. One noticed that he was extraordinarily cheerful. Amiability oozed from him like molasses from a Maple tree in Canada…..or something. He had a life-loving, melodious voice, and he used it to spread goodwill to all. Then he noticed me.  

“I ain’t seen y’all here befo’ — I’m Lester. Good to meet ya, sir.” We shook hands melodramatically as he sat down on one of the swiveling seats. Racial goodwill and all that.  

“I’m Joe. Yeah, I’m not here too much…..first time actually.”  

“Is that right? First time?…..well then, Joe, welcome to Hal’s. Whatcha gonna have?”  

“I ordered some chili. Then I gotta get back to work.”  

“I understand that only too well, young man,” Les chuckled in a friendly, ironic way, and looked down at his cup of coffee. People came in and went out all around us, paying at the cash register, going to the restroom behind us to the right, leaving through the double doors out into the brilliant light and torrid heat of South Pasadena. A dry whoosh of hot air (hopefully it wasn’t from me) hit us whenever the doors opened. Stylish white people mostly, not dressed up exactly, but very California Casual and blinged-out. Quite a curious contrast to the family atmosphere of the Hal’s in Rancho. I continued:  

“Yeah, I gotta get back to the grind in a minute: Macarthur Park.”  

“That killing?”  

“Exactly. Making sure it’s all done right, above board.” Ms. Thurman arrived with my chili and set it down, then refilled my lemonade.  

“Would you like a taste?” I asked Les.  

“Nooo, thank you, sir, I got burgers coming.” After a pause, I said:  

“Guess it was the Diablos.”  

“Yeah, Joe, I guess it was, too. I’m with that.”  

“Some kind of turf war with Saliciamon, I bet.”  

“Yeah, yeah, that would be my thinking.”  

“67 stab wounds, must’ve been crowded.”  

“Yep, musta been.”  

“And the guy was strangled, too — why would you strangle a dead body? Unless that came first and went wrong, so that a bunch of ‘em had to gang up on him and go at him like piranha. So it was probably pretty messy.”  

“That’s good thinking,” Les averred, then turned in his seat towards me and went on, “Yeah, maybe the guy gets on top of the strangling, and got the guy what was sticking him. Maybe wounded him. Man got back what he was giving out.”  

“Yeah…..that’s my hunch…..” I replied, then added, musing, “but I thought they were in cahoots, the Diablos and Saliciamon.”  

“Not no more. They was. It’s the distribution — the Diablos done it a long time, but now Salicia do it themselves — got the soldiers up from Guatemala. No need for no Diablos no more: big trouble.” Les nodded grimly.  

“Gotcha…..but I wonder now where I can meet this Pancho Rodriguez cat?”  

“Not in the park. And he ain’t went to the killing, neither. Never do go. Try Pico/Union. But watch yourself, boss, he’s a live wire, a real live wire. Be very, very precautious.”  

“Thanks, Les, I will. I appreciate your take on all this.”  

“Forget it, man.” I offered to pay for both our lunches, but Les declined and offered to pay for mine instead. In the end, after some awkward and uncomfortable racial jockeying, we both just paid for our own. Fictitious moral redemption was not to have its say this day. I then made my way over to the address Mrs. B. had given me for Ingrid. I decided I would save Pancho for later — I didn’t have my gun.  

************************************

 WELL, SOUTH PASADENA MY FOOT. The address that Mrs. B. had given me was in downtown L.A. in some high-rise crapshoot of a building. It was dingy, to say the least, and tall. It was residential, to be sure, but it looked like an industrial animal. Not very inviting, not very savory. Drug dudes loitered and lurked around the front of the entrance, looking like death-warmed-over. They avoided eye-contact, as if not knowing you were there, yet still managed to be threatening. The still heat did not dissuade them from wearing coats. The park was nearby, too, how very convenient.

A sleek new black BMW was parked at the curb, shiny in the sun to the point of eye-pain. A bumper sticker on it read: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, we will all know peace.” I remembered then that the Dalai Lama meditates six hours a day: goodness gracious, six!

I entered the eye-sore, and walked over to the directory to confirm that Ingrid lived there on the fourth floor. She did indeed. I approached the elevator to go up, since I couldn’t find any stairs. The small lobby was like something out of a pretentious whiteboy art movie, pretending to be street-smart: very self-conscious, cool tackiness. A glowering, tall man then came over to me like he wanted to tear me limb from limb. He was dressed in a dirty white tee and old trousers, not jeans like me. He had work shoes on his large feet, dirty white socks easily showing. Flood pants, basically.

“You here for someone?!” he said, as if to kill the intruder.

“Yeah, I’m paying a visit on the fourth floor.”

“I’ll just bet you are, buddy. Wait a minute!…..” he said sternly, as if I had made a sudden move to kill him, whereupon he walked over and looked up at the top seam of the elevator door and shaft, as if he could see through into the dark, cool emptiness there. He pushed the button precisely, like he was invoking some secret knock, to summon the ancient old conveyance.

“Gladys!!!” he yelled in through the crack in the elevator doors, “Are you up there?!” He fell silent and motionless and listened to the fascinating interior of the elevator shaft. No sound forthcoming. Then another loud sally to Gladys, but again to no avail. He was just about to assay a third go, when I stopped him by glancing around and asking,

“Are there any stairs?” He responded to me by pointing irritably at the corner of the lobby, around the corner. I saw for the first time that stairs were there. He surely felt defeated that the elevator hadn’t worked — he slumped, and watched me as I departed. Possibly he had done some maintenance, but it hadn’t taken.

I exited the stairs on the fourth floor, emerging into a hallway through a creaking door: dark, shadowy interior scene. I walked down the carpeted hallway, ancient with smells from before the war. (Any war, just name one.) I soon stood before a smoky brown door, number 444, Ingrid’s. It was about 1:00pm by now. No sounds from within, but I knocked intrepidly, nevertheless. No response. Big surprise there. Druggies aren’t known for jumping up to get the door unless it’s healthy time from the poppy fields of Asia.

I knocked again, not so intrepidly this time, and waited in the silence of the moist, dark, Gothic hallway of the old building. Finally something shuffled forward. Was it a dog? After about a century, there was some fumbling with the doorknob. I felt half-inclined to help from outside. Was she retarded? (Sorry…..that’s just anger talking. Won’t happen again. But wait to see how I get my comeuppance in a minute!) The deadbolt turned, the door opened, sticking, and then the chain jangled taut. A sleepy face peered out at me. I could discern enough to figure out who it was.

A tawdry, yet magnificently beautiful young woman was slouched before me. She had short and chic black hair covering her pale forehead, and shapely ears tilting out elegantly from within her unruly locks. She had sharp features. She wore faded jeans with holes in the knees, dirty pink socks without shoes, and a tight, filthy white top exposing her waist. She looked up at me, bored to death. Then she looked down, chagrined, as if to say “how long is this gonna take?” And then she looked up again, and spoke first.

“Are you ‘Mr. Downing?’” she asked, emphasizing my name sarcastically. I nodded courteously and added,

“Yes, Ingrid, I am.”

“Yes, Ingrid, I am,” she repeated instantly, even more in-your-face. She made a grimace at me, then went on: “Well, yeah, my fuckin’ mother told me you were coming, but why don’t you just do me the favor of just fucking off instead, you little bitch? Huh?! Why doncha? You little fuckin’ wussified, emasculated, neutered, cuckolded little fuckin’ idiot! Huh?! Are you listening, motherfucker? Do thine eyes see?! Just go away, asshole! You bourgeois oppressor of the proletariat! You tiny fuckin’ imperialistic Nazi motherfucker! You neo-fascist Hitler moron! You Nazi motherfucker — go away!!!” She stared bullets at me like a cornered animal. She leaned forward menacingly. There was a pause as she fell into a sullen silence. The potential tenor of my inevitable response hung in the air. Well, I guess, in retrospect, I can now say I was somewhat taken aback: I had really expected that charming Hawaii thing with the lei.

But beyond all doubt, this girl was simply a comedy show. First of all, she looked so coked-out as to be incapable of lifting those proverbial two stamps. I think a new-born kitten could have won a Smack-Down against her. Her pallor was white and wan, a sickly hue that could come only from a long period of ill health. Her sharp nostrils, sculpted originally out of beautiful white marble, were now red and irritated, and looked likely to bust out into pus at any moment, so scintillatingly and painfully abused they were. Her voice was a bit hoarse and strained, but still musical like her mother and sister’s.

Her long elegant arms were slender to the point of evincing in the mind the image of toothpicks. Her feminine hands shook violently with longing for her white medicine and perspiration glistened on her delicate forehead. She finally let me into the place in a resigned way, and shuffled over to a tatterdemalion couch and collapsed tiredly. Her knees bobbed up and down ceaselessly as she sat, her hands all the while moving up and down the length of her jeans nervously, even desperately. Her nails were spotted, shattered, and brittle, her hair dull and a little frizzy. She threw her head back to breathe, closing her eyes. She was the very picture of degradation and sickness.

After the initial shock, though, I could hear a brave noise wandering within her voice, a misguided, ludicrous posturing somehow suggesting indirectly a just-discernable and forgotten sincerity underneath the hypocrisy and the F-bombs. “Make life mean something to me,” the tea-leaves in her tone implored. I could see she was Aly’s sister, too: a demonic determination exuded from her every pore. But she was obviously destroying herself, and one took no joy in that. Mrs. Biddleman was right to be worried, but what had taken her so long to act? Her daughter, Ingrid Maureen Biddleman, was on the edge of obliteration.

“So, Ingrid, how long have you known Pancho?” I asked, as I sat down on an upright chair across from her.

“About a year, not that it’s any of your business, asshole.”

“Oh, yeah!!!” I shouted, “I think I could do without any more abuse, little girl, so wise-up, would ya, dumb female!!!” I glared at her. She was somewhat admonished, she knew I had a point. A family picture was in a nice frame on the pine bookcase against the greasy wall. It showed Ingrid, Aly, Mrs. B. and a man, probably the father, Phineas, all standing together and smiling broadly. Phineas had a yarmulke on his head and a prayer shawl on his shoulders. A Menorah was in the background.

“If you’re so smart, why are you addicted to that stuff?” I gestured at the personal stash she had on the low, unpretentious coffee-table. “Your mother can’t stand it that you’re on it,” I added.

“I don’t care what that thief thinks, she can go to hell. I’ve got Pancho, and that’s all I need. I love him. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Downing.”

“Did Pancho order the murder of Gomez?”

“No! Of course not! He’s not a murderer, he’s a proletarian entrepreneur, not a capitalist business man thug. He brings justice to the people, not mayhem. But did you order the murder of Gomez?”

“Yeah, I did, I just picked up the phone and said, ‘giddy up!’”

“That’s it, Murderer! Get him! Get him! Hey everybody, I caught him!!!”

“Why did you say your mother was a thief?”

“Because she is. That bitch skims 20k a year from the endowment.”

“What endowment?”

“My father,” she pointed at the picture in the bookcase, “Phineas Biddleman, founded the Pasadena Old Heritage Museum in the sixties. It now has an annual endowment of $4 million. Mostly from the John Jakob Jones Living Trust. My mother has been skimming her 20k for years. To make ends meet, she says.”

“Does your father know?”

“He’s got Alzheimer’s, dude. He can’t tie his fuckin’ shoe.”

“You were once a close family,” I said, motioning to the picture, “what happened?”

“Mind your own business, dude! What are you here for, anyway? Are you a chaperone, baby? Mind your own business!”

“Your mother thinks Pancho is in on the murder in the park, and wants me to find out. That’s why I’m here. The rest is up to you and your family.”

“Oh, boy, isn’t that touching! She wants Pancho gone for my sake! What maternal care! What familial bliss! But Pancho cares far
more about me than she does! He’s the best thing to ever happen to me! She, on the other hand, is full of shit! Pancho bought me a Beamer! How’s that?!”

“Isn’t that a capitalist pig car?” I joked.

“No!…..it’s a…..it’s a…..it’s a ‘People’s Justice’ car!”

“Oh, I see. But let’s do move on, nevertheless. Do you see any of that 20k mom skims?”

“What?” her voice cracked nervously, her manner a pretense of being appalled. She sat up straight on the lumpy couch, staring at me, astonished. Her hands spread out on the couch like a sprinter’s on the track in the 100 meter final.

“How much do you take?” I persisted.

“What!!!” she shrieked, ”What are you saying, mister?!”

“I’m saying $4 million is a lot of white snow off the top of Mount Baldy. How much do you get, if your mother gets 20k?” She was at a loss as to how to respond. She looked around the apartment, one resplendent with dirty dishes piled up in the sink of the small kitchen, a mottled cat sleeping curled-up in an old easy chair of the same color, stupid “people’s justice” slogans written by hand high on the wall:

“When they kick in your front door, how you gonna go? Shot down on the pavement, or waiting on death row?”

(That’s The Clash, I believe.) Meanwhile, Ingrid squirmed uncomfortably. She glanced enviously at the cat. Lying didn’t sit well with her.

“Nothing! I get nothing! I mean, just….just a little…..like her…..how did you know that, anyway?”

“How much does Pancho get?”

“Oh, now, wait just a damn fuckin’ minute, mister! Where you going with this? Are you some lawyer creep?”

“How much does Pancho get?” I asked again, deadpan.

“What?” she asked, irrelevantly, a little scared.

“Pancho. How much?”

“He…..he gets some…..” she said, looking around for solace. After a pause she then blurted out: “He gets more than us. He sort of gets Reggie to do it for him.”

“Who’s Reggie?”

“Reggie Colombo, the curator of the museum. Pancho has him siphon off the funds from the endowment.”

“I’ll have to talk to him at the museum. So how does the war between the Diablos and Saliciamon come into all this?”

“I don’t know, who says it does?”

“I dunno, I guess I do. Did Saliciamon find out about the endowment skimming, and want in on it, too? Just like Pancho found out about it?”

“Now how in the blue fuck did you know that, dude?! Is there anything you don’t fuckin’ know? God!!!”

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The meeting drew to a close after more revelations, mostly not very enlightening. Ingrid had to go out somewhere, so we went down together. She briefly disappeared into the bedroom, then re-emerged wearing some orange, hideous hat.

“I guess you couldn’t find your hat,” I kidded her, “but what is that thing on your head, a pair of old socks?” She stopped to stare, incredulous at my rudeness.

“Very funny! How timely! But what’s that in your pants, a Kool-Aid push-up Popsicle? Oh, yummy! I know you’re glad to see me, dude, but chill.” We exited the apartment out into the hall, which was unaccountably still there. I moved over to the stairs. She looked at me quizzically.

“There’s an elevator.” She motioned at the thing.

“It’s not working. The Commish tried to get it to work, but it wouldn’t,” I said, and she laughed.

“He’s a blithering idiot. Didn’t you see that, Downing? It works perfectly well. Everybody knows it but him. It’s just the contacts in the switch downstairs on the lobby level. Up here it works fine — the switch is intact. Watch.” Ingrid summoned the elevator, and soon here it was. It worked perfectly, she was absolutely right. Then outside, on the sidewalk, there was an awkward moment between us. We were parting allies, I think, she had cooperated, but there was indecision in the air. Just then an old, rattling, yellow car heaved by. It looked just about to die on the spot. It was a ramshackle relic of another era. I grimaced playfully at it as it passed and laughed. I made the following observation:

“It’s okay to have an old car — no problem,” I said, smiling a bit and gesturing significantly, “but just don’t have a yellow old car.” Ingrid threw her head back and laughed fully, a beautiful sound emanating from that beautiful neck. You had to be there. Next stop: Pancho.

…..to be continued…..

September 16, 2009

That’s what the headline said on the cover of Sports Illustrated long ago, back in the days of John Wooden and Sidney Wicks on the basketball team. I was probably still a preteen, and I worshipped athletes, so of course I had my little subscription to the magazine. I loved UCLA basketball.

But I didn’t know what “unprecedented” meant. My dad was in the garage, one particular Saturday morning when the issue in question arrived, so I went over to him with the magazine and showed him the cover. “What does that mean?” I asked, pointing at the obstreperous but fascinating word. (It better be something good, if they know what’s good for them, since they were talking about UCLA basketball.)

His eyes lit up with rapture that I would want to know, that I was clearly interested in words even at a young age. I can still see him standing there, delighted, from 40 years ago. “It means it’s never happened before, that it’s the first time,” he answered, leaning forward over me in anticipation of my reaction. I looked silently at the magazine cover (with that deadpan, unself-conscious concentration only children have), which showed Sidney Wicks holding a basketball and smiling pleasantly, as if inviting one into that cover for a little game of Roundball. He was the very picture of youth and health. I didn’t say too much, but I understood for the moment that the word was something good. But I was too young to confirm or deny the mysterious word or the mysterious answer that went with it.

I walked away, satisfied, without saying thank you, glad to have a father who could clear up the various mysteries of childhood dilemmas. I think we watched the UCLA game together later on T.V. We both loved to see our guys annihilate those poor Big Ten teams.

August 31, 2009        

A Joe Downing Mystery 
 
 

The following is fiction:

Synopsis: In Part One, Joe had a dream in which he was easily manipulated by a stranger into hurting a nine-year old child. Joe was relieved to realize it was only a dream, but now he unconsciously doubts his own moral strength.  

The steets were dark with something more than night.

– Raymond Chandler

Part Two:

I HAD TO GO TO PASADENA FOR AN OLD WHACK-JOB. She was pretty decent in the end, though, and pretty smart, too. I awoke unshaven and grungy: no surprise there — it’s called being a bachelor, folks. I was just on my way to the shower, hands laden with soap, shampoo, comb, mirror, shaving cream, razor, and towel, when the landline rang in the office. With all that stuff, I was handcuffed comically as I tried to turn the knob to go back in: to no avail. I couldn’t mange anything except to let the soap and mirror and razor fall from one hand with a nice plop onto the dark, florid carpeting of the hallway. A really white, soapy, liquid, oozing mess ensued thereupon.  

“Is that how you treat the shampooed carpet, boy?” Sammy queried me calmly, slowly coming up behind me (since slow is about as fast as he can go), already at work: 77 years old.  

“Oh…..” I said stupidly, “I’m sorry, Sammy, I got a call right when my hands were full of all this. I’ll clean it up in a second.”  

“That’s all right, Joe. I didn’t mean nothing by it…..go answer the phone; but you know you’re killing me, Joseph, and I refuse to die.” I laughed, and Sammy hobbled away, saying to himself,  

“I been trying to figure that sucker out…..that white dude…..”  

********************

The San Gabriel Mountains run on an east-west axis and sit patiently behind the patios of L.A. and Pasadena like a backdrop to a puppet show. The puppet show called “L.A.” that is. La La Land, Hollyweird. Or, maybe, they’re just a backdrop for the big palm trees and the baseball games in Chavez Ravine — or, maybe, for the skyscrapers of L.A. they dwarf (the Art Deco numbers included, of course).

But they make a backboard, too, for all those foul balls ejected out of the city — those hills, those tall, brawny, scratchy, darkish, scrub-oak dense and Manzanita-monopolized hills, they do know where all the bodies were buried in the glorious founding of the City of Angels.

You see the slate-colored rivulets running down from the summit of old Mt. Baldy (so named for its white top), like so many seams in a forbidding, steel door? Oh, do inquire within — no experience necessary. And welcome to the hotel: check-out time is never. Ya gotta lie to get in, ya gotta bungee jump off a basketball floor to get out. And oh, yes, I almost forgot: Baldy isn’t white on top cuzz of snow — it’s white from something more than just regular snow. Shall we say it’s “powdered snow?” You catch my drift, I’m sure.  

I picked up the L.A. Times at Bristol Farms in Pasadena after getting off the freeway, or rather, after the freeway turned into California Boulevard under my tires. It was a still, warm, pleasant morning in July. I sat outside at a heavy silver table for breakfast, with my four strips of bacon, hash browns, and four eggs (scrambled, Cayenne pepper in abundance).

I stretched my legs and my jeans out and glanced over the paper. The Metro-Link train came clanging by from Claremont and from even further away, come to think of it, San Berdu County. Now, on page two — what’s this?  

Body of Saliciamon member found

Grisly, mutilated state

Located in dumpster downtown: Macarthur Park

“The Times learned early this morning that the mutilated body of Ramon Gomez-Gonzalez, a reputed member of the Honduran drug cartel ‘Saliciamon,’ was found yesterday morning by a homeless man digging through the trash of a dumpster in Macarthur Park. 

“The LAPD spokesman, William Braxton, did not immediately respond to questions whether the apparent homicide was gang-related, pending the investigation. He did speculate, however, that the steady, six-month trend charting increased violence downtown was most probably due to the recent influx here, studied by the University of California Los Angeles, of illegal immigrants from cartel-controlled areas in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

“The county coroner issued a preliminary report giving the time of death as approximately 72 hours ago as of 2am this morning, and the cause of death as strangulation and multiple stab wounds, 67 in all, to the stomach, back of the neck, chest, and the small of the back…..”

Meanwhile, in the sports section…..But it’s a small world: I had just passed by the park on the 110 freeway. Not the place to be at 2am. At the cashier I paid the lady in the funkadelic glasses and the Jimi Hendrix tee, got back in the Corvette, and proceeded to the old Biddleman place in the heart of old Pasadena: Elizabeth Anne Biddleman, nee Astor, 60.

This gal was the whole nine yards — the big hair, the horrible breath from six feet away, the suffocating fragrance, the clothes from about 1842, the fake elegance in her voice, the make-up, ugh! – she was all that, I warn you. A quiet woman, dressed all in white (let’s call her “Guadalupe”), let me into the dark, muffled, huge interior: I was expected (but for what, though?!).

The outside of the house, not to get ahead of myself, was tall and dun, with second-story windows peering down at you implacably (without revealing themselves, however), and there were several inset granite pillars holding up the medieval facade. A wide, neat, broad lawn stretched out in the front and in the back garden, too, with yellow, white, and red roses climbing six feet high and more on prickly, skinny, slanting, tensile vines. The house was set back from Colorado Boulevard a good thirty yards. You could have a scrimmage.

You were out of breath by the time you finished climbing up the steps to the porch. I walked up to that porch on a walkway of wide, blonde-colored stones, like so many trapezoids, under the sycamores and eucalyptus, which made sketchy patterns on the immaculately manicured lawn. Practice my putts? No! Not now! So dive putts, down to my soul!

A medieval light structure thing hung down portentously on a long electric cord from the porch ceiling. The light was still on at 10am, feeble against the light of a hot day in July. But once in, Lupe led me down a gloomy, long, silent, carpeted hallway. My eyes were still full of the dazzling, splashing sun of L.A., so I didn’t catch a lot: some Renaissance-style paintings of some old honchos in suits, beautiful Asian earthenware poised on delicate, curving, gold-leaf tables which were themselves poised under humongous mirrors — things like that — a general sense of clueless old money, in short. The air, too, must have come wrapped up as an addition from medieval times — a bit stuffy and sickly.

Lupe led me into the library and motioned me to a chair: I thanked her and sat. She nodded pleasantly, half maid, half nurse, and went out without a sound. The library was barely illuminated, with bookshelves crammed with hard-cover stuff all the way up to the top of the high ceiling. They looked carelessly put away. I twirled my neck around, looking. Dark wood was everywhere. Rugs with Middle Eastern designs were all over the floor of the comfortable, capacious room, giving a curious impression of being in a bazaar.

This house must have been built just after WWII — it had an aura of the long-ago. A very quiet, humming sound, like a swarm of polite bees, became evident to me. It “emanated,” let me put it that way. It wasn’t the traffic out on Colorado. As my eyes adjusted to the dim, I thought I beheld Miss Havisham herself perched in front of the cloistered window which looked out upon the front lawn. She sat behind a gargantuan wooden desk, which was stained dark brown. Her eyes were closed. Then they opened.

“Mr. Downing, I should like to thank you for arriving so very promptly, and on such short notice, too. It’s very kind of you,” Miss Havisham said pleasantly.

“Not at all,” I responded, “it’s easy as pie, Mrs. Biddleman. I’m sorry, though, for intruding upon you, and that I didn’t speak up. I didn’t know you were in the room at first. The sun; my eyes weren’t used to the dark yet. A very stupid start to the case for a detective.” I looked down at my hands in my lap and chuckled sheepishly in self-deprecation.

“On the contrary, Mr. Downing, I must beg your pardon — I was the one who neglected her manners. I was meditating overlong, I fear. I apologize. You see, I’m a Buddhist. It calms my nerves. But you needn’t worry, Mr. Downing, I don’t really believe it all. But you no doubt perceived my efforts?”

“Well, yes, I did, Mrs. Biddleman,” I replied, “and I really was taken by your meditating. Maybe I should learn it myself! Got to relax sometimes, that’s what I always say!” She beamed and smiled beatifically. I think she liked me.

“Indeed yes, young man! It works wonders for the spirit in these times of trial! I feel eminently serene after my morning effort. Do you know, the Dalai Lama meditates six hours a day? Six! Goodness gracious!” Effulgent praise, to be sure, but “eminently serene?” She continued, the kindness in her eyes turning to a more serious gaze:

“Mr. Downing, now I’ll relate to you why I called. I’m concerned for my daughter, Ingrid. I’m concerned for her safety. She’s twenty-eight, but she has a wild streak, shall I say, and she also has an awful boyfriend, this Rodriguez fellow in a drug gang downtown. He’s horrid, Mr. Downing. I think he’s a murderer and a drug-sniffer. I want you to investigate him, and discredit him so Ingrid will forget about him. I believe he committed the murder in the park, and I want you to gather the evidence and give it to the police.” This was unusually detailed for any client to be.

“Well, Mrs. Biddleman, that’s a tall order, you know. I’m sure the LAPD homicide unit and forensics team have already gathered all the evidence and will move to make an arrest. They probably already have a good idea of who it was, or at least of who is close to who it was. There aren’t a lot of different patterns that come up. It’s surprisingly uniform. They know who they’re up against, I would bet, and it’s just a matter of playing a little chess game, to make it come out clearly.” I sat back and waited. She sighed, and then countered:

“Mr. Downing,” her tone evincing a little impatience at this point, “we both know the police have always had their own reasons for what they do. If they find out it’s a gang-fellow, and how could it be otherwise, they’ll just arrest anyone they wish in the gang. It doesn’t matter to them which one. But it does to me — Ingrid is in love with this wretched Rodriguez. I want you to supplement them so they arrest the right one. They’ll believe you. It’s Pancho Rodriguez — that is the one who did it.” I lifted myself up in the chair from slouching. 

