A radical blending of 1960s counterculture and noir
sensibilities, Trinian’s novels evoke the West Coast spirit of the times with
the doomy melancholy of Goodis. The plots vaguely touch on murder, but they're more
like hangout books, with the characters drunk or stoned most of the time. Booze,
drugs, and art flow freely through these pages—at times the inebriation is a
pure high, at others it’s a hazy attempt to block out reality. But unlike
something like Lawrence Block’s A Diet of
Treacle, these books aren’t Beatnik-sploitation, or caricatures of the
scene. Trinian, who was pals with Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack
Kerouac, lived the lives he writes about. With each passing page, there’s an
authenticity to North Beach Girl and Scandal on the Sand that can’t be
faked—it gives the books their realism, but it also gives them their sadness.
Trinian feels for his characters, their troubled pasts, their hazy futures, and
their lost present.
Though at first glance, the title North Beach Girl might sound like some Frankie and Annette
sandstorm, it is nothing of the sort. Erin, the main character, just quit her
job as an artists’ model. She crashes as a garage paid for by another woman
named Bruno, who runs a local art gallery. The gallery has attracted a local
crew of beatniks, drunks, artists, wannabes and has-beens, including Riley, a
painter who comes knocking on Erin’s door late one night, piss drunk, wanting
to hire her as a model. Bruno, who obviously has some sort of affection for
Erin, is resentful and jealous. Deep in debt and looking for a way out, Bruno
wants Erin to borrow money from her dying grandmother in order to invest in a
larger gallery space. And Erin, indecisive in life and love alike, hasn’t made
up her mind what to do about anything.
“The bitter confusion of her life became magnified and it seemed to melt into a solid lump of nothingness. Why should she think about it? Life was wretched and disgusting. It was mean for the stupid idiots who could swallow its lies and shadowy promises. Only fools lived in peace. She thought of the cemetery where her mother was buried. Give and take, old ashes to even older ashes … have another drink and the hell with it. One negated the other.”
It’s as gloomy as any of Goodis’ gutter monologues, a pure
mainline dose of 100% noir.
Trinian’s first line in North
Beach Girl establishes the theme of entrapment that runs throughout the
novel: “Erin covered herself with the pale green robe and sat on the empty
packing crate by the narrow barred window.” From her workplace to the garage to
the gallery to her grandmother’s house—and of course the variety of places
where she goes to drink—Erin never has a place of her own. Always in between,
borrowing, crashing, or killing time, she lives in a permanent state of
impermanence. While she may be an anti-establishment figure of the time who has
dropped out from mainstream society, Erin isn’t a romantic or idealistic
character at all. She’s realistic as hell. Most of us have either known an
Erin, or been like her (at least for a little bit). And that’s where the power
of North Beach Girl is—in the
characters. Unlike Riley who likes his “entertainment real simple,” where “the
good guy wears a big white hat and the bad guy wears a black one,” Trinian
writes ambiguous characters who are neither good nor bad, neither heroes or
villains, nor even anti-heroes. They’re screwy people who drink too much and
say stupid things and waste time and never seem to figure out what they’re
supposed to do. And that’s why Trinian’s characters are among the most
recognizably human—and modern—in all of the Gold Medal paperbacks.
Though sex, drugs and murder are very much a part of the
story North Beach Girl, the novel
isn’t plotted like your standard head-first-into-the-action thriller. Trinian
takes his time, slowly developing the characters, their relationships, and
their inebriated trajectories. North
Beach Girl is structured like an extended bender, coming out of the haze
for brief moments of recognition and sobriety, only to drive back into the fog
once they see the bleakness of their circumstances.
“Hell,” Erin said softly, “people drink a lot.”
