Love Is a Racket - Hardcover

Ridley, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375401423 ISBN 13: 9780375401428

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

In his first novel since Stray Dogs, John Ridley offers up a brilliant noir farce about a small-time con man who finally gets it right just before it all goes wrong.
        
Everything's a racket for Jeffty Kittridge, a thirty- seven-year-old ex-wannabe scriptwriter living on the skids in Hollywood--the two-bit cons he pulls for spending money; the way he convinces himself that he's not a drunk between every shot of booze he kicks back; the way he tries to assure Dumas, the local shark, that he's just about to pay off his 15K debt . . . Except he's not good at any of that. He's been in jail twice (and the state's got a bad attitude about seeing someone the third time); that bug he just felt crawling up his neck is most likely the first installment of the DTs; and Dumas recently delivered a fairly emphatic payment-due reminder: a couple of his goons busted two of Jeffty's fingers. The fact is, Jeffty's a loser, big as they come, and things aren't about to change up for him anytime soon: "I would've felt . . . near terminally depressed," he tells us as his story begins to unfold, "but I was so used to my life all I felt was content."

Then he stumbles on salvation: a dirt-caked, street-hardened, exquisitely beautiful young homeless woman named Mona--Jeffty prefers to think of her as Angel--who inspires both his love and the idea for the perfect con. It's Jeffty's chance to hit it big, and to be set for good in his new life with his new love. "The thing about love," Jeffty declares, "is no matter how twisted, or wrong, or evil, it never dies." But as the momentum of the con carries him closer and closer to what he imagines will be a moment of blissed-out consummation with his angel Mona, Jeffty discovers there are some severe exceptions to his rule.

Smart, edgy, caustically funny, Love Is a Racket puts John Ridley in a darkly comic league of his own.

About this title

About the Author

John Ridley began his career as a stand-up comedian in New York before becoming a writer for several sitcoms, such as Martin, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The John Larroquette Show. Having done slave labor as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he has also, on occasion, worked with such visionaries as Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, and Ernie Pandish. This is his second novel. He lives on the West Coast somewhere.

From the Inside Flap

novel since <i>Stray Dogs,</i> John Ridley offers up a brilliant noir farce about a small-time con man who finally gets it right just before it all goes wrong.<br>        <br>Everything's a racket for Jeffty Kittridge, a thirty- seven-year-old ex-wannabe scriptwriter living on the skids in Hollywood--the two-bit cons he pulls for spending money; the way he convinces himself that he's not a drunk between every shot of booze he kicks back; the way he tries to assure Dumas, the local shark, that he's just about to pay off his 15K debt . . . Except he's not good at any of that. He's been in jail twice (and the state's got a bad attitude about seeing someone the third time); that bug he just felt crawling up his neck is most likely the first installment of the DTs; and Dumas recently delivered a fairly emphatic payment-due reminder: a couple of his goons busted two of Jeffty's fingers. The fact is, Jeffty's a loser, big as they come, and things aren't ab

