#answered. grisham

[ayyy-imma-ninja]

hihii

ik you're getting alot of questions and prolly making this worse sjwejjne

but for the sk!au, we know the boys target parents that aren't good to their kids, but do they also maybe target parents that are abusive to their spouses as well?

They do!

Howard Grisham was prime example #1. He was cruel to both his spouse and his two kids.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The phone rang four times, the answering machine clicked on, the recorded voice echoed through the apartment, the beep, then no message.

"The Pelican Brief" - John Grisham

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans for Kamala is taking off and includes some high profile former office holders and staffers. This is more than just the usual handful of mid level and obscure officials.

At least three former governors including Jim Edgar of Illinois (1991-1999) have publicly announced their support for the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Nine days into her 2024 candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris picked a couple of notable Republican endorsements: Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan threw his support behind the Democrat fairly quickly, and John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, Arizona’s third-largest city, endorsed her soon after. Given the state of the cotemporary GOP, it’s not easy for any Democratic candidate to pick up cross-party backing, so this represented a decent start. But hanging overhead was an obvious question: Would other Republicans soon follow? The question received a rather emphatic answer over the weekend. NBC News reported: >> The Harris campaign on Sunday unveiled more than two dozen endorsements from Republicans, including former governors, members of Congress and Trump administration officials. Many of the endorsements came from politicians who were already openly critical of former President Donald Trump, including former Republican Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts; former Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va.; and former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham.<< Those names are, of course, just a sampling. According to a press statement from the incumbent vice president’s campaign, Republicans for Harris includes endorsements from former Trump White House officials Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troye; former Secretaries Chuck Hagel and Ray LaHood; former Governors Jim Edgar, Bill Weld, and Christine Todd Whitman; former U.S. House members Rod Chandler, Tom Coleman, Dave Emery, Wayne Gilchrest, Jim Greenwood, Adam Kinzinger, John LeBoutillier, Susan Molinari, Jack Quinn, Denver Riggleman, Claudine Schneider, Christopher Shays, Peter Smith, Alan Steelman, David Trott, and Joe Walsh; and former GOP State Chair and State Senator Chris Vance, among others. “As a proud conservative, I never thought I’d be endorsing a Democrat for President,” Kinzinger said in a written statement. “But, I know Vice President Harris will defend our democracy and ensure Donald Trump never returns to the White House. Donald Trump poses a direct threat to fundamental American values. He only cares about himself, and his pursuit of power. “That’s what we saw on January 6 when he sent a mob to overturn our lawful election, who violently attacked law enforcement and ransacked our nation’s Capitol in the process,” the former member of the Jan. 6 committee added. “There’s too much at stake to sit on the sidelines, which is why I wholeheartedly endorse Kamala Harris for president. Now is the time for us all to unite to save our democracy and defeat Donald Trump one last time.”

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Helping Hand 2

Warnings: non/dubcon, mentions of divorce, and other dark elements. My username actually says you never asked for any of this.

Characters: Jonathan Pine, 40s reader

My warnings are not exhaustive but be aware this is a dark fic and may include potentially triggering topics. Please use your common sense when consuming content. I am not responsible for your decisions.

As usual, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I’m happy to once more go on this adventure with all of you! Thank you in advance for your comments and for reblogging.

A week in and you’re… efficient. Rather, self-sufficient. You can’t say you’re confident but you are starting to figure it out.

The till isn’t so confounding and the customers not so intimidating. It’s easy enough to ask how their day is, if they found everything, and get the rung through. You’ve learned quickly if only to keep Giselle from rolling her eyes at you.

That day, you’re closing. Less than an hour now and you walk the floor, checking for any errant customers to remind them of the coming deadline. There aren’t many, a tall college student wandering through the history section and a couple of older men chatting over a stack of Stephen King classics.

You head down the rear all and feel the buzz in your pocket. You ignore it. Any calls you’re getting, you’re in no hurry to answer. You sigh and pass an aisle, movement twitching at the edge but you don’t bother looking over.

As you get to the next row, you hear your name. You turn back as you see the man’s head just over the top of the shelf before he turns down the same aisle. He must be the speck you ignored.