“How do you know so certainly it’s exactly this Pancho guy?”

“Because he’s horrible, Mr. Downing — believe me, sir. And because he had to be in on it: it’s his gang, he’s the chief of it, he’s the chief of the horribles.”

“The ELD — the East Los Diablos?” I asked.

“Yes, Mr. Downing, the very same. I do believe that is the correct name of those hideous people.” She crossed her legs in her leather chair for the first time, pronouncing “correct” by trilling the r’s. She went on: “I want to rid my dear lost Ingrid of him since she is too far gone to manage it herself. You see, she, too, is a cocaine addict.”

I gazed out through the white, lace-covered window onto Colorado Boulevard and its traffic. Things seemed so normal out there, in contrast to what I was listening to now. Traffic went by, on its way somewhere innocently in the bright, friendly sunshine. In a few months the Rose Parade itself would come meandering by — but not now, not in the heat of July and gang war. Mrs. B. grew quieter, and adopted a confidential tone:

“Mr. Downing, my husband, Phineas Cadwallader Biddleman, came to Pasadena in 1933, during the Great Depression. He was a child of three years of age. His father, Asa, was an oil man in Wyoming, and Cad followed in his father’s footsteps. We became rich, and we lived well. Life was wonderful. Southern California was the jewel of the country. Everyone wanted to come here. Then came these times, this violence. My husband was unable to compete with the bigger companies, and he foolishly refused to sell or merge.

“We have fallen on leaner times, I concede, but I expect you to bring a little justice to us at least. I want this man’s head on a platter! I want Ingrid free of him!” Mrs. B. glared a bit. Eventually, after a little more back and forth, I agreed to see what I could do for Ingrid. I agreed to investigate this Rodriguez dude.

We were just about to close the meeting. Behind me, though, as I sat on the dark embroidered cloth of the walnut masterpiece of a chair, the great oak door to the library cracked open a tad. In slid a small, lithe cat, except that it was not a cat at all — it was a very young girl, doing all she could to look older than her twelve years, unsuccessfully (if you’re twelve, you’re just gonna have to live with it).

She kept to the walls, moving laterally, eyeing me relentlessly. She already knew what her mother looked like. A very small, white, Bichon Frise had come in with her, quiet, cute, and worshipful. The girl knew every inch of the library, easily avoiding, without ceasing to stare me down, the green Byzantine-patterned chair up against the mahogany panels. The panels rose to the fourteen-foot high ceiling, which depicted a dreamy reverie scene of the blue sky, beyond the hopeful, sunny, cream-colored battlements.

The girl looked at me a ton, implacably. I glanced at her a tiny bit, quickly. She was slender, about five feet tall, athletic and svelte, wearing pistachio Capri pants, flat shoes, and a short-sleeved white top. She had long, long mahogany hair, straight as a string, like the long grooves in those mahogany panels against which she stopped, fifteen feet from me. Her delicate, fluffy dog, plodding along like a walking bathroom slipper, followed her everywhere, looking up at her from her ankles. Mrs. B. was indulgent, but not too.

“Are you talking about my sister?” the girl queried, calmly, like a grizzled, experienced trial lawyer. She took five steps towards me after speaking, looking deep into my eyes. (The Magic Johnson look-off pass was decidedly not her style.) I looked at Mrs. Biddleman briefly, then replied,

“I’m sorry, Miss, that’s confidential. But may I please know the name of such a pretty girl?”

“Aly, don’t bother Mr. Down–”

“What’s ‘conn-fee-den-tal’?”

“Oh, no, please, it’s OK; she’s not bothering me at all. She’s perfectly charming, in fact.” (Did I really say “perfectly charming?”) I smiled benevolently, trying to smooth the rift between mother and daughter. I went on: 

“But you know what ‘confidential’ means, Aly,”  I said amiably, then made the mistake of adding, “Don’t give me that, Cat Girl.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Aly!”

“All right, I’m sorry. You’re right — I thank you for pointing that out to me…..but do you spend a lot of time with your sister?” I continued.

“No!” she said abruptly and decisively, as if everyone knew something so obvious, then walked fully up to where I sat, put her hand possessively on the arm of the very chair, leaned down to my face, and, in a manner that can be plausibly described as “clinical,” put her eyes about two inches from mine, like she was an eye doctor now. She looked at the sides of my eyes as I looked over, amused, at Mrs. B., who sighed irritably at the interruption.

Aly was so serious and so painstaking as she gazed at my faculty of vision, totally deadpan, I couldn’t help chuckling. Then she had both hands on the arm of the chair, in single file, still searching my eyes, and presently she leaned forward even more with the grave news:

“You’re outside a lot.”  

“Oh yeah? How’d ya know that?”

“Your eyes aren’t completely white anymore,” she answered with finality. Her eyes were mischievous and confident of their wisdom.

“Well,” I smiled, “you’re right about that, Aly. You’re smart to notice that. Are you a detective?”

“Yes,” she promised, “I read Encyclopedia Brown.”

“Yeah?! I did, too, when–”

“Aly! Leave us! We’re discussing business, and this is no time for a young girl’s shenanigans! Take Flapper out in the garden and be a good girl, please!” Mrs. B. was a little bent out of shape. Aly slumped a little, for the first time, and her posture flagged a bit, but she shot me another deadpan, conspiratorial look as she slid her hands over the cloth of the chair upon exiting: “Don’t betray the cause!!!” her eyes said to me. I nodded in assent to the silent imperative.

Aly thereupon picked up Flapper and went out unceremoniously. Flapper barked a little out in the hallway, in excitement at going outside, presumably. Then I had to bark a little out in the car as I got back in: the sun had made the steering wheel super-hot to the touch. I had to go talk to Ingrid, and to Aly, too. Mrs. B. didn’t mind. Well, South Pasadena, so chic, so haute couture, so nouveau…..so…..so…..I’m at a loss for words…..anyway, it was now South Pasadena or bust.

…..to be continued…..

August 22, 2009

Conventional wisdom asserts the Palestinians are suffering from an Israeli apartheid in much the same way as the blacks were in South Africa under the apartheid regime there. Moreover, it’s fashionable to further hold that Israelis are racist like the Nazis, and that Israel, alone among all nations of the globe, has no right to exist. It is additionally asserted, incredibly, that the Jews are perpetrating a holocaust upon the Arabs of Palestine such as the Jews themselves had inflicted upon their own lives by the Nazis.

Thus, Richard Corliss of Time magazine recently reviewed the new movie District 9. It’s set in South Africa, so the proximity to the former scene of apartheid is built-in. Corliss points out that the extraterrestrials in the movie are being deprived of their rights similarly to, according to him, the Gazans in Palestine and the blacks under apartheid. But it is outrageous in the extreme to make an analogy such as this, given the implied correlative, that Israel and the former apartheid regime are morally equivalent. They most certainly are not.

Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, has apparently given currency to these tragic beliefs. But Alan Dershowitz, in his book, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, tears Carter’s book apart, exposing in Carter’s book what Dershowitz sees as sloppiness and disingenuousness. One has to feel that Carter has it coming for the distortions in just the title of the book. Also, Dershowitz shows how Carter works for the so-called Arab lobby, which funds the Carter Center generously. But Dershowitz’ denunciation of Carter is of no avail, sadly, if even a distinguished, senior writer at Time, albeit an organ for liberal policy positions, can so cavalierly take it as settled, established fact that one may imply with impunity an apartheid nature to Israel’s government.

In the world of truth now, not fiction, Arab leaders have been attacking the Jewish national revival since the 1920’s. For almost 100 years, Middle Eastern despotisms have been lying to their “constituencies” about their motives concerning Israel. But the “catastrophe” that the Arabs suffer from in Gaza, the deprivation of rights they experience, is very much one imposed upon them from within — their own leaders have brought it about. That is, the violence in the Middle East is not because Israel has no right to exist, but indeed does; rather, the violence is inherent in one version of Islamic, Koranic teaching that a present-day totalitarian movement, born from Hitler and Stalin’s ashes, insists upon. That teaching, in conjunction with the disturbed totalitarian ideology of a fictitious world conspiracy that must be stopped, would promulgate the same level of violence even if the Jews had not conceived and realized their fully-justified Zionist project. The violence has nothing to do with the Jews or Israel.

If the Arabs had accepted Israel’s existence immediately, in 1920 or so, both Israel and Palestine would now be much the better for it: both countries would be rife with economic development, intellectual development, athletic and artistic achievement – anything you can think of that’s good. Accepting Israel’s existence wouldn’t have been very hard (without a totalitarian ideology in the way of doing so), and would have involved no shame to the Arabs or injustice to them. It would have been all to their benefit. It was only ideology that motivated the rejection of Israel. The Arab leaders have always known that Israel would make itself into a Euro-American style democracy, and so they wouldn’t have it.

To claim the dispute is over a piece of land is as outlandish as saying Israel is the aggressor. Why would Israel wish to be the aggressor? Israel wants to pursue development, whereas most Arab capitals wish to prevent a democratic neighbor from taking root close by. It’s an inversion of truth that accuses Israel of the chief wrongdoing – it’s an overemphasis, to the point and beyond of indefensibility, on the last frame of the story. Israel is desperately attempting to defend itself against the pathological, murderous, and anti-Semitic assaults upon its existence. The willful blindness on campus that denies this obvious fact is arrogant, naïve, clueless, and deeply troubling, at least. It could even be coming from a vague, poseur sympathy with pseudo-Marxist stances.

It can only be fatuous, vast ignorance (and simple laziness) that unwittingly falls prey to the pernicious new anti-Semitism taking up residence so confidently in Europe and America. This new anti-Semitism trendily and casually posits a criminal nature to Israel in supposedly oppressing the Palestinians. But it is the Arab countries, those superannuated despotisms, those quasi-totalitarian regimes of the Middle East, that spin this fable, and that actually deprive the Palestinians of their right to accept Israel, to work in Israel, to run for office in Israel, to reject medieval autocracy, and to live freely and productively. Israel an apartheid state? Only if you’re bought and paid for, too, like Jimmy Carter.

The following is fiction, kids:    

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.”

– Raymond Chandler

PART ONE:

SOME PRETEEN KIDS WERE PLAYING TENNIS. I knew them from around the club, the Portuguese Hills Racquet Club. I had even hit with them and their parents a few times. We had played doubles. Now I just idly passed the time watching their game. They swung mightily at the ball, concentrating so fiercely, so sincerely – and then whiffed. They burst into laughter at the other guy’s mistakes, rubbing it in for all they were worth. No, they didn’t argue about line calls very often, only every two seconds.

One in particular of these four kids would toss the ball up for his serve, and it was so bad it would spray out ludicrously at a 45 degree angle. Unhittable. He bravely swung at it, though, to no avail. He didn’t have pockets, so he’d come up to serve with two tennis balls, as you’re supposed to, but he very carefully would place one of the two down at his feet so seriously, so solemnly, it was unbearable. The racquet was almost as big as he was, I’m required to say at this point. Then the crazy ball toss out to the side fence, and the other kids, anticipating this now, erupting into a riot of drunken laughter. They were absolutely drunk on laughter. Sometimes they didn’t like me, my solitariness unnerved them, or they thought I was putting the move on their mother. I dunno.

A guy in a fancy suit came up to me. He drove up in a sleek red sports car over the gravel parking lot, a car so new it was perfectly immaculate, sexy red, red, red. It gleamed low to the ground, as it should have, and it must have been a Ferrari or something else properly Italiano. It looked like it was fast – yeah, somewhat. Anyway the guy gets out ceremoniously, comes up to me, smiling, and pulls out quietly what looked like a regular old ball-point pen. He shows it to me for some reason. He still didn’t say a word; he never spoke the whole time. He wore a dark and rather expensive suit that shimmered in tandem in the bright sun with the shiny, hot car.

He was younger than me, and he wore a ridiculous pink tie, without self-consciousness, without irony. He had a white flower in his lapel, a pathetic daisy. He proceeded to flip open the front end of the pen, and it rotated down on some hidden, mysterious hinge. I just stood in silence observing this, the tennis game forgotten for the moment. He pulled a dart out of the tube of the pen, and showed it to me, smiling more maliciously now. It had a tip that looked so sharp as to be lethal, and a somewhat fat middle for stability in flight. It, too, looked fast. It looked as balanced and as well-formed for killing as a Cheetah.

He put the dart back into the tube, opening up the other, closed end. He then gestured briefly with his hands, European-style, towards the children. It was self-evident what was to be done now. He handed the instrument over to me carefully, slowly, even elegantly, his game-face on at this point. We stood there on the grass picnic area outside the high chain-link fence that surrounded the courts. The kids’ distant voices came back into my ears now, and one of them hit a high ball over the fence, and it dribbled crazily up to my shins. I fielded it awkwardly, with the instrument in my right hand, and I threw the ball back to the kids over the twelve-foot high fence with my left.

They then started arguing about the score, making spectacles of themselves, easily heard throughout all the club. They provided four straining, high-pitched voices, all competing against one another. Absolutely piercing, believe me. They were just about to appeal to me to play referee in their dispute. But I raised the blow-gun thing wickedly, aimed, and shot the dart hard at little Derek through the chain-links of the fence. It traveled magically, like a beam of light, not hitting anything but the side of Derek’s nine-year-old neck.

The dart pierced the peach-fuzz on his skin viciously, and dug several inches in. A stream of blood trickled down. Derek grabbed at his neck immediately, of course, whirling in pain and confusion. The other children grew quiet and afraid as the situation unfolded. Derek went down on the court, crying, sad plaintive sounds emanating from his young, gasping lungs. He looked at me eventually, as he sat on the court, miserable, through the circle of the other three kids.

He looked right into my eyes, his whole face, in its disbelief and in its forlorn, betrayed state, wordlessly forming the question, “Why?” I squirmed inside my heart like a weasel. Then I awoke with a shudder. It was just a dream. I propped myself up in bed, my senses straining acutely in the silence. The clock ticked. Thank God it was just a dream, it hadn’t really happened. Thank Goodness I wouldn’t have to face Marie, his mother, with that same question “Why?” on her face, too. It had seemed so real, amazingly real now that I had awakened. In the moments when I had seen Derek reeling, I had felt like a walking corpse. At that moment, I would have given anything to un-do it, even my life, I would gladly, with great relief, have given my life to un-do it. But I didn’t have to – I hadn’t hurt an innocent child. Thank God that’s not who I am. It hadn’t happened, I kept telling myself. Thank God I was still a man.

I sat up on the couch where I slept, swung my bare feet to the floor. It was about 4:30am, and I was drenched in the sweat of a horrible nightmare and in the heat of the season. I breathed deeply to prove to myself it was really true, it was just a dream. I almost wept with relief. I knew, though, that I was walking on the edge of a razor, perdition on one side of me and oblivion on the other. That part was not a dream.

And a bundle of questions occurred to me, making their presence known from the much ballyhooed periphery of consciousness. Who am I that I would so much as dream a dream like that? I got up, walked across the bare, wooden floor, and looked out the old window, down into the dirty, empty, nasty streets of the City of Deep Gorge, CA: “The City of Good Neighbors.” That’s who I was, that’s who I was becoming. The courtyard below was still, and shadowy, as the full moon shone through the patchy clouds, casting long geometric shapes of darkness as it hit the steps, the little Greek arch at the entrance, and a sauntering cat from next door. Who will I choose to be? I thought. But, then again, was this all just self-dramatization? Isn’t a dream just a bunch of crap in the brain? I dunno, kids. Onward, Christian soldiers.

It was about 5:00am by now; first light and sunrise were less than an hour away since it was early July. They would bring a moral epiphany with them. I climbed back into bed. It’ll come clear in the light of day, right?

…..to be continued…..

August 9, 2009        

I’m against universal health care because I believe strongly that it’s a Trojan Horse for a larger socialist agenda.  

It’s essentially affirmative action, and it is therefore destructive. It rewards bad behavior. It’s very seductive, though, since it would supposedly “solve” the “health care crisis,” and “who could be against that?” It’s a Trojan Horse in that it’s a way of presenting you with something you must not be against if you’re decent: healthy kids. But once this universal health care becomes the law of the land, another precedent will have been set whereby the government’s function is to live your life for you, to give you guarantees of ultimate support. But a government that gives you everything you need to live will want something in return: unreasonable control over your life. I don’t know about you, but lame free health care from the government (and all those forms to fill out!) is not a good exchange if I have to give up either my independence or my soul to get it.  

Universal health care is affirmative action, too, in that it’s a handout to people who have done little or nothing to obtain it — it will further enable a self-destructive underclass that prides itself on its ethos of failure. That’s how much you care about people?! It will further breed that misguided culture, since if one accepts the necessities of life for free, without effort, one misuses them, one becomes dependent on them, and one loses self-sufficiency and self-reliance.  

Furthermore, universal health care will not solve the so-called crisis in health care. The care it provides will be lousy, first of all, who are we trying to kid, and moreover, it will further strain an already bursting social welfare budget. That means less of what you want. Quality will go down and prices will go up. That is, it will make costs go up since the government guarantees payment, and will be overcharged routinely. When there’s no competition, and therefore no choice, prices go up. And, inversely, the quality will go down, for the same reason: without competition, there’s no accountability from the marketplace, there isn’t a reason for the entrepreneur to bust a gut. It is in the private sector that we find competition, and it is precisely that competition that would keep prices relatively low and quality high.  

In the larger scheme of things, universal free health care will foster irresponsible behavior, will be yet another program to further dissuade people from attempting to achieve the dignity of full self-sufficiency, and will trap people, tragically, in a cycle of failure, like a bird that never had the courage to fly. The abiding, underlying purpose of universal health care is to fully implement a social welfare state which would enable us to finally feel good about ourselves. Many people assume without argument that such a state is the humanitarian thing to do. But we must avoid the rearview mirror in that case, to avoid the sight of what we have wrought, that is, the damage to others.  

The cluelessness of universal health care is best epitomized by a recent cover photo of Edward Kennedy on one of our weekly newsmagazines: he’s looking off blankly into the distance, as if he vaguely sees the future out there, but he’s not looking at the camera — he’s totally detached from the destruction he brings to the lives of blacks, Hispanics, and poor whites as he preens, lapidarian, for the moral mirror.

August 5, 2009

Bill Clinton did good for the young journalists who were held in Pyongyang (since March) for their allegedly being in North Korea. Frankly, I don’t believe entirely that they were really in the country; the North Korean government is quite possibly just making it up. How would they have pulled this off? At a border crossing? Did they beat someone up? Did they climb a mountain and come over the ridge?

And even though Clinton deserves high marks for going all the way over there and enduring the bad breath of Kim Jong Il, it still remains a propaganda coup for his totalitarian regime. (I noticed the T.V. media refers to the regime as a “rogue nation,” which is fine, but it’s obviously their euphemism for “totalitarian.”) We can’t call them totalitarian since that would constitute impoliteness, you know.

This whole affair afforded Kim Jong Il the opportunity of posing as a non-totalitarian leader: first, he gets a visit from a former American president. The leader of the free world comes to pay you a visit?! And he travels to you,
not you to him?! That’s huge, sports fans. This fictitiously legitimates the North Korean government as a supposedly normal government of a supposedly normal country. This is bad for us. We don’t want to legitimate the likes of that regime. In this case, unfortunately, we had no choice, we had to get fellow Americans out, and I’m grateful to Clinton for pulling it off, but at what a price for the freedom loving nations of the world! We had to let ourselves be used for the horrible propaganda purposes of a sick old man whose cruelty and lies know no limits.

Second, the North Korean totalitarian lying joke of a government can play the part of being benevolent, by “granting” clemency to the journalists. Kim Jong Il can pose as the moderate father of his country, doling out wisdom and justice like crazy all day long. But of course we know that totalitarian governments pose as non-totalitarian, and we know that they set-up Potemkin villages to fool the credulous Westerners who visit, and we know, furthermore, that these same totalitarian “governments” use those credulous Westerners as useful idiots to spread the message for them. So what am I worried about if we know all this?!

But do we know all this? Do we know, for example, that Michael Moore is a useful idiot for buying into the Potemkin village he was presented with in Cuba for his doc “Sicko?” Do we know that Marxism is a Potemkin village itself, as it endlessly poses as both irrefutable and infallible? Furthermore, do we know that Sean Penn is a useful idiot, for traveling to Iraq and to Venezuela and then coming back full of praise for them and criticism of us? Do we really know what just happened in North Korea? Do we really know that on the big chessboard of the global political scene Kim Jong Il indeed won, and freedom certainly lost? (Well, we better know it.)

August 2, 2009

The Iranian people deserve our unqualified support. The Chinese people in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had the West’s unequivocal support when protesting the corrupt and tyrannical regime in Beijing, and similarly, we should now extend our support to the Iranians who dare to defy the idiot cabal in Tehran.

The fact is that these Iranian protesters cannot ever be praised enough for their service to the cause of freedom and to the hopes of the world. They obviously face the possibility of death and ruined lives, yet they are there, facing down evil, facing down a lying regime. They wish for a return to secularism, as exiled Iranian journalist Amir Taheri (The Persian Night) has written, and the elimination of the current, illegitimate, Nazi-style, Communist-style, government.

I remember that the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran while I was in college here in California, and I had made some friends coincidently among the Iranian students. I prided myself on being the only one who did, for some reason. But they all hated the shah, and wished for his removal. It was a given among them all. I was somewhat sympathetic to their complaints of his repression, but was also wary of this wave of radicalism. They were so sure that he was the worst possible person on Earth. I can still remember some of them dimly, and I can still remember that many of them were very nice people. Some of the males simply ignored me and endured my presence, but some others would discuss things with me. They would always shake my hand when I arrived at the table in the university cafeteria where we hung out, and they would always offer me a smoke before partaking themselves. The women were always gracious. I remember talking to one young woman about Jean-Paul Sartre, of all people. She thought he was a bit gloomy, and of course she nailed it. I was a nobody, then as now, so it couldn’t have been calculated on their part. They must be in their early fifties by now, as I am, but I hope they’re as idealistic about the current revolution as they were about that other one in ‘79, and are consequently disgusted with the legacy of Khomeini.

It’s inspiring to know that someone cares about truth, and will not flinch, whatever the cost. There is no moral ambiguity here. The regime in Tehran is not only buffoonish, it is dangerous and satanic. It has imprisoned the nation of Iran, and strikes out viciously against those Iranians who would attempt to unshackle their nation from the iron grip of malice. Alarmingly, this depraved, ugly govenment in Tehran has dedicated itself to acquiring offensive nuclear weapons, hiding behind the dual ruses of purported civilian use, on the one hand, and of moral equivalence, on the other, as if possessing WMD is a civil rights issue.

Furthermore, this gang in Iran hosts conferences committed to eliminating the existence of Israel, so that that splendid country could no longer contribute so richly to world culture, and so that the endless, futile, insane, bankrupt assertion of the Arabs, that Palestine’s misery is not imposed by the autocratic despotisms of Araby, will emerge victorious.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is pure evil, and a pure liar. Make no mistake: he poses as a normal head-of-state, concealing the totalitarian ambitions of the regime. He is counting on the West to be gullible, and thereby to believe his infamous statements, or to foolishly counsel him against them, as if totalitarian regimes can turn back. The world is largely ignorant of the inner nature of totalitariansim, and thus gives currency and legitimacy to it unwittingly. Such totalitarian regimes have taken steps into crime from which one can never return to the normal world. It’s forever, folks. Counseling ain’t gonna work. It is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is the truly illegitimate one now, in the horrific, unbelievable tradition of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, and Che Guevara (etc, unfortunately).

But we can hope that Iran may be freed, and that that nation may rise above the catastrophe that befell it three decades ago, when the grisly, murderous revolution of Khomeini took place. And may those friends I made back then not be so ensconced by now in that horrible, sick cabal of Ahmadinejad’s administration, that they can’t find their way out. I hope they will be free. I hope Iran and my long-ago friends will be free.

July 26, 2009

It’s worth noticing that our president chose initially to assert that only Sergeant Crowley acted stupidly. The president chose not to say anything about the behaviour of Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor whom Crowley arrested. Admittedly, it could be debated whether Crowley needed to put the cuffs on Gates, and whether it was necessary to actually arrest him. But the president, significantly, didn’t say anything critical of Gates at all, even though Gates had said, absurdly, that he was getting attention from the cops only because he was a black man in America.

That statement from Gates was actually the most inappropriate action in the whole sorry mess. I can well understand Gates’ anger at the false accusation, but Crowley didn’t arrest Gates because Gates is black, but because Gates was being unruly. Black leaders too often make their living convincing blacks of the alleged continued existence of widespread and virulent white racism, even though most whites are very obsequious towards blacks. Gates seems to be one of these leaders. But these black leaders do their faithful a great disservice, in that they indirectly encourage them to wait for some ultimate tribunal that will make it all right. Better to get started on one’s own efforts to make a life of one’s own, before old age takes away the possibility. 

Obama didn’t object to Gates’ ridiculous statement of racial persecution, but he should have. That would truly have been the real change that Obama prides himself on and talks about so often. But Obama is not a leader, he’s a follower. He incessantly disses previous administrations, and pledges to change things, but when he gets an opportunity, he fails to do anything other than reinforce the status quo. Obama could have taken Gates to task for the over-the-top rhetoric, and exhorted Gates to admit that unpleasant things happen to everyone, not just blacks, but he characteristically failed to do so. Obama could have encouraged Gates to get out of denial, but our new president could only have done so by getting out of denial himself, and that is something he doesn’t seem capable of doing. So Obama is not something new under the sun, despite his pretensions, but he is indeed the same-old, same-old.

