Doubt, Handguns and the Advice of Raymond Chandler

"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."
-Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business-

Photo copyright - Steve Houk

If you know anything at all about me you know that my idol as a writer is Raymond Chandler.  Well before I entered a life-long career as an actual detective I was reading old Chandler paperbacks.  Not only was I in love with the genre, I was head-over-heels about the writing.

I never set out to be a detective.  About all that I did well was write.  I didn't know it at he time because the shitty creative writing classes I took in high school were all about poetry or about writing critical essays dissecting the fine works of established authors.  The few times I went off scipt as a teenager the teachers were dismissive and discouraging.

I ended up going to college chasing a degree in journalism.  I took Chandler with me. His prose was always spare and lean and I found that it translated well to newswriting.  Throughout the scattered and unfocused years of my college career it was the words of Chandler and Edward R. Morrow that led me to a degree in journalism. Perhaps not so much of a coincidence that I've ended up spending 30 years doing detective work.

In the introduction to Trouble is My Business Chandler talks about the demands for action when writing for the pulps, which led to one of his most quoted lines, "When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." This was Chandler being a bit facetious but, as a young man, I took it to heart as a metaphor.  I was often paralyzed by indecision and Chandler's line was a reminder to not spin on the mental hamster wheel and to take action.

That's how I ended up in California.

After my divorce literally everywhere I went in Seattle was the trigger of painful memories.  If ever I needed a man with a gun to walk through my door it was then.  And he did, in the form of job hunting for anywhere and everywhere that was not in Washington State.  And it worked.  Within a year I had relocated to San Diego.

Unfortunately, I'm the world's most reluctant Californian.  I find it very difficult to find any sense of connection here, to the place or the people.  It really has nothing to do with San Diego, its all me.  I immediately felt like an alien here.  A woman who I briefly dated who was also a transplant told me to give it some time.  She finally felt at home here after about 3 years.  I've been here 10 years and it still feels like I'm on a long and now somewhat awkward business trip.

After about a year I decided that a man with a gun needed to walk through my door.  This time it was in the form of a surfboard.  If it had not been for surfing I would have left San Diego after my second year here.  Learning to surf was terrifying, difficult and exciting.  Maybe not the stuff of the pulps, but like any good pulp hero I got a little banged up, met a few femmes fatale and collected some damn fine stories.

But man cannot live by surfing alone.  I had not taken a vacation since I'd moved to San Diego.  I was stressed, lonely and unhappy.  This time the man with gun had a Costa Rican accent.  I took a solo vacation to a surf camp.  This was the first time that I had traveled solo outside the US.  And the man with the gun delivered.

Costa Rica Selfie

Copyright - Steve Houk

There was a little man with a big, big truck, a poisonous snake bite to an ass cheek, a delightful Canadian woman, and the thrill of discovering that I was knee deep in a river teeming with saltwater crocodiles.

In the following years travel became my man with a gun whenever Southern California life became too oppressive. I went to North Africa and fell in love with Morocco.  The sense of wonder that I felt the first time that I heard the call to prayer at sunset has never left me.  Neither has sweaty fear of a fist fight and trip to jail from the altogether way too tense haggling for a leather jacket at the souk in Agadir. Every time that I wear that jacket I'm in Morocco and visiting all the great overseas friends that I made.

A close friend from my days in Tamraght

Copyright - Steve Houk

I surfed the South China Sea and stayed on an island south of mainland China and east of Vietnam where I weathered a surprise typhoon and survived an encounter with a dyspeptic camel.  I lived for two days on almonds, beef jerky and tiny bananas that the hotel maids left in a basket outside my door.

The list goes on with new friends and adventures in Australia and New Zealand.

Now however, I can't seem to find the man with the gun or even the door that he might come through.  Health issues and upcoming life changes have put travel adventures on hold.  I'd like to think that I can get back to tuc

king myself away in out of the way corners of the world but right now it feels like I just can't get there from here. I am afraid of the coming changes.

Me & Mr. Camel just before our grave misunderstanding

Copyright - Steve Houk

I try to stay positive.  I tell myself that there will be a different man with a different gun coming through a door that I hadn't noticed.  But it sounds like the type of lie you tell late at night in a squalid bar to a woman who looks better after midnight.

So, I keep re-reading Chandler, seeking wisdom and solace in his descriptions of a California that is now lost in the past alongside clunky black rotary dial phones.  Chandler wrote nearly all his best works while dead drunk.  That seems sad to me.  Back when I wrote more frequently I felt that my best writing came when I was the most depressed or angry.  I stopped writing for years after that revelation.

