I am not saying that Dog the Bounty Hunter was ever actually a good television show, but I used to extract a scintilla of amusement, if not actual pleasure, from mindlessly tuning in & dropping out in front of it. Now even that feeble activity is a "diminishing return".
I watched the latest episode, from Norwalk in Los Angeles County, California, and Beth looked old and grumpy and wasted. She looked like a sack of potatoes. She was used-up. She looked like W.H. Auden's ballsack. Her old man, it hardly needs saying, looked like scar tissue on an over-done rump steak. These people been around too long.
"Been on the bum too long."
They will outlive us all.
Firstly, Beth has a lousy attitude. It's unchristian, it's uncharitable, it's plum wrongful.
Must do better.
Doesn't play well with others.
She's rude, spoiled and unsophisticated. She's not a gal's gal-pal. She sees other women enter the room, and she instantly wants to humiliate them in front of the "male gaze". She is most "women beware women". In Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet is discussed by Mr. Bingley's sisters, they are unfair to that honorable female. They would however be entirely correct if they were talking about Beth Chapman:
"Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, "is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex, by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But , in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art."
She is one of those people who they cover up their social awkwardness with a vocal show of authority –– which is to say, she is personally brimming with abrasive obnoxiousness. With her lousy attitude she should ideally work in a comic-book store. If she did that, I predict she'd go far.
Leland, meanwhile, is week-to-week (not to say bumper-to-bumper) being reduced to a glorified door-to-door salesman. He turns up in a cheap suit smelling of bad cologne and inquiring as he opens his suitcase up whether you would like to buy this body armour or that taser or failing these twain perhaps you'd like a gold-leaf-embedded King James Bible or a few stray volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica even?
"Would yeou like to buy a razor strop?"
The first twenty minutes was taken up with dull inventory, Beth inspecting the arsenal of this week's bailbondsmen and pedantically finding fault, then snapping, "Leland, fetch the samples." Leland wakes from his stupor to go out to the big black coach to get the suitcase. He looks like he hates the show.
In another scene Leland was coaching the bailbondsman CHRIS (who "looks like a doofus from Michigan" –– Beth) in how to talk to prostitutes on the phone. He said he was too "shy" and "inexperienced" to do it himself. There followed a tract of innuendo and joshing about who was more plausible as a "john" to the Korean hooker they were chasing. Sonny was suggested, that useless fat pillock. He was rejected because he would have probably forgotten the plan and tried to fuck the hooker. So they decided on fat CHRIS, who worked at the Norwalk bail bonds shop. He looked like he might pass for a user of whores. A really nice thing to have said about you.
They were doing run-through conversations, role-playing. Leland kept doing the phone sound, quite straight-faced: "Ring ring ring ring ring. You say 'hello'."
FAT CHRIS: "Hello?"
LELAND: "Hello."
FAT CHRIS: "Hello, I'm around right now and I wondered if you and me we could hook up––"
LELAND: "Don't say 'hook up' to a hooker bro!"
FAT CHRIS: "Oh yeah! Uh, ... I was wondering if we could get together joo and me...'"
LELAND: "Okay that's better..."
FAT CHRIS: "What if she asks what I want to do?"
LELAND: "Bro I guarantee she won't bro."
But she did. Chris didn't get flustered, he shot back instantly: "Water sports!"
CLICK. She hung up.
Leland was baffled. "Why'd you say 'Water sports' bro?"
"It was the first thing I thought of––!"
"Funny that!"
"Hey you do it if you're such a nat'ral-born pro at talking to prostitutes!"
"Ah fuggew!"
They ended up tracking the lady-of-the-night to an apartment where she was hiding under some laundry. They pulled her out of the pile of towels and pants and took the flannels and socks off her head and frogrmarched her out into the streets.
Dog's soliloquy to the Korean hooker was a strange one. He said, "Get out. Run to the hills. Bad time a-comin'. Animals migrate [sic] when the water runs out. Your water's dry here. Why don't you make like a leaf and blow away. You won't see twenty-five the way you're going. Specially given the freaks in this State."
That's Michigan and California they've managed to offend in this one episode.
Later, in the SUV together, Dog and Beth found time for some of that patented schoolyard courtship ritual that is their "playful chiding exchanges":
B: Women have more stamina than men.
D: More stamina than––? Where are we talking about here?
B: Everywhere. You know exactly where.
D: Are we talking about––?
B: We are.
D: You think you have more stamina––?
B: I know it.
D: We'll see tonight.
Hideous imagery this exchange unavoidably conjures in our heads. A knock-down drag-out slugfest in their hotel room. Lots of wheezing and panting as these heaving, groaning octogenarians grapple and dully pummel each other around the bedroom. Ostensibly it is a love-match, but all affection, and all pleasure, left the venture in the first half a minute. They've been here five hours since. An exercise in willpower and endurance and sheer gnarled contrariness. A refusal to stay down. A refusal to die.
Much like this show and everybody watching it.
THOMAS RUGGLES PYNCHON.
