Adjusting Blogger's Attitude

This is my writing on blogger.

Pallies, molls, slicksters, and hoodlums: I'm sorry to report Blogger has been eating the formatting for my posts. Every entry was a giant block of text with no spaces or paragraphs. I had to take measures. I reposted every post, and in the process, lost all of your great comments. I wish I could have kept them, but my skills in this area are...well, they're not so hot. I have a bunch of new posts coming this week. I hesitated to post them until I'd figured out WTF was Blogger's problem. Now I have. Sorry for the long hiatus.

Down and Out of the Abyss

     It was pretty bad for me at the Abyss the other night. Sammy Napalm met me at the door.
     "You're not carrying a gun, I hope," he said. 
     "None of your business," I said. 
     "Let me ask you something."
     "No. Unless it's a question about what I feel like drinking. In which case, the answer is, pomegranate juice. On the rocks."
     "You have 30 seconds to either give me your gun, or get the hell out of here."
     "Fine." I handed him my gun. "You have 10 seconds to tell me what this is about, or you're buying my drinks forever."
     "It's no joke. The old lady said no guns in here until this thing cools down. I've been taking guns and giving them back all day. I'm like goddamn coat check girl."
     "That's an image. Wait, what thing?"
     “You know what thing. Your thing. Your pulling down the Smoke's pants at the Sollies. That thing."
     "Forgotten all about it."
     "The old lady hasn't. She wants to talk to you yesterday. Where've you been anyway? She's been calling you."
     "I had the flu."
     "Didn't you get her message?"
     "I figured she wanted to have lunch."
     "She's going to have you for lunch."
     "Really? Over Kurt-the-Liar? I don't think so."
     "Listen, babe. You're in trouble. It's not just the Smoke. It's what happened afterward."
     "Which was?"
     "Suspicions. Paranoia."
     "So what? Nobody's guilty like the Smoke."
     "But they're all guilty of something."
     "Yeah. So are we all. So?"
     "So they've all left their teams and gone rogue."
     "Who?"
     "Everybody."
     "No."
     "I'm telling you. All the jobs went to sleep. People are ratting and rolling and moving their banks."
     "Oh shit. Shit!"
     "That's what I'm saying."
     "I'm in trouble, Sammy. Very big trouble here."
     "We're all in trouble. You've got to fix this. Right goddamn now."
     "Where's the old twirl?"
     "Upstairs. In the apartment."
     "Call up there and see if she'll see me."
     "In a shake or two. Go have Mike mix you something first. You're going to need it to help the crow go down."
     "I'll be eating a lot more than just crow, Sammy."
     "You got that right."
     "Just make the call."
     "Too late. She knows you're here."
     "What? How?" I saw the look on his face, spun around, and there she was. My face went hot and my insides turned to ice water. She gave me a curt nod.
     "Daniella."
     "Lisette."
     "Won't you come up and have some cake and conversation?"
     "I'd love to, Lisette. Thank you."
     "After you," she said.
     I walked the length of the bar. I opened the door to the stairs. I climbed them. I passed through the lounge. I nodded at the hackers and the old timers playing cards. They were the only ones there. I could hear people arguing out on the roof. Not many. Not enough of them for me to care. I went into the library and waited at the door that leads to Lisette's apartment.
     "Go right in," she said behind me.
     I took a deep a breath and for the first time in a while did as I was told.     

     I've got to pause the story for a minute and just tell you - Lisette is a powerful and terrible figure around here. For 40 years she has been solving the underworld's unsolvable problems. Sometimes with her influence and diplomacy, but mostly with poison. She owns the Abyss, the building it's in, and the block it's on. Thirty years ago she and her cohorts invented the Sollies. She's an institution.
     If you saw Lisette walking down the street, you'd see a beautiful, well-turned out, elderly gentlewoman. If you looked closer you'd notice her little laugh-lines and dimples and kid gloves. And as she walked past you, you'd see in her walk a cross between an empress and a ballerina. Your eyes would follow her even after she'd gone. You'd rack your brain, wondering who she used to be. And whoever you came up with, you'd be wrong.
     She's not famous, except for here. She's not nobility, except among us. She's not the world's richest woman, she's our world's richest woman. She's not a wife or a mother to anyone. She's just a tough brilliant broad who's been looking out for me since I was still a kid and she was still a nun. That's how far back we go. It's a hell of a ways. In every way.  
    