With the future uncertain for me I have returned to writing, not as a balm for sadness and loneliness, but in hopes that words from the heart will lead will lead me lead me to the place that I seek.

A door. That will open and I'll get to see what shape the next man with a gun will take.

Old Bastards, Tattoos and Surfboards

Yesterday was my birthday.  The last few years in the weeks preceding my birthday a pall would fall over me. Since reaching 50 something has changed.  All my friends are enjoying and celebrating their fifties and, for the most part, so am I.  But each year now, just after the New Year a heaviness settles over me.  A sense that my time for future plans and adventures is growing shorter.  A relentless parade at night through my solitude of every poor choice and bad decision I've ever made, leading to a grim re-examination of my life.  I'm flooded with a million what-ifs at countless branchings of the decision tree that have led to now.  What if I'd had the courage to study abroad in Scotland when I was in college?  What if I'd stayed in journalism?  What if I'd handled things better and with more heart with any number of the women that I've loved?  What if I'd been stronger and not broken after my divorce?

To make it plain, approaching my birthday I am not fit for human consumption.  I am moody, irritable, consumed by feelings of loss and regret.  I look in the mirror and wonder what happened to the young man full of ideas and audacity.  When did he get replaced by the introspective guy with salt and pepper hair and an unruly beard?

Yesterday I took the day off work.  The rain had cleared and I had decided to surf.  The ocean, for me, has always been a place of healing.  Absolution and repose in a salty embrace along with the forlorn cries of the gulls. I was also a little anxious.  In winter my surfing generally goes to shit.  My work schedule isn't compatible with weekday surfing and early winter sunsets.  Winter weather or terrible wind conditions wipe out entire weekends.  The waves seem inhospitable and my board feels like a stranger.

Before I got online to check conditions I got a text. It was a friend that I'd known since grade school.  She wished me a happy birthday and said, "Here's to not being like every other old bastard," and attached a photo of a trio of old tattooed guys.

I got up and went back to the mirror.  Over the last 10 years I've been slowly acquiring more and more tattoos.  I have no doubt that one day I'll look just like those guys.  I looked at every line, ink and artistry under my skin, earned with intent, sacrifice and perseverance.  It's a roadmap of choices that left wear marks on my soul deep enough they could no longer be kept hidden.

I saw the lines to my path on the warrior's road, to a 10 year study in martial arts that allowed me to find undiscovered wells of dedication, strength and fortitude. Of mentors who opened up new vistas the mind/body connection and how learning to rain down merciless punishment on your fellow man can be a path to inner peace.

I saw the dust on the soles of my shoes and the sand on my feet from every step that I've taken in Central America, Africa, Asia and Australia.  The crusty salt left over from every amazing wave I've tried to master across the face of the globe.  The smiles I somehow earned from all the amazing people that I was blessed to have encountered on my journeys, citizens of the world with a bit of kindness for a clumsy, hapless American.

I saw the places in my heart that have been touched by people that love me.  Students, surfers, colleagues, partners in crime, old flames and childhood friends.  The embrace of a brother that I had thought long lost and reclaimed through random chance and forgiveness.  The faces of people that care for me despite my being remote and insular.

As I traced every line I saw that by body is marked, not with poor choices and regrets, but with joys, triumphs, and adventures.  Each one an indelible snapshot of achievements from the past 10 years that I will wear proudly until the end of my days.  Every bare expanse of skin and empty canvas beckoning to whatever is in store over the horizons of birthdays yet to come.

In the end I took my board to the ocean and surfed the day away with a far lighter heart than I'd had in weeks.

Here's to not being like every other old bastard.

Surprise and Delight

For sixteen visits in a row I have gotten free coffee

at my local Starbucks and I feel a bit guilty about it.

There's no real trick to it.  They have a program, instituted by the wonderful people in my Pacific Northwest homeland, known as Surprise and Delight.  It's really a quite brilliant customer loyalty scheme.  Baristas are expected to give away a certain number of free drinks every shift, whereby they "surprise and delight" the customer.  The theory is that the customer thinks that this is truly awesome and returns to the store to order again.  The cynical among you might view this as a bit insidious.  Starbucks presses your happy button by handing out a free drink to you that costs them virtually nothing.  You are surprised and delighted and do exactly what I'm doing now, telling the story of how you got some free coffee and how its so awesome that Starbucks is rewarding its customers.  There are some people out there that would say that Starbucks is manipulating you, making you feel special and happy about something that is literally required of their employees to do.  They have a quota.  I sort of lump these naysayers in with Flat Earthers, Moon Landing Hoaxers and Anti-Vaxers.  At the end of the day you walk away with a free coffee that you were ready to pay for in the first place and still have the comforting weight of a $5 bill in your pocket.