Reviews

Ridley's second novel (after Stray Dogs, 1997) brings panache and a kooky premise to a familiar setting. Jeffty is an African American L.A. grifter whose hustles inevitably fail, whose screenplay everyone deems "beautiful" and whose plot to wring money from old-time movie mogul Moe Steinberg is as quintessentially Hollywood-gothic as a mansion on Mulholland Drive. Jeffty concocts the scam of a lifetime to enact revenge on his bookie, Dumas, whose goon breaks Jeffty's finger. Sadly for him and for us, Dumas proceeds to bump off Jeffty's best chance of making the payback money (and the story's most interesting character): Nellis, a wife-killing junkie who wins fortunes by applying Zen techniques to poker games. Jeffty is left to run his scam using a beautiful street girl, Mona, who bears an uncanny resemblance to James Dean's dead, sometime girlfriend, the real-life movie star Pier Angeli. It seems Steinberg may have orchestrated Dean's death in order to get close to Angeli. Jeffty's sure that when he sees this perfect replica, dressed up in 1950s clothes, Steinberg will refuse her nothing. While the swindle plays out, a cop called Dentphy pressures Jeffty to inform on Dumas. By the time the scam and story reach their climax, the characters don't know whom to trust and neither do readers. The preposterous plot is less important than Jeffty's voice, saturated with classic noir self-mockery and convincingly compromised morals. Even if Ridley ignores such glaring questions as why he keeps a gun he never uses, or why Dumas leaves Jeffty alone long enough to carry out his plan, die-hard fans of neo-pulp will forgive these slips with hardly a second thought. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Second thuggishly pulp-styled novel by Ridley, whose Stray Dogs (1997) was filmed as the Oliver Stone dud U Turn. As James M. Cain found and Jim Thompson later confirmed, the female is the deadlier of the species. Jeffty Kittridge, a scriptwriter who has written only one unsubmitted script (A Kick to the Heart), which the various lowlifes here read and pronounce beautiful, is a con man who adapts short-change ruses out of Thompson's The Grifters until he runs into the big con that can change his life (a turn also out of The Grifters). In the novel's first sentence, two of Jeffty's fingers are broken to spur him to round up the fifteen grand he owes bookie Dumas. Jeffty is an alky who hangs out with other heavy boozers at the Regent bar, but his boozings unconvincingly detailed and the bar is like a badly lighted movie set. Jeffty notices that Mona, a street beggar forever asking for change, is a ringer for Pier Angeli, once the love of James Dean, and he remembers that big producer Moe Steinberg still carries the torch for the late Pier. If he can clean up Mona and wave her in front of Moe, chances are he can get the bolus he owes Dumas out of Moe and save more fingers from getting broken. So he takes in Mona, pulls some low scams to get her done over by beauticians in the manner of Pier, and begins planting her in a bar Moe frequents. At last Moe shows up and bites on the bait. Meanwhile, vice cop Duntphy (a name hard even to think) locks up Jeffty to get him to put the skids to Dumas. The climax is a cat's-cradle of cons and deceptions. Good Cain novels are pleasures to reread, their turnings ever fresh. Each page here, though, has inky fingerprints smudging the original. May Ridley look into his soul next time instead of his bookcase. (First printing of 50,000) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Suspenseful as a slow-burning fuse, this vulgar and violent, down-to-the-pavement piece of fiction by the author of Stray Dogs (Ballantine, 1997), on which Oliver Stone's film U-Turn was based, first shocks and then stimulates the imagination. Its central figure and first-person narrator is a besotted thirtysomething "nobody" who looks at life through gray-tinted glasses and sees nothing but its drabness, its sordidness, and the futility of those who expect anything more of it. Would-be movie writer Jeffty Kittridge, with the complicity of a Pier Angeli look-alike, concocts a scheme to extract a healthy sum of cash from an old-time Hollywood mogul to pay off his $15,000 debt to a loan shark. Told crisply and without wasting a monosyllable, the story moves deftly to its well-concealed denouement. Along the way, however, young Kittridge is immersed in a variety of unrelievedly brutal situations, some of which stir the reader to revulsion. Cheerful? No. It's a thoroughgoing study in hopelessness without a free laugh in it; but it is also a strangely haunting drama. For larger collections.?A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First Things First

