Matt Paust's Crime Time : humor

Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2016

SEVEN ANGELS (short story bundle) -- Jane Lebak

Next time you feel a pang of conscience when you do something you know is wrong, imagine how your guardian angel must feel. Don't think you can? Not to worry. Jane Lebak has imagined it for us.

In Seven Angels, an e-book bundle of short stories about these celestial spirits, we get to see how angels feel about things, including, for those assigned to guard the souls of humans, how they suffer when those souls get into trouble or even are lost.

In one story, Winter Branches, we share the grieving memory of Reflection, the angel who guarded a man named William from the moment of his birth to the judgment of his soul after death. Despite heroic efforts by Reflection to protect her charge from demons and to encourage him to make the right decisions in his life, poor William ends up literally going to Hell. Winter Branches, told in Reflection's voice, describes her struggle to come to terms with what she considers her failure to save William's soul.

Don't let Lebak's light, humor-sprinkled style mislead you to think these tales are merely imaginative fantasy. She reveals her serious side in the story that appears right before Winter Branches, about an angel assigned to guard a malformed baby, not yet born, that's not expected to live long after birth. The story is called Damage, and the knowledge Lebak bases it on comes straight from personal experience.

Introducing the story, she writes: "Six years earlier, I’d lost a baby to anencephaly. This was the first time I’d ever been able to put any part of that experience into fiction. And yes, that’s my daughter’s face on the ultrasound photo on the cover."

Winter Branches sprang from that same devastating experience, she writes, noting that Reflection's grief over losing William reflects her own over losing her infant child.

Lest one wonder if all of Lebak's stories in Seven Angels have similar dark themes, rest assured these are the only ones. I laughed almost continually while reading The Gold Star Saints, a spoof of institutional "morale building" in which recognition is bestowed by means of attaboy or attagirl stickers. Heaven's "Self-Esteem Initiative" would have angels bestowing such stickers on every living human. The campaign gets out of hand when the angels themselves start whining about not getting stickers, and, yes, even God gets into the act.

In the hope of getting my own heavenly sticker I shall withhold telling you how this one ends. You'll have to download the bundle and read it yourself. For Heaven's sake, it's only four bucks!

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Snatch XI (blood)

Blood. Portal to basics. A demanding focal intersect of now with ever. Distractions vanished in relevance. Whose, the initial interest. The sense of a voice, one of his own, weighing implications of the blood being of the preferred other: A wound from him? Accidental? Negligence? Otherwise...

“Otherwise it would have been assault, by me...” Public voice when he's tense. Tension leaves with its recognition. Ultra private voice: “That's bullshit. No memory of anybody near and if I'm not remembering them it could be somebody else or something hurt somebody and it wasn't me but what the fuck did happen? Is it me then? My blood? Nothing hurts, I don't think. No, don't feel anything, pain, itching, nothing. So if it is my blood? My blood. OK. What the fuck. Just on my face though. Just there? So how'd it get there?

“But I'm just guessing, OK? That it's blood. It could be bird shit hahahahahaha. But what about the rest then? The numbness or whatever. Could I move if I wanted? If I had to? I don't have to, I don't think. Do I want to? I don't really want to, I think, although I could be rationalizing. Shit. I shouldn't be afraid to see if I can move. Just to see. I think I am, though. Afraid. Maybe just theoretically.”

Thursday, April 28, 2016

WHAT'S WRONG WITH DORFMAN? - John Blumenthal

I put off reading What's Wrong with Dorfman? as long as I could. Not because I was afraid it wouldn't be good. I knew it would be terrific, which is why I finally gave in and read it. I read it despite knowing that whatever was wrong with Dorfman would soon be wrong with me. I was right, of course. This is precisely what happened.

Dorfman wakes up disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, depressed, and has diarrhea. As I followed his symptoms in the book it became grotesquely clear to me I had them, too—except for the depression. The saving grace is John Blumenthal's devious comic sensibility. Every time I started feeling depressed along with Dorfman, I came to something that made me laugh. If only poor Dorfman could have read What's Wrong with Dorfman? whenever he started sliding into depression maybe he would have laughed like I did, and felt better. But let's get real.

