Three passages in three different novels have puzzled me for years, so I’m finally asking in one post if what I read was author invention, or if it has any basis in reality.
– Everybody’s All-American by Frank Deford. This was in the movie as well as the novel. One character is a compulsive gambler and gets deeply in debt to some dangerous people. Three goons show up at the bar/restaurant he manages, intending only to send a message, but because he fights back, it becomes a murder. The last thing they do before they leave is throw his body through a glass partition between the bar and dining area. Later, another character states that this is an indicator that it was not a random incident. The people he’d owed all this money to were from New Orleans, and “Down there they got this code. A man welsh on bets long enough [or, I guess, crosses OC in any way], they beat him up, throw him through glass. That tells the police it’s just private business.” Is that, or was that ever, true, (in New Orleans) or did Deford make it up?
– Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly. Teenagers hooking up, breaking up and making up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Hanging out in and in front of a drugstore in the 1940s is hardly mysterious, nor is a gossip mill, in any era. But what the narrator, and by extension, the author, describes is somewhat creepy. A group of guys are described as “the ‘checkers’. They are the more popular crowd at high school…sharply watching the cars going by to see what fellows and girls are out together; they watch to see who is having a coke with whom and to report any violations on the part of the girls who are supposed to be going steady…also keep their eyes open for new prospects among the young sophomore girls who are growing up and show signs of datable promise…they can start or stop any of the younger girls in town just by passing the word around.”
Again I say, of course small towns gossip, but this takes it to a disturbing level. I mean, how could these guys have been popular if all they do is stand around spying on people – didn’t they have steadies of their own? And sure, report girls’ “violations” but not boys’. Anyone heard of a dedicated spy system like this in any other context? By “popular” guys, not wannabes? I can kind of see it if it was junior-high guys wanting to impress the older guys, but beyond age, deciding who shall live and who shall die has always, IME, been the province of girls, not boys.
– Catcher in the Rye. Holden checks into a hotel and looks across the courtyard into other guests’ windows. One room has a transvestite, and another has a man and a woman who are taking mouthfuls of some liquid – “it probably was highballs, not water” – and spitting it in each others’ faces. Now, I won’t ask what they would get out of that; kinks don’t have to be explained. But I am wondering, has this ever been a thing, the way golden showers is a thing?