Thoughts on "The Dark Frontier" by Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler wrote The Dark Frontier, his very first espionage novel, in the mid-1930s. He meant it to be a parody, as he relates in his excellent and typically erudite introduction to the Mysterious Press edition from 1990. He wanted to write a novel that would “make fun of the old secret service adventure thriller as written by E. Phillips Oppenheim, John Buchan, Dornford Yates and their cruder imitators,” with their indomitable, jut-jawed heroes, ungreased by human failing, and, consequently, often as dull as unspiced soup.

The novel starts out amusingly enough. Henry Barstow, a overworked, dowdy, 40-year-old English physicist and bachelor of celebrated reputation is on an overdue vacation in the south of England, when he encounters a mysterious Mr. Groom. Groom immediately starts picking through the cave-scape of Barstow’s considerable brains for knowledge, specifically about those new atomic weapons that have been making the news (weapons that were in reality already being researched at that time).

Mr. Groom represents the nefarious-sounding corporation of Cator & Bliss. He attempts to enlist Professor Barstow in a scheme to steal the secret plans for a new-fangled atomic weapon held by the unstable government of the shadow-strewn (and mythical) Balkan nation of Ixania, before they can use it against western nations . . . or so he claims. . . .

At first, Professor Barstow, a Scientist with a capital “S”, refuses with admirable English staunchness, suspicious that Mr.Groom cares only about world peace as it applies to the shareholders of Cator & Bliss. On his way to bed that night, he happens across a fictional version of the derring-do tales being parodied here—one titled Conway Carruthers, Dept. Y, and indeed, it’s pretty lame—and almost promptly puts it
down. “Barstow the mathematician had no use for Barstow the romantic.”

Unfortunately for the Professor, not long after, he receives a bump on the brain and  awakens with a case of amnesia so severe that believes himself now to be master spy Conway Carruthers. As Carruthers of the secret service, he promptly adopts the disguise of “Professor Barstow” (an identity doubling that might have spurred an admiring snort from Vladimir Nabokov). With his new identity as a super
secret agent, the professor sets out across the dark frontier into mysterious Ixania to stop the dissemination of this new weapon of mass destruction (before it’s too late! Of course.)

In his introduction, Ambler modestly and intelligently dismisses his maiden voyage into fiction, writing that, as a parody, it fails. Over 70 years later, and from the vantage point of my reading chair, I’d agree.

After the amnesiac Professor decides to don the disguise of, well, himself, you would eagerly anticipate a string of comic calamities like something out of Donald Westlake. Unfortunately, there are few laughs to be found and the misfortunes unfurl in the classic fashion of later Ambler.

As it turns out, tweedy Barstow’s amnesian makeover into Ultra Action Spy isn’t a delusion at all. He really does become a master spy and, therefore, an entirely different character. With nothing to link the two men, we’re left with a character who’s a vague, non-funny and confusing mush, hard to envision either as scientist or hero. Ambler makes a few passes at portraying some confusion underneath Carruthers’ ultra-confident manner, but seems to give up.

Mid-point through the narrative, Ambler changes to the more-believable viewpoint of an American investigative reporter. The narrative swirls along on surer ground here, but it also makes Barstow even more baffling and less interesting. It would also help if all the characters and the world they chase each other through were as whacked-out as the professor/spy should be, but in the end, Ambler the realist rather clumsily wins out over Ambler the farceur.

Outside of the problem of Professor Barstow, the novel does have excellent plotting, a driving story, and is threaded with fine writing, excellently drawn supporting characters, and an incisive and sophisticated take on politics, money and power (though Ambler, always a dedicated leftist, would later strongly disavow his own romantic flirtation with Soviet Russia.)

As a straight novel of espionage and adventure, The Dark Frontier has its pleasures. You can see the talent that would make Eric Ambler a pioneering genre writer whose work would fully flower in novels like A Coffin for Dimitrios, Background to Danger, Cause for Alarm and many others. His innovation of the “everyday hero” inspired no less a personage than Alfred Hitchcock. His novels have influenced such major genre authors as Graham Greene, John LeCarre, and Alan Furst, who relates he wrote the first sentences to his first masterwork, The Night Soldiers, on the back of a copy of Dimitrios. And, finally, his name even inspired the founding of this neat little publishing house.

(Edited 11/12/10)

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published March 2011 by Ambler House Publishing. His essays and blog entries can be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be approached on Facebook, followed on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

Photo by author

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

You Just Wait! I'll Be RIGHT There!

"I’m now at Trader Joe’s, Emeryville—"  Recent Facebook/Twitter feed.

