a writer is [someone] for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.
Thomas Mann
…..Inside the café, from left to right, 8:20 AM. Caucasian male, red hair, red beard, green sweater, in his 20s, working on a lap top. Asian woman, about 50, wide black-framed glasses, red quilted jacket, underlining in red a book about “Power.” Young Asian man, charcoal grey sweater, ear buds, working on his lap top. Indian/Pakistani male, 30-ish, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy white sweater, laptop. Caucasian man, 50-ish, grey hoodie over black racing cap, on his laptop too.
…..All silent.
…..All alone.
…..Working toward what they could not know.
…..
I am often interested in why people write and what it is they choose to write about.
Several years ago, I entered into an e-mail correspondence with a woman over an article I’d written about the B-movie actress Peggy Maley. [See: https://www.broadstreetreview.com /articles/ peggy-maley-hollywood-castoff.] I had become interested in Maley after learning that she, as Mildred the platinum blonde beautician, not Mary Murphy, the wholesome cafe-owner’s daughter, who had posed the question “What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?” in “The Wild One” to which Marlon Brando had uttered the generation-defining answer, “What’ve you got?” My subsequent research had led to a fascination with Maley’s social life, which linked her to, among others, Artie Shaw, Farley Granger, John Hodiak, a British lord, Greek shipping tycoon, cousin of Al Capone, the head of Columbia Pictures, an ex-husband of Peggy Lee’s, and being “kept” by King Farouk. My correspondent, whose name was Denise Noe, had a broader appreciation of Maley’s talents. She would send me You Tube links to films and TV shows which featured her dramatic and comedic skills. None displaced King Farouk in my imagination.
Through e-mails, I learned that Noe lived in Georgia and had an even deeper interest, B-movie actress-wise, in Barbara (“Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”) Payton, whose biography she urged me to read. Payton’s star, which had briefly out-shown Maley’s, had fallen after her boy friend, Tom (“Detour”) Neal, brutally battered her fiancee, Franchot (“Jigsaw”) Tone. Within a few years, she had gone from a cinematic headliner to $60-a-trick prostitute – and, within a few years more, a $5-for-oral-sex one. I knew the outline of Payton’s story from “Confidential” magazines read in barbershops of my youth, and I declined to fill in the blanks.
But Noe and I kept in touch. I learned that a disability prevented her working but that she wrote stories for the Christian Domestic Discipline [Hereinafter: CDD] market, which, she explained, was based on an instruction from St. Paul: “Wives, submit to your husbands as unto the Lord.” After failing to find work through Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Services, Noe was evicted from her apartment and moved to Bolivar, Missouri (pop. 11,000), to live with her father, her mother having passed away three years before. She had to pay for her clothing, medicine, and a share of the utilities, and, a few months ago, she notified me she had published three books: “The Bloodied and the Broken,” “Justice Gone Haywire,” and “I Spy, You Spy, They Spy.”
Disability, I thought. Three books!
II.
Photos of the three regulars who had died that week were taped to the espresso machine.
…..A sweet woman, in her 80’s, the wife of a professor emeritus of anthropology. She had been in an assisted living facility with dementia and had stopped eating.
…..The owner of a used book store who rarely spoke to anyone. From the looks of him, while isolated at his corner table, it had been cancer.
…..A 92-year-old activist attorney, who’d come every day with his wife. They had been a couple since they were 14, and she was back the day after his passing.
…..“You poisoning your customers?” Large Victor asked.
…..“Is come to everyone,” Pedro answered.
…..
Noe was born in Los Angeles in 1957. Her father performed manual labor for a tire company. Her mother had left a bank job to be a housewife – and never felt qualified or inclined to work again. Noe has two younger brothers. The family attended sequentially Baptist, Brethren, and Church of Christ churches, whose teachings emphasized traditional sex roles and chastity and condemned homosexuality. When Noe was 15, her father’s plant closed, and, with her mother refusing to seek employment, the family fell from the lower middle class into poverty. Noe describes her adolescence as “Hideous.” She was, she says, the “classic kid getting picked on,” due to a brain “deficit” that impaired her ability to recognize “non-verbal clues” – and to being raised by a mother who “did not realize she was talking to a child rather than to a pint-sized psychiatrist or adult best friend.”
“My mother wanted to be a good Christian woman, and the only way she knew to do that was to clone her own mother, who had filled her with tales of men victimizing women. She pounded that into me. Women were good for nothing but keeping a clean house. Men were women-victimizing beasts. When people questioned my mental health, she would tell me and add, ‘But if you were more like other girls, you might get a boyfriend and get pregnant.’ At the same time, both my parents were extremely homophobic. Dad called them ‘Perverts.’ Mom said, ‘God gives up on them.’ Basically ‘queer’ was below ‘murderer’ in my house.
