"Living It Up At The Cock Fights."

"He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos."

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses.

I was watching a Dog the Bounty Hunter episode which I knew I'd already seen, which is - as I said yesterday - not far different from giving up altogether and freely, deliberately, frittering away your God-given life. It is not far different, I say, from cocking a pistol into your lower jaw and spinning the barrel playfully then pulling the trigger just to see what might come of it.

Anyway, that happened and this episode involved the team chasing a slippery character who goes by the colourful name of CHESTER CHRISOSTOMOS ("gold-mouthed," I thought, a good and dutiful scholarly "spalpeen" and remembranceful reader of James Joyce), who had retreated to the deepest darkest wilds of Hawaii. He had, in the idiom of his confreres, "dug in."

This man CHESTER GOLD-MOUTHED withdrew from society not - like Thoreau - to be closer to his thoughts and God-in-Nature, but to partake in low gambling and cock-fighting. He found a certain rural transcendental calm in bloodletting and mayhem.

The team busted in on one of his associates out way out in the wilds and the guy had dead chickens all over his yard and was actually wearing a baseball cap that said "COCK FIGHTING". The man goes, "I am not involved in cock-fighting."

They didn't find Chester. He had a way of disappearing into the night.

So on day three or four, Dog announced to the camera his revised methodology: "The plan is the boys are riding the motorcycles down in there, Baby Lisa's parked out at his mother's house and Beth and I are going to be up on the ridge." Then, without a trace of irony, he said: "We learned this tactic from Custer."

Their enterprise was about as successful as Custer's. Baby Lisa abandoned her post to use the toilet and the thing fell apart from there. "We're kind of stuck here," Dog admitted, "so we've got to try to make a possibility out of the impossible."

This seemingly involved them browbeating Chester's girl CARLA to no avail, then blundering aimlessly through the brush. At one point Dog picked up a breeze-block and hurled it into a bush. I thought, "What if Chester Chrisostomos had of been in there? He'd of been killed." The methodology further involved Duane Lee and Leland building plank bridges and falling into quicksand. The A&E website amazingly has the transcript of this episode, which includes this wonderful exchange, which since we have the apparatus I simply must quote liberally from:

00:54:16	Right now we found this freakin' pig farm, we can't find a way to get around it.
00:54:20	There's a big, huge moat.
00:54:22	We got Leland going to go get a plank, and then we're gonna drop it like the military and freakin' attack.
00:54:31	Go, just bounce like a rabbit.
00:54:33	I'm right behind you.
00:54:36	( laughing ) Are you going ?
00:54:44	No way, bro.
00:54:48	Okay, you guys, it's getting dark.
00:54:50	We gotta put this on hold until tomorrow.

As you can plainly see from the transcript, they conclude their "methodology" - as usual - by going home as soon as it gets dark. It's really a pity that they stop at sundown, so they can put the kids to bed. Because as I have established in a previous essay, most criminal enterprise tends to take place after sundown. Maybe this is another tactic cribbed from that master strategist CUSTER.

In the interests of brutal honesty they really ought to show the scenes at home after a day of bounty-hunting, after the Chapmans have "clocked off," and everybody is sitting in the TV room watching TV. Like that scene a few weeks ago where they showed Duane Lee dolefully watching Storage Wars. Gary Boy stuffing his face with too much pasta. They could have ingeniously juxtaposed these scenes of domestic calm with orgiastic, bacchanalian scenes of Chester living it up at the cockfights. Chester with a chicken's head in his mouth, blood around his jaws as he heaves on an ice pipe.

[...]

As I mentioned, I had seen this episode before, but happily I couldn't seem to remember the ending. How they caught the bad guy and such. Usually I remember some sweet peculiarity from the arrest and the corollary Backseat Redemption Scene. This time I couldn't remember any such thing. It became clear why not in the last minute or so, when it turned out that one night, while the Chapmans were innocently dozing watching TV at home, the police burst in on Chester's rural compound and arrested him. It was one of those episodes, where they lost out to the FILTH. The police, it seems, don't play fair. They have an annoying habit of going after criminals even after the sun has gone down.

[...]

I wonder how much they pay per hour for somebody to transcribe the dialogue from an episode. It'd be a lot of fun I expect and you'd certainly improve your written English as you worked.

"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."

"Crime Tips For Junior G-Men"; Or, "The Eye That Sees"

Watching old episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter at lunchtime when my patience for the Monkees in their facetious--sophomoric phase has run out and I cannot make it through Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass---

Watching old episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter because I no longer recall which I have seen and which I haven't, they have turned into one colossal narrative unceasing and unswerving and overwhelming. Since I don't know if I've seen it or not I have to watch it, alway.

Watching old episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter because I have lost all direction in life...