Dear Earl Eckenlouper:

I am a corporate spy, government assassin, professional criminal, and certified clinical psychopath. I am writing this e-mail to thank you for keeping me constantly up-to-date on your real-time whereabouts via your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Thanks to your penchant for public exposure, I am now able to track you wherever you go without expending endless miles of legwork or investing thousands of dollars in hi-tech surveillance gadgetry. Your compulsive self-promotion enables me to take whatever actions necessary should necessity, desire, or both, arise.

For instance, as a corporate spy for a fast-food franchise, I may “take you out” (as we say in the trade) when you tell the whole world that you have committed the error of dining at my client’s competitor.

As a government assassin, I may “put you down” at some future moment for “friending” the Turbaned Guy at the Local Mosque, signing that Climate Change petition, or hitting on Michelle Bachmann.

Further, as a professional criminal (or a “Crime Pro” as we underworld citizens like to call ourselves) I wish to inform you that next time you’re slumped over at Slumpy’s Tavern at 8th and Weyauwega , I may pop by your place, kidnap your entire family and hold them for ransom. That will be a hangover you will not forget.

And finally, as a certified clinical psychopath, I may simply enjoy watching you squirm when I track you down to Mr. Blister’s’ Deli on 9th and Broadway where, every Tuesday at one p.m., wearing those godawful low slung jeans with your butt crack showing, you order your cold pastrami on day-old white, sprouts, no mustard (and if that’s not reason enough to whack a guy, then there’s simply no justice in the world.)

To make my job/hobby/favorite pastime a little easier in the future, I request that next time you inform us of your current whereabouts via Twitter and Facebook that you wear a large circular bulls eye on your back, or lift your chin skyward so as to enable an easier headshot

Oh, and I’m still mad about Betty Jo Bialowsky dumping me for you!

Because I am not a completely bad person, I will give you a head start by saying that I’m six-two, look like Lee Van Cleef and stare a lot--usually right at you. I also openly carry high-powered weaponry, thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings.

And please note that any sudden movement tends to set me off.

Thank you for your help in this matter. I know I’ll be seeing you . . . soon.

Sincerely,

You’ll Find Out . . . .

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published March 2011 by Ambler House Publishing. His essays and blog entries can be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be approached on Facebook, followed on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe[at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

Photo by author

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

THEY SAY HE DIED IN THE LAND BEYOND THE FOREST . . . BUT THEY WERE WRONG

 Cover design by Cathi Stevenson/Book Cover Express; cave/moon image by photosani; used under licensing by Shutterstock.

For a century, Dracula--the Prince of Nightmares, the Superman of Evil--has been quietly casting his dark and impish dreams over the sleeping souls of a High Sierra community who only know him as the eccentric recluse who lives under the forbidding peak known as Dragon’s Ark. But now, facing a modern world intent on washing away the shadows of his enchanting but haunted world, the Vampire King gives life to a dying woman and ensnares her in a grim and ruthless struggle with greedy resort developers over the future of his mountain kingdom.

Dragon’s Ark is a weird, thrilling, and violent tale of supernatural power, intrigue, betrayal, and surreal bloody revenge that follows a fabulous legend’s bizarre and bloodthirsty quest to preserve his life and power against the unforgiving, dreamless light of the 21st century.

COMING 2011 FROM AMBLER HOUSE PUBLISHING
IN POD & E-BOOK EDITIONS!

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

The Exciting Secret Adventures of Naked Man

Author John-Ivan Palmer’s long colorful career in American show business gives him a lens able to focus on corners far removed from the experience of most writers.

Since the 1960s, the peripatetic Palmer, has roamed the country, first as a magician and, later as a popular stage hypnotist and mentalist. Along the way, he's written a huge number of of distinctive, often brilliant, articles on the often-treacherous ins-and-outs of the fading world of traveling show business folk. He is, in his words, "the only known literary author who is a stage hypnotist."

In his long overdue first novel, the farcical, roughly charming and racy picaresque Motels of Burning Madness (The Drill Press, 195 pp; available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc.), he takes willing readers on a fast, entertaining, bawdy, no-holds-barred voyage into the musky backwater swamp of male strippers and other remote bizarries of live entertainment in America.

Though very explicit, Motels is not a sex novel at all of the type found in Borders’ erotica section. Instead, it's a picaresque novel, a traditional form stretching back to Ancient Rome and Petronious' Satyricon. Set in the early 1980s Rome of Los Angeles, its protagonist is Huey Dubois, a 24-year-old gigolo and stripper of fine uncut endowment, not much brain, but more heart than you’d expect. Handsome Huey is a misfit’s misfit—a good soul who’s not much good at anything but being a prancing, g-stringed boy toy, and because of that, he always seems to be bumping n’ grinding away in survival
mode. He’s paradoxical young man: though an exhibitionistic gigolo, stripper (and other kinds of performance, er, artist), he pursues these pursuits while a sense of misplaced honor constantly struggles to break through his selfish exterior.

