Fri 7 Nov 2008 21:16 [Fiction] In Progress, last updated Once again Dad stood on the front porch in the late afternoon, watching his youngest son happily riding up and down the street on a new bike—and this time it really was new.
When I’d arrived home, Mom had caught sight of me as I walked from the living room toward the back hallway, and yelled at me to take a shower and put on clean clothes, both of which I’d been set to do already. It wasn’t until I’d got into the bathroom and looked in the mirror that I’d realized what a bedraggled mess I’d made of myself. I worried that Mom or Dad would ask about it, but apparently both chalked it up to boys being boys. When I emerged freshly scrubbed and cleanly clothed, I was put to work helping with Eric’s birthday party without further comment.
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Fri 7 Nov 2008 12:56 [Asides] I did not vote for Barack Obama for president. I oppose his “progressive” proposals and disbelieve his moderate ones. All you need to know about what I think of him can be summed up in the fact I voted for John McCain instead of him.
So understand me when I tell you that when he takes office on January 20 he becomes my president too. I will retain the right to oppose him politically, and to complain bitterly about the things he does, but he will nevertheless be my president.
So to the dictators and terrorists and lunatics out there, I give warning: Don’t fuck with my president.
Thu 6 Nov 2008 22:52 [Asides] I do plan to resume writing, either in “Dance” or in Play Rough, by next week. Still decompressing from that stupid political thing people insist on inflicting on themselves and their fellow Americans every few years. Meanwhile, I’m reading some “Star Wars” genre dreck, which should help with the decompressing while also not running a risk of contaminating either of the in-progress stories.
There’s been a lot of TiVo viewing as well, but the closest there is to something that could contaminate my work is “Sons of Anarchy,“ and I’m finding that its cartoonish portrayal of the nominal “good guys”—cops, including even the boy-scouty deputy police chief—is getting just a little bit on my nerves. I watch the show for the storytelling, but good storytelling depends on good characters. A corrupt police chief played off against his hyper-honest deputy is one thing, but the nymphomaniac ATF agent is taking things just a little too far.
I realize that I’m talking about a show whose protagonists are gun-running motorcycle gang members who, in last week’s episode, gunned down a port commissioner in cold blood, but having all the cops be a bunch of dysfunctional weirdos cheapens the effort to make the viewer care about these outlaws. I would think the point should be to create a tension in the viewer’s mind between the obvious protagonists, whom the viewer knows to be “wrong” even as he may understand them and root for them against even more wrong adversaries, and the nominal “good guys” whose efforts to clean up Charming, while “right” in the moral and legal sense, nevertheless threatens to bring ruin onto people we’ve come to care about.
In last night’s episode, when SAMCRO member Otto, who is in prison for something or other, grabbed the ATF harlot and slammed her face repeatedly into the surface of the table, I laughed out loud. If I wrote such a scene and you reacted that way, I would have considered the scene a failure. Making you root for one character because the other is a mere caricature, swindles you. You may be okay with it, and in some kinds of stories it’s not only acceptable but expected, but I had higher hopes for this show.
What would I want to accomplish with a scene pitting a criminal protagonist against an antagonist who’s a good cop? I would want you to watch the scene unfold while not knowing for sure which character to root for. Even though you may already be inside the head of one character—and in a first-person story that would have already required some investment by the writer—the other should be filtered by the protagonist-narrator’s perceptions only, and not by any I might have hoped you would bring into the scene. Of course your perceptions will come into play, but if I do my job right it won’t matter what they are and they’ll apply the same to all of the characters. If I pander to your filters to separate you from a character in a way that the protagonist would not share, I’m cheating.
I think that’s what’s happening with “Sons of Anarchy,“ based on what I’ve seen so far. It’s also possible that these character issues are being developed for a future plot purpose, but I would be more confident about that if there were more “cop” characters to establish a better-rounded baseline. If all of the cops have quirks and all of those quirks end up somehow serving a storyline, in the end they’re not really characters, they’re just plot devices.
