A Shadow In The City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior - Charles Bowden

Under the pseudonym “Joey O'Shay” a deep cover narcotics agent operates in an undisclosed city at the heart of the nation. He's a man with nearly three hundred drug busts, orchestrated over a span of more than twenty years. 

Fighting an unofficial war the U.S. lost long ago, the late Charles Bowden details O'Shay's last endeavor—a high-stakes heroin deal worth $50 million. The deal, originating in Colombia, triggers a chain reaction that places federal agents on high alert, spanning the stretch from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and reaching New York City. As the narrative unfolds, we learn of O'Shay's relentlessness that guides him through deadly terrain as he dismantles drug kingpins. 

Set in the shadowy and unforgiving streets of middle America, this is a masterclass in the brutal and corrupt realities of the war on drugs. Something made very clear about the drug world, you have to keep your deals. In that world, you can't say, “Well, look, the guy cheated me. I'll go to court and sue him.” The only enforcement is force. 

Several figures stand out. One is Bobbi, a woman battling cancer who oversees various hotels and provides lodgings for O'Shay's drug-dealing clients. She knows him better than anyone. As he tries to step back from this world, she holds that no one that “knows” can ever leave it. 

Another is Gloria, who he encounters while setting the stage for his Colombian counterparts, the dealers Garcia and Irma. They are immediately attracted to each other, but O'Shay is confronted with the painful necessity of betraying her, such is the job. This leads to imprisonment, decades minimum, without her being aware of his true identity as the cop responsible for her downfall. “Not him, he's my baby,” she says when the feds try to get her to flip on her contacts.

Through this ordeal, he realizes destroying people like her wasn't going to solve “the drug problem.” People are going to buy these substances and find them no matter what he did. Then, finally, a woman he got to know really well on the case said, “Look, I have never created a single addict in my life. They existed when I was born; they're going to exist when I die. I just supply them.” And he realized she was telling him the truth.

This time, his path leads to a realm where distinguishing heroes from villains becomes impossible, robbing him of his purpose. As he gets deeper in it, he slowly stops believing in what he is doing. As he gets to know the people he destroys, he stops believing he is any better than they were. 

“He did not betray Gloria, who played out her hand in the only hard world she ever knew. He betrayed himself. He enforced a law he no longer believes in,” Bowden writes, (p. 301). 

In the end, he is haunted by the weight of his deception. He's also torn between loyalty to his fellow narcotics agents and prosecutors, whom he disdains. As time goes, he finds himself respecting the drug dealers he brings down more than law enforcement. 

There is a scene that really adds insult to injury. This comes when O'Shay is closing out all hope for Gloria and the others caught in his snare when he had to meet with two bosses from a federal agency.

“It is Halloween,” Bowden writes, “and one is dressed as some kind of troll and the other a candy-ass vampire or something. One is a man, the other a woman, but to O'Shay both are ridiculous. There is a decency on the street, some kind of honest ground, people are ruined... O'Shay has put his life on the line, and here he's talking about what to do and how to settle the case with a troll and a vampire. And he and his dew feel violated. He feels sin for being there. There are decencies that must be observed, things old cops taught, and criminals and creeks and stars at night, and you don't sit in an office dressed like pansies and decide the fate of hardworking drug dealers. It is a violation, an insult to the crew...

“There is a world that is rock hard and actual and it runs like a stratum through the city. And there is this other world, soft and dishonest... and it is worshipped,” (p. 251).

As becomes clear, you can't live certain things without paying a price. You can't pretend they didn't happen. He'll have to live with the damage of his life. As O'Shay deals with his blurred allegiances, he reads Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl's seminal work Man's Search for Meaning, feeling kinship with the author. It tells of his time in the camps and how he found the will to live, surrounded by so much death. “It is death that gives life meaning.” It's the most difficult book I've ever had to read, FYI.

I'm not sure I'd call what Bowden did “true crime,” though it is that. More cultural critique. I adore Bowden's voice, both literal and in the written form. He wrote extensively on the U.S.-Mexico border, shining light on the femicides in Juarez, and later the drug violence taking place there, and America's part in it. If you've never heard him speak, I encourage you to check this out. No one can say it like him. Excellent read, for anyone that's got the stomach for rage and disgust. 

"The Wrong Jason Brown"

I read a lot of essays. Books of essays from authors I like, the Best American Series every year, and recently the Best of the 20th Century. Read The New Yorker, Esquire, The Believer, Harper's, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, so forth. I read hundreds of essays a year, minimum. 