Even his own private desires make him a freak in an environment already a-roiling with alternative, offbeat desires (S&M fans and the like). Huey has little taste for women his own age. He likes them older. In fact, much older as revealed in Palmer’s sympathetic portraits of Huey’s three main forty years-plus paramours: Malibu matron Madelein; Debra, the abused, lonely wife of an L.A. cop; and, the real
song of his heart, Gloria Madlock, the late-night waitress at the Donut Hole for whom Huey loyally puts on a free midnight show from behind his hotel window, san culottes.

As the novel opens, Madelein from Malibu has just given Huey the boot out of her beachfront bodega in the mis-belief that Huey stole her jewelry. The next day, Madelein winds up mysteriously dead. Not surprisingly, straight society’s suspicion naturally turns toward Huey, who, like his associates in the sexual underworld, is no friend of law and order, lying to the cops even when he’d better off telling the truth.

Soon, Gloria herself mysteriously vanishes as the law closes in. Huey has to leave L.A., but on the way out, he takes us on a gamy, hair-curling tour through the underground of male strip venues, “staggette” parties, private video shoots, all of this arranged by some of the sleaziest, most crooked agents imaginable.

With the hot breath of the law steaming his shoulders, Huey jumps from a bedroom window and lands in a fugitive’s gig--a traveling male striptease troupe that takes him through Las Vegas and on a zany zigzag into America’s heartland (where the biggest audiences of all exist for this kind of entertainment). This barrel-bottom, Barnum & Bailey male animal act happens to be the hideout of a fellow narcissist whom Huey suspects made off with both Madelein’s jewelry and her life: the perfectly named Billy Slipton.

After a series of entertaining and tawdry mishaps—why anyone would ever choose this showbiz career path befuddles my comparatively conservative mind—Huey rips off and gives the nefarious Slipton the slip and sets fire to the troupe’s motel in his escape (hence the title).

Hugh finally tracks his beloved Gloria in Omaha, only to learn that she, like so many in this world, keeps her own secrets, even while parading naked.

After a pungent exploration and analysis of women’s mud wrestling (there’s actually a business and craft behind this performance genre), Huey learns once again he’s only found another bad refuge and so must flee. From there, he stumbles into my favorite stop-over in the entire novel: Clown Town, a bizarro setting that could birth a whole novel of its own inside its limits. (At this point, I must leave you to discover this community for yourself.)

At the end, Huey does land on his feet, a little wiser and, as he realizes with touching insight, a little older. Like other comic heroes, he may not get what he starts out wanting, but he gets something much better.

Palmer—who worked as a male stripper to research Motels (I doubt George Plimpton went so far)—describes Huey’s world with lively evocative care, insight, humor and remarkable kindness. Such a milieu is a natural target for easy putdowns and lazy, knee-jerk moralism. Palmer avoids both.

Sometimes, though, the narrative seems thin. We’re told little, if anything, about Huey’s background and the plot eventually seems to drift away from its whodunnit aspects. Motels of Burning Madness could have burned on for a few pages longer; for example, I wanted more insight into Huey’s brief sojurns of dancing in respectable middle-class households. Though, with a roomful of women grabbing at his intimacies, Huey probably doesn’t have much time to ponder the family photos he passes by and reflect on his outsider's role in the secret world hidden behind those bland smiling masks.

(Photo by author)

Whackers: The Story of an Unproduced Screenplay

During the 1990s, I worked as a freelance legal assistant in San Francisco, while I pursued the improbable dream that I could write a screenplay that Hollywood would want to buy and—maybe—produce.

Sometime around 1994, I was working at a giant beehive of a law firm in the financial district, when I developed another one of my periodic (and failed) romantic fascinations, this time with a compelling first-year associate at the firm. (No names because (1) I am a gentleman; and (2) she is an attorney).

I believed then that one should always perform some gesture in tribute to these feelings—preferably a civilized one, success or no--so I called her up and asked her out. She called back and left a polite “no” on the home answering machine. She ended by adding that she was already engaged to be married (I don’t recall that I ever saw the Ring on her hand).

Rejection took place on a Friday. Saturday I went to work and suffered the sting of running into her. That afternoon, I took my pummeled ego out for a beer at a favored watering hole, The New Delhi, an Indian bar and restaurant at the edge San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

My bartender at the New Delhi that day was a cheerful Nepalese named Rabi Kunnar, who also worked as a doorman at a nearby hotel.. Slumped behind my beer, I whined my tale of woe, concluding with her upcoming engagement.

