NOIR CANADIANA

 

The Conversion of John the Baptist

 

It was supposed to be a quiet evening, just Ann Fatale and me, tablecloths – plain or chintz – who cares, muted lighting, some palatable Italian food and a bottle or two of red. There’s a bright neon sign in the restaurant window, a blue winking oval OPEN. Outside a nearby streetlight casts a sickly, pale grapefruit circle on the purple sidewalk snow. The night bleeds black for all the honest souls and unrequited lovers alone tonight in this cold, harsh city.

 

I feel good; I look even better: a new haircut slicked back with pomade and my freshly shaven cheeks still stinging from the slap happy application of witch hazel. I’m wearing new blue suede shoes in bad weather, but I don’t care. The rest of my clothes fit better than they normally do. I’m feeling like a million bucks. My baby is looking like she’s just sashayed out of The Royal Canadian Mint carrying a bulging handbag, along with three suitcases humped by love sick inside help only too happy to be of service gratis. Sometimes my heart breaks when I look into her blue peepers because I have a sense of what would happen to me if she ever walked out: that rear-end black skirt hip sway would kill me. I would die a little more saying sayonara.

 

I’m crazy about Ann and maybe I’m crazy because of the way I live my life; it’s a hard living trying to set things right. I’m no saint. I’m no diplomat. Talk is cheap and a bullet speaks volumes. The name’s Danger, Geoff Danger. I’m the fixer behind the curtain, the lethal shadow in the mist and fog.

 

The waiter doesn’t mince but he wants to, trouble is he’s about 50 pounds too hefty. I’m wondering about the thumb prints in the bread rolls. I’m wondering if the kitchen is cleaner than the men’s toilet. The coke addled owner is a crime family scion; he’s even paying protection to his old man. The trattoria’s a small time money laundering operation but Ann likes the food and the joint’s within walking distance. Just another night until the Baptist dame huffs in, dragging her purse like a ball and chain, her husband on a leash behind her.

 

Religion is the crutch of the vacant and feeble minded although all of us strive to fill the innate emptiness within ourselves someway, somehow. That holier-than-thou face is pinched. Her worm wiggly lips are the mere suggestion of a line revealing teeth sharper than some confidence men I know. Her tight little ringlets of hair are L’Oreal coloured, somewhere between mouse and auburn. The Baptist lady is all hi, hello, how are you, won’t you come to Bible study and who’s your man, to Ann. I ask the woman if she can remember the last time she uncrossed her legs. Conversation swiftly goes down hill from there.

 

She strides off smarting and thumps back down at their table to commence her snit. It’s been my experience that one of the reasons this great dirty world turns is that dames compel men to do things they’d prefer not to. I watched the little man reluctantly rise. Misguided honour but I didn’t court and marry the crone. I wasn’t spoiling for a fight; I was enjoying Ann’s vivacious company and my penne al dente.

 

“Did you insult my wife?”

 

“Not at all,” I reply. “I merely suggested she relax a little. Better for her and probably better for you.”

 

He looked relieved. “My name’s John,” he says. He held his hand out. Shake.

 

“You already know Ann Fatale,” I say. “My name’s Danger, Geoff Danger.”

 

“You’re new to the community. You should attend our monthly Bible study meeting and get to know everyone.” He grins. “I often serve beer as a little lure for the fallen.”

 

“Well,” I crack wise, “was it Ben Franklin who said, ‘Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy?’ Or was that in a letter from Paul to the Corinthians?”

 

“I don’t remember that particular passage. However, I do hope you’ll join us. Our next meeting is this Saturday night.”

 

“Thank you for the invitation. That’s very kind.” I rise from my chair and take John by his necktie and lift him so that the toes of his patent leather shoes scrabble against the chequered red and green ceramic tiles on the floor. “But get this and don’t you forget it. Beer is nothing but a chaser for Irish whisky. My bible is Storyville to Swing Street: Who’s Who of Jazz. And if you think we’d spend our Saturday night with the likes of you and your ilk, well, you’ve got another thing coming. And this is it.” I punch him hard in the face and then knee him in the groin. The waiter flits over but I stop him cold with a glare.