 July 18, 2009        

The Coen Brothers specialize in being confusing and exciting. This movie is no different — in fact, it’s tailor-made for the purpose. Thus, in one sense this movie is a sincere lament on the tragic self-destruction of human moral choice, but in another, competing sense, it’s an empty academic rumination on the role of chance in our lives. This tension in the movie between moral choice and chance is resolved in favor of chance, to the detriment of the film. On the other hand, it’s a thriller of great achievement at times, but with an unsatisfying ending even there.    

Echoes of Ancient Greece reverberate throughout this movie, but unfortunately, those echoes don’t ring true: it’s a case of misinterpretation. That is, in the old Oedipus plays of Aeschylus, our royal protagonist is prophesied by the oracle at Delphi to kill his father and marry his mother. In response, Oedipus flees, so as to make it flat-out impossible for the prophesy to come true: just don’t show up, and then it can’t happen. But it does happen anyway, he does fulfill the two prophesies, doing both unwittingly by wild chance.    

But the point in these Oedipus plays is not that mere blind chance wholly rules our lives, that chance is a dragnet one can’t escape. The point is rather that the logos, the rationality of the moral system underlying the chance occurrences, is the really decisive part. Since Oedipus has answered the riddle of the Sphinx correctly, something no one else had ever done, Oedipus has thereby put himself outside human society and outside human morality, and he is manifestly a prodigious moral freak beyond nature.  

The ineluctable logic of moral consequences, then, will bring it about that Oedipus will live a truly monstrous life, as Nietzsche pointed out, since he is a man without compass psychologically. He can see what’s behind the veil of nature’s secrets, he can see behind the riddle of nature’s mystery, and therefore he is beyond the pale, not one of us. So it is not precisely chance that makes him do monstrous things so much as the grinding wheel of punitive comeuppance, the Furies, that is. (Don’t mess with them!)  

To return to our movie, it is, in short, a misinterpretation of all the Greek stuff, to the point of farce. The Oedipus-like character here, Anton Chigurh, compared to Oedipus, is about what a candle is to the sun: not much. The Coen Bros. are experts in this type of brilliant vapidity. Their movies are very entertaining, to be sure, lavish, sumptuous, a feast for the eyes and ears and sensibility, but ultimately they’re empty due to their failure to stand for something besides barren, wandering intellectuality.   

Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, the old sheriff who is worn down and eventually broken by a world increasingly violent and out of control. It could be said his character is a good candidate for the central consciousness of the movie, since the plot spins out his inability to live up to his opening voice-over, wherein he pledges to keep on fighting the good fight. But the sheriff’s defeat in the plot represents the defeat of moral choice’s efficacy, and the defeat of responsibility and accountability. He must lose so the movie can have some fun with juvenile profundity.  

Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a welder, out hunting pronghorn in the middle of the day for some reason, when he happens upon the very bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. He finds dead bodies galore, and, wouldn’t you know it, two million bucks in a big black satchel. (We learn a new vocabulary word, too, the word “transponder,” which device tracks the whereabouts of the satchel.) Fatefully, Moss decides on the spot to take the money, and by so doing he puts himself outside of conventional ethics.  

His grisly outcome is to be eventually killed by the dealers who want the money back. (He had no idea what he was up against.) It is blind chance, of course, that gives him this opportunity, as has happened in so many previous movies (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Simple Plan), but it is still straight forward moral consequences that deliver him to perdition. So the treatment of his character by the plot is one of the bright spots of the movie, since chance is here relegated to its true place as a triggering cause only, not promoted foolishly to an underlying cause. That latter type of cause in this case is provided by Moss’ choice to take the money.  

Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, the most bizarre creation in the plot by far. He carries the chic haute couture of the movie on his shoulders, he’s got the cachet. He is vaguely Asian, or Native American, or Eastern, or…..something — something vaguely out-of-this-world, in sum, not Westernized. This L’Etranger aspect of Chigurh gives him a sense of moral authority (according to the movie-makers, that is), but it fails miserably in the artistic long run. It degenerates into the usual and tiresome Coen weirdness-gratia-weirdness. Chigurh’s dialogue is peevish, irritable, confusing, purposely self-contradictory, and full of half-baked Sartrean existentialisms to snare the unsuspecting. He does everything but wink at the camera. It is definitely funny at times, the Coen Bros. know a good joke when they see it, but the pretentiousness of having a retarded psychopath claiming to know something profound is ludicrous and cliché. Chigurh delights childishly in intimidating the down-to-earth Red State types with his Socratic banter.   

The movie opens with a beautiful, evocative montage of desolate, pure, lonely, deserted countryside, accompanied by a magnificently gravelly voice-over by Tommy Lee Jones talking about the good old days. But he is confused about these bad new days, and the growing level of violence, and he vows naively to continue to do his job in this brave new world of mayhem, that “he’ll be a part of this world.” In fact, though, the plot will spin out his inability to live up to those words: the forces of disorder win in this script, and Ed Tom Bell, the symbol of order, loses. There’s very little music in this movie, but there’s plenty of moody sound effects: lonesome wind rustling through the sage, ominous, crunching footsteps, lightning, and cars whizzing by past the various roadside motels, like so many harbingers of something or other. There’s also a lot of silence, evoking yet more moods. The narrative gets under way and switches cleverly back and forth between Bell, Moss, and Chigurh.  

Moss finds the money and puts it away at home, and then implausibly goes back to the scene of the drug war to give water to one of the drug-deal guys who had been asking for agua. The guy is gone when Moss gets back. (No kidding?!
Didn’t see that one coming!) Is this Moss’ attempt to remain within conventional ethics? It certainly bespeaks a contradiction within him, and an innocence in believing he could survive the excursion. There are many implausibilities like this in the plot: another is when Moss forgets that his mother is dead, and has to be reminded by his wife. He comically stops to think about it, as if he’s realizing, “Oh, yeah…..that’s right!
You know, you’re right!” There are too many pointless things like this in the movie, apparently designed to give it a little psychological texture.  

But most of the crazy stuff is for Bardem/Chigurh, though. At first, he’s being arrested; somehow a cop has got the better of him. (That’s implausible right there, given the preternatural powers the movie ascribes to him.) In the station a little later, the cop foolishly turns his back on him to make a phone call, and just as the cop is saying, “I’ve got it under control,” Chigurh walks over and strangles the cop with the handcuffs manacling Chigurh’s hands. The motif that everything is now out of control in our civilization, despite our best efforts, is thus introduced. We are put on notice that the forces of disorder are stronger than the forces of order. The camera slowly pans over the murder scene, revealing to us a million or so black scuff marks on the floor from the shoes of the sheriff as he desperately struggled against his assailant. This is a portrait and image (like a Jackson Pollack painting) of the violent randomness that emerges victorious in this movie — the Coens are giving us an emblem of the Dionysian limitlessness that joins battle with, and defeats, order and measure.  

Later, on the trail of Moss and the money, Chigurh pulls out a quarter at a gas station, and demands of the station owner that he call it. The man delays. This eventually prompts an irritable, and pointless, “You’re a bit deaf, aren’t you?!” from Chigurh. The man, being normal, is confused by the unprovoked aggression, and by the opaque, shell-game style of conversation Chigurh engages in. The man finally calls the coin-toss out of fear of the consequences if he refuses, and he fortunately gets it right, thus saving his own life.  

Chigurh then says to him, “Don’t put that back in your pocket — it’s your lucky quarter. It’ll get mixed in with the other coins, and then it’ll just be another coin…..which it is…..” This confusing, back and forth philosophizing demonstrates the tension in the plot between chance and necessity. The quarter should be saved, since it saved the man’s life, and is thus a non-contingent, necessary thing. But, on the other hand, it’s still just a random quarter, a contingent, non-necessary thing. The whole scene is too cute by half, though, and is characteristic of the whole movie — having fun being sadistic, juvenile, and intellectually superior towards decent, non-insane, country folks. Moreover, there’s a curious elegance to Bardem’s portrayal of this remorseless murder, an elegance which can only be made up, not taken from real experience, and which can only be explained by the script’s conscious desire to make an innately antipathetic character look sympathetic and chic.  

There’s lots of strange interludes in the movie, too. For example, Chigurh at one point is driving alone across a bridge out in the bright emptiness of nowhere, whereupon he slows down to shoot at a crow he sees sitting on the railing, but misses somehow, and then continues his driving back at regular speed. Oh…..I get it…..this is heavy stuff…..back at the gas station, while he’s torturing the owner with fear, he munches on some snack, like peanuts or something, and puts the squished cellophane wrapper back down on the counter — then the camera, in all seriousness, focuses solemnly and luxuriously on this stupid, irrelevant candy wrapper re-opening and uncoiling. This was a close-up. What are we supposed to do with that? Do these film artists just put a bunch of stuff like that into the movie because they feel like doing so, and then we have to figure it out for them? There’s a lot more of that type of stuff, not worth going over.  

Woody Harrelson arrives in the plot, tracking the money, but the hunter becomes the hunted. At first, Woody finds the money in a not-believable way, yet another major implausibility in the sometimes sloppy script. Somehow Woody has tracked Moss to a hospital where Moss is recovering. Then Woody is outside after the  interview with Moss, walking over a bridge and looking around at random, and just happens to look down at the right moment to see the satchel far below on the ground where Moss threw it earlier for safekeeping. (That’s how it works when you’re a pro, kid.)  

But Chigurh is also in town, and he knows Woody from before. By ESP, evidently, he knows where Woody’s hotel is, and gets the drop on him in the lobby, and they adjourn to Woody’s room. He’s going to kill Woody, but he has to torture him first with philosophy: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” (…..indeed.) Chance rules all, you see. No sense in trying. This is an example of the sophomoric nature of this psychopath the movie seems to think is a cool guy. Woody suggests a deal whereby they go to an ATM (in 1980?), take out $14,000, and “we all just walk away.” (Can you take out $14,000 from an ATM in one visit? I don’t know about y’all, but my bank limits me to $20 a day.) Chigurh looks off into the distance beatifically, and says, like a half-wit, “A-T-M.” Then he kills his friend Woody.  

Towards the end of the movie, Moss is dead, too, at the hands of the original drug dealers, and Chigurh has gone to see Moss’ wife, because he made a promise to Moss. He tries to make Carla Jean feel as though Moss wanted Chigurh to kill her, but she doesn’t fall for it. In fact, Chigurh has a lot of trouble throughout the movie getting people to fall for his philosophizing. He pulls out a quarter again and demands that she call it, which she refuses to do. She says, “You don’t have to do this,” quite intelligently introducing the concept of moral choice into his empty life. He responds with his usual self-deceit by scoffing and saying, “People always say the same thing. They say ‘you don’t have to do this.’ But I got here the same way the quarter did.” He means to say that his being a murderer is just a chance occurrence, like a coin-flip, or just like the quarter being in exactly that spot, instead of somewhere else. The script seems to take this seriously. But then Carla Jean says, “It’s just you, the quarter ain’t got no say.” That’s the most intelligent line in the script, but he kills her anyway.  

Chigurh gets admonished finally, and by his own principle of chance. He’s driving away after killing Carla Jean, driving very safely, in fact, when he gets hit by a reckless driver. He makes a sling for his broken arm from a kid’s shirt and walks off, remorseless as always. He has suffered a minor injury compared to the fatal ones he inflicts. Why is he made so fashionable?   The penultimate scene in the movie is the worst. Bell the sheriff goes to see his lawman mentor, who tells him about the old days, as if Bell is some kind of rookie cop when he’s actually a crusty old veteran. The mentor does a lot of looking off into the meaningful distance as he speaks, a lot of pauses for silence to catch up, a lot of baritone voice, a lot of respectful deference. It’s a masterpiece of crap, totally unspontaneous and phony.  

The last scene has Bell in retirement, at the breakfast table with his cheerful wife, who knows nothing about what goes on in the world. The contrast is extreme. He tells her about his dreams. They had his father protecting him. Then we hear the inexorable sound of a ticking clock, so profoundly, as the screen goes black. Now, this movie is very entertaining most of the time, to be sure, but it needs to stand for something clearly. The purposely confusing nature of the moral sensibility of this work is a major flaw.

June 30, 2009

This movie is very high both in quality and in purpose. It has a sweet, but exacting plot: it gets its pound of flesh in the end. It deserves a detailed treatment. Bill Murray plays a sarcastic, resentment-addicted T.V. weatherman who must cover the tiresome (for him) Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, PA. Initially, his character is overwhelmed with contempt for everything human – no mortal foible goes unnoticed, no peccadillo is forgiven. Cynical disdain governs his attitude.

Once he gets to Punxsutawney, it’s established that he can’t escape. Groundhog Day repeats endlessly. The same things happen, the same words are spoken. He lives the same day over and over. Only he knows it’s happening, only he remembers the previous cycles. He has been chosen by fate for this trial because of his repeated encroachment upon decency, and Groundhog Day becomes the venue of the courtroom since he has become a groundhog himself in his blind tunnel-vision and cave-like life of chewing on others. (His name is Phil, just as the official groundhog.)

Interestingly, in ancient Greek myths, an abiding theme of many stories was the purification the soul undergoes in the travails of psychological suffering. The main moral text of this movie is precisely this unfolding of Phil the Weatherman’s suffering, and his various reactions to it. He can’t be allowed to leave the nightmare until he has earned it and gone beyond.

Back on the first day in Punxsutawney, as the crew of three (Phil, Andie MacDowell the producer, and the cameraman) had finished its work, and was starting out to return to Pittsburgh, a blizzard starts. Phil gets out of the van to talk to a state trooper. “What’s going on?” Phil asks. The trooper responds with the utmost in stern replies: “Nothing’s going on! I’m closing this road! You can go back to Punxsutawney or stay here! What’s it gonna be?” Phil has been found guilty – caught in his getaway. You will not be allowed to diss Punxsutawney and then just take off. Thus starts the Eternal Recurrence of the Same for poor Phil the Weatherman.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche developed a concept he called “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same.” Put briefly, it was a gloomy test: could you live your life over again, the same details, infinitely many times? Of course you couldn’t, I’ll help you out here. That’s why it’s the supposed supreme test for Nietzsche of life-affirmation. The only way to approach the task would be to free yourself completely of all and sundry resentments, and thus you will have maxed your will-to-power, baby. Nietzsche saw the human race as shooting itself in the foot with its pettiness.

Now, Phil the Weatherman has been put in exactly this test of overcoming resentment, disdain, and contempt. He can’t leave Groundhog Day until he so overcomes. But he has been put into this trial by his own attitude, it’s a self-imposed catastrophe. The course of the movie spins out his various attempts to escape.

First he has fun with the situation, once he figures it out, by stealing money, driving crazy, trying to snag some free tush,etc. He also finds he can set himself up in previous cycles for the subsequent cycles: in other words, since only he remembers the cycles, he can blatantly seek useful info from people for use against them in the next cycle. But his wittiness mostly goes awry – he rarely hits a home run because his attitudes are obnoxious and off-putting. So, in despair after awhile, he tries to commit suicide. It turns out he can die in a current cycle, but then he’s magically alive again at 6:00am the “next” day, the new repetition of Groundhog Day. Nothing he does matters or has meaning since he has put himself outside the code of decency.

But eventually, as he notices things and remembers them from the previous cycles (in order to navigate better in the current cycle), he also begins to notice the suffering of others, prompted in this by his own suffering. He turns to good works. For example, he buys an old homeless failure a humongous dinner, and later even gives him mouth-to-mouth when the old man collapses in the snow. Phil’s emotions have evolved from the self-absorbed to the noble. He starts to use his not inconsiderable talents and powers to enrich others’ lives. They are enormously grateful to be taken seriously by such a man, and also prove themselves quite capable of appreciating his elite ability.

Finally, the new sincerity impresses Andie MacDowell’s character, and they become lovers again. The first time, though, she had been swept away fatefully and had disappeared at pumpkin time, 6:00am, when the clock radio alarm went off, playing Sonny and Cher’s “I got you, babe.” The song was meaningless to Phil, alone in bed. It was just another cycle beginning, another Groundhog Day. But now, this second time, 6:00am arrives, and she’s still there. It’s not Groundhog Day any longer, since fate, life, and the Furies have allowed him now to move on from the nightmare. He has paid his debt with the currency and coin of decency and sincerity.

This movie has a real redemption on offer, as did “Memoirs of a Geisha,” given that the protagonist has to go through real trials, with all the human mistakes made, before reaching true life. This is in contrast to the epically abysmal crap of “The Da Vinci Code,” where the protagonists are mollycoddled by the script into believing themselves victims of an arbitrary totalitarian society that they must overcome with their badass “courage.”

June 29, 2009

The president’s response to the rampant theft of the Iranian election is irresponsible and pathetic. His administration procrastinated as long as possible in order to avoid saying anything controversial, and only when it was demanded of him did the president begin to timidly mention the outrage for what it was: the second stolen election in a row in Iran. The truth is that Iran is held prisoner by the regime in Tehran, a regime that does not have popular support. The ruling mullahs are completely corrupt, and they rule the country for their own depraved self-interest. They are a joke within Iran.

To speak as if maybe the election was fair, to speak as if we need to look at both sides dispassionately, is ridiculous – what cave do you live in, Copernicus? The ruling clique in Iran is dishonest, and has been ever since it took power in 1979. There’s no ‘if’ about it, it’s a lying regime that wishes regional hegemony for no reason whatsoever but its ludicrous totalitarian designs. What we need is a strong president who will stand up for truth, not an eloquent salesman.

Barack Obama sees himself as the third chapter of the New Deal, begun by FDR and pushed forward by LBJ. But at least FDR brought eventual economic prosperity to America with some of his financial and banking programs, but LBJ brought only inflation, high interest rates, and unemployment. The policies of Lord John Maynard Keynes were the inspiration for both these men, as they are for Obama.

But our new president does not live in the actual world, but rather in a world of fiction. That’s why he’s a Keynesian. Further, his domestic and foreign policies are of a piece, in that he foolishly applies a priori theories to the actual world, and thereby drives us off a cliff. In economic policy he is going to prolong the current recession with his deficit spending, since it is based on mere entitlement programs, and not on the creation of wealth. Thus did LBJ cause a recession. In foreign policy, Obama is busily giving the message to the radicals of the world that America does not stand up for truth, or stand against totalitarianism, but only blah-blah-blahs a little bit. Obama is waiting for the news to lose steam, so he doesn’t have to keep addressing it. The Iranian election is Obama’s chance to be the change he talked about in the election season here, but so far he’s just milktoast, while stupidly letting the enraged Iranian people turn into burnt toast. The American people, however, will not notice who he is: they voted for an end-in-itself: a black man in the Oval office. Those who voted for Obama never thought beyond that end, or about whether he could govern worth a damn.

Tony Downing

May 28, 2009

A Joe Downing Mystery

The following is fiction:  

Part 6: 357 Sig Reloaded, or, Street Cred to Burn

FRAYED NERVES WERE TAKING OVER. That rope was just about to snap. Strands separated off gradually and curled up insolently. I spun and twisted slowly, agonizingly in the tension. Getting your ass kicked and then shot twice doesn’t do much for your Christmas. You’ll take my word for it, I’m sure. Well, we were in St. George, Utah, holed-up. It was now Monday morning, the 28th of December.  

Me and Johansen had picked St. George for getting sewn up and mended in since it had a central location, and it wasn’t in Nevada. Early Saturday morn, the 26th, about 3am, we had abandoned the Mercedes in the parking garage of the hotel in Vegas, and had taken only the Corvette, the unknown car to the populace of Las Vegas. We took off in the middle of the night. Already paid. We had gotten the endless bleeding to stop when the blood coagulated, and we had contacted, through the motel in St. George, a doctor to fix us up Saturday morning about dawn or so. We had gotten back a clean slate to a certain extent. No questons asked about the lead, fortunately, but that couldn’t last for long. Hiking accident, maybe? There’s a whopper, kids! I called Tom Wilkinson to sound him out. He was home in Rancho Verde. I walked outside to make the call.  

“I think she’s got Stockholm Syndrome,” Tom said.  

“Yeah, I think so, too. Feelings of sympathy for the kidnapper. But it’s obviously even more than that. If they’re blogging pals, then I’m sure she went voluntarily, and like you said, the dog never protested the initial escape. She doesn’t consider herself kidnapped.”  

“Maybe not, but the Mann Act does.” I looked up at the rugged walls of red rock towering above my head. The sun shone from a white sky. The air temp was brisk and refreshing, not bad at all.  

“So, how do we shake her out of it?” I asked.  

“You can’t. She has to make that choice on her own. It’s up to her. Nothing you can really do but show her an alternative example. Break her faith in this Jones character.”  

“It seemed there was a chink in her armour when she saw her father shot. Like she wasn’t sure of Jones anymore. Like she was feeling, ‘who is this guy shooting my father?’”  

“Good. That’s a first step. Play on that. It’s your best ally…..I found their blogs on the Web, too. Jonesy is all about radical politics and the coming revolution. Idiotic stuff. But very slick and polished, nevertheless, the guy knows what he’s doing. The actual writing, though, is sophomoric, embarrassing, even. Check this out: 

‘These counter-hegemonic narratives provide historical transformation from the Colonialist symbologies, and supercede ineluctably the Euro-American, neo-liberal perspective.’

“How’s that for gobbledy-goop?” Tom asked. 

“Pretty damn good,” I said. “Ya gotta keep a soft spot alive for those counter-hegemonic narratives, c’mon. So what’s Chelsea’s blog like?”  

“It’s all about photos and friends and being social. It’s a chick flick, all the way. Not any politics at all. It’s more like a MySpace page than anything else. She’s very handy, though, she also knows what she’s doing. It’s like a scrapbook.”  

“Yeah, I get what you mean. Any recent postings on either site to give us a clue where they are? Any chess clues?”  

“No,” Tom answered, “neither one has posted for several days — the 23rd for him, the 24th for her. That’s unusual, it looks like: they both seem to post 3 or 4 times a day.”  

“Okay, just trying…..but now — any ideas about how to get the drop on him?”  

“You could blow his head off his shoulders with a Smith and Wesson.”  

“Yeah, I could. And go to jail. Any non-jail ways you can think of, amigo?”  

“Not really. But how’s this — I e-mailed the publisher of Chess Life magazine, since Jones’ blog has some chess postings. Apparently Jones was pretty good. U.S. Top 100, the publisher said!”  

“Top 100?! His resume said Top 25!”  

“Really? Well, I guess he’s lying on his resume, then. Anyway, he was gonna be the next Bobby Fischer or something, get the crown back for the United States. Tactical genius, nerves of steel, great preparation, stuff like that. But he lost some chance in 2002 to enter some challenger tournament for the world title. He was going for the gold, the whole enchilada. But he got DQ’d, and he felt there was some unfairness from the U.S. chess head honchos. A bourgeoise organization, don’t you know.”  

“Ah, I see it all now. Chess is so known for those flagrant fouls…..well…..all right, Tom, gotta go, thanks for the narratives, and let me know if you find anything out. Later.”  

“Be careful, Joe.”  

***************************************

 I went alone to the grocery store to get us some food. It was about 8am. Johansen was on the phone with Julie. I also bought a small chess board in anticipation of the next clue from Jones. Moving around slowly, the stitches held. When I got back, Johansen showed me the latest text from Jones, just in:

Pe4     Pe5

Re3     Re6

Qe2     Qe7

Ke1     Ke8

North, POS

“What do we do with that?” Johansen asked, exasperated, gesturing towards the display. His hair was unkempt, his slacks travel-worn, his appearance disheveled. Worry and strain bit at his face.

“We figure it out, that’s what,” I answered.

“Figure what out? This crap? Why can’t the weasel just come out and face us?”

“He’s a sadist. That’s why he’s doing this. He doesn’t think about the future — only in a chess game, not in real life.” We set out the pieces on the board.

 King

Queen

Rook

Pawn

Pawn

Rook

Queen

King

“Now — these are all pairs of chess moves in the text message. Four pairs, to be precise. The first move of each pair is white, the second is red. I don’t know if he’s white or if we are, or if it matters. Let’s set out the moves.” As it turned out, we decided to just clear the board of all pieces except those mentioned in the text. All the pieces were on one file, the ‘e’ file.
 

“Well, what does this do for us?” Johansen asked.

“Everything’s on the ‘e’ file, or column, for some reason,” I ventured. “It looks like an invitation to a final battle. A makeshift formation for a special game. Look, he’s got pawns leading the way, then the castles, or rooks, then the Queens, then the two kings last. All these pieces are capable of moving in a straight line, straight ahead. This set-up is like a head-on collision, an Armageddon scene. He’s asking for a shoot-out to the death.”

“We’ll be glad to give it to him.  But how do we know where to show up? And what does he mean by this ‘North, POS?’” Johansen queried.

“‘North’ might be telling us what direction to go from Las Vegas. ‘POS’ might mean ‘position,’ of course, but who knows?”

“It might mean ‘Pile of Shit,’ too. He seems to enjoy that particular phrase,” Johansen suggested.

“Yeah, it probably does mean that, come to think of it. We already know the pieces are in position, why mention it? He wouldn’t miss a chance for an insult. So, then, why the ‘e’ file? What’s ‘e’ mean?” I asked.

“Entrance?” Johansen proposed.

“Maybe,” I said, “what else?”

“Equine. Equality. East. Everywhere. Enema.”

“A place, yeah! It might be a place, like the other clue. And it’s out in the middle of the board again. Going vertical, like a freeway going north on a map. This formation is a map!” I said.

“We’re supposed to drive on this map? On the ‘e’ freeway? Or east?”

“Yeah, it could mean east, but he put ‘north’ down probably to make sure we didn’t go east. The ‘e’ then might not be a compass direction. He wouldn’t put two compass directions in one clue, I don’t think. It would be too confusing,” I said.

“So what’s a place that’s out in the middle of nowhere, that’s north of Vegas, that involves a straight shot on the freeway, and has something to do with an ‘e’?” Johansen summed up.

“The initial of a city, you mean? It could be the initial of the city we’re supposed to meet him at. What are some ‘e’ cities?” I asked. Johansen paused, thinking.

“North of Vegas?” he clarified.

“Yeah, north of Vegas,” I repeated after him. We sat and thought in one of the dumpy, seedy rooms we had rented. Traffic outside began to pick up, people driving to work. Not much occured to us.