“Oh, hi,” you smile, wiping away your worries; you’re at work. “Jonathan, right?”

“You remember,” he preens, “I was hoping you’d be around.”

“You… were?” You hesitate. Your phone buzzes. A short jitter signaling a voicemail.

“Ah, yes, I was hoping for some advice,” he puts his hand on the slender wall of the shelf, “I am gift hunting and I can’t seem to pin down an idea. I thought most people love a book but I fear choosing something utterly boring.”

“Oh, well, uh, who are we buying for?” You wonder.

“She’s about your age, I think. So I thought…”

He’s married. Of course, why wouldn’t he be. You don’t know why that disappoints you. It shouldn’t. He’s only friendly and you’re a poor divorcee. Another buzz in your pocket.

“Well, you could get her a nice bookmark and maybe a cookbook?” You had loved your cookbooks. You miss them dearly.

“Mmm, she doesn’t do much cooking. More the type to order in or eat out,” he pulls his hand back and crosses one arm over his chest, bending the other to tap his chin.

“Does she sew? Or do any crafts?” You prod, searching for options. “Or maybe she likes fashion?”

“She does spend a lot on clothes,” he chuckles.

“Well, if you’d rather a novel, you really can’t go wrong with a thriller. They tend to be fast-paced and easy to read.”

He nods thoughtfully and drops his arms, pushing back his jacket as he slides his hands into his pants, “do you like them?”

“Like… what?”

“Thrillers? Perhaps you have a specific suggestion?”

“Ah, well, John Grisham. He’s always good,” you turn, “I’ll show you where they are.”

“Thank you. Always helpful, darling.”

You’re happy he can’t see your face. That last word makes your chest twinge. He’s so nice. It makes you sad to think you would never have one of those. A nice man. Your pants buzz again.

“Why don’t you have a look,” you present the books with a wave, “and I’ll be back to answer any questions you have. I just need to finish my walk through.”

“Certainly,” he agrees, reaching to trace a fingertip down the spine of a book.

You smile and rush away. You’re just going to turn your phone on silent and deal with it later. As you peek at the screen, you see the same name, over and over. What could he want?

You scroll through the onslaught of Andy’s messages. It’s just like living with him. It never stops. His last text is all caps; CALL ME.

You reply, ‘working for fifteen more minutes. Can’t.’

“You didn’t get too far,” Jonathan startles you and you quickly slide your phone away, “what do you think of this one?”

He holds up a copy of The Whistler. You nod, “it’s not bad. Main character is a woman, so probably a good choice for them.”

“Wonderful, and you suggested a bookmark?”

“Yes, er, over here,” you beckon him onward and take him to the swiveling rack of bookmarks, “these ones are especially nice, I think.”

You point to the thick leather bookmarks with the tassel strings attached and a few charms at the end. He leans in and examines the different colours. He clucks, “I really can be indecisive. If I recall,” he unhooks the same style you suggested, “she was preferable to pink.”

“Great,” you declare, “perfect gift.”

“Hope so,” he agrees, “I’m sorry, am I keeping you? You’re eager to be rid of me.”

“No, not at all, I didn’t mean to hurry you,” you assure him, “I’m sorry. It’s been a very long day and–”

“And you’ve been on your feet. You must be tired,” he suggests, but not in a sarcastic way. “I forget it is so late.”

“Really, it’s okay, I didn’t mean to come off as sharp.”

“Relax,” he taps his knuckles on the book, “you’ve been a wonderful help. Really. I’ll be sure to put your name on the survey.”

“Uh, thanks,” you swallow, “have a good night.”

“You as well,” he raises his handful and nods before striding off.

You groan, cringing as your chest threatens to cave in on itself. Why are you so awkward? You’re so bad at this job. Like everything else.

There’s a scratchy noise. It catches your ear and you swear, it sounds just like your name. Shit! You pull out your phone, the timer is ticking. You must have pocket-dialed. You bring the phone to your ear.

“Hello?”

“Hello!” Andy booms, “Christ. We have something important to talk about.”

