Tag: Dress Gray

I’m Not Through Loving You Yet

Sunday morning here in the Lost Apartment, and how are you doing , Constant Reader? I feel good this morning, actually; a good night’s sleep and a rest day always seem to have this effect on me. I guess the new reality for me is being worn out by the end of the work week and needing a brain-dead day of rest. I feel good this morning and my coffee is hitting the spot this morning. Yay! I hope this means a productive day around the house. I have work to do that I do need to get done, after all.

I was tired yesterday, both mentally and physically. I managed to get the errands run; made groceries at two different stores (!), dropped a box of books off at the library sale, and picked up my copy of Alter Ego by Alex Segura, which I am very excited about. I loved Secret Identity, and there’s no reason to think Alter Ego won’t be better; reviewers are loving it all over the country, and I’m probably going to move it up on the TBR list to the on-deck position behind my current read. So many good books! Which is, as always, a delightful problem to have. Whee! I am very excited about this. I am going to get back into reading fiction, now that I’ve finished The Demon of Unrest–my. new non-fiction read is probably not going to be as smoothly flowing a narrative (White Too Long). I have so many great fiction reads to get to! A plethora of riches to be sure. I am going to work today on some things, and I am going to work on the house some, too. It always seems to be a mess for some reason which is beyond me, but go figure, right?

We watched some of the Grand Prix of Figure Skating finals, which saw US skaters win gold medals in three disciplines–men’s, women’s, ice dance–which I don’t think has ever happened before? This bodes well for the World Championships in March, and it’s been awhile since anyone could say that, really.

I also wound up watching some football games idly, while I read short stories for a contest I am judging. I guess if you were pulling for either team, the games were exciting; Georgia beat Texas in overtime; Clemson needed a desperation field goal in the closing seconds to beat SMU; and even Penn State-Oregon was dramatic. Now on to the bowls and play-offs, which is going to seem very weird. I’m not really sure how I feel about this entirely new, semi-pro look college football is going for, and how it really has always been about greed. Which is a shame–but it always was a farce when it came to all that “amateur athlete” bullshit anyway. Players always got paid, and colleges always looked for ways to justify it or cover it up or exploit loopholes in the rules. It was also interesting seeing SMU in the ACC title game, too–SMU was the only school under the old rules to ever get the death penalty for too much cheating, and it killed the program for decades…so the NCAA became reluctant to use it again. (Ironically, the next college that would have–should have–gotten the death penalty was ALABAMA in the 90’s–and they weren’t ever going to do anything to Alabama that might kill that program.)

When I took the box of books to the library sale yesterday, they asked me if there were any mass-market paperbacks in the box because they aren’t taking those now. They’ve told me that before–and I’ve had to take books out of the boxes before. I still put some in there, just to see if they’ll say no to them, and if they don’t, it does get them out of the house. When did mass-market paperbacks become so anathema to American readers? I loved them when I was younger; they used to be as cheap as seventy-five cents when I was a kid, and I remember their prices gradually increasing until it was silly to not pay the dollar or so mor to get it in trade paperback, which were usually sturdier and more solid editions. Now it’s more along the lines of “the print isn’t big enough” for me, and I suppose ebooks have replaced the mass market editions. I always wanted to write something with my name on the spine in mass market, but never succeeded in getting there–and now they are being phased out completely. That’s a shame.

I was thinking about mass market paperbacks because I was moving books around in the laundry room and came across two editions that are two important books to my younger self; two that I’ve always wanted to revisit as companion pieces to each other: The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, and Dress Gray by Lucien Truscott IV. The former is set at Carolina Military Institute in South Carolina (aka The Citadel), the latter at West Point. I read Dress Gray first, living in Kansas and picked it up at the grocery store, I think. It was a murder mystery set at the military academy, and the victim was a closeted gay cadet. I remember really loving the book, and I don’t remember why I picked up The Lords of Discipline, other than I know we’d already moved to California before I read it. I think I’d watched The Great Santini and wanted to read the book, but the Waldenbooks at the mall only had Lords in stock, so I got it instead, and became a huge Pat Conroy fan. I do want to revisit both books; I’ve been wanting to write a crime novel set at an Alabama military high school–that all-male environment I’ve always found so interesting–but that won’t happen for awhile, at least.

