Book 10: Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss

Do not trust this man.

I can't imagine a time when people believed that Jeffrey MacDonald didn't kill his wife and children. In ealry 1970 Fort Bragg military personnel answered an emergency call at the home of Dr. MacDonald, a Green Beret surgeon. The MPs found an injured MacDonald and three corpses. His pregnant wife and two daughters, 5 and 2, had all been bludgeoned and stabbed multiple times. MacDonald's injuries were not life-threatening.

MacDonald claimed that four "hippies" had broken in, attacked him, and killed his family. "Pigs" was written in blood on the headboard of his bed. Only 6 months after the Manson family murders of Sharon Tate and her friends, MacDonald's story threw Fort Bragg and the neighboring community of Fayetville into a panic that lasted months. The investigation of the physical evidence was seriously bungled by military investigators and it took another 6 months for the team handling the case to look at MacDonald as a suspect.

Nearly a decade after their deaths MacDonald hired journalist Joe McGinniss to chronicle his murder trial, as well as his life up to that point. With complete access to MacDonald, the closed courtroom trial and all of the documents of the defense, McGinniss quickly became convinced that the well-respected doctor was guilty.

Fatal Vision is a chilling read not only because McGinniss is brilliant at building tension, but also because MacDonald is so clearly guilty. It was only about 30 pages in that I thought "That motherfucker killed them." The physical evidence is staggering, but MacDonald dug his own grave by being, in turn, cold, violent, sarcastic andso egomanical that it's hard to believe that he wasn't a suspect from Day One.

It is sobering to read an account of a crime committed before DNA testing and the explosion of forensic science in American popular culture. I cringed at the mistakes made by investigators; a single episode of CSI has taught me enough to know that 20 people should not run in and out of a crime scene, that garbage should not be taken away, and that investigative personnel should not be using the phone or the toilet inside a house full of physical evidence.

With hindsight, MacDonald's story was completely ridiculous. I do understand that it would have been a lot easier for people, especially for military personnel, to believe in roving bands of murderous hippies, in 1970. Now we know enough about the drug culutre of that era to realize that the Manson family murders owed much more the Manson's personal magnetism and control over weak minds, not to drug use. The LSD counterculture (MacDonald claimed that the assailants chanted "Acid id groovy") is practically quaint in the spectre of the heroin and crack industries.

MacDonald, serving threee life sentences, refuses to waver from his story. He has always manitained his innocence, and his continuing self-promotion is disgusting. McGinniss was a clever enough writer to let MacDonald hang himself in the book, by interspersing long passages of transcripted stories from MacDonald, with accounts of the crime and subsequent trials. MacDonald comes off as a sociopath and liar, hundreds of pages before court testimony, letters and diaries reveal that even his accounts of dating in high school are almost completely ficticious. All of MacDonald's stories reveal a sad need to always cast himself as a hero living a life full of challanges that he ably meets. He's a classic egomaniac.

MacDonald was convicted without the help of Fatal Vision; he specifically hired McGinniss to make him look good. Although McGinniss had insisted on editorial priviledge before contracting with MacDonald, he did not tell anyone on the defense that he was convinced MacDonald was guilty. He let them believe, for years, that he was working to clear MacDonald's name; he did this so that his access to the convict and all documents would be continued until the book was finished. After it's publication, MacDonald sued for fraud and after a mistrial and the threat of another law suit McGinniss settled out of court. This relationship is popularly cited as a case of journalistic malfeasance, as exploitative as Capote and Perry Smith.

Frankly, I don't care that McGinniss crossed the line with Jeffrey MacDonald. All I care about is that after years of appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court, MacDonald remains in prison. It's clear that he committed a terrible crime out of anger, but also clear that his is a kind set to snap at any moment. We are all safer with him behind bars. As for McGinniss, his talent trumps the ethical question. We learn, as he learned, that MacDonald is a monster, and he deserves whatever life prison has to offer him.