Wed 5 Nov 2008 12:33
[Asides] All of the old “McGehee Zone” content is archived here. As far as politics goes, I’ve gone “John Galt.“ The training wheels are off, America, just like you wanted. Be careful, have fun, and you know where the band-aids are.
I’ll be over here if you need me, ignoring your cries for help.
Oh, and the RSS feed for this site is here.
Update: You may notice the publish dates on these entries are all over the place. That’s because I want the most recently updated story or chapter to come to the top of the page—so I’ve set the index to display the entries in that order—the most recently edited piece will automatically come to the top. That way I won’t have to keep fiddling with the publish dates.
Hopefully it’ll work out.
‘Nother update: It didn’t. At first blush it seems it should have made things simpler, but because of other considerations in starting new chapters of Play Rough, Fight Dirty, it turns out to be more complicated than it needs to be. So, the posts are back to displaying by order of publish date, and I’ll just edit the publish dates as I update stories or chapters.
Mon 20 Oct 2008 22:43
Completed The place was called “Pandæmonium,“ with that funny A-E-melted-together thing that’s supposed to mean something more than just noise and chaos. In this case I suppose the “something more” would be sex and booze, and probably drugs. Also probably a virus if you weren’t careful.
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Fri 10 Oct 2008 14:08
[Fiction] Completed Chapter 6 will begin at its appointed time. When is that, you ask? You’ll find out at the appointed time. Billy puttered up Bob’s street on the dirt bike just as Caleb and Dad were inspecting the go-cart.
Bob had talked his father into providing spare parts from his collection to build an engine, gearbox and clutch for the go-cart, and helping us find other assorted parts at a scrapyard out on Oil Patch Road where the owner owed Caleb a favor and let us have the parts for free. Once we had everything we needed, it only took us another week to finish the project, and Mom wanted Dad to look it over before I tried to drive it.
Billy’s arrival drew a stare from Dad, but after a moment he seemed to shrug it off and resumed inspecting the go-cart.
“What do you think, Frank?“ asked Caleb expectantly. He was humoring Dad and Dad knew it, both well aware that Caleb knew more about engines, and was no more likely to let his son operate an unsafe machine than Dad was to let me. But we all knew Dad was only humoring Mom, so he played along.
After a moment, Dad turned to Bob. “Let’s see you take it up and down the block a couple times.“
Bob grinned and climbed into the old riding-mower seat we’d used, and I went around back to start the motor. Though we were using a motorcycle engine, the kick starter wasn’t practical on a go-cart so we’d adapted the pull-start.
“Clutch,“ I called out.
Bob pushed down on the clutch pedal and said, “Clutch.“
“Brake.“
We went through the whole checklist like this for the grown-ups’ benefit, until all that was left was for me to pull the cord. It fired right up, and Bob only had to adjust the choke a little to make the motor rumble like a real Harley-Davidson chopper.
Caleb, Bob and I were all grinning with pride, and Billy sat on the dirt bike next to Dad’s car, looking on with a grin of his own. Dad’s eyes went wide, though, at the serious sound of the motor, and he gave Caleb a doubtful look. “How fast will this thing go?“ he asked over the noise.
» Read more "Play Rough, Fight Dirty—Chapter 5: Down by the River"
Tue 23 Sep 2008 15:36
Completed UPDATE: I’ve consolidated this story in this one post, since it’s the one that’s received actual reader comments.
I wrote this story—or more accurately, the story this version is based on—years ago, and did actually have it posted on the web for a while. In retrospect the ending was beyond suspension-of-disbelief design specs, and OSHA should have closed it down.
By the way, alert readers might think they can figure out, based on physical descriptions, where “Clearwater” is. It’s true I may borrow from the physical environments of real places to describe the settings of my stories, but the people and events are entirely my own invention and are not meant to reflect on the actual residents of real places.
Except California, if it makes them look bad or weird. Because, I mean, come on… It was a hell of a place to be afoot, out in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere, walking along a stretch of two-lane highway where you were more likely to be bowled over by a galloping pronghorn than see a passing vehicle.