In this episode Dog tries to inveigle some "clew-hunting tips" into the chaotic proceedings, to give his show a vaguely documentary air, like the sort Chester Gould used to put in Dick Tracy Sunday strips --- and they make about as much sense as the Dick Tracy ones.

Dog goes, "The thing to do when looking at a perp's eyes, to get their full measure, is to hold the mugshot upside down so that you can tell which eye stands out more."

Here a pause; no comment from the assembled extended Chapman clan.

"You didn't know that did you?" Dog says to Leland.

You can tell that Leland is thinking, "No, Dad, I didn't 'know' that... for the very good reason that it isn't true."

There is a hush in the room as the whole family looks at Dog, stupidly grinning, and thinks as one: "This guy is strictly full of prime hooey."

Later on in the episode the snow-capped bungler Bobby Brown fucks up in classic form and leads the crew to the wrong address... couldn't read his own wretched scrawl... and so they send Duane Lee to the back door to hover in the garden and they surround the shack and they bombard the tenant, when this poor old run-down flea-bitten revenant lurches to the front door. He looks a lot like the Gravedigger from EC Comics, at the door in slippers and mom jeans and he says to Dog, rather mystically, "I've been wanting to meet you for a long time," as if it had been prophesied by the three wyrd sisters that Dog would come along. To which Dog responds singularly ungraciously, saying "Yeah, well you just have."

Like, yeah you just met me and that just happened and now it is in the past.

The poor guy waves pathetically at Beth then.

______________________________________

Speaking of criminality, I was in the Thing on Manhattan Ave sifting the shelves for Renaissance literature a few months back and I saw a book about Hate Crimes. I misread it and thought it was called I Hate Crime. An excellent sentiment and a worthy title.

"Kibbles 'N 'Bits 'N 'Shit."

"Adversity is the good man's shining time." EDWARD YOUNG.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a standard spiel, used by Dog and his bounty-mad gang, by which they sentimentally justify their chosen avocation.

Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal;'tis no sin for a 

                                             man to labour in his vocation.

Lest onlookers think that Dog is a grubbing, mercenary cur, he always reminds the perp and the public and the "studio audience at home" that if he doesn't collect the bounty, he foregoes the amount and that money is stolen directly from his "children's table."

What exactly is this "children's table"? I have sometimes wondered. Do the little kids - Gary Boy and all his tiny uncles and aunts who are actually younger than he is---

"I'm my own Grandpa"

--- all sit at a miniature table that is overlaid with banknotes and coins? Is this the celebrated "children's table" so often mentioned in these speeches?

(While I am on the subject, I might as well admit that I don't have the least understanding of the basics of bounty-hunting. Why is Dog foregoing the money? Does he put the money up in the first instance? Then how does he actually earn any money? At best he would break even; at worst he would be ruined. Can anybody explain bounty-hunting to me?)

(On reflection, don't bother.)

Anyway, in the episode I watched today Beth muffed up the standard spiel. She went:

"They all think they're tough. But you know what? They're none tougher than me when it means they're gonna take the food off my children's table. Because then the lion comes out!"

[Pause. Beth turns and starts to get into her SUV. Stops. Turns and adresses the camera again.]

"The lioness."

Beth when she was saying this was putting on her so-called "street-Hawaiian" voice. She goes, "Sistah."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was watching an episode of the show recently and they were in a very specific situation, waiting for a perpetrator who was deep in a rural, jungle area of the "Big Island" and they were going to catch him before he fled in the morning. Then some music played and the lyrics were ridiculously apt for their situation. It was like a "nu metal" song that went, more or less:

"I've got to get up early

To escape the shack

To travel through the canebrake

To escape from the bounty hunters

Whose names are Leland and Dog

Youngblood and Beth

Not forgetting Duane Lee"

"They're coming up the back roads in their SUVs

I'm on my moped

I'm an ice addict

Charged with 'paraphernalia possession'

With a history of spousal abuse."

"Bethy In Disguise With Glasses"

Judy in disguise,
Well, what you aiming for,
A circus of horrors, yeah,
Well that's what you are.
You made me a life of ashes,
I guess I'll just take your glasses

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog, Beth and Youngblood are on the "big island" planning a crafty trap. They aim to catch the female perp as she arrives at the airport. Dog goes, "We're going to have Beth sneak up on her in disguise."

You could see the incredulity in Youngblood's eyes. He was patently thinking, "What are you going to do, Dog? Give Beth radical breast reduction surgery before she leaves the house ?" Of course, proper etiquette dictated that he didn't say any such thing; but canny viewers could read the meaning in his facetious smirk.

Then Beth comes in, wearing a straw hat and some sunglasses and goes, "This is my disguise."

She said, "I didn't want to wear something too flamboyant and eye-cathing."