     "I'm so sorry, Lisette," I said, and took my usual seat on the end of the chaise longue.“I've no doubt you are," said Lisette, taking her place in the center of the sofa.
     "I knew the Smoke would want to kill me."
     "And he does," said Lisette. "Why didn't that deter you?"
     "I don't know. Because I was right. Because I had back up." "Yes. Yes, you did. Johnny Holiday, and Ali Fortunato," said Lisette.
     "They're not to blame," I said. 
     "Don't be absurd."
     "Lisette, they're not."
     "Don't contradict me, Daniella. I saw the three of you with your heads geared together. If you'd been alone, or if you'd been sitting at my table."
     "None of this would have happened."
     "That's correct."
     "I couldn't have guessed everyone would over-react."
     "Couldn't you have?"
     "I didn't think they'd turn on each other."
     "Didn't you?"
     "No. I really didn't. What's going to happen now?"
     "Sammy is going to take the three of you up to the safe house."
     "We can't Lisette. We have jobs."
     "Not anymore. You are going to the house. You're going to stay there until I call you back. You'll talk to no one."
     "For how long?"
     "For as long as it takes."
     "What are you going to do?"
     "That is not your concern."
     "Please, Lisette, tell me. And let us help. Don't send us away."
     "This is the only way."
     "Lisette, I'm begging you."
     "The Kid has a small team up there. One of them will bring you food. Don't open the door to anyone over ten."
     "But Lisette."
     “Load every piece of heat in the house, and take turns sleeping. You'll have to control that perimeter every minute."
     "What about you? If this is as bad as that, you should powder with us. Plan your thing from there. Then if it goes to hell, and they all wipe themselves out, you'd be safe. You'd be with us."
     "That's not how the song goes, Daniella."
     I felt about a million years old. I felt about to cry like a baby. "I know."
     "Then we're ready for some cake," said Lisette. "Cake?"
     "Yes."
     "After this, you get in the car with Sammy. You go to the house, and you wait for my word."
     "I will."
     And so I did. I'm writing this from the house. We're still in the dark about everything back in the city, but I do know a couple of things. This is where I need to be. I'm in very good company. And it's a beautiful day.

It's Not Whether You Win Or Lose, It's How.

I went to the 2009 Sollie Awards dinner on Friday night. For those who've never been, the Sollies are the Oscars of the underworld. Any criminal with an expired Statute of Limitations is eligible to present his crime story and have it ranked by his peers. Points are given for style, evil, execution, and originality. At the end of the night, the previous year's champ tallies the score cards and announces the winner. The prize is a miniature gold bar the size of a deck of cards, stamped with a tiny hat, shoe, car, or dog. To, you know, emphasize how it's all a game.

I've been to a few with JD and Al. The first time they didn't tell me where we were going. They just gave me orders to doll up to the nines. Translation, tame the hair and nix the pencil skirt; forget about the gun-kitted trench coat. Good advice, as it turned out. A room full of masterminds and their trusted friends is no place to get caught with a .38 snub. Wearing the wrong dress would be almost as bad.

So, while I do know what to expect, and accordingly got ready for my close-up, this year was my first time competing. I presented my crime well, I thought. It just wasn't the best crime of the night. Maybe not even second best. In any event, we all lost to a real pro, Kurt the Smoke.

As in other years, Kurt arrived at the Sollies with his security detail, the Night Sisters, his band of terrifying female impersonators. They're known as Ms Ross, Ms Kitt, and Ms Latifah. Ms Kitt drives, Ms Latifah knocks heads, and Ms Ross pushes Kurt around. Not that Kurt's disabled. He's not. He's just a fat man who really doesn't like to pant and sweat. To that end, Kurt has wheelchairs like most crooks have suits. His favorite is a 1972 chrome and leather manual model - the chair he took to the Sollies. It's fine and stylish but needs a lot of care. When Kurt visits the barber across the street from my bookstore, he always drops off a chair for tuning up at the bike shop next door. The '72 is temperamental, I saw it more than the others.

Anyway, Kurt became Kurt the Smoke right around the time he started planning all his heists to not require his massive wheeled presence. His caving in to the seductive trappings of the chair wound up being the key to his criminal success. He'd had to figure out how to A - assemble a crew that takes orders just once, B - execute plans without any contact with the scene, and C - beat a polygraph. With these skills under his 70-inch belt, Kurt blossomed. Nothing could stick to him. For the crime he won his previous Sollie with, he'd constructed a forty-man job, a corporate crime, in which no member of his crew performed anything worse than a misdemeanor. Not that that mattered, of course. No one was caught. It was the sweetest, smartest, cleanest heist I knew. I admired it like crazy.