The manhunt for the man who killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO continues, and with every new bit of information released he becomes even more of a folk-hero. Some have started calling him the Adjuster, which is funny, but I saw someone call him Robin Hoody yesterday and that, I think, is my absolute favorite thus far. He’s almost taking on a Batman-like lore amongst the American people; few things this century have united the country as much as approval of this murder has. That says something about the mood of the country, and if I were a politician or a corporate executive whose business model is fucking over the working class, I’d be pretty fucking nervous right now. There’s a bit of a sense of 1789 Paris and 1917 St. Petersburg in the air, and now that corporations and the uber-rich have been screwing us all over for decades with no relief anywhere in sight–if anything, a sense they are going to make it worse for all of us–and no, it wouldn’t surprise me if revolts started up, or more murders of the exploitive class.

It doesn’t hurt if the uber-rich begin to understand that it’s actually not in their own best interest to fuck around with the working class, either.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; stranger things have happened.

It’s a Heartache

Thursday morning, and my first night spent alone here has passed. It’s so eerie and quiet around here without Paul and Scooter. It’s also weird having that big old bed to myself–Paul is rarely, if ever, not home; I’m the one who’s always traveling–and of course, the apartment always grows exponentially in size somehow when it’s just me in the house. Go figure, right? But I hope to get some things done around the house–I can, for example, spend an entire day upstairs on the weekend cleaning, using Paul’s computer to work on and I can stream stuff through the television upstairs while I clean and organize and try to get it into some semblance of order. I can also work on the downstairs every night and over the weekend, etc. I always plan to get a lot done and I inevitably end up not getting a lot done, which is part of my perpetuation of me being incompetent and lazy and so on; make so many plans there’s no way in hell you can complete them all even if you’re super motivated and driven, and thus can castigate myself once again as a lazy loser.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So, I am planning on making the best of being a temporary widow. I am not going to be a slug, and I don’t have Scooter’s demands for a lap to sleep in to blame it on, either. SO THERE ARE NO EXCUSES. I doubt very seriously that Paul will come home to an apartment so sparkling clean and organized he’ll think he’s in the wrong house, but I can certainly make it all look better at any rate. I may even move furniture. I know, madness, right?

Stranger things have happened. And will again!

I was mostly productive last night; I decided to not really do a whole lot of anything much more than chores. I did several loads of laundry and several loads of dishes, picked things up, reorganized a bit and wiped things down–one would almost think I was on a very strict and tight deadline or something. I had a few pleasant down moments, because when doing laundry and loads of dishes sometimes you have to wait–and there’s not the time to start watching something or writing something, so it’s short little videos on Youtube time, and avoiding wormholes there is sometimes difficult, but it wasn’t last night. I spent some time moving and organizing computer files, and frankly, it was a nice and easy relaxing evening. I got things done, didn’t get sidetracked, and made a great start on the thorough cleaning the apartment needs. I am probably going to spend the weekend mostly working on the upstairs, because we are having work done on the downstairs; when I got home last night there was an enormous ladder and some other tools and things in the living room; and the work on repairing the walls had begun. I have no idea how long that is going to take, but obviously, there isn’t much point to doing a lot of work in the living room while that is happening. And…being forced to focus on the kitchen, laundry room, attic, and upstairs isn’t a bad thing at all. I can always take plug a flash drive into Paul’s computer and write while I am up there working, too.

The theory here is staying busy will keep me from feeling lonely or missing Paul and Scooter. (We really need to get a cat as soon as he gets back, seriously.) Hopefully tonight when I get home from work (and running errands) I can work on the book and do some more cleaning and/or organizing. I may even try to repair that wobbly drawer myself. The file cabinet itself needs a serious purge, as do some of the file boxes I have accumulated around the apartment in my tragic paper hoarding need. As I was looking around at the books last night and thinking about the next serious pruning, I kept coming across books where I would think at first oh, that can go, I’ll never read that again but as I reached for it remembered, oh yes, you wanted to read that because its hardboiled crime fiction set in Los Angeles in the same period as Chlorine is set, and there was a really horrific scene where a gay man is abused by the cops, and that could be helpful in getting into the mindset of how MY queer characters would view the LAPD in that period and so I moved on to the next book on the shelf. It was literally funny how almost every book in my apartment, on my shelves or yes, in the stacks on the floor, I could remember a distinct reason for wanting to read the book and in many cases, it involved writing something; whether a short story, a novel, or an essay about themes or characters or whatever within the book, there was some writing-related reason I wanted to read that book for the first time, or in some cases, like The Lords of Discipline or The Last Picture Show, for maybe the fiftieth time because I wanted to revisit it and see how I felt about it now, at this point in my life as a reader.

