And so, as if I were a character moving at the behest of some anonymous writer, smoking Camels and sipping from a bottle of Four Roses, I did what was expected of me. I lit a candle for David Goodis. And for Jim Thompson and Gil Brewer and Peter Rabe and Harry Whittington and Bruno Fisher. And for Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini, who had initiated Pic and me into the tribe. And, yeah, I lit it for Pic and me, too. I lit it in the hope that we’d always remember where the stories come from and what’s at stake when we string the words together into the tale and send it on its way to the reader.
Then I pushed the glowing taper into a little vase full of sand and, suddenly lightheaded, exited the church… and promptly stumbled on the last step to the sidewalk, bumping straight into a pack of Latino teens in full colors, hopped up on testosterone and the noise of something like gangster-salsa that was following them out of a nearby club.
I mumbled an apology, which I knew, as it emerged from my throat, would only make matters worse. And it did. They pushed me like a party toy from one thug to the next, got right in my face and yelled things that, very likely, had to do with my mother. I tried to run but one of them grabbed my jacket. I shirked out of the coat and kind of lurched forward – just as that wonderful Crown Vic pulled up onto the sidewalk, throwing a big, hulking block of Detroit steel between me and the St. Lucy’s Boys’ Choir.
I believe that Pic saved my undeserving ass that night. It should be noted that he feels my memory of the evening is, shall we say, skewed, and, beyond this, that I’ve surrendered, in the recounting, to my bone-deep tendency toward melodrama. As it often does, the truth may reside somewhere in the middle.
Which brings us, the hard way, to Fuckin’ Lie Down Already. Because only a guy who would drive a sketchy acquaintance on a nonsensical mission to honor an almost-forgotten, morbidly depressive paperback novelist could write the story you’re about to read.
I’m guessing that the majority of his fans know Pic primarily as a horror writer – appropriately enough, as I’m convinced that A Choir of Ill Children will come to be regarded as a classic of the genre. But while I’m a lover and proponent of the terror story, raised on Matheson and still drawn to Lovecraft, sometimes in spite of myself, I think Pic is, at heart, a stone noir scribe.
For me, FLDA starts out as homage to Goodis and Thompson and McCoy and Brewer and Willeford and that whole cadre of 1950s paperback noir-ists. That it ends as something else is the source of its startling and upsetting power.
Up front, the story feels like a Lion/Gold Medal fable crossed with a slew of those wonderfully gritty, blue-tinged cop flicks of the ’70s – The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mean Streets, The Outfit, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (with just a dollop of southern-fried cornpone like Walking Tall and Macon County Line thrown in). It feels like The Getaway as reinterpreted by Cronenberg – the road, the guns, the plummet toward an inevitable and bloody doom plus the leaking bodily fluids. Death Wish as reinvented by the young Kathryn Bigelow treating a bout of the old bipolar with some Michigan street crank.
But if our story begins as homage to the originators of pb noir, it takes a turn into territories toward which those guys usually only pointed. (With a few significant exceptions: Think of the finales of Thompson’s Savage Night and A Hell of a Woman).
Piccirilli isn’t content merely to hint. He isn’t willing to save the horror, the horror for his exit line. He moves into hell immediately, colonizes the country and then begins to mine the land, digging ever deeper toward its molten core. About three pages into this tale, we speed right through – and then past – the boundaries of traditional mid-century noir and into a land adjacent to Kafka and de Sade and the legend of snuff films.
Our hero, Clay, starts out as the Grim Reaper and turns into a devouring angel powered by a gearworks that runs on a relentless and insatiable need for vengeance. A kind of demon of mindless regret and fury behind the wheel of an ’89 Caprice.
There are images in this story that I’m never going to get out of my head. I won’t cite them here for a number of reasons, the least of which is that you need to trip over them in your own time and respond in your own way. But midway through my first reading, I was reminded, suddenly and violently, of a moment in 1976: I was 16 years old and feasting on my first course of those ’70s crime films that I referenced above. Friday, Saturday nights, my buddies and I would tramp the three miles downtown, cans of Narragansett smuggled in our pants, to the Paris Cinema to gorge on double-feature reruns of Peckinpah and Don Siegel, Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich. Straw Dogs, Vanishing Point, Across 110th St., The Seven-Ups. You’re holding this book, you probably know the canon.
One night we wandered, unaware, into John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. Five minutes in, I was confident and happy that I’d purchased two hours of gunplay and hard-guy dialogue. But shortly after that, I witnessed a moment in American film so brutal, so nihilistic, that it brought me up short and silenced the giddy, wiseass bullshit from my little gang and me. You know the film, you know the scene – the little girl and the ice cream truck: “I wanted vanilla twist.”
Here on the plains of middle age, I’ve seen and read and, yes, lived enough that it’s hard to nail me with that kind of Rinzai slap. It’s not so much that I’m entirely calloused as it is that, like the washed up pugilist of any number of bus station paperbacks, I’ve refined the flinch and the cover-up to deep reflex. But the fact is that, with this story, Piccirilli led me down that fabled dark alley and did to me what those East L.A. gangbangers did not.
I’ve written elsewhere about my sense that the very act of writing, of making words into story, is an act of faith and a sign of hope. But what does it mean when the writer chooses to make a story about a universe void of faith and hope? Void, in fact, of logic, of joy, of even the smallest scrap of redemption?
That question is at the heart of why I’m drawn to the noir scribes. Because in the face of all good sense, they repeatedly climb down into the gutter and wrestle with the oldest and meanest bear of them all – the elusiveness of meaning.
Some years back, my brother-in-law came into possession of a parcel of letters handwritten by Charles Manson. These were sick, ugly, occasionally nonsensical texts. The kinds of things you scan, cringe over and drop. And afterwards, you wash the hands with Lava and walk around nervously humming saccharine pop tunes for a week. FLDA has little in common with the Manson letters. Pic, of course, is a thoughtful and talented writer and Manson is a babbling sociopath. But both those letters and this story have that same kind of power. Both leave you with a primal sense that words are dangerous, which is to say, a sense that words can change consciousness. In all sorts of ways.
Make no mistake, FLDA is a bleak and brutal little journey. And you know you’ve got no choice but to take it. So brace yourself, reader, and then hit the gas. I promise, one of these nights, I’ll light a candle for you. -by Jack O’Connell, author of WORD MADE FLESH and BOX 9
CHAPTER ONE
Coincidence only carries so far, and then you’ve just got to figure the universe wants to fuck you up as much as possible.
Clay had been on the road for two days straight when he got pulled over for failing to signal. He was in upstate New York someplace, a few miles outside of Winnoroneck, a small town where everybody had a half acre of yard, picket fence, and an enormous bird bath you could set a helicopter down in.
Still had a while to go before he hit Saratoga. Nothing out here but fields, orchards, meadows, and bumpkin cops laying in wait behind billboards.