A New Noir

It was a Tuesday, 11:06 pm. The night was as dark as something really dark and not well lit. I stared at a computer screen as empty as something empty with nothing in it.

Evelyn had just called to tell me I was a bastard. She had legs like something long and sexy, but after two highballs she was as crazy as something really crazy. She drove me nuts. Both ways.

She wasn’t the first to call me that and she wouldn’t be the last. I got that all too familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach like a bad feeling you get in the pit of your stomach at times like this.

But I needed to put Evelyn behind me. I took another shot of my bourbon and went to work.

I had just scored a new gig. A writing gig. The kind of gig you dream about when you’re new to the writing game but always seems just beyond your grasp. But I wasn’t new any more. I wasn’t young. I felt like something old trying to do something young people should do.

I had just four weeks to do character sketches, plot outlines and put together an outline. Then the real race would begin. Fifty Big Ones. And I had to pull it together in just 30 days. Fifty thou in 30 days is like something hard. Something really, really hard.

So I stared at the blank screen the way some animal stares into something.

I had heard on the street some rouge writers were having a secret meeting tonight over at Nanowrimo—a seedy website on the outskirts of the internet. Only the locals knew about it and they weren’t talking—not to me, not to the cops and not to publishers.

I reached for the mouse. It felt like a mouse-like thing in my hand. My nimble index finger clicked the left button, placing the cursor into the address bar like a cursor-like thing blinking in an address-bar like thing.

I was in faster than a fast thing.

I went over to the genre I was going to pile 50K of words into. Mystery. Suspense. It’s a tough genre, gritty like gritty stuff, but it has the edge I need. Sub-genre: Noir.

I saw a couple tomatoes at the bar along with a couple toughs. The toughs looked like tough people—people who know how to be tough. I took my place at the bar to the right of a juicy fruit, placing her between me and the tougher looking tough guy.

The Lolita stopped writing in her notebook and turned her face toward me and gave me the look of someone who knew how to write. She had been around a pen and paper before.

“Buy you a pen beautiful?”

“Sure” the word slipped out of her mouth slowly, like a slow thing coming out of a mouth-like thing.

[ To Be Continued… ]

---

Art found here.

OK, tell me if either of these are worth it…

I just posted two pieces of writing–one if for a book project and one is the first part of a short story. I’m not good at judging these. Are either any good or are they amateurish? Do I need to take a class or something? I’m interested in any real and honest input, even if it’s negative.

Book Project - Chapter One

Resurrection, Act I

Book Project: Start of Chapter One

Chapter One: Death

You will likely say it was obvious the deaths were related. But you didn’t live there. Not then. For those of us in the middle of it all the obvious connection was obscured by proximity.

Proximity and shock.

Other than the cops I was one of the few people to view the scenes of both deaths. Not glossy black and white crime photos. Not a “True Crime” television show.

The stark reality of blood and gore.

As a minister I had seen lots of dead people, but I had always seen the “prettied up” dead. The suicide teenager whose wrists had been nicely sewn and hidden beneath a crisp white shirt and a suit coat purchased a day before by a grieving mother. The 87 year old patriarch whose sallow cheeks now carried undertaker’s rouge.

I’ve played my role in that game too. Ministers are the P.T. Barnums of Death. We turn Death into a show for all to see. We pick the pretty scriptures, say the pretty words, lower our voice or a give a knowing, consoling nod at all the right places. The Greatest Show on Earth.

But Death doesn’t come pretty; we just dress it up later for show. Death is raw. Death hits like a sledge hammer. It’s messy, revolting and final.

I know that now. It stopped being a show for me the instant I saw Death as it is. Before the split back suit coat. Before the makeup. Death in all its pornographic horror.

================================

Doris Faulkner had worked for the Gilead Baptist Association for 18 of her 47 years. A lifelong Southern Baptist she was proud to have her own little ministry—not the pastorate like her two brothers, but a ministry none the less.

“Dory” was happily single after her husband died in a car accident some 25 years ago. With no children she busied herself with “church work”—both professionally and as a layman at First Baptist—as well as spoiling her three nieces and two nephews.

Her work was always precise and orderly.

================================

I had been talking to the Most Reverend Ralph Jamison just a week before his death.

We had lunch at Ruby’s—the smoke-filled local café whose ceiling tiles had been painted tar-black years before, acknowledging unconditional surrender to the billowing smoke rising from the patrons. The thirty year old paneling didn’t need to be painted—it just faded to a deeper shade of brown.

