I had two martinis at around what used to be the cocktail hour and drifted off to sleep for an hour or two on top of the covers after the big trial run to Move the Bluesmobile and navigate on the crutches around Big Pink. This convalescence is screwing up my drinking. It is too hard to visit the Loo, so I am practicing a certain liquid intake management, and that has lead to an alarming sobriety at all sorts of unusual hours of the day.
The wheelchair is swell, and I spend most of the waking day in it. But it is too hard to horse around and in and out of the car when my guardian Ensign isn’t around. This was a big deal on the road to recovery.
Woke about eight pm, worried about another endless night stretching out before me. Thought briefly about going out to the living room and turning on the television, but I have recently demonstrated that is stupid. I picked up the iPad and flipped it open, entered my access code and finished the latest of a series of twisted thrillers.
Getting back in the habit of reading is pretty cool, I thought, and when I had finished that blood-soaked epic impulsively started another.
I gave up a little past midnight, folded the snuggly cover over the brace and then tossed but did not turn the rest of the night.
As the darkness flooded in around me, I took stock. The trial run demonstrated that I could navigate the police cruiser. That meant I could make the funeral- at least the one for which the portion of Raven and Big Mama’s ashes in the urn in the trunk were intended.
If I can get this behind me, then life will be pretty good. Lying there, looking up in the darkness, I took stock of things. I can work the crutches. Don’t seem to need the chair, which was a significant barrier to getting out of the building on my own.
So, job one, healing, seems to be going all right. Job two was to make this enforced inactivity somehow productive. I used to be a voracious reader, before I got the electronic device Attention Deficit Disorder that afflicts all of us these days.
I set a goal of reading a book a day- that guilty luxurious feeling of falling into a book, feeling the world around me drift away and live in the theater of the mind.
Rolling through the titles, I had to turn on the bedside lamp, fish around for my glasses, light up a Lucky with the ashtray perched uneasily on my chest, and clicked on the iPad to see what I had accomplished.
I will grant you, this is not optimal pool-side reading. I will try that next week, ins’hallah, if the crutches mobility permits. I know, I know, no swimming for another eight weeks. But it will signify something. Glancing at the titles on the Kindle App on the second flick-screen of the iPad-2, I was surprised to see what has tumbled off the list so far in the first three post-op weeks:
The one I just started. Lee Child: “The Affair.” A prequel in the Jack Reacher stories. Apparently Tom Cruise is going to take on the role on the big screen, which seems unlikely for a short shit like him. Jack Reacher is about six-five and two-twenty and kicks the crap out of all sorts of people even though he carries no luggage except a toothbrush and replaces his clothes when they get soiled. I am not so sure about that, or how his active romantic life is independent from having one pair of skivvies, but like I say, we can suspend disbelief curled up on the Big Bed. In this outing, Child reveals how Military Police Major Reacher leaves the Army in 1997 after uncovering sordid political involvement between Army Legislative Affairs and a brutal local crime committed near a base in Mississippi. Opening scenes in the pre-9/11 Pentagon brought back memories strongly.
The one before that was Jo Nesbo’s “The Leopard.” How the hell these ascetic Scandinavians have so thoroughly appropriated the Noir genre is a little bewildering. The book doesn’t make complete sense, but neither did the original LA sleuths of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose dark words invested the sun-drenched streets of LA with a wild and romantic presence. Norway just has dark, and a lot of caffeine. In this wild serial killer adventure, we get some walk-on characters from The Snowman and some other sadists. For a break from the darkness of the Olso winter, there are chapters set in Hong Kong and Goma, Congo. It is creepie beyond belief. Don’t ask what a “Leopold’s Apple” is. Trust me, you do not want to know. If you read it, well, you will be as freaked out as me and existential protagonist Harry Hole of the Oslo Crime Squad.
I dipped back into the historical murder mystery thing with Philip Kerr’s “Prague Fatale.” Kerr started with a trilogy of novels about Germany in flames. First was “March Violets” (Hitler takes over); then, “The Pale Criminal” (life in hell, 1943) and “A German Requiem” (note to self: do not lose major wars with the Red Army). Since then there have been several more, ranging through the life of hard-boiled public-and-private dick Bernie Gunther. This one is about the run up to the assassination of Reichsprotector SD General Reinhard Heydrich in Bohemia and Moravia. Bernie is a tormented reluctant SD officer in this edition, and he has seen (first hand) what the Special Action teams are doing in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. It is another horrifying episode in the disintegration of Western Civilization in the Nazi expansion towards Gotterdammerung.
Craig Johnson. Two police procedurals set on the Rez in Montana and Philadelphia. New author I had not heard of with a Wyoming connection like C.J. Boxx, whose stuff this echoes. It is a lot of fun, with reverse riffs on Tonto and the Lone Ranger, with Johnson’s Tonto being the smarter, more spiritual and tougher of the two. Modern adventures in the Wild West: “Kindness Goes Unpunished” and “As the Crow Flies.” Great fun- I will read more of him.
Ann Coulter, the irredentist. In “Treason” she attempts to dynamite the conventional wisdom on Joe McCarthy. For all his flaws, she asks, “Was Tail-gunner Joe wrong about Soviet penetration of the US Government at the highest levels?” No, he wasn’t. Proved by Soviet archives opened (briefly) after the Cold War and US the US Government decryption of Soviet diplomatic cables from WWII. Her point made, I put the book aside as the vitriol may be justified but is hard to take.
Edward Klein: “The Amateur.” A slightly superficial account of a more than slightly superficial Administration. With more leaks this morning (“Secret American Airfields set up all over Africa!”) you have to wonder if this is just incompetence or pure mendacity. How could you play with the lives of American kids in harm’s way overseas? Being with Harry Hole in Goma, Congo, last night convinces me I am not going back to Africa personally any time soon.
Andre Norton: “Distant Shores.” She was a great science fiction writer of the post-Golden Age, and one of the first I read when I discovered I could buy adventures at the RexAll for a quarter (or .35 cents) when I was a kid. Fun nostalgia. This collection is a triple novel, one third better than the old Ace Double Novels that they sold, two books printed head-to-foot or the novelty. Maybe it read better when I was still taking Percocet.
John Irving: “In One Place.” John mines a lot of ore we have seen before. This is one kid’s clearly autobiographical adventure through the entire astonishing spectrum of weird human social and sexual interaction. Fun but made me a little queasy. Like everything else these days, you wonder, at its conclusion, if John is a genius or just working out some junk we didn’t need to know about.
That is nine in 21 days, or a little off the pace I had hoped to maintain, but it is going to be a long summer and one has to do what one can to stay amused. It is interesting to be reading again. It is a going to be a pity if that is one of the arts that we leave behind with eight-track tapes and the Betamax.
All those other books are lurking on the shelves, too, from months (and years) gone past.
Visit from the Goon Squad. The Room. The English translations of whoever that last Nobel Laureate from Latin America was. All those Alan Fuerst ‘30s spy novels on the shelf. Mom’s last two book-club editions in real hardback covers. The 20 volumes I own (one more is incomplete) of Patrick O’Brien’s definitive sea-going sail-operas with Jack Aubrey and that strange Maturin fellow in the Age of Napoleon.
If there was world enough, and time. Man, I haven’t even begun to deal with the magazines yet. I may not have time before the leg is healed and I have to go back to digital ADD.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com