Truck bought; Sausage adopted

Over Christmas I bought myself a new truck. Observe,


I'm not positive it was the smartest move, financially speaking, but it is so nice to walk out of my house, put a key in the ignition of a vehicle and actually have it turn over. It's been a long time since I had a car that I could rely on and it feels amazing. Of course, I branded it right way...


About a week into January, I adopted a cat from our intern, Karen. She had taken her in off of the street, but found that she couldn't take care of her long-term. They were calling her "DC" for "Damn Cat". I decided that "Dixie" was close enough.

She's mean as Hell and fat as a little sausage, but sweet too, in that way that cats have of being wonderful companions, yet total dicks at the same time. In fact, right now she is sitting next to me on the couch, watching Homicide while I update my blog. I just tried to pet her and she clawed the shit out of me. The world is normal again.

All Hail the Dark Lord

He's not pretty and he's not nice, but damn it if he isn't one fine actor. Mickey got a Best Actor nod this morning, folks. Hail the Dark Lord, indeed.

Book 9: The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss, Jr.

Chase is a delivery man in Las Vegas. He delivers prostitutes. He picks them up at home or, more often, from the suite at the Palace Hotel, and drives them to other hotels or men's homes. His friends, Bailey and Michele, have rented the suite for the summer, and they pay him to drive Michele, and an increasingly large number of high school girls, to appointments. Chase knows that this is wrong, but he is hamstrung by apathy and the beautiful Michele, who he has known, and maybe loved, since they were children.

The Delivery Man, which is Joe McGinniss, Jr.'s debut, is frightfully sparse in language, and rich in character and heartbreak. It's impossible to not compare him to early Brett Easton Ellis; like the characters in Less Than Zero McGinniss's cast is selfish, self-deluded, violent, apathetic, and full to the gills with booze or drugs. His language is pared down and conveys the perfect sense of desolation that is so often heavy-handed in novels about young people frozen in life by bad choices.

Chase and his friends are all pathetic. In flash backs we learn that from an early age Michele and Chase's sister Carly were whores. Carly was Bailey's girl back then and he pimped her at a young age as he pimps the twenty-something Michele, and scores of underage girls, now. Carly is absent in the present, but functions as a full character because that absence is the cause of much unexplained tension between Chase and Bailey.

Chase is the only person who has ever managed to get out of Vegas and his sad destiny, by making a splash in the local art world, attending NYU on an art scholarship, and meeting the beautiful, intelligent Julia. But Chase could not handle New York, because he is tied to Michele and Las Vegas, so he moves back and teaches art at a local high school and pretends on the phone to Julia that he is still painting and will leave Vegas soon to be with her. He is eventually fired for beating a student, a rich thug whose girlfriend is being pimped by Bailey and Michele, and this confrontation drives the novel toward an unavoidable climax.

It is to McGinniss's credit that expected events in the novel, like the reappearance of the thug and the dissolution of his relationship with Julia, still carry a powerful sting. None of his characters are particularly likable, save Julia and Chase's friend Hunter, who manages to do what Chase can not by leaving, but they are compelling. There is a certain glee to be had when bad things happen to these stupid, selfish people. A perfect example is when Julia visits for a black MBA conference, and the vain and oblivious Michele is put in her place after trying to convince several investment bankers that she is involved in Vegas development. It is a delightfully painful scene that rings true, as we all know the joy of seeing a know-it-all and liar shut down. Of course, the biggest moment of Schadenfreude is Chase's fate. Though smart and passionate and talented, Chase deserves his comeuppance because of his inability to just fucking do something. He has options and he wastes them. For this sin, he receives a terrible punishment. True to form, the final line of the novel let's us know that, if nothing else, the bad things that happen to Chase wed him to his fate: finally, he is all in.

Annnnd, it's on!

Yesterday the collection that I've been working on for over a year, the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection (no comma, for some reason Morehouse doesn't like it), came open for research. The finding aid is online and we've gotten some nice press from the local paper, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and the local NPR affiliate, WABE. I was particularly happy about the call from WABE. I'm a big NPR nerd and it was cool to answer the phone and hear a reporter's name that I actually know (and like), Odette Yousef.

