The blinds are half-drawn in the retired detective’s office. Two cigarettes smolder in an antique ashtray stolen from The Plaza, no doubt, in better days. The dank bulbs of fluorescent lights blink and bleep with each of the ex- detective’s heavy steps. May as well have been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. He tore through piles on his metal desk, dinging drawers, feeling for moldy files that probably weren’t even there in the first place. A rattling, and a curvy brunette in a teddy and torn stockings appeared in the corner. “That commode couldn’t service me with my veins pumped full ‘a morphine,” she drawled in an accent every bit Staten Island as Marilyn Monroe…
As you can see, I’ve been reading noir lately. Not the good old classics, which the above text is meant to suggest, but those I’d like to call the “modern noir,” stories with all the pulp and theme told by characters that might have been dreamt up by Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs or, frankly, anyone whose lives have been touched by level-5 desperation—something I believe to belong to the noir’s essence.
I recently engulfed Tony O’Neill’s Sick City, a modern noir at its finest. Not only was the story completely readable and, dare I say, brilliant, it produced many ear-marks of a good noir—an implacable indifference to violence and sex (and the two combined), a half-hatched plan, mystery, get-aways and decidedly valuable goods. Instead of the lonely detective, somewhere between 35 and 45, who drinks coffee, eats eggs and smokes cigarettes (in that sequence sometimes) on the hunt for the case and woman that got away, O’Neill provides us with two of Los Angeles’ finest losers.
I couldn’t separate myself from either of the lead characters, Randal and Jeffrey, two no-good junkies who meet in a Dr. Drew-like celebrity rehab and decide to make bank on a supposed sex tape featuring Sharon Tate before the Manson Murders in 1969. Yep, that, there is their ticket to life on easy street. The absurd set-up only leads to the most delightful, screwed up imagining of an underground Los Angeles that O’Neill reminds us, even when obscured through his demented lens, isn’t so absurd at all.
As readers, we’re fascinated with the perverted, the wrong, and the ungodly. We also pray for redemption, realization and self-preservation. Not without a hitch or two, O’Neill gracefully combines the two with a story that is as revolting as it is beautiful, dirty as it is honest and sadistic as it is gentle. Sick City sparkles acid rain fairy dust over the reader—his captive audience (me) shaking in my shackles demanding more, more, MORE! When there was no more, I cried and then slept a precious, baby sleep, awaiting my next neo-noir challenge, Jerry Stahl’s Pain Killers. I won’t go into it here, but it is so awesome. SO awesome.
The first noir movement really took hold around the time of the Great Depression. Is it a stretch to say that maybe this depression, which is very great, indeed, has sparked a new interest in the noir? New challenges, new shenanigans?
What it is about the noir and its current revival, or so it seems? Am I making this “revival” up or has it always been there? I think it’s all about desperation and what we wouldn’t do for what we want and need. Especially in this “economic climate,” (and I put that in quotes because I am so sick of hearing the phrase), where’s a literary buff to turn? The first noir movement really took hold around the time of the Great Depression. Is it a stretch to say that maybe this depression, which is very great, indeed, has sparked a new interest in the noir? New challenges, new shenanigans?
Writers like O’Neill and Stahl, both ex-junkies, knew a different world than many of their readers, perhaps. Others, like me, follow them because I can relate to some part of their journey—some part of the desperation—there it is again—that begets a hardboiled novel. But these novels have heart in a way that some of the oldies but goodies don’t. How can I say the older ones have no heart? All stories have heart or else they would be rubbish! To this, I say you’re right. A story is incapable of being whole without one.
What I believe is that O’Neill’s novel not only showed me the suggestion, even a mere chalk outline of a heart. He showed me one bloody, beating upon a table, begging to be crushed, to be made malfunctioned machine. He asked me to hold it while he shot some dope and keep it for the ride until I could place it safely back inside his character’s bloodless face. It made me wonder how surgeons feel, holding peoples’ hearts in their hands as they beat and sputter.
Tony O’Neill’s Sick City is sick indeed and oh so exhilarating. For a Midwesterner-turned-New Yorker, I didn’t need to know L.A. to know that no matter where you are, the noir landscape is, well, a neon kind of black. It is in the darkness we thrill us and are so thrilled in return. And THAT is the messed-up exquisiteness of the noir, whether you go with a Carver or an O’Neill. Or A Stahl. Read the Stahl too.
[Image: Flickr]
