seriousfic | Entries tagged with oh john d. macdonald no

Okay, so I finished reading the book, just in case Trav learned a lesson or something (ha, no! He's infallible!) but mostly because I wanted to see if there was anything that could top "moisturous gasping". Not a real word, by the way. Moist already means moist. It's already an adjective. There's no reason to add a 'urous' to the end. It's really dumburous.

But no, nothing could top that. Vangie goes to get some money to stash away and our heroes don't think maybe they could go with her, just in case she runs into the guys who have already thrown her off a bridge, so she gets killed. Trav pays a visit to the coroner's office, where more charming behavior ensues.

I looked at the young man. He was standing there, staring at her breasts which he had so unnecessarily uncovered, his underlip hanging away from his teeth. […] As we headed back out I said, "Why don't you go get yourself a live one?"

"Huh?" He turned the room light out, pulled the door shut. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "Sure, buddy, if I could find one of those. Even that messed up you can tell it was built like it wouldn't never quit. About the only thing didn't get mashed up was the tits, but you can tell it had everything to go with them. A stack, buddy." He sat down, winked, picked up his Playboy and said, "See you around."

Hey now! It would've been one thing if you were fetishizing her legs while she was traumatized, wounded, and going into shock, but boobies on a dead woman? That's just wrong!

Also, I would've figured a necrophiliac for more of a Penthouse guy.

So here we go again, noble brave name Key-Hoe-Tee?

Hasn't the white man done enough to Native Americans without bringing them into these books?

Wasn't the world maybe just a little bit better off minus one slut? Did it grab you that much, boy, to have that seasoned meat offered to you on a platter? Did it squinch your sentimental Irish heart to see the lassie roll her lonely hips in the solitary dance? How can you know the whole thing wasn't all lies, that she didn't try to cross up her fellow assassins and grab all the loot for herself and that's why she got dropped off a bridge?

I'm going to run out of gifs before this is over, aren't I? So Trav meets up with a black maid, who at first talks with a "sho nuff mastah!" accent and then reveals she's a black militant who speaks the Queen's English perfectly fine. MacDonald, I think the time to subvert phonetic accents was back with the lazy, animalistic Mexican hooker.

Trav gets the 411 on the murder ring she was involved in, and after some debate (!) decides to put a stop to it. And he does. And I am done with this racist, sexist, homophobic, masculine poser trash forever.

By the way, here's the Library Journal's entry on the book.

MacDonald, whose 21 Travis McGee novels represent arguably the best U.S. mystery series of the past 50 years, died in 1986, leaving behind a legion of fans. Sadly, Travis McGee seems lost amid today's hip, violent, and politically correct private eyes and series detectives, so much so that most of today's younger mystery readers may never experience this National Book Award-winning series.

I'm taking "politically correct" to mean "doesn't hate women and Mexicans."

Okay, so they get more information about Jane Doe, including her name, Vangie. She was, natch, mixed up in some pretty nasty business and the pretty nasty guys wanted to get rid of her. Since they were bad guys, they made it a point to leave her alive to drown, instead of killing her quickly and dumping the body. But because she's kinda incredibly badass, Vangie pretended to be dead as they dumped her, not even screaming as she was DROPPED OFF A FUCKING BRIDGE, just for the chance that the bad guys would think one of them had put her out of her misery ahead of time, and thus land one of them in some trouble. So, what's Trav's response to this Crowning Moment of Awesome?

I could not tell whether it was spirit or stupidity that made her feel pleased with her own cleverness in giving Terry a hard time as she was, as far as she knew, being murdered.

Oh, fuck you. It was huge brass balls. Maybe you should look into getting some of your own. I hear hunting's good for that.

And, this being a Trav McGee novel, and this being a girl with some trauma in her recent past, she tries to sleep with Trav, but he turns her down because… you know… dirty pillows.

I'd felt no itch of desire for her, and knew why. It had been a white lie. I was a prude.

Yes, that's a good start…

I had been emotionally involved a few times with women with enough of a record of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. It is difficult to put much value on something the lady has distributed all too generously. I have the feeling there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each woman. And whether she gives herself or sells herself, once she reaches her own number, once X pairs of hungry hands have been clamped tightly on her rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein her juices altar from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death.

You know, I started reading this series because I heard it would get better in its attitude towards women, and that Trav would end up even poking some fun at his own "chivalry." But this? Jesus, this! I've seen writers who are trying to write misogynistic characters that aren't this sexist. I mean, Jesus fuck shit damn folks! Me and this series, we're fucking done professionally.

