by Jim Nisbet
Gent: And he had all the books in the store?
Jim: He didn’t have them all. Actually, we got completely sidetracked talking about poetry—Gary Snyder was on the list. He had Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems in stock—nice clean, used copies. For a tasty price—not too bad. Point is he had ’em.
Patrick: So what were we talking about?
Jim: The noir section in the store. So you look at the Black Lizard list and see what’s still in print and you look for the others used and you get this tasty little section going. Curated strictly by quality.
Patrick: Kayo Books is great—
Jim: Just great. I went there with Dennis McMillan, the publisher. Dennis found very obscure stuff. Some of the books that are collectible are cheap, like Charles Williams, because no one knows what they are. And there are several black writers that did these tough books.
Patrick: Gary Phillips is an expert on that.
Jim: And Dennis McMillan knows all about it.
Patrick: You seem to know all about the down-and-out world. In Snitch World, the main character Klinger gets screwed over—
Jim: And snitched out. He is very busy screwing himself over.
Patrick: I like all the San Francisco stuff.
Jim: We have all been wandering around North Beach drunk in the middle of the night and found these strange places. That local stuff is wonderful because there’s a very interesting thing that happens when you ask, “What is this place really like? I don’t remember how I wound up on this corner.” Well, you got dipped on Broadway, and then they went down to the corner to divide the money. And in Snitch World it turned out, or course, that Frankie had lifted the guy’s phone. Which is the real issue. He didn’t give a shit about the money.
Patrick: Which is this whole world of phones and apps.
Jim: About which Klinger knows nothing.
Patrick: There seems to be a digital divide.
Jim: Not really. Anybody can jump in and anybody can be left out. There are plenty of people who want to be left out. You know, we were talking about print versus tablet media. I have a cabinet shop, for many years, and one of the great things about having a cabinet shop is print catalogs that mean something, that have stuff in them that you actually need and want and buy. And some, like the Granger catalog is something like two thousand pages. It’s a brick.
Patrick: I’m surprised they still make those.
Jim: They stopped. Here’s the point. A couple of years went by after they stopped, I get this CD-ROM in the mail. And the assumption is you have a computer that will run the CD-ROM. And then if you wanted to browse the catalog, you’re clicking on the arrow and it’s not like sitting on the head with the Granger catalog, just flipping through it. So then they got rid of the CD-ROM and now they had e-catalogs. It’s all not-do-ably slow. It’s just a drag, no matter how you tart it up. So now, after ten years or so, all of a sudden, they are starting to come back with the catalogs.
Patrick: From e-books to print!
Jim: I think there’s a big possibility that the wave has crested and that it is going to recede. And what’s going to be left is independent bookstores and independent presses that know what they are doing. And the big publishers who have hedged their bets while dealing with Mister Bezos. Don’t forget, there was a time when Borders was the elephant of capitalism that was tromping on everybody. And why shouldn’t it happen to Amazon?
Patrick: Too big to fail.
Jim: Too big to not fail. So anyway, what does Snitch World have to do with this?
Patrick: Well, you often concern your characters and plot with technology, and there are some technological similarities between the two books we did together: A Moment of Doubt and Snitch World, although A Moment of Doubt was written in the ’80s and this book is from a year or so ago.
Jim: A Moment of Doubt was written in 1982, so thirty years ago. I don’t know where the subject matter comes from. And it’s hard not to read the technology as somewhat adversarial. Like there’s such a thing as being up against Stalin, although you’ll never meet him, and his machine will just crush you, or do whatever it wants to you. You’ll have that 1984 experience or even the Kafkaesque experience, where you don’t understand why it’s happening; you just understand that it is happening. You don’t know who is doing it or why. And technology is a similar thing. In its way, it is a force of history. Tolstoy made this argument, that humans are just helpless in the face of history. That long, insufferable last hundred pages of War and Peace. He calls it God, but the previous eleven hundred pages were about Napoleon. It’s like, hey, man, make up your mind! Is it Steve Jobs, or is it technology? And you know Bezos is not in my game. Although he’s fucking with me more than Steve ever did. Steve made my life interesting. I still have three Windows98 PCs that I do CAD and my accounting on. And if can, I have a DOS machine that I do my writing on. And I got reasons for all that stuff. But here’s an iBook right here.