One aspect of Trinian’s writing that does remind me of
Lawrence Block, and also anticipates the work of Ed Gorman, is the portrayal of
alcohol and drugs. These aren’t people who drink to have fun, or get high to
have a good time—they’re just sad wrecks of people. Trinian has great sympathy
for them and their constant need substances—and he never pities them, perhaps
because he was something like them, himself. As his daughter, Belle Marko,
writes, “He was popular and unreliable, his own worst enemy in many ways,
getting in his own way with self-sabotage and isolation, depression and bouts
of rage and horrible remorse. He was plagued with demons …” One of the biggest
clichés of noir literature is its senseless and unrealistic celebration of
alcoholism. Trinian, on the other hand, hammers home the unpleasantness of what
it really is like.
The second book in the anthology, Scandal on the Sand, also sounds like a Frankie and Annette movie,
but it is even less like one than the preceding novel. It begins with a great,
and totally surreal, first line:“In the deep, in cold darkness, a hundred feet below he rocky cliffs and half-hidden among the fan fronds and greenly-waving fields of sea grass, the great gray whale hovered, his tail fins moving now and then to maintain his depth.”
The first couple pages are all from the whale’s point of
view—an unorthodox narrative as exciting and it is insane, and yet Trinian
pulls it off perfectly. The story is set into motion when the whale washes up
on the beach, gets stuck, and can’t get back to the ocean.
An ensemble narrative like John D. MacDonald’s Cry Fast, Cry Hard, Scandal on the Sand follows
a group of characters on a single afternoon that all come together because of
the spectacle of the beached whale. There’s Karen and Hobart, a hookup from the
night before that Karen resents and that Hobart thinks will lead to marriage. There’s
Joe Bonniano, a wanted hitman whose picture is on the front page of the
newspaper and who is hanging around for a delivery of money. Also near by is
Mulford, a cop whose stupidity is matched by his ego and quick temper. Out for
a stroll are Fredric, a one-time Hollywood star-turned-dope addict, and his wife,
Becky; Riley, an ex-con tow truck driver; and even a sleaze photographer named
Earle and his two bikini models. And overseeing all of this is Alex, a
lifeguard too hungover to notice what is unfolding on his beach.
Scandal on the Sand is,
in my eyes, an even greater accomplishment than North Beach Girl. Structuring the novel around the beached whale is
just a magnificent, maverick concept that borders on the avant-garde. The whale
functions as a unifying symbol for all the characters: a manifestation of their
collective problems, disappointments, uncertainties, and pains. Confronting the
whale brings out their true character—in some it reveals compassion, in others
indifference, opportunism, and violence.
Like in North Beach
Girl, Trinian’s characters are distinguished by their waywardness and
uncertainty. In Scandal on the Sand,
the action may be compressed into a single afternoon, but the characters
experience years of life through their reveries and regrets. Unable to
actualize any change in their lives, they’re stuck in a limbo consisting always
of nights-before and nights-after-next; days are spent forgetting and planning,
and rarely doing. Of Karen, Trinian writes, “She felt a terrible need to search
for something, anything, inside or outside herself that would help erase the
idiotic outcome of the night before.” Trinian also has Fredric ask his wife, “Becky,
do you think that if I can manage it on pills today, pills alone, without
anything else, that I’ll still be all right by this evening?” These aren’t
characters living for the day so much as they’re struggling to just make it
through. As Earle sums it up, “Sometimes I do good; sometimes I don’t. Beer one
day, champagne the next. Up and down, and down and up. That’s life.”
Scandal on the Sand also
has its moments of hardboiled noir philosophy, like this line that reads like
something out of Richard Hallas’ You Play
the Black and the Red Comes Up:
“What had Herb said? That Joe wouldn’t even break away from the post? That the odds weren’t in his favor? That was a laugh and a half. Joe had known that all along. Because that’s the way it had always been. Not matter what. Dice, roulette, poker, the horses. Everything always ended with a bust-out.”
North Beach Girl and
Scandal on the Sand have whetted my
appetite for Trinian, and convinced me that he is one of the true unheralded
greats of the Gold Medal canon.
Never read these. Definitely sound unique though.
ReplyDelete