Dorfman's dad is a doctor, a medical doctor. He is such a conscientious doctor he takes the blood pressures of Dorfman, Dorfman's sister and their mother several times a day. He admonishes the three of them repeatedly, whenever they are in his presence, even as adults, before meals and, in fact, whenever it occurs to him, to wash their hands and to make sure they work up a good lather with the soap. This reminded me of my own father, who constantly harped about washing hands. The only difference was my father never mentioned the lather part. But then my father wasn't a physician. He never took our blood pressure.

It seemed fairly evident to me, as it's probably seeming evident to you, that Dorfman's father--who does other nutty things, as well, such as following everyone around in his house turning out the lights behind them—that Dorfman's father is the reason for Dorfman's symptoms. That he is neurotic, just as my father was neurotic.

Living with such nuttiness it would be expected of Dorfman to be neurotic, too. Unless the experts have re-defined neurosis, or if in fact there even is such a disorder anymore. For the sake of coherence here, let us say there is indeed such a thing as neurosis. Let us say further it's pretty damned clear Dorfman and his doctor dad are both neurotic nightmares.

I'm not going to give anything away here and confirm or deny that what is wrong with Dorfman is caused by neuroses caused by his nutty father. That would be too easy. Dorfman himself would—and did--scoff at such a suggestion. He spends tens of thousands of dollars seeing specialists and undergoing every test known to medical science. He seeks treatments not recognized by medical science, such as a Chinese “herbal treatment” that might well have been based on dried “cow turds,” and torture prescribed by a chiropractic allergist.

John Blumenthal

It should come as no huge surprise that Dorfman is a hypochondriac. This means he is ambivalent with test results that turn up nothing frightening, such as cancer or an aneurysm that could kill instantly without a wisp of warning. He's relieved as well as disappointed. His recreational reading consists of “The Big Red Book” of diseases. He commiserates and talks of suicide with a down-on-her-luck actress named Delilah, whom he meets in his doctor's waiting room and who suffers symptoms identical to his.

Dorfman, by the way, is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. While he suffers with the uncertainty of his intermittent symptoms—that's another thing, they come and go unpredictably—his screenplay, a comic cop story, is undergoing the horrendous Hollywood sausage grinder committee process that could ruin him for good if it fails, or save his career if it ever becomes a movie.

Yikes, my own neuroses (yes, me too), which I've pretty much maneuvered into dormancy over the years, are giving me flashback pains in the abdomen by my merely recounting what's wrong with Dorfman's life. I must go now before I contract sympathetic diarrhea.

Okay, I can tell you this: What's Wrong with Dorfman? has what I would call a happy ending. If it didn't I would not be sitting here writing this report. I'd be reading an outdated magazine in the waiting room at my doctor's office. In other words no matter what is wrong with you, you will find What's Wrong with Dorfman? not only safe to read but rather a hoot—so long as you read the whole thing straight through to the end.

An added benefit for me is that I now diligently work up a good lather with the soap when washing my hands. You should, too.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

Thursday, March 31, 2016

I'VE BEEN DEADER – Adam Sifre

Not gonna lie. I mean, don't get me wrong, I do lie. I'm just not lying here. This is too important to dance around the truth with. The truth is my doctor has ordered me, on threat of losing my health insurance coverage, not to read the rest of I've Been Deader. I suppose it's my fault I told her I suffered the hernia while reading the first chapter of I've Been Deader.

She'd been looking at me funny as she felt around down there. Finally she said, "You have a very serious laugh hernia. What were you doing when this happened?"

I told her.

"Gimme the book," she ordered, giving me a squeeze, which, I must admit, felt both stimulating and agonizing simultaneously (try reading that last sentence real fast eight times).

"No!" I shouted. "Why not?" she said, softening her tone just enough that I felt my resistance begin to slip away. Her hand continued to probe, although more gently now. "B-b-b-because it's an ebook," I half-gasped, half-murmured, and quickly added, "b-b-but I can lend you my Kindle!"

She waved the offer off with her other hand and said she would happily download the book herself. I said, "B-but aren't you afraid you might get a laugh hernia, too?"