“Right, I told you, I’m at work–”

“You called me. Don’t waste my time. My mother’s birthday–”

“Andy, we’re not married anymore.”

“I know that. She asked me to tell you she wants you at her party. She always liked you. For whatever reason.”

You don’t take the bait. You don’t have to please him anymore. He filed for divorce, he made that choice.

“I’ll check my schedule–”

“Who were you talking to?” He interrupts.

“A customer,” you keep your voice down, “speaking of, I need to get back–”

“You were real nice to him, weren’t you?”

“Good night, Andy.”

You hang up. You don’t know how he’s still paranoid when you’re not even together. Jackass.

[50cal-fullauto-astarion]

↮ for the sake of having you near [two]

[ part one ] [ part two ] [ part three ]

captain john price x f!veteran!reader (no use of ‘y/n’) 5.7k words

cw: descriptions of gun violence & gunshot injuries, suicide, murder, minor character death, reader is an amputee & the same age as price, foul language, mentions of terminal cancer, extremely divorced-but-still-in-love behavior from two people that consider one another soulmates (some of these aren’t out-and-out cw’s, but points that deserve noting) ↮ Twenty years you had known John, and for seventeen of them you were married. After a career-ruining injury in the field, you were forced out of the service, and the marriage did not survive your survival. But: when John goes on leave, he always finds his way home to you. (another shoutout to @alittleposhtoad who has been nothing but an on-going cheerleader and inspiration for this project, for whom this entire work is for. it wouldn't exist as well it does without her, and i owe her the hell out of my gratitude.)

The first bookend holds in place a cold, but dry for-now day in November 2003, where you shriek awake in bed beside John. You do this because he pole vaults out of bed, shouting, “We fuckin’ overslept!”

“Are you fucking kidding?! We’re going to miss the bus. What happened to the fucking alarms?” You lurch up like you’ve been electrocuted, legs tangled insanely in the bed sheet. 

“I don’t bloody know!” he grunts, bare-assed and running around the room, trying to get his clothes back on. You jump up and run as well, and take the clothes he throws your way—his shirt, your flannel sleep pants, one sock of his and one of yours, but your bra is simply gone. Perhaps it’s gone to heaven. Perhaps it’s stuck to the headboard and neither of you’ve simply looked. Altogether too busy rushing.

You both tear through the hotel room, and you’re almost out the door when he turns sharply, busting your nose with his chin, leaving you both hissing and confused. “Dress—your dress, on the loo door,” he starts, squeezing back past you as you swear and straighten. Almost forgot the damned dress!

On any other day forgetting the dress or missing the bus might not be as big a problem—it would be a total nothing, because you and John have scored a fat two weeks of leave together, and you’re going to go to Iceland at the end of the week for four days. 

The issue is, if you forget the dress, and miss the bus, you can still go to Iceland at the end of the week for four days, but it won’t be a honeymoon. You’re getting married today, in John’s mate Grisham’s back garden in Sussex. 

He bombs back with the £60 clearance wedding dress over his shoulder in a garment bag, clapping you on the ass, “Go, go-go-go-go!” in a jittering singsong. His Jordan’s aren’t even tied. 

Between checkout and the wild, harebrained sprint down the empty lane, you almost don’t make it. It takes you pounding on the side of the bus as the engine growls as it starts to pull away to get it to stop. You rush aboard, dumping your fare in spare change, telling the driver between gulps for air, “Thank you. So much. Jesus. We’re getting married.”

“Mhm! Lovely!” the driver looks like she wishes you’d not talk to her. John scoops up your hand when you’re sat, giving you a bright-eyed grin. It doesn’t bother you at all that you’ve only known one another for three weeks. Felt like you were finding him after a lifetime of looking. 

You make it to Grisham’s in time for the clouds to darken and brood angrily as a hen waiting on eggs. Grisham, a battle hardened Staff Sergeant in John’s unit, is in the midst of a shave when he answers the door. He grabs John’s shoulder, grumbling, “Need to shave, piss-ant, to the water closet with you,” causing John to laugh and bully his way from the grip. To you, Grisham says, “Mornin’, sweetheart, Jezza’s got the bedroom sorted for you,” giving you a squeezing half hug. 