Kurt the Smoke's win on Friday night was for a burglary of a stolen painting from another thief. Not his finest work, since he didn't make any money on the deal. But all told, it was original, for a switcheroo. No easy feat. I have to admit, there was a great double stinger of karma and cool.

First, he stole the replica of the painting. He took it right from the house of the original owner, an older woman, now twice victimized. A woman he refused to name. She'd commissioned the thing as a stand in for the swiped one, which evidently she missed. Next, Kurt hit the thief's house. He stole the stolen painting, and replaced it with the replica. Then, he returned the original painting to its original owner. A total of three break-ins, without detection. The true owner of the painting was the only one who could have nailed him. She may have realized her replica had been switched with the original, since, when she died a few months back, she left it to Kurt.

Although, as JD noted, she might have also been inclined to leave Kurt the replica, if that's what she thought she still had. Either way the maybe flipped, it was still cool. But it irritated me, losing to this crime. Unanswered questions nagged at me. Did the true owner know at the end what she had or not? In all this time, the original thief suspected nothing was amiss? He never had it appraised? Never tried to sell it? Was the inherited painting the original or the replica? How the hell did the owner know to leave it to Kurt? And didn't his mother pass away last year?

It sounded like a bad short story I might have written in high school. I beefed it to JD and Al. They agreed. They encouraged me to ring a ding on my glass and stick it to Kurt. I felt uncertain. Causing a scene seemed over the top, and it would put me squarely on Kurt's bad side. More, I didn't want to seem a sore loser. But they egged me on, smoking and taunting and refusing to light my cigarettes. In the end, JD simply dared me to do it. My glare said fine. I rang my dirty spoon in JD's water glass. People automatically hushed and turned to our table.

"Mr. Smoke, if you don't mind, I have a question."

"Oh, yeah, sweetheart? All right. What? What the fuck do you want?"

"Can you prove you're not the original thief, that you haven't had the original painting all this time?"

The room exploded in laughter, shouting and hooting, cat calls. At me, at my sass, my ignorance. But not from Kurt the Smoke. He was just sitting there under the spotlight, staring me down from his wheelchair.

"Mr. Smoke?"

It got quiet. All eyes were on him.

"Mr. Smoke, who was the original thief then? You can tell us."

Kurt looked as though he might launch himself right down my throat.

"Mr. Smoke, did you lie to your friends here? Because I'm pretty sure you only stole the painting once, from your mom. And you replaced it with a replica, and were never caught, or even spanked for it. End of crime. End of story. And a neat, plausible, eligible crime it was, too. Just not necessarily a story to beat a girl's teenage blackmailing of, oh, say, a priest."

Well. For a big man, Kurt the Smoke sure can move fast. He jumped out of his wheelchair and whipped his prize at my head like a skipping stone. It crashed into our table, shattering all the glasses. JD, Al and I covered our eyes. When we peeked, we saw it was JD's dessert that finally stopped it. Diana Ross hustled Kurt the Smoke out the side door, Ms Latifah and Ms Kitt backed out after them. The crowd sat in stunned silence.

I looked around and didn't like much what I saw. Trust in the room was degrading fast. A hundred people were rolling over just one thought: "Who else here has lied?"

JD, Al and I lit cigarettes, three to the match. We divided the room and observed our respective thirds. Everyone was suspicious, but no one looked guilty. It was going to be fine. Eventually. I picked up my purse and tried to hand JD his hat. He ignored me.

"Don't say a thing, JD," I said. "Please. Don't."

"Baby, I've got to."

"No, JD," said Al, "you don't. It's funny enough."

"Not...quite." JD brandished his fork.

"Oh, God," I said, "here he goes."

"Mmm! Eighteen carat cake. It is the Dessert of Champions."

"Yeah, okay," said Al. "We're done here. And leave the prize where it is. Let's go, you two."

"JD?"

"All right, Kitten, hat me."

I did, and we left. A slow, sparse applause followed us out to the street. I know. I can hardly wait until next year.

Crookslist for the week of July 20

I copied these from the bulletin board at the Abyss. I made a few spelling corrections.

Brass Knuckles, $10. Hand in Jar, $10. No trades. Call Smitty: you know the number.

Bitchy-Poo had her puppies, so whoever wanted one, come get one. They’re 7 weeks old and fucking adorable. Bring a leash, a blanket and a driver, and buys bowls and puppy food. I mean it, you idiots. Or no one gets a dog! Damn.

House for long term sub-let. Jimmy’s in for 10. His house, $1500/month. Call Jimmy’s wife at Dave’s place.

