51cglou6lpl_sl500_aa240_.jpg(Please welcome Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and Pain Killers in the comments — jh)

We don’t generally do fiction here on the FDL Book Salon, but somehow it seems appropriate that we should break the rules with Jerry because, well….my history with Jerry is all about rule breaking.

Jerry and I met some time in the mid nineties when our mutual friend Nancie Ferguson gave me a copy of Jerry’s autobiography, Permanent Midnight.  His personal story managed to perfectly capture the absurdity of life in Hollywood, a place where guys from Harvard are grossly overpaid to sit around and refine with the intensity of Talmudic scholars the next week’s episode of Alf.  Becoming a heroin addict seems a rational and appropriate response.

We made a movie of the book, which started as a sex story with David Duchovney and wound up a comedy with Ben Stiller.  It became self-reflexive in the extreme, but that’s a story for another day.  Our lives have continued to intersect in a way that safely puts it in "long strange trip" territory, and I count Jerry among the most gifted people I’ve been lucky enough to know.  

If I were going to describe Jerry to the uninitiated I’d probably say he’s the Matt Taibbi of fiction, or perhaps TBogg several shades darker.  His work is characterized by that unique ability to find humor right at the moment when the door drops and the rope tightens.  

Pain Killers takes us into the world of Manny Rupert, former cop turned private investigator-cum-serial substance abuser who falls in love at first sight with a woman who just murdered her husband by putting Drano and crushed lightbulbs in his Lucky Charms.  He tampers with the evidence to clear her and is summarily kicked off the force, then she leaves him because his anger issues are making her bulimic.  And that’s the back story.

Unable to pay his mortgage and soon to be evicted, Manny takes a job at San Quentin arranged for him by a mysterious intruder who wants to ascertain if a 97 year-old inmate is really Joseph Mengele.  He finds himself living in a camel-backed trailer at the prison, drinking the boxed wine of its recently expired ex-tenant,  at least until the smell drives him wretching outside and he discovers the WWI morphine stashed underneath. 

There aren’t a lot of people brave enough or talented enough to mine those depths of pain and craziness for insight into the human condition, but there is — as always — something about Jerry’s work that seems deeply right for the moment.   I was reading the scene in Pain Killers when Manny is being operated on by Mengele at the same time I was reading Simon Johnson’s article in the Atlantic on the triumph of the American oligarchs.  Somehow they are both evocative of our unique moment in history.    Johnson compares it to the twilight of failed emerging market economies, when the government inevitably steps in to bail out its oligarchs.  The difference, he says, is that those runs always ends when the money is gone.  But the US is "rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print."  In other words, we’re in uncharted territory.

It felt weirdly parallel to watch Jerry find redeption in teenage Asian amputee porn, skinheads pumping iron with gallon water bottles and inmates trapped in the prison’s revolving door:

Free for six hours?  My fucking hero!  Something about luck that bad gives a man hope.  I couldn’t explain it, but I already liked him.

It’s impossible to say how people will look back a hundred years from now and assess which work of art most perfectly conveyed the absurdity of our era, with its scoundrels and its gluttony and its insanity.  But Jerry’s work comes as close as anything I know.  Pain Killers may seem extreme, but these are extreme times.  It’s conjured from a reckless, deranged, self-immolating will not only to survive but to consciously wrestle with the despair and the insanity all around us.  And to laugh.  Did I say laugh?  Yes, laugh. 

To read this book is to plant yourself before the demon, pull your gums back over your teeth and howl.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my friend Jerry Stahl.