You look back on the day with bittersweet fondness. So many there and gone memories, places once full that now were left empty in the halls of your life. 

John had pulled his squad mate, Darian, to the side, and only sounded joking when he said, “Skeeter, mate, I respect your fashion choices. You know this, yeah?” slinging an arm around his neck. “If you wear that fuckin’ footie jersey to my ceremony, I will beat the fuckin’ piss out of you.” Darian put his hands up in surrender and changed, grinning so beautifully and widely it showed his perfect molars. A gorgeous man, always laughing. 

He’d been court-martialed and found unfit to stand trial for murdering his fiancé during a psychotic episode in 2010. He was adamant that he was saving her from being kidnapped by the sex traffickers his unit had been dealing with for years in Thailand. The episode never ended. Last you’d heard, he was still being held custody in a mental facility. He’d just…cracked.

The rain broke open as you read your vows off a sheet of printer paper, and it ate away at the words you worked so hard to put together. John gave you a look that asked in challenge if you could hack it, and you’d just stuffed the paper down your bodice and freestyled your vows off the cuff. Soaking wet, intoxicated to the point of shaming each and every lotus-eater on the man in front of you, you grab the lapels of his dress uniform and haul yourself up to his ear. 

You don’t know why this quote comes to you, other than you know his love of crushingly sad Russian novels, all thick enough to act as door-stoppers. Other than the fact that the exact moment you fell in love with him was the moment he’d restarted Doctor Zhivago for you, to read to you as your fucked-out bodies cooled against one another in his bunk, reaching behind your head for the faded paperback on the window sill just beyond his bed. 

“You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.” You were panting at the end of the passage, unsure entirely how badly you’d mangled it, and John sat tight and straight under your hands, rain soaking his hair almost black. 

You push through. You are nothing if not deadset on seeing a job done, and he’d thrown a challenge down at your feet. Picking up another quote that had burned into your mind endlessly, you finish, “I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely,” pressing a kiss to his neck before dropping back on your feet, heart slamming against your ribs as if it were borne of a wrecking-ball instead of a mother.

John’s heartbeat slams like war drums in his chest, and you can see his pulse jumping in his neck. Everything. Everything. Everything. That’s what the look in his pale blue eyes calls you, reading loud and clear that you were the reason his soul had made landfall on terra firma, and not a planet circling a different celestial body.  

Grisham swears, starting to gather up food, running it back indoors. It wasn’t supposed to rain for another two hours, enough time for a small reception, enough time to send the two of you trotting off to another friend’s house to borrow their loft space until you were to leave. He tells most to sit still, to finish watching the ceremony, and his fiance, Jezza, helps him in the mad rush. 

But they both stop to watch John snap his arms around your waist, pulling you in tight, kissing you to close out the ceremony. Then they jumped and yelled like football hooligans, cheering for the both of you. And so did the rest of the gathered.

Grisham met his end at the barrel of his own sidearm, watching the sunset through the window of he and Jezza’s bedroom. It was a soft, temperate afternoon in late March of 2014. He had simply seen too much, his heart had always been gentle, he had loved and cared deeply for nearly all he met. When he accidentally killed a child who’d bolted in front of his scope at the last moment, running for his mother, it had broken the last thing tethering him to this place. He’d imagined the face of his youngest son as the bullet cut through the boy’s chest. A barrel to his temple, a quiet afternoon, and Jezza found his brains painted across their bedspread moments after the muffled pop that sounded throughout the whole home.

There are faces in the small crowd, one after another after another, that you recognize from military portraits displayed at their funerals, but, then, at that moment, with freezing rain soaking your hair, and pouring down your back, you couldn’t imagine a single death occurring in the next seventeen years.

It feels selfish, really, to count your marriage among them, when so many of your mutual friends had faded into the dark and gotten lost.

+

After you’d been forced out of the service, you’d come back to an old hobby. Your entire life, you’d sculpted. Often, just small, silly things–an ashtray here, a little horse head there–but the decades had put practice into your hands, and rendered you past the expert level. Not bad for someone who spent their college-aged years humping two and a half stone rucksacks across all the different environs of hell.