Here's the deal though...I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to benefit from the surprise and delight nearly every time you get a coffee.  I would have to estimate that since I became aware of this program I have probably been given upwards of 50 free coffees.  After the first few I felt like I was getting away with something.  After a few more I insisted on paying.  Finally one of the girls at the store that I frequent spilled about the program.  So yeah, I wasn't somehow unconsciously using Force powers on these young ladies and wouldn't be turned to the Dark Side by a handful of gratis vanilla lattes.  But I still wondered, why me?

The other day the answer came to me out of the blue.  I was telling a new friend of mine how the girls at the Starbucks keep giving me free coffees.  Flippantly I replied that they love me, I charm their socks off with stupid detective stories.

But then I thought about it...

My mentor for much of my professional life was Windsor Lincoln Olson, World Famous Private Eye. Windsor was an aluminum siding salesman who, in 1958, decided that the life of a gumshoe was far more interesting than exterior residential cladding.

I wrapped my first case as a licensed private detective when I was 23 years old. At the start of the

Windsor Lincoln Olson

World Famous Private Eye

Seattle Times 1983

case Windsor gave me a crash course in film photography after handing me a battered Minolta 35mm camera.  "If anyone asks why you've got a camera," he said, "Just tell 'em you're out birdwatching."  That this was possibly the worst thing to tell people didn't escape me, but this was, after all, a World Famous Private Eye and, in what would become a long string of dubious decisions on my part involving Windsor, I nodded eagerly, "Birdwatching. Got it!"

We sat down in the office, a daylight basement on Queen Anne Alley, facing the parking lot of the Sonics headquarters, and began putting together the final report for our client.  I had shot perhaps 150 photos of a mid-life crisis attorney with a comb-over who had been engaged in vigor

ous double-billing with his paralegal, often in the backseat of a Chrysler LeBaron convertible.

"What you've got to do," Windsor said, "is pick the photos and lay them out so
they tell a story..."  I didn't know it then, even though I had just graduated with a degree in journalism, but this was the most valuable thing that Windsor ever taught me.

Looking back on his life I've come to realize that Windsor was a born storyteller.  It may not be the only thing that makes for a great detective but I'm convinced that telling a good story elevates good detectives to great detectives.  What Windsor knew and was trying to impart to the 23 year old me was that whether its detective work, journalism or aluminum siding sales, the path to success is lining up your words in just the right way so that you connect with your audience and, right down to their sad, misbegotten souls, they "get it."

Over the years, in this fashion, I saw Windsor wow clients and journalists, tourists and fishermen.  He would talk his way around government officials and gun-toting strip club owners.  We could not go anywhere in Chinatown and not eat for free.  Not everyone loved him, but, to put it in Windsor's words, "By golly, he won't forget me."  And no one did.  At the end of the day Windsor would ride off into the sunset in whatever hazard to the roadways that he was convinced was, "a Skookum deal," (a certain listing woody stationwagon that was later diagnosed with termites comes to mind) and I would think to myself, "What the fuck just happened today?"

Windsor, hot on the trail

Seattle Times 1974

For the next 17 years Windsor was a fixture in my life.  And even though I lived life right next to him, was a part some ongoing half-baked scheme, Windsor was always a larger-than-life character to me.  Over the years I collected stories, from his old friends, colleagues, his wife and his kids.  Often the stories that Windsor wouldn't tell himself.  That the man became my hero was a foregone conclusion.  But it was not because of his crazy antics or his schemes that would go wildly pear-shaped.  It was because Windsor was one of the few people who taught me how a life should be lived. Large and weird, sometimes poorly thought out, fearless yet with humility and with the endless capacity to laugh at yourself.

Windsor has been gone a while now and I've forged on the best I knew how for the past 11 years without him.  I like to think that he lives on in the life lessons that he taught me, both sage and dubious.  I'm no Windsor Lincoln Olson.  I'm no World Famous Private Eye.

But as I stood there, day after day at the coffee window, living as large and weird and fearless as I know how, telling tales of my career and my travels, it came to me that I was maybe reaching these girls behind the counter. That maybe I'm no ones idea of Windsor, but maybe I've come to a point in life where I'm somebody's Steve.  That in some small way I'm imparting to them my own haphazard Surprise and Delight.  That in some way that this is the how the cogs of the universe turn and how good shit is maybe recycled back into the world.  And in return I gets a coffee.  Pavlov would be proud.

Thank you Windsor, for the words, the wisdom and the mayhem.  And thanks for essentially setting me up for free coffee for life.

I still tell people that I'm out birdwatching.