Staring at her colossal "bosom," which is after all Beth's most prominent attribute, Youngblood goes, "With that straw hat on you look like a completely different person!!"

No he didn't actually say that but he should have.

I should write the script for this show.

Of course it isn't scripted I'm just joking with you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The summarised description for another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter says:

"Dog hunts a man he knows very little about and does not like."

What else, after all, need you say?

"Give 'Em Enough Rope, Brah"

More Notes From the Back Seat---

Freddy, the short spare verminous wight who they caught asleep in his beat-up flat-bed truck surrounded by baggies containing "pharmaceuticals" and miscellaneous stolen plunder and a switchblade close to hand...

This was Freddy, who so wildly over-reacted when they took him to the old back-seat, like they were going to kill him when they just offered him a cigarette. Maybe Freddy thought Dog Chapman was like the Krays, who would similarly offer a foeman a cigarette, and when the foeman opened his maw to take the cigarette a Kray would punch him in the open mouth, breaking his jaw in twain. It's a handy trick to know, no doubt. But Duane Chapman is no Reggie Kray.

Freddy was being dramatic. Beth said he was "an old-style convict," which is to say institutionalized and paranoid. He thought that they were going to beat him green and yellow when they were only offering to loosen his cuffs.

YOUNGBLOOD: Freddy, are you hungry? You want something before we go in?

FREDDY (THE PERP): I'll take a rope.

YOUNGBLOOD: Nah you don't need a rope. Listen, you know what... you never know what's gonna be tomorrow.

[PAUSE]

FREDDY: No, I know what's tomorrow.

YOUNGBLOOD: Nah, brah, a rope is, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem... The only advice I can really tell you, brah, is to start praying about it.

[Camera cuts to the harrowed, sober look on DUANE LEE'S face.]

[DOG bounces onto the back seat.]

DOG: My brother said you said something about a rope. Don't be stupid.

FREDDY: I'd let you shoot me, you know that?

DOG: But brother, I wouldn't be the one to do that. Right? I'm the guy that helps you out of the water when you're drownded. So I can't be that kind of guy.

Dialogue like this you can't buy. You couldn't make it up! My wife, who used to gamely chuckle and gasp along at the various antics and saws and cutting up and sich a gittin upstairs of Dog and his family, now haughtily disdains it as "vulgar, coarse, white trash" and "a libel on the good people of Oklahoma." Never mind that Duane Chapman was born in Colorado and the show is set in Hawaii. My wife has lost her sense of humour. Acts all hoity-toity like just watching this show will lower her IQ. Now she watches High Society and has taken Jules Kirby as her guru. Then she flips bloops and flops across the channel wavelengths and settles on watching The Hills.

I don't even hate The Hills. I find its vapidity freeing in a zen-mass-mind-ultra-suicide sort of way. Watching The Hills you know positively that no matter what befalls you hereafter it can't get worse than this moment right here sitting on the couch watching Spencer and Heidi canoodling and crooning unparalleled bollocks.

My least favourite character is Audrina.

To return to Dog, The Bounty Hunter: The difference between Dog and The Hills is that the viewer shall find illumination (nearly wrote humiliation) along the back-by-ways and the dirt-paths as we goe through the show together. Like The Amazing Race it opens up your skull with new and radical experiences. It doesn't simply confirm what you already knew (that Spencer and Heidi are voidoids and Brody Jenner is a horse's ass.) I would not likely run into a Hawaiaan wife-beating meth-gulping string-bean scum-bag on the streets where I live. In Greenpoint our wife-beaters are Polish and drink paint-stripper. Of course in Williamsburg, on Bedford Avenue, everybody seems like a character off The Hills. Plus The Hills is scripted so you shan't find folk saws like those that generously dot the above dialogue.

That said...

They should totally have a cross-over, brah.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I liked how in this one episode Beth broke Dog's pinkie finger half in two and he goes "The fuck's that for?" The editors and the censors missed that because they kept it in.

Brah I laughed dude.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Speaking of calling people "brah," when is the prop'rest time to do so prithee? I saw on one episode a man called his own wife "brah". I said to my wife, "Wife - brah - is it right to call your wife 'brah'?"

I thought "brah" was short for "brother" but wife reckoned it was Hawaiian for something more profound.

Da kine.

Urban Dictionary says:

"This is the slang term for "bro" which is slang for brother..a slang inside a slang. THIS ORIGINATED IN THE STATE OF HAWAII! for those who think that it originated in Southern California or where ever, your are miss informed [sic- E.N.]. It is the pigeon (English-Hawaiian slang) word that is used state-wide in Hawaii not only by surfers but by all people born and raised in Hawaii of all racial groups. And it pains me when I hear cali haole [sic - E.N.] tourist say it.