“Thomas!” Rabi cheerfully scoffed with a dismissive wave. “Don’t feel bad! Tell you what! You give me five hundred dollars, I go kill her fiancé and THEN you can have her!”

My hat about flew off my head as I straightened up on the barstool, my finger in the air, the ecstasy rising in me like sap:

“That,” I cried in my best bad Hitchcock voice, “is a moooo-veee!”

I was in the middle of another script at time, and though I knew it would not turn out to be a good one, that job had to be finished. So another six months passed before l sat down and took a year and a half to write the funniest movie I could think of. Even looking at it fifteen years later, I think I succeeded. Even in the spare, dry restricted language of screenplays, its joyful music still plays.

And now, strictly as an experiment, I’m presenting Whackers for your reading pleasure over at Smashwords online publishing, where you can download it to your computer your e-reader . . . or even your i-Phone!

The pitch for Whackers goes, more or less, like this:

WHACKERS: A law clerk’s blind passion for an attorney puts him on the fast track to hell when a glib n’ greedy hit man hires himself to whack the attorney’s fiancé. A madcap slapshtick nightmare about the awful things that can happen when a dream comes true.

Clearly, this is a wish fulfillment tale. It’s also part film noir parody and the story of a con man and his patsy (a setup that doesn’t seem as popular now as it was in the days of Abbott & Costello and Billy Wilder). Those two clowns, talented but haplessly besotted Bryce Doolittle and scheming but foolish Jack Studd, were the easy parts to write. I encountered significant but enjoyable challenges with the patsy’s “romantic interest” (enigmatic Elaine Wilder) and the climactic showdown where all three collide. The Elaine problem was solved when I happened on a news photo of a young girl jumping joyfully into hurricane-driven surf. For the chase, I opened a dozen
doors, until one led me to where I thought the movie needed to go.

For much of the way, I had no title until perceptive singer/songwriter Pat Johnson, during a long beery conversation at the Club Deluxe in San Francisco one afternoon, pointed to the “whacking” that triggered the main plot, and said, “How about ‘Whackers’?”

I got good advice from a screenwriting critique group, but in the end, I found the best approach was to pass it around to six or seven readers who both knew and did not know each other. The response was perceptive, mostly highly positive, even enthusiastic. Women seemed to like it more than men. The harshest criticism from this group was that it was “way out there” (where I fully intended to send it). One reader admitted he didn’t like comedies anyway and also wanted something closer to a Hollywood ending rather than the bittersweet flavor I gave it.

When it was done, I set Whackers sailing into the Hollywood Fog. And, as with most of the other screenplays I wrote, I was tortured with encouragement. Almost everyone liked it. The Seriously Big Hollywood agent (and nice person) Catherine Tarr at Creative Artists Agency had once asked me if I had a comedy in me. Whackers was my response. Her response: “But I didn’t mean a slapstick comedy!” The rest were intimidated for financial reasons (Bryce, for example, is a frustrated crooner and my idea was to score the movie with classic love songs, the licensing for which would have sent the production budget to the moon. This is why writing novels is better. In novels, there are no budget considerations on the imagination)

The one person who did not DID NOT like, really REALLY hated Whackers was a friendly old gentleman screenwriter I met on a flight home from a screenwriters conference in Austin. I sent it to him after it was done, then called him a few weeks later. His verdict: “Awful. Terrible. Bad. Six drafts? That’s all you could do after six drafts!?”

Lesson learned: Never submit your comedy to a man who worked on Raging Bull.

After over a year of constant peddling, the small barrel of agents and producers who (a) appeared reputable and (b) would enjoy something as righteously off-the-wall as Whackers ran dry and I moved on. My favorite of my screenplays—and definitely one of the most entertaining things I’d ever written—crawled sadly into the drawer with the others.

Looking back, it’s just as well. Whackers is both too “whacked” and too expensive to be a Hollywood movie. And if they had produced it, it might have gone the way of so many other offbeat scripts—its racy, zany spirit weighed down with leaden realism, its wings clipped to make it more pablumatic for the bland-minded audiences that the Hollywood is beholden to.

Hollywood is always looking for the next Titanic, the next Avatar, the next E.T., the next Knocked Up. Whackers frolics far away from those mainstream blockbusters. A righteously outrageous yet sophisticated farce that portrays organized crime and federal law enforcement as multicultural hotbeds of alternative sexuality and ends in a huge vacation resort with a cartoon-like chase out the Silent Era might be beloved by comedians, serious comedy aficionados (meaning people who know who Jack Benny is) and critics, but the “mainstream” audience would go off in search of ever-safe Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock.