Adam Sifre

She laughed, an ugly laugh, and asked, "How old are you?"

"I just turned...,” I said proudly. Her response? "Ewww," and she dropped her hand from its professional ministrations. She snapped, "Nothing personal. I have other patients."

At least I got a prescription for Vicodin out of it, with which, wearing a special truss designed just for laugh hernias, I've been able to continue reading I've Been Deader. Sure it hurts, at least three times on every page. But I'm a stubborn cuss, and not afraid to click on the Kindle button that says, "No Contretemps for Old Men."

[Oh, btw, it's a story about zombies, if you haven't inferred as much from the cover image—crimes galore, of course. Even if it hurts to laugh, you just might find it rather...uplifting.]

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

Friday, February 12, 2016

Union (Snatch 2)

Many of the shrinks' questions had a déjà vu feel to them: Do you know why you're here, Jack? Do you like being here, Jack? If you could be anywhere else, Jack, where might that be?

He looked at their faces only to establish he wasn't afraid to look, to make eye contact long enough to certify his “self-confidence” but not enough to convey challenge. He did this at the start and end of each session. During the sessions he kept his gaze steady, focusing on the hand that held the pen that wrote on the yellow pad, and every now and then darting up to the face for a quick reminder he was “paying attention.”

There were little fights.

“Please do not address me as 'Doc'.”

“Why?

“I'm your psychiatrist. There should be a formal distance.”

“What's wrong with 'Doc'?”

“It's too familiar.”

“You call me 'Jack'.”

“What would you prefer I call you?”

“Jack's fine. You want me to be comfortable, right?” Asshole smiles coldly, nods. (All the shrinks are assholes.)

“You can be comfortable without being familiar.”

“Why?”

“It's the preferred way.”

“Preferred by whom?”

“Professional standards.” Asshole clears throat, writes something on yellow pad.

“You can't be flexible?”

“Of course, but within professional boundaries.”

“Am I making you nervous?”

“Of course not, but I can't help you if you won't cooperate.”

“Who said I need help?”

“Everyone needs help.”

“Do you?”

“That's all for today.” Asshole leaves.

Exchanges like this came intermittently, initially as each shrink strove to test the dynamic, “establish a relationship.” Later incursions were intended to surprise, discomfit. Always obvious, occasionally evoking overt laughter.

This was all pre-Aggie. She was there, he knew now, but not on his radar. Once she was, the session evolved. After his radar had found her, he felt more potent. Deleted the snark from the “Doc.” (Embarrassed to seem so predictable.) The vigilance remained, of course, but leavened with insouciance.

But...but whenever Aggie was not immediately present, so he could witness her, he forgot what she looked like.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

What's Wrong with Dorfman? [book report]

I put off reading What's Wrong with Dorfman as long as I could. Not because I was afraid it wouldn't be good. I knew it would be terrific, which is why I finally gave in and read it. I read it despite knowing that whatever was wrong with Dorfman would soon be wrong with me. I was right, of course. This is precisely what happened.

Dorfman wakes up disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, depressed, and has diarrhea. As I followed his symptoms in the book it became grotesquely clear to me I had them, too—except for the depression. The saving grace was John Blumenthal's devious comic sensibility. Every time I started feeling depressed along with Dorfman, I came to something that made me laugh. If only poor Dorfman could have read What's Wrong with Dorfman whenever he started sliding into depression maybe he would have laughed like I did, and felt better. But let's get real.

Dorfman's dad was a doctor, a medical doctor. He was such a conscientious doctor he took the blood pressures of Dorfman, Dorfman's sister and their mother several times a day. He admonished the three of them repeatedly, whenever they were in his presence, even as adults, before meals and, in fact, whenever it occurred to him, to wash their hands and to make sure they worked up a good lather with the soap. This reminded me of my own father, who constantly harped about washing hands. The only difference was my father never mentioned the lather part. But then my father wasn't a physician. He never took our blood pressure.

