Buh-Bye Cruel World

By Champ Clark

Praise for Champ Clark’s Venetian Blonde…

“A modern-day noir written in the terse style of Raymond Chandler and just as satisfying.”

“Hammett, Algren, and Spillane, all mixed together and brought to you with grit and humor into the 21st century.”

“If you picked up Holden Caulfield at the end of the Catcher in the Rye and spirited 30 years beyond, the individual you're looking at might very well be Venetian Blonde’s Drake Haynes”

“Venetian Blonde by Champ Clark is a must read! The writing is brilliant. The characters take you on a journey that you don't want to end!”

“Equal parts gumshoe detective novel & Confederacy of Dunces.”

“It’s been a long while since I’ve had this much fun with a book.”

“Taking an adventurous journey through the poetic, damaged, frequently hilarious lens of bitter, can’t let it go, investigative journalist Drake Haynes, is about as entertaining as it gets.”

“What a fun, twisted, refreshingly captivating and truthful ride!”

“Mr. Clark's writing is first rate.”

“Clark's prose is so punchy and vivid, his characters so alive that Venetian Blonde knocks stars into your head.”

“Flows beautifully and so much fun!”

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663235176

Champ Clark

A former writer with PEOPLE Magazine, Champ Clark lives in Santa Monica, California. He is the father to beautiful Sarah Ana.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

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I was recovering from a second heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery and there was no one in my life to bring me chicken soup. My TV was on the fritz. The only thing I could tune in was the Rodeo Channel. It got so that, for the first time, even the rodeo clowns failed to make me laugh. So, one day, I swabbed my chest wound with iodine, put on the cleanest shirt in my dirty laundry bag and drove to the pet store. Bought a fish. One fish. I named it Francoise. After the 1960s French chanteuse Francoise Hardy. Back at my apartment I put it in the $50 tank I’d also purchased. Then Francoise gave me the fish eye. Like she’d been expecting a little castle, too.

I decided to return to work after three weeks. I still had a week of medical leave left, but me and Francoise were getting on each other’s nerves. So I pulled on my black suit, white shirt and black necktie and started limping to the office. I took my grandfather’s old wooden cane with me. I didn’t need it—though the heart surgeon had taken a healthy length of vein from my left leg and sewed to my heart—but, with an exaggerated limp, I thought it might attract a sympathetic glance or two from the young ladies on the street. Maybe I’d even get a smile. I didn’t, though a bus driver yelled out for me to get a move on as I slowly made my way across a busy intersection.

I stopped and purchased a hot dog from a push-cart. I worked there. Not at the push-cart, but in the squat three-story building set back behind it with the sign that read The Hollywood Daily Drum. I asked for a Chicago Dog, an eight-incher of indeterminate color topped with mustard and sauerkraut. I’d lived in Chicago for a time before migrating west. Colder than a ditch-digger’s ass. And one thing I’d learned in my time there. Never, ever, put ketchup on your dog. Murder is a lesser crime in Chi-Town.

I paid my three bucks and bid the vendor a Gracias, buenos dias. He nodded at me and replied with a De nada, mi amigo, dark eyes centuries old looking into my own. This was the sum total of our daily salutation, though I’d been purchasing this same breakfast from him for the past year. I took a bite out of the Chicago dog and entered the doors of The Drum, exaggerating my limp even more while wiping mustard from my tie.

No one paid me any attention as I walked into the newsroom, even though I practically faked a crawl to the desk at my cubical. Instead of having someone fill in for me, they had just left a huge pile of letters stacked on my desk. It was going to take me a good week to work my way through them, with more coming in each day. I was the paper’s advice columnist and I refused to accept emails. I had told my boss--AKA The Kid—that a hand-written missive revealed more about my correspondents than an email ever could. That it allowed me to almost smell out their problems. Of course, this was all bullshit. My no email policy kept the work load down, letting me escape the office and get to the pub by four o’clock tea time. And the readers actually seemed to prefer dropping their troubles into a mailbox, as if all their difficulties might be magically whisked off with the afternoon pickup.

In my prime I’d been a real journalist for The Drum. I’d even once been nominated for a Pulitzer, albeit with seven other colleagues attached to the same story. We didn’t win. But a week after I turned fifty I got canned and then spent a couple of years in the desert, hustling an ill-paid freelance gig here and there and drinking too much. Tough times. A few years later, the firing editor got the boot himself and I was hired back. Not as a reporter, though. But as Mister Drake, advisor to the lovelorn, the dispossessed and the terminally lonely.

I took off my coat jacket and hung it on the peg I’d attached to the back of my cubicle. Glancing around the newsroom, everybody had their heads down, intent on their work. Blood, sweat and deadlines. I was already ready for my first drink of the day.

Instead, I reached to the top of the pile facing me and pulled off an envelope. Ask Mister Drake it was addressed in a scrawled hand. My last name—Haynes—was left off. Nobody remembered it anymore.

I slit the envelope with the pearl-handled opener I’d purchased for myself. When bored, which was often, I’d throw it up to the gypsum ceiling, seeing if it would stick. When it did, I’d have to call engineering to come get it down for me. Someday, when I’d forgotten about it, the thing was going to fall down by itself and attach to the top of my head.

I started to read the enclosed missive…

Dear Mister Drake--

I am sixteen years old now and I dont know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose.