Whackers, at best, would become a cult item. No one sets out to make a cult movie.

In case I forgot to mention it, Whackers is a comedy. Here’s a list of some of the movies that directly and indirectly inspired its writing: Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box; Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last; Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Sherlock Jr.; Bringing Up Baby, Abbott & Costello’s Pardon My Sarong and Buck Privates Come Home; The Three Stooges’ Dizzy Pilots; Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot and The Fortune Cookie; the oeuvre of Sylvester the Cat, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote; Going in Style; Monty Python & the Holy Grail; Sleeper; Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Airplane!

Maybe I’m getting old and reactionary, but few of the comedies I’ve seen since I wrote Whackers even try for the oddball alchemy I was trying to create, but a few of them are: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut; Cannibal!; Strangers with Candy (the film); Hot Fuzz; and 30 Rock.

The lists only hints at what kind of movie to expect because you don’t care how many movies I’ve seen or how darn many clever references I’ve woven into Whackers, right? If you don’t laugh like I think you will, none of that matters.

NOTE TO NON-SCREENPLAY READERS: On normal paper, Whackers comes out to about 110 pages. Smashwords uses a different formatting so don't be intimidated by the Smashword page count. It reads very fast.

NOTE TO SCREENWRITERS: I no longer care whether or not anyone buys Whackers, so I’ve insolently violated several of the Sacred Tenets of Screenwriting to make reading this screenplay more entertaining to the general reader (the vast majority of my loyal but small audience); for instance, the use of Times Roman font, which is much easier on the eyes than Courier, especially on non-paper media; Whackers is also a movie where some of the world’s great love songs are almost characters in themselves, so I put back the titles of all the songs I could only hint at and put more in where they weren’t. Yes and “they” hate things like “ACT I”, etc., . . . pardon me while I sit right down and cry over it.

Now go read and enjoy. I still think Whackers is funny. I'm betting many of you will too.

(Photo by author with the assistance of Elizabeth Burchfield, Annette Roux, Christine Henry and Don Herron).

(Revised 2/14/10)

The Generic Year-End Book Review And A Christmas Note

Because everyone else does this and I’m as much a conformist as anyone—put a single malt in my hand, point me to the nearest cliff and I’ll run faster than any lemming in town—I’ll share my literary cultural highlights of this typically distressing year in this fantastically weird decade where "I Like IKE” somehow passed for useful wisdom.

As I reached the end of 2009, my judgment that Shoot the Piano Player, David Goodis’s emotional and bleak tale of a hard-luck piano player, finely and sincerely told, was the best book I’d read all year.

But wouldn’t you know it? The great Russian magician himself Vladimir Nabokov (Na-BOE-kof) slipped a last card into the TBR deck at the last moment with his great and magical tragicomedy Laughter in the Dark.

Told like a classic fairytale in a deceptively light-footed cadences, this stunning light-footed 1939 novel (Nabokov translated himself) relates the downward spiral of a stuffy bourgeois art critic whose obsession with a lovely (but untalented, callow and cruel) nineteen-year-old actress unravels his tidy consciousness and dull, but happy life. Nabokov would revisit this plot again in Lolita, but readers who may find that novel too dense an experience (not me) will find a fast moving, ecstatically written and suspenseful tale where never a word is put wrong (and wait ‘til you meet arch-villain Rex). I find the idea of novels centered around matrimonial cheating to be dull, but this is one novel I want to throw into everybody’s lap. Take my word: you will be entertained.

Another book that made me smile during the year was another early Nabokov work, his novella The Eye which first appeared in English in Playboy magazine in 1966. This wry spin of gamesmanship featuring another of Nabokov’s toxified romantics who thinks he’s committed suicide and become a ghost (Nothing to say on The Invention of Laura, which quietly awaits my eyes, but I sense it’s of more value to Nabokov scholars and bibliophiles than general readers).

Moving on: Peter Straub and Borderlands Press dished up a disturbing appetizer to Straub’s upcoming novel A Dark Matter in the form of the novella A Special Place: The Heart of a Dark Matter. As with many books I read, this is one of these things not for the sensitive among you,. Straub has taken a more stringent, spare approach to his prose in his recent novels and its works extremely well. The spareness makes this tale of young serial killer’s tutelage by a peripatetic uncle all the more upsetting and appalling, as it should be.

In a more historic-realist vein, Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer thrillingly dispensed with the notion that the Polish people failed to put up much of a resistance to the Nazi invasion of their country. It also made me wish I’d been hip to Furst’s work when it started appearing the late 1980s.