Patrick: You are a techy nerd. Let’s face it.
Jim: I know about this stuff to a certain degree, it’s true. I’ve got way better reasons to be acting this way than they’re giving me to act some other way. Except the fact that I’m superannuated, which I am becoming anyway.
Patrick: The technological aspect in your books is a dialectic.
Jim: It’s the Other. I don’t approach it that way.
Patrick: But there’s a process—
Jim: That implies that they are talking to each another.
Patrick: That happens, I hear I hear.
Jim: Klinger’s not talking to it.
Patrick: But he is determined by it.
Jim: In spite of the fact that he doesn’t even know what’s happening.
Gent: Is it appropriate to see the historical lines, like you were talking earlier? Klinger belongs to a world that has ceased to be, but he is still alive.
Patrick: We are all part of some lost world, San Francisco or otherwise.
Gent: Like you were talking earlier—
Jim: Like Harry Bridges—San Francisco used to be a blue-collar town. Try to find a blue collar now.
Gent: It disappears, but you are still here. I know so many people like that.
Jim: Gent, I can so totally go down with that. Even a blue-collar criminal can’t make it in this town.
Patrick: But you point out that a white-collar criminal is insanely successful.
Jim: And sophisticated. Although the wire guy, the dipper, did okay. I’m speaking from experience. I’ve been dipped, on Broadway. I was carousing on Broadway with Andrei Codrescu, Barry Gifford, and Davia Nelson and was going from Tosca to that joint that was across from Enrico’s for a while.
Gent: Swiss Louie’s.
Jim: Nah nah nah, way after that; no one remembers Swiss Louie’s.
Patrick: The Black Cat.
Jim: Chat Noir. It lasted a couple years. They were all up there and had a bunch of booze and stuff and I lingered at Tosca over my martini. I still had a full martini and I was loaded and didn’t care about eating. I finished it off and wandered up Broadway and there were various things that happened, but at some point a very nicely dressed little man came up behind me and brushed by me and said, “Oh, can you tell me how to get to the Ferry Building?” Just like in the book, except there weren’t two of them. I remember the moon rising up over the end of Broadway. I told him how to get there, and he said he had an appointment and he left. I had decided not to eat with my people and I had walked almost back to Columbus toward my truck when the light went on. I wasn’t that fuckin’ loaded. I had on a suit jacket and a sweater and jeans with a horizontal pocket. I went in my pocket and the two hundred bucks less some drinks was gone. Folded just like I always do. I couldn’t believe it. It was good. It was like magic. About a week or so later I was with my friend George Malone, Shanty Malone in the Herb Caen column. He used to own the River Inn in Big Sur. Longtime hustler, con man. A dear friend of mine. And I explained this to him and I asked him what had happened.
Gent: How’d he get his hand in your pocket?
Jim: “Jimmy,” he said, “he’s a dipper.” I said, “What the fuck is that?” He said that sometimes they call him a wireman. He’s got a piece of wire that’s got an “L” on the bottom of it. “And he checked you out, man. He marked you. He saw you buy a drink a couple times and you always went into the same pocket. Man, you didn’t have a chance. And you were loaded.” And I said, “Wow, man, that’s pretty good.” And he said, “Yeah, they’re all very good. But the problem with those guys is that they’re all fucking hop-heads; you can’t trust ’em.”
Patrick: What are you going to trust ’em for?
Jim: Well, you know, guys partner up and stuff and they never snitch. They’re all junkies and they make good money doing this. They only gotta dip one or two guys like me and they’re good for a couple days. ’Cause they got a habit. It’s like, I ran into an old friend of mine and I said, “Hey what are you up to?” And he said, “About sixty a day.”
Patrick: You put that in Snitch World. Except it was a hundred. Pretty funny. There is a lot of hilarious stuff in the book. Like the scene of the nightmare where he’s digging under the cemetery with the Chinese guy in Colorado.
Jim: That’s another true story.
Patrick: What? Wait a minute!