I’ve been trying to remember my influences, the cultural moments that resonated or impacted me in some way that changed the way I write because my perspectives had also changed. I recently acquired a copy of a juvenile mystery I remember reading, either from the library or from buying a copy at the Scholastic Book Fair, which I lived for when I was a kid, because I wanted to read it again–and already, just from seeing the image of the original cover and reading the description, I can still remember details from a book I read over fifty years ago; and those were the mysteries I read before I found the series mystery books for kids; once I started with the series, that was all I read…before moving onto novels for adults, which I read voraciously. I’ve talked about and written about books that I loved reading when I was a kid or a teenager, books that made an impression on me in some way and that I remember very fondly, like The Thorn Birds or Green Darkness or The Other Side of Midnight, and sometimes I wish I had the time to go back and revisit those books–but there is so little time and those books are all so long. Everything back then seemed to be incredibly long–The Winds of War, everything by James Michener, Captains and the Kings, Rich Man Poor Man, and even Dress Gray, the West Point murder mystery I always wanted to reread back to back with The Lords of Discipline. Genre fiction–mysteries, romance, scifi–were shorter books as a general rule. Even Harold Robbins wrote some door-stoppers of novels, like The Carpetbaggers and A Stone for Danny Fisher. Irving Wallace churned out incredibly lengthy books that ultimately really were thrillers at their beating heart; Irving Stone mastered the historical biography; and Irwin Shaw also wrote novels the size of leviathans.

And somehow I managed to read them all.

I am not the voracious reader I was when I was younger and had more energy and somehow more time (no cell phone or Internet, more like), and I also read a lot faster than I do now. Heavy sigh. But today is the last day in the office of the week for me, and the last time this week I have to get up this early–I did wake up several times during the night, but I feel rested this morning, if a little spacy–and that’s very nice.

And on that final note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, everyone, and I’ll check in with you again later.

Breakin’ Dishes

Well, it definitely is not gout, Constant Reader. The antibiotic cream prescribed by my doctor has made a remarkable difference with my toe since I started using it yesterday; this morning it isn’t even reddish anymore and bending it hardly is noticeably painful. AH, modern medicine, and sorry I doubted you, Doctor. I did get tired eventually last evening; shortly after finally finishing yesterday’s post I repaired to my easy chair where I watched a few more episodes of Netflix’ The Movies That Made Us, primarily the ones about Friday the 13th, Aliens, and Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s always somewhat lovely to revisit pop culture of the 1980’s, even though it was mostly a pretty shitty decade overall. The difference between 80’s movies and 70’s cinema was dramatic, as I learned during my Cynical 70’s Film Festival back during the early days of the pandemic when I was making hundreds of condom packs every day sitting in my living room during what I was never completely convinced weren’t the end times.

I do have some more cleaning and straightening up to do around here today around working on my book. Yes, I am definitely digging into the book today. I slept like the dead last night, and even stayed up later than usual (Paul came home before I went to bed) and slept an extra hour later this morning being a lag-a-bed until nine (the horror!). I’m feeling very well rested this morning on all three planes of existence–physical, emotional, intellectual–so it should be a great and highly productive day. It’s cold this morning–in the forties outside–and yesterday I had to turn the air on because it was stuffy in here and the clothes weren’t drying. Turn the air conditioning on and cool it down a couple of degrees and it made a significant difference. (I’m always interested in that weird range of temperature where it’s really not hot enough to need the air conditioning, but the air is thick enough so that clothes won’t dry unless it’s colder and the damp is taken out of the air; I also always sleep best on the night that I launder the bed linens) But I am going to have some coffee, do some straightening up here in the office, maybe read for an hour or so, and then get cleaned up and parked at my desk for however long I can stand it today. My coffee is tasting pretty marvelous this morning too; always a plus and always a good sign.