The largest shed just beyond the car park shed–which John simply does not park his Jeep in, for reasons still mysterious to you in the three days he has returned to the rectory–is your sculpting studio. 

It’s a utilitarian space, plenty roomy, with pedestals for larger projects. There is a much more comfortable bench running along one wall under a beautiful window looking out onto the rectory, roomy and the perfect height for a barstool. 

Tools are scattered about the entire area, the definition of organized chaos, and you keep yourself occupied by occasionally looking out the window, watching your ex-husband work on a project he has suddenly decided is of utmost importance: a ramp for a neighbor’s elderly dog to get in and out of their bed with. He’s been busy designing all morning, and now he builds in his carpentry shed, leaving the doors wide open to catch the breeze and vent the sawdust.

You think he is, perhaps, distracting himself. It is the second anniversary of his father’s death. The way that you understand the man you had married, you know he has not processed it. He’s endured too much death, and the ability to grieve has been cut out of him, or atrophied. He stays, always, vacillating between denial and depression.

Under your hands is a specimen of your specialty. A living death mask. It is something that had become your signature in the years since your honorable discharge. 

Your busts were built of the faces of the deceased, right at the moment of their last breath. What had started as a grim coping mechanism, starting with your own face all those years ago–now hanging on your studio’s wall, face frozen forever in an expression of wide-eyed confusion, mouth peeled back from your teeth in a gasp–had become prize winning art.

You sculpt the face of an alternative model, who had died of an overdose. It was commissioned by her agent, her own mother, wanting to cast it in bronze, to later reproduce as jewelry. You’d initially thought it had been a reprehensible request, but the cheque was too large to turn down. Your parents’ medical bills are mounting as they grow older and live off a fixed income, and you would not dare ask John for the help.

Not because he wouldn’t give, nor that he would hold it over your head in a power play, no. Because he would open his wallet without thought and tell you to drain him dry, and he’d do it humbly and hopefully.

You look back to the face under your hands–a clay rendering of sloppily-cracked eyes, a mouth sloping open in fogged mid-death, brows knotted in confusion. You brush your thumb over a scar hugging the left nostril. Pressure mounts in your chest, and you have to move, or you will crack. Because the bust will crack if you leave it bare, you pack a damp cheesecloth around it before you leave, stepping out of your studio, stretching your back.

Your steps take you to John’s workshop, waiting at one side of the doorway for him to stop running the table saw. He wouldn’t cut a finger off, but, still, you worry and practice good judgment.

He does turn it off after it screams through a plank of white oak–something a little too fancy for an overweight dachshund, but, it’s his wood and projects, he can choose his materials. It will be a nice piece for the owners, at any rate.

“Everything alright, Prem?” he asks, pushing his safety glasses onto his scalp. You shrug and nod, pushing down on the hip over your amputation, feeling tight and locked up. 

“Just fine. Wanted to make sure that we were still on for dad’s dinner tonight,” you say, trying to choose your words like picking pearls. You do not want him spooked, and you do not want him feeling like his father’s birthday is easily discarded. It is a fine line to walk. “My head’s everywhere today, and I don’t want to head out on errands without confirming.”

He snorts, raising a brow, throwing you one of his signature, closed-mouth grins. “You? Forget anything? Cold day in hell before that happens,” he chuckles, putting the cut planks beside the table. He rubs a dusty hand over his beard, clearing his mind. It’s a quick process, but one you know he has to prime himself for. “Yeah, dad’s dinner. We’re still on. Still going to the fish and chip shop he liked, yeah?”

You snort, crossing your arms and nodding. “Tully’s. Of course. Tried my damnedest, but Terry liked what Terry liked. Whitefish and chips with mayo and malt vin. Good old Scouse boy’s heart never got off the boardwalk.”

“Can take the boy out of Liverpool, but…” he starts, smile pulling into a smirk. “Yeah, it’s a da–it’s a plan.”

