"The House Always Wins."

Sometimes in your day, in your life, in your soul's reeling arc betwixt the vault and the precipice, you have to simply listen to some good old kkkountry gold on the stereo of your shitkicker flatbed truck. And when you stop, as stop ye must, you have to stroll over to your foeman's front porch, where your foeman lounges in a hammock, and you got to spit a plug of tobacco in your foeman's face and smile as the juice drips down your foeman's chin.

Other times you have to watch an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter that you know that you have seen before, even with the knowing that thy term of natural life on this firmament is perishing by the second.

Why because it's good and it's righteous and it's right and it's goodly and it's kindly and it's not ungood.

This lunchtime I watched an episode where Dog was going after an inveterate gambler, one Kristine Lau, and this provided the premise and the impetus for round after round of gambling metaphors from Dog.

"She's a gambler. So are we. We're gamblers. It's gonna be like chasing ourselves. Because bounty-hunters are gamblers. Every time we take on a bond we make a gamble. Right?"

The camera then shows Leland with his lips parted. You can almost read his mind:

"...? Whaddid he just say? We're gamblers now?"

Nothing daunted, Dog kept the thematic zingers coming. "We're The House. She's the gambler. She's bet she can outrun me. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now Dog had narrowed his focus. He wasn't going to keep making broad gambling metaphors. He was going to refer to himself and the team henceforth as "The House".

This is not to say he didn't experiment with other, equally confusing figures of speech. At one point, to punctuate a lull in the narrative, he growled "We're here. We're live. This isn't Memorex."

Bad metaphor for the digital age, Duane. You're making yourself look old - obsolete.

Then he resorted to that classic trope of American folk rhetoric, willful exaggeration. Speaking of his quarry's dwindling options, he asked facetiously, "Where they gonna go, the ocean? They gonna rent a submarine to get away from us?"

He was on rare form in this episode. It was, I should note, from maybe six or seven years ago, when the world looked young and hopeful and a bard was inspired to heights inconceivable today.

Dog's methodology had been typically bewildering. In pursuit of Kristine Lau they had decided to be as blatant and cumbersome as possible, effected by blundering raucously into all the illegal gambling dens and asking the staff bluntly "Ya seen her?" while brandishing her mugshot. Amazingly, when this didn't turn up any results, Dog seemed genuinely surprised. He was at a loss as to how it could've not've worked.

As time ran out the bounty-hunting team would go to the car parks of these strip malls where the gambling dens were and saunter around like Union Square protesters, ostensibly scaring off custom. I think the quaint idea was to embarrass her into submission. This didn't seem to be working either, especially because come about ten o'clock at night, when most gamblers are still eating breakfast, the Chapmans got tired and went home.

They were knocking on a gambling den door one evening when they received a call from their own office that Kristine Lau was there and had given herself up. Not one to underplay the moment, Dog still got right flustered and acted like they were in a race against death itself to get back to the office before Kristine Lau changed her mind. He was all animated in the SUV, bouncing up and down on the back seat, one second chiding Beth for her driving then chuckling with glee "The House is gonna win!"

As usual when they got to the office the arrest was totally mundane and everybody calmed down immediately.

Nevertheless, Dog had room for one more gambling metaphor in his summing-up segment: "In a gambling perspective you win, lose or draw. This was a draw."

Here he paused, and I thought he had finally laid his flirtation with the device of The House to rest. No such thing. He grinned his pure kkkountry gold smile and resumed:

"A draw in favour of The House."

"Da Kine. Da Fuck?"

1) I have a dreadful habit of watching episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter that I've already seen. 

Usually I'm two thirds of the way through an episode of Dog before I realise, "Oh I seen this one already I know what happens." By which point I think fug it I'll watch it again.

Because life is so long that we can afford to waste time like this can't we?

I was watching this one episode with a female perpetrator who in her mugshot had badly-drawn on eyebrows. It was as if they had been drawn on with a big black magic marker - via the tremulous hands of a blind man. And when I saw her mugshot and those magnificent brows, I thought, "Oh I've seen this episode." But I kept watching, rapt in my sublime forgetfulness, and Dog and Beth and family were nosing about this woman's home - which was really just a dirtshack complex on a remote backlot, but it was full of hidden rooms. Lots of ninja hidey-holes. 

