Crumbtown - Hardcover

Connelly, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375413642 ISBN 13: 9780375413643

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Bringing Out the Dead (“A knock-down spectacular first novel” —GQ), a darkly comic, wildly imaginative, unstoppable new novel.

Crumbtown is disaster zone as neighborhood, crisscrossed by streets called Lemmings, Felony, Sodden; rapidly losing its edges to the river; inhabited by people who know firsthand that “there’s bad luck in the world, and then there’s crumbluck.”

Don Reedy is the poster boy for crumbluck. His ticket out of town was a fifteen-year jail term for a staged armed robbery. His ticket out of jail is a return to Crumbtown. He’s got early parole and a job as a consultant to the TV show based on his own life, but he’s had to give up “all current and future rights to any representations of his life, both fictional and otherwise.” So when he decides to rob the TV robbery—becoming the criminal he never really was—the cameras are rolling, the script-writer is already making the appropriate changes, and the producer figures they’ve got a ten-point rating in the bag. Don, however, is on the run—a ploy complicated not just by the cameras, but by the dual casts of his life and the show: the fireplug half twins, Tim and Tom, who ran out on him after the first robbery; the still-prone-to-tantrums former child star who plays Don; the real cop/TV cop on Don’s trail with a posse of actor cops carrying real guns; and Rita, the beautiful Russian-born Crumbtown-adopted bartender with a past full of man trouble and a future full of Don—if he can just decide which Don he wants, or needs, to be.

Written with all the immediacy, heart, and richness of character that marked his debut novel, Crumbtown is, as well, furiously satiric—and further proof that in Joe Connelly we have a writer of the first order.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Connelly is the author of Bringing Out the Dead, which was made into a film by Martin Scorsese. A native of New York City, he now lives in the Adirondacks with his wife and family.

Reviews

Lean, mean and comically incompetent-so run the characters of Connelly's riotous sophomore effort (after Bringing Out the Dead) about a crime junkie and the town that defeats him. Don Reedy's been down on his luck for as long as he can remember, and a recap of his past reveals a collection of stolen vehicles, botched stickups and robbed banks, the last landing him in jail with a 15-year term. He's just been granted conditional parole and is being shipped back to Crumbtown (a neighborhood in the fictional city of Dodgeport, "where dummies like Don were a dime a dozen") to act as consultant on a TV movie of his life of crime. On the set, he watches his infamous bank robbery replayed, complete with his triumphant trademark of tossing dollar bills in the air while speeding away with the big bucks. He's also keeping a lustful eye on Rita, a tough-talking Russian barmaid running from an abusive husband who can't seem to resist Don's charms. A ridiculous scheme to rob the staged bank on the set reunites Don with inept twin robbers Tim and Tom, the same pair who bungled the original bank robbery but this time manage a clean getaway. Could the cameras still be rolling on Don's new grift? This mangy hit parade of hardscrabble locals is kinetic. Connelly sustains a reckless, devil-may-care mood-a dramatic shift from his stark and harrowing debut-with clipped, fast prose and serpentine plot that offers plenty of opportunities for satire.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Crumbtown is a crime-ridden, blue-collar, postindustrial town in decline. Crumbtown is also a town that is seen by Hollywood bigwigs as more New York than New York, and that's why it has emerged as the favorite (read cheap) location for filming TV cop dramas. Enter Don Reedy, a product of Crumbtown, released from a 15-year prison term from a failed Robin Hood-style bank robbery, paroled so he could consult on a TV show based on his life and about the crime he didn't really commit. Upon return, realizing he was framed for the crime, he decides to go through with the crime after all, exacting revenge on those who set him up, and this time he decides to rob the TV show that is staging his original, legendary bank robbery. Reedy emerges as an unlikely hero, and he gets the girl in the end. With a biting, sardonic wit, Connelly crafts a novel that is as fast paced as a cop show, a fun romp, and a satirical tale about political corruption and Hollywood. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

SCENE I

Joe Far unlocked the door to the bar and held it open with a chair, to let in what was left of the morning and air out the last of the night. He filled the mop bucket in the sink, set the chairs on the tables, the stools on the bar, and rolled the bucket mop and broom into the men's room in the back. Through the dim light of the gated window he swept the used cigarettes from around the sink, the derelict pipes in the corner. The door to the bathroom stall was locked, the handle of a cane hooked over the top. Joe bent down and found the cane's owner sitting on the pot. "Wake up, Tim," Joe said, jabbing his broom into the man's legs. "Up. Get up." When the man didn't move, he took out the mop and rubbed it over the splintered tiles around Tim's feet, then he rolled the bucket out and closed the door.