Your smile twitches, but you don’t call his slip. Another oldie, confirming plans by it’s a date when it comes to you. Though it’s only the connotation, it’s enough to warrant a slowly changing lexicon. 

+

The yearly dinners on Terry’s birthday to his favorite joint are the only form of mourning John seems to be able to cope with. It was your idea, as so many things were when it came to caring for the man’s heart, and it was something that seemed to help. As you had done last year, on a complete whim, dragging his ass off the couch and saying that you always took Terry down to the shops for this very birthday dinner, he would simply have to suffice, because you quite liked the tradition.

In all honesty, you could not stand the vacant look in his eyes as he stared and thought, and thought, and thought. Your John was a shark. The moment he stopped moving, he began to fall prey to death. If you had to put on a show and almost literally sweep him from the house, you would. If only to maintain the cracks in your heart that were barely sticking together.

You pull on something casual, because you are going to a chippy, and not to the fucking Bar Vendôme at the Hôtel Ritz Paris. Had gone there, once, though, gathering intel. That glass roof haunts you to this day, and never had you seen anything quite like it again.

John has the audacity to be waiting downstairs for you in the tightest black t-shirt known to man, hugging his thick, sturdy waist, and his full pecs. It seems to strain around his biceps, and you have to bite your tongue to stop yourself from telling him to wait a moment as he pulls his bomber back on.

It is almost a nuisance, how quickly your body recognizes this man, how quickly it responds. You think if he were ever to offer you both blood and body in the form of bread and wine, you might not be able to turn him down. Even that is a lie. You would eat straight from his hand, you would drink from his collarbones and his mouth. 

“You look good, Prem,” he says, trying hard not to do an up-and-down over your body. It makes your throat dry, the way his head bows a bit, as if he is deferring to you, as if he is bowing. He has always treated you well. Better than you deserve, you think. 

“Ta,” is all you can manage around your cracking-dry throat, trying hard not to swallow in front of him. “I could say that you cleaned up well, too, but you always keep yourself put together.”

This time he is the one to snort and shake his head. “You say that, but I know that you remember Albania.”

You laugh, but your mind says, You would be the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, even covered in mud, blood, or shit. What you say is, “Come on, then. Your car or mine?”

+

Tully’s is easy territory. It is paper boats, loads of steak cut chips fresh out of boiling animal lard, and white fish that flakes as if transferred straight from water to batter to fryer. And the pints of lager that go with it are crisp and cold, with a dense, creamy head an inch deep, bubbling ambery-gold and sweating in the glass.

The post-storm air is charged, buzzing, carrying a cleansing breeze that pushes through both of your jackets. The inside is small and intimate, dimly lit, with a footie match on the ancient CRT telly hung over the modest bar. Manchester United v. Arsenal. But neither of you are paying attention.

Instead, it starts as it had the year before, twinned reminiscing spinning together in a double-strand thread, your hands each pulling slowly at the wool of memory, working together to find your way back into history warm and safe.

It starts simply, his memories from childhood. His mother, who’d never wanted to be a mother, slipping out on a hot summer afternoon, never to return, but there was his father in the evening, covered in sawdust and smelling of wood chips and hot saw blades. Terry Price had always stood strong for his son.

It moved into the future, now a far past, and you draw stories out of John as you both sink down pint after pint. 

His first school, his first dance, his first drive. “He’d had this awful Beetle, no interior, all metal. Christ, that thing should’ve never been on the road, it didn’t even have seatbelts.” 

His first kiss, his first formal, his first heartbreak.”Hah. I’ve already told you plenty of times about Dana Rowbotham. But, ah. No, dad poured me a few shots at the kitchen table, and we watched the Liverpool match. He. Well. He was a man of discretion, you know how he was. Didn’t say a word while I did that pinched, angry crying the whole time.”

He polishes off his fish, scrubbing off his fingers over the boat, licking his lip to rid his mustache of foam, huffing a bit of a laugh. “This one I know I haven’t told you before. I just have no bleedin’ idea if he told you while he was living at the house.”

You hold up a finger, knocking back the last of your third pint, and turn your head to belch over your shoulder, shaking a laugh out of him. 