“We need a U.S. map.” I went to the manager’s office, found a man already started in on another day of marathon T.V. watching, got him to get up out of the chair somehow, bought a map from him, and returned to the room. We opened it out on the floor. We pointed to Vegas.

“Okay, north of Vegas means the 15 freeway. Any cities beginning with ‘e’?” We traced a route up the 15.

“Enoch, Utah; Ely, Nevada; and Evanston, Wyoming,” Johansen said. “Which one?”

“Enoch is right on the line of the freeway, and Ely is to the west. Only Evanston is really fully to the east of the15,” said.

“So?” Johansen replied.

“It could be the ‘e’ file represents two things: the initial of the city, like we said at first, and also the compass direction.”

“But you said he wouldn’t put two compass directions in one clue. Too confusing,” Johansen declared.

“Yes, I did say that. But what if he could embed the second directional clue within an already existing clue? In other words, the clue telling us to go east of the 15 might be embedded within the same clue for the city-initial. That would satisfy his need for efficiency. So the ‘e’ file clue does two things. It says first: ‘a city that begins with an E.’ Then it says secondly: ‘go east of the 15 to get there, not west.’ If it’s really Ely or Enoch, then he hasn’t finished the clue — he hasn’t gotten us off the 15. He has to break the tie somehow between the three cities. If it’s not Evanston, then he has to let us know it’s either Ely or Enoch. But he didn’t do that. He just left it. That means Evanston.” Johansen became studious.

“Yeah…..yeah, you’re right. He has to break the tie. I guess that’s why I’m the stock broker and you’re the P.I.” (I promise you I didn’t say anything or laugh at this point.) Johansen continued: “Well, I’m ready whenever you are, Joe. Let’s get the hell outta here. Let’s go get Chelsea. And let’s not mess it up a third time.”

********************************************

 IT’S MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED MILES from St. George to Salt Lake City. We didn’t stop much except for a pitstop here and there. Johansen drove the Corvette part of the way, and handled it pretty good. But we didn’t stop much on the way to SLC. And we left it pretty quick, too. We took the Interstate 80 East, straight outta SLC. But we had to be so very careful. The fuzz seemed to have some sort of joint task force out on the highways, a combined job of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Now was not the time to get pulled over by the state troopers, not with a shooting just past in Vegas, trumpeted on the T.V. news, and not with the two of us plum full of stitches. No, indeed. Now was not the time to go over the speed limit. So we kept it down to 85.

Evanston, Wyoming is about eighty miles east of SLC. The highway in was mostly dry all this time, a pale sun had boiled off the ice crystals. When we hit some occasional treacherous parts that had gotten little sun, we slowed a bit. We turned the car backwards once, but no injuries. You can’t expect too much from Southern Californians. But, all in all, we were fed-up with this Jonesy, fed-up with cross-country driving, fed-up with being shot at, fed-up with kidnapppers, and fed-up with being far from home in the cold without the right clothes.

Finally we pulled into Evanston, which is just 6 miles in from the border with Utah, at about 3pm, still on Monday, the 28th. We took charming little Harrison Street down from the 80, and went along that winding way below to Front Street, a more serious and industrial looking set-up, with store fronts (some abandoned), a police station, and the sturdy, still-functional, old railroad tracks that old man Evans himself had used so long ago. Front Street was the main drag of the place. Sunset was getting close, and the sky was losing light fast. Descent into a storm of darkness once again, just like back on Friday, Christmas Eve, when I first met Johansen.

Snow was everywhere. Looking down perpendicular to the right as we tooled along the gradual slope of Harrison, we saw, at the shoulders of the residential streets, snow piled up two feet high by the snow plows, or even waist-high in spots, almost shoulder-high. A good place to hide behind, come to think of it. All the streets sloped precipitously and icily down from Harrison, as if they wouldn’t let you back out if you only had 2WD. Just take a wild guess what the Corvette had. These streets were motionless and silent, as if painted on a canvas. Illumination glowed cheerily from within the neat, upright houses, soft spots of light behind curtained windows. The omnipresent snow perched lazily on the rooftops, and icicles, 6 or 8 feet long and as fat as your arm, hung down from under the facia of the tall school building on 10th, like so many Swords of Damocles poised above thy head.

On Front Street, going-home traffic nudged along. Some drivers had their headlights on even at 3pm. There was the occasional, brief whoosh! as a car’s tires had momentary trouble gaining traction. Everything was white save for a narrow and black asphalt strip in each direction on Front. Sound was muted from all the snow. We turned left on 9th and then left again immediately into the Mavrik gas station. Snow piles, 6 feet high, and just as wide, were pushed off to the side of the small payment shack. Huge monoliths of snow. Hide and go seek.

We pulled up at a pump and got out. The chilly air bit savagely and ferociously at our skin through our thin cotton and wool clothes. A slight breeze added its force. Nerves were worn. Anxiety nibbled at our thoughts, and the cold aggravated it a thousand-fold. There were three parallel rows of pumps, it was a big boy of a station. We were in the outermost row, at the back pump, right on Front. Off to the furthest right side, and at the front pumps, my eye caught something. Hadn’t noticed at first. The fatigue, the altitude, the whatever-factor had prevented me. The view to over there was blocked a bit by the pumps and by a pillar holding up the sun roof. I moved a step and leaned to see better. It turned out there was an old, blue, beat-up Volvo station wagon pulled up at the pump.

 My blood stirred. I peeked casually around the corner and saw a ‘Free Tibet’ bumper sticker on the Volvo. Lightning shot through me. He had managed Wyoming plates, too. I pulled back, out of sight, behind our pump at the rear. I looked at Johansen, who hadn’t yet seen. I motioned him over to the driver’s side with me, and reached for the Colt and the Sig. I looked down at the snow and at my black shoes, trying to summon strength. Something inside told me that I didn’t really have to do it. Not now, not this fast. My heart beat wildly. I could let this pass, no one would know but me. Johansen hadn’t seen. I could make something up. I was freezing, shaking, trembling with anticipation and fear. Johansen came over to me, wondering what was up. I had to make a decision.

“…..to the right…..forward pump…..” I said quietly, with my head and eyes down. Johansen listened, alarm on his face, swallowed hard, and then looked over like a rifle shot. It was his daughter’s life at stake. He grabbed the Colt out of my hand, practically taking my wrist with him. People went nonchalantly in and out of the mini-mart. The double-doors slid open and revealed the interior: potato chip racks, sodas, post cards, people milling around. The doors slid shut.

“Only Chelsea’s in the car,” Johansen whispered vehemently, “he’s not in there.” I nodded.

“…..all right…..” I said, “we go over there slowly…..then you bring Chelsea over here…..watch your back at all times, 360 degrees! He could be anywhere, watching us right now, right this second. This guy is Houdini. I’ll block him from getting at her while you put her in the Corvette. I don’t care if he shoots me, I don’t care if I leave this stinkin’, ugly world. Let’s make one thing right.” We spoke in fierce undertones.

“I’m gonna get Chelsea, and I’ll kill that psycho if he interferes,” Johansen declared.

“Good,” I agreed, “let’s saunter over there carefully, and keep your gun concealed, for God’s sake!” We snuck up to the back of the Volvo, on the side of the pumps away from the car, as if we were looking for the squeegee (the ruse didn’t have to work for long). We saw a blonde head bobbing around inside the Volvo, on the passenger side. No one was on the driver’s side. We slid over to the other side of the pumps. We stood in back of the car, so close as to touch it if we wanted. Our gaze took in everything, but still we didn’t see Jones at all. That meant, of course, that he had seen us.

Johansen didn’t need any prompting to go around to the right side of the Volvo, and up to the closed, frosty window on the passenger side. He appeared at the car window in front of his daughter. The window was worked down very laboriously and slowly, like something was making it drag. A sad voice spoke to him from the depths of an intolerable purgatory.

“Dad…..help me…..get me away from him, take me home, please, Dad, please…..” It was the most plaintive sound I had ever heard. Johansen responded without hesitation:

“Of course, my love, right now, we’re going home, we’re going home to mom right now…..I love you Chelsea, I love you more than anything in the world…..” Johansen reached over and opened the door of the Volvo just as a shot rang out. His eyes dulled and rolled back, and consciousness departed from them. He slowly fell forward against the car, his body weight shutting the door again. He slid woodenly down the car body to his left, hitting his face repeatedly, and ended up face down on the concrete of the pump bay. Red oozed from a hole in his neck. His spinal chord had been ripped by the bullet, and death had been punctual. Chelsea recoiled in speechless disbelief, and climbed out of the car awkwardly, whimpering and sobbing. Her wrists were bound in filthy duct tape, and red friction marks were evident.

I turned towards the origin of the shot, behind one of the snow monoliths. I saw a man in a trench coat and fedora looking at me from behind wraparound sunglasses. His left arm was in a sling, and he leaned to the side, favoring the left ankle. Dried blood stained the sling dark brown and red. He looked like a mad man escaped from the dead house. His timing had been impeccable: as I had turned towards Front Street to shoot a glance, he had stepped from behind the monolith and fired from 15 feet. We shot at each other immediately, without any discussion now, a mutual shoot-on-sight policy, and we pulled the trigger at the same instant. Reverberations rolled through the air. People scattered again, just as in Vegas. Both of us hit the other in the core area. We stumbled back in odd unison and onto the snow, clutching our stomachs. We stared at one another wordlessly as we fought strenuously to regain our feet. We both got up and stumbled forward to engage. He shot again, missing me, hitting something loud. The gloom of late afternoon gave his features a hideous aspect. I shot back with the Sig, hitting his thigh. I slipped on some hidden ice beneath the snow, and I dropped the Sig, which went flying to the side. Jones approached and put me in the crosshairs of the Colt carefully, and also walked towards Chelsea. His eyes darted everywhere.

 He suddenly slapped Chelsea with the back of his hand, and shot me through in the stomach again. Enraged, he yelled:

“Get back in the car, whore!!! And shut-up, why doncha, bitch?!” Chelsea wept uncontrollably, and he shoved her in. He hobbled into the car and drove off.  I labored to my feet eventually, got the Sig, got Johansen’s Colt, and gave chase, leaving Johansen’s body there. I was his daughter’s last chance. We raced and fishtailed down Front Street, away from Harrison now. We got on the Interstate 80, passing the Wal Mart where Jones must have gotten some ammo. We went east towards the Bridger Valley. For almost 35 miles we raced each other towards an early death. The Corvette was still low on gas, so I had to do something quick. Up and down we went on the Three Sisters, the long, steep slopes of the Rockies. The beauty of the mottled scenery made a mute, curious contrast to the ugliness of human affairs.

Jones got off finally at the Fort Bridger exit and started down the extended, 2-lane ramp road to Bridger. Deer startled and ran. After about 6 miles of this he turned left at the Urie Crossroads and headed frantically out onto State Highway 414. We were the only customers on the roads. I was about 10 seconds behind him at this point. Perpendicular dirt roads under the snow passed by every so often, risng up to mesas from the 414. Then, far up ahead, in the shadowy light, I saw his brakes lights go on, and he stopped altogether in the middle of the road. Then he got out alone. He shot at Chelsea through the open door, and started off to the left, tramping and hobbling over to the dirt road on his bad ankle and with bleeding thigh and core. Heavily he climbed over the metal gate, clutching himself, and limping as he started off again. He slumped forward from the waist as he struggled, an insane, hopeless portrait of a lost human being.

I reached Chelsea, my eye on Jones as he plodded up to the top of the mesa through the snow. I relieved her wrists of the duct tape. She cried and spoke incoherently, tragedy etched on her face. She shivered with the cold and with the violence,  and paroxsyms shook her body. I gently put her in the Corvette, gave her the fully-loaded Colt in case things didn’t go as planned up on the mesa top, and locked the doors. I started out after Jones. This was gonna be the last time I followed this guy.

Darkness vied with me to get to the the top of the mesa first. After a minute, I arrived at the top at last, breathing hard, feeling dizzy, wet, exhausted, and freezing, looking all around. Snow was everywhere for miles. Undulating snow covered the rugged, scrawny sage for scores of miles in every direction. The sky by now was a deep blue, the sun just down but still glowing a bit from beneath the distant horizon. Footsteps crunched in the ice off to my left. I saw a dark, familiar figure 2o yards away, standing, strolling, loitering off the road, arms to the side, a gun in one hand, pointed down. The figure stopped and spoke as if an old acquaintance had arrived.

“Hey…..Downing…..Downing, my friend, tell me something, old pal…..do you know what it’s like to be loved…..?” The heavy silence was broken by his hacking voice, and silence reconvened as he fell into reticence. We stood looking at each other in the quiet murkiness and isolation. I looked at him, he looked at me. Alerted Pronghorn suddenly appeared, ran off, and disappeared into the gathering night. Only we were left. Jones’ voice was tired:

“Hey!!!…..Downing!!! I’m talking to you, man! Do you know what it’s like to be loved?!!!…..asshole…..” I stood staring at him. He stood staring at me. We were now ten yards distant. He raised the gun slowly at my face.

“Answer me, asshole! Because I don’t know what it’s like! And I know you’re just like me…..you don’t know either…..” He began to laugh in triumph, rocking his head back, but keeping his eyes on me. His laugh was a bitter, disappointed, joyless sound. He shot at me with the Colt I had lent him. I fired at him with the Sig. We both missed, and he burst into laughter again. He fired yet again, missing yet again. I approached for a closer shot, hobbling and tripping in the snow and sage like a wounded zombie. I held the gun sideways, looking down my extended left arm at him, protecting my face. We fired simultaneously, and we both were hit. I fell with a wound to my side, Jones fell with a wound to his forehead. The sound of the shot cleared. He fell back on his head in the snow, making a final, heavy, padding sound in the snow as he left this life. He was dead. The silence recommenced its long reign. I crawled over and took my gun back from him. I saw the white crystals of snow on the ground change hue as his blood stained them red.
 

All the shooting and all the killing were over. I collapsed down into the snow in the dark to wait for the sheriff. I lay down flat on my back, next to Jones, looking up at the sky as it gave itself to the winter night. A light snow began to fall on my face, melting as it hit the blood on my clothes. The snowflakes floated and drifted down from the darkening ether, as if a curtain was falling on a play. My eyes closed.

************************************************

Three months later, I was having lunch at Hal’s with Tom, Lorraine, and Alicia from the law firm in my building. We saw Chelsea and Julie. Both of them gave me a solemn hug, and shook hands with Tom. Their somber faces said it all. Julie spoke first.

“Joe…..I’m so glad to see you. I wanted to thank you in person for coming to the funeral…..David knew you were the only one who would see it through…..without you, Chelsea wouldn’t be here…..” She hugged her daughter. “That’s why he picked you. I’m so grateful to you.”

“I wish I could have done more, Julie, I feel like I failed you…..your husband…..was very noble…..” Chelsea hugged me again, burying her face in my tee-shirt, fighting back tears. It was spring again, no need for trench coats now. The mustard plant was making a brilliant, magnificent, yellow splash all over the Southern California hilltops. Johansen was dead and buried. We were alive. His duty was done. Ours was not yet done. We had to march forward and soldier on for him and for all those before him who had given everything to assist the victory of goodness and secure the defeat of malice.

THE END

Tony Downing

May 18, 2009 

A Joe Downing Mystery

Nota Bene: Thank You to Patrick Sperry, of  the Conservative Libertarian Outpost, for his expertise and advice on nomenclature concerning firearms.

The following is fiction:
 

(caution: extraordinarily strong language)        

Part Five: Sweden, Here We Come! or, We Got Waxed  in Vegas!

Me and Johansen got into a fight with some guys practically as soon as we got to Las Vegas. We had just barely checked-in to the brand-new Hotel Cosa Nostra and Casino on the strip. Really nice. It was about 6pm, still Christmas of course, and we had come back down from our rooms and were kicking back in their lizard lounge with a quick beer and burger. We planned to trowl every casino they had, in search of Chelsea. Anyway, a leather-jacketed biker didn’t like the looks of Johansen, who happened to be wearing preppy, cream-colored slacks, reddish penny loafers, and a white, collegiate-looking, long-sleeve dress shirt. His features seemed especially sharp and his hair especially blonde under the soft lighting cascading down from recessed fixtures in the black ceiling. The man accidently on purpose bumped Johansen as the latter held his glass of beer at the bar, and a little beer splashed innocently on the back of the man’s hand as he leaned forward to give his own order.  

“What the fuck?!!!” the man demanded of Johansen, and stood back in utter amazement, palms up, arms out in consternation. He turned briefly to plead to the jury, a couple of other bikers at a nearby table, who smiled at him, obviously his companions. As he turned his back momentarily, we could see clearly the rockers on the back of his jacket. The top one proclaimed: Round Hedz, the bottom one: Hayward. So they were from northern California. They weren’t Angels, though. Not that high in rank. Small fiefdom, these guys. Two skulls with wings hectored and glared at each other in the no man’s land between the rockers.  

“Can’t you see someone’s standing here, ding-dong?” The biker looked steadily at Johansen.  

“I…..I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t see you. I apologize.” Johansen nodded nervously, but pleasantly, and moved over some.  

“You apologize?! What about my cut?! It’s got your damn beer all over it, man! Look at this!” He appealed once again to the jury of his peers. I got the feeling the view of the back of his jacket was for our benefit. Maybe we hadn’t caught it all in one go.  

“I…..I said I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again, I assure you.”  

“You assure me?” He leaned forward gravely. “You assure me of what? That you wouldn’t screw a skanky-ass whore to save your mama’s life?” The gigling from the backround, which had started as an ambient drone, now could not hold its banks, and spilled out and over into laughter, like the Nile river during its busy time.  

“It won’t happen again, sir, I’m sorry,” Johansen stammered, and then concluded, “I don’t know what else to say.”  

“Hey, do I look down and out to you?” the biker queried angrily.  

“…..no…..” said Johansen defensively, a little nonplussed now.    

“Yeah? Well, I know all about guys like you. Guys that would never serve their country.” Johansen, in spite of feeling fear, scoffed a little at this last claim, whereupon the man grabbed that collegiate-looking shirt he was wearing, and shoved him hard, off the bar stool. I tried to pry the two apart, but the man reared back quick and decked Johansen. He then swung at me and missed. I shoved him in turn with both hands hard in the chest, pushing him back a bit.  

“Enough, dude!! Get away from us!!” I shouted. He rushed at me to grab my neck, and I grabbed his, too. We reeled and whirled like two drunks locked in battle, locked in stalemate, squeezing each other’s necks for all we were worth, eyes bugging out at each other. Around and around we spun, wordlessly. Finally my foot caught in one of the legs of a barstool, and I lost my balance and fell to the side, hitting my head on the runner of the bar. I ended up on the floor. Drunk with laughter, the others surrounded us. I got up, furious. I commenced raining blows down on the guy’s forearms as he covered up his face against my onslaught. I tried to put more and more height in my punches, to sneak them in from above, over his defenses. He felt it, and adjusted his battlements accordingly. I kept hitting his arms, I kept hitting nothing more than bone. An iron forearm closed anonymously around my neck from behind, and a knee crashed a few times into the small of my back. A fist exploded on the back of my neck, and I think I got one more kick in the rear. I leaned over the bar, dazed. The blows stopped. A voice said, “C’mon, Bob, leave ‘em alone. Let’s go. C’mon…..”  

************************************************

Back upstairs, as we were licking our wounds, my cell rang. It was Larry Vaughan of the Gorge P.D. He spoke in a friendly, jovial way.

“Hey, Joe! Detective Vaughan here of the P.D. How’s it going, man?”

“It’s going just absolutely fuckin’ peachy-keen!!! Whaddya think, Larry?!!!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s all this? Where’s the respect, Joe? Where’s the respect?”
 

“We just got rolled, Larry!! We’re shittin’ bricks over here! Some bikers from Hayward!”
 

“That sucks. The, uh, the Hedz, the Round Hedz?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about those boys, Joe, they’re just out for some fun.”

“Well, they just got plenty with us, that’s for damn freakin’ sure!…..man!”

“Get over it. Listen up — we informed the Vegas P.D. about this Chelsea Johansen gal you’re lookin’ for, and I told ‘em you were in town over their way. Go see ‘em. Check in. Also, this Jones is wanted for sex offenses in D.C. and in New York state. He likes the young ones. FBI is on it, too. This guy put an NYPD uniform in the hospital with a gut wound with a Glock. Almost died.”
 

“Great news, Larry. What would I do without you?…..any leads over your way?”
 

“Well, this Jones has also violated the Mann Act now, if they’re really in Vegas — transporting a minor across state lines. Chelsea’s mother says she’s heavy into computers — so is Jones. This guy is a real Houdini — squirms out of everything. Have you seen ‘em?”

“No, not yet. We’re gonna start looking now. We just got here.”

“Okay. Good. Keep me in the loop, Downing. Don’t drop the ball again. Mick is counting on you.” I made a face into the phone after hanging up, right there in the hotel room. Neither me nor Johansen was bleeding much, Johansen a little from the nostrils, so we just splashed our faces with a little water from the sink. He came back out into the room.

“God! Does that always happen? Is it always like that?” Johansen asked, aghast.

“Uh, well, it can be. But, no, we just got a little unlucky. I mean, sometimes, it happens.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Johansen replied. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been hit. At least it’s the first time since that Joey Johnson did in fifth grade, or whatever it was. I guess I done-real-good,” he quipped.
 

“Look, those guys were pretty out-there. They’ve got some chip on their shoulder. Let’s shake it off, there’s no worries.”
 

“I was pathetic, Joe!” He glared at  me. “How am I gonna get my daughter back if I can’t even handle myself with a guy without a gun?” He shook his head in disgust at himself.
 

“You didn’t really do all that bad. You didn’t run out of the bar, you held your ground. You didn’t expect somebody to shove you off the stool, you just weren’t ready.”

“Well, I better get ready in a hurry. That was just the minor leagues.”

“Let’s get out there now. Get some fresh air. Look for Chelsea. We had a bad first inning, so what? Plenty of game left. And, speaking of guns, you take this little beauty: the Commish, if you will.” I handed him my other 22 LR Colt. He took it out of my hand slowly.

“I thought this was lost?” He looked at me, confused.

“I got two. Our trenchcoat boy has probably got the other. On the other hand, I’ll use this.” I showed him the 357 Sig a well-to-do client had given me long ago. Johansen appeared as if he felt unworthy so much as to touch it.

“Wow…..that’s a double Commish,” Johansen declared, smiling. “I’m glad I’m on your side” was written on his face. The incoming text alert sounded off just then on Johansen’s Blackberry. The text read:

Qe4 Qe5

BTW: DJ=Cap Pig   
 

“I guess he means me,” Johansen said. “I’m  a capitalist pig, you know. What’s this other stuff?” Johansen gestured towards the message.

“It looks like chess notation. I pointed at it. I guess the creep is saying he’s moving his Queen to the fourth rank of the King’s file.There’s two moves here, though. One for him, one for us.”

“What?”

“He’s giving us a clue where to find him. He’s playing chess with us.” I stared down at the citation. “He knows we’re in Vegas, since he’s the one who told us that he himself was here, and so now he’s telling us where in Vegas.” The notation implied a game in progress, which was appropriate enough, if you thought about it, since a Queen in chess has got pawns in front of her initially, and she can’t move, she can’t jump over people. The way has to be cleared for her first.

“But why would he move precisely the Queen?” I asked Johansen. He stared at me in disbelief. “What’s he mean by that?” I continued.

“What Queen?” he snapped. “What are you talking about, Joe?”

“Somebody’s the Queen, David. The Queen has moved. Both of them, actually. I assume the other Queen in the text message is ours.” I gestured. “What does he mean? Chelsea, maybe? Is Chelsea the first Queen?” Johansen looked away, then warmed to the task.

“Yeah! She is! She is the Queen! She’s moving away from the King, out onto the board! She hates him! She hates his guts!” I glanced around for a chessboard, to no avail. But I glimpsed the bathroom floor. It had small square white tiles, about an inch long on each of the four sides. Dozens and dozens of white squares, a red one every eighth one: perfect. Chessboards are 8×8. Four red squares marked the four corners of our chessboard. I took a napkin that was lying around and tore a few pieces off. We then used the tiles as a chessboard.

“Okay, let’s say this is the back row, or ‘rank,’ as they call it. That first rank is represented by the number 1. And let’s say this piece of napkin is the Queen — she starts here, in the fourth column over from the left, or the fourth file, as they call it.”

“I don’t know any of this really, I don’t play chess,” Johansen said.

“Well, let’s just go with it. So —  the first Queen in the notation on the Blackberry has moved out to the fourth rank, that is, the fourth square out on the board. But she’s on the King’s file, though, on the King’s path, so to speak. That’s the ”e” in the text message, the fifth file over, since “e” is the fifth letter of the alphabet. In other words, she’s moved over to the right one file.” I put a bit of paper out on the fourth rank of the “board,” in the “e” file, to represent her.

“So she’s right in line with the King now.” Johansen said.

“Yeah, she’s paving the way for him, if he wanted to come out.”

“She’s protecting him? No, no…..”

“That’s what he’s saying, at least!”

“All that? Really?”

“Now, the second Queen is ours, I’m assuming, and she’s in the same file as his Queen, one rank away. They’re staring at each other in the middle of the board. Staring each other down.”

“Why so far out on the board? Why not keep her closer in?” Johansen asked.

“She’s in the middle of the board, that’s right. She’s got more control of the entire board from out there. Maybe the board represents Las Vegas, and the middle of the board represents the middle of town. It’s where you have more power, if you pull it off.”

“Could be. He’s saying he’s coming out with her to the center of town, and that we should meet him for a showdown there? And that she has taken his side, since she’s supposedly paving the way for his entrance?”

“We’re gonna find out. What’s the center of town?” I asked.

“The strip, I would say, Las Vegas Boulevard.”

“Okay. At what casino, then, it’s gotta be a casino, I would think.”

“Mandalay Bay.” Johansen suggested.

“Maybe. Keep going.”

“The Egypt one?”
 

“Luxor? Yeah, it’s possible. What else is there?” I persisted in driving him.

“The Flamingo…..or the MGM Grand.”

“That’s it!!! That’s gotta be it! The MGM Grand! Jones wouldn’t have it any other way than that! He believes himself to be some sort of new type of man, someone who avoids the pitfalls of the past, but he really has a deep desire for tradition. Let’s try the Grand first!”
 