“Then there were the Kleenex. They had been invented to be thrown away after noses were blown in them. My mother saved hers. She stuffed them in her bra, so the breast – the symbol of womanhood to me – was distorted by snot and boogers. At the time I was developing as a woman, I was seeing the symbol of womanhood dirtied. And if I asked her to throw them away, she’d pull them from her bra and wave them in my face.
“I started spending almost all my time in my room. I was fixated on not getting pregnant and isolated myself from boys/men, the impregnators. But I had to be heterosexual because anything else was unthinkable. I started putting on lots of makeup to prove I was feminine. If I was feminine, even if ‘not interested in boys,’ I could not be ‘queer.’”
One morning, when Noe was dressing for school, her mother said, “Whose eyes are you going to gouge out now – mine?”
Noe had been reading books focused on sex crimes against women and running scenarios in her mind multiple times a day of “rage and terror and rape and abortion and gouging out rapists’ eyes.” But she hadn’t known they had been coming out of her mouth, along with words like “Fuck” and “Bitch.” (She would receive a diagnosis of “Schizotypal personality disorder, with obsessive and compulsive features.” Later, “Impulse control disorder” was added.)
…..
After stints at Whittier and Pomona colleges, interrupted by periods of “anxiety and confusion,” Noe graduated from Claremont College, in English, in 1981. Her family had left California, but she had stayed. She had a boyfriend. She tried psychotherapy, hypnosis, and anti-psychotic drugs. She chanted and prayed. None of it released her from her seizures of rage/terror. She landed jobs in a factory, a library, in telephone sales – and lost them all.
When her boyfriend moved to Austin to purse a PhD in finance/economics, she went too. Again she found and lost jobs. She was too slow; she could not follow instructions; she was rude and made inappropriate comments. In 1985, she and he married, so she could receive psychiatric treatment under his medical plan. A new therapist suggested she set an egg-timer for 10-or-15 minutes and let loose the thoughts in her head. In three days, she brought her condition under control. (She has used the egg-timer, once or twice a day, as needed, since.)
Following a job offer to her husband in Atlanta, they moved there. Noe still couldn’t hold a job. She couldn’t cook or keep the house clean or host the parties her husband’s work required. They divorced in 1996.
…..
Noe floundered. No one would hire her. (Her work history was so bad she feared to even apply for jobs.) She survived on alimony and gifts. She passed most days “in a haze of nothing in particular.” The only thing she could do, she thought, was write. She had begun as a teenager. She had written for her school paper. She had completed a novel, which she revived and tried, without success, to have published. She wrote short stories and collected enough rejection slips “to paper a wall.” But now she had a goal. Her first acceptance, albeit from a lesbian sex magazine with about 60 subscribers and which paid in free copies (two), left her “thrilled.”
Eventually, she began writing stories for a newspaper which reported on the Caribbean community in the greater Atlanta area. She had never been to the Caribbean and had no familiarity with it, but now she had “something to look forward to, something that structured my life.” Her assignments brought her to restaurants, to festivals, into relationships with other people. She was promoted to Community Editor and sent to the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.
Then Noe turned to spanking stories. Man-spanks-woman. Woman-spanks-man. Woman-spanks-woman. Man-spanks-man. Her specialty became female-spanks-male. “I don’t have many writers who can do that,” her publisher said, “and since you can, I want you to write them.” Spanking stories are “pretty much all WASP,” Noe told me, but, to widen their appeal, she populated hers with Blacks, the Irish, and Italians.
(“Do you think the Hasidim would be interested?” she asked, as if my last name made me an expert on all things Hebraic.) She next moved into CDD, and, turning the fear of sex instilled in her as an adolescent which had interested her in crimes against women, into an interest in crime in general, wrote nearly 200 articles for a “True Crime” website.
But by 2015, both the crime and Caribbean sites had folded. So Noe turned to books. Besides the three I’ve mentioned, she wrote three hard copy and five e-books on CDD, one book about the contributions of Jews to Christmas, one each on the television shows “Married With Children,” “Teletubbies,” “Maury,” and “Wishbone,” an e-book on crimes-against-children, another collecting letters from famous prisoners with whom she’d corresponded, including Charles Manson, Squeeky Fromm, and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, and one entitled “Obsessions & Exorcisms in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates.” (Oates praised it. How Manson et al. felt is unrecorded.)
III.
…..The increase in his a-flutter had led his cardiologist to ask the specialist with whom he’d consulted why he counseled against an ablation. “Look. The man’s asymptomatic. He feels fine. I’m not going to go down in history as the one who made him feel bad.”