 

“Oh, baby,” Ann breathes, “I’m hungry for dessert but I believe we should eat at home.”

 

I let John slide down under our table. I finish my wine; it’s a paler shade of crimson than John’s blood but still a decent Asti.  I tell the waiter to get our bill and make it snappy. And penne ante up our doggie bags to the Baptist dame.

 

Walking home in the sub-zero darkness, Ann takes my arm and leans into me. Parts of me begin swell. I flex the knuckles of my left hand inside my glove. The little man never saw it coming. I shiver. Maybe it’s the cold; maybe because I know I’ll be sore in other places too come sunrise.

DAMES, HEATERS AND SLEUTHS

 

meGeoff’s Guide to Detective Noir

 

Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Charles Dickens and author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone is generally credited as the originator of fiction’s mystery genre. In Britain the format gradually evolved from Victorian melodrama into deductions voiced before the assembled cast of characters in the drawing room: The butler did it with a candlestick in the library. The current incarnation of dark and often violent police procedurals abundantly populated with flawed, maverick protagonists owes more to the American detective story than the works of Agatha Christie or P.D. James.

 

Consider our neighbour south of 49 100 years ago. The New World republic peopled with Europe’s disenfranchised is expanding ever west, cities are being built in deserts. Big Oil has been birthed. The American Dream is a function of mass production and the Oz illusion that this hard won and still young democracy offers opportunity and a fair shake to all of its citizens. Everything’s on the up and up, there’s no seething underbelly to speak of: In God We Trust. Thing is, everybody wants a piece of the free market action, at least a wedge slice of the American Dream with two toppings whatever the cost. The best of American literature, music and art, an astounding canon, has long laid bare The Big Lie. Detective noir, a uniquely American creation, provided us with the lurid and sordid details.

 

Movable type was conceived in China, probably 1000 years after the birth of Christ. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press some 400 years later; it was the Internet of the Dark Ages (except most people were illiterate). Efficiencies followed centuries later with the invention of the steam engine and the idea of imprinting with a rotating cylinder rather than the much slower process of pressing down one impression at a time on a flatbed. In the States this mechanization gave rise to the pulps, inexpensive themed magazines printed on inexpensive paper; an affordable, low budget entertainment option for many. The writers were not paid particularly well. (As one science-fiction scribbler wrote to a friend, ‘The big money is in religion.’ Those are the words of L. Ron Hubbard, hope that sentiment sits well with your inner thetan.) Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the absolute apex of detective noir was initially serialized in a pulp rag.

 

The hardboiled, cynical private detective Sam Spade casts such a towering shadow over the genre that it gives one pause to recall that the character appeared in a single novel. Hammett’s other creations included the nameless Continental Op and sleuthing socialites Nick and Nora Charles whose dog Asta remains a staple solution in The New York Times crossword puzzle. Spade’s equal is Philip Marlowe whom Raymond Chandler introduced to readers in The Big Sleep. Marlowe’s turf is down the coast highway from Spade’s San Francisco, but his City of Angels which he describes as ‘having all the personality of a paper cup’ becomes a character itself alongside its resident unhinged psychotics, hoods and femmes fatale. Both men are sharp-eyed observers of their surroundings – hey, they’re detectives, but their commentaries on the depravity of the human condition and the foibles of the rich, powerful and spoilt crackle with as much electricity as the characters’ realistic dialogue.

 

Crime writers seem to love Los Angeles as much as Randy Newman. Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, a worthy successor to Marlowe, prowls its mean streets alone. James Ellroy, the reigning king of modern noir who may be as whacked as some of his more extreme characters, continually mines the city’s corrupt and colourful past. Elvis Cole, the wise-cracking private detective conceived by Robert Crais, lives in the same neighbourhood as Michael Connelly’s L.A.P.D. detective Harry Bosch. In the weave of mood and atmosphere in fictional, alternative reality L.A. these two anti-heroes are actually on nodding terms with one another.