I also spent some time last night revisiting Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet in what was probably the first time in about thirty years, which is kind of terrifying when you think about it. I discovered Russo back in the day when I was discovering the rich culture and heritage of my community, when I was venturing into gay bookstores and had started reading the gay papers and magazines in search of my people and some sort of definition of what it meant to be a gay man in the United States at that time. The Russo book was the first seminal text in critiquing the entertainment industry and its participatory role in enforcing the homophobic standards of the times (if not helping to create those standards by the erasure of queer people and themes in entertainments). Russo set out to show how Hollywood’s erasure, or stereotypic rendering, of queer people served to enforce those social dynamics and mores that were suppressing our community and relegating those who identified as members of that community as outsiders, a lower caste, and separate from the dominant culture. I’d love to see a popular nonfiction version of Russo’s work that focuses on representation in crime fiction; I have neither the research skills nor the patience to write such a book myself. One of the things I enjoyed the most about the Russo book was finding out what films had queer content erased from their original source material; like the film Crossfire, about anti-Semitism in the military, was based on a book called The Brick Foxhole, which was about homophobia in the military; the murder victim wasn’t a Jewish soldier but a gay one. The alcoholic Ray Milland won an Oscar for playing in the film of The Lost Weekend drank because he had writer’s block; in the book he drank because he couldn’t handle his homosexuality in a homophobic society. The mini-series made from Dress Gray saved the reveal of the dead cadet’s sexuality for a plot twist at the end; in Lucien Truscott IV’s novel it was right there, revealed on page one and treated, really, throughout the entire book as not a particularly big deal (I’ve been meaning to reread Dress Gray; it was one of the few books I read as a teenager that didn’t treat homosexuality as a hideous moral failing, a massive sin, and/or something just revolting and disgusting, just as I’ve been meaning to reread Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline–you just know there had to be a queer or two at Carolina Military Institute).

I also remember discovering queer mysteries for the first time at the gay bookstore in Tampa, and thinking you’ve always wanted to write mysteries, why don’t you write them with gay characters and themes? And thus the seed was planted–by Michael Nava, Richard Stevenson, and Steve Johnson–that grew into my becoming a gay mystery writer in every sense of the term: I’m gay, I’m a gay writer, and I write gay mysteries.

So, that’s where my mind was last night; thinking about the very limited queer rep I’d been exposed to as a reader growing up and how discovering gay fiction by gay writers about gay life and experiences–books–essentially changed my life and the trajectory of my writing. I think my writing began to improve when I started writing what I knew–the tired old trope of write what you know–because I was writing about my truths and experiences and feelings about being a gay man in a homophobic country; that was how I found authenticity and truth in my writing, and was able to extrapolate that outward into writing about other lives, other people, other experiences.

And of course, the Lefty Award banquet is tonight. I’m cheering on my friends and fellow nominees from afar. It’s a pleasure and a thrill to be nominated for Best Humorous Mystery; I never expected in a million years to ever be nominated for a Lefty and then it happened, so A Streetcar Named Murder continues on as my “first” of many things. I’m not sure which of the other four nominees will have their name called tonight, but it’s an honor to lose to any of my fellow nominees. (I also never thought I’d be nominated for an Agatha, and yet here we are; I’ve been having a hell of a twelve month period, am I not? Two Anthony nominations, a Lefty, and an Agatha; who’s a lucky Gregalicious?)

And on that note, I am going to make another cup of coffee and go curl up for a bit with a book for a little reading pleasure this morning before I go to work. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Close Range

And suddenly it’s Friday.

Our weather is taking a turn–not quite as horrific as all y’all up north with your ice storms and blizzards and below zero temperatures, yet it still a turn nonetheless. There was a quite nasty and wet thunderstorm that passed through here yesterday afternoon, and the temperature began to drop precipitously and noticeably. The governor made an announcement of some sort yesterday–severe weather alert or something of that sort–and it’s probably something I should research a bit more, I am slowly realizing as my first cup of coffee kicks in. If we’re in a severe weather alert of some sort, I should probably know more about it than this vague recollection of something I saw in passing somewhere on social media yesterday. And if that is indeed the case, well, it’s just as well the parades were cancelled ahead of time anyway.

Parades aren’t as much fun when it’s cold and raining.

Not, of course, that cold or rain would stop us from going out to the corner.