“Christ, woman.”

“A moment,” you grunt, before doing it again.

“I hope you know people are staring. Judging. You’ll be run out by the town council any moment now.”

“Let ‘em fuckin’ try.” You hold position, waiting on whether another will come, and when you are certain you’ve run out of so-called ammunition, you turn back to him. “So what’s this story you’ve never told me? I want to compare notes.”

His amused expression dulls, softens. It morphs into something a bit sorrowful, tinged with either remorse, or longing. And it is incredible how closely linked those two emotions are, twins separated at birth, saints left starcrossed and adrift after the death of Christ. Left standing listless, unmoored witness outside of Christ’s sepulcher with empty hands and no direction, staring at impossibly heavy stone sealing the Garden Tomb.

“The first thing he said to me after the wedding–and the last thing he said to me about you.”

Your amusement slips off your face, as if it was a mask you had always worn, and you aren’t sure what to call your expression as you peer into John’s averted eyes. Is it vulnerability? A weak shade of shock or surprise? Is it simple, strange weakness? Maybe it is a combination of all and one, an unsteadying concoction that makes you way as John shows you a few of the cards he’s kept close to his chest for years or decades.

“Oh,” it’s all you can say, shifting in your seat.

You remember his father’s last words, as clearly as if you were playing them on a tape in front of you, or sitting in his room on the ground floor of the rectory, watching it happen all over again. It was a cold, bright afternoon in February, and John sat next to his father’s bedside, listening to his labored, watery breathing as he read aloud from The Brothers Karamazov. You’d only come in to drop off some tea with lemon for John. His voice had been starting to become hoarse as he read. 

You were at the foot of the bed, leaving the room, when Terry’s rheumy eyes slipped open, and he’d made a sound. You’d stopped and turned, hands resting on the footboard. You’d known he was going to pass that day, it’s why you’d called John home at all, for the first time in your careers, and why you’d been giving as much privacy as you could.

A smile, dulled by painkillers and impending death into something almost childlike with wonder, slid onto the elder Price’s mouth, nestled in his gray beard. John sat forward and picked up his hands. “Hey, dad,” he’d croaked.

“John-John. There you are, pal,” his father had managed, too weak to even squeeze his son’s hands back. “I’ve been lookin’ all over for you.”

“Sorry. I.” John stopped to swallow, collecting himself, pulling on the act. His voice steadier, he’d said, “I just got in, ran a bit late.” Four hundred pages into the Russian door-stopper novel, ten hours of bedside, death-watch vigil. 

John’s father’s last words came out, fading by syllables, “That’s alright, lad of mine. Always a good lad,” and he’d slipped into a deep sleep. Another five hours of sitting sentry, and John had knocked on your door. You knew his dad was gone, and you’d let John strangle down his weeping on your bed attempting to begin executing funeral tasks, as dusk dug deeper into the frigid dark of night.

In the present, in Tully’s, he nods, pushing his tongue around his mouth, and, it’s bizarre, you wonder if he is feeling the same things as you are. And you don’t at all know for certain, caught in a moment where you can’t read him as simply as a book. 

Or, no…this is one of his motifs. It has become difficult to pick from the prose, because it has been so long since you’ve poured through his pages with such intimate attention.

He rolls his shoulders, and pushes himself into the back of his chair, as if trying to stretch or pop his back. His biceps and triceps strain the material of his sleeves as he puts his hands behind his head, pulling the cotton tight across his chest and shoulders. You have to fight the urge to squeeze your eyes shut against the image. He is not preening, he is uncomfortable, trying to ease himself.

“The first one isn’t so great, but you were there,” he snorts, finally something like a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, puts crinkles into the crows feet at the corner of his eyes. It’s dour and wry, but it’s there. 

“Oh, I remember,” you laugh with him, against your better judgment resting on your elbows on the tabletop. You hold onto your empty pint glass, tilting it back and forth on the varnished wood, soft rocking clunk-clunks beating out like a slow metronome. “I think we were the only ones pleased with the two of us, eh?”