I thought I was watching Shinobi No Mono for a minute!

Heh.

You didn't like that one, all right.

Anyway, the woman was a "meth-head" and (naturally) also a single mother of six, but she in addition stood accused of stealing somebody's dog. Like that episode when that "Bonnie and Clyde" team stole Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant. And so this time Beth goes, "What the fuck is this about you stealing a dog?"

"I didn't steal no dog."

Meanwhile Beth is, you can tell, trying to steal one of the woman's dogs herself. I know I've seen one episode where Beth actually did take the perpetrator's pet dog because she liked it and the perp was going to jail after all. So Beth is in the habit, let us say, of blithely taking other people's pets herself. And she was playing with this puppy on camera for ages. Lots of screen time for this one puppy. Eventually Beth had to reluctantly give the puppy back to the meth-head owner (who dully goes, "Drive safe now"), but you could tell that she had been hard at work angling to get the puppy for free. Like a child in a toyshop does - tries to get his or her parents to buy them something simply because they make such a public show of spontaneous fondness for it that the parents can't legally refuse.

Like my nephew in the Disneyland shop. He ran in there, sensing that the time was ripe to get gifts from the adults around, even when he didn't necessarily want anything. He wanted things in the abstract. He was picking up things willy-nilly and pulling a heart-tugging expression.

Beth was doing that very thing with this puppy, but it didn't work anyway.

And then she has the big brazen magnificent balls to accuse the perp of stealing a dog!

2) So then they have the perp on the backseat, and if you've read my earlier "posts" about the show in question you'll know that the backseat is a scene for a lot of soul-searching and hard questions. As the academics would say, it is a "site of radical cultural mediation and exchange." So as usual Dog and Beth are like Jay Leno, in that the first thing they ask the perp is if she's got any kids, and she goes "I had six, but one died."

And Dog, half-asleep and oblivious, goes, "And how old is she?"

"She WAS one-year-old -- WHEN SHE DIED in a car accident!"

So then, all tact and sensitivity, Dog goes, "Oh, da kine."

The fuck––?

"Da kine" is an old Hawaii word that doesn't have a set meaning and so can be said at virtually any times. Dog's company is even called "Da Kine Bail Bonds." And so when this woman tells him her daughter died aged one, all he can find in his human heart to say is, "Oh. Huh. Da kine."

One for the linguists, methinks!

"All My Sins Forgiven."

Dog.

Bounty Hunter.

What He Says.

Dog had a female mother-of-three "ice-head" on the backseat and was drilling her for her life story. He goes, "Talk story. Shoot."

For his troubles he got the usual crock-pot of gab and guff. Really a load of old rot. Baby Lissa was on the back seat with them rather than Beth, because - as Beth rightly says - Lissa has to learn what bounty hunters do if she's going to do this job. She has to participate in all parts of the job.

That was a really nice idea, Beth - a nice thought or emotion - but it didn't work at all because Lissa just sat on the back seat biting her bottom lip with her big Robin Gibb overbite. Her and her Dad together, they look like the Bee Gees sans Maurice (which is, after all, exactly what the Bee Gees are now). In fact Baby Lissa did on the back seat what baby Lissa does when she is in the bounty-hunting "field": that is to say, fuck all.

If she was a stray niece or a stepdaughter Dog would have kicked her off the team as quicky as he kicked off that weird drug ingester Justin, his wigger nephew; but since she is a flesh-of -his-flesh daughter he keeps her around and lets her slide along while Dog tells himself outrageous untruths about his daughter's mettle and efficacy.

Anyway they're all on the back seat and the ice-head stay-at-home-mom goes, "I was straight for fifteen years." Already at this point this had the awful ring of exhausted familiarity to me. "What started you off again," Dog mutters - scarcely interested himself.

"My father died," she said, and I thought then: "Haven't I heard this ballad before?"