 

Travis McGee is not a licensed private eye. Instead, he is a self-described ‘salvage expert’ and ‘rusted knight errant’ who will work for a monetary percentage of whatever needs to be recovered. He lives alone on a houseboat (won in a poker game) in Fort Lauderdale. John D. MacDonald’s McGee stories are notable for their prescient undercurrent of the ecological impact of greed-fueled overdevelopment and the arrogant futility of capitalism’s attempts to harness and control nature. One more armed and solitary figure splashes through the puddles of The Lonely Silver Rain.

 

Robert B. Parker’s one-named Spenser (‘like the poet’) is a hybrid of Marlowe and McGee. Parker’s Boston is as present as Chandler’s L.A.; the reader may never have been there, but they will know it like the back of their hand. Like McGee, Spenser operates by an idealized personal code of conduct which is above the ignoble grasp of ordinary average guys, their fans. Each has a sidekick: McGee the hirsute economist Meyer, his slip neighbour; while Spenser calls upon the ultra Shaft-like, mysterious and lethal Hawk As with Mickey Spillane’s ham-fisted Mike Hammer, Parker’s Spenser and Hawk sometimes teeter dangerously on the precipice of pulp or comic book super heroism. However Parker’s dialogue is as witty and snappy as Elmore Leonard’s.

 

Disgraced New Orleans ex-cop Clete Boyer is Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux’s sidekick. Both are shockingly violent alcoholics, except that Dave is a dry drunk and a bit more rational with a bittersweet, default fondness for Dr. Pepper. The skies over the Louisiana bayous in the Parish of New Iberia are oppressive, purple and iron, a storm is always imminent, death lurks in the swamps. Author James Lee Burke forces you to inhale the twin reeks of humidity and heat, the organic rot of antebellum history. How can a reader bypass a novel called In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead? Like Spenser, Robicheaux conducts himself by a unique and peculiar personal code; both men are Korean War veterans although each seemed to cease ageing sometime before 1980 even as real time marched on in their respective constituencies and in the narratives of their creators.

 

Somewhere out there tonight in your town, in the lee of a recessed doorway away from the lemon sidewalk cast of the street light, there is a good yet unfriendly man in a trench coat who signed on for a job at an hourly rate plus expenses because nobody else would. As to why he did, well, therein lies the mystery. And if your conscience lets you sleep at night, why, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

 

Shopping in Montreal

 

Kicking merchandise in a shoe store on St. Catherine Street. Blue suede shoes with crepe soles. Slick. Hipster. I’ve wanted a pair my entire sentient life, since rock ‘n’ roll steamrolled the Catholic Church into the ditch. They’re on sale too, just $40 a foot. A bit rich and I don’t actually need them as I already have six pairs of shoes, three pairs of winter boots and a pair of skates; a lot of footwear for a biped. But those blue suede numbers would be too cool with a pair of black stovepipe Levi’s. But I don’t own pants like that anymore. Anyway, I’d have to get a new leather jacket and a porkpie hat and so it all becomes a bit too much. I cannot pull the trigger on those blue suede shoes. Parting with a dollar is painful; perhaps I’m as cheap as talk.

 

Strange, the 30 years I lived in Montreal I never shopped for shoes. I just bought what was needed when they were needed. When you return to your hometown as a visitor after a long time away there’s not much else to do except browse shop windows. Old friends have since moved away and established themselves in other provinces or in other places dotting this chaotic globe. The life spans of old haunts have long expired and some of the addresses have been demolished. For the prodigal music fan, the old record store route that used to stretch from Guy Street to Park Avenue has gone the way of America’s Route 66 – the interstates made the legendary highway a mere patchwork of its Chicago to L.A. blacktop myth and the famous stops along those 2000 miles withered; in Montreal A&A Records, Discus, Deux Mille Plus, Rock en Stock, Dutchy’s Record Cave, Phantasmagoria and Sam the Record Man were all fatalities of the new digital world order.