So there's me and Amy, and we're all inseparable, right? Just big time in love. And then four months down the road, the idiot gear kicks in, and I ask about the ex-boyfriend. Which, as we all know, is a really dumb move. But you know how it is: you don't wanna know, but you just have to, right? Stupid guy bullshit. So, anyway, she starts telling me about him... how they fell in love, and how they went out for a couple of years, and how they lived together, her mother likes me better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah... and I'm okay. But then she drops the bomb on me, and the bomb is this: it seems that a couple of times, while they were going out, he brought some people to bed with them. Meacutenage à trois, I believe it's called. Now this just blows my mind, right? I mean, I am not used to this sort of thing. I mean, I was raised Catholic, for God's sake. […] So I'm totally weirded out by this, right? And then I just start blasting her. Like... I don't know how to deal with what I'm feeling, so I figure the best way is by calling her a slut, right? And tell her she was used. I'm... I'm out for blood. I really wanna hurt this girl. I'm like, "What the fuck is your problem?", right? And she's just all calmly trying to tell me, like, it was that time and it was that place and she doesn't think she should apologize because she doesn't feel that she's done anything wrong. I'm like, "Oh, really?" That's when I look her straight in the eye, I tell her it's over. I walk. […] It was a mistake. I didn't hate her. I wasn't disgusted with her. I was afraid. At that moment, I felt small, like... like I'd lacked experience, like I'd never be on her level, like I'd never be enough for her or something like that, you know what I'm saying? But, what I did not get, she didn't care. She wasn't looking for that guy anymore. She was... she was looking for me, for the Bob. But, uh, by the time I figure this all out, it was too late, man. She moved on, and all I had to show for it was some foolish pride, which then gave way to regret. She was the girl, I know that now. But I pushed her away. So, I've spent every day since then chasing Amy... so to speak.

That was from a Kevin Smith movie. When Kevin "wrote Felicia Hardy getting raped, Silver St. Cloud getting killed, ripped-off Elektra's death for Karen Page" Smith is more feminist than you…

If this weren't a library book, I would burn it.

By the way, Trav, you know what a good way is to keep from having too much sex? STOP DATE-RAPING PEOPLE. YOU FUCK.

Oh, did I forget to introduce Trav's friend, Meyer? He hangs out with a bunch of young babes, but not in a sexy way. You know, just because he's such a badass, thus satisfying John D. MacDonald's sense of sexual Puritanism while establishing that Trav McGee don't truck with no homos.

And there are always the young popsies, sixteen to twenty, eyes soft with a special worship, content to be near him, the same way those of sterner breed clutter the hotel suites and the pits of the Grand Prix race drivers. Were he sensuously unscrupulous he could keep his bunk forever stocked with the exceptional tenderness of the very young.

But instead, on an average of three times a year he takes unto himself one of that breed which he calls, with warmth rather than irony, the iron maidens. These are stern, mature, aggressive, handsome women who have made their mark in the world, and perhaps forfeited much in the process. Accomplished artists, concert musicians, heads of fashion houses and other competitive businesses

You know, whatever chicks do other than make pretty dresses.

administrators, editors, women in government. He treats them fondly,

Oh, good. Finally, someone who respects women.

but as though they are enchantingly foolish young girls,

and goes off with his iron maiden of the moment for a few weeks and when he brings them back, their mouths are soft, and their voices have lost that edge of command, and their eyes are filled with that unmistakable look of devotion. When I seemed curious, he suggested I read what Mark Twain had written about choosing a mistress.

Don't drag Samuel Clemens into this!

He said he had discovered just one other factor Twain had overlooked. He said that the woman who achieves a position of power and command is usually so intelligent that she catches on quite quickly when it is explained to her that she has a secret yearning to be hapless and foolish for a little while, to switch off the machinery of domination, to be cherished not only as a woman, but also in the same way she was cherished when she was a little girl,

Oh God, someone please tell me that MacDonald never had kids. Especially girls!

before she became locked into those motivations that drove her upward so mercilessly.

Yes, poor dears, being rich, powerful, and respected. Really, they're fortunate someone like Meyer takes pity on them and gives them some good solid dickings, otherwise they might become old maids and never get their family a dowry!

"They want a ribbon in their hair," he explained, "and someone who does not want to make any use of what they've achieved, and someone who would never go around waving their scalp on the end of a spear after they've gone back to the wars, or even look them up at the embassy or in the executive suite someday."

Someone who doesn't respect them as a woman or a human being, or treat them as an equal, or want to build any sort of relationship at all!

You know that bondage fetish I thought LotS gave me? Gone now. Gone forever.

Okay, so Trav goes fishing… I know I like a little salmon after I do my raping… and he sees a girl getting dumped off a bridge with cement overshoes. He dives in to save her, and after rescuing her, does some field surgery to get a fishing hook out of her leg. And, hey, she has nice stems!

