“Notes From the Backseat: Saws and Sayings of Duane Chapman.”

          One. "Woe Is He": In His Own Words. 

1. “God have mercy –– ‘cause Dog will not.”

2. “I like the babies and the children, but the parents are kind of... [LONG PAUSE] I don’t know... 

     different. During your work everyone lies to you, Grandma lies to you even, so you kind of 

     think everyone’s a liar. It’s a good switch to get with the kids and you’re back into reality and 

     you realise everyone is not a liar and there is kindness and love in the world.”

          [Holden Caulfield? No, Duane Chapman, at his stepdaughter’s school play.]

3. “I’m only five–seven. With the boots I’m five–ten.”

         3a. “White male, five–eight, 175 pounds; big kid.”

4. [Highly emotional –– this after the death of his daughter:]

      “I have many children... and all these sons.”

5. “This turned out to be a quickie, this is a good way to start the day, it’s kind of like Wheaties, the breakfast of champions. Fugitives, the capture of champions. Taco Bell, south of the border; fugitives by order.”

             [Nephew JUSTIN laughs nervously, “uh... huh... ha ha!” at this Dutch Schultz-like rap by his uncle. N.B.,  the arrest was made at Taco Bell.]

           Two. Prayer, Scripture, &c. 

6.  “Lord, thank-you for the day, bless us as we go off full–blast!”

7. “As the Bible says, by their fruits shall ye know them. In this world, by ‘fruits’ we mean     

      record.”

8. “Okay Dear Lord here we go again.”

9. “As I like to say, I’m marrying my common-law wife... [makes sign of the cross]... the 

     Christian way.”

10. On one occasion Dog said “Aloha” when he meant to say “Amen.” 

11. The potential danger on this is high. What if he’s ‘high,’ doesn’t want to go and he’s got a gun? But the closer we get to the guy, the more we turn into kinda like robots on a mission from God.”

          Three. Detective Field Gleanings, Lore and Insight.

12.  I just want to stand in the same area that he [the perp] stands in all the time... Why, I don’t 

       know.”

13. I like it when the plan comes together that you didn’t plan.” 

14. “Let’s look at his trailer and see if he’s got a flag and stuff out. [Pause; laughs.] That’s 

       terrible. If you got a flag you own a gun.”

           [A minute later: “There’s a flag in the yard!”]

15. “I remember the day girls started getting tattoos, me and Youngblood celebrated. Once girls started getting tattoos, they fell right in the category with the guys: easier to find.”

          Four. Dog’s Socio-Cultural Sensitivity.

16. “Walter should be on medication if he doesn’t straighten up... he needs twenty-four hour monitoring. In Hawaii they call it ‘light in the mind’.”

17. Dog and the team were running after one perp who they thought he was their quarry. When 

       they caught up to him they determined –– after some considerable debate –– that he was not     

       “their man”. But still they asked him repeatedly, brandishing the perp’s mugshot, “Do you 

       know him, brah?”

       As if to say, you look like him, so surely you must know him.

       An interesting fallacy, I think you will agree.

           Five. Dog As Seen By Others.

18. “Yeah, Duane has weird instincts.” YOUNGBLOOD

19. “Looks like Dad’s gonna fold like a cheap tent once again.” DUANE LEE.

20.  “You look up the word ‘whipped’ in the dictionary you see a picture of my dad.” LELAND

           Six. Kinfolk. 

21.  “This is a normal typical day in a Chapman’s life. There’s always drama, excitement, 

       triumph... and Beth."

22. [Dog, being upbraided at length by Beth:] "Beth is tired I think."  

23.  Beth puts on a special accent when she addresses the “natives”: “Seestah...”

24. ANNA (A.K.A. “IRENE”): I haven’t gone into probation. They haven’t said nothin’. I got tired 

       of going. You don’t know why.

       BETH: I spent six months in Jefferson County Jail. Don’t sit here and tell me I don’t know 

       ’cause I do.  