Loren D. Estleman pleased me for the fourth time in a row with another of his western tales The Wolfer. Published in 1978, it tells the story of a professional wolf hunter set against one of the great environmental disasters of the wild west—the near extinction of the timber wolf. With the passing in 2008 of Donald Westlake and the emptying out of the mid-list writers market (leaving nothing but God damned fucking juvenile YA zombie-vampire mashups--[Hey! Save it for the Ramsay Campbell discussion board!—Ed.]), Estleman seems to be one of the last practitioners of serious, finely-honed genre writing, a population I fear is fast-dwindling. I hope I'm wrong.

My favorite “new” writer of 2009 was David Corbett. The former private investigator published his first novel The Devil’s Redhead in 2002 and, I’m embarrassed to say, I only read it a few months ago. I promise to try to be timely when his Do They Know I’m Running? Comes out next year.

Another new old writer discovery was British author Nicolas Freeling whose entertaining, observant and nicely-titled 1966 mystery Because of the Cats this ailurophile came across in an obscure Berkeley used bookstore. Set in 1960s Amsterdam, it features a wry and world-weary Dutch detective and a nasty twist on Oliver Twist.

The Unique Novel of the Year award must go, however, to Motels of Burning Madness by a stage hypnotist named John-Ivan Palmer, who, if jacket copy veracity is to be trusted, personally researched this raunchy, wacky tale of a hapless, bone-headed, professional male stripper and his cross-country, cross-dressing journey through the grimy fringes of American show-biz society (I’ll undress—address--this entertaining, raunchy but good-hearted work at greater length in an upcoming piece.)

A CHRISTMAS NOTE:

I like Christmas. Like Faith and Unbelief in their purest, most demanding forms, there’s no defense for this position in either science or law.

The reasons why I love Christmas I won’t discuss now, but I’ll note that for most Americans the holiday has devolved far away from the original intent of both church and Charles Dickens into the deepest gutter of human greed to become a spectacle of sterile glitter, every moment flavored with anxiety, desperation, despair and debt. No wonder so many hate it. So, what’s the use of a hated holiday?

But recently, the stone cockles of my icy heart were warmed to read in a Slate magazine article (elaborated on in Time magazine) that a new War on Christmas has begun--a war waged by . . .

. . . Christians . . . .

Apparently, a large segment of Christians everywhere has had it up to their mistletoe with Christmas as defined by WalMart, Glenn O’Breilly, James Donahue, et al. (Something about Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple, instead of giving them the run of the joint while piteously demanding that they greet customer with “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” . . . sheesh!)

Calling themselves the Advent Conspiracy, this Plot Against WalMart-mas was hatched by an Oregon pastor named Rick McKinley, who, while sitting around with some of his colleagues four years ago, suddenly realized they were all dreading the upcoming holiday. “None of us,” he admitted, “like Christmas.” (“A Time to Worry,” as wise Mr. Boffo might say).

And so the conspiracy was hatched: to take Christmas back from the Capitalists and their scolding Satanic reactionary collaborators to its Gospel roots of love, charity, patience, forbearance, hope . . . all the values that you just know Bill O’Reilly hates.

The Advent Conspiracy's concepts are these: Worship fully, spend less, give more, love all. Which leads me to ask a question for all of you: of all those concepts, which one would you find the most challenging to live by?

I'll answer first: number four.

And so, a True Merry Christmas to you Christians who happen to be surfing by and to the rest, Happy Holidays!

There'll be no going to Hell for that.

Take the Long Way Home

I should have stayed off Baker Street that night and walked the long way home instead.

My assailant stormed out of the San Francisco Saturday darkness, bellowing something along the lines of “Fuck you, motherfucker!” as his fists bounded across my surprised face.

In a certain world, one fantasized in Charles Bronson movies and by certain ideologies, I would’ve promptly battled back, finally sending my assailant crumpling to the sidewalk, bleeding and begging for mercy as I blew smoke from my gun barrel, twirled my pistol and dropped it into my holster.

(And then I would’ve performed my Lee Van Cleef laugh, always a winner at parties.)

I did attempt to fight back. I even cleverly retorted with as couple of “fuck you”s of my own. But neither clever riposte nor small soft fists were any match for strong, swift ruthlessness; in fact, my knuckles were nearly the only part of me left uninjured as I danced backward on my heels. “Fire! Fire!” was the next deathless line out of my mouth. (I’d read somewhere yelling “Fire” is more apt to bring help than “Assault!” Maybe the neighborhood didn’t want to get involved with the fire department that night either).

I sprawled to the sidewalk on my back and quickly surrendered the battle. Something sharp, like a box cutter, sliced smoothly down the outside left leg of my slacks, cut open my front pants pocket; and off my attacker vanished into the night with the treasure I kept there.