Okay, so I looked and I don’t see anything; I’m not sure what the governor’s message or whatever it was I saw somewhere was about, but at least for today there is no threat of severe weather in New Orleans. It’s forty-eight degrees–it doesn’t feel cold in the Lost Apartment, but one never knows; the interior temperature is not always an indicator of the exterior–but it is gray and grim outside. It rained most of the night too–a thunderstorm woke me up in the middle of the night (never fear, I was able to return to sleep quite easily) and so everything outside looks wet. I don’t think I am going to go outside much today–I will go to the gym tomorrow–as I have to work at home today and once today’s work-at-home duties are over I have to dive headfirst back into my book–and so shortly will have to head back into the spice mines. I haven’t decided what film to watch during my condom-packing duties, but I am starting to lean toward the teen movies of the 1980’s. I had thought Risky Business was free to stream somewhere, but I couldn’t find it anywhere yesterday…but Prime suggested Taps to me, and since the idea was to view early Tom Cruise films performances (at least the ones before Top Gun), and he was in Taps–in fact, I think it was Taps that first got him a lot of attention–and I had never seen Taps, I thought, why not? So I clicked play.

I wsa vaguely aware of the film at the time of its release, and knew vaguely what it was about–military school being closed, cadets seize control of it–but had never seen it. I also knew that it was Timothy Hutton’s first star vehicle after he won an Oscar for Ordinary People, and that it–like many other teen movies of the early 1980’s, had a bunch of early-in-their-career stars in it who made good impressions on critics and audiences–Tom Cruise in particular. I’d forgotten that Sean Penn was also in it (if I ever knew; I think this preceded his breakout role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High; I seem to recall his follow-up to that was Bad Boys, which was set in juvie, and after that he was on the fast track to stardom), and I don’t think I’d ever known that Giancarlo Esposito was in it as a beautiful young man. There were any number of other faces I recognized–one of the younger kids I’ve seen in other things, but I couldn’t place him or his name while I watched and I still am not completely sure who he was (a quick google search turns up the name John P. Navin Jr., who played one of the cousins in National Lampoon’s Vacation)–and another was Evan Handler, young and with hair, years before he joined the cast of Sex and the City.

I’m really not sure why I never saw Taps, either in the theater or on cable, to be honest. I’ve always liked Hutton, and (surprise!) I’ve always been drawn to stories about all-male environments for teenaged boys or young men. I loved Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline (the book is a favorite; I’ve never seen the movie) and also Lucian Truscott IV’s Dress Gray (again, the book and never watched the film); I’ve always enjoyed seeing the group dynamics play out in those environments. But watching the film, I couldn’t help but reflect how dark the movie was in tone–it’s very anti-military, really–and is actually very attuned to our present day world, which the film can be extrapolated to expose and perhaps even be seen as a warning. The devotion that the headmaster, General Rache, (played by George C. Scott) and the school inspires in the young boys under his watch is very disturbing–particularly given what we know about cults and how they operate nowadays. The boys’ rebellion to save their school is misguided from the very beginning; a decision is made that they do not agree with and decide they are not going to abide by it, even if it means violence and seizing control of the school. They are obviously breaking the law–and as the movie went on, I couldn’t help but think yeah, this movie isn’t going to end well–a lot of these boys are going to wind up dead…

But then I remembered they were majority white, and breathed a little easier…because of course the National Guard and the police would never use violence against privileged white boys. The tragic denouement of the film is in perfect accord with the darkness of the plot and its warnings about how easily people can be indoctrinated and what mass delusion can look like and how dangerous that can be certainly are timely in our present day America. It’s definitely an anti-war film–more specifically, an anti-military film, and in that regard is more of a Cynical 1970’s Movie than it is an 80’s teen movie; and again, it’s a lot deeper than my original impression before watching it led me to believe. Timothy Hutton is fantastic in the lead role–all of the boys are terrific–and there’s this wonderful moment with George C. Scott, when he’s talking about how military leaders are often considered “mad” because of the decisions they have to make, knowing that the men under their command could die or be permanently maimed or injured but having to make those decisions….how can it not drive you mad? It was also interesting seeing Scott play the scene, considering he won an Oscar for playing Patton…and thought, they cast him specifically for this speech, didn’t they?

And of course, now it has me thinking about a long dormant crime novel idea I had set at an all-boys military school.

And yeah, on that note I need to head back into the spice mines.