25. “No, I don’t think today’s hunt really... we didn’t get into the secret life of Leland because it’s such a secret life. I mean we’re trying to pull stuff out like, ‘Where were you?’ and all I got was, ‘I was in the bathroom...’”

       [LELAND: I don’t know what he’s talkin’ about. There’s no secret life.”]

  

          Seven. Vacuum Cleaners. 

26. [To perp on the backseat, after Dog used a vacuum-cleaner-themed ruse to capture him.]

          “I used to sell Kirbys! You’re like, ‘I don’t want to hear that word Kirby again in my life!, 

       right? ‘I’m going to use a Hoover!’”

27.   “It’s fun to fix the vacuum and make it work and watch it pick up the dirt. That sounds 

        stupid, but I like that.”

          Eight. Human Mortality and Frailty.

28.   [To a low-down undernourished perp perv caught in a peepshow booth:––] “You’re addicted to that store. You know, that booth. I had a feeling, though, that you would come back to that place. That was your downfall.”

        Dog’s afterthoughts: “To affect a change right now, physically, that I saw, that didn’t happen 

       this time. When you get that age, forty years old, and you’re breaking the law, something I    

       guess more than Dog the Bounty Hunter picking you up has to traumatize you where you 

       can change your life.”

29. ANNA (A.K.A. “IRENE”): I don’t want to comply. I’m sick of it.

       BETH: Anna, listen, at this age we’re not robbing banks, we’re not killing people, right? 

       Straighten up, the family’s cool. 

"Cookie's Gone to Hilo"

Dog, hard on the trail of a petty glue-sniffing blue-collar criminal. Dog's first port of call is always to harass the perp's parents. He tracked down the suspect's mother, who travels under the name "Cookie," an obese and toothless crone (much like the informant, in fact). She was in tears at the bus depot. When Dog began his legendary interrogation methodology, she soon blurted that she had just come back from jail herself.
"For what?" said Dog, ever so innocently.
"For beating up my girlfriend."
You could see the recoil on Dog's naive face, even under his wraparound sunglasses.

It seems that there is a whole conspiratorial "ring" of morbidly obese toothless bulldaggers in this part of Hilo. They quite naturally and without any obvious design, like elephants trudging to their graveyard, congregate at the bus depot, where they leisurely do meth.

SONNY: There's a lot of hiding places in Hilo.
DOG: You go through here, it's like a different terrain. If you ever wonder what the moon look like, it look like the road to Hilo.

"Viewer's Poll Results." / "Bieber Ain't In It." / "Two Classic Motifs." / "Mace Store Days."

As an interactive feature of the season, A&E experimented with having viewers' polls for the discerning yeoman-farmer-citizen advocate of reality TV. This was one of the questions.

Who ("apart from Dog") would you want on your team?

LELAND           42%
BETH                 29%
BABY LYSSA  17%
DUANE LEE     12%

_______________________________________________________

Dog's words of homespun backseat wisdom, Part 473:

"If you'd been married you would of been okay. You can push around yer legal old lady. You can smash her face in and steal her clothes. Hell you can put on her silk panties and her finest dresses if it suits you. It's a free country and marriage is a wonderful institution my brah."

______________________________________________________

Justin Bieber obviously refused to appear on Dog the Bounty Hunter. He clearly calculated, no doubt correctly, that it was beneath him at the current point of his blazing orbit. In the episode where Dog's daughter or granddaughter or stepdaughter went to see Bieber in concert, Dog (accidentally wrote "Fog") was furiously wheeler-dealing to contrive an onscreen meeting between these two legends of scraping all the hair from the back of their heads to the front. You could almost hear the disembodied Bieber whining to his agent: "Do I have to?"
"No. And hopefully you will never fall so low as to have to."

______________________________________________________

Two Classic Motifs.

1. Even when they force the perp to give himself up through mean coercion they try to act like it is a trap.

2. The "Court Date Mix-Up":

    The PERP: "I thought my court date was on the 23rd."
     LELAND: "It was on the 27th of May.
     PERP:  Oh really? Damn.