I got the needlenose pliers, the good wire cutters, and Dr. Meyer to assist me. We had her lie prone on the giant bed, custom built-in equipment on the boast when I had won her, and Meyer folded the robe back, untangling it from the barbs of the other set of gang hooks on the belly of the speckled plug. I swung the big bed lamp over to bear upon the operating area. There are too many trite words for legs like that. Ivory. Gercian marble. I was considerably more accustomed to brown legs. These had a dusky pallor.

Uh, Trav? The girl's in pain? Hooks? Embedded in her flesh? Bleeding?

But pallor did not mean softness. The chills were in cycles. When a chill tightened her up, the long muscles of calf and thigh, dancer's muscles, swelled—changing the elegant curvatures of those legs in repose.

So glad you're getting off on her SUFFERING FROM EXPOSURE.

The back of the thighs and the calves had a fine-grained, flawless, matte finish, and the areas of the backs of her knees were shinier, faint blue veining under the skin.

Maybe she's cold? It could be from being dropped off a bridge into freezing cold waters. But who cares about that, how 'bout dem nipples?

So finally Trav gets the hook out of the anonymous cement-wearer and lets her get some sleep. And from all that, he's about to make some astute observations.

I thought of Vidge. She wouldn't have endured so placidly the pain of removing the fish hooks. She would have been bleating and hooting and thrashing, and she would have been demanding doctors and policemen. When I said Jane Doe's acceptance of our help seemed significant, he beamed at me and said that her muscle tone, the rich trimness of her figure, her acceptance of the situation all seemed to point to some aspect of the entertainment world, probably one of the more sleazy segments of it, a so-called exotic dancer, a hinterland belly dancer, a bunny at one of the more permissive key clubs, a singer on one of the little cut-rate cruise ships. All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.

Yes, like all strippers, Jane Doe was dead inside. It's like a scene cut out of Mad Men for being too sexist. "No," you may imagine Jon Hamm saying, "the audience would never buy this."

Okay, so Darker Than Amber starts off with Trav McGee giving a female friend and old flame of his a place to stay while she recovers from an abusive relationship. Well, that's kind of him. Maybe I misjudged the big lug. That really is a selfless, caring thing to

Charlie had so thoroughly insulted her womanhood she was far too nervous and anxious to be reached. She was certain she had become frigid.

Because what's the point of a woman if you can't stick your dick in her, amirite guys?

I attempted another of Dr. McGee's famous nostrums. I roused her early, and I gave her a full day of swimming, fishing, beachcombing, skindiving, and maintenance and housekeeping chores about the Flush. I gave her a day that would have reminded any marine of boot camp. That night, with the waxing moon at the half, and a good breeze keeping the mosquitos away from the sun deck, she was too sodden with exhaustion to think of being nervous or anxious or apprehensive when I moved over onto her sun mattress and gently shucked her out of her shorts. She made small purring sounds, half contentment and half sleepy objection. When the sudden awareness that it was working for her brought her wide awake she was too far along to choke herself off with all those anxieties Charlie had built, and when it was done she was happy enough and confident enough to keep chuckling now and again until her breath deepened into sleep.

It's called date rape, Trav. It's wrong. In the past, I've railed against comics and other stories which have included rape as a plot device just to have a moral of "rape is wrong," because duh. But apparently, we need those stupid, stupid stories. Thank you, Trav. You are the target audience of Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do.

Seriously, these books. Every villain is a rapist and every girl (always suffering a psychological problem) just needs a good dicking to set her straight, for her own good of course. Did Terry Goodkind read these as a child? Fuck. And this is the first five pages! That's how long it took me to be completely disgusted with the hero. But at least he can't get any worse, right?

Finally, just to ensure every possible demographic is offended, Trav's thoughts on hunting!

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelts, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely more sophisticated versions of the New jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white tail deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.

Yes, you're totally more masculine than Teddy Roosevelt, guy who doesn't exist.

They have all their earnest rationalizations about game control. It is good for animals to shoot them. It may serve some purpose to gut shoot them with a plastic arrow. We have so bitched up the various ecologies in all our areas, game control is a necessity. But it should be done by professionals paid to do it,

Because why should people do something for free when we can get tax money to pay for it?

the ones who cherish the healthy flocks, the ones who do not get their charge out of going bang at something with thrice the animal dignity they can ever attain.

I do violate my own concepts by slaying the occasional fish. And eating him. But spare me the brotherhood of the blood sports, the hairy ones, all the way from Macmillan and his forty grouse a day to some snot kid who tries to slay every species of big game in the world, with the assistance of his dotting daddy.

It's not everyone who manages to combine hypocrisy with a superiority complex, but you, Trav, have done it swimmingly.

There is one thing which strikes me as passing strange. Never have I met a man who had the infantry memories, who had knocked down human meat and seen it fall, who ever had any stomach for shooting living things. I could not imagine Paul Dominguez ever shooting even a marauding crow. He would need no romantic fantasies about himself. His manhood would need no artificial reinforcement.