Are you old? Does technology scare you? Then, you need The Kid. The Kid’s got your discounted newspaper subscription and he wants you to have it. You earned it. You deserve it. It’s a real newspaper, none of this online, internets baloney. The Kid will deliver your paper every day, old school. You pay only once a month. Cash. Customers who pay in advance get regular conversations with The Kid. Subscribe now, before school starts, and be eligible for the grand prize drawing. The winner gets a ticket to The Kid’s 8th grade graduation, plus a fancy dinner with the family. Call the newspaper and tell them you want The Kid. The Kid will take care of you.

Moll Wanted: for regular bank and credit union sneak jobs. Blonde, mid-40s, racked and gammed preferred. Fuck it. Come back, Gertie, it’s just not the same without you.

More next week.

You Know Who You Are

To the person who lets their dog whiz daily on my lavender plants: In your next life, you can look forward to being given a 24-inch, beautiful, fragrant, lavender catheter. Daily.

To the silly cow who lives two doors away: You can stop pronouncing to the neighborhood what a bitch I am. We're all perfectly clear, my lack of appreciation for your husband's car stereo makes me a bitch. But it's been two years now. If you need assistance in coming to terms with the fact of my bitchiness, and it seems you do, you might want to seek help outside the neighborhood, where I'm less well known as a hero for standing up to your enormous mate and his friends on the matter of their ghetto tunage. Oh, and FYI, you're white. You're white and you're measurably, demonstratively stupid. The rest of us are either not white or not stupid. Not a one of us wants to hear your music, nevermind feel it shaking our walls. So settle down and shut up a while. If you don't, you leave me no choice but to come down hard on you this time. Yeah that is a threat, and I swear to God, you beast, I'll do it. I'll come right over there and teach your 12 year old kid to read.

Cloak and Swagger

Easiest choice ever?

My great grandmother Crucifissa was a liquor-smuggling queenpin. I know I said noir is fiction, but this is true. I mention it because the FBI came by this morning. Apparently some analysis genius found that the descendents of successful lawbreakers are extremely likely to follow suit. Because of Nonna-fissa, two agents wanted to get to know me. I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. The family knew Crucifissa worked at a speakeasy during Prohibition. It was part of the lore - little widowed Nonna, slaving away during tough times to put her sons through Ivy League schools; the youngest, my grandfather, graduating in 1933, and Nonna finally retiring from the "restaurant."

Nobody imagined she owned the speakeasy and controlled her own supply. If they had, logic might have followed that she also owned a warehouse full of "produce" trucks and land on both the Canadian and American sides of the Niagara River. As it was, no one had a clue.

They way the agents tell it, it would have taken 50 typical motor boats, running 24/7 for every day of Prohibition, without ever losing a bottle or getting caught by the police boats, to explain the 10+million gallons of liquor the government could prove flowed in Western New York yet was not attributable to known smugglers. These seemed impossible figures because that’s what they were. The ever-escalating boat race between the smugglers and the law was a close one the entire time. One out of every four runs, a smuggler lost either his load, or his boat. Still, even small-time smugglers with big losses turned huge profits. That was the game. No small risk, plenty of losers, more winners, and lots, lots of money. The government had itself a missing pipeline.

The agents showed me a photograph of a scuttled barge being extracted from the Niagara river bed. It meant nothing familiar to me, but it was the reason the FBI had learned about Crucifissa’s existence and her invisible empire in the first place. The barge was two things - it was a pleasure boat painted with the name of a women’s temperance club and sunk by vandals on the day Prohibition was repealed, and it was full of liquor.

Fifty years too late to catch her, the government finally found their missing pipeline. It wasn’t 50 boats non-stop every day for 13 years. It was two. A tugboat and a barge, 3 or 4 times a year, year in and year out. Incredibly, the barge was never stopped, boarded or inspected. It’s almost if the temperance boat, supposedly carrying a load of hymn singing, tee-totaling, Christian women, was avoided and given the widest berth.

So tonight we drink to irony and the FBI. Without their informative visit, I might have been content to sell books all my life. But now? Well, I have my biological imperative and a sudden urge to use it. They have their empty file on me; and they've stated their intent to see me fill it. I did the only sporting thing I could do. I invited them to come back in 50 years when they’ve got something.

Cheers.