We sat at my “usual” booth, in a cubbyhole of sorts created by the L-shaped checkout counter. It allowed two small town pastors to be out of the line of site of the other patrons as to avoid the obligatory “Well, fancy seeing you here” from every third person who entered the restaurant.

Sitting in my cloistered booth I could avoid making eye contact with patrons without appearing “uppity.” There is no more unforgivable sin in rural Kentucky. When some overly gregarious parishioner would come over to the table and interrupt me, I could always honestly say “Hi, I didn’t see you.”

Public privacy is always a tricky business but pastors quickly learn to master the art.

Ralph and I had been friends for 6 years. At 52 he was 14 years my senior, but we had much in common.

As we talked, I knew Ralph was struggling, I just didn’t realize how much.

Resurrection, Part I

Tom Sibley loved his watch. His father, a physician of no small reputation in the “hills and hollers” surrounding Silerville, Kentucky, had left it to him. After 25 years on his father’s wrist and then almost 15 on Tom’s, the watch body had it share of marks and scratches. Upon close inspection, one could see the crystal also had a tiny fracture, visible as a small line between the Roman “X” and the tick mark representing “XI”—in 1967 the Rolex “Bubble Body” face only had room for the even numbers.

Jim Helton, Tom’s across the road neighbor and local jeweler, had more than once offered to replace the cracked crystal. “Tom,” he would say in his perpetually and inexplicably jubilant tone, “when ya gonna let me fix up that watch fer ya? It’s probably worth near on three or four thousand. You oughta take care of it.”

“One of these days, Jim, one of these days.”

The truth was Tom didn’t want to replace the crystal. That hairline fracture meant almost as much to Tom as the watch itself. The watch received that injury the day “Doc” Sibley took his 12 year old Tom out to the garage to show him how to change the oil in Doc’s new fire-engine red 1972 Chevy Impala convertible.

Huddled beneath the huge crimson hulk which was securely elevated by two bright orange ramps, Tom held the “trouble light” while his father ratcheted free the drain plug.
Being a new car, and this being its first oil change, the plug was putting up solid resistance. Doc lay on his back, his right hand on the wrench and left lying motionless on his chest.

Doc was just instructing his son saying, “No need paying someone to do something you can do…” when the bolt suddenly gave way, causing Doc’s typically nimble hand to lose grip of the wrench, which predictably landed smack dab on the watch crystal.

“Damn.”

It was one of the very few times Tom heard his father offer a profanity.

Doc quickly slid out from under the vehicle, carefully inspecting his watch for damage. Tom scurried out as well, “Are you OK dad?”

“I think I cracked my watch. Shoulda taken it off before we started. Oh well, what’s done is done. Let’s get back to work.” With that Doc placed the wounded watch on his workbench and crawled back under the car, placing mom’s old roasting pan beneath the drain plug to catch the oil.

That was the first day Doc had ever treated Tom like a man. He explained to Tom everything he was doing, imparting seemingly ancient masculine wisdom. Dipping your finger in the used oil to lubricate the seal on the new filter. Checking the timing using a strobe. Revving the engine by pulling on the little rod next to the carburetor. Checking, “gapping” and replacing a spark plug.

Things men must know.

In Tom’s mind that was the day he became a man. There would be many days where he would learn “man” things, but that day Tom knew his father no longer saw him as an awkward boy, he saw him as a man.

That tiny, barely visible line in that 40 year old Rolex meant everything to Tom. It meant manhood. It meant his father’s love.

At precisely 11:58pm Tom looked down at his watch and pronounced me dead. A single stab wound to the chest the obvious cause.

Dahlia

Dahlia
Your eyes, your lips, your skin, your hair; I knew I must preserve you
Settled when the white-hot electric shock coursed down my spine
You would be my masterpiece

Lust is for school boy crushes and back seat romance
This was epic, more than mortal, more than power, eternal
You must be my masterpiece

Beauty fades, but yours will never; years, decades, eons unchanged
Enshrined in stark reality, achieving your fame dearly bought by infamy
You will be my masterpiece

As I lay you on the grass, placing you just as I had pictured it before
Beautiful butchery sealing your memory, no one but you and I understand
Forever, you are my masterpiece

(Originally written January 15 - the 60th anniversary of the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s body)