     This after a day-long chase.

      The most audacious gambit in the history of jurisprudence was in the episode where a perp took out a restraining order on the judge due to sentence him.

"Mace Store Days."

      Dog: "I need a can of mace. Let's go to the mace store."
      As Chekhov observed, a loaded dueling pistol seen hanging on the wall in Act One must be used most resolutely in  a succeeding Act.
      This episode didn't end with the customary redemption scene, but with Dog growling, "Get this scum away from me!"
       Leland was hailed as the hero of the day, although when first seen he was reeling about an empty lot groaning "I'm blind!"

Dog:  Keeps saying "Aloha" to people in Colorado.

"Low Man on the Totem Pole." B/W "Stray Leaves From a Country Doctor's Desk." B/W "Cat Drug In."

I have a few stray feuilletons of notes going back months, maybe years, that have been sitting around to no useful end lo these many summers. These are they. In one of those seasonal impotent sweeps where I try to diminish the clutter in my life by throwing out a few bits of paper, I am committing these to the "online log" so I can throw away at least one envelope of hazy ideas.

One.

Previously I have written about Dog's, ah, precarious relationship with the gentlemen of law enforcement. Here is a rather apposite testament to that –– fascinating documentary evidence of that strange symbiosis betwixt police and bounty-man.

Recorded from the TV:

"Okay listen here let Uncle Dog talk. Pipe down. Now you know what today is, right? Career day! So that you can decide right now at this age what you want to be when you grow up. Now listen, I met this guy one time, he came to me on Career Day and he said, 'Dog, what do you want to be when you grow up?' and I said, 'I want to be a police officer,' and he said, 'If you have a goal and you strive to be that, some day you will,' and here we stand... not police officers but on the same totem pole as ah police offices.... We're bounty hunters. Go ahead, son."

The cop at the Career Day promptly gave Dog the bum's rush. Dog stands there and gives him the thumbs up. Dog was kissing the cop's ass. He said, "Just tell your cop friends that the guys in black are the good guys." Sickly grin followed. Youngblood was seen smiling even more queasily.

Two.

Dog was duly and appropriately delicate with the LGBT community. "This is a very complex case because Kiki is a man and looks like a woman so 'she' has the strength of a man."
Leland was less diplomatic, forgetting to refer to the transgendered personage with the correct pronoun. Even so his message was a positive one of equality: "That means that if we we see him, we're, you know, we're gonna grab him and take him out just like we would anybody else."

At the end of the bust Dog was broad-minded and philosophical in his summary: "It's a different world today okay and we're all learning to accept things we don't understand. But... everybody's human and, again, the Lord looks on the heart. I learnt a lot about life today."

Three.

"That pitbull drug that tyre in the street. That's over, that says. A maniac dog, ain't it?"   DOG
They were being chased around by a single pitbull named "Pooch" who was tied to a tyre which he "drug" behind him. I never saw Beth move so fast. Leland was scared, doing high kicks to keep his heels away from the dog.

"Dog and Beth Do Not Have Minty Fresh Breath"

In the terrific tradition of giving a single name for a celebrity couple, like "Brangelina" and "Tomkat" &c. &c., by the same marvelous sort of "think tank brainstorming" I thought up a similar sort of name for Dog and Beth.

"DOGBREATH."

Or,

"DOGBETH AND BAD BREATH."

"Dog Formula Is a Pet Food"/"Confusion Is Not Necessarily Sex."

The new Dog TV show has a different formula, but I've already fathomed out the formula for it and found it to be not-so-great.

In the Guthrie, Oklahoma episode Dog & Beth caught a fugitive up in Colorado. Nice country they have out there. They drove up to his house and arrested him while he was watching cartoons. They always catch life as it happens. The best aspect of this show is the documentary aspect. But it wasn't exactly an exciting bit of sleuthing.