**************************************************

Bright, dazzling lights of every imaginable kind twinkled and blinked and went on and off in an incessant display of hue and color. The lights followed one another in mathematical patterns, like dominoes in some elaborate scheme to trick the eyes into an admission of inferiority. Beautiful, gorgeous, absolutely sexy women strolled heedless in the finest, most elegant, most exciting clothes ever designed for the purpose of enslaving men in female pulchritude. It was working pretty well. Music escaped like fugitives from open doorways. Fountains splashed away in reponse. Wandering eyes and glances were the rule, and the two of us were no exception to it, in spite of the task we faced. We tooled towards the MGM Grand in Johansen’s Mercedes.

“This place is something else,” Johansen said.

“It is definitely a piece of work,” I agreed. We pulled in and parked and started walking. Past hordes of the faithful we walked. Suddenly, Johansen stopped, and he stared straight ahead. He was open-mouthed in astonishment. His face became a canvas written with anguish. The incredulity made him slack-jawed, the vivid evidence before his eyes made his heart break. He stood motionless, gazing, gazing. He looked unblinking, steadily, obsessively, into a picture so very familiar and yet so very unknown, so unanticipated. It was the logical conclusion of a nightmare. He couldn’t look away.

I tried to see what he saw. I looked along his line of sight to get a glimpse of that same infinity, that same black hole of nothingness, that his tortured, thousand-yard-stare perceived, and climbed into. I was unable to catch on. It was just a random agglomeration of meandering humanity to me. But finally I suspected what he had seen immediately. Far away, through a thicket of mingling, walking people, two figures did not walk. Two figures leaned against a wall and against each other, flirting, laughing, touching. She, on the one hand, was maybe 5′5″, with bell-bottom jeans and a black leather jacket. She had short blonde hair, and was willowy, energetic, and lithe, a classic Scandanavian beauty. She wore Converse Chucks, and big hoop earrings bobbed about her neck. She carried two bags, both slung over her left shoulder. She was a teenager. It could only be Chelsea Johansen. The very picture of health and loveliness, she was caught in a moment of happiness. The man, on the other hand, was only a little taller, and wore a full-length black trenchcoat, black work shoes, a dark, felt-looking fedora, and black wraparound shades. As he turned his head about, looking at Chelsea, looking at people, one could see a gray ponytail tumbling onto his upper back. He was middle-aged. It was William Jones, none other.

His hands were in the pockets of the coat. A smile adorned his grizzled face, and he looked like the past president of the avante garde club. His clothes were somewhat dirty, and were so out of sync with the bright Hawaiian shirts and rayon fabrics of the mid-Westerners, that he elicited a naive look or two from some. He was the very picture of cynical self-absorption. I spoke to Johansen:

“All right. We’ve arrived. Let’s play our hand right, it’s Vegas, after all. Let’s approach calmly, so we don’t make them run. At a certain point, they’re gonna see us. Let’s not make them run. First objective: don’t make them run.”

“Okay,” he replied mechanically, earnestly.

“We’re gonna talk to them. Make them come on in, come home. The game’s over, it’s time to quit. If Jones runs, I’ll go after him, you stay with Chelsea. He’s wanted for everything in the book. You got Chelsea, I got Jones. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t forget your little peacemaker, either…..he’ll make a mistake. He doesn’t like reality.” I looked over at Johansen. He nodded. We started up again, inexorably. First into the light, then into the dark, then back into light. We got ever closer, never wavering as we applied our sight to the vision. About 15 yards away, I saw Jones’ face suddenly go limp. He had seen us. He might not have expected us to pick up on his little chess game. He was clearly surprised. Perhaps they had thought to make merely a token appearance in the middle of the board, to confirm we were too stupid to show. He darted glances around, looking to flee, looking for avenues of escape. People were everywhere. He decided ultimately to hold his ground, have some fun. The joy of combat, that sort of thing. The smile returned to his face. He took his hands from his pockets, took off his fedora, revealing thinning hair, and then took something quickly from the lining of the hat. He grasped the thing, replaced the hat on his head, and put his hands back in his coat pockets.

About 5 steps away, 15 feet or so, we stopped our pacing in unison. I was diagonal from Chelsea, Johansen diagonal from Jones. The four of us faced off like chess pieces. Chelsea’s chin darted petulantly, defiantly, sensuously about as she saw her father. She had no reaction to give but that of a teenaged girl. Some Iowans, or whoever, were about to walk in between us and them, so I closed one step towards our quarry. The Iowans politely went around us, wondering what-the-heck. Two versions, two layers of reality swirled and intermingled. It was time to speak:

“All right, Jones. Time to quit. Queen to King four, or whatever. Chelsea, it’s time to go back to your family…..” Jones laughed some.

“Go die, Downing. Take your pig friend with you. Leave us alone or suffer the consequences.” He smirked all the while, brushing up against Chelsea, as if to grab her if she bolted. She evinced no inclination to do so. His hands rose a bit inside the pockets of the coat, as if getting something into proper alignment.

“You didn’t get your promotion at Microsoft, so now you’re taking it out on her?” I asked. He tilted his head back and laughed sadistically, bitterly, knowingly, but not taking his eyes off me or his hands out of his pockets.

“What a precious little freak you are, Joey Boy, I didn’t even want that chicken-shit job. Your capitalist pig friend here might want it, though. Just put your application through, accompanied with resume, to Human Resources. We’ll get back to you. Does that sound good, Davy?” Johansen finally managed to speak through the shock of realizing Chelsea had been acting for three weeks, had been lying to him for just as long. He spoke nevertheless in a tone of infinite affection for her:

“Chelsea…..honey, come home. Come home to your family. Come home with your father. We love you so much, darling, your mother is so worried she’s about to die of heartbreak. Chelsea, sweetheart, leave this man, and come home to us. Come home to where you belong. Please, Chelsea.” He started towards his daughter.

“Get away from me, you asshole!!! You’re not my father!!! You little lying, chicken-shit motherfucker!!! Fuck off and leave me alone!!! I hate you!!!” The horror written just then on Johansen’s face is simply not describable in words. The Roman Empire wouldn’t have been enough. His face blanched, his shoulders slumped, his entire frame was about to buckle under the stress of so much at once. Everything he lived for had been taken from him in one moment. He stared blankly, not believing, not feeling, too numb to function. Jones laughed in triumph, an ill, sickly sound.

“You heard it, boys, now fuck off. Let’s do dinner sometime, Joe Baby, but get lost at the present time. Scram, asshole.” It was my turn now to cross the Rubicon. We weren’t gonna budge.

“You know, Kid Dropper, you’re gonna play one too many games of chess. Just quit now while there’s time. Give it up. The Bureau has got a file on you even fatter than you are. There’s nowhere to go. Give it up.” A dark rage seeped into Jones’ face from within at being called that name. It was as if he was suddenly possessed. A threatening, hideous aspect came over his features. His love of resentment was out in all its glory. People glanced over at the spectacle of a rabid, motley, sick dog. From behind his shades you could sense his yellow, sickening eyes. The colored lights of the square shone on the lenses of the shades, and his mouth formed into a grimace. The nightmare had developed further.

“Downing, pile of shit, that is, you’re gonna end up dead with a pick-axe sticking out of your head. And this guy here is gonna end up like that yapping dog. I’ll do the same thing to him. Leave me alone, idiot. Just refer to me as: ‘Above It All Demolition and Deconstruction.’ Better stay out of range, little boy…..asshole.” I responded thus, pawn takes pawn, so to speak:

“Did you know that, Chelsea? Your dog is dead. Spark is dead because of this guy. He killed him. He broke Spark’s spine with that club, or whatever it was. Your dog died trying to protect you from this thing. Did you know that? He broke Spark’s spine.”

“Who the fuck are you, creep? I don’t know you! Fuck off!” Johansen then said:

“Chelsea…..this man is evil. He killed Spark, and he’ll kill you, too, when he’s had enough…..do you remember, you got Spark when you were just twelve, Chelsea, remember all the fun we had, chasing each other around? Remember how Spark would pretend he was real mad, and pat his paws on the lawn? Remember how he loved to make us laugh? Remember how he loved our attention? This guy here killed Spark! For no reason! He’ll kill you, too! Chelsea–”

“That’s not true! It’s not true!!! Spark’s not dead, you piece of shit! He just pushed him out of the way! Spark is alive!” At this point, Jones had only one possible response to a situation no longer under his control. He slowly and steadily pulled my Colt out of his jacket and fired at my core, hitting me twice. The crowd scattered in panic, shrieking. A knife appeared in Jones’ other hand. I got out the Sig almost simultaneous and caught him in the shoulder, knocking him down, stumbling, and turning on his ankles. From the ground, propped up, he shot at Johansen and put two rounds into him, too. We both rocked back, reeling under the barrage of shots. Jones got up, grabbed Chelsea by the arm, and fled desperately through the terrified crowd, which parted in fear as they went through. It was just like the night before on the slope at the Johansen place: they had disappeared into the night. But Chelsea looked down at her father this time. She looked down at the man who had paid for that Versace bag and the gold jewelry, the haute couture hair-style, and even the Converse Chucks with the rainbow laces. The man who had brought a small puppy named Spark home to a twelve-year-old preteen girl. She looked down at her father, David William Johansen, and a look of dismay and regret came over her face.
 

Me and Johansen staggered off to avoid the cops, too weak to pursue Jones, trying to hold our blood in. We reached the Mercedes and finally the hotel, and snuck up to our rooms. Sorry, Vaughan, we never did check-in with the Vegas P.D. We had to get these plugs out, get sewn up, and then get out of town. We were gonna track Chelsea and Jones some more, after the next chess clue, for surely there would be one with this guy. His ego had to be burning right about now.

“How long is this gonna go on?” Johansen asked.

“Until somebody’s dead,” I replied.

…..to be continued…..

Tony Downing

May 11, 2009      

A Joe Downing Mystery

The following is fiction:      

 Part Four: Dude, Where’s My Colt?      

During the night, during my fitful sleep, something in my mind attacked. My sleep was restless, disturbed. Periodically I awoke in the quiet, and saw the eerie, well-kept street filled with shadows and parked cars. No motion of any kind broke the winning streak of the frozen silence. ‘Chelsea is really gone,’ the emptiness seemed to say. ‘Two parents are worried sick, whattya gonna do about it, Ace?’ spoke a voice in my head. SUV’s loomed at the curb, omnipresent. Their dewy, tinted windows intimated secrets not-to-be-told, and an aggressive indifference to the affairs of others. But in my thoughts, there was something that wouldn’t let go, a dark presence pursued me, relentlessly and implacably. It continually hounded me, searching hungrily for my vulnerable point. It probed my defenses, looking for a breach in the walls, searching for a broken battlement over which to scale. Suddenly a feeling of not being strong enough, an intimation of being unable to properly defend myself, came over my haunted senses. This menacing guy, dressed all in black, this abductor, kept coming at me. He wielded an iron rod, and angrily prepared to swing it at me viciously. There was a mindless confidence and certainty to his manner. The nightmare wouldn’t come to a resolution, but yet it wouldn’t cease altogether, either. It maintained a perpetual middle state of unbearable stasis. I tried endlessly to protect what was utterly without defense. I was a city without walls: I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. So I had to knock this guy off, and get back to my life…..I awoke with a shudder.      

*******************************************

First light came in its own good time. It was getting near 7am before it broke. I had been up for a little bit, though, sitting in one of the pool chairs, pondering, waiting impatiently. My legs were not fresh, more rubbery than anything else. I felt grungy in spite of having gotten clean just a few short hours ago. Finally the orange winter sun made its marvelous, long-delayed entrance, like an operatic diva. It slowly climbed above its rivals, the white-topped, brawny San Gabriel mountains, who themselves soared high above L.A., itself sprawled like a flat octopus 20 miles away from here in a straight north line, in case you’re asking about it. The air was chilly and still. No sound stirred but some crows squawking and some finches chirping.      

I started to search the slope and backyard. In the dim light of dawn I still couldn’t see much. I slipped and slided my way up to the ridge, and looked down at the mashed grass, weeds, acacia, and yellow mustard plant, just barely in bloom in December. The signs of the struggle I had experienced the evening before were certainly there, like truth waiting to be caught red-handed: broken vines, twigs, and bushes, for one thing, and footprints, for another. I could discern my own prints, my Converse shoes, like Chelsea’s, and another set: just guess who. They looked like boots or heavy work shoes, with wavy lines in the front part of the sole, and a square indentation with a curved outer edge, marking the heel. Must be fairly small: size nine, perhaps. Spark’s paw prints were there, too, in the mud, like markers of that animal’s noble bravery. The cops had done a good job of not ruining any of the impressions.    

I wandered, and then saw deep in some tangled weeds a big, circular, cream-colored button standing on end. I scraped my hand through and I picked it up carefully with thumb and forefinger. I put it in a baggy for the cops. I’m so nice. I walked along the probable path of the man and Chelsea. Actually this path became more discernable the further I went, from the matted-down foliage, so it was more than probable. The foliage became waist-high, and then shoulder-high. After 60 yards or so I came to the further ridge of the mesa, and saw over to the other side. A slope led down steeply to a lonely, serpentine, dirt service road, built obviously for access to the power installation and small radio telescope, both of which came into view as one looked down from the ridge. I had seen it before, of course, all peninsula residents had.      

The installation was privately owned by the California Power Service and Utilities Company: CPSUC, the sign said. (Almost thought I was in the old Soviet Union.) A prickly, chain-link fence guarded a small, stout, well-built shack of building blocks. The quiet, steady hum of electrical power emanated from within. (Better watch my exposure – might still wanna have children someday.) I circumnavigated the square perimeter of fence, each side about 9 steps. I crunched the grayscale dirt clods underfoot. Presently I saw, just inside the links of the fence, and leaning against them, another cream-colored object, twinkling with dew, rainbow-like, in the growing sunlight. It was just over an inch long and about 3/8″ wide. It was a flash drive. I put that little Christmas gift into the baggy, too. Soon after this I went back to the Johansen place, looking desperately for my little Colt 22 LR along the way, but to no avail.      

As I slipped my clumsy way back down from the ridge, Johansen was in the backyard, speaking to someone on his Blackberry. He raised his chin and eyebrows at me in greeting as he listened to the other end, the very image of the VIP, and he then spoke into the phone with a tired, somewhat irascible voice:      

“Mr. Patel, I warned you about investing in emerging markets. I warned you about undercapitalized banks in those markets funding the projects of delinquent borrowers. Indeed I did. You wouldn’t listen. And I warned you that you would be playing Russian Roulette, several times. A high-yield, low-risk investment just doesn’t exist, sir. The laws of economics are like the laws of physics.” Johansen listened to the response, and then countered:      

“Yes, Mr. Patel, I am concerned about the capital ratios and balance sheets of banks like that, and that is precisely why I had you sign a waiver, protecting me against malpractice lawsuits. Clients that seek credit from banks like that are a red-flag, sir, and so are their projects. I sympathise with you, sir, but I have to protest that I saw this coming, and that I attempted to dissuade you, sir.” He listened some more, then countered again:      

“Very well, Mr. Patel…..yes, sir…..I will schedule you for Monday at the firm in Century City at 10am, with all the partners present, myself included…..yes, sir, I understand, sir…..goodbye, Mr. Patel.” Johansen sighed deeply and put the phone in his slacks. I produced the baggy.      

“Look what I found.” Johansen reached out for it, squinting at it like it was a bug.       `

“Is that his stuff?”      

“Well, that’s what we’re hoping. Can we fire-up this flash drive?”      

“Done. Let’s go.” Inside the house, we entered a small den with light-colored, tan carpeting. From upstairs, footsteps could be heard, so Julie was stirring. Johansen had dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping, and I’m sure all of us did.      

“You can do this?” Johansen asked, and looked at me, as I opened the flash and documents opened on the monitor.      

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” I replied, not turning towards him. “We’ll give it to them eventually, just not right now,” I declared. Johansen flat-out stared at me now, speechless. Microsoft Corporation internal memos then opened before us. They seemed to be confidential updates about ongoing projects for software. “Software Design Engineer” was a fairly frequently employed term. There were also guidelines of some sort as to the proper manner of writing code. There was in addition a job announcement for the position of “Software Design Lead Engineer,” for the NYC office. Most of it was incomprehensible teckie jargon. Then, finally, at the bottom of the drop-down menu, we saw the word ‘resume,’ and opened that file. Voila!    

William Jones

666 Fidelity Boulevard Apt. 101

New York, New York 10001

(212) 555-8958

kiddropper@blastmail.com

Jones’ job history included, guess what? — ‘Software Design Engineer’ at MS (not Lead, though, evidently) from March ‘02 to November ‘08. He was also a clerk at a computer store before that, both jobs in NYC. Apparently he was unemployed at present. It had been over a year since the MS job had ended. Kidnapping possibly took up all his time now. Hobbies: Chess (Grandmaster, U.S. Top 25), blogging, Internet surfing, IT. PC Platforms: Everything, MS Certified Master. Computer Languages: Everything, baby, you name it.    

“At least we know who he is now.” I said.    

“You’re sure this is the guy?” Johansen asked, skeptically.    

“Reasonably sure, yes. McNulty will send this stuff to the FBI Info Service in West Virginia, if need be, to confirm. But I think we’re gonna track him. Let’s print all this stuff out. I’ll call Mick and tell him what we got.” I used Johansen’s landline in the den and got Mick. He jumped all over me.  

“You were caught in the ‘net? Do you know we had the perp in custody? You didn’t say anything, Joe? You couldn’t tell the P.D. that was the guy? You just let him get away?”  

“What are you saying, Mick?! I didn’t see the guy, and I had no reason to notice him, and I barely know what he looks like, anyway! Are you crazy, man?! I let him get away?! What?!”  

“Did you or did you not see an old, blue Volvo wagon off to the side with the Pedro County Sheriff?”  

“…..uh…..yeah…..I guess I did…..I saw somebody off to the side…..that car had a ‘FreeTibet’ bumper sticker on it, I think…..”  

“That’s right! It did, Einstein! That was the guy, damn it, Joe! That was him! He got away!”  

“…..oh, crap!…..(here we go)…..how do you know it was him?”  

“Because of that dog. It had coat fibers in its stomach from what was probably a Burlington Coat Factory trenchcoat. You said the dog was chewing away on this guy. There was also some skin of his in the dog’s teeth. William Jones is his name. You described him as wearing that type of long, dark coat. You missed it, Joe! It was right in front of you!”  

“…..God…..all right, Mick, I blew it, I’m sorry. I was so preoccupied with thinking about it I didn’t see what was right there in front of me. But your guys in the Gorge P.D. didn’t see it either. And where was Chelsea?”  

“He must have had her in a motel or something. And I know, I know, my guys missed it, too; they’re not used to working with the Rancho Verde P.D. or with the Sheriff. Don’t remind me.”  

“Why did your guys pull him over in the first place?” I asked.  

“His license plate tags: three months out-of-date.” I didn’t say anything at first. (Plenty of blame to go around, ain’t there? )

“Well, we’ve got some stuff for you here.” I said. “I was up on that hill just now and I found a coat button and a flash drive in the dirt with his resume on it.” A shocked silence came over the line, more ominous than a screaming voice.  

“You looked at his flash drive? You tampered with evidence? You opened his files, Joe?”  

“C’mon Mick, lighten up…..what was I supposed to do? Not look? How was I to know who it belonged to? It could’ve been anybody’s. Anyway, it wasn’t evidence yet,” I said weakly. “I’ll leave it here with Mr. Johansen for you. I might have been the only one who would’ve found it.” (Whoops! He didn’t like that one!) I eventually cooled him off. It was mostly an act on his part, anyway. I know him well enough by now. Besides, he knew I could get out of it. I hung up. Johansen then goes to me,  

“I thought you weren’t gonna tell.”  

“I was being sarcastic. McNulty’s nobody to mess with…..now, I wonder if the dog swallowed my Colt, too.”  

“What?”  

“Nothing.” Just out of curiosity, we quickly looked up the Burlington website.  

“How could they possibly know the exact brand of the coat?” Johansen queried me earnestly.  

“Ya got me, David.” He frowned at me. We searched the NYC area to see if there was a store there: they only had 28 stores in NYC. Okay…..so, he had come all the way from NYC? By car? With CA plates? How did he pull that one off?Or did he steal that, too? Ralphie gets around, does he not? Julie came in just then, as we were reading the monitor. A look of apprehension and a look of resignation were mingled somehow on her face. She was getting better at dealing with this situation.  

“I got a message from Chelsea,” she said calmly, holding out a Blackberry stoically. She evinced a sense of dread nevertheless, it seemed, about what the menfolk would be prompted to do upon hearing the news. Johansen reached out for it carefully and slowly, as if Julie might sarcastically and bitterly pull it back out of reach suddenly. She didn’t, of course. Johansen read the text:  

“I’m in Las Vegas. I ran out of units! Help me! Ha!”

Johansen showed it to me. “Mrs. Johansen, did Spark bark at any time between after David left and before David and I arrived?”

“No…..I don’t think so…..Chelsea was just gone…..I still can’t believe she’s not here.” Sadly and wearily, she leaned against her husband, who gently embraced her.

“Why do you ask that?” she asked.

“Well…..just checking…..but I wonder how she could manage to send a text message.”

“Chelsea is very resourceful, she could find a way, or that horrible man is making her do things like this,” Julie said, gesturing towards the text.

“Did Chelsea like blogging?” I asked. She looked at her husband anxiously.

“You mean that computer hobby? That Internet hobby?”

“Yes,” I replied, and so did she in response to my question. Tom was right – it was computers, it was how they got together. It was decided we would drive to Las Vegas, taking both cars in a caravan. Jones probably didn’t know my Corvette yet, so we needed that car, and if one of the cars broke down, we had the other. (I guess we’d leave the broken-down one by the side of the road?) I tried to persuade Johansen not to go, but he wouldn’t budge, he insisted on going. Well, I suppose old Mr. Patel of the late, unfortunate investments will just have to make do with just the senior partners. We decided to meet in an hour.

*******************************

In the meantime, I went to the high school, Portuguese Hills Peninsula High School, to talk to campus security about Jones. There was a guy on duty, walking around slowly. The high school had suffered vandalism in the past to the vending machines and such on holidays, so they had someone there even on Christmas. I got the security guard to talk to me in his little office, more of a maintanance closet for buckets and stuff than anything else. He was about 25, a little portly, and slovenly dressed. He wore dark blue Dickies work pants and a waist-length black jacket over black shoes and white socks. He also sported a black-thread New York Yankees baseball cap in homie-style. This kid was from Gorge, or I’m a monkey’s uncle with three eyes, I’m telling you right now. Paul Blart, Mall Cop, he was not. He sat back in a creaking, ergonomic chair, lit a cigarette, and put his hands in the pockets of the jacket. He began.

“Yeah, he would talk to that girl. That Jones guy. She seemed okay with it. I thought he was a punk asshole, though. He was just sniffing her out. I didn’t like him around on campus. I gotta do my thing. No stay. I made that punk-ass bitch leave…..I guess he played some chess sometimes with the PLC, too. I guess he was pretty good at it.”

“Oh, so he played some chess with the high school kids?…..what’s the PLC?”

“Uh…..I guess it means the ‘Portuguese Logicans Club’ or something.”

“You mean ‘Logicians Club?’”

“Yeah, home, that sounds right.”

“Did Chelsea hate him?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. Not at all. She seemed to kinda look up to him. I don’t know why, though,” he chuckled. “But he hated those smart chess kids, though.”

“Why? Did they beat him at chess?”

“No, I think he beat them. All of them, easy. He would play a bunch of them all at one time and beat every single one of ‘em. They called him some name he didn’t like to get back at him — they found out something about him somehow.”

“What was the name?”

“I can’t remember. It wasn’t worth remembering.”

“That’s okay. Let me know if you remember, though. Now, the kids knew his name was Jones. You know how they found that out?”

“Nah, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that computer shit.”

“That’s all right. But did you ever go to the authorites about him? Did you ever tell the princi—”

“Kid Dropper! That was the name – I remember it now. You said tell you if I remember. I do remember it now – those crazy smart kids called that fucknut Jones: ‘Kid Dropper.’ Now I remember.” He looked at me with a look of triumph, and as I looked back at him in dismay, a feeling the exact opposite of triumph came over me. I thanked the guard for his time and info. He said I could buy him dinner. He meant it, so I gave him a sawbuck. Don’t give me any crap about it. I hurried out to the car in the big, deserted, asphalt parking lot. I sat in the silence of the car, shivering, trying to warm up. Nice way to spend Christmas. I paused, took a deep breath, then started the engine. I had no choice but to drive to Las Vegas with Johansen, and track down this God-knows-what human fubar named: ‘William Jones.’

…..to be continued…..

Tony Downing

May 2, 2009

 A Joe Downing Mystery

The following is fiction:  

Part Three: The United States of Anytime    

I knocked on the door of Tom’s townhouse. Sounds of merriment came from within. His son, Mike, in his early 40’s, answered the door.

“Joe! Hi! How ya doin’? It’s great to see you!…..Wow! What happened?! You look like you got in a fight!” Stepping in slowly and carefully, I feigned a joviality I didn’t feel:    

“I’m okay, Mike; I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d bounce over for the revelry.”      

“Hey – come on in!” He waved me on in with mock high seriousness. Mike’s ten year-old son came by to size me up, but he didn’t speak. ‘What happened to you’ was on his face. Tom appeared.

“Joe!!! Hey! Thanks for stopping by, babe! I didn’t think you’d have time for us little people.” Tom was toasted, big surprise there.      

“Have a beer?” he asked.    

“Absolutely. And a shot of Jack, too, if possible.”    

“It’s not only possible, it’s probable, Joseph, my man. Sit down, genius.” He motioned to a couch full of people. He snapped his fingers sharply and whistled at Mike to fill my order. The shot came first, burning and soothing. Soon I didn’t feel as sore. The beer I sipped slowly. I washed-up in the bathroom, and then talked with Tom’s daughter Heidi about her two children, who were 7 and 11, and were now attending Soleado grammar school on the peninsula, and learning tennis.      