Every time the perpetrators tell Dog how they "fell" there is always some sad story that mitigates the sin. It's like the American Idol auditions on the backseat there. (Did you see, incidentally, the recent round of American Idol auditions? People were seriously trying to wreak pathos from the fact that they had asthma. One girl who was in her late twenties complained to the panel that her parents had got divorced last year. She was a grown adult who lived away from home! Isn't it a statistical probability, by now, that the average American is the child of a "broken home"?) But this dead ur-vater motif... even Dog felt it was hooey, he goes gruffly, "Well, she admitted that she wasn't even close to her old man so it's just so much deflection of existential responsibility."

Then they arrested some worthless hoodlum gangbanger who was hiding in his mother's attic. The mother swore blind that Sonny wasn't there but she and all her swearing could not defeat the paranormal nose of "Youngblood" who says sotto voce to Dog, "I smell a female rat, cap'n, permission to go in?" Dog nodded in assent and sure enough they dragged the son out of the attic and the mother stood there coolly chawing tobacco as they did it. Like she was thinking, "Waal you got to try and beat the rap well innit." I laughed savagely - she had been shown to be a loathsome liar on television but it seems she didn't give a pfennig for the "television audience at home" or what they might think. She answered only to her personal genius of the hearth.

This seems the sign of the age - more people are appearing on television every day and they care less and less what the viewing audience at home thinks. This is not, as the anthropologists would say, a shame culture. Like: there are shows about overweight people where the contestants go through all manner of degradation violation and exposure and you wonder, "Do these people not have work-colleagues or schoolmates who will tease them to the point of suicide for this?" Maybe I grew up in a crueller time and place but we got teased for the smallest flaws in Sonning Common in the 1980s, I'll tell you. The averge schoolchild was both a sadist and a pedant, which is a critical hybrid indeed. And in that day there was no panel, with Randy, Simon and Posh Spice, there to sympathise because you had asthma or a weight problem.

You were simply given "grundies" and henceforth dispatched promptly with "bundles down the dip."

Anyway, I saw that and I thought, "My mum would have shopped me to the bountyhunter in a heartbeat and I am a better man for it." Mothers, don't commit perjury on television!

So they arrested the son, and there he was on the backseat and Dog is lecturing him against his anti-social affectation of carrying a loaded gun everywhere he would go. Then with that boring drivel out of the way Dog leans over and says, "What do your tattoos say?"

(I have seen this line used on the L train out of Bedford Avenue, only it was delivered on that occasion by a salivating old man leaning over a female hipster. Amazingly the girl was all too willing to describe at tedious length what her tattoos meant. I think this eventually, by dint of sheer boringness, fairly killed the lecherous old man's ardour and he abruptly returned to his introspective activity of "pocket billiards.")

Meanwhile the crook says to Dog that his biggest tattoo says, "All My Sins Will Be Forgiven" and he next tells Dog that he used to be "a dancer at church." Dog is suitably impressed by this. You could tell this by the way his eyebrows shot up. I was only thinking, "Since when do they have dancers at church?"

The mind boggles. What would the Reverend Cotton Mather say to hear this to-day?

And meanwhile Dog was all shocked, after all these years, still shocked that somebody who goes to church could at the same time be a gun-toting criminal.

This in America yet!

"Charlie Manson Eyes"

"God loves everybody, including these guys." - Duane Chapman

"Lord thank-you for this day, bless us as we go full blast." - Duane Chapman

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog pursued this perpetrator in Colorado who Dog eloquently and insightfully said looked like "Wild Bill Hickock!" Then, squinting at his mugshot, Dog covered up the lower part of the perp's face and chuckled "Manson eyes!"

("Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the Colorado small-time ex-con

The eyes of the very learned criminal mastermind." )

The bounty hunters like to mess around with the image of their quarries and make personal jokes about their faces, who they look like &c. On a Halloween episode there was some biker tattoo artist asshole who they said looked like a pumpkin. They cut out the photo of his head and made it a pumpkin shape.