"Joe, hey Joe." A bald man wearing a neck brace had come into the bar, and was sitting in the shadowed rear end, his stool tilted back into the surrendering paneling. "Get me a beer," the man said.

"No, Tom. We closed." Joe walked to the front door and shut it, slamming the lock.

"Come on, Joe," Tom said. "I need a beer, and one for Tim. He ought to be getting up soon."

Joe Far threw a glass that shattered a foot above Tom's head, a framed photo of a police lineup. "Now I clean," Joe said.

Tom adjusted his brace and walked behind the bar and pulled two bottles from the cooler. "Tim," he yelled, setting a stool on the floor next to his. "Beer," he said.

The bathroom door opened and the cane came out followed by Tim, who knocked down two chairs as he made his way to the bar. "What happened?" he said.

"You fell in there last night. We couldn't wake you up." Tom raised his beer and leaned his stool against the wall. With the brace around his neck, Tom could only drink at sharp angles to the floor. "We thought you were dead."

"Oh no," Tim groaned, "I can't keep living like this." He reached for the bottle in front of him, pressing it to his ribs. "What about my kids, Tom, who's gonna take care of my kids?"

"Who's been taking care of them?"

Tim sighed. He drank for a long time. "I have no regrets," lowering his bottle and lifting it again. "Just tell me one thing, brother, who was better than us?" He stood and banged his cane against the bar. "That's what I want to know. Who was better than us?" He walked to the back corner and hit the switch that lit a spotlight in the ceiling, shining a section of wall hung with newspapers, Tim reading from the top headline, "Robbing Hoods. Bank robbery turns into riot as masked gang tosses $$$ to crowd." The grainy photo beneath, of four men in black ski masks. "Tim and Tom Dwight, Don Reedy, Happy Jones. We were heroes, Tom. They can't ever take that away."

"We were kings," Tom said.

"You're right there, brother." Tim finished the beer and sat down, out of breath. He rested the bottle on its side, "Joe, help us."

Joe Far stood facing the window, broom in hand, and stared at the women clutching their bags at the bus stop, a man punching a pay phone on the corner.

Tim walked around Tom to the cooler behind the bar. The two men were half twins, same birthday, same father, different mothers. They had turned forty together three months earlier, and were still recovering. "Joe, comrade," Tim said, "my Chinese buddy pal. I need a big favor."

"No," said Joe Far, throwing a glass that crashed where Tim had been sitting.

"I need you to call Loretta and tell her I'm dead," Tim said. "It's better if she knows."

Joe swept furiously at the damp floor. "You owe me twelve bucks."

"It's in the will," Tim said. "Loretta will have it for you. My wife gets everything."

"What about me?" asked Tom.

Tim handed him a beer and placed another on the table near the cloud of broken glass that Joe Far was sweeping. "Please, Joe," Tim said, "call Loretta. Tell her I died."

Joe grabbed the remotes and pointed them at the television chained to the ceiling. On the screen, a rabbit was kicking a duck. Joe dropped the broom and lifted a cigarette from his Chinese army-issue raincoat, which in the five years he'd been sweeping there no one had seen him not wearing. He blew a series of smoke rings at the tarred tin ceiling.

2

Rob Landetta could get his hand on the front doorknob of his apartment. He could turn it. He just couldn't pull. Soon his boss would be calling, asking how come he wasn't in the office yet to pick up the contracts. Why wasn't he on the road already to Crumbtown, to sign up the woman too fat to get out of bed? Rob could understand how his problems with the door were simply the physical manifestations of his inability to write, yet this understanding did not bring him any closer to the computer on his desk; it only reminded him how many used and expired words awaited there. Twice in the past month, desperate for a solution, he'd left the oven on with the burners off, both times forgetting to close the window. The night before he'd been up until two talking to the angry lady on the suicide help line, asking her advice on the best way to die.