Hmm…

So Trav goes down to Mexico, where he pumps a prostitute for information. (Not like that. Just then. Later, like that. When he's black-out drunk. THESE BOOKS, I swear to God…)

She made the Mexican gesture, shaking her right hand as thought shaking water from her fingertips. "Ai, a knife is a bad dying, Pobre Sam. You look for them?"

"Yes."

"Because you are a friend? Maybe you are a clever man, eh? Maybe what you want is in that heavy box."

Wait! It gets EVEN MORE racially sensitive!

"The box is why he was killed."

"Maybe you send me some money instead of Sam, eh?"

"Maybe."

"Down stairs you make me think of Sam. Hey-o! So big. Hey-o! Dark almost like me, but white, white, white, like milk where the sun is not touching."

"Felicia, please don't tell anyone what we've talked about. Don't tell anyone he's dead."

"Maybe only Rosita."

"No one. Please."

"Very hard for me," she said, and smiled a small smile. I took the fifty, folded it into a small wad, laid it on my thumbnail and snapped it over onto the bed. She fielded it cleanly, spread it out, looked content. As one is prone to do with animals, it was a temptation to anthropomorphize this girl past her capacity

Oh Jesus!

to attribute to her niceties of feeling and emotion she could never sense, merely because she was so alive, had such a marvelous body, had such savage eyes and instincts. She was just a vain, childish, cankerous Mexican whore, shred and stupid, canny and lazy.

She had done all her mourning for Sam Taggart, and had enjoyed the drama of it. She was not legend. She did not have a heart of gold, or a heart of ice. She had a very ordinary animal heart, bloody and violent, responsive to affection, quick in fury, incapable of any kind of lasting loyalty. Sam had not made her what she was today. I suspect she was headed for the rooms over the Cantina Tres Panchos from the time she could toddle. Perhaps villages fill their own quotas in mysterious ways, so many mayors, so many idiots, so many murderers, so many whores.

"Not even Rosita," I said.

"Okay, Trrav." (sic)

I'm not sure who should be more offended, Hispanics, women, or sex workers.

( Triggery, so I'm putting it behind a cut. )

G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra is on Netflix Instant View. Who wants to watch it with me? The Ninth Doctor, the Mummy, and Joseph Gordon-fucking-Levitt fight a Wayans brother, the dude from Step Up, Gaila, Darth Maul, and Dennis fucking Quaid. It is the most awesome badness you will ever see.

***

You know how people keep saying that Power Girl's boob window is completely ridiculous? Well then... is Blake Lively a superhero? That's not a rhetorical question, I'd really like to know.

***

I don't really care for the Trav McGee series enough to do more than take them out from my local library. I know they're period pieces and so they're not going to be politically correct or even polite, but even by the standards of the time, McGee pisses me off by making himself out to be a feminist when he's really quite reactionary. He makes a lot of talk about being a romantic and only getting with women he loves, but what this boils down to is serial monogamy -- he fucks a woman for a few weeks, gets bored of her, and then they part on semi-amiable terms. That's not love, that's infatuation. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but he's also completely judgmental of anyone who doesn't go for monogamy. It's all very That Guy, and the worst part is that the text supports it.

Like in The Quick Red Fox, where the central plot is about a drunken orgy that has RUINED EVERYONE'S LIVES. I'm not kidding, there are folks in a mental institution who will never recover, all because they had wild sex. Because, you know, there was girl-on-girl action! Check out this encounter with a woman who has short hair and doesn't wear make-up and her girlfriend. Here, we're meant to see Trav as a manly man telling it like it is. See if you can spot the moment where it goes from that to "total asshole being a total asshole."

"Martha, I want to talk to you alone."

"I bet you do," the big girl behind me said.

"Mr. McGee, this is my friend Bobby Blessing. Bobby, whyn't you go away for a while, okay?"

Bobby studied me. It is the traditional look they reserve for the authentic male, a challenging contempt, a bully-boy antagonism. An attempt to steal my male light. There seem to be more of them around these days. Or perhaps they are merely bolder. The word is butch. Having not the penis nor the beard, they damn well try to have everything else. Like getting paid the same as men. Bitches! One of the secondary sex characteristics they seem to be able to acquire is the ballsy manner, the taut-shouldered swagger, the roostery go-to-hell attitude. They have a menacing habit of running in packs lately. As I observed last Wednesday, when I went to the tavern with my buddies. Don't worry, they were all straight guys. No homo! And the unwary chap who tries to make off with one of their brides can get himself a stomping that stevedores would admire. These are a sub-culture, long extant, but recently emerged from hiding. In their new boldness they do a frightening job of recruiting, having their major successes among the vulnerable platoons of those meek girls who, like Martha Whippler, are abused by men, by the Catton-kind of man, used, abused, sickened, shared, frightened and... at last, driven into the camp of the butch.