Despite his brute efficiency, this must have been my attacker’s initiation into the world of violent crime. All he got for my trouble was my handwritten pocket calendar while he completely missed the inside right pocket of my stylish camel hair black sport coat where I kept my wallet. (Unless of course my meager, illegibly noted social life possessed more economic value than I realized).

I rose carefully but quickly. One punch had connected solidly with my mouth, but my smile would remain intact. Despite the hammering, it still felt like my glasses had stayed on my face but when I tried to adjust them, I realize it was oozing flesh swelling around my eyes that I felt under my fingers. My right eye seemed swollen shut, but I could see out my left. My glasses lay undamaged nearby.

It was August 13, 1999. I’d been walking home from Frankie’s Bohemian Cafe on Divasadero and Pine to my apartment on Post Street in an area between the Fillmore and Laurel Heights neighborhoods. (The last similar incident took place in 1988: another thug—an aging one I think--pulled a knife as I waited for a bus at Geary at Fillmore. His prize: $15.)

Jazzed on adrenaline, I crossed Baker to a grimy pink adobe corner market on Sutter, across from the low income projects stacked across the street.

It was a dangerous area. A year or so before, a woman in the projects had been shot dead in her kitchen by her estranged husband. And not long before my Encounter of the Flying Fists, I nearly strolled into a failed ambush by one young gangsta on another (I actually witnessed the shooter blasting away before he slunk off). If I’d arrived just a minute or so earlier, I would have been greeted by three .45-caliber slugs flying by—or through—my head.

The latest victim of neighborhood violence walked into the little market. From the look on the proprietors’ faces, I was the evening’s surprise customer (but there was no door prize).

In a certain world, one fantasized in spaghetti westerns and by certain ideologies, I would’ve grunted, “Gimme a quart of Jim Beam” through my smashed and bloody lips. Then, with swinging arms, strode manfully home along streets I’d paved with my own hands, into the 4-unit apartment building I’d built by myself with cheaply paid labor. There in my one-bedroom apartment, I would’ve downed the whisky, broke out needle and thread, iodine and bandages and, with instructions downloaded from the Internet on my AOL dial-up, bent over the bathroom sink in front of the mirror and sewn up my own goddam lacerations.

“You should’ve seen the other guy, baby,” I’d wink as I spat another tooth into the sink.

But, being a card-carrying weakling, I surrendered to reality. The market man and his wife took one fast look and said they would call in Government Officials. Local Government Officials, but Government Officials none the less.

I agreed as I watched drops of my blood plash on the grimy floormat. I promised myself when I got home to spit at myself in the mirror and growl, “Davy Crockett didn’t whine for an ambulance at the Alamo!”

The government workers, two men and a woman, dressed in blue uniforms with shiny aluminum badges, arrived fairly quickly. Fearing I'd suffered possible brain injury, they advised me to take a seat on the sidewalk. I obeyed, instead of taking the opportunity to grumble about fascism and free men in a police state. Something about wanting to come out of this alive and cognitively intact.

The three civil servants interviewed me. (Yes, mere civil servants! Next time, I’m calling the mailman!) I had little to say. Young black male, maybe about my height, clearly stronger. We shook our heads resigned to this violent magician’s escape. Without a better description, another bad guy had escaped. Again the world had worked its violent way as it has since I can remember.

A battered black and white police ambulance van arrived. The Government Officials helped me into back and strapped my freedom-loving body onto a very simple gurney. They’d deemed, probably correctly by then, that my injuries were not serious enough to require a fully equipped ambulance, so thanks to taxpayer vigilance, the ambulance was bare of medical equipment.

On the short drive over to UCSF-Zion, three blocks away, my mood blossomed into shining hilarity. I bantered with the officers and felt a pang of sorry when our quip party quickly abruptly ended. They seemed like nice people--especially for freedom-hating Government Officials. For one, they did not give me forms to fill out in triplicate or force another tax hike on me.

My memories of what happened after I was wheeled into the UCSF-Zion emergency room, though vivid, are like shards of over-exposed film forgotten on the cutting room floor. I lay around a lot (From my medical file: “Difficulty concentrating.”) Out of my whirling mind spun the trivial realization that it was Alfred Hitchcock’s 100th birthday, a feebly poetic insight as I felt nothing like Richard Hannay and I hardly think that Hitch, bless his impish soul, would consider sneaking to me this kind of Gift from the Beyond.