Rob was twenty-three when he wrote his first television pilot, The Monkey House, about homeless teens living in the Bronx Zoo. His "grit opera," which he directed himself, lasted two seasons, and was quickly followed by: Black Tide, clam diggers vs. oil refinery, half a season; Veracruz, hard-bowling vigilantes in a busted mine town, two episodes; and the short-lived Death Valley Days, snowbelt refugees on a desert oasis, canceled in preproduction. His last project, Exley, about a burned-out building inspector, had been cooling on the studio shelves for six months. He'd directed two deodorant commercials in the last two years, and was due to turn thirty in less than four months. Rob could see the other side of the hill now, the long downward climb.

To pay his rent, he'd taken a job with his former college friend Brian Halo, the third-biggest mass media superagent in New York, and worked as Mr. Halo's Fringe Client Outreach Assistant, the Freak Department. Rob paid visits to those who couldn't make it to the office, like the woman too fat to get out of bed, and other clients too deranged or delinquent to converse with on the phone. Rob made sure they signed the bottom line: Brian Halo Inc. gets one-third of all earnings, ninety percent of which goes directly into supporting the company director's lifestyle, documented for anyone to see on channel 63: The Brian Halo Show, every Friday at six-fifteen.

Rob tried the knob again, and fell to one knee in the attempt. There was a time when he used to start his days at six, sprinting five blocks to the gym, his next hour on the treadmill, wondering which girl to call, Ula, Tammy, or Kym.

He walked to the bedroom and pulled three sheets out of the closet and tied them together while listening to the TV, a song about powdering men's feet. He brought the sheets to the bed and tied one end to the frame and tugged at the knots, testing them, and threw the other end through the open window, his emergency exit. Before climbing out, he glanced back at the television he'd forgotten to shut down--Today on Cheryl: Women who kill their men.

"What's the point of writing," he shouted to the screen, "when everyone is writing themselves?" He walked down the wall, ten feet to the ground, threw the sheets back up to the window, and headed for the office.

3

Loretta dropped her arm off the pillow and groped for the phone. "Harbor Homes," she said, as if she was in the office already, instead of in bed. "Who is it? Joe Far? From the bar? Tim's dead? What happened? Listen to me, Joe. You tell him he has to sign those papers. I'm getting this divorce."

She heard the sounds of glass breaking downstairs, doors slamming, her daughters leaving for school. She put down the phone and picked it up again and called the police. "I need to speak with Detective Hammamann," she said, "yes it's an emergency. Hi Harry, it's Loretta, anybody kick last night? Oh Jesus," she said, grabbing a pen, writing down the name. "He lived alone, how big? A studio, huh, any light? I got an appointment at noon, you think they'll have him out by then?"

With the phone under her ear, she pulled a pantsuit out of the closet, held it up in front of the mirror, dropped it on the bed. She clicked on the television, a woman in a bathing suit was preparing to leap from a bridge. "No, Harry, I can't see you now," Loretta said, "I'm still a married woman, remember. I've got the girls to consider." She put a free ear against the bedroom door, listening for her daughters, to be sure they were gone. "Not until you take care of this thing, like you promised me you would." She bent over and reached under the bed, two shoes and some underwear. "No, Harry, there's no talking to Tim. His mind is gone. You said it yourself. That there was only one thing to do..." She waited through his excuses, the phone between her teeth, trying to be patient. "Just tell me that my husband is out of our lives, that it's just us, baby, me and you...now I got to go...no, Harry..."

4

Rita remained in bed the few minutes it took the framed border of the sun to descend the wall and cross the pillow to find her. When it left, she made the coffee, holding the cup to her stomach as she walked to the window's edge. She couldn't see the man sitting in the doorway across the street, three floors below, but she knew he was there, waiting to see her face, and if she took just one more step toward the window he...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375413642
• ISBN 13: 9780375413643
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272