Eat. Love. Namaste.
On the origins of Namaste Mart Confidential
It was early winter, 2021. I sat at my writing desk at my home in Los Angeles. By then my resume of published short stories, all in the hardboiled crime genre, had grown to a decent size. It was time for a novel, one which would become Namaste Mart Confidential, my debut published on May 1st of this year from Run Amok Crime.
My anger at what COVID did to the world was heavy then. I felt immersing myself in a longer project could provide me with the illusion that I had a degree of agency in a deteriorating world. The Joan Didion line applied: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Pre-COVID life was gone and it was never coming back. The author Alec Cizak has pointed out that the past ten years had brought about more changes in the world any decade in which he’d been alive. Almost all of those changes, I’ll add, have been for the worse.
*
Fall, 2013 — eight years earlier. Smart phones were only six years old. You saw them around, but the general public’s brains weren’t fully phone-fried yet.
I sat in the audience at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, juiced on Old Fashioneds. My friend and co-worker, the stand-up comic Richie Walsh (I’m using his fictional character’s name here), was on stage, doing ten minutes under the spotlight. Tonight Richie had been stuck with a shitty slot. He went out and killed regardless. The first red light flashed.
Richie began a new closer: The nuns at his Catholic school growing up told him that if he jerked off, he’d grow unseemly hair all over the back of his hands. “After I heard that, I decided for all of my formative years to just wear mittens. Better than walking around with hands that look like an Armenian’s asshole!”
There were laughs and shocked gasps. But they were few.
It’s okay not to laugh at something you don’t find funny. Senses of humor vary, but this was 2013. People were still allowed to tell jokes. Obvious jokes were still commonly interpreted as jokes, and judged on how much they made people laugh.
*
During World War I, the Ottoman Empire committed a genocide against the Armenian people. Over a million were killed. Equivocations or denials about this still occur today. The Armenian Genocide was absent from my Midwest public school education. Today, when I see my Armenian-American neighbors looking celebratory when there’s an earthquake in Turkey, I understand their motives.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, L.A. County was flooded with Armenian immigrants eager to take a shot at the American dream. They settled mainly in Glendale and East Hollywood. A subset of these Armenians organized a mob. They called themselves Armenian Power.
Today, East Hollywood is known as Little Armenia and the only place in the world with more Armenians than L.A. is Armenia itself.
AP was acquired by the Mexican Mafia. This meant that in the crime landscape of L.A., they were here to stay. There is, of course, nothing particularly special about this story arc in America. Forming a mob is a common step toward successful assimilation.
Some of the old school Armenian mob bosses didn’t even speak English. The younger ones, the gangsters born stateside, copied the L.A. cholo persona. On the streets, these Armenian-American cholos were everywhere in 2013.
*
The red light flashed again. Richie waved goodbye. “I’m Richie Walsh and I always close on Armenian assholes!” There was more applause and laughter.
Earlier that year, Richie got in a street fight in Little Armenia.
This was outside a bar, just after last call. For a while it was three on one — Richie was handling them all fine. Then a fourth guy pulled a blade and stabbed Richie in his side. A crowd of hipsters stood and watched. The four guys escaped, driving off down a Hollywood side street. A hipster wrote down their plates.
Richie initially refused medical attention. He just kept partying. He even showed up to work again before the wound was healed. Minor surgery later fixed him up. Today, you’d never know he got stabbed at all.
A Major Crimes detective ran the plates of the getaway car. The guy who stabbed Richie was in the Armenian mob.
“I always close on Armenian assholes!”
I remember thinking I’ve got to write about all this someday.
Richie was already using it for his comedy in 2013. He thinks faster than I do.
*
“Paris was a moveable feast.”
Find me a good book or film even remotely connected to Paris in the ’20s that doesn’t somehow acknowledge Ernest Hemingway’s book. A Moveable Feast is his memories of that time, when his writing career was just beginning and he was still with his first wife, Hadley. This was before all the head injuries, the plane crashes, before the booze got so far out of control, and before his suicide in 1961.
Significant parts of this book are, from a factual perspective, bullshit. Hadley shows up, but her trust fund money they lived on during those “starving artist” years does not. We know that Hemingway was a pompous and repellent jerk, especially to his older, more successful and more sensitive friend Scott Fitzgerald, who did nothing but champion the younger writer. In this text, Hemingway always comes off as the hero. A Moveable Feast is laughably petty. It’s cartoonishly dedicated on settling old scores through lies.
The book is a heartbreaking and beautiful masterpiece regardless. Papa’s looking back on the good and the bad and crafting an elegiac and romantic vision of how things should have been. One of his most enduring fictional creations is this younger, heroic portrait of himself.
What if I tried something like that as a P.I. novel? I thought. What if I didn’t wait until I’m an old man before I start?
*
People have always told me, “You and Richie don’t seem like friends.”
I have many friends like Richie. Outlaws. Fighters. Today I see why this is. My religious upbringing in the Midwest taught me lessons. Many of these lessons I wasn’t supposed to learn. Christopher Hitchens said, “Faith is the most overrated of all virtues.” Most non-believers spend long stretches of their lives in silence. People are free to believe whatever they want. I’ve passed my loudmouthed and annoying phase of speaking out against religion. But I still distrust it. What, or who, do I trust then? Well, guys like Richie have always been more honest, loyal and dependable than any traditional believer I’ve known.
I still know that the evil use religion as a cover. They always have and I’ve never had trouble seeing this. The villains of my novel couldn’t just be the Armenian Mob. I would have to include another, perhaps even more sinister presence: the truly faithful, the type who can quote every verse of their holy books from memory.
*
Joseph Smith was a teenage ex-con and grave robber from upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. A year after pleading guilty to fraud in court, Joseph walked out of the woods and told all of his neighbors that he’d been visited by an angel named Moroni who’d given him some golden plates, which, when translated, became something called the Book of Mormon.
After the first few years of laughter from the general public died down, Mormonism took off. Smith got into trouble with the law and with other religions. Eventually, the Mormons moved to Illinois, where Smith started his own city called Nauvoo. He ran for President and lost. He started telling every woman he met that God told him it was their personal duty to sleep with him. He said God condoned plural marriage. This lie almost certainly began when Joseph was caught cheating on his first wife, Emma. “God said I could have another! I’m not saying this baby, it’s God! I’m just the messenger.”
At 38, Joesph was murdered by an angry mob at the jail in Carthage, Illinois. After his death, the Mormons went west and settled in Utah and polygamy gained popularity. Then, in the late 1800s, the church changed course and outlawed the practice. Some factions didn’t accept this change and moved onto polygamist compounds. Some went into hiding.
Others turned to crime.
*
I had all the elements. I was ready to stir them together.
A 2013 setting in an America that didn’t understand it was on the cusp of a major decline. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Richie and I would be recast as P.I. anti-heroes. His long-ago stabbing would be woven into a missing person’s plot centered around a vanished lingerie saleswoman with mysterious origins. There would be Armenian mobsters and outlaw Mormons. Fiction and fact. I’ve always liked James Ellroy’s concept of “reckless verisimilitude.” So beyond what I’ve written here, I won’t clarify what’s true and what isn’t. Namaste Mart Confidential is an emotionally true depiction of my life, and Richie’s, as it was then. It’s a workplace comedy, a send-up of fashionable spiritualism. It’s a very funny book.
Cultural decline is a choice. Show your opposition to it by hovering your mouse over that PLACE YOUR ORDER button and then click away.
Namaste.