They did the job for a family business down in Oklahoma, as I said. The wife of this family, who had a son of 21 and a daughter of 16, still wore a metal retainer in her mouth. What she really needed was a chin, but you can't get a chin through your dental surgeon. You'd have to go to a plastic surgeon and the cost might well run into the tens of thousands. After all, they'd have to graft the body parts from elsewhere to add it to your chin. Maybe your thigh.

I don't know. This is idle speculation.

That being the case or not, Beth and Dog caught this dangerous man and sent him to the clink without a fuss. So far, boring TV. Then (and: here comes the formula) they drove to Oklahoma to meet the family they'd caught the perp for.

They arrived at the old farmhouse, the old dawdi haus,  at twilight, and it was like a Jimmy Stewart film, all magical and golden and Old American. Everybody shook each others' hands, and the womenfolk pecked each other on the cheeks and exchanged recipes, and the daughter of the house was off out to the prom, so some mildly ribald humour was indulged in at the expense of the father and the boyfriend. Dog grinned a big off-white smile and said he'd put a tracker on the boyfriend's car. "We ain't gonna make it easy for you to fuck this girl on prom night," he laughed lecherously. "We're going to try and ruin your fucking fun! You ain't gonna get to first base without thinking of my leering, salacious face and that's gonna put you right off! I might have put you off sex for life in fact!"

Anyway a terrific time was had by all that evening, and the tears of paralysed elation were soon streaming down everyone's cheeks, and as Dog and Beth turned to leave they chimed that they'd "swing by the office in the morning."

This is the trigger for the next segment of the show.

Dog should have took aside the paterfamilias here and said, in a dark dead baritone, "The nice portion of the show, the gee shucks, Whole Earth catalogue, Allen Ginsberg finger-cymbals mile-high circle-jerk, Hare Krishna, touchy-feely, Kum-By-Yah part of the show, is over as of now.  Tomorrow we'll descend on you like a wall of locusts and Beth will abuse you horribly. She will slit you from tip to taint and use you as a fist puppet. I will be absent-minded and bored and chain-smoking and want to get the filming over. Leland, in his designated role as the 'tech and tactics expert,' will be all 'fingers and thumbs', 'all at sixes and sevens,' a fucking tongue-tied bumbler saying obvious things and things that make no sense and bumping into things and generally fucking up. That dumb bohunk. But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, Beth is going to be rude as hell to you and your loved ones. She's gonna all but shit on your shoe. She's gonna take a brutal dump in your kitty litter. She's gonna crap in your hatbox. She's gonna tear this dawdi haus down. I'd say I'm sorry about it, but as you'll see tomorrow my chosen solution to this unpleasant state of affairs is to act all absent-minded and remote and moral relativist. So I'll be no help to you. Sorry but the worst part is about to come. The part when, guaranteed, my wife insults your wife and family and my son makes a horse's nether asshole of hisself –– again."

He should have said that but, perhaps understandably, he didn't.

Next day though it went as predicted. Beth tromped into the family dawdi haus with dirty fucking boots on dragging dirt with her tailbone, wiped them on the best linen, and spit her wad of tobacco bang smack in the center of the family portrait over the hearth. She pissed on the toilet seat "because she could."

Then she berated the wife, who made the rookie error of admitting casually to having "stacks" of unfulfilled bonds.

"Stacks? Stacks? What stacks? How much in a stack?" She sounded like Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Beth had at record speed fixed on something to drub the dumb wife for and she wasn't liable to surrender the chance to be high-handed and didactic.

Next she sought to sow discontent betwixt husband and wife. She told the wife that her husband had made a fundamental misjudgment and that he should be denounced in the village square for a witch. Then she goes, "You must carry the day within these four walls. Do you think my husband is anything but a blue-balled cuckold? To enforce your position, you might withhold sex if you have to."

I looked at the chinless wife with an empty thought bubble over her head. That drenched head from her daily application of mid-Eighties hair products, and the retainer athwart her teeth. I looked at her and I thought, "'Withholding sex' isn't going to really turn the screws on the husband. I think the threat of sex might be her best bargaining chip at this point."