The letter continued on, but I stopped reading there, crumbling it up and tossing it into the trashcan. I looked around the newsroom. Everyone was still head down and hard at work. Then I noticed Stella Rafael, young and cute and proving herself to be one of the best damned writers on the paper only three months out of grad school. Stella was still learning her reporting chops, but her written copy had sparkle and grace. It could make you laugh with an eagle-eyed observation that no one else would notice or have you shedding a tear over a bullet-ridden corpse. Stella Rafael had talent in spades. I’d been a good reporter, but my own writing had always left something to be desired.

As I watched, Stella displayed a small smile on her face which suddenly turned into a giggle. At the desk next to her, Ed Norsom, a likeable sort and the biggest joker in the newsroom, gave her a shush and then broke into a smile himself. Other heads started lifting up. I said to Norsom, "Ok, funny man, was it you who slipped that passage cribbed from Miss Lonelyhearts to the top of this slush pile? Or haven’t I told you that Nathaniel West is one of my favorite authors?"

The newsroom suddenly filled with laughter and there was a rush over to my desk. Hands slapped my back and there were even a few hugs given, including one by Stella Rafael. This was not what I expected. And then The Kid, the editor who had started out as my intern, broke through the circle. He was holding a bottle of champagne. Welcome back, old sport! he said as the bottle popped. We’ve missed your ass. I could have sworn there were tears in his eyes. There were in mine.

CHAPTER TWO

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T hings calmed down about two minutes later, my beloved colleagues drifting to their desks, bubbly in hand. I went back to being invisible. I returned to my missives, slicing them open one by one, tossing more than one in the can. I couldn’t concentrate and found myself thinking about purchasing a brass spittoon. I’d always wanted a brass spittoon. Then I could spit in it. There were days when I actually tried as best I could to respond to my little army of discontented and depressed, but this day wasn’t one of them. My surgical wound still hurt and about noon I was ready for my mid-day aperitif. But, as I was reaching for my jacket, the old mail clerk, Albino Floyd, passed by my desk, announcing, DRAKE HAYNES! DRAKE HAYNES! I hated Albino Floyd, with his snow white hair, baby pink skin and filmy piglet eyes. He performed this same routine every day. Fucking town crier. Floyd tossed another bundle of letters onto my desk, scattering the ones already piled there onto the floor. MISTER DRAKE! Floyd shouted out as he moved by on his rounds.

I put my jacket on and descended onto the street, limping up Gower and then taking a left onto Hollywood Boulevard towards Musso and Frank. All the freaks were out in force along with grungy out-of-work actors masquerading as comic book movie characters, peddling selfies with the tourists for five bucks a pop. Passing an alley, I spied Superman ducked behind a trash bin grabbing a quick drag on a cigarette. A thirty-something skateboarder weaved in and out of the crowded sidewalk coming close to knocking me over. I almost shook my cane at him.

Inside Musso and Frank things were all old-world calm, polished brass and red leather. At the door, matre d’ Victor, his sparse black dyed hair slicked to one side over a large dome and with his one droopy eye peering at me from under a brow you could set a glass of whiskey on, asked if I’d like to check my hat. It was an old gag between us. No one had checked a hat there since 1957, the year Victor had started as a young bus boy recently arrived from Guadalajara. And, though I sometimes thought about affecting a fedora partly just to please Victor, I happened to sport a pair of Dumbo wings for ears that, under a hat, made me look like I was about to climb into a clown car. If I could flap them I’d have flown from this town years ago. Still, I liked Musso and Frank. It was and remained the oldest of Old Hollywood, a place where you could still order a gimlet and have Rita Hayworth dreams.

I sat on a stool and gave a small wave to Ali, Musso and Frank’s own dream of a bartender. Rumor had it that Ali had been Bogart and Bacall’s personal drink mixer and that he and Betty Bacall had enjoyed a brief fling together. I once tried to ask him about it, but Ali just gave me a little zip up of his thin lips and went back to polishing a glass. Whatever his past, Ali could mix a drink like no other, custom-fashioning it to the exact mood you were in for that very moment in space and time. I ordered up a meatball sandwich and a margarita on the rocks…with salt. Ali delivered my drink. I gave him a Salud.  Then I noticed the drink was red.

Ali, I said with embarrassment. I asked for a margarita. I’m sorry.

Pomegranate, said Ali. You must try.

I did, almost falling off the stool it was so damn good. Ali shook his head sadly at my even doubting him.

I pulled out my phone to scan the headlines. Ali shook his head again and reached under the bar, handing me that morning’s copy of The Daily Drum. Ali had a no phone policy at the bar. This wasn’t a Musso and Frank official policy. It was Ali’s. But if you ever wanted a spectacular drink again, you adhered to it. I scanned the Drum’s front-page headline and was informed that a well-known movie star had decided to give up fame and fortune to become a Tibetan monk. He’d already had his head shaved clean, causing convulsions on the set of his still-shooting reboot of Samson and Delilah. Underneath that was an expose of a renowned Los Angeles art dealer, who for years had been selling forged Jackson Pollock’s to his Bel Air clientele. Really, I’ve done nothing improper, claimed the dealer. Pollock couldn’t paint his way out of a paper bag. I am the superior artist. Several of his well-heeled customers agreed. The point is, The Daily Drum wasn’t exactly The Wall Street Journal. But it had its niche in a city where the comic book superhero reigned supreme.

I flipped to Page Three, the crime blotter. This was my favorite section and I always looked at it even before turning to the back page sports. I’d been a local crime reporter in my time and knew how difficult and thankless it was to cover the beat, spending hours of your life talking to