This particular perp today had posed for the police mugshot with his head held back, staring down his nose, so the bounty hunters couldn't tell if he had hair or if he was bald. I coughed awkwardly, painfully recognising this tactic from my own life.

Anyway they caught the Hicock-Manson guy at a trailer park. Like most felons, he was arrested without his shirt on. The guy was rambunctious and scrambling and sliding all over the place. Jumped out of a window and dumped his stash of crank. Dog caught him, wrestled him to the ground and unnecessarily made fun of his bald head.

Dog has got some nerve making fun of anyone's hair loss - he's quite patently thinning on top himself. He scrapes what hair he has all over his head in an intricate four-dimensional pattern that cannot be described by conventional contemporary mathematics or mechanics. Dog's hairstyle is in fact like an M.C. Escher drawing.

The perp was embarrassed to have been arrested in front of his neighbours. He spontaneously went from scrabbling about half-naked in the dirt to being all Victorian and genteel. He groaned, "All the neighbours think this is some crazy beef. My God---"

Dog was not exactly sensitive; he chuckled, "Nooooo, it's all right, it's a trailer court, it's not the Taj Mahal."

The perpetrator duly got his cigarette and his opportunity to cool off and tell his sad story-- and here I became confused. The perp told how he had managed to get his life back in order after a phase of chronic heroin addiction and petty criminal bungling, and that his life since had been just "dynamite!" He went on, "I met a nice dame. Kids call me Dad. Everything's okay. I mean when I'm not loaded I'm a not unpleasant motherfucker. Then Nine-Eleven hits and I get kicked out of a job..."

Here I stopped listening and frowned. How exactly, I was wondering to myself, did the events of September 11th impact the job of this man living in a Colorado trailer park? The nefarious influence of the Reverend Bin Laden is notoriously evident in much mischief abroad, I concede, but can it really be discerned in this ex-con losing his job somewhere in Colorado?

The black fingernail of disgusting evil is long indeed and rather like a hydra!

"The Lion and The Lamb –– And That D___ Dog."

Sometimes Dog makes a big rollicking deal of an assignment when it could be done perfectly simply. He complicates things unnecessarily to create tension. Like on the episode "Father and Son." Leland called his father over to "the big island" to assist in what was supposedly a troublesome case. It was so difficult that Leland couldn't handle it alone.

Dog walked into Leland's office and phoned up the felon. The felon's name was "Paki," which in England at least is a racist slur but obviously this is not so in Waikiki. Dog asked Paki to come over to the office. Paki agreed to do so, and said "I'll be there in half an hour."

"He's probably so high he don't know what he's doing," Leland mumbled, piqued that it was all going so smoothly.

Dog laughed dramatically and said "I love an ambush!"

I was thinking, what ambush? You phoned the man up and he agreed to come in.

Because this was too easy, Dog decided to "stir the pot" and obfuscate matters for no reason. He bade Leland now phone Paki again and impress upon him that he must come by now because they were auditing and his father was mad at him. Then Dog walks out onto the veranda, saying "I hate to watch my son lie so I'll be out here."

Leland got on the speaker-phone, and just as he had begun talking to Paki, Dog walked back into the room and pulled Leland's pony-tail. It doesn't take much to confuse Leland and this was all it took. He was stammering on the phone and reeling.

Afterwards, Leland was sort of miffed, you could see, and Dog obviously knew in his heart of hearts that he had been an irresponsible pillock because now he was making up elaborate rationales for why he pulled his son's pony-tail. "I wanted to get Leland to sound good and mad on the phone to fool the felon," he said.

Then they went about setting a trap for Paki. Dog waited in the office while Leland sat in an undisclosed location outdoors ("the mosquito patch") and Tim Chapman was down the street. Dog then got his nephew "Justin" to dress up as an "ice-head" and coached him in how to act like the aforementioned "ice-head." This seemingly involved jogging on the spot and shaking about. Justin was meant to accost the felon on his way up to the bailbondsman office and so follow him to the office in case he suddenly tried to escape.

None of this made any sense to me. If the felon was going to come into the office, why would he suddenly try to escape in the last hundred yards between his car and the office?