“Maybe you could hit with them sometime, Joe.”      

“Sure, it’ll give me a break from your dad.” She laughed. I needed to talk about the case with Tom. I needed to be patient. The room positively swirled with Christmas lights, alcohol, excited people, children racing around, Christmas music, sparkling packages (wrapped and not-so-wrapped), a ramped-up, glistening Christmas tree presiding in the corner, and food, OMG, the food: honey-baked ham, turkey, potato salad, macaroni salad, green salad, mashed potatoes, vegetables, pies, rolls, apple cider, candy-canes, ice cream, on and on and on, who knows. I lost count at infinity. For a macho guy, Tom is surprisingly Martha-Stewart.      

Celine Dion and Shania Twain were on TV with a joint Christmas special. (Tom is totally in love with Celine.) Tom’s new girlfriend Lorraine chatted with me, too — she was about 45-50, and was very gracious and sweet, like all of Tom’s girlfriends.      

“Tom thinks the world of you, Joe.”      

Through the somber mood I felt, one thing made me laugh – when I first came in, loitering alone in the kitchen briefly, an older man I didn’t know shuffled over to me, stooped, making eye-contact like it was the last day of Earth. Must be one of Tom’s golf buddies, I thought. (But how this guy could’ve gotten through even nine holes was a mystery in itself.) He pointed a crooked finger at a small calendar on the kitchen wall beside the refrigerator, above the microwave.      

“Is that a clock?” he inquired very politely. I saw that it was only a calendar, so I just said very simply and evenly,      

“No, that’s not a clock.”      

“It’s nine o’clock?!”      

“…..well…..yes, it is nine o’clock, but I was just saying: ‘That’s…..not…..a…..clock.’”      

“That’s nine o’clock?!” he repeated immediately. (…..I was just…..forget it.) Eventually the party wound down. Tom’s kids and grandkids left. They would all visit the other side of the family tomorrow. When it was just me, Tom, and Lorraine, I finally could ask Tom,      

“Can we go to Hal’s?”  

*************************************

The two of us drove in the Corvette down the hill to the restaurant, taking Portuguese Hills Drive. We were still in Rancho. We pulled into the parking lot, overlooking the ocean, and went in: Hal’s 24/7 Burger Teepee. We settled into a booth and ordered: I got the Bigger, Badass Breakfast (served all day): 6 eggs, 6 slices of bacon, 6 links of sausage, 6 English muffins, 6 slices of toast, 6 pancakes, hash browns, milk, juice, coffee, and a Badass Biker Burger, all for just $2.99 (…..uh, Hal? got a minute, sport?). Tom got just coffee and two crackers. That was $3.99. I related the facts of the case to him.      

“So, what do you make of this guy?” I asked.      

“Well, he’s not very nice, obviously, and he’s probably an Internet predator and he’s probably extremely dangerous. Killing that dog was just what he needed to do to get through the moment. You’re next, big boy. You’re in for a world of trouble with this one.”      

“I know that. What’s his psychological profile?”      

“Probably a loner. A computer junkie, I would guess. That’s probably how he encountered this Chelsea girl. Maybe he developed a May-September crush on her, maybe he saw her picture on MySpace, or Facebook, or on a blog of hers – somehow. If so, it’s possible he’s fixated upon her as a digital image – she represents a perfect virtual world for him, the world as it should be, but can’t be. Dopamine courses through the prefrontal cortex of his brain upon viewing his beloved, and he gets a physical sensation of pleasure from seeing the digital image. He’s probably obsessive. Now he’s possibly attempting to apprehend that digitized image in real life, and experience it at the source, in the non-virtual world.”      

“So you’re saying that he doesn’t distinguish between the two worlds, virtual and non, as being actually separate from one another?” I replied.      

“Well, we don’t want to go too far: we don’t want to exaggerate here. I would just venture that he certainly has shown he can navigate between the two worlds, and that he can separate the two – but the real point here is his desires, Joe: he doesn’t want to acknowledge a difference between the two worlds, even though he knows there is indeed a difference.” Tom paused to take a sip of coffee. Why he was drinking coffee at this time of night, I can’t say. He continued:      

“Perhaps he unconsciously attempts to draw certain elements of the non-virtual world into his perfect virtual world. Perhaps this Chelsea gal is a rare part of the real world that he approves of, and so now he wishes to bring that element, so to speak, into his cocoon of virtuality. The nerve centers in the brain that consider the self-interest and the feelings of others have been suppressed in him. He’s just given himself over to computers too much – he can’t feel anything anymore, he doesn’t care about right and wrong.”      

“Sounds pretty common, really.” I said, stupidly.      

“It can’t work, of course, but he’s in denial, and he’s in flight from reality. He’s in very deep, too, if he’s kidnapping and killing. What he did to that dog he’ll do to you, too, Joe. And without remorse. Like an animal killing an enemy. You watch yourself good, mister. I’m not kiddin’.“
He wagged his index finger at me.      

“This boy is most likely an atomic whack-job,” he summed-up.      

“Oh, you got that right,” I agreed. We stared out at the water, which was too dark to see, too obscure. There was a feeling of dread at knowing Chelsea was in the custody of this man, this altered form-of-man. Tom broke the pause:    

“I’ve got a question, Joe.”    

“Go ahead.”    

“About the dog: you said it was barking and running around, right? That was when you first came into the backyard?”    

“Yeah.”    

“But did it bark before that? Did Mrs. Johansen mention that it was barking before you and Johansen got there from your office?”    

“No,” I shook my head, “she said nothing about any barking. She just said she was cooking and Chelsea was watching TV and then Chelsea was gone, without a sound. That was all. No barking.”    

“Curious that the dog wouldn’t protect Chelsea and make some noise if they went right past it, presumably struggling.”    

“Yeah – I definitely gotta check that out with Mrs. Johansen tomorrow. It could lead to some deeper stuff. But how do you think this guy makes a living? Dealing?”    

“Could be, but unlikely. If he’s a transient, since no one in the family or neighborhood has ever seen him before this case, he probably doesn’t deal. He probably doesn’t use, either. Those both take time to develop contacts, a settled presence in an area. But maybe he’s got a cache in his car. That’s possible, too. But I would say he probably gets money doing something you can do anywhere, no matter how new you are in the area.”    

“Such as?”    

“Well, some sort of computer crime, some hacking, maybe. For example, maybe he writes malicious macros or viruses or worms or malicious software, or he sends infected e-mail attachments, whatever – all to the purpose of disabling some database so as to move in on it, when security is disabled, and steal the files. Then he can sell the info.”    

“It’s possible. And he could do that from anywhere, even from a motel room.” I responded.    

“Yeah, that’s right. Computer crime can be committed without getting off your tush,” Tom declared.    

“Well,” I said, “the next step for me is to take a look at that slope tomorrow morning at the Johansen’s, and ask about the dog, and hopefully this guy will contact them somehow…..but maybe he just wants to keep Chelsea. No ransom desired.”    

“Could be,” Tom concurred, “but that’ll make things harder for you — you’ll need him to make some mistake up there on the big chessboard that way.” We paid our bill and left, saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to our waitress and to the cashier, both of them looking at us in amazement, having witnessed our brooding conversation. Traffic suddenly slowed to a complete halt on the drive back up the hill to Tom’s townhouse. Lots of cars out, even now, well past midnight: it was now Christmas. Must be an accident, I thought.    

“Damn!” Tom breathed. “A sobriety checkpoint!”    

“Shit!” I hissed in return. Tom looked at me.    

“How much did you have?” he asked.    

“Two beers and one shot,” I announced summarily.    

“Starting when?”    

“At nine.”    

“Well, you should be okay – it’s been over three hours since you started and at least one since you stopped.”    

“I guess.”    

“You guess that the hunter has now become the hunted?” he laughed.    

“What?” I said irritably.    

“You’re tracking this kidnapper guy, and now the cops are tracking you: the hunter becomes the hunted. It’s perfect.” He rocked his head back in laughter. I couldn’t believe it. I snapped:    

“Look, I don’t need any of that right now, A-hole.”    

“Don’t call me any of your goddamn names, sonny-boy, or
I’ll kick your ass!”    

“All right! I’m sorry! But I’m stressed about this case. I’m worried about that girl and her parents.” Tom knew he had wide latitude with me. He has a melodious tenor voice, so when he speaks, you’re inclined to pay attention.

After about ten minutes, we drew close. Red brake lights ruled our world by now. One driver had been nabbed, and was off to the side with the San Pedro County Sheriff giving him a lot of attention. A young, efficient cop walked over to us when we were at the pole position.    

“Can I see your I.D.’s gentlemen?”    

“Both of us?” Tom leaned over. The cop took my license out of my hand and looked it over with a flashlight.    

“Joe Downing?!” He looked at me. “You’re Joe Downing? Oh, I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t recognize you – I apologize.” He looked in at Tom, who said,    

“I’m Tommy Wilkinson. I work with Joe.” (That was true enough.)    

“I realize that, sir. I recognize you both now. Detective McNulty has said a lot of good things about both of you. I don’t really need your I.D.’s now. I’m sorry to trouble you.” He paused, a little sheepishly, then roused himself and continued:    

“We’re looking for Chelsea Johansen.” He reached a flyer over to us with Chelsea’s picture on it. I know you’re working on the case, Mr. Downing, and McNulty is asking anyone who knows anything to come forward.”    

“Oh, we will officer. I’ll definitely keep McNulty in the loop,” I said, smiling a little disingenuously. Tom leaned over again and said,    

“Hey, did Vaughan say anything nice about us?” Tom laughed some more. The cop said,    

“Thank you, sirs, please move up.” He motioned us on. Tom had the flyer in his hands and then saw Chelsea for the first time as he looked it over.    

“Wow! Talk about dopamine messages! This girl is gorgeous, just flat-out beautiful.” Tom held the handbill which contained two photos of Chelsea, one of her face, another of her from head to foot. She was a teenager, of course, almost 18, with very short blonde hair, blue-jeans with old-fashioned bell-bottoms, black, high-top Converse Chucks with rainbow laces, and gold, thin, hoop earrings. She was very tall, about 5′7″, with a confident air, and a pristine, regal facial beauty. She had smooth, fair, flawless skin, and she was somewhat, but not overly haughty. She wore a short black leather jacket over a white top. She carried two bags, emblematic of her divided character: she was half-woman, half-girl. One bag was denim, the other Versace. She had a vaguely bohemian, avante garde aura, but still appeared healthy and hygienic as could be. She took pains with herself, she was perfectly groomed, she was proud of being a classic Scandinavian beauty.  

I left Tom with Lorraine finally, saying ‘Merry Christmas,’ and drove back to the office in Gorge to shower in the hallway bathroom. I sat at my desk in the silence, under a dim lamp. I was the only person in the old, broken-down building. I studied the scribbled, hurried notes I had taken during Tom’s discourse at Hal’s. Questions went through my mind: Why didn’t the dog bark during the abduction? Were Chelsea and this guy talking as if they knew each other? Was it all planned? What will I find on that slope at first light?  

I drove back to Rancho and parked at the curb by the Johansen place: I wanted to be the first one in the morning. Inside the Johansen’s, feeble lighting illuminated the curtains, and there was a movement of the lace. Johansen was looking out and had seen me. He let the curtain fall and looked away. He had it figured-out: I was gonna sleep in the car and get a jump on everyone. He was okay with it.  

I decided to get out and explore even then. I let myself into the backyard. I could see the mashed-down grass in the moonlight, the chair I had bumped my shin on, all the slippery, worn mud on the slope, suggesting struggle, and finally, the police tape. The sliding glass door opened behind me. It was Johansen. He approached.  

“Hear anything?” he asked.  

“No, I wish I had, David, but nothing yet.”  

“Yeah, the same with us. I would’ve called you immediately, of course, if we had been contacted. But we weren’t. The P.D. called, though, and said they were setting up an alert for Chelsea.”  

“Yeah, I was in it…..David…..this is gonna work. He can run but he can’t hide – and I don’t think he’ll hurt her. He’s probably in love with her, actually.”  

“In love with her?! God!” He shook his head in disgust. “Julie is about to crack with the worry…..” We stood there in uncomfortable silence: for ourselves, for Chelsea. After a bit he turned on his heel and went back inside wordlessly. I listened to the soft sound of his steps on the grass, then the long, slow sliding of the door. He paused before closing, though, and said,  

“Joe, we’ve got a spare bedroom – you can sleep there tonight if you want.”  

“Oh, that’s okay, David, I’ll be getting up early, so I better stay out in the car. I’ll be okay.” The intimacy of a grieving family was no place for me. He nodded. I was then left in the quiet of the crime scene: what had once been a family circle was now a picture of infamy. I went back out eventually and slept in the ‘Vette, waiting anxiously for dawn. I froze, of course, but I got some sleep somehow. It was 3:30am on Christmas Day.

  …..to be continued…..  

Tony Downing                          

April 24, 2009

A Joe Downing Mystery
The following is fiction:

Part Two: Thud, Baby, I mean Thuddd!!!

“David!!! Julie Johansen cried out to her husband. “David!” She cried out in a faltering, distraught voice. She gathered her head in her hands despairingly and tried unsuccessfully to speak. At last, she screamed: “She’s gone! I can’t find her! I’ve looked and looked and – oh, David!” She stopped speaking and buried her face in her husband’s chest and sobbed passionately and uncontrollably. The flood of tears convulsed her exhausted body, and utter despair and loss were written now all over Julie’s face. Dismay slumped her shoulders. Johansen looked away blankly from h er, unseeing. Julie began to weep so bitterly as to tremble. Johansen pulled her closer. It was a scene of such particular poignancy, of such familial intimacy, that I felt it incumbent upon me to turn away. But I had to push, I had to do my job, and it had to be now.

“Mrs. Johansen, how long ago? How long ago was it that you last saw Chelsea?” Julie acknowledged me, as Johansen calmed his wife. She looked at me accusingly, reprovingly, as if I had taken Chelsea. I persevered:

“Mrs. Johansen, they still might be close. It’s surprising how long it takes them before they’re actually gone. We can still catch this guy right now.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, and steadied herself. She was a little surprised at my optimism.

“I…..I don’t know…..I suppose it was just a few minutes ago…..I’m not sure…..” Her hands and lips were shaking from the fear, aggravated by the chilliness. She wasn’t dressed for outdoors in winter, she wore just blue jeans and a navy blue Cal Berkeley sweatshirt. Her hands grasped the lapels of her husband’s coat, and her knuckles looked white.

“I was just making some dinner and Chelsea was watching TV and I went to ask her what she wanted for Christmas Eve dinner but she was gone…..she wasn’t there, she wasn’t anywhere…..” She put her face in Johansen’s shoulder in renewed tears, a tortured pain written o her face beyond description. Total defeat ruled her spirit.

“Mrs.Johansen, did they leave from the back deck, maybe? Can I look there, is that all right?” Johansen looked at me like I was crazy, as if I had suggested that Chelsea and the kidnapper could still be there waiting for us to come play gin rummy. He recovered, roused himself, and replied:

“You can look, Joe, sure! Let me take you.” He moved hurriedly with his wife towards a wooden side gate sand undid the latch. We then moved along the side of the white-stuccoes house, and into the backyard. As we entered, I saw a tear-drop shaped pool and various pool furniture. I bumped my shin on the dark and confusion. I stepped on a garden hose somewhere on a patch of lawn. A friendly, motley dog presently ran up to me, panting, and put two wet paws on my black, faded jeans. The dog started to play, barking and running around crazily, stamping its front paws on the wet ground in mock challenge. I petted the dog as I looked up, above the pool. I had my Colt Diamondback revolver in my waistline, but in the back, as was customary with me, so the dog wasn’t leaning on it as he sidled up.

“Spark! Stop!” Johansen said suddenly and angrily. There was a slope over strewn with seemingly half-established ground cover rising up sharply about 40 feet in elevation from behind the pool. The slope was a work-in-progress, perhaps. All was quiet as we stood silently peering up the dim slope, listening; listening for a pin to drop. Julie and Johanasen clung to each other, twisting their necks all about as they sought out their daughter frantically. I could just see dark against dark up at the crest line of the slope. A puff of clouds slowly moved across the moon. Some acacia-type bush up there moved somewhat, and there was a slight, quick, arboreal sound as the bush retracted. A towering, dark figure receded from the crest hurriedly. Lightning shot through me like quicksilver: I bolted like a horse out the gate at the Kentucky Derby. I called out in rage, as I ran and slipped on the dewy slope:

“Hey! Stop! Let her go! Stop, mister! Let her go! Don’t do this! Stop now!” I couldn’t breathe any longer as I climbed frantically, as I climbed more than frantically. Drums thundered in my ears and chest. I could hear mingled voices above me and below me, mixed in with the sounds of my own footsteps. Spark followed me noisily. Below me, Julie was crying out for Chelsea, and admonishing her husband to join the chase. I could hear him scrambling up the slope, and he obviously navigated no better than I. Above me, I could hear a confused female voice, evidently not knowing what to do, and a gruff male voice vehemently denouncing her. My heart beat in my chest like a hammer. I fell to my knees repeatedly on the bare, slick mud. My face was scratched by the lower branches of slim trees planted on the slope.

I reached the crest at last, breathing hard, my lungs bursting. As I stood recovering, chest heaving, I saw the back of a wide figure, dressed all in black, apparently, about 50 yards away over the grass mesa, roughly pulling on a blonde girl. Her short hair reflected what little light remained. The dark one wore a black raincoat or trench coat extending to the knees, looked like some sort of hat, a black fedora possibly, and black pants. I thought I could see a dirty gray ponytail bouncing against his upper back as he ran confidently away over the mesa with the girl. I could just make out the sound of her trying to mollify him, and then his sharp, autocratic rebuke, instructing her.

Suddenly nothing but silence. I scanned the landscape in front of me, a landscape of tall grass and reeds, damp and soggy like me. I started forward only slowly now, since it seemed the twosome had stopped. Plenty of time at this point. I looked left, right, and center, still breathing hard, sweat forming on my neck in the cold air. I peered and squinted into the obscurity. Spark reached me, panting like he was famished for air, bumping hard and clumsily into my leg. He barked into the darkness irritably. I shushed him gently, and he obeyed. I whispered to Johansen, halfway up, to stop and listen. I looked out over the sodden heath as best I could, acutely alert, on a hair-trigger response. I slowly took out my Colt, which had stayed put on the climb. My left hand curled around the grip and the trigger, the familiar balance in my palm.

I surveyed. Anticipation hung in the air. A crow squawked stupidly overhead, on its way somewhere to stand all night in a tree. All was quiet, as if no human had ever trod that pristine soil. I felt like the first European in the New World. Spark then began to utter a low guttural sound from deep in his neck. He scoffed and harrumphed menacingly and disapprovingly. He kept it up, and I didn’t scold him this time. We looked into the night, cautiously advancing.

A silvery, sliding , pushing sound then started up quietly, close off to my right, as if emanating somehow from my own unconscious mind. I turned towards it, too late, as a loud, prolonged, and hysterical growl erupted from the sable nothingness. Some club struck me ferociously in the neck on my left side. I staggered, but remained vertical. My shoulder had absorbed part of the blow as it slid up to my neck. Spark leapt upon my assailant, tearing fiercely and repeatedly at his clothes. The dog’s eyes shone with rage eerily in the moonlight.

The swinging club kept coming at me, hitting me again and again all over my raised arms and hands. Johansen got knocked off the ridge by a blow like it was a game of king of the hill. I stumbled forward to try and catch the club out of the air. My Colt had been knocked out of my hand, who-knows-where.

All of a sudden I heard a corporeal-sounding thud, and then another, accompanied by a pair of high-pitched, agonizing wails that pierced the veil of night: Spark lay motionless. I lurched forward and grabbed at the man, catching a button and pulling it off the coat desperately, as I tried to bring him down from my knees. A muddy, wet boot smacked me on the side of the face hard, and the club then rained blows down upon my upper back as I fell onto my stomach. The club was like a lash of fire through my woolen shirt. On and on the beating went until spent, exhausted, and satisfied, the insane growling stopped, and the blows ceased.

*********************************************************

Detectives Mick McNulty and Lawrence Vaughan of the Deep Gorge P.D. sat looking at me in the living room of the Johansen residence. A Christmas tree in the corner was bulging with ornaments, lights, tinsel, and unopened gifts. Plates of half-eaten food were strewn on the coffee table in the midst of the two facing couches. The TV and the stereo were both off, the atmosphere was hushed and grim. Family heirlooms, photos, and Christmas stockings were on the hearth above the fireplace that cheerily flamed with illumination, in contrast to the defeated humans sitting close by. Julie Johansen and her husband sat on dining room chairs that had been brought over from the dining nook. Johansen himself was muddy and disheveled, his eyes downcast. Both the Johansens were silent, and caressed one another in their agony of loss. Mick McNulty broke the silence:

“Joe, you should’ve called us that you were here.”

“Yeah, I know that Mick, but we had no intel that she was gone until we got here. We were just doing a recon, and then it all started to happen. There was no time to call.” I shrugged my shoulders. Vaughan then observed intelligently, with the wit he was known for:

“He sure beat the crap outta you, Downing.”

“C’mon, Larry, zip it! Just give it a rest! Now – Mr. and Mrs. Johansen – we’re gonna run an Amber Alert on this for your daughter, and we’re gonna get her back. We’re gonna get her back! Of that, you can rest assured. In the morning, we’ll do a more thorough search up at the top, and we’ll find out what that guy left us. There must be plenty of Christmas presents up there for us. And tonight, right now, we’re gonna do a forensics on your dog, to ascertain if anything caught in his teeth when he was biting this man. This perp will be brought in, and your daughter restored to you, Mrs. Johansen. You can rest assured.”

The two detectives stood up in tandem, their neckties remaining perpendicular to the carpeted floor as their backs angled forward t rise from the couch. Leather sounds came from their belts and side-arm holsters. They secured a photo of Chelsea from the Johansens, pulled the uniforms down off the slope, put Spark in a small body bag, and then departed, wishing us good night and Merry Christmas. They admonished us all to keep them in the loop should the kidnapper contact them.

“Mr. Downing, are you sure you’re all right?” Julie asked after shutting the door.

“I’ll be sore, I’m sure of that, but I’m okay, thanks. But I’d like to come back in the morning and look for my Colt, before the cops get here. There’s no telling what else is up there, too.” Johansen then said:

“Of course, Joe! You can do anything you like. And I wouldn’t blame you if you told us to go jump in a lake. I didn’t really know I was drawing you into something like this. God, this guy! If you want to relinquish the case, I understand perfectly.”

“Absolutely not. I’m involved now completely, and I’m glad. We’ve gotta nail him. He’s going away for a long time when we catch up to him. And if there’s something up there tomorrow, we’ll submit it to the Bureau through the P.D., and find out who this perp is.” I gingerly fingered my neck, and put the ice to it again. I obtained my own photo of Chelsea from her two parents, and took my leave.

The image impressed upon my mind now is the gloomy picture of their worried faces as they stood on their front door stoop. The neighborhood was undoubtedly abuzz with speculation about Chelsea.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get him,” I said to them. “I’m sorry he’s got Chelsea. But call me ASAP if anything develops. I’m gonna get some help right now, and I’ll see you at first light tomorrow. Is it all right if I let myself into the backyard tomorrow?” They assured me it was.

I lumbered out to the Corvette, feeling as battered, beaten, and bruised as the car appeared. I slid in behind the wheel painfully. I felt ashamed that all I had been able to offer them was cliché rhetoric like: “We’ll get this perp, rest assured of that, Mrs. Johansen!” I was as bad as McNulty. I pulled out onto Via Capri and then onto Portuguese Hills Drive North, headed for Whitefox Drive and the townhouse of Tommy Wilkinson. It was just a few clicks away, still in Rancho Verde. A gentle rain began to fall, mocking the violence. It was 9pm on Christmas Eve.

…..to be continued…..

Tony Downing

April 20, 2009

A Joe Downing Mystery 

The following is fiction:

Mr. Scary Smart

Part One: NOW THAT I KNOW YOU EXIST

IT WAS 4:45 ON THE AFTERNOON of Christmas Eve when I first encountered the Johansen family. Sunset had arrived, and the long shadows had begun their slow rule. The temperature had dropped to “shivering.” The year 2009 was about to turn the corner and take its much-lamented leave. But you knew that. Sammy, the building custodian here in my little office complex, had given me the head’s up from the foot of the old staircase:

“Hey, Joe?! You up there? There’s a man here seems to be lookin’ for ya. Says he’s sorry it’s late, and can he see ya? I could tell him you’re OH-YOU-TEE….. if you want…..”

“Yeah, I’m right here, Sammy. And yeah, it’s okay. Business is business, or…..whatever. I’ll come down for him. He can probably tell by now that I’m not O-U-T, anyway.” I started to descend. An articulate voice I didn’t know then entered the fray:

“I’d be glad to come up there, Mr. Downing, if your office is up there…..I mean, uh, I don’t wish to trouble you unnecessarily.” I then saw a tallish, early-middle-aged man emerge into view. He wore a dark, expensive business suit, and a red, floral-patterned tie over an immaculate white dress shirt. He had a full head of sandy hair, and trim, athletic looks. He was the very picture of responsible success in every way. This success undoubtedly was won through long application and through confident, prolonged effort, but now he had a vulnerable look, a deeply troubled look.

Bay City or L.A. were both a bit far away to come for just me; Portuguese Hills was closer, of course, and rich, but it had an older population, an elderly demographic; Rancho Verde, on the other hand, was all about up-and-coming executives, six-figure-annual-income-heaven, with a decidedly younger demo to go with it. Which one was he, ya think? Sammy called up to me, past the shoulder of the upwardly mobile gentleman caller who effortlessly ascended the stairs:

“Merry Christmas, Joe! You have yourself a nice Christmas Day tomorrow with your family.” (What family?! I thought to myself.) But I returned the sentiment, envying Sammy the wholesome, conventional life he possessed. Not a lot of money in his stock portfolio, to be sure, but he was rich in other ways. My client-in-training now reached the top of the darkly-lit, darkly-carpeted stairway. He extended his hand with a friendly, professional, and practiced smile.

