"And O Where Is Duane Lee Today On This Day?" Or, "Baby Lyssa Said..."

The gang went down to Alabama, where they pursued a young lady ("Shakeisha") with a bad "rap sheet". They tracked her down and tricked her into coming to a food court car park –– the preferred site for toxic smackdowns.

They caught Shakeisha fairly effortlessly, with the usual excess of hollering and waving of empty bazookas.

As she shoved Shakeisha onto the backseat Beth said, "This isn't as bad as what you think it is."
Shakeisha snuffled, "It look like it, though."
Beth said, "You have two attempted murders on your history."
Shakeisha said, "I'm not that person though."

Strange paradox –– you tried to kill people on two separate occasions but you're not that person by any means. It's true. It could happen to anyone and they're really blameless after all.

Watching this episode I suddenly ("pointlessly") thought, plaintively and possibly for the first time, "Whatever happened to Duane Lee?"

I did rudimentary research (having no patience for anything more) and found an interview with Baby Lyssa, about her new book. It seems there is some bad blood between Baby Lyssa and Beth, and it seems also that Dog takes Beth's side against his children. There was talk of Beth's malefic influence over the internet –– that she reads adverse criticism and takes it personally and vindictively, and that Beth hath a long arm indeed and it is said that her fingernails are even longer than her arm.

I read all this about Beth's long arm and her fingernails and wondered wistfully whether she'd perhaps ever read my humble "feuilletons" on her family and whether [bashful, blushing] she ever wanted to send some redneck faux-bikers round here to duff me up!

In this same interview with Baby Lyssa, she was rightly miffed by an interview lately bruited all over Hollywood town in which Beth had said that Leland, who stayed right adamant with the Chapman traveling circus, and not with his brothers and sisters, because he was following the money (Baby Lyssa said), was the "son that loved Dog the best." (Recalling that well-discussed epithet from the gospels, "The disciple whom Jesus loved.") Apparently Lyssa and Duane Lee laughed quite savagely at this report.

Their laughter hath set them free!

"A Mitzvah On Your First-Born." Or, "Sound, Fury, And So On."

"That's a good question. That--the explanation of that whole book is in that. It began with the picture of the little girl's muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn't have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw."
     William Faulkner on the genesis of The Sound and the Fury. From Faulkner in the University.

"Cry baby, Luster said. Aint you shamed. We went through the barn. The stalls were all open. You aint got no spotted pony to ride now, Luster said. The floor was dry and dusty. The roof was falling. The slanting holes were full of spinning yellow. What do you want to go that way, for. You want to get your head knocked off with one of them balls."
      The Sound and the Fury. 

Notes from a recent episode:––
                                                    thoughts resulting:––

1. Dog, post-bust, saying "God bless" and "Aloha" to the cops as they part ways. He goes too far, and calls one of them "sweetheart".

2. Perp's name was Alfred.  Dog, that old dotard, staggered through the perp's home, hoarsely hollering for him to give himself up; calling him variously "Howard" and "Albert".

3. The team have those huge Rob Liefeld Cable and X-Force-style flame-thrower bazookas that they carry abroad with them, but they can't possibly fire bullets, so what exactly do they fire?

              A: Ping-pong balls.
              A: Hot air.
              A: Cotton candy.

4. This was the episode which introduced a new character, Leland's benighted son DAKOTA, to the cast. Followed the usual hazing that verges on child abuse. Leland sprayed Dakota in the eyes with mace and tazed him. Tackled him hard in the street and gave him "noogies". Then he sat him astride a female masturbation device and forced him to "go ten rounds atop it." I didn't see quite how this was relevant to the successful learning of crime-fighting techniques.

To properly mark the solemn dynastic quality of the episode, Leland gathered everybody on the "Big Island" where he would have them go in pursuit of the son of a man he had arrested seven years earlier.

Dakota had graduated that week and Leland obviously felt the undeniable pull of the years and the miracle of time passing and the cosmic cycles and equinoxes and solstices that mark a man's time on this paltry planet. He was waxing philosophical, reminiscent: "My son's graduating. I'm so proud. He wants to be a bounty hunter. I actually had Dakota in my arms when I walked up my graduation line. So for his graduation present I'm going to buy him his first truck."

I spent about half a minute trying to determine how the one situation in the dim past (the magnificent  babe in arms scene) led ipso facto to his decision in the present to buy Dakota a truck. Then I caught myself, remembered that this was Dog and Beth on the Hunt, and as such had no debt to reason, and dismissed the speculation utterly.

This episode was Faulknerian, and not just from all the dwelling on doomed, collapsing white dynasties hellbent on vicious self-destruction. No, and not just the Myth of the Lost Cause. Faulkner's hand seemed to be directing Leland's gobsmacked awe as he recalled how seven years previous he had hidden in a "little room by the gate" and waited for the old scoundrel to return. It came back to him irresistibly in a stream of consciousness, like Caddy in her muddy drawers watching through the window––

Now Leland was coming for the son of the old rascal. Fatherhood was in the episode –– inheritance –– blood crimes. The sins of the father visited on the head of the first-born.

Absalom, Absalom. Old Colonel Sutpen. A mitzvah on your first-born. The remains of the family, reclusive in the neglected tracts, hidden out in his ruined old mansion –– the bougainvillea, the neglected porch swing, and cetera.

To add spice to the mix, the old man himself was only now out of his seven year "stretch" and he blundered straight into the middle of the arrest.

As Leland was hunkering down in his old hiding place, as if in a divine pocket outside time –– Zachary in the tree ––  ecstatically feeling the onrush of time and empires and dynasties, the smallness of Man and the largeness of God, the old man came onto the set roaring profanities and picking a brawl with Dog. Meanwhile, the old man's girlfriend was sitting in the cab of the pick-up putting on lipstick by the dashboard light!

"So ironic," Dog mused after the anticlimactic arrest. Summing up. "So ironic that this is the second generation that Leland has arrested, he arrested the father years ago, now arrested the son. It's the third generation of bounty hunters. It's ironic that, you know, how the world turns."

It would've been nice to end it there with that universal thought for the day, but hey killed the moment rather by showing a preview of next week's show where Dog brays, "We ain't huntin' alligators. We ain't huntin' boar. We're huntin' a man."

“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."