As it turned out, Paki walked into the office as meek as a lamb and Dog said "You're under arrest, hold out your hands," and Paki coolly complied and the arrest was mundane. Paki goes, "I want to work for you, Dog." The felons seldom put up a fight. All Dog's gilding and filligree was pointless.

"I like the arrest by appointment," Dog crowed regardless. "We tricked him real good."

Gotta fill thirty minutes somehow.

Another time Dog created unnecessary complications by phoning up the quarry's landlady and saying, unbidden, "This is Dog." He turned to the camera and goes "Ah she recognised my voice anyway." The egotism on this guy. The brass! So now the felon had full warning and then a chase was necessitated.

Later Dog had the temerity to go "Somebody told them we were after them."

They caught a felon and she told Dog about how her daughter had died. Dog goes, "That's one of the saddest fricking stories I ever heard."

He wanted to cry but he wasn't quite upset enough.

This episode was a special focus on Leland. It was like "Secret Origins" of Leland, which is good because Leland is the most cryptic and mysterious character on the show. He is the Snake Eyes of the Dog set. He is the one character who can actually hold his own in a fight so he is the one always sent up to the front door. Can you imagine Duane Lee in a brawl? Duane Lee is always told to go "round the back" of the house. Endless shots off him milling around in back yards across Hawaii. I don't know why Dog even bothers to tell him any more. Duane Lee must know by now that his place is round the back of the house.

My wife said "Leland's got such big ears... and a lot of air in between."

[...]

I hope you liked my latest notes on Dog the Bounty Hunter.

"Dog the Bounty Hunter: A Novel."

Since 1993 I have had the irresistible compulsion to write a novel, but when it comes down to it I only rouse idle trivial thoughts and bop them around dully like a kitten playing cup and ball - fetid leaves swept up from the flagstones which flare for a spell, flicker and duly settle again in a different corner.

Banana leaves -- sycamore leaves -- my leaves are autumnal and broke - - -

I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees / And before dying, I want to share these poems of my soul / My poems are soft green / My poems are also flaming crimson /My poems are like a wounded fawn seeking refuge in the forest.

This is another clump of the self-same dry leaves. A pot-pourri for the maw of Tophet, if you will allow the flourish. (If you will not, disregard the last sentence.)

I thought: there is a Faulknerian dynastic novel lurking within the seemingly banal and berserk goings-on of the bounty-hunting Chapman family.

Dog the Bounty Hunter is aired on TV in a muddle of repeats from different years in which we are tumbled back and forth through the time-space continuum willy-nilly in the company of the Chapman family. It is an anti-chronological negative-zone whirlpool in which even an experienced time-traveller could get confused. Even so, the current season of Dog the Bounty Hunter is easily recognisable from among the others.

In the new episodes, Beth looks pronouncedly younger and Dog looks conspicuously older.

Dog has lost weight and his lower eyelids have accordingly sunk eight inches as a result and he now looks gaunt and noble -- thwarted and impotent, like a Biblical patriarch. When he stares dolefully into the mist (mistily into the dole queue), as his family skirmishes around him, mace cans in their hands, I get to idly daydreaming about writing a thinly-veiled novel about Dog the Bounty Hunter and his family. The inevitable ageing and the doomed onset of wisdom would be my subject. Arms and the man would be my subject. My conjectures would be followed to their logical endpoints for a rip-roaring legend for all the family.

(Here everything disintegrates into sketchy notes written in a fever.)

Dog: firstly he is older. Obviously so. You can see his mind is no longer on the job.

His vacant expression at inapt times.

Reinstating his nephew Justin was clearly a poor choice and a clear sign that Dog had lost his tactical edge. Justin was and always will be a lovable fuck-up. Everybody knows this but Dog doggedly insisted on giving this dog another day. They brought Justin back to the pack and this proves to have been a fatal right poor decision later on in the novel.

Important: Leland has an affair with Beth. This was my first spark of inspiration, I must admit. As Dog gets older and Beth seemingly gets younger, she starts to look at the son in a way she never used to. She is a tough woman with a hide like a rhinocerous and a heart like an elephant. She needs constant warming-up and upkeep.