Dispatch from the Abyss

When noir protagonists are in a tough spot, they stop by the Abyss for dangertinis and sympathy. Every bartender has a sharp eye for back-lit doorway silhouettes, and can prepare the perfect pitcher in the time it takes to traverse the length of the bar. The pool table is level. The jukebox is free. The hat pegs and coat rack are full of trench coats and ribboned felt. A game of switchblade darts is usually underway, as is gun show and tell. Safe-crackers debate in low voices. Attack dogs dream and twitch under tables. The fan draft catches the cigar smoke, the perfume, and the aftershave. It incenses the air and ripples the hanging blueprints, the wanted posters. The Abyss is a fountain of noir comforts, our oasis in the rust belt desert.

Holed up at the Abyss on the night of the 4th of July, Sammy Napalm, Two Quiet Mikes, JD, and I admitted that none of us have ever been very good patriots. We mused on why, and found a common disgust for racist idiots. Also, we’d never met a patriot that wasn’t better than 50% moron, but for the sake of the conversation, we stuck to racist idiot encounters. When it was my turn, I told them about my Eviction-proof White Trash Neighbors.

I refer to my EWTN as the Ewwtons. The Ewwton Clan. Since White Trash live everywhere in North America now, and only a very few of them are as usefully entertaining as the Trailer Park Boys and Eminem, it seems important to classify them definitively. The Ewwtons in Buffalo have their origins in the great Southern Welfare Diaspora of the 80s, specifically Catbox, North Carolina. They spent their first two decades in New York acclimating in the projects, enjoying indoor plumbing, real mayonnaise sandwiches, and expressing their fertility and their ignorance as simultaneously as possible.

Whether from drug and alcohol abuse, or because Catbox generations are less Homo Sapien than barn animal or fruit fly, the patriarch and matriarch not-inappropriately appear to be elderly grandparents. They are 45. The Ewwtons have eight children, and seven grandchildren, who are 0 for 7 in legitimacy. No one in the clan has ever worked, possessed a driver’s license, a car, pride, or finished high school. Their alternative milestones are: I have no idea. Maybe pregnancy, juvie, dishonorable discharges, and jail time.

The male Ewwtons are cadaverous, dingo-faced, dustbowl era looking pieces of work. The females are massive, shrill, lazy and stupid. The kids are dirty and wily and seem to be fed a steady diet of fast food and lead paint chips. They never change.

Since the day they moved in, JD and I have observed them with a horror bordering on wonder. They constantly do things we can’t fathom, and in the most remarkably public way. Not accidentally public, say due to their loudness, nor incidentally public, due to a conflict spilling out of the apartment. The Ewwtons clearly prefer to conduct all their most perplexing dramas in front of an audience. So at some point early on, we started inviting friends and family over to witness White Trash Theater.

Some highlights: Moving Day is a passion play in 7 or 8 acts, with 20 minute intermissions between each. It’s a fully reversible assemblage of scenes on such subjects as: the ownership and/or right to remove/insert mattresses, box springs, stereo speakers, stereo, TV, couch cushions, lounge chairs, kitchen appliances, fake plants, chrome tables, a requisite quantity of particle board assumed to be shelving but which may also be bunk beds or a bedroom suite from rent-to-own. The youngest children ride in, around, and on top of each load. They hold everything in place.

Big Garbage Pick-up Day is a seasonally occurring, roving production in which the children scour the neighborhood for suitable garbage, drag it back to their house and make a giant garbage fort. Act two is when the teenage parents take over the fort and have romantic moments while huffing propellants.

Muralology is another repeating series. This play opens whenever an Ewwton lucks into a can of spray paint. The neighborhood becomes a temporarily more curious and colorful place for the giant marijuana leaves on the backs of everyone’s garages. Between regular productions, the Ewwtons keep up their practice through advanced dirt studies. Their canvas is a thick layer of grime on any surface, such as the siding of their own house; their medium and instrument, copious spit and a sleeve. With these modest implements, they make swastikas and SS-lightning bolts appear right out of the space that before was just mere filth. Watch your back, Michaelangelo.

Gardening for Dummies is an annual summer play about the Ewwtons admiring their neighbors’ gardens, hanging baskets and porch furniture, and then every second weekend in June, stealing what they especially like. Act two is where three police cars and the neighbors march on the Ewwton’s apartment and the owners reclaim their property.

Unfortunately, White Trash Theater enjoys an uninterrupted run, but what’s a noir heroine to do? No, really. It’d be too easy to lure them to a location en masse, with a simple invitation to a reality show casting call. But then what? No one I know, even those from the Abyss, could stand being in a room with any of them long enough to kill even one of them. Frankly, we’re at a loss. The floor’s open.