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Letter to the editor

Tattletale and a tit-for-tat in this 'Jacket'

When a snitch gets involved in a big-time racket, the results are dirty and dark. Very dark.

By Gregory McNamee, Special to the Times
Published October 14, 2007

Snitch Jacket
By Christopher Goffard
Overlook/Rookery, 270 pages, $24.95

Festival of Reading
Christopher Goffard will speak at 1 p.m. on Oct.27 at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. 

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Because you are a good and upright citizen, gentle reader, you have never seen the inside of a dive bar, one of those adult refreshment stands that blight our cities and the poorer suburbs and that scream for the wrecker's ball.

I, however, have such experience, born of the writerly need to understand all corners of life - or, more likely, the foolish, arrested-development need to test the limits of my liver. I have haunted places where everyone knows your name, for which reason you take pains not to let your fellow drinkers know the truth about who you are or, heaven forbid, where you live.

And so, it would seem, has former St. Petersburg Times crime reporter Christopher Goffard, whose debut novel is largely set in an unbelievably nasty saloon, a dark, moldy, slimy, Stygian bit of real estate hiding under the warm sun of seaside California.

Goffard's thoroughly antiheroic hero, Benny Bunt, was born for Greasy Tuesday, this portal into the abyss.

Benny introduces himself to us by telling us the name of his public defender, who "does not inspire confidence." He tots up his good points: He's spent a lot of time reading, taking advantage of the leisure time lockup affords; he's worked his way up to R in the dictionary ("Got the idea from Malcolm X") and can whip just about anyone in games of trivia - no small skill to have, at least if one seeks a career as a barfly.

Benny is also a runaway husband, a drug dealer and a snitch. Make that "Confidential Informant," the euphemism the well-tanned, nicely dressed California cop who manages him prefers.

Benny has few illusions about what he's doing. He needs the money, to be sure, but the gig also affords him good reason to spend the hours when he's not working as a dishwasher - and a junior dishwasher at that - sitting on a bar stool, listening ("my only real talent"), watching and plotting.

Give someone like Benny a little power, and you have the makings of a little tinhorn dictatorship. But once Benny has seen through a few small acts of revenge on those who have dissed and shunned him, he begins to take his work seriously. He's not quite worthy of Camus, but he attains a certain existential nobility as he ferrets out peddlers of hijacked volleyballs and other such contraband, keeping his ears open for news of greater ambitions on the part of the walking wounded and ex-cons who share the bar with him.

"I snitched on them for their own good," Benny philosophizes. "Freedom was bad for them. They didn't know what to do with it. Lockup kept them from drinking and smoking themselves to death."

He is forced to re-evaluate that syllabus when the bar's doorway fills with a newcomer: Gus Miller, also known, for good reason, as Mad Dog. Gus arrives from the howling desert - rather, one imagines, like Tex Cobb's character in the film Raising Arizona - muttering harrowing tales of Vietnam, with a string of mummified ears and a full load of ugly scars, psychic and physical, to back those stories up.

Gus is a man with a plan, as well as a mysterious burden that he keeps chained up inside an ice chest in his foul van. Claiming an accumulated body count of "forty-two men, eight women, and three children," he's also the only person at the counter whom Benny deems worthy of his company.

So much the worse for Gus. So much the worse for Benny.

As Gus' scheme unfolds, Goffard's tale threatens to spin out of control, as if his word processor had suddenly got a bad case of the DTs. When it lurches back into something approaching balance, his studied, neo-noir mannerisms take on a more urgent tone.

Bars, dive and yuppie alike, are places where people invent and reinvent themselves, but this is reinvention in the extreme, and it ends in a gruesome surprise. Suffice it to say that every grisly anecdote with which Gus has regaled the patrons of Greasy Tuesday turns out to be at once less true and more true than they ever imagined.

But by the time Benny learns the truth about Gus and his baggage, the wheels of bad karma have sunk deep into the mud. Soon the body count requires adjustment, heroes and villains exchange seats, and - well, as we saw at the beginning, Benny finds himself behind bars of a different sort.

Goffard's tale won't win any prizes for life affirmation or family friendliness. In its dark vision, it's reminiscent of Newton Thornburg's excellent novel Cutter and Bone, if entirely less redeeming. It would probably give Raymond Chandler night sweats. You'll want to take a shower or two after closing it - but you won't close it until the last page.

Whether you'll want to have a drink is another matter. It'll be better to do so at home, at safe distance from the world Snitch Jacket so ably captures.

Gregory McNamee is a writer and editor in Tucson, Ariz.

[Last modified October 12, 2007, 16:32:20]