It seemed fairly evident to me, as it's probably seeming evident to you, that Dorfman's father--who did other nutty things, as well, such as following everyone around in his house turning out the lights behind them—that Dorfman's father was the reason for Dorfman's symptoms. That he was neurotic, just as my father was neurotic.

I'm not going to give anything away here and confirm or deny that what was wrong with Dorfman was caused by neuroses caused by his nutty father. That would be too easy. Dorfman himself would—and did--scoff at such a suggestion. He spent tens of thousands of dollars seeing specialists and undergoing every test known to medical science. He sought treatments not recognized by medical science, such as a Chinese “herbal treatment” that might well have been based on dried “cow turds,” and torture prescribed by a chiropractic allergist.

It should come as no huge surprise that Dorfman is a hypochondriac. This means he is ambivalent with test results that turn up nothing frightening, such as cancer or an aneurysm that could kill instantly without a wisp of warning. He's relieved as well as disappointed. His recreational reading consists of “The Big Red Book” of diseases. He commiserates and talks of suicide with a down-on-her-luck actress named Delilah, whom he met in his doctor's waiting room and who suffers symptoms identical to his.

Okay, I can tell you this: What's Wrong with Dorfman has what I would call a happy ending. If it didn't I would not be sitting here writing this report. I'd be reading an outdated magazine in the waiting room at my doctor's office. In other words no matter what is wrong with you, you will find What's Wrong with Dorfman not only safe to read but rather a hoot—so long as you read the whole thing straight through to the end.

An added benefit for me is that I now diligently work up a good lather with the soap when washing my hands. You should, too.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

I'm Interviewing Muses [book report]

I and most likely every human male since the species first appeared in the cosmos have been tormented by what has seemed the ultimate unanswerable question, “What do women want?”

Having read the above sentence you might be thinking something along the lines of, “Aha, at last I am about to know the answer.” Forget it, pal. The only “answer” you will find in Laura Stinchcomb's amusing little book, I'm Interviewing Muses, is another question: “What say we just forget about that other question?”

Stinchcomb's writing, which can be described as evoking an unthinkable collaboration between Erma Bombeck and Prof. Irwin Corey, has persuaded me that even women, no matter what they might say or think they want, haven't the slightest clue as to what they really want.

One might expect a man reading such revelations from the mind of an intelligent, articulate, good-humored and admittedly snarky New Jersey mother and wife to scream in self-righteous frustration. I can be as self-righteously frustrated as the next guy, but I did not scream thusly while reading I'm Interviewing Muses. Not even once. I laughed my ass off, is what I did.

An underlying theme is Stinchcomb's obsession—she's reaching that stage in life when women refer to each other as being “of a certain age”--with becoming “a sex symbol.” We learn about her experiments with collagen injections to puff up her lips, and what happens at a party when, wearing breast tape, she bends over too far and reveals too much, and how she claims to have saved her flagging marriage by, on a whim, deciding to have sex with her husband every day. It works brilliantly for over a year, she says, until he pooped out.

On another, admittedly less connubial whim, she cuts down on her trips to the drycleaners because “I have decided that I like to hear my husband ask me in an almost begging way to drop off and pick up his shirts.”

She fantasizes what it would have been like having sex with George Washington. The George Washington, with all the 18^th century body stenches including that of fecal traces, a permanent sinus infection and rotting teeth.

She loves potbellies on men.

Are we getting the picture here? Is it just Stinchcomb having a little snarky fun? Or is she ratting out an entire gender?

Can we ever know for sure?

Do we really want to?

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The Unbearable Lightness of Prunes (a review)

Always hesitant to engage heavy dialect in writing, a reluctance I developed in childhood reading Tom Sawyer, I took the plunge with The Unbearable Lightness of Prunes on the recommendation of a friend. She's not only still a friend, but a more trusted friend than ever before. This long story, which Ms. Langstaff has said she plans to include in a book about the protagonist, a tormented, mischievous boy named Jerrold, quickly smacked down my dialectal squeamishness and seduced me into a world of linguistically quirky humor I eventually came to savor thanks to a late-blooming appreciation for that same Mark Twain who'd stymied me in my tenderer years.