“Hello, sir. I’m David Johansen…..I would very much like to speak to you, if I may intrude upon your time at such a moment. It’s very important to me that I get your advice on a certain matter — I’ve heard great things about your competence and discretion, and I’d be very grateful for your time, Mr. Downing.” He meant it. There was a desperation and unsettled quality to his voice, barely controlled. I could only respond with a neutral graciousness until I knew more.

“Certainly, Mr. Johansen, I’d be glad to speak with you. ‘Time’ is what I do for a living….. and please call me ‘Joe.’” We shook hands over a small smile, and his shake was firm, but he seemed to show nevertheless a slight deference towards me at the same time. (What in the world for?) I motioned, and suggested we stroll down the gloomy hallway to my office (but I didn’t say it that way).

We quietly padded past the now darkened and silent real estate firm, past the usually-busy law firm, too, with the two gorgeous babes, now off-duty, and finally we passed the Marriage and Family Counseling office. Absurdly, we were at pains to keep quiet, though the building was deserted for the Christmas Eve festivities. We were playing some role we knew not what.
 

Inside the inner office we settled down. I sat behind the oak desk in front of the window, Johansen on the couch. He suddenly got up, however, with considerable alacrity, and moved into the solid, not-very-comfortable, straight-backed pinewood chair at the corner of my desk. He did it hurriedly, as if he had to just beat the 24-second clock. He looked like someone from the right side of the tracks who had gotten lost over here on the wrong side. (The City of Deep Gorge is not your dream condo in the Hamptons, let me help you out.) But there was no arrogance about him. He seemed a good guy: not much use for digging ditches, but an okay sort. The shadows grew longer outside, and the white courtyard below us was now illuminated through Sammy’s ministrations. A Douglas fir Christmas tree could be seen down there twinkling green and red. I eyed my new client silently. Johansen began:

“I live in Rancho Verde with my wife Julie and our daughter, Chelsea. I’m a stock broker at Mills, Robertson, and Johansen in Century City. And, well, anyway, I mean, I don’t know how to put it, Mr. Downing, but there’s been some, uh, trouble, Joe, that we’ve been experiencing…..some real trouble. We’re just at sea about it, we’re worried sick about it, and we just don’t know what to do. We really need your help.” He sighed so deeply I thought his lungs would pop.

“What’s been going on, Mr. Johansen?” I said patiently. He fidgeted nervously in the chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs perpendicular on his thigh, trying different ways to get comfortable. None worked. (He had some expensive socks, boy, I noticed that.) It was tough for him to come out with it: maybe a sense of shame that fate had picked him out to sound his depths. Maybe he felt it was punishment? Who knows…..as he thought over how to put his points, he looked the office over: fairly Spartan quarters, to be sure, not real impressive, I had found out, to the high-powered legal babes: a TV/DVD player on a little stand in the corner, a photo here and there of old girlfriends, the dark, oaken desk, the light-colored, birch bookcase my dad had made for me — not much, admittedly.

Oh, yes, there was also a framed photo in the bookcase of my mother’s grandfather in his old Civil War uniform, a daguerreotype: Colonel Joseph Patrick Spillane, Union side. I was named after him. May I live to be half the man he was. Johansen then roused himself and laughed uncertainly, sighed once more, and continued his narrative:
 

“Well, my daughter has unfortunately made a new acquaintance, shall we say. An unwanted acquaintance, Joe. It’s so outrageous! I could pummel this guy! I mean, I don’t want to do anything illegal, to risk everything, but I’ve been sure thinking about it…..but I haven’t done anything yet, you understand.” I nodded gravely and respectfully. I then had to ask the obvious, to manipulate him a little (in a benevolent way), to establish a clear benchmark:

“I understand, Mr. Johansen. It sounds like a serious matter. Now, is this ‘new acquaintance’ positively being forced on Chelsea against her will?”

“OH, VERY MUCH SO! Very, very much so! It is definitely being forced on her against her will! That’s absolutely the perfect description, Joe! We’re just minding our own business and then this creep outta nowhere comes into our lives! I just don’t know what to do, Joe. I’ll do it, whatever it is, you just tell me what I need to do. This guy is a freak! We gotta end this!” He certainly could bristle with anger. I didn’t think he was lying. His eyes were full of pain, too, that he couldn’t help his daughter more. Maybe he felt a failure in that way. His eyes almost asked for forgiveness. But why from me, of all people?

“We’ll get him, Mr. Johansen. That you can be sure of. We’ll just go through the steps, one-by-one, and we can’t fail. We will end this. Now, how old is Chelsea, and what’s happened so far?”

“She’s 17, about a month short of 18. This guy, this damn guy, has been staring at her relentlessly through our windows at night for about three weeks. And then he goes to her school during the day and stalks her there, too! He’s unbelievable! Sometimes he talks to her, I don’t know what he says exactly, but he’s careful, I’ll say that for him. He knows how to have his cake and eat it, too.”

Johansen took on a bitter countenance now, and sat on the edge of the chair — now he looked the very picture of edginess and agitation. Their family life had become pins and needles, obviously. He abruptly continued: “This guy was even on the back deck, just now, less than an hour ago! Looking in! Right up against the sliding glass door of the deck! Julie almost died from fear! It scared the living daylights out of us! The cops won’t do anything until he actually touches her…..some Constitutional thing, but I don’t care, it’s my daughter!”
 

I was paralyzed: a sense of doom came over me, and not for the last time: “Just an hour ago?! On your back deck?” I stood up suddenly. “Where’s Chelsea now?”

“She’s at home with Julie. She’ll call if he appears again.”

“You can call her, too, and I suggest you do so frequently. Mr. Johansen, this could very well be extremely serious, and we can’t take any chances. At all. I’m glad you’ve come to me. I’ll be glad to take your case. And from now on, until this thing is settled, don’t let Chelsea out of your sight. Take her to work with you, check in on her bedroom in the middle of the night. Do everything. She must be on Christmas vacation, so that’ll help us out. Keep all doors and windows doubled-checked. Watch her like a hawk constantly while I track this guy. It ain’t complicated – stand in the way!”

“I will, Joe. I definitely will. I’m grateful for your help. This has been going on so long, we’re just drained with the worry…..the cops say we have to catch him trespassing…..”

“That’s true – they’d have to be there actually on guard when he comes over, and of course they can’t just sit there waiting…..that’s where I come in. I’ll need to talk to Chelsea, though, and get this going quick. With you present, of course.”

“That would be great, Joe. You’ve really given me a sense of hope! We haven’t slept in days, weeks even…..when can I bring Chelsea over?” An aggressiveness took root in his eyes.

“Or when can we meet at your house in Rancho? I should get a look at the grounds, to get a feel for what this guy is doing and thinking.” Johansen was astonished:

“You mean, at my house?! Right now, possibly?!”

“Yes, yes, of course! No time like the present. We better get over there. Will you lead me there?” Johansen broke into a broad, relieved smile like you’ve never seen.

“Will I! God yes, let’s go! No time like the present I always say! This is great, really great, Joe! Thank you so much!” Off we went, me in the battered, weathered Corvette, him in his black Mercedes SL. As I pulled out onto Mission Boulevard behind him, I wondered, as I always do (and with considerable trepidation), what new wonders of the human soul this case would bring. It’s usually more than you would’ve thought possible.

We went up Mission and then left onto Footfalls Boulevard, and then left again after a while onto the eucalyptus-lined, downward-curving, Portuguese Hills Drive North. The dark, rolling waves of the Pacific were just visible from the drive, in the distance and in the gathering gloom. The stars overhead began to be visible, and radiated from the darkening ether.

We drove into the night on a chilly Christmas Eve, the Nativity displays of Rancho Verde blinking from the wide, well-manicured lawns, the tidy neighborhoods passing us by until we reached Via Capri. We drove up a slope on that winding way and finally arrived at the broad, clean, up-tilted driveway of the Johansen residence. As we pulled in, an anxious, maternal, illuminated face appeared at the just-opened front door of the sprawling, two-story, ranch-style house. Gazing upon that worried face, so wracked with pain, a face so unaccustomed to danger, a sense of doom came over me for a second time.
 

…..to be continued…..

Tony Downing

April 9, 2009

When President Obama told the Turkish Parliament recently that America was not at war with Islam, and never would be, he was in effect talking to President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Obama’s speech was irresponsible in the extreme, and just the sort of thing that we had feared he would do in his foreign policy. It was capitulation, and it gave a signal to Iran that we would not stand in the way of their uranium enrichment program, their centrifuges, or, indeed, in the way of their nuclear ambitions at all.

During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, there was a major global shift in power away from America and towards the Soviet Union. This took place because of Carter’s moribund and passive foreign policy, which came to him from his National Security Advisor, Zibigniew Brzezinski. The latter believed that ineluctable, historical changes were occurring, that we were in fact “between two ages,” and that America could not, indeed must not, try to stop those changes. The similarities to Marxist theory are painful.

Furthermore, the clear disaster of Carter’s international policy is there for anyone with eyes to see (along with the willingness to do so): Nicaragua went Marxist, spreading that pernicious faith throughout the Latin world; Iran underwent an Islamic-Marxist revolution that still plagues us today, thirty years later; Africa embraced the Soviet Union in several instances; India deepened its involvement with Marxist experiments; Afghanistan went Marxist after being invaded by the Soviet Union; and the Panama canal was given away for a song. All this and more in only four years.

Unfortunately, Obama seems poised to repeat these types of mistakes. One just cannot publically give away one’s plans, as Obama has, and one just cannot publically adopt so passive a stance in world affairs. America has a responsibility to the captive nations of the world to act as a bulwark, a firewall, against the advance of renegade, rogue regimes such as the Khomeinist one in Tehran. Obama is clearly unfit to lead the world to freedom, since he is at pains to please the implacable enemies of freedom at a time when he should concern himself with implacably promoting the interests of allies such as Israel and Georgia, the latter a staunch friend of America from the New Europe.

Another example here is Obama’s reaction to North Korea’s launch of a rocket: Obama said in essence that America has to tool down first in order to get others to do the same. This is simply juvenile. If America disarms unilaterally, then that much freedom will exit from the world, that much ability to fight for truth. Criminal regimes are not known for their compliance to agreements that limit either their power or their ambitions.

Negotiation, as stated recently by John Bolton, cannot be an end in itself. At a certain point we must prepare for hostilities, given the demonstrable intransigence of some of those we “engage,” and forget about getting through to them. Thus, Iran is clearly a totalitarian regime with the intention of doing harm, and it can do so quite inexpensively. It is one of the captive nations, and that does not bode well for the rest of us: it will want to extend its realm. To proclaim that we will lay down arms forever is foolish beyond description. It is not that America is the world’s cop, it is rather that America must not leave itself vulnerable when it can easily avoid so doing.

The guiding philosophy behind these Carteresque attitudes is first a misguided, watered-down Marxism that believes History is a prewritten script we are working our way through and must obey through submission. Secondly, it’s the overreliance on negotiation, on nuance, as if hostility cannot ever be shown or felt, as if multicultural sensitivity has been proven objectively true (when it hasn’t). Frustratingly, Obama believes we are entering the age of the “post-American world” (just as Fareed Zakaria), and that America should behave as did King Lear: give up power in the name of the wheel of history. But don’t forget what happened to Lear when he did foolishly relinquish all that power: disaster.

Tony Downing

March 13, 2009  

Christopher Hitchens has written an exciting, powerful, and involving book, but one nevertheless inconsistent. This book is only periodically convincing, and Hitchens fails to give us a fully realized thesis. This is undoubtedly because that central thesis, that religion alone poisons all, that a completely secular humanism should drive religion out and take its place, is so draconian as to be insusceptible of demonstration.  

Further, his amazing confidence in himself is apparent on every page, and unfortunately finds its correlative in his fondness for radical statements: Hitchens seems inclined to believe that truth must always be wholly radical, that truth cannot be found in our everyday, red-state world. The book also has some vague similarities with radical leftist thinking in that human history, exclusive of Greece of antiquity, is mostly viewed as a crime, “a nightmare from which we are trying to awake,” and must be corrected. It couldn’t be, of course, that there was good in the past, but only in the ideal, Platonic, Darwinian future. Hitchens wishes to discard all religious elements without heed for the baby or the bathwater, to the detriment of his book.  

This book is indeed a passionate, intelligent plea for humanistic rationality, to be sure, and the point is well-taken that secular life has its glories, but one suspects at a certain point that at bottom Hitchens is really pursuing here his contempt for the non-elite, for the non-cosmopolitan, and that he simply couches this contempt in atheism. He has a pretentious and annoying habit in this book of referring repeatedly to people simply as “mammals.” Early on, Hitchens says to religion: “Leave me alone.” This is ironic since Hitchens has spent his life diligently seeking out violent religious hotspots — leave me alone? What? This book has high-brow aspirations, but mainly preaches to the choir with radical pronouncements. Hitchens is a brilliant fellow, but one wishes he wouldn’t lump things together so willy-nilly, for example, his implying moral equivalence between the Palestinians and Israel.  

Now, Hitchens’ central point is that religion is man-made, rather than revealed. This is the basis of all he goes on to say, and it is the strongest, most fully realized part of the book. Certainly fewer “mammals” today believe in the Virgin Birth, for example, than did a thousand years ago, say, and certainly, in any case, it is a less fervently believed in faith than heretofore. There has to be a reason for that: the gains of science. So Hitchens does adduce solid evidence that religion has an earthly and non-transcendent origin. But then, partly on this basis, he makes the mistake of positing that civilization and religion are distinct, that the former was possible without the latter. “We could have done without the whole thing,” is his attitude. But he adduces virtually no evidence, to my mind, for this further claim, other than his own opinion.  

Since religion has no transcendent authority or provenance, Hitchens continues, and since it is horrifically cruel and fanatical, it must go. Religion “plots your destruction.” There is a clash taking place between civilization and religion, and we must save ourselves and take up arms. But this is just the over-the-top radical rhetoric earlier referred to: it is actually only Islamofascism that we are threatened by, not religion as a whole, and even Islamofascism is unlikely to threaten all of civilization with destruction, given its power level. It can only threaten us with occasional, albeit horrific and murderous, acts of terrorism.  

If we step back a moment, the question plausibly arises as to whether civilization is not completely based on religion. Persia, Old Testament Israel, Greece, Rome, Sumeria, Mesopotamia — weren’t they all rooted in religion? Wasn’t religion itself, and not science, the creator of moral values? And aren’t science and rationality incapable of value-creation? And isn’t the well-placed, intelligent admiration we give to science a value that itself derives from the religious sensibility, a sensibility attuned to the larger-than-life? Isn’t the Bible, that is, the Old Testament, actually the Book of Nation-Building, and therefore the Book of Civilization? If all this is true, or even just some of it, Hitchens’ argument against religion is internally incoherent: he attacks religion and thereby unwittingly attacks the foundation of civilization. He praises his allegedly secular worthies and yet denies the source and wellspring of their awesome inspiration.  

It has been written that philosophy is the transition from myth to science. This definition suits me, and yet it should still be noticed that science owes myth for the magic bus ride: Thales, the first philosopher, from his abode in Asia Minor, near Egypt, stated that all is water. The significance of this is that when science took its first unsteady steps into a new method, empirical observation, it still relied on the myths of Egypt about the power of the Nile, and included those mythic elements in the scientific hypothesis. Well, now. Mighty, all-conquering science initially had one foot remaining in fanciful description even as it put its remaining foot into the certainty of empirical evidence. It is clear that the human intellect created myth, religion, and science, all three. They are of a piece in that. Their methods are different, and that distinguishes them, to be sure, but they have indeed different functions thereby. They do not displace each other, as Hitchens believes. Science is the mere gathering of evidence, so how can it posit moral values?  

The law-givers of history, be they religious believers or quasi-secular rational thinkers, have always known that law is a scar on the human psyche. Stubborn material, the human impulse. But the scar imposed by the law-givers had to be imposed to make civilization possible. In retrospect, the law-givers were in the right. Hitchens might disagree — he believes it is only religion that makes us bad. This is Rousseauist with a vengeance, however. Marquis de Sade, a younger man coming after Rousseau, wrote violent, disturbing scenes in his novels for a reason: to ridicule the optimism of Rousseau about mankind. I think that Hitchens’ rational man is just Rousseau’s natural man redux.  

Moreover, Hitchens believes we would behave better without religion, since it is precisely religion that makes us behave worse than anything else. Oh…..to have no moral compass gives one more moral compass. I see now. But wouldn’t humans be bad even if religion had never existed? Isn’t it the badness of ”mammals” that prompted the original religious activity, the law-giving?  

Towards the end, Hitchens anticipates an objection to his blueprint for a Brave New World of Secular Humanism. He knows that some of us will bring up Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot. Aren’t they proof that the secular world of atheism is just as capable of atrocity as any type of society? And therefore, why bother with establishing its hegmony? The defense he gives here is the weakest part of the book, without doubt. He asserts that early religious societies, of the ancient world (Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Aztecs, Incas, etc), were totalitarian. Thus it is religion that created totalitarianism, and thus the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century are on the conscience not of secular society, but of religious society. Secular society is innocent of all wrongdoing here. Now, it’s obvious that Hitchens is simply making an arbitrary rule at this point that states everything bad is from religion, and everything good is from humanism. But anyone can do that as he will.  

The mechanism that Hitchens claims transferred the totalitarianism of past religious societies to the twentieth century was the modern concept of utopia, and the age-old desire to perfect the human species. If only we hadn’t done that. But let’s step back. Didn’t Alexander the Great consider himself a god? And isn’t he a secular humanism A-Lister? And, even more compellingly, what in the world has Hitler got to do with the Aztecs? It is implausible in the extreme to assert that religious societies of long-ago created the psychopatholgy of Joseph Stalin, or contributed to it in any way.  

A much more recent, obvious, and plausible suspect would be Marxism. This much-vaunted theory gave us the idea, derived from Hegel, that history has a spiritual terminus, and that the economic interpretation of history is the precise key to understanding the gears of history. Doesn’t that sound a lot closer to twentieth century totalitarianism than the Incas? There really isn’t much description of the new secular order in Hitchens’ book. We’re on our own there. Ironic, too, that he feels so wholly threatened by religion — isn’t our society pretty much already a secular one, hasn’t he already won his victory, for the most part? This book reflects the bias of its time.  

Tony Downing

February 27, 2009

“Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”  –Frederic Bastiat (1801-50)

“You’re using a hatchet when you need a scalpel.” –Barack Obama to John McCain at the first presidential debate in 2008.

Obama’s outlandish budget shows distrust in the free market to right the economy, and a willingness to blame that same free market for the current economic woes. But it was not the free market that caused this trouble, but rather affirmative action finance, the latest chapter of which goes back to Bill Clinton and to George W. Bush. This type of finance, which rejects market forces as the most stable rudder for an economy, now finds its ferocious apotheosis in our new president. Furthermore, Obama is using this financial crisis to institute a broad new social policy in America, one that is European in inclination and that diminishes seriously the self-reliance that is the hallmark of the American personality. Obama is promulgating a welfare state and, as Emmett Tyrrell put it recently, he is nationalizing the economy.

We are penny-wise but pound-foolish when we tinker with the market on behalf of social justice theories, and accomplish nothing so much as strangling the goose that lays the golden egg, competition. These socialism-style remedies are an attempt to extinguish the current fire with gasoline, and will only further aggravate a trying situation. It’s evident that President Obama and Speaker Pelosi have an emotional investment in these same social justice theories, and consequently they are dissociated from the real-world consequences of what they do.

There is an idea among those on the left that capitalism impoverishes those on the bottom of the social scale. This idea advances the proposition that the poor would not have been poor had capitalism never been. But this is false. Capitalism creates wealth for all, and there is no viable alternative, anyway. That is, Marxism, the pretender to the throne, is incapable of creating any wealth whatsoever, since it does not allow competition — all industry is state-owned in a fully Marxist state, and thus we have the abolition of competition. The poor of this world are not poor because of too much capitalism, but because of too much social engineering. If they are ever to attain wealth, it will be because free market competition came within their borders. Cancel their debts? Fine with me, in some cases, if it brings more competitors into the market.

Obama’s budget evinces a bias against free market capitalism and a prejudice in favor of human intervention in economic affairs. This is a misguided approach, however. Friedrich Hayek demonstrated long ago the impossibility of theory duplicating the compexities of a spontaneous marketplace, but Obama wasn’t listening. We are being taken for a ride that has no destination but crack-up, and Obama’s blaming “deregulation” and “the failed policies of the last eight years” for the economic problems we face is obfuscatory.

Tony Downing

 
 February 20, 2009  

 In descending order:

(3) The Jesus and Mary Chain, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, California, about 1985: the world’s shortest concert.   The lads from Scotland came out on stage in their best alienation-look: dark clothing, hair covering their eyes, heads down. They positively exuded “how does it feel?” Obviously, with attitude like that to burn, they were hot-as-a-pistol with the avante garde set. They began to play. Then they stopped (after about twenty seconds). They got together in a huddle. No explanation to us, three or four thousand new fans.  

They got back into position, and restarted. Restarted a different song, that is. Forget that first one, apparently. They would play a song at most for about a minute before it broke down, then they’d go into huddle, remerge, and play a different song. This happened several times. The last time, however, they were in the instrumental part of a song, when the singer, leaning on the microphone stand, started to lean not merely forward, but also started listing to his right: slowly, slowly, slowly, down to the sea in ships, he got more and more diagonal, until finally he just collapsed outright on the stage in a heap.  

The song stopped, and his mates pulled him up, groggy, off the floor; they proceeded to consult with him about his high-protein diet, and then they all just walked off the stage. Without a word. House lights: On. Explanation: None. Elapsed time of “concert:” about 12 minutes, maybe? Refund: Dream on. That was it, I’m not kidding. Go home.  

(2) The Rolling Stones, at then-Anaheim Stadium, Anaheim, California, about mid-80’s.   I was with a friend along the first-base line, and the stage was in center field. Mick and the boys in the band were rockin’ out, in fine feather, but every so often a lone shoe would sail from the crowd up to the stage. Curious…..Some of the shoes fell short, mere pretenders to the throne, and some sailed over the Stones’ heads to the back. This went on for several songs, one or two shoes per minute. After about ten to twenty shoes had been thrown at him, a miffed Jagger, in between songs, says into the microphone, leaning forward to better school us, “All right, I want all your shoes!” He pointed down at the stage as he said this. Now, it could be stated at this point that the crowd complied with the order. Chaos descends! The heavens roll! The tragedy begins! Thundering hordes of shoes start zipping up onto the stage, end-over-end, sideways, it didn’t matter, the crowd had responded with a criminal vengeance. It was like a buffalo stampede through the air.  

Hundreds of motley shoes, spinning furiously, went flying through the sky towards the stage, the band members ducking for all they were worth, Mick and Keith included. And then finally, under the sustained onslaught, the Stones relinquished the stage all together. They ducked their heads ignominiously and scurried like ninnies as they hurried off. Shoes were making it to the stage from incredible distances, seemingly from the infield area all the way to center field. And yet still it did not stop. On and on it went, sorties into the night. The Stones counterattacked, but to no avail! They were outflanked! The shoes were launched like rockets, shooting up fiercely out of their tall, narrow silos, on their way to annihilate the enemy, The Rolling Stones.  

The stage was soon covered with shoes. It was three or four deep. A rummage sale. Roadies had to start clearing it, and even they had to duck. They were allies of the dread opposition, they were the hired help! The Stones were off-stage for a full ten minutes, while the music lovers savored their unequivocal, unembarrassed, ultimate victory over The Rolling Stones, The Greatest Rock Band in the World. The Stones came back and behaved themselves.  

(1) Johnny Rotten, at the Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood CA, about 1987. This was a punk-rock reunion concert, and Rotten was no longer a Sex Pistol full-time. He was quite the composer, too, with all sorts of intellectual stuff. Not a good idea. This was a hard-core punk audience, and they had no use for fancy stuff. He came out playing this new stuff. There were some boos in the front of the pack, on the ballroom floor. But he kept on playing his newer stuff, ignoring the old Sex Pistols songs.

And then suddenly an arm whipped forward like a baseball pitcher’s. Something zoomed by. A missile of some sort. It came from about ten feet back. Wham! A huge, sloppy tomato smacked square into J. Rotten’s face. His face was gloriously soaked with tomato puree. Totally covered, dripping, it was a shot from hell, a career shot, a magnificent display of marksmanship! Johnny stopped dead. Motionless and speechless with rage. He couldn’t react, he couldn’t begin to react. For a full 7-8 seconds he didn’t budge an inch or move a muscle, there was just an ugly grimace emanating from his pasty face, eerily illuminated under the lights. He stalked off the stage, his back bowed with anger. The musicians followed apace.  
 

They were gone for several minutes, and we all thought we were done. “He’s fed up with us now, we really did it this time!” We hung around a little, though. You never know. Some buffoon spilled beer on my arm. I wiped it off on him. Only fair. We lingered around, musing, laughing. Then Johnny and the boys come back! At that point we witnessed a sight that no mortal heretofore can claim to have seen: Johnny Rotten, sheepish. He was downright apologetic. His manner was fully remorseful at playing the intellectual stuff. He had seen the error of his ways.

I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it. It was a bit disillusioning to see Johnny Rotten unsure of himself. Are there no verities? The King of Brash? He then said into the mike to the crowd that he’d play the old stuff, and when the band did so a second later, the punks erupted with happiness and exploded into mayhem all around. Paradise regained, the mosh pit unbound.  

Tony Downing

February 14, 2009  

“No man is a fit judge in his own case.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

in re: Geert Wilders v. The Koran  

England recently denied entry to Geert Wilders, a Dutch parliament member. Wilders had twice been invited by a British lord to visit England and preside over a showing of Fitna, his short documentary movie illustrating his belief that Islam incites to violence. England’s refusal to allow Wilders to enter the country is capitulation: to intimidation, to lies, to totalitarianism.  

But refusing Wilders is also a mistaken policy in another sense — it evinces the belief that the intentions of total domination can be appeased. But that change of inclinations has never taken place; nay, on the contrary, we see time and again that appeasement accelerates the inclination to aggression. That is, the same old ancient mistake is being made once again: the mistake of believing there is no difference between the totalitarian world and the non-totalitarian world.  