It was also a full moon night. The ER doc told me they’d been extra busy and made note of the cycle that many statisticians claim does not exist. I recall another patient was there, an older Asian gent who’d suffered similar thuggery elsewhere in the City. The doc told me my blood was a little thin—I’d spilled enough to supply a high school production of Night of the Living Dead.

Later, they decided to give me a CAT scan. I was permitted to go into the bathroom on my own feet. “Wow,” I murmured at the monstrous portrait painted by the mirror: both eyes swollen and purple, the right a pulpy oozing slit; a large bruise, split and ballooning on my upper right forehead; and the fattest pair of lips since Pia Zadora, but nothing even she would want to kiss.

At this point, I believe, pain’s fire at last touched my nerve endings. I tenderly washed my face as watery blood whirled down the drain.

They slid me inside the CAT donut. Whirrs and clicks, nothing remarkable. I was damned lucky. No concussion, though my nose was mildly broken. Ten stitches on my forehead. I was driven home in a hospital van at 2:50 A.M., according to my file.

(Not long after, UCSF-Mt. Zion was closed down, I don’t know exactly why, but three reasons occur to me: 1) to save money; 2) to save money and 3), to save money. The hearts of oppressed taxpayers and supply-siders fluttered like butterfly wings throughout the state. Why, if it wasn’t for that hospital, I might’ve spent more time cracking wise with Government Officials in that sorry ambulance on the way to another hospital. Poor all of us.)

The next morning, sore, half-blind, my face a stiff puffy mask, I made phone calls. I explained to my boss, Susan MacTavish Best, at Posthoc.com why I’d be late with my work for the Film Page that week. Not long after, a bouquet of flowers burst through my door stirring the soup of emotion as it sunk in how close (again) I’d come to something much worse and how glad I was there was a rest of the world outside my door.

Later, two other friends, Max and Janet Bran, brought me one of Frankie’s famous and no-longer available, cut-glasses brimming with Frankie’s beer (I still treasure that glass). Max asked me what I thought I had done wrong and I gave the answer you saw at the top of this article.

Later, they drove me down to Frankie’s where, bloodied and unbowed, I showed off my wounds (Ohhhh, I was a sight indeed!). I am told that some women lovingly throw themselves at such bloodied men and nurse them back to health with hot sex, marriage, et cetera, but in my case at least, I remained a bachelor in a half-empty bed. And as for the free beer, I was already mostly drinking gratis anyway.

I only had one that Sunday and went home before dark and by another roundabout route (one I walked ever after). I spent the next three days out of work and at doctor’s offices. The only remaining scar is a small stitching that remained invisible until the surrounding hairs left for good. The dry cleaner declared my beloved, but bloodied, camel hair coat to be beyond saving. At least the trash bin got to look sporty for once.

The expected emotional wounds opened quickly. The feeling of violation, of hatred for the thug, the continuous Dirty Harry/Death Wish Channel that broadcast twenty-four-hours inside my skull, all normal, even desirable, but not acted on. Yet, the failure to catch the criminal, while solidifying my already conservative stance on violent crime, has not turned me into a rigid rightist. If anything, walking our streets safely is also a civil right alongside all the others.

As for what I think now of my assailant, his life, if he’s even living it, is likely much worse than mine. That will be all the vengeance I can hope for.

How much money did this all cost me? It took nearly a year-and-half of dealing and appealing to both public and private bureaucracy but in the end, not a penny. (Of the two groups, the private proved itself no more efficient than the public.)

The state government (whose chains we are last throwing off, if the increasing number of pot holes, closed state parks and general air of glum chaos are any sign), has one of those nefarious welfare programs called the Victim Compensation Board, which only encourages lazy people to become crime victims so they can live off the dollars of hard-working taxpayers (a group that I could not possibly be a member of.)

Ten years have passed without another encounter like that one. The neighborhood I now live in—southeast Emeryville, glued against West Oakland--is no safer and much less charming. Except for a cozy nearby beer cafe, a friendly place for a decent drink is a mile away on Piedmont Avenue, a dreary bus ride through a dicey dour neighborhood. I avoid all dark corners and sometimes call for patient Elizabeth to come bring me home.

What set this reminiscence off, I guess, was the return of the shade of a favorite of the Bathrobe Warrior crowd, Ayn Rand, in two new autobiographies. Her beetling brow glower everywhere again. (I’d been reading The Fountainhead around that time; I hadn’t laughed so hard since I read Catch-22). I gather she may have regarded my assailant as something of a hero, a man who made his own world as though he lived in it alone. In a world run along her always straight, clean, transcendent lines, I
might very well not have survived that night, when, in the face of a relatively petty evil, the real mediocre world she and her fellow ideologues hold in contempt, reached back out to me when I needed it to.

(Photo by Author)