I need not say one whit about the prunes and their weight, or lack thereof, as suggested by the title of this delightful plum of a story. If you have ever eaten a prune, or even seen a bag of them dried like gargantuan raisins, or smelled them stewing in water in a pot on the stove, you will most assuredly feel an instant rapport with poor Jerrold whilst thanking your lucky stars to be a mere voyeur as the lad suffers with surrogate angst for your own private indolence and dietary trespasses.

The story is rich in and of itself, and the language beyond the dialogue brings depths of brilliance and humor of a sort I haven't seen since those miracle days discovering the voice bewitching me with the likes of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was the same one that frightened me as a lad about the same age as Jerrold in this splendid, uproariously entertaining tale about prunes, potato guns, horrible adults and the kind of crazy aunt we all would love to have in our family tree.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Santa Detained at Guantanamo

by Jordan Paust

Santa has been detained at Guantanamo Bay as a person who poses a potential threat to national security. In commenting on the detention, a White House “official” admitted that Santa does not presently threaten national security but stressed nonetheless that Santa:

1. hides his face with a beard

2. wears red (an ominous form of coloring under prior U.K. antiterrorism laws)

3. has a male’s first name ending with an “a” that sounds “foreign”

4. flies into and out of the U.S. without going through airport security checks or immigration controls and flies outside air traffic routes without filing any sort of flight plan

5. brings items of value into the U.S. in a large sack in violation of U.S. customs laws

6. has been alleged (in unsworn statements) to have traveled yearly within countries such as Cuba, Iran, and even North Korea and, thus, has “known links” with such countries and various types of persons therein

7. surreptitiously enters buildings through chimneys

8. as indicated by home searches here and abroad, he transferred items of value to opposition leaders in several countries, which the leaders do not declare for tax or any other governmental purposes

9. harbors strange persons at his compound who perform labor without pay

10. has never taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S. or to preserve and defend the U.S. Constitution, is not known to be a national of any country and, indeed, is an alien

11. has never registered to vote in any election or served on jury duty

12. has opposed war in any form, even if authorized by the U.N. Security Council

13. summaries of secret surveillance demonstrate that he has been seen often with a white powdery substance on his boots

14. somehow knows when any person is sleeping or awake

15. opposes NRA members and anyone else hunting deer

16. FBI mail checks indicate that children of various government officials and others write to him and hearsay and undisclosed informants indicate that he keeps a secret book with the children’s names and addresses

17. an alleged terrorist named Rudolph has been captured, and Santa has a known acquaintance named Rudolph

In lieu of the above, the Administration will raise the alert to “red” in December when his organization’s patterns of activities and relevant “chatter” seem heightened. The Administration has also identified things that we and/or the Administration can do in December:

1. seal off your fireplace openings with duct tape

2. kill all deer in Alaska and ask our Canadian friends do to the same in Canada

3. Homeland Security will authorize companies to clear-cut all potential Christmas trees in Alaska and elsewhere in the U.S.

4. intercept letters to Santa from your children and turn these over to the FBI

5. avoid traveling to department stores

6. do not help to finance any charities using his image

7. capture metal pots on tripods manned by Salvation Army look-a-likes as these are actually suspected weapons of mass destruction

8. destroy any Salvation Army trucks engaged in furtive behavior, since drawings from the State Department indicate that they are actually involved in the delivery of the pots

9. remind the world that we are at “war” with his organization and its message of peace

10. Homeland Security will hunt down any elves with “known links” to him or his compound

11. the Administration will launch a preemptive strike against his compound and toy-making schools

12. the Administration may try him in a military commission because much of the abovementioned evidence will not be admissible in a court of law, where he would also have the rights to judicial review of the propriety of his detention, to have access to counsel of his choice, to challenge members of the court for cause, to examine all witnesses against him, to fair procedure and fair rules of evidence, to equal protection of the laws, and to appeal to a real court exercising judicial powers.

[Jordan J. Paust is the Mike and Teresa Baker Law Center professor of international law at the University of Houston.]