But there is indeed a difference, and we will continue to ignore it at our peril. What works in the non-totalitarian world will not work in the totalitarian world. Appeasement in the non-totalitarian world can work at times, if there is a normal, healthy strand of self-interest that can be reached in the aggressor. But in dealing with a totalitarian movement, however, the aggressor has no normal self-interest that can be reached — they don’t live in the world we do, a totalitarian movement does not care about its immediate self-interest in terms of this world.  

Such a movement is only concerned about the perceived eternality of the ideology, its interpretation of history, that is, and about what can further that ideology. We are playing into their hands by not recognizing this — we assume, incorrectly, that they will respond to our cooperation with their own cooperation. They will not. To try to appeal to a normal self-interest in them is to assume they are non-totalitarian, and not steeped in ideology, an ideology that claims the world as its property. That appeal to a non-existent self-interest will fail because the totalitarian movement will seize upon the appeasement as yet another gain for the ideology.

We project onto them our own psychological state, that is, our desire for peace, and we project our own non-totalitarian version of personal interest. But appeasement cannot work — totalitarians don’t have any motives rooted in this world that can be reached! They want the world, in short, and will not settle for any compromise or meeting-of-the-minds — there will be no budging on their part since their goals are beyond any understandable state of consciousness. They have put an ideology above reality, to an unreachable degree.  

Finally, Wilders was right to fly into Heathrow, to make the British government go on record, publicly, as an uncomprehending foe of freedom.

Tony Downing

 February 10, 2009

Liberals believe man’s past is the record of a fundamental evil, and that the farther we leave it behind, the better. The more nearly opposite to the past we become, the more ameliorated world history will be. They see nothing at all good in our history, except for those few figures in the past who were the harbingers of those today who see the way out of that history. They see themselves as the sole source of rectitude, justice, and sympathy.

But what they do not see is that the good of today actually depends wholly upon what was good in the past: that is, solid, middle-of-the-road tradition is the vehicle that carries goodness forward. It cannot be otherwise. Liberals don’t see, furthermore, that the complete break with the past they propose is not visionary but, rather, uncomprehending in the extreme, and will only result in a race-to-the-bottom morality, a Lord of the Flies world.

They insist on living in a world of fiction and in a world of the ideal, in a world of theoretical substitutes for reality, in order to distance themselves from the unyielding paradigms of life. They see themselves as the end of a long, inevitable process of moral and intellectual development that finds its culmination today in them, the end of history, as it were, when the long reign of injustice is overturned finally by the ineluctable force of truth. The narcissism here is extreme. The real truth, however, is that liberals have voluntarily separated themselves from the actuality of the world as it can only be, while claiming that that tragic dissociation is a higher spiritual state. They have made their irrelevance the center of the universe.

Moreover, they defend their weak theses by means of emotional postures that usually rise to nothing more than the contrived, and they avoid, in their determination to live a life of estrangement from the actual, any true commitment to empirical evidence or rational sobriety. They attempt to transform their flight from reality into objective nature. The more they feign worry over the “carbon footprint” of man, the more we realize how strong is their disinclination to accept the actual, how strong their hatred of the past, and how strong their belief man is an aberrant species, and America a nation with a completely evil past.

The difficulty in accepting liberal politics, then, is that a sickly atmosphere of victimhood is encouraged and foisted upon those already the most vulnerable, with the result that a milieu of clear decadence is generated, touted as a new moral state. But the self-inflicted nature of this milieu of sickliness is not perceived.  Liberals just love the claims of the absolute, of the irrefutable, and of the ideal: the difficulty is that this ardent love evinces a desire to flee, a desire for refuge. Liberal politics, then, is the rejection of self-reliance.

Finally, liberals implicitly posit that only their perspective is legitimate, and that any other point of view is tainted with some sort of mental or moral illness, such as racism. It is inconceivable to a liberal that another point of view could be valid. They think themselves to be an enlightened elite, but are merely myopic. In their dissociation and estrangement, they have mistaken their separation from the genuinely existent as an embracing of the universal, but they really only manage to arrive at the hypothetical, the abstract, and the nonexistent.

Tony Downing

February 5, 2009

A Joe Downing mystery

The following is a fictional mystery short story:

“It turns out there is such a thing as ’spectral evidence,’ Tom. Hubrisa in the movie is solid, celluloid evidence that Viper killed her. It was really weird to see her moving around alive in the movie, knowing she was dead. She was in two places at once. But she really had something to her, a kind of magnetic attraction, more than just physical. But she’s quite a babe, though. I can see why Miramax wanted her.” I sat talking with Tom Wilkinson in my office in Deep Gorge, on Saturday night at about 10pm. Tom’s a widower, with a couple of kids out of the nest, so he’s okay with late nights. He likes action: tennis; football; murder.

“Celluloid heroes never really die,” Tom sang. I ignored him. We guzzled our beers from the office fridge and batted the ball around about how to move in on Viper and Paco Baby.

“McNulty and Vaughan have to be told, and fast, or we’ll be in it for withholding evidence,” I said.

“You got that right, Big Paco Boy,” Tom slurred at me, tilting his head back. I ignored him some more. I went on:

“And if they take the collar away from us, there ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.”

“The hell with them, then, let’s not tell. It’s your evidence, and it’s your collar, Big Boy!” Tom said. I took a deep breath and thought about it: certainly risky, for a bit of personal glory (and advertising for the business), but then in deep water with McNulty. He had always been fair with me, Vaughan, too. I made the only decision I could:

“We gotta tell them, Tom, I couldn’t stand it if I was responsible for you getting in legal trouble, or put in the slammer, even for a few hours…..I’d love to nail these two little operators at the motel on our own, without anyone in the way, but…..let’s at least tip ‘em.” Tom sighed. He had always been bold, and it had paid off. But not always. Vaughan hated Tom.

“All right, you win. Call ‘em.” Tom gave in reluctantly. He would have made an awesome test pilot. Anything wild and dangerous. So I called it in. McNulty and Vaughan were both at home, so I just left a message with the P.D. saying that I had broken the case, and was waiting for word from them, anytime. Call my cell. If they don’t believe me, that’s not my problem.

“If those two don’t get back to you, we’re moving in on their damn case,” Tom stared bullets at me. “Tomorrow morning we take Viper and what’s-his-face down. McNulty and Thromb-Bosis have until 9am!’ Tom waved a forefinger at me and thundered. Was he louder sober or toasted? Who knows? Couldn’t tell. But I couldn’t have asked for more loyalty or purpose than Tom had. (I’ll try to go easy on the cliches.) I drove Tom home to his apartment since he was very much too plastered to drive. I was to call him at 7am Sunday.

I proceeded then to tool by Viper’s motel at about midnight, just slowly cruising Beacon Street in a taxi, since they already knew the ‘Vette. Didn’t want no rabbits. Just checking. Well, it was all quiet seemingly, only the usual stuff going on — liasons made, people then going their separate ways. Not a world of long-term stuff, no. I looked down the long alley into the motel units. Are these the real people, I thought to myself, have they got something on the diurnal world of ordinary types? Or are they only parasites on that world? The night felt okay — no one seemed to be moving any troops around. Just a regular Saturday night in the realm of the teeming shadows. Exciting to be out, still prowling, every corner fraught with potential peril if you didn’t play your hand right.

“What you need, my friend?” The cabby turned his head back. I saw his taxi license in the sun-visor thing above his head: his name was about a mile long.

“What? Me?” I was not ready. I was fumbling in my mind for what to say. I didn’t want to make a mistake at this juncture since we were doing pretty good, yet if this guy was a source of untold riches, I’d better get healthy, as the druggies put it. He looked at me with a “what a rookie” look on his face. Good. Maybe I can play a part. “Well…..I dunno, sir.” I began. He rolled his eyes a bit, exasperated, impatient. He probably made extra cash putting people together who wished to find each other. Maybe he supported a wife and kids this way. I got an idea:

“Uh, yeah…..ya know…..uh, I saw this triple X movie one time, not that I, you know, but uh, I was wondering, sorta, where a place like that was…..you know…..”

“Yes, my friend, I know. I know everything. You desire everything, you are interested in everything. I know. I can take you.” The cabby stated this categorically. I decided not to argue about it. Maybe I do “desire” everything.

“Well, I didn’t exactly want to watch a movie, if you know what I mean…..” I hoped he wouldn’t fly into a childish rage that I had changed what I was angling for. He didn’t:

“Yes, I do know what you mean, my friend. I can take you, I can take you. Sit back, relax, I will take you.”

“You know where she lives?” I asked excitedly.

“Who?” He glanced back, a tad uncertain for once. We were deep within Deep Gorge now, on Front Street.

“The girl…..you know…..that one…..” I said. 

“The girl? Which girl?” he countered.

“The one who…..who…..you know…..” I countered in return.

“The girl who…..the girl who…..?”

“In the movies!” I said. “The one from the Midwest.” I finally said it. His mood blackened immediately. Clouds formed instantly in his weather pattern. He knew. Oh, yeah, he knew.

“Can I have her?” I asked.

“No!” he practically shouted.

“Why not?!”

“Because you cannot! You cannot, my friend! You cannot!”

“Is she married or something?” I persisted.

“No! I mean…..yes! No! I mean ‘no’!”

“What?!” I said, pretending confusion. He looked back at me accusingly as we stopped for the red light at Front and 22nd.

“She is dead, my friend! Can you have her so?! You cannot have her!” he yelled at me. I gasped in surprise.

“Are you serious? No way…..! She was so beautiful, sir! She was so nice!”

“I am afraid it is true,” he related quietly, softening now.

“What happened?” I asked. (Oh, homie, roll those dice now!) He was silent. Driving along lonely, deserted, degraded streets, through the urban landscape, or what had become of it, an occasional solitary figure lurking in the dark, still he was silent. “I am so sorry, sir, if something happened to her. I didn’t mean no disrespecting. She was really a nice girl. She was so nice!”

“Yes, she was!!! She was nice girl! Why do they did this to her?! Why?! They have not already enough money? Why?!” He almost broke down with the emotion. “Always like this! Why?!” (Now I thought to myself, how can I finish this quickly, and stop torturing this man? How to make all that candy come crashing down?)

“I’ll bet it was that weird Spoof dude,” I said in a sinister undertone, laughing sadistically. “I’ll bet it was that damn scumbag, dirtbag, loser Spoof!!!” I yelled out the window.

“No!!!” He slammed on the brakes in the middle of the street. We caught ourselves against the seats and dash. “No! Spoof is good man!!! You do not say that! You do not say that! I will rip you ‘part, mister! Spoof is good man! It was Paco Baby, my friend! It was Paco Baby!!! He kill her! He kill her!! He kill her!!!”

He looked at me like he wanted to tear me limb from limb. Then he squeezed his eyes shut tightly, fighting off tears. He turned away in shame. Cold sweat broke out on my neck, freezing me in the cold, as I stared into the nothingness of the urban canvas, unseeing.

***************************************************************

Indolent Christmas lights twinkled from the broad fascia boards of dark houses in the predawn chill. Children’s bicycles lay abandoned and sprawled on the shadowy, dewy lawns. It was Sunday, 6:45am, December 13. How this symbolic innocence before me contrasted with the turbulence I now felt inside was extreme. I pulled out of my office building in the freezing ‘Vette, on my way to Rancho Verde to go rouse Tom. His BMW, of course, had been left here last night. McNulty and Vaughan hadn’t got back to me, but I called in to the P.D. that I would meet them at the motel anytime, starting now. 9am was Tom’s deadline for them, but I was shortening it up a bit. I turned left from Western Avenue onto Portuguese Hills Drive North. The sun behind me burgeoned, and just peeked over the ridge of distant mountains, orange and glowing. Tom’s apartment was in a nice section of the city, but then, all of Rancho Verde is a nice section, like Portuguese Hills. I parked on Rancho Verde Drive and rapped gently on Tom’s door. Movement within. Steps coming closer, the door sticks, but finally gives way. I raised my chin at Tom as I went in. “You ready?” I asked the obvious.

“Hell, yes.” He looked at me a bit. Tom was actually pretty quiet in the morning — when we played tennis early, he barely said a word. Just what was necessary. “How do we get both these guys at once if they’re in different units?” Tom began. I took a deep breath.

“Yeah — that’s our little problem. Viper’s the most dangerous, I think, in spite of what I found out last night, so I say we get him last. We got to get big fatboy first, Paco, the easier one, to make sure he’s in the bag safely, before going on to snake-face…..you know, this guy has got a huge tattoo of a snake on the back of his head, looking right at you.”

“Maybe we can put a little mouse out for it to eat.” We laughed, a little nervously. I looked around at what was already familiar. Tom had a nice pad: well-maintained inside and out, not messy — strictly modern, up-to-date stuff.

“Okay — how ’bout this?” I started. “We’ll take both cars, after we get back to yours, since they don’t know yours yet, and I’ll park away. So first, I’ll walk in to Paco Baby’s unit, and I’ll pretend I’m a user, even though they know me already. I saw See-Saw Lady going in before, so I think I know which one it is. When I’m in, or while I’m walking over there, whatever, you pull in and block the entrance with your Beamer, pretending you need a jumpstart after visiting. When you see I’m in, you get Viper out of the manager’s unit, right in front of the pelican. Or in back of the pelican, I guess.

“Anyway, pretend you’re there for drugs from See-Saw Babe — it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t really deal. When Viper boy refuses to give you a jumpstart, you get real loud and abusive and complaining, all: ‘where’s the love,’ and that kind of thing. Just a real white jerk on Sunday morning. That should draw him out. I’ll cuff Paco Baby and See-Saw, then come out to help you. But don’t, for God’s sake, let him go back in the office! And take the negative cable off your battery when you get in there, first thing, quietly, so Viper will be convinced.”

“It’s pretty crude, Joe.” Tom summed up his feelings.

“It’ll work, Tom. Just believe in it, and that’ll make it work. Like tennis: if you believe in the shots and trust them, they go in.” Tom pursed his lips. I continued: “If I can get in and take Paco Baby down, it’ll work. Take your time, there’s no rush, give me a few minutes to work, and when I’m done, I’ll open the door a crack to signal you to go for it. Just keep glancing at the door. I’ll take duct tape in to shut those two up.” We left Tom’s apartment carrying tennis racquets so none of Tom’s neighbors would wonder what the strange geezer was up to this time. We actually were carrying our pair of Glocks, concealed, business-end down for the moment. The incongruence of the rest of our winter clothing to the tennis racquets didn’t matter. I was even wearing steel-toed boots.

We stopped at 7/11 for some caffeine, keeping the car running — Tom just coffee, me a Coke and some junk food. Tom’s got a better diet than me, so what. The headline of the Peninsula Daily Herald proclaimed: “Obama slashes DoD $31 billion.” It was 7:30 when we got close to the motel. We should have been here an hour earlier. I parked upstream on Beacon. Tom kept his Beamer running, double-parked by the ‘Vette, as I walked the fifty yards down Beacon, away from Mission, to the Proud Pelican. My heart pounded out of my chest as I negotiated more children’s toys left overnight on the narrow white sidewalk. The metal pelican was still grinning as I entered the grounds.

I walked down the middle of the quiet alley of the motel, through the pink stucco on either side. Every spot was taken. No vacancies, homies! I saw Spoof’s unit, then turned three units to the left, also at the back of the square horseshoe. I think this was the one. I knocked quietly, but with a little force, nevertheless: nothing. No suprise there. I tried the door gently, duly locked. I knocked once more: irritated voices within. I heard Tom’s BMW pull in at the top, I didn’t look back. The car shut off. I heard Tom get out, pop the hood, and begin disabling the battery with a little 9/16″. Hopefully he was blocking the view of the office as to what he was really doing. The door before me opened. A very tall, barefooted man in a white Jack Daniels tank-top and jeans glowered at me, his teeth bared somewhat from behind a mostly white and yellow grizzled beard. I could smell last night’s skiing party on his breath and his Marlboros on his clothes. I was a bit non-plussed, so I didn’t speak at first. He shook his head quickly, a little scared, as if to say, “whattaya want, genius?”

“Uh, I’m sorry, sir, I’m looking for that See-Saw Lady, you know her? To give her something. Does she live in this unit, sir?” He gave me a chagrined smile, and glanced over at his Harley, just checking, the chill sunlight now gleaming on the handlebars and fuel tank of his old Shovelhead. He gave me the finger abruptly and shut the door in my face. Okay…..doing good. At least he didn’t order me out of the place. Maybe the single finger was a code saying move one door to the side? All right — let’s try it — I moved to the right one door, and knocked once again: immediate, energetic response. Heavy male footsteps a’coming. Paco Baby himself, in the flesh, opens the door with supreme confidence.

“Downing?! What do you want, fool?”

“Man, what do I want? Are you serious? C’mon, man, don’t be like that!”

“Get lost, Downing. Leave.”

“But the taxi-driver told me to come here! C’mon, man, please? Just once, that’s all, then I’ll take off…..” Paco Baby, uncertain at first what he was facing, got real serious and threatening:

“What else did he tell you?” he asked.

“…..what?” I played possum, played the stoner-doofus.

“What else did the taxi-driver tell you?!” He raised his voice sharply, staring.

“What else did the taxi-driver tell me?” I countered, infuriatingly dense and dim.

“Yeah!!! What else?!” he replied.

“…..what else did he tell me?” I said, crinkling my nose, and tilting me head stupidly.

“Goddamn you asshole!!!” Paco Baby grabbed me summarily by the jacket-front, and pulled me roughly into the apartment, and closed the door quickly and quietly. He took a deep breath, summoning patience. He was worried about this. My Glock was down my pants, up against my tush, pointing down. I could hear Tom’s hood shutting outside, and the distant sound of Tom mumbling something about needing a jumpstart. Okay — he’s got the battery cable off now. The tragedy begins, then.

Well then: Paco Baby and I meet again. A little less friendly than before, though. “Do I still look like Elliott Gould?” I asked, like a dummy.

“Shut-up! What’re you doing here, trash?”

“I’m hurtin’ for a…..let’s see…..I’m hurtin’ for a…..for a…..” I laughed. “I’m trying to find a word that rhymes with ‘hurtin’, but I can’t think of one…..” I put my palms up in consternation. The contrast to my behavior before him on Friday morning was total. I had to be careful. I thought I heard Viper’s voice outside. Not so fast, T.W., I need time! Paco Baby spoke contemptuously:

“You want a joint, or something, idiot?” I pouted a little.

“Yeah…..maybe.” I folded my arms across my chest. Paco Baby went to get a joint — he threw it at me, backhanded, at the level of my stomach, and I just barely caught it, bending it in half.

“Oh…..there’s no need for that, Paco Son, c’mon, man…..”

“Get out, Downing. I got a woman waiting.”

“You got matches? I ain’t.” He sighed heavily and went to get some, resignedly. He spoke to someone in the back briefly. But that was Viper’s voice outside, mingled with Tom’s. I looked out the window through the cheap gauzy curtain. Viper gesticulating like the irritable creep he was, Tom playing his part to the hilt of the well-to-do addict. The Beamer clicked and clicked as first Tom, then Viper in turn, tried to start it. 

I glanced back at Paco Baby arriving, and then reached my hand out to his extended arm. I looked back at the action outside, pretending to be fascinated. I purposely bumped his hand with my fingertips clumsily and obtusely, groaning comically, so the matches would fall to the green carpet. They stood up on the high pile. I needed to time this thing like a Swiss watch. I kept looking outside, feigning interest, my hand ludicrously extended without purpose in midair. Not quite yet…..not yet…..no, not yet…..I turned slowly, staying in character, disciplined, and finally saw what I most wanted to see: Paco Baby bent over to pick up the matches. With lightning speed I suddenly reared back and kicked his face hard with my boots. He fell back on his butt, dazed but not incapacitated, legs out in front of him. Blood trickled from his nose. He revived a bit. He was more muscular than me, though I was taller, so I better end this now. I took my time and kicked his face again, harder, even sickeningly. He fell back, unconscious. I felt his nose give way beneath the boot.

See Saw lady stood in front of me, speechless with fear. “Get down, without a word, and I will not hurt you.” I said quietly and explicitly. She couldn’t move. She trembled from head to toe. I felt badly about scaring her, but she had let herself become an accessory to a first-degree murder, that of Hubrisa. I motioned with my hand silently for her to lower herself, and at last she was capable of complying. I cuffed them both behind their backs, See Saw to the heater, and Paco to the door hinge, away from her reach. I covered their mouths with duct tape, careful to allow breathing through their noses. Even so, Paco Baby struggled to breath through the blood in his nose, so I wiped it away as best I could. See Saw Lady’s eyes were hot with terror. I finally opened the door to signal Tom, albeit belatedly.

I stepped out cautiously, like an animal. Faces watched me from the windows. Curtains opened. I stalked right down the middle of the lane. No sense keeping to the side now. No one spoke from within, no one signalled Viper. Tom kept it going:

“It’s the starter, man, the starter!”

“No it isn’t! It’s the battery, moron! That long clicking sound means the battery, not the starter!” Tom disagreed vehemently, keeping on, keeping Viper’s back to me, keeping that snake-face looking at me. I was twenty feet away. Tom spoke loudly and continuously to muffle the sound of my boots on the grains of dirt on the asphalt, and Viper started pushing Tom back roughly, infuriating me.

“Get this thing outta here, now!” Viper stared, his strong suit.

“How can I, home?! It don’t run no more!” Tom countered.

“It’s brand-new, idiot trash!!! Get it out!” Tom was getting stressed with the prolonged effort and intensity. But he didn’t look at me or give it away. But he was almost seventy years old, and his energy was flagging, but still he kept going, not looking at me, only at Viper. It was a magnificent, miraculous performance. He should get an Oscar and a Wickie. But the extended intensity was getting to be too much for him, thinking smoothly of something to say continuously was taking it out of him. But still he didn’t look at me, still he did not give my wicked soul away.

But his eyes froze suddenly on Viper’s face. I was ten feet away. He couldn’t think of anything more to say. He simply was exhausted, finally, completely spent, all in. His eyes just froze with the effort, staring eerily onto Viper’s face. Viper caught what it meant. He whirled and jumped on me like a rabid cheetah, biting into my neck like a long-famished predator. I fell onto my back, bumping my head hard. His teeth broke the flesh of my neck, as he was tried savagely to rip the jugular vein out of my neck. He made ferocious sounds. He punched my face again and again, and bit deeper into my neck. I bled from nose, mouth, and neck.

My Glock popped out of my pants, and I found myself lying on top of it. Still he punched me. Still he pounded me. Still he bit into me. Tom circled uncertainly, trying to help. He pulled his gun. I spit into Viper’s eyes, the only action I could manage, so overwhelmed I was by his fury. I was groggy from the beating, quite a bit dazed. I spit again into his eyes, sometimes feebly, other times forcefully. Viper felt such revulsion at my snot in his eyes, he paused to wipe his eyes and face clean. I pushed him off me with my hand in his face and managed to stand up, my Glock at my feet. Tom pointed his at Viper — I simultaneously reached down for mine, looking all the while at Viper. He ran at me like one of Satan’s own, diving at my face and neck with his hands and teeth, and Tom shot him in the side, in mid-jump.

Me and Viper fell back down again, in the same exact position. He pinned my left arm down with his leg, and I could no longer hold onto the gun. He grabbed it quickly as it fell out of my  hand and shot me in the chest. Hot, liquid pain raced through me. Tom circled around to face Viper and shot him simultaneously in the chest, rending his body, and I think I heard yet another shot after that, whereupon Viper, kneeling over me, straddling me, fell heavily from his waist onto my face, slamming me hard, as motionless as the tomb at midnight.

*************************************************

Joaquin Manuel Alvarado, that is, Paco Baby, was sentenced to death by the jury that convicted him, in Los Angeles. He sits on Death Row in San Quentin, pending his appeals. The ACLU has taken an interest in his case. Carol Tiffany Atwater, that is, The See-Saw Lady, in a separate trial, was convicted of being an accessory to first-degree murder in the death of Hubrisa Williams, and sentenced to life-without-the-possibility-of-parole. She spends her days now in the California Institution for Women in Chino, California, San Bernardino County. Richard Williams, on the other hand, that is, Spoof, the father of Hubrisa Williams, testified for the prosecution at Paco Baby’s trial for the rape and murder of Penelope Phillips, of Ohio, movie-star aspirant. In addition, the testimony of the Jordanian cabbie and the newly-tested DNA sample on Phillips’ body, put Paco Baby there. Anthony Juan Jimenez, that is, Viper, was killed by Tom’s third shot, this one hitting him in the face. Viper’s wife and son have taken over the Proud Pelican, and steered it onto a better course.

I myself eventually pulled through, and Spoof paid me quite well. I was unable to attend Hubrisa’s funeral at the mortuary overlooking the Pacific, the Portuguese Hills Mortuary, but from Tom’s description it was well-attended, numbering of course Spoof with his broken ribs from Paco Baby’s shove, Higgy and Theodora from the Institute, other porn actors and actresses, and possibly even a Miramax executive. Miramax released this statement to the T.V. pop-culture magazines:

“We are saddened greatly today by the death of Hubrisa Williams. She was a bright, aspiring talent and possessed a beautiful spirit, and she was tragically taken in the flower of youth by inexplicable violence that could only misunderstand her love of life and joyful heart. We mourn her loss deeply, and our sincere prayers are with her immortal soul and with her dear father, Richard ‘Spoof’ Williams.”

Tom and I were both eventually given a nod of approval from the Deep Gorge P.D., and Mick McNulty and Larry Vaughan received commendation for their work on the case. In the course of time, Spoof himself went on, stumbling, pain in his heart, making porn movies once again, winning Wickies right and left for Best Director, ten at last count. He never got the call to the big-time, as his daughter had. He was too heart-broken, anyway. Hubrisa did get her fifth Wickie for Best Actress, posthumously. She was going to redeem them all at one-fell-swoop. But, then again, Spoof, it’s not against the law to be bizarre and sleazy, even though it is against the law to off innocent people, sports fans.

THE END

Tony Downing