They carry on outrageously to the disgust of everybody except Dog who doesn't (or doesn't seem to) notice it. If he does notice it, he doesn't apparently care. Also Baby-Lissa (nearly wrote Amy-Liisa there) is so stunned by TV fame that she follows Beth around uncritically, narcissistically.

We, the readers, will have the inside knowledge that Dog does know about it; and he freely lets Beth and Leland "run around" together because Dog feels a dreadful guilt - no, not guilt - regret that he can no longer sexually satisfy Beth in the way to which she is accustomed.

Important to insert a quote here from "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town."

Duane Lee, however, knows of the disgusting incestuous affair and he at least shan't stand for the outrage of his father's good name and virtue. This is the set-up for the ancient mythological ur-tale of The Two Warring Brothers. Cain and Abel -- Duane Lee and Leland.

Duane Lee, in this season, has been filmed "working out in the gym" - assisting the one-legged Justin and helping him build his muscles up "so he can be tough like me." This is something of a strange character development for us viewers, who are used to seeing Duane Lee as a bit of a goof-off second-rater, a fat coward and a sneak. Dog always sends Duane Lee "round the back" of a perp's shack - where nothing ever happens. Dog places more responsibility in the lap of Baby-Lissa than the ample lap of Duane Lee for goodness' sake!

Anyway so there is this laughable idea that Duane Lee has been out in the wilderness building himself up into a Tough Guy, like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo - training, as I say, with that dependable misfit One-Legged Justin. Training for his bout with Leland.

Meanwhile Beth has had various surgical procedures to make herself thinner and younger-looking. She also spends more time - too much time it is whispered - with her personal assistants, who woo and wow her with ideas from New York and Los Angeles -- Paris, Milan and London. Even some ideas from Luxembourg.

Beth becomes more urban and "cool" just as Dog is become more rural and foggy and fazed-out. Beth is also ever more cruel and bloodthirsty on bounties. She is taking out her stress on the perps, just as Dog is becoming more humane and philosophical and magnanimous with them. Obvious rifts emerge, both in matters of bounty-hunting technique and in the vagueries of the boudoir.

Maybe it all comes to a head when Beth violently murders a perp who after all only has one measly misdemeanour for "alleged illegal custodianship of a propelled vehicle". Dog is shocked and wants Beth to turn herself in to the "County Sheriff" or the "Federal Marshall" [?] but she won't - worse, she makes Dog collude with her, forcing him at gunpoint and in tears to bury the corpse.

"Now you're implicated, Big Daddy!" she drawls through a curled lip - and sniggers.

Dog sobs, leaning on his spade. The scene resembles Millet's Angelus.

Dog becomes more and more abstracted as the novel goes on. Falls in love with a horse.

Duane Lee becomes crazier and crazier, under the absurd illusion that he is a tough guy.

Youngblood - you wonder about Youngblood. Where is he? I wonder this too. Youngblood, I decided, is craftily exiled from the gang by Beth's "Macchiavelian machinations"; she manipulates events so that Youngblood and Dog have a final falling-out over a seemingly trivial thing. (Cigarettes, say - - or the Samoan secretary.)

This could be connected cleverly to the real-life allegations that Youngblood was caught jerking off in his car a few years ago.

Anyway I'd have it end so that Youngblood comes through finally to redeem Dog's shame, his cuckolded humiliation, but at a horrific cost. Leland kills Justin and Duane Lee with consummate ease (he has, I should perhaps have mentioned, become a diabolical, monosyllabic ninja killer by this point; finds himself in the sinister, dazed, doomed thrall of Beth). Even so Youngblood kills Leland with nunchuks and then, in a heroic fury, Beth.

Dog enters the room hazy from an afternoon catnap to find Youngblood standing over the corpses and he goes, "Whu-- Tim-- bra! -- you killed Bethy!" He and Youngblood tazer eachother and that's how it ends - with the two men tragically locked in each other's tazers, electricity pulsing through them.

Incidentally, has a novel ever ended with a tazer duel before?