[Examples:]

sup brah
howsit brah
a' brah we go beach
ho brah where you stay

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brah

Subsection 4 states: "Meaning: My brother/ close associate/ cousin/ or Kama'aina (person FROM HAWAII)."

Subsection 2 says: "Hawaiian Pidgeon Talk for friend. Orgin: 60's Hawaii

In kauai my cousin started it! ha!"

The people on Urban Dictionary are always useful for penetrating the hitherto murky mysteries of vernacular. One subscriber signs himself "Da Kine Fish OutaH WataH."

Subsection 13 says "brah" is: "How one tool refers to, or greets another."

Let this be the end of this worthy meditation. I still find it peculiar that a male biped might refer to his female spousal helpmeet as "brah". It's like when Ed Long used to call his girfriend Emma Halling "man".

"Emma man, what's for dinner brah?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tough old convict though he was, bedraggled and hellbound a vulture though he was, however vile a killer he was I say, by the end of the journey Dog was literally dabbing tears away from Freddy's bleary eyes. As Dog said later, with fading sensitivity, "That was sad. Ker-BLAm, ker-BLAM."

I laughed at one point when the talk descended somewhat from the arcane old hobo folk-talk noted at the start of this entry, to the transcendental-bathetic bushwa we know all too well from previous late-night back-seat bull sessions. "Tough convict at first," Dog said (sounding rather like Herbie Popnecker), "then you mentioned his little girl and all he could do is cry. Very surprised."

And here was the key, don't you see?; Dog "mentioned his little girl" and the old-style small-time hood fell quite to pieces. "How old is she Freddy?" Dog goes. "Eight," sobs Freddy. "Seven!" coos Dog, who forgot his ear-trumpet that day. "Eight," says Freddy, clearer now and through grit teeth. "She's eight years old, pretty soon she'll be thirteen," Dog carries on. Well, Dog, I think I can be more precise than you in this instance. In five years she will be thirteen. Freddy should have said, "Yeah, and...? In fifty years we'll all be dead but what's that got to do with anything?" Unfortunately Freddy was pretty much a broken man by this point, reduced to lowest, vilest plankton, and he had nothing new to add to the banter.

It's really a crying shame he didn't say that, because it's true too - - - in fifty years we probably will all be dead.

Except for Heidi and Spencer.

Puppies "4" Sale.

Watched another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where the cops beat Dog to the suspect. Should this show be renamed Dog, That Whipped Puppy? Should this show be renamed Cringing Cur Cowed by a Rolled-Up Newspaper? Or should this show be renamed, succinctly, Cops?

Nothing daunted, after wasting fifteen minutes of my time with a case that goes nowhere, Bobby Brown and Dog and his family now rallied and went after a female petty thief. Surely even they can’t bitch this one up.

OR SO YOU’D THINK.

Perp worked out of a “video store” as a "model" and so Dog says, “Bobby you go into the store and pretend you want to hire her and get an appointment with her and then we’ll pounce.”
At this time Bobby is dressed in a t-shirt that says in large letters “Property of Bobby Brown, Bail Bonds” and he has his big  bounty-hunter badge swinging from around his neck. Surreptitious as ever. He flaps into the store and soon he bounces out again, saying, “He’s setting up an appointment now.”
Here be stealth.

So they're like a bunch of Scooby-Doo detectives scurrying and panicking in the forecourt of a mini-strip-mall and they go, "Quick she's coming, let's hide!" They duck into a building and Dog goes, as they scram through the plain wooden door, "Can you see through the peep-hole." A moment later as the door shuts: "Is there a peep hole."

The room they were in was a sort of abandoned seminar room.

When they "pounced" on the girl she just passively stood there and singularly failed to enter into the excitement of the moment. It's often that way on this show; the bounty-hunters get all worked up and enthused about the job and the chase and the thrill of the hunt, the spoor of the quarry, view halloo! and tally-ho!, right up until the moment when the perp has been caught and the perp is so bored and bland that the illusion is dashed. This girl simply misunderstood the arrest warrant. She said she didn't want to check in with the police until she had paid off her cell-phone charges.
This is, I believe, precisely what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil."

Another idiocy while we’re at it: On the side of my Kellogs “Smart Start” cereal box (“Dumb Start” more like - a vapid cereal we bought while they were on offer and now that I have established conclusively that I hate this shit we have about ten boxes to go) is an offer to get the DVD of Marley and Me. What I ask you could possibly go wrong with a post-suicide-attempt Owen Wilson, a labrador puppy and Jennifer Aniston as the stars. Anyway, on the side of the box it says, “Get a $3 rebate when you laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me.”
I naturally thought of the following “exchange”:
“What if I don’t laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me?”
“Then you don’t get the rebate.”