Fuckin' Lie Down Already

Introduction for “Fuckin’ Lie Down Already” by Jack O’Connell

I’ve only met Piccirilli in the flesh on one occasion, which we’ll get to and deal with in a minute. We were introduced, digitally, by Don Eduardo Gorman, head of the Cedar Rapids combine and much-loved padrone to a whole pack of upstart noir scribes, all of us dreaming about the good old days when Dick Carroll would cut you a check on the strength of a sample chapter and an outline full of automats and small town banks and a dark haired woman who held your doom somewhere beneath her gauzy babydoll.

Within the first couple of e-mails, I knew that Pic and I were long lost tribesmen. My first clue was his easy comprehension of mildly obscure pop references. We were raised on the same gutter cuisine – had mooned over the same forgotten songs, movies, TV shows and, of course, most of all, books. The guy couldn’t be stumped. I’d close out a missive with some throwaway query regarding the whereabouts of Zooey Hall. Pic’d retort – He’s still on Bomano, pining for Tiffany Bolling. I’d sign off with a line from an obscure Thin Lizzy tune; he’d counter with one from Sweet. I’d recount the joys of finding my first Silverberg paperback in a spin rack at the corner Rexall; he’d reminisce about his initial encounter with a Matheson or Philip K. Dick collection. Stuff like that.

So a few years back, we both end up in Los Angeles at the same time and conspire to get together for dinner. He was meeting people about a possible film deal – I can’t recall which book was under option. (And at this point I want to publicly confer to Pic the right to add footnotes to correct the historical record.) I was there for much less romantic and profitable reasons, on which I will not dwell beyond mentioning that they involved attorneys and depositions and the kind of bad blood that can turn the marrow forever septic.

I was bunking at the airport Hilton, honestly, swear to God, under an assumed name. Not to worry – all this was a while ago and much of this particular hash has been settled. Pic and I arranged to meet and he picked me up in a rented navy blue Crown Victoria, a cushy tank for off-duty cops and old-time leg-breakers, which, I know, is often one in the same. I was impressed and as I hopped into shotgun position and extended a hand to shake, I felt an easy camaraderie, as if we’d known each other since Sharon Stone was a virgin.

For two guys who belonged to the Church of the Gold Medal Paperback, there was little question as to where we’d dine that night. Pic jumped onto the 405 headed north and made his way, like a native, to 6667 Hollywood Boulevard and the Musso & Frank Grill.

Now, for the average tourist, Musso & Frank is a shrine that glows with the light of old Hollywood. Chaplain and Bogart and Douglas Fairbanks all hung out there. For the tourist with a literary bent, this is where Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Dorothy Parker all got hammered when in the city of angels. For the hardboiled junkie, this is, according to legend, where Raymond Chandler scribbled bits of The Big Sleep. But for two shmucks who’d give a year off the back-end of their lives for a mint copy of Black Wings Has My Angel, this old-time chop house was only the place where Jim Thompson spent many a long and boozy afternoon brooding over lost children, lost fathers, lost opportunities.

We settled ourselves into one of those red leather booths and made introductory small talk as we studied our menus and wondered silently if our particular table was where Thompson – allegedly, allegedly – had been screwed badly on the South of Heaven film deal by a slick young actor-turned-producer.

A side note: I once heard a writer-friend tell of attending a reading by a revered novelist. Throughout the event, the revered novelist sipped at a glass of water and, upon finishing the reading, left the glass on the podium, where, when the crowd thinned out, the writer claimed the glass and swilled the remaining fluid. This friend told me: I knew there was nothing in the water that made him a great writer, but I figured, just in case…

I am not too proud to admit that, in this same spirit, I ordered the zucchini Florentine that night at Musso & Frank. In fact, I don’t much like zucchini, but I had read, in Robert Polito’s wonderful biography of the writer, that Thompson often would select the zucchini Florentine when dining at M &F, and so, when the waiter arrived, that’s what I requested. Along with a bourbon. Which did and did not have much to do with Thompson. Piccirilli ordered a sirloin and what sounded like a nice Cabernet. And it was only after the waiter had left that Pic reminded me: Thompson also favored the pot roast special.

Anyway, at some point early in what proved to be a long evening, our discussion of Thompson segued into a discussion of David Goodis. Goodis is, I learned that night, Pic’s favorite noir scribe. Whether or not Goodis ever dined at Musso & Frank, I don’t know. I can’t even determine if Goodis ever met Thompson. Because, unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot known – or at least written – about the novelist from Philadelphia. Pic and I had both been through Jim Sallis’ fine essay a dozen times or more. But in the end, our sense of the man derived from the haunted, anguished vibe that emanated from his books. As if, in simply holding Down There or Nightfall in your hands, you got a tactile education in the many agonizing ways that one’s life can detonate in an instant.

What I recall Pic saying about Goodis that night was, “He goes to his dark places more often and more honestly than anybody else, I think. He was fucked up worse than the other GM writers… which is why I love him.”

That comment told me a lot about Piccirilli as both writer and man. It said that he knew where stories come from and that he understood what was at stake every time he cobbled words into myth. And it said that he realized the depths of the connections that can be made between writer and reader.

Near the end of the evening, but sometime before my last bourbon, we decided, suddenly and enthusiastically, to light out on a quest. Initially, the object of the quest was to discover the identity of Goodis’ mysterious and, by most accounts, tormenting wife, known only as “Elaine” – a primary source, it seemed to both of us, of much of his anguished vision. (I’m betting that Goodis knew – and found a perverse irony in the fact – that the name “Elaine” is derived from the Old French for “light.”)

But by the time the check came, the quest had evolved, thankfully and somewhat more rationally, into a desire to light a votive candle in memory of poor old David Goodis and the noir world he bequeathed to us. Somehow, it didn’t seem such an odd idea at the time – two erstwhile Catholics lighting a candle for our lost Jewish idol.

Now, I’m a little bleary on the details of what happened next, but I know that it involved some bad directions from a surly 7-Eleven clerk and a series of wrong turns that put us, eventually, somewhere in East L.A. Which was where we spotted St. Lucy’s. (I had hoped to find a St. Elaine’s, but Pic suggested this would be a long shot at best.)

It was a little mission-style church on a busy street full of clubs that were spilling music and light out onto the sidewalks. Unable to find a parking spot, Pic dropped me off and began to circle around the block. I made my way inside and found a classic alcove in the nave, filled with a black, wrought-iron table upon which rested, in tiers, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of flickering candles, all of them set in small, red glass holders. That the church was wide open and deserted at this hour did not at all surprise or concern me at the time. And as I selected a taper and ignited it, I felt as if I were inside a noir novel, some old, battered paperback from my childhood Rexall. As if I were moving through the penultimate chapter of a book, bringing my mind into line with my fate just before the bottom fell out of the world.

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