Monday, September 16, 2013

Chapt. 40 (1st draft) - Ride to the West Wing

The SUV's blue grill lights were flashing urgency when Trueblood saw it pull up in front of the house. Not taking time to kiss his wife and son, both transfixed in front of the TV, he dashed out to his ride, iPhone in hand, and climbed into the psychedelic maelstrom of President Morowitz's animated voice launching the WACKO song. Joe Secord took a moment to study Trueblood's face, which reflected a three-way mix of shock, confusion and horror, before punching the accelerator and squealing the tires back onto the roadway.

“Bart know anything?”

“He's so upset he kept breaking the connection.”

“You get Chapman?”

“He called me. Called Bart, too. Watching the game when it started. He's probly there by now.”

“Good thing traffic is light.”

“Yeah. Everybody inside watching. What we gonna do?”

“Let it play out, whatever it is. Probly be over by the time we get there, anyway. Morowitz will be in a straitjacket by daylight.”

Trueblood's iPhone chirped. Bart. Trueblood put it on speaker.

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Almost there, Bart.”

“Joe?”

“He's driving. Roger there yet?”

“Huh?”

“Chapman.”

“Oh, the hacker. Just got here. Told him to shoot the damned thing down.”

“Anybody from WACKO?”

“Oh, yeah. Sonofabitch sitting at my desk when I got here.”

“Buford?”

“Little one. I told him I'll shoot that big bald-headed bastard I ever see him in my office again. Don't fuck with Bart, goddammit!”

Chapt. 38 (1st draft) - Bunker Madness

Bradford Morowitz switched the floodlights on in the studio and the room went still, as a theater does in that electric moment before a play begins, those few seconds between the lights going down and the curtains drawing back to reveal the actors frozen onstage. The actor now was Charlotte Remora, standing against the curtain, beside the lectern. She wore a simple yet stylish light green shift, which accented the freshly pretty, light-complected face within her trademark cloud of orange hair. She spoke briefly, the clipped cadences of her voice calmly professional, as she promised “an extraordinary development” and noted the exclusivity of her network's coverage.

“Do you suppose she knows?” Geddes whispered to Joan Stonebraker. Ruth was standing behind the lectern.

“I doubt it. She'd be peeing her pants – if she isn't already.”

Ruth was next. Her face serious, presidential, she simply said, after “good evening”, that President Morowitz had invited her to be with him, and she introduced him and stepped aside.

The president's awkward stride to the dais carried an oddly positive sense of purpose. Ruth suppressed an impulse to laugh aloud at the contrast this made with everything else, the surreal circumstances, fear for the safety of everyone in the bunker, and her knowledge that no matter how this unprecedented episode might pan out, Morowitz was utterly dooming a presidency that already had become laughing stock for most if not all of the world.

She had come to like and respect him in recent days, since their talk beside the Reflecting Pool. Until then her impressions had been largely superficial. Not having noticed him politically until his seemingly meteoric rise in the party as a presidential contender, she'd been struck initially by his Lincolnesque features. The absurd contradiction of his Nixonian voice quickly negated any illusion of gravitas his physical appearance might have suggested. Yet, she wasn't overly surprised when this strange apparition managed to fool enough party people to secure the nomination and from there enough voters to stumble into the White House. She watched in concurring dismay as Morowitz the president, stymied by a public perception of indecisiveness and a hostile Congress, progressively shrunk in the public eye until at this point he was barely visible.

Back in her seat in front of the dais, Ruth watched as a hidden mechanism elevated the lectern to better accommodate Morowitz's height. As this was happening it became apparent to her the lectern also was narrower than standard. She turned to Geddes and whispered, “See how narrow the lectern is? That's so his head and shoulders won't look so small.” She stifled a giggle as Geddes jabbed her with his elbow.

“Good evening,” The assured, assuring, deeply sonorous voice startled Ruth even though there was no electronic amplification in the studio and the sound was turned down on the five overhead monitors. The president's image appeared on only one of them. “My apologies for interrupting the program you were watching...well, that's not true. In fact, it's pure hypocritical baloney.” Everyone in the studio registered shock, even as their eyes remained fixed on the president.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Friday, February 12, 2016

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Monday, December 23, 2013

Monday, September 16, 2013

Wednesday, September 11, 2013