And if a car or truck did come along it would be just my luck if it was somebody from Clearwater who’d recognize me, hit the gas, and blow on by. The moral of that story is, step soft sometimes or you’ll curdle that milk of human kindness that just might save your life. A man could die walking across Little’s Empty, which is what people call this wide-open tract of nothing. I was facing a long hike in work boots, blue jeans and a T-shirt. No hat to keep the sun off, just a dirty red bandanna for a sweatband. My worn, shabby old gym bag wasn’t big enough for more than two changes of clothes and anyway I’d figured to ride my Harley the whole way home from Little Springs (named after the same guy as the desert, and if I owned this much desert I’d damn sure own the springs too) in three hours at most. Damn machine gave out on me halfway between, and now I’d been walking for an hour, the hot sun blazing down on me from a cloudless sky, burning the back of my neck as I trudged on northward.
My feet hurt like hell, but if I heard somebody coming I suppressed the urge to limp.
» Read more "Don’t Hitchhike"
Tue 9 Sep 2008 12:15
[Fiction] Completed Bob and I sat in the living room, right where Seth told us—me in the middle of the couch, Bob on a chair in the corner—while he went back out to inspect the garage and lock it up again. Neither of us dared speak after Bob’s attempted explanation merited only a glare and a grunt from his uncle. Besides, as silently as the man moved, he could have been back in the kitchen listening without our knowing it.
When he reappeared from the kitchen he looked at Bob and said, “When’s your dad coming home?“
“He gets off at five,“ came Bob’s meek reply.
“Straight home?“
“He don’t stop if he’s working the next day.“
Seth vanished into the kitchen again, then returned with a coffee cup in one hand and a bottle of Jim Beam in the other. Putting the cup down on a table, he poured whiskey into it, capped the bottle, and put it down beside the cup. When he picked up the cup to take a sip, his eyes settled on me. Even in his seemingly calm mood, it was a chilling feeling, being looked at by Seth Scruggins.
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Tue 2 Sep 2008 19:30
[Fiction] Completed It was a hot and, for Clearwater, sticky Saturday afternoon, and I’d noticed the day before while riding home from work that the chain on my bike was loose. So I was just inside the standing-open garage door working on it when Eric came walking up the driveway with his little bike, the one he’d learned to ride with training wheels before he was in kindergarten.
“Wiley, could you raise the seat some more for me?“
I looked up from the rear sprocket of my bike and remembered how I’d already raised the seat for him once around Easter time when we’d gotten our bikes out for the first time since last fall. To illustrate his request he stepped over the back wheel of his bike and stood straddling the seat before having to bend his knees to sit down on it.
I looked at the seat post and grimaced. I’d accidentally pulled the post right out of the frame before, and Dad and I had had a heck of a time getting it back in and tightened in place. “Eric, I don’t think that seat’s going to come up any higher.“ Then I looked at my bike, with the seat post sticking only a couple of inches above the frame.
“If you’ll help me with my chain,“ I offered, “I might have an idea how we can fix your bike.“
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Play Rough, Fight Dirty—Chapter 2: All This and a Pair of Pants Mon 25 Aug 2008 10:09
[Fiction] Completed When I rode my bike up to the old former Clearwater Drug and Discount Market, there was a crew working on putting up a new sign at the corner of the parking lot, and several trucks parked in the lot itself. The front door was propped open and I could see some men working around a couple of checkstands while others were taking stuff out of boxes and putting them on store shelves. A hand-lettered sign in the window said “Accepting Applications Inside.“
I rode on by and around the back of the bowling alley next door, where I chained my bike up to a telephone pole before walking back to the drug store. I didn’t know anybody that I’d seen at the store, and maybe having a cop for a dad made me more suspicious than I needed to be.
Inside, I found Uncle Phil behind a counter at one side of the store, busy talking with somebody about something having to do with “point of sale” and “inventory control.“ I stood close enough for him to notice me once he finished explaining whatever it was he was explaining, and waited.
“If you don’t hate doing it there’s something wrong with you,“ he told the other man with a smile, “but if you don’t do it every time you turn around, you’ll be out of business before you know what’s happening. Hi there, Wiley. You want to apply for a job, don’t you?“
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