Blogging through it

Okay, okay, I’m late with this posting. As Luther said in 48 Hours, when he went to pick up Reggie’s car at the garage – I’ve been busy! Yesterday was the Fourth of July and I’m glad for the holiday weekend; the phone stops ringing for a while and I can catch up on the stuff that’s fallen by the wayside. Like this blog.

Summer is the busy season at Sheffield’s, one of the bars that I own with a friend of mine in Chicago. We’ve gone through a lot of changes there lately, and so the business takes a lot of time and attention. That, of course, is no excuse not to write, but it does prove an additional distraction, coupled with what I already suspect is adult onset ADD.

But the minding of other business isn’t everything that’s been clamoring for my attention. There’s the story that I told you about in my last entry. The wild ride of a woman whose life began as the daughter of a Chicago labor boss and friend of the Outfit, a guy whose own business was mixed up with helping cook Prohibition Era alcohol and hustling votes for the Chicago political machine. This thing really has got my attention and I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to put it together.

During the week I recorded a number of hours of my new friend telling me what she recalled of her life; I’ll be going back again soon to get some more of her story on tape. And I’ve been doing independent research, spending hours combing through the archives at the Chicago tribune and the historical society. Some of the story is easy to document; her father cut a large swath through his part of Chicago in his day. Other parts – the parts that really set her story apart from the Outfit tales that have been done a hundred times before – are more problematic; reportedly she worked for the FBI after her father was murdered, going to work for gangsters and giving the Fed’s inside information as a way of retaliating against her father’s killers. Obviously, this is a little harder to confirm.

In the wake of the shameful antics of pseudo-journalists such as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, I want to be especially careful to document my work. But what does a writer do to get information from the federal government about their pursuit of organized crime? Neither side is really in a hurry to share their information with a stranger.

I beat my head against the wall trying to determine how best to corroborate my subject’s story. I thought about it and, finally, the obvious answer jumped up and bit me on the ass (scanning that last sentence it seems that I have to watch out for both head and rear, this writing thing is a dangerous endeavor). Anyway, as with most complicated questions, the Occam’s Razor approach is often the best. Why try to do a bunch of investigative gymnastics to discern vague details when it makes so much more sense to go straight to the source? Have my gal pull her FBI file, as is her right under the Freedom of Information Act. If she’s telling me the truth, her story probably won’t all be there, but enough of it should be that I can check some of the facts.

Now I’m not all that keen about poking around, looking for FBI case files. I know that it’s my right, but there are a lot of guys stuck away in remote cages, cut off from the rest of the world, who had rights too. The antics of this current administration have left me a little gun shy. Which kind of pisses me off, when I think about it. The FBI’s homepage states:

Our mission is to help protect you, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation…

So if they work for me, why does even the thought of my name coming across some knucklehead’s desk at The Bureau make me nervous? I don’t have a guilty conscience, I just don’t trust them. Ever since I read Stephen King’s Firestarter when I was about ten, my imagination has run wild with what a misplaced sense of priorities and unlimited power can do to disrupt a life.

But I digress. One of the things that comes with being a writer is going outside your comfort zone, digging around to learn something new and then being able to talk about it in a way that you couldn’t have before. So fuck it; I’ll petition the FBI for a few files. Along the way I’ll have to get over being worried about asserting my right to information that was mine to begin with.

At the end of my last blog, I said I was going to talk in this one about how my story was going to be shaped. I think I’ve finally settled on what that is going to be. I’m going to start out with the story of a little girl who was raised in privilege, who adored a father who doted on her and gave her everything she ever desired. A father who also happened to consort with rum-runners and crooked politicians and who was gunned down in front of his young daughter for the problems that inevitably arise from those kinds of associations. His murder will frame a brief intro into the story, his history and rise to power will comprise the first section and then his daughter’s work for the FBI and her fall from wealth and luxury will round it out and give it an original spin. The conclusion will describe her and her family today and what has happened to her in the ensuing years. I think it will make a hell of a book.

Next week I’m traveling to New York to pitch this and other projects. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to get my pages into some well connected hands and receive their feedback. I’m also hopeful that I’ll have something good to report on the progress of my novel Opening Day. I’m going out there with a full menu of ideas. One thing I learned in my time in LA was to never come to a meeting with just one project to sell. Always have something in your back pocket that you can pitch, in case the first one sails out and falls flat on its face.

I’ve got a couple of meetings set up to hawk this new story and I’m trying to line up more. Next time I’ll tell you how my time in New York goes and what the result of our Freedom of Information Act petition is. At any rate there’s something happening, a lot of things. Which is the way it always is; feast or famine. But I’d rather have it that way than the other, sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. JFK famously said that there was an ancient Chinese curse wherein one would wish that one’s enemies might live in interesting times. Of course it turns out, there never was any such curse and JFK never said that. But the story makes for a good quote. When you think about it, even if that ancient curse never existed, maybe it should have.

— Ric Hess, Jul 7, 06:58 AM

Comment