Lee Hacklyn Private Investigator in Reform Schoolhouse Rock: Lee Hacklyn, #1

By John Leister

New York City.  1978.

 

Lee is hired to investigate the murder of Max Brennan,

Superintendent of the Second Chances Reform School for Boys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Leister
• Release date: Jan 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224447985

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

I’m not a stereotypical old man who romanticizes his past, but there are a few things that I miss about the swinging seventies.

Cigarette vending machines.  Used bookstores.  Marvel Superhero Slurpee cups.  8-Track tapes.  Cars with lighters.

Yes, I still smoke.

In fact, I’m smoking as I’m writing this memoir in my Pomona, California house, on January 1st, 2024, Happy New Year, wondering if the Snowflake Brigade is going to knock my door down with a battering ram.

I’m a former two-pack a-dayer.

Now?  It’s one in the morning and one before bed.

My wife hates it, but she loves me and looks the other way.  Thank you, Karen.

I believe in God and I believe He, in his Heavenly Glory, Created Everything, including the bad stuff, on purpose.

I believe that God wants us to enjoy our vices, as long as they’re earned; and as long as we control them and not the other way around.

What I miss about the 70s.

Oh, yeah!  Drive-in movie theaters.

In 1978, on this very day, I was at the Queens Skyline Drive-In, open all year ‘round, with my all too ahead of her time date, Bonnie O’Shea, a St. Michael’s night nurse.

Irish I could show you a picture of her, Dear Reader.

Pun very much intended!

She was a dish, to say the least.

Her political views, which she was enthusiastically fond of sharing, to anyone who would listen, were about a billion light-years to the left of Karl Marx.

We were in my white, um, privileged, Dodge Charger and Grease was just starting. 

Grease is the word, is the word, that you heard.

I’d seen it like eight times already.

I thought it was joyful.

My date had a decidedly different opinion.

This is the worst fucking movie I’ve ever seen.  Nobody owns a car in Sweden, you know.  Everybody rides a bike.

Feeling like I was falling down the rabbit hole, I asked her, What about the elderly and the infirm?

We have to cull those types.  We need to stop reproducing for at least a hundred years, to hear our ravaged world.  Ravaged by CAPITALISM!  Hey, there’s butter on this. Is there such a creature as a man who actually pays attention to a woman when she’s talking?

Were you talking just now, I wanted to ask her, but didn’t, because I wanted to live.

Or is that a myth?  Like Santa Claus or God?  Oh, we have to stop religion, too.

I’ll get your popcorn.

"Oh, I’d a like a box of Junior Mints,