Mallory's Camera

I went to see Sinners at the neighborhood movie complex in New Paltz. The Raisinettes were not stale, and the movie was not very good—which kinda shocked me because the Reddit-ors were all This. Is. The. BEST. Movie. EVAH!

There were interesting things about the movie. I do like the idea of vampyric musicians, and of course, the idea that a blues guitarist could be so slick that he summons the ghosts of musicians past & present to play with him is a wonderful conceit. There were also some great shots of Mississippi's endless cotton fields, a panopticon shot in that kinda dark your eyes see when the actual light is overwhelmingly bright & dazzling.

But on the whole, no.

An unexpectedly boring movie.

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When I got home, I dashed off a couple of pages of my own vampire story! Resolved: All vampire stories should take place in Indian casinos!

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THE ECOLOGY OF ISLANDS

The thing about an island is it's a long way from home, and you have to go over a bridge to get to one.

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On Techuma Bridge, Pellegrino was held hostage in his car. A van had gone crazy on white lines slick with rain; it had taken thirty-five minutes for the police and ambulances and the guys with the fish-hooks to show up. The reflection of red brake lights spilled across two lanes of stopped traffic. Pellegrino watched as the twisted doors of the van were pried open and the bodies extracted. There was a lot of blood.

Pellegrino felt the old reflexive tightening—incisors somehow hard-wired to groin.

Well what the hell, he figured. He was on vacation.

He hadn't made reservations at the casino motel and they overcharged him for the room. The girl jotting down his license plate number didn't seem surprised at all that Pellegrino was three thousand miles from home. "Room 72," the girl told him without looking up.

The motel rooms had doors opening up on to a veranda. Convenient for midnight strolls.

In the casino, Pellegrino sipped espresso and searched for a victim. They didn't serve alcohol on Indian reservations. Pellegrino liked that; it kept things quiet. It was two o'clock in the morning, but that had never seemed to matter when there were mirrors and indirect overhead lighting. The casino was small, two connected rooms and a coffee bar. The usual faces clustered around the low-end tables, the $2 and $5 limit blackjack games. Men in polyester shirts, pointed and grim. Strangers on their third day of desperation. Hustle and rush.

Pellegrino wanted a woman.

Pellegrino found one. She was Chinese and middle-aged; the pai gao table at the end of the room had baited the trap. She clutched a small jade medallion which she shook furiously for luck. She appeared to be alone.

Pai gao appeared to be a high/low game. The dealer flipped the cards fast with practiced indifference. The dealer was also a woman, one of the very few Caucasians working at the casino, her blonde hair angrily moussed back. Her name tag said Janine. Her salary, it would seem, was a good investment for the house; the pile of chips at her side of the table grew larger and larger.

After a while, the Chinese woman gave up on Janine's table and wandered over to the dice.

Soon, she gave up on that one, too, and wandered toward the door.

Pellegrino followed her.

Outside it had stopped raining but clouds haloed the moon, an effect, Pellegrino noted, not unlike an X-ray. Time slows down when you're about to score: Pellegrino had plenty of time to reflect not just about the moon's discreet radience, but also about the Chinese woman's screams, the way she shuddered and convulsed in his arms when he grabbed her, stainless steel file to her neck; the way her blood tasted when it pulsed out of her wound as she lay dying and he stood waiting to come alive. The Chinese woman ate a lot of garlic.

Pellegrino dumped the body in the Sound.

Afterwards, Pellegrino returned to the casino. Afterwards, it was always particularly sweet to pass.

He bought another espresso. He circled back idly to the pai gao table.

The blonde pai gao dealer, Janine, was staring at him.

Pellegrino looked down.

On the collar of his white shirt was the imprint of the Chinese woman's good luck medallion, outlined in blood.

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Today, BB, Flavia, & I are off to a protest march in Middletown.

Woke up in the middle of the night from a vivid dream:

I was on a bus, but then the bus took a turn off the familiar route, & I realized it was the wrong bus.

So then I had to think about which stop I should get off to have the best shot at getting where I wanted to go. Rick Raffanti was on the bus, too—a very old & withered Rick Raffanti. And I thought, Yes, of course: He has MS (in real life, he doesn't.) And I also thought, Those preternaturally young-looking men—the ones who look 18 when they're 35—always age badly when they finally start to go.

I decided to get off the bus where Rick got off the bus. And I kissed him on his cheek—which was papery and... moist at the same time.