Jim: It was told to me on a ski lift in Colorado. A place called Ski Cooper. All these stories, I left out a lot. Because of my narrative I was servicing. But in those days I had a small pickup truck and I was winter camping and skiing all over Colorado and New Mexico. March and April. I had my dog, pH. We slept in the back of my truck. Not even a camper shell. Brown rice and tea. Living outside. I would find a ski hill with nobody on it and I would just go skiing for half a day. I wound up in Leadville and I found this place called Ski Cooper. It’s in this big long flat valley, and it turned out that the United States Army trained their ski troops there during World War II. And when it was over they leveled all the buildings, which explained this big unblemished valley that was completely filled with snow when I was there. And they had this very modest ski hill that had a rope tow still. And I found a place called the Little Tundra Motel. I stayed for a week and they finally bumped me out because an evangelist choir had booked the whole place six months in advance. I was reading Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, the whole time. So I’m on a chair and here’s a guy, breathing hard, because he only has one lung, see. Leadville is the highest town in the United States. And it’s played out. There’s a closed-down molybdenum mine north of the town, and the pickup truck of whoever owns it is parked in front of all this gear and they’re waiting for the molybdenum deposit in Congo, or wherever the fuck it is, to play out, so they can reopen it. Leadville was silver and gold at one time.
Patrick: That was Horace Taber and Baby Doe—
Jim: I wanna hear that story. So this guy was winded, on the chairlift, and we started talking and his story is he was from Leadville. A Vietnam vet, and he got shot up in Vietnam, that’s where the lung went, and got airlifted back here to Alameda, and was in a busload of wounded vets on the way from Alameda to Letterman Hospital in San Francisco—which is now George Lucas’s Letterman Digital Arts Center—and during Vietnam it also had a psych ward. On the Bay Bridge demonstrators turned the bus over and he and this one other vet who still had their arms and legs got out and pounded the shit out of every demonstrator they could get their hands on. Until the cops broke it up. Okay, so that was one ski lift story. We ski down the hill together. So on the next trip up he asks me what I do, and I mumble I’m a writer. And he gives me his card and it turns out he is a dynamiter. He makes his living, such as it is, dynamiting. He learned demolition in the service and once in a while he sets charges. For roads or mines. He was in AA and had a twenty-four-hour tureen of coffee going in this big Victorian in the middle of Leadville. And anyone who came through could get a cup of coffee from him, drunk or sober, vet or not. And he had huskies on the roof, three stories up, looking down on Leadville. At that time Leadville was pretty moribund.
Gent: It don’t look too good now.
Jim: So, he had become a drunk, he had become homeless, he had gotten cleaned up, and he came back to Leadville, adjusting to the altitude in stages, because of the one lung, beginning here, at sea level. So we’re going back up on the lift again. I said, “So, do you really make a living blowing up shit for mines and roads, and stuff?” he said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I got a buddy, and he’s a vet, too.” You know, Leadville, like a lot of places in California and the West, is honeycombed with tunnels that Chinese laborers would dig on their days off. They would just follow seams looking for gold. He said, “My buddy and I, we got a pretty good map of what goes on under Leadville.” It’s all owned and forbidden. But they had a place on the outside of town, this cut-bank, with all these bushes on it, where you could go into the tunnel system. And it’s dicey, because the tunnels weren’t at all reinforced. And he said they would get out enough nuggets every year to supplement the dynamiting income.
Patrick: There are hundreds if not thousands of people living in the boony wildernesses of the Sierra.
Jim: So, he told me that the first time he took his buddy, with picks and headlamps and the map, they got into this one place. There were boards on the roof of the tunnel, which was rare, because the Chinese had not reinforced the tunnels, and the wood was fairly rotten and they chipped away at it and it caved in and it was all bones. They were under the Leadville cemetery. It was a long time before that story worked its way into the greater narrative of Snitch World.
Patrick: Well, hell, I’m glad it did.
About the Author
San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published thirteen novels, including the acclaimed Lethal Injection. He has also published five volumes of poetry and a nonfiction title. Dark Companion was shortlisted for the 2006 Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in A Mystery Novel, and Windward Passage won the Science Fiction Award of the 2010 San Francisco Book Festival. Ten of his novels have been published in French, six in Italian, and these are constellated by a miscellany of translations into German, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Russian, and Romanian. One of his current projects is the complete translation of Charles Baudelaire’s 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Another is a new novel, currently titled You Don’t Pencil, which he is considering changing to Stuck on Stupid. Learn more at www.noirconeville.com.
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Table of Contents
Titlepage
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
A Conversation with Jim Nisbet, Patrick Marks, and Gent Sturgeon
About the Author
