Neil jacked my goddamn blog. Here's how it went down: I had just come from The Clipper, a bar up the street, where I had put back about twenty pints of the black. Where I had been talking to the bartender, Willie the Cutman, who was almost all the way deaf. "Yellow fucking Medicine," I said. "Go up to the Bay Plaza Barnes and Noble and order yourself up a copy. On Monday, old man." On the way home, I was thinking I would get out my ax and sharpen it on the fire hydrant in front of my joint. I was drunk enough to forget about that and get out the old projector. I found an old flask and filled it with rotgut. After getting things going, I turned around and saw the road trip pull up. They cut me down with road-grizzled stares and grabbed me. My kind of crew.
Last stop: Bryon Quertermous' Blog
Last stop: Bryon Quertermous' Blog
The Bronx. Nightfall. We find William Boyle outside with a rickety old projector, flashing "Touch of Evil" against the weathered brick wall of the neighboring building, eating popcorn and heckling Charlton Heston. He turns to find the whole bloody road trip staring him down. "Can't you at least let it get to the part where--"
Nope. We grab him by the scruff of his shirt and Karen steals his popcorn. We drag him kicking and screaming away from the screen, down the stairs, and into the Hummer-sine, absolutely crusty with the debris of our aimless partying. Right before we pull into traffic, Boyle pulls out a knife. We all back away...
William Boyle is an academic, a romantic, and a noir writer whose main characters are almost invariably that class of men we call losers. Not that they want to be losers. It's just that losers can be fascinating in their self-destruction and self-delusion, especially in noir fiction. And so we watch these guys like they're a train wreck. From the guy who's just looking for some company from a sweet a seemingly-interested girl until he realizes something else is going on in "Far From God". Or the guy trying to steal a church poor box during a service in "Poor Box". Or Calhoun sinking low to pick up an average drunken woman with B.O. in "Death Don't Have No Mercy". Once at her place: "They went inside. It was a modest apartment, somewhere between a shithole and the kind of apartment that grandmothers usually died in." Then of course he's surprised to find her great in bed, only to ruin it again by remembering he had to pick up his mother soon. (Oh, but hang on until the end). Pathetic? Maybe. Good noir? Damned right.
What's so fascinating about noir, then? It's the same story over and over, right? Well...aren't they all? I guess there are some stories I never get tired or hearing or telling. The details change, though, and it's the details that make or break you. So we love to watch so many average Joes fail in so many tragic ways because of money, or that damned femme fatale, or because they thought they saw paradise just over the horizon, but they couldn't quite make it through the mud to get get there. Or snow, in Billy Lafitte's case. Not only does it slow you down, but it numbs you, too. Come along for the ride and find out what it takes to thaw Billy's icy heart. Yellow Medicine. Psychobilly Monday, May 12. B&N.
After a while, the stand-off loses its energy, and Boyle shrugs, sheaths the knife and says, "What the hell? I've got nothing to lose." He pulls out a flask of something so powerful, half of us get drunk just by the odor alone. Since Ray seems to be the most alert, we let him take the wheel out through the Midwest and the desert to the Pacific Coast one more time to grab the hardboiled rock-and-roller Stephen Blackmoore.
Driving Time: Go ask Alice.
Tune for the leg: "Fox in a Box" by The Gore Gore Girls