There were two ways out of the street I found myself on.

The first was an alley that ran along the back of a clutch of little stores. Except the alley deadended against this massive cliff with very eroded stairs. I watched two young vigerous girls struggle up those stairs & thought, You (meaning me) will never make it up.

The second way was through one of the stores. And it was the most amazing store filled with all sorts of rare & beautiful treasures presided over by a kindly Black man.

Sadly, in waking up & then willing myself back asleep, I have forgotten what all those rare & beautiful treasures are.

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Anyway, I neither Remunerated nor web-designed yesterday because early in the morning, I stumbled across Tracy Daugherty's absolutely terrific biography of Larry McMurtry & began reading that instead.

Tracy Daugherty is also an excellent fiction writer & the Larry McMurtry bio reads like fiction, not necessarily because the events of Larry McMurtry's life are so picaresque—though in many ways, they are—but because Daugherty sows so much backstory into them that the book is as much a biography of Texas as it is of McMurtry. Thus, the opening chapters about McMurtry's family & his boyhood—first on Idiot Ridge (!) and then in Archer City—read like Jim Harrison's most elegaic myth-making about the Old West:

This was the new Cold War Texas, redrawing the map of the state McMurtry had known, on which he could pinpoint, in this same area near Amarillo, the spot where, in the late nineteenth century, the sad last running of the buffalo occurred in the Panhandle. It was a single buffalo, begged from Old Man Goodnight on his famous ranch by a small, ragged band of Comanches who'd slipped away from their reservation in the Indian Territory. They showed up one day riding old, emaciated horses, wearing tattered feathers and scraps of white man's clothing. They asked Goodnight to release an animal to them. He complied out of compassion, giving them a ropey young bull, assuming they'd take it back to the reservation and eat it. Instead they let it loose and chased it across the plains—to the extent that their horses could run—the way their ancestors had once pursued millions of animals here. They killed the bull with lances and arrows, just to taste the old ritual, then sat silently on their exhausted mounts staring at the dead animal, reckoning with their longing and the staggering absence of what once was. A chilly wind from the north ruffled the rags of their clothing.

That is a perfect paragraph—from the way geography balances on the conditional, comma-separated clauses of its opening sentence, as elegantly as a gymnast on the bars, to the way a myth condenses from the mists of its imagery and the unsentimental dismissal of that last understated sentence.

The hackles on the back of my neck stood up when I read it.

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If I close my eyes very tightly, I can still summon up the smell of the McGill University stacks where I first discovered Larry McMurtry. (What was I doing at McGill University? Don't ask.)

The book was Moving On, generally considered one of McMurtry's less successful novels. But I liked it.

Moving On was the saga of the lachrymose Patsy Carpenter, filled with aimless graduate student angst and rodeos and Houston heat, so I don't know why I liked it. I didn't like any of those things. I suppose I liked it because it was immersive, and I like to be immersed.

I was in the library stacks at McGill University hiding out from a complicated love life and also from a physics class that I was flunking. I didn't much care that I was flunking because it was clear my complicated love life would shortly take me very far away from Montreal, back to California where I would never, ever mention my McGill transcripts.

That was also the winter I discovered Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God! As a child, I had been obsessed with Greek, Egyptian, & Roman mythology, used to organize complicated role-playing games with my fellow students at Hunter High School, then an all-girls school: You be Zeus, I'll be Hermes. (Trickster gods have always appealed to me.)

Campbell offered validation for the syncretism I saw everywhere. Still see everywhere, beneath the forces of social conformity constantly rallying to restrict human imaginations.

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McMurtry himself turns out to be a fairly unpleasant character. Not only looks like my old Monterey neighbor Bill Sullivan but seems to have that same obsessive personality, hiding out behind a cloak of gee-whiz affability.

One thing that really surprised me: I had always assumed McMurtry was kind of a laidback writer, as casual as his casual prose. In fact, he was not: He was deeply steeped in the canonical literature of the 19th century. Like the structure of The Last Picture Show—my favorite McMurtry novel—was actually patterned after the structure of Middlemarch.

Who knew?

And, of course, McMurtry is a very uneven writer. Not just from book to book, but also within the same book. Like The Evening Star is mostly drek but right at the end of the novel comes one of the most moving scenes I have ever read.

I got about 200 pages into the biography, and I can tell I am reading it too fast.

So today, I will try to do some Useful Work before scampering off to socialize.