“The Wrong Jason Brown” is one of the best.  By a guy named Jason Brown, obviously. He won a Stegner fellowship, the prestigious two-year writing program at Stanford. He is the author of three books of short stories—Driving the Heart and Other Stories, Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work: Stories, and A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed: A Novel in Stories. 

“The Wrong Jason Brown” stands out as being one of the most memorable things I’ve read. Probably my favorite essay of all time, honestly. It blew my mind. Reminded me of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. 

Incredible work. That’s said, if I knew what it was about, I wouldnt have read it. Masterfully done to ease you into this world. Not gonna spoil it. Just gonna encourage you to read it.  

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's first novel from 1926. Meh. Expats living in Paris who go to Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and then later their slaughter. Bullfighting is, of course, the worst “sport” of all time (maybe except for gladiator fighting or American football). 

A modernist staple, I read this in high school. Hated it then. Hate it now. Based on people in Hemingway's "friends" going to Spain in 1925. Recounts their drinking, fighting, fucking. Shallow bullshit. The book is too long for such vapid dick-tickling. 

I vaguely remember talk of the whole point of the book being that these are young people of a "lost generation” not really knowing what to do with their lives. The novel then recounts something of a diversion for these moody, aimless sorts. Having reread it as an adult who has critically read a thousand or so books, I feel that is a cop-out. This was what he knew and fell into. The whole man-coming-home-from-war to a peaceful life with all the shit bubbling under the surface. These themes are better developed in his shorter work, in my opinion. So is his style, for that matter. 

I know the meditations on life and death are extremely moving and thought-provoking to some. However, it didn't move shit for me. "The few unsad young men of this lost generation will have to look for another way of finding themselves than the one indicated here," John Dos Passos said. That was a friend of Hemingway's. I'd rather read Camus, Joyce, or Kafka from that period. 

I find Hemingway to be the idol of masculine males I strongly dislike. Hunting, bullfighting, racist, antisemitic, meat-obsessed, sloppy drunk. What's not to love, am-I-right? Personally, I hate all of those things and anyone who imitates Hemingway in those beliefs. He is an embarrassing cliché of a dead white male firmly on the losing side of history.

All that said, there are things I really dig about Hemingway and his writing. He was a dog and cat lover. He wrote standing up and fucking lived. I believe his short stories are some of the best ever (though I may need to revisit them). “50 Grand” is probably my favorite. About a washed-up boxer who puts everything on his opponent. Gets punched in the balls. If he goes down, he wins the fight but loses everything. Stays up and nails the other guy in the nuts, giving the guy the win. I can think of no more appropriate metaphor for Papa's bullshit than this. It is fantastic. Plus, he is 100% my style icon. 

The most interesting part to me is the relationship between Jake and Brett. She should just be with him and have sex with dudes on the side, letting him perform cunnilingus so they can share some sexual intimacy. But Jake is Hemingway's stand-in, so I'm sure it wouldn't have worked out. 

In addition to the glorification of animal cruelty and what have you, there are a couple other things that make me hate the guy that pop up in the novel. When we read this in high school, I remember one of my classmates saying that Hemingway was obviously racist/antisemitic. Throwing the N-word and the K-word around (but also the treatment of black and Jewish people). Someone asked if that was the way it was back then. The answer is no. Yes, if you were a racist antisemite, yeah, which was more socially acceptable, but this was more than problematic even back then. 

The Robert Cohn character, who, with Bill, is probably the only person in the novel I'd hang out with. Cohn is pretty much always condescendingly called “a Jew,” save for when he's being called a “rich Jew” or “kike”. He is ostracized for being different, and we never forget that he is Jewish. “'Brett's got a bullfighter,'” the character Mike, Brett's fiance, says at one point. “'But her Jew has gone away .... Damned good thing.'” That seems to be the only real problem anyone has with him. They are annoyed by his presence. What is fucked is the character is based on a guy that Hemingway hung out with who thought of himself as Hemingway's friend. A guy named Harold Loeb, also a writer, was Hemingway's rival for the inspiration for Brett – Lady Duff Twysden.

While I'm not a Hemingway fanboy, there is greatness there. However, this is a "first novel" that's meh though it does put forth essential themes that he continues to explore. Come home from the brutality of war and keep on keeping on with your traumatized peeps.