…..She put it to him like this. “In medicine, sometimes ‘Good’ is better than ‘Best.’”
…..He repeated it when he lay in bed or when he walked. “Good is better than Best.”
…..It seemed to have wider application..
…..
I ordered the books about which Noe had told me.
“Spy,” which is not yet available in hard copy, would seem to be about betrayal. “Justice” compiles stories of people victimized by a legal system designed to protect them. Some – a queen (Katherine Howard), a movie star (Fatty Arbuckle) – were well known. Some (Anthony Carpozzi) were not. Some (the Scottsboro Boys) still ring bells of tragedy. Some (Alice Crimmins) barely echo. But all tell of men and women done in by carelessness or prejudice or duplicity or venality. “It is easy,” Noe writes, “for something to go wrong and injustice to occur.”
That seems inarguable. Yet “Bloodied” seems more significant, if only because death extinguishes hope and chance of correction more entirely than prison. Its 10 stories run seven-to-29-pages in length. One stems from the 18th century; the others occurred between the 1940s and the present. All recount, if not murders, extreme physical abuse, except for a recapitulation of Barbara Payton’s life, which Noe included because “She was so terribly, terribly broken.”
Lonely women are killed by a couple seeking money. Random adults are killed by teenagers seeking thrills. A mother drowns two of her children. A father sets fire to his son. One man stabs to death a nannie, who’d abused him as a child. Another sets fire to male prostitutes. A father and step-mother starve to death a 10-year-old boy. A middle-aged woman, aided and abetted by children, torture to death a 16-year-old girl.
Noe researched these stories through books, newspapers, and magazines. She reviewed lawyers’ files and court records. She conducted interviews and watched movies interpreting the events she is recounting. She analyzes and speculates. She suggests motives and decries the failures that allowed atrocities to occur. She writes with intelligence and dedication and seriousness of purpose. Her prose is not graceful, but it is insightful, unflinching, stinging, and strong. Even I, who teethed on “Tales from the Crypt,” and chortled at those fed to pigs on “Deadwood,” found myself, on occasion, shutting her book and turning away.
In her “Introduction,” Noe writes she set this fare before us because the victims’ “extraordinary… suffering” place “a special claim on our sympathy.” She notes they raise questions “about the social ecology… (and) biological factors that lead to violent crimes.” “Yesterday’s victims,” she says, “all-too-often become today’s victimizer.” In many instances, “a ‘broken’ human being will ‘break’ another, leading to a… cycle of brokeness.”
I do not disagree. Nor do others of greater renown. An individual is not “by nature evil, depraved, villainous,” Herodotus concluded in his “Histories, according to the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapucinski in his “Travels With Herodotus.” Having considered the slaughter of Greeks by Persians and Persians by Greeks (as well as slaughters by and of Lydians, Babylonians, Scyhthians, Ionians, Egyptians, and others), he declared individuals formed by “the social arrangement in which (they)… live.” But, I wonder, what alteration in “social arrangement” – or “social ecology,” as Noe has it – would have made Gertrude Baniszewski not starve, burn, and beat to death the 16-year-old Sylvia Likens, nor lead Robert Bennett, Jr., a millionaire attorney who cared for his disabled mother, to, in his leisure time, set fire to young men he had drugged and handcuffed? And if such an “arrangement” was achievable, what acts might it trigger in people not suited for it?
…..
I do not believe Noe would say she has had a happy life. The words “broken,” “injustice,” “suffering,” and “victim” repeat too often in her work. (“Write about what you know” is, after all, the common instruction of Writing 101.) But while the events that seeded Noe’s path may have narrowed the vein of ore she had available to mine, what she has extracted has value.
There are two ways to look at this. Societal and personal. I would not claim that Noe has advanced the art of “true crime” reportage. The fences planted by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer lie beyond her reach. I can’t say if she affected the feelings of other readers toward victims or perpetrators, but she would have had to venture more deeply into inner lives to affect mine. But she has provided some voyeuristic thrills, some shocks, some revulsion at the shame of being a human being, some heady, if unnerving, thinking. If one of us can so blithely snuff out the light within another, is there any reason not to dread what a mass of us may do?
But one writes, I think – as one acts in most, if not all, ways – for internal gratification. (Celebrity and wealth may come, but this is secondary and largely beyond one’s control.) Here Noe’s achievement is unquestionable. You have to say that writing brought the sense of purpose she sought. The volume of her output alone is commendable – even inspirational. There are many reasons to keep one from writing, and she was confronted by more formidable barriers than most. Yet she achieved.
And when you get work out, there is no foretelling what may come of it. You may change the world. You may roll your personal boulder to atop a hill.
Or you may meet someone through a mutual interest in a B-movie actress.