Massing and a Boneyard

A friend posted this saying on Facebook yesterday and it was so appropriate to yesterday post here that I had to include it. It just rang true on so many levels and not just for my interactions with my favorite Panamanian. I’m blessed with a number of very strong women in my life, both at work, in my family, and as friends. I have lived this saying with each and every one of these women at some point. It’s kind of what makes hanging around them fun.

A second date night this week although the shared movie experience didn’t last past the popcorn feeding frenzy. My wife walked out of Black Mass right after the first savage beating was administered and went to see something more soothing. I think it was all the time she spent watching the Pope yesterday. I stayed, of course, and thoroughly enjoyed movie which finally gets Depp out of the morass his career has sunken into over the last decade. He is riveting as Whitey Bulger, the Boston crime lord. He dominates.  He seems to almost pulsate with evil, dragging friends, family, and law enforcement down into his own personal quagmire. I was away, in the Army, from the Boston area during the zenith of his criminal career which is still rife with Whitey stories.

There are those, such as the woman I’m married to, who doesn’t think Hollywood should “glorify” criminals on film. This movie does the opposite, it shows him as the demented sociopath he is while shining a light on the pervasive quality his evil infected any who came in contact with him. Chief amongst those was his FBI enabler, played with gusto and a really bad wig by Joel Edgerton, continuing his strong run of roles. There’s a robust attempt to capture a sense of “Southie”, Bulger’s main stalking ground and about a 30% success rate for the Australian and British actors with the signature Boston accent. Certainly not a date film (as ably demonstrated by my experience) but a fascinating look into the face of true immorality.

Its official, Lawrence Block, with his protagonist Matthew Scudder has officially elevated themselves into my pantheon of literary super-heroes with my latest read, A Ticket to the Boneyard. This label is reserved for those whose stories I cannot put down, careening through the prose so fast and at the cost of ignoring life until I finish. Scudder is the first inductee into that august company of Lucas Davenport, Hieronymus Bosch, Travis McGee, and several others since Jack Reacher. I stayed up late and extended lunch over the past two days to finish this latest book. Scudder has an old case from his days as a policeman come back to haunt him and some of the women unlucky enough to associate with him. Scudder just can’t catch a break in the female department. He rightfully framed (if that’s even possible) a  deliciously talented psychopath twelve years prior. Said psycho gets out of prison and embarks on a series of murders of friends and associates of Scudder, promising to save him for last.

While Scudder was the hero, he certainly takes his bruises in this one as the psycho has a Hannibal Lector suite of skills to employ. Scudder is still struggling at times with his now years long sobriety and reads the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius throughout this adventures. He’s got a few layers. That’s what draws me to Scudder as a hero, he’s not pretty but possesses an infallible sense of justice. This whole plot sparked from an indiscretion, a failure to follow the rules, for all the right reasons (this psycho definitely needed to be off the street) so an interesting consideration of “doing the right thing”.

Here are some of Block’s words from the book, after Scudder almost takes a drink and beats the hell out of a young man who was annoying everyone with an overly loud boom box (for those of us who remember what those were – the beating was earned):

“The rage that had empowered me had not been quite strong enough to shut out the little voice in my head that told me to cut the shit and act like a grownup. I’d heard the voice, just as I heard it before when it counseled against buying the booze. There are people who never hear their own inner voices, and maybe they can’t honestly help the things they do in life, but I’d heard it loud and clear and told it to shut the fuck up. I’d caught myself just in time. I hadn’t taken the drink, and I hadn’t kicked the kid’s head in, but if those were victories they struck me as small ones. I didn’t feel very proud of myself.”