The thing with Mounk is just a fluke, but man, you have no idea, Peter! It's been that way my whole life. I have always seemed to have a way of blundering into the most absurd situations. For example, at 21, I needed a job. So of course I found myself working for the feared international criminal Eddie Nash, or Abdel Nasrallah, sitting on his storeroom full of fire extinguishers, right up to the time of Eddie's involvement in the famed Wonderland Murders and then the subsequent explosions and shootouts and arrests, etc...
After that blew up my next job was as a kind of glorified copywriter at Hustler Magazine right when Larry and Co. were contemplating the release of these alleged scabrous Ronald Reagan sex videos. This was all happening right in front of us, in the glass box conference room right off the main bull pen of cubicles where we toiled. This was just a few years after Larry had been paralyzed via rifle shot, so he was in a wheelchair, attended to by his obviously beyond high-strung wife.
Then I wisely switched to music for a time, but even that quickly exposed itself as largely absurd.
Years later, around 98, 99, I somehow got suborned as a kind of confidential informant as a result of my strange popularity among the regulars at the Shortstop Bar, where I hung out a lot during the making of Triage, and where all the Rampart Division criminals hung out and plotted their famous crimes.
If you don't know the fabled tales of the Rampart Division and the OCID, they were one of if not the most out of control and corrupt police divisions and units in LA history, and that's saying something. They had grown reckless and gone ineffably rogue after their many years as Chief of Police Daryl Gates' private army/dirt squad who could do no wrong.
God was even on their side, via the 'God Squad," a super-connected group of high-ranking officers who went to the same church and basically ran everything and either protected or destroyed officers at will.
But the foot soldiers at Rampart, the Shortstop crowd got very sloppy and reckless, started renting themselves out as hit men and the like, getting into blackmail, kidnapping, robbing jewelry marts and electronics stores etc etc.. Drinking constantly of course, and god knows what else. The song "Nobody" from Triage was supposedly kind of an unofficial locker room anthem at Rampart to the end, according to the only one of those guys I've spoken to in the last thirty years or so, who I can't talk to any more, as he has now become a diehard Maga idiot. The whole division was gutted not long after that, shut down by a huge joint investigation, I think even involving the feds. The Shortstop changed hands and became a reigning East Hollywood-ish hipster joint.
I've stopped wondering why I've kept blundering into and out of these worlds, any of them. It still happens, to a degree. It's even happening with this book, I know the feeling one gets when one is swimming among large, mostly unseen sea creatures. I've decided it's part of my karma or whatever one would call it, and so I just take it as it comes.
