Pale Green for the Sap

I was the exception in a family of readers. My mom, pop and sister were voracious readers. I was a lazy one and, compared to them, probably still am. My pop was flabbergasted when he gave me a collection of Jack London stories for my eleventh birthday, and found me uninterested in them. Had he had such a book when he was eleven, he said, he would have devoured it. Clearly, comic books were already sapping my intellectual resources.

It wasn’t until my late teens that I got bit by the bug and began reading, a lot; and it wasn’t till my mid-twenties I began to read some of the stuff my parents had gorged themselves on. I was living in Idaho, and a friend offered me a “John D”. I recognized it as one of a series of crime thrillers that had been mainstays in our home.

The author was John D. MacDonald. He’d written hundreds of short stories for the pulp magazines, and a few dozen paperback originals. In 1964, in the wake of James Bond’s huge success on the silver screen, MacDonald was persuaded by his agent and his publishers to try his hand at a series character. He came up with a setting, a hero, and a concept. All of the books would have a color in the title: The Deep Blue Goodbye, Nightmare in Pink, Dress Her in Indigo, The Scarlet Ruse, etc., etc. MacDonald figured that the color gimmick would make them stand out on the spinner rack, particularly in airport bookstores. Traveling businessmen would spot the books and buy them as in-flight entertainment. It seemed to work.

There were 21 novels in the series. Two or three are duds, but the others took entertainment to cosmic levels. The protagonist was a boat bum, living on a house boat moored at Bahia Mar in Ft. Lauderdale. His name was Travis McGee. If you’re a Boomer, chances are your parents read these books. They sold by the gazillions. McGee’s schtick was that people take their retirement when they’re too old to enjoy it. He took his in installments. He’d lay around doing nothing except boffing young maidens in gargantuan quantities until the cash reserves ran low. Then he’d hunt for work. He called himself a “salvage consultant,” meaning that if something had been stolen from you in such a way that the law was powerless to intervene, he would try to salvage your loss. Whatever he could get back for you, he’d keep half its value. The notion was that half was a lot better than nothing. And in the course of each book, McGee/MacDonald took the time to pontificate about a myriad of subjects: the vagaries of county government, the rape of Florida’s environment, the catastrophe of the modern educational system and, especially, about sex. McGee’s privy member was therapy for wounded women in nearly every book. I’m hardly a crusader for woman’s lib, but even I find the casual sexism in these books a little much. But in the context of the world MacDonald designed for his hero it made a kind of sense.

Travis McGee was fun on steroids. And it was an experience I was able to share with my father. (My mom was considerably more jaded toward MacDonald, and told me pointedly that Ross MacDonald was a far better writer. I laughed at the notion, although I’m grateful that just before her passing, I’d seen the light, and admitted to her that Ross, and especially in his later books, was a far more substantial artist than John D. “So who listens to mothers?” she shrugged.)

Anyway, yeah, it was an experience I got to share with my father. He loved McGee and I loved McGee. And as his eightieth birthday loomed on the horizon, I had an idea of what might be an appropriate gift for him.

It took a couple of years. I came up with parody versions of MacDonald’s characters, and his setting. I stole phraseology and, occasionally, whole paragraphs from his books. Boat bum Travis McGee became trailer park resident Dimples McCann. (My sister, who is actually a real writer, suggested the name.) McGee’s sidekick Meyer became Hoover. McCann’s girl friend, whom he kept chained in a pit next to his trailer, was inspired by my soon-to-be wife Lisa. Her maiden name Boswell became Boz. She manages to escape from the pit by almost strangling McCann with the chains that had bound her.

MacDonald had an unmistakable style, which was easy to parody. I managed to seize on every proclivity to which he was prone, and build 117 pages of text using them at every turn: the alliterations, the anadiploses, the antanaclases that MacDonald might use two or three times in a book were stacked like cordwood in almost every sentence. I’m not a good writer, but I know how to take cheap shots at good writers.

I presented Pale Green for the Sap to my Pop on his eightieth birthday.

Although the book was given to my father in June of 1993, it had been typeset, bound and illustrated two years earlier. The cover was painted in gouache, as was its lettering. The technology existed then to paint the cover, scan it, and place it in an Illustrator document. But I didn’t have a very powerful computer and had never used Illustrator, so the cover is a good example of the technology of the early 1990s marshaled against problems which a trained seal and a license for Photoshop and Illustrator could do far better today.

The clunky painting, done using a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as a reference, would have looked terrific had I painted it twice up. But unwilling to shell out a few dozen bucks for scans, layout, professional typesetting and printing, I did it the hard way. Which probably made it far more endearing to my father.

When he died, we took the book back. I ran across it yesterday and read it. It was kinda funny here and there, especially turning John D’s explorations of various social and governmental phenomena into conspiracy theories of the lowest order.

When I was a kid, my sister and I made comic books together, and gave them to Pop. Although he detested comic books, he loved us, and he delighted to read them with us. Fast forward a few decades. He was delighted to read my silly and inconsequential parody of one of the great series characters of the twentieth century.