 

The intersection of St. Catherine and Peel was once reputedly the busiest street corner in Canada. This recalls the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, our country’s centennial, Expo ’67, the city’s race against Toronto to trumpet a civic population of one million and hosting ’76 Summer Olympic Games. Since then there have been recessions and referendums. The island’s tunnels, bridges and elevated spaghetti expressways are literally crumbling, falling apart and falling down. The current hearings investigating the corruption entwined within City Hall’s infrastructure maintenance and sourcing (cheap cement, Mafia strings twitching union bosses and shameless Third World graft) is 70s Cliche Commission redux. Tammany Hall could never touch this. It’s good to be home, if only to get a whiff of 400 years of gangrene.

 

Canadian HMV stores have been spun off by their UK parent but the store at St. Catherine and Peel reminds me of the one on London’s Piccadilly Circus (since closed). Massively multi-floored yet inviting despite the lack of twee amenities such as pleather club chairs and an in-store café although it’s immediately apparent that music is now just a sub-genre of home entertainment. Still, the lowest level is almost all CDs and vinyl, as if Napster and iTunes never existed. The selection is vast, not merely compilations and recent releases: artists’ entire back catalogues are stocked in the racks. The Bob Dylan section is spilling over and Infidels will plug a hole on my shelf of His Bobness. HMV’s prices are Amazon competitive too. Pinch me.

 

It takes two trips over two days to browse and shop just the Rock alphabet from A to Z. There is some heartbreak and pain, a bit of crying in the climate change January rain. HMV has a deluxe edition of High Hopes, the new Bruce Springsteen release and it includes a live DVD from 2013 of Born in the U.S.A. in its sequential entirety. When I bought the album earlier that week in Edmonton there was no deluxe edition in evidence. I would’ve spent the extra $2 then but damned if I’m repurchasing it 72 hours later even though I’m a Bruce completist. Or was until now. And there’s an enhanced package of the Stones’ recent Sweet Summer Sun which now includes a DVD of their premier 1968 Hyde Park performance. Bastards! Mick and Keith have been hoovering money from my wallet for 40 years; I dread the forensic accounting.

 

After all these years of consuming music, sweet music, it’s pretty much come down to plugging gaps in the library. The bond was formed long ago and this need persists. For instance, no decent collection should be without at least some Randy Newman or Long John Baldry. So HMV was good, Better Than Ezra in fact. I spent enough to buy at least two and a half pairs of blue suede shoes, but you can’t hear shoes unless they squeak.

 

Shopping in Montreal remains problematic. If you spend a dollar, the Feds will top up that amount with the five-per-cent GST. Fair enough. Afterward the province’s Ministry of Finance will impose its 9.975 per cent tax on the sale, but not on your initial dollar, no, those ferrets in Quebec City calculate their take on $1.05. Sing about sticker shock.

 

I do not move in the rare air circles of Coffee, Tea or Me? or Executive Class in big old jet airliners. Planes are flashy Greyhound busses, giant incubators of other people’s infections, most of whom cart way too much carry-on along with their sniffles. So hefting a shopping bag into the cabin is humiliating. At least it’s filled with CDs. Yet I feel like yesterday’s émigré, some sad sack from a former Soviet satellite country packing onions for on-board snacks.

 

All things considered, I guess it was worth it although the neighbours keep calling the Edmonton police with noise complaints. Bastards.

NONSENSE VERSE

 

Scamp’s 21^st Century Marine Cadence Blues

 

Are my claws in your shoulder

Excuse me, sir, come a bit closer

Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen
This old house puts the M in mean
Woe is me, I’m wasting away
I’ve been fed just once today
Now listen, mister, I ain’t fat
All tabby toms are built like that
What’s so funny about my striped girth
I ain’t no joke, no waddling mirth
I don’t get no dinner ‘til 'bout five
Times are hard, help me survive
Oh brother, can you spare some kibble
Something tasty that I can nibble
See this long and graceful stretch
It helps me puke, I like to retch
A soggy hairball for your time, sir
I made it myself with my own fur
A gift from a sad and forsaken pet
With eight long lives to be seen out yet