Now if I can just get through the next 9 1/2 months...Anybody need an archivist in October?

Books 7 and 8: A Red Death and White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

After reading the first Easy Rawlins mystery (Devil in a Blue Dress) and the last (Blonde Faith) in 2008, I've decided to go back and read through all of the Rawlins novels. A Red Death and White Butterfly are the second and third in that series, and neither disappoints.

As you'd expect from Mosely, both novels involve a crime that Easy gets pulled in against his will by a government agent; the IRS/FBI in the former and the LAPD in the later. While putting together the pieces that the cops, white and black alike, can not, Easy drinks, smokes, loves a woman or two and most importantly, associates with the deadly Mouse, his best and most dangerous friend.

In ARD, Easy is forced to spy on a suspected Communist organize to avoid prosecution by the IRS. Since the days of DIABD Easy has invested his ill-gotten gains in property all over Watts, and the IRS is both rightfully suspicious and racially motivated to prosecute. In a deal with the FBI, Easy agrees to go under cover at a black church and investigate the organizer. In his personal life, Easy is happy and frightened to find that EttaMae, wife to his friend Mouse and his own lost love, arrive in Los Angeles after leaving Mouse and taking his son, the deliciously names LaMarque.

In WB, Easy has found a wife and had a daughter; he is also acting as father to Juan, the abused and mute young boy that he saved in DIABD. This time around there is a serial killer lose in Watts, focusing on young, black party girls, and the LAPD comes to Easy for help in asking around the black clubs that the victims frequent.

Both books follow a similar pattern: Easy gets involved; Easy gets drunk; easy gets his heart broken; with Mouse, Easy finds the bad guy and either they, or the cops, put him away for good. What makes the books special within the series is the continued progression of Easy as a character; he moves right along in his development with black America.

In both books, Easy is hesitant to get involved in the case not only because he is being strong armed, but also because he doesn't want to get involved. In WB, Easy only agrees to join the case after a white woman is killed, and he feels the guilt of not helping his community until a woman of another color died. And in ARD Easy's eyes are opened by the organizer and he learns that there is more to know about the government that hating it; without knowledge of the world and the system, he can never successfully fight it.

As essential in these books is the development of Easy as a man in relationship to women. In DIABD, Easy sleeps with close friend's woman while his friend is passed out in the next room. This is not the man that you meet in last year's Blonde Faith. The later Easy doesn't drink, or cheat or avoid his responsibilities to black folks or Watts. In ARD and WB, Easy is learning how to be a man. The Easy of WB starts off as someone who laughs when his wife accuses him of rape, because he doesn't believe that a man can do that to his wife and that when she says "No", she really means "Yes". By the end of WB, that Easy no longer exists. It's not just that he's been hurt, but that he now sees women as more than possessions and outlets for lust.

Despite his flaws (misogyny, drunkenness, and an irresponsibility toward his own children that borders on the criminal), Easy is intensely lovable, as is the evil Mouse. I'd be hard pressed to think of another more compelling duo in modern literature, particularly since the kind of business that Easy and Mouse get up too, whoring, drinking and violence, is so close to my own heart. Beyond that, Mosely's style is irresistible. It's a gumbo of street slang from various eras, country talk (as most of Watts' residents are transplants from Texas or the Deep South), and brilliant insight. There is also plenty of sex and, as I've mentioned on this blog before, Mosely's sex scenes are intense and sweaty and oftentimes the best parts of the books. It is no wonder that in 2008 Mosley also released an erotic novel.

To put it briefly, the Easy Rawlins novels are worth your time. They are carefully crafted, intelligent, sexy and compelling and unlike many likable series of detective fiction, the plot of each book is important in the sense that Mosely fits it into a larger period of American history. Spanning two decades in Watts, these books are miniature histories of American blackness. And baby, they are beautiful.

The Best Thing That has Ever Happened to Me

Linda Blair and Dean Wormer? My life has been empty up until this point.