        Kraop was the sound that I heard. Heard it twice--kraop, kraop--one time each for my two fingers that got broke. I heard my bones pop before I felt anything, gunshot-loud they echoed in my ears. Maybe that was the tip-off what'd just happened was going to hurt like hell.
        Wrong.
        It hurt so bad, I didn't feel a thing.
        The hands that held me, Ty's hands--big like bear claws, strong like presses--let me go. I twisted to the ground, slow, the way a snowman melts. Couldn't help from going down. Something about having body parts mangled that messes with your lucidity. I gave that a lot of thought as I lay on the hard, dirty pavement that felt feather bed-comfy to my fucked-up senses. If I slept a million years in this outdoor bedroom I couldn't care less.
        "Sorry, Jeffty," Ty said from somewhere above me. He meant it, too. I could hear it in his voice. It almost made me feel guilty. It almost made me feel like even though he'd just busted my fingers, somehow I was the bad guy.
        All Dumas had to add to things was: "Let's see if we can't get me my money, do you know, Jeffty?"
        I heard the two of them walk away. I heard them get in their Benz and drive off, the sound seemed to drift from the other side of the planet.
        I was alone. On the ground. In an alley. I thought about getting up, but the growing throb in my swelling fingers told me otherwise. It said I should relax, take a rest, pass out for a while. Why not? I didn't have any plans; nowhere to go except a little further down in life than I already was, and there was plenty of time for that. I got cozy with the dirt and rubbish, and remained undisturbed. People passed by the lip of the alley, but they paid me no mind. Just another black man stretched out near some garbage cans. So what?
        So nothing.
        So life went on around me. I took my fingers' advice and went to sleep.
        Later, I came to. The same throbbing in my fingers that'd passed me out woke me up. Except sometime during my minicoma, the dull pain had gone through a metamorphosis into full agony. Agony that instructed me in the strongest possible terms to get to a hospital.
        Hospital. That's what I'd thought. Free clinic is what I'd meant.
        I made the long climb to my feet, the five-thousand-mile journey to my car, and drove. I did my best not to look at the fingers, but you got broken fingers, how can you not look at them? They were bloated and a deep black-purple. They twisted up and back away from the other fingers of my hand like decrepit branches on a tree that refused to grow right. It only took a second or two of staring at them before I started choking on my own vomit.
        Fairfax. The free clinic. A nurse--a woman in a nurse's uniform--at the receiving window, neatly tucked away behind bulletproof glass.
        "Here." She shoved a clipboard with a sheet of paper attached through a slot in the window. Her tone told me she was annoyed, like me showing up had interrupted whatever she'd been doing that was far more important than helping injured people. "Fill this out and bring it back when you're done."
        The woman in the nurse's uniform spoke without looking up. She spoke as if she said the same thing every sixty seconds whether there was someone there to hear her or not.
        I took a seat and went to work on the forms. There was a gunshot victim, a stabbing, and some guy with hedge clippers in his thigh ahead of me. Around this part of LA, a lousy twisted finger or two isn't much as emergencies go. I guess they figured trying to do paperwork with my busted appendages would just about eat up enough time for them to get to me.
        It didn't.
        I sat for I don't know how long, my arm raised, my fingers looking like I was trying to point up and around a corner at the same time, waiting. Just like Gunshot Guy and Hedge Clippers Guy kept waiting.
        What health care crisis?
        I took the opportunity to pass out some more. When I came awake again there was a nurse--another woman in a nurse's uniform--yelling at me for not finishing my forms and pushing me toward an examining table. As I walked, the world started to do funny things. It juked and jived and turned to soft matter under my feet. I thought, Rather than deal with the yelling woman and the liquefying ground, it might be better if I pass out for a while more. It was getting so I could do it on cue. There was a circus job waiting for me somewhere. Jeffty, the one-trick wonder. See him get roughed up. See him go down like a prom queen. Then witness the marvel of him going lights-out at the first hint of pain or bother.
        A crazy dreamlike big top floated through my fuzzy mind. It was full of scary clowns, and lion tamers with nothing to do, and a guy sporting a turban.
        Only . . . the guy with the turban wasn't part of the dream. The guy with the turban, as my eyes fluttered open, was standing over me. As I got my wits back, I figured Turban Guy, skinny and greasy-looking, must have been a doctor. At least, maybe he was a doctor in the country he came from which was probably the same as being an auto mechanic in the civilized nation that I called home. This one looked like he should be selling fruit from a freeway off-ramp as much as operating on people.
        "It is bad. It is very bad," he said. I think he said. His command of English was about that of someone who had mastered it just that morning. "You should have had this looked at immediately," he scolded. "Why did you not have this looked at immediately?"
        Sure. It was all my fault. Whatever. I didn't say anything to that. I just let Turban Guy finish setting my fingers with splints and medical tape. When he was done hacking around with my hand, he wrote out a prescription for painkillers, codeine, he wanted me to go have filled, as if I had the money to fill it. Twice as strong as aspirin at five times the cost. Nice racket.
        But don't think I wouldn't find a way to come up with the cash. Codeine ain't heroin, but it'll get you high, and there's always a junkie out there looking for some kind of a fix. I could turn around and sell that shit on the street for a healthy profit.
        What about my fingers?
        What about them?
        I could live with the hurt. Cash is my painkiller.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375401423
• ISBN 13: 9780375401428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295