He nods. “Yeah. Heh.” He pushes his chair back onto two feet, pulling a mild balancing act that reminds you of him when you’d first met. He always sat like that, and it made his CO so furiously angry. The man thought it was disrespectful. John smirked as he was getting dressed down at a paint-peeling volume. Had fire as a boy. Still held it within his chest as a man, and the like inside of him sought out like. 

Continuing, he says, “I’d met up with him once, after the wedding, before things cooled off. I brought some of those Kodak prints Grisham had developed for us. Didn’t even take them out of the envelope before then, I was scared as shit they’d somehow get ruined before we had a place to hang them.” His laugh is warm and fond, and you feel yourself rising to meet the temperature, chest filling softly with emotion. “And he looked at them. 

“Had this tired look on his face. You know the one, where he looked like he’d just worked eighteen hours straight and was told there was no dinner waiting for him at home. I don’t think dad was ever disappointed in me, but that look came close. Thought I’d die from being under it, honestly,” he laughs, shaking his head. 

“I bet. Dad was just so…gentle,” you say, thinking back on your father-in-law, who’d become one of your dearest friends in those last years. “Must’ve felt like shit.”

“That, my dear, is barely scraping the surface of how it felt,” he says in agreement, and the pet name slides right by the two of you, too comfortable now to comment on, lest the moment shatter. “He was just pushing the prints around on his table, and he looked up at me and said, ‘Lad. I don’t think you’ll be able to afford the alimony for her.’”

It takes a second for that to sink in, but sink in it does, and you burst out laughing, turning your head and covering your mouth with the back of your wrist. “Good lord. He didn’t need to skin you alive to compliment me, but I commend him for it,” you laugh, looking at John and his pleased grin from the corner of your eye. 

“Speak softly and carry a big verbal stick, I suppose,” he agrees. “He knew you were big ticket, even then. And he just.” He tucks his lips between his teeth, wetting them, before he releases them with a soft sigh. “Dad just loved you to bits, Prem.”

“I know,” you tell him, your voice hushing, overcome with a layered ache. “I loved him, too. One of the best men I’ve ever met.”

The absolute best man you’ve ever met sits before you, and you so badly want to tell him that in the moment, but the words fall to ash on your tongue. There it is, again, the bitter gulf. Could you make it across if you ran and leapt? If you really tried?

Your throat pinches, and for one of the few times in your life—a biography that could harrow the very worst of humankind, weathered like a lighthouse on a violent, black sea—you cannot speak. You cannot find a single word to press past your teeth. 

All you can do is look at the man whose last name you couldn’t bear to give up in the divorce.

You fought him on nothing—neither of you fought at all during the division—and he didn’t fight you on that.

“Prem?” he says, checking, reading, thrown. And he says your real name. “You good?”

“Ah, fine,” you lie seamlessly. But John knows the pattern of your embroideries too well. He can scent your stories as a hound could. But he will not bay and call it out. You look down at your paper boat, the few scattered chips in the bottom, the mostly empty cup of malt vinegar. 

You look at his left hand, and you know his wedding band lines in your jewelry box alongside yours. They were made together, a gift on your fifth anniversary, and together they would stay.

“I think I let myself get overtired, quite honestly. And the greasy food didn’t help,” you say, with a lifted shoulder. “What was the other thing? The last thing?”

John’s hand is in the table, you’ve kept it in your periphery. Watching it as one watches something shy, something they want desperately to approach. And that large, harsh hand—capable of dazzling, deathly violence—creeps a centimeter your way. His swallow is audible, even with the humming chuckle he releases afterward to cover it. 

“He said, ‘John-John, that girl—that woman is the best thing that’s ever happened to us. I hope she knows that.’”

+

It’s 31 July, 2020. The hottest day of the year in Somerset. That’s when it happens, where the final bookend takes its place. 

Grisham is long dead, Jezza has married up. Darius stays confined in the facility, visions of villains painting the inner walls of his skull. Grover, and MacNally—Terrance, and Windham—Park and Montgomery—they’re all dead. 

You sit outside of your studio, waiting on a call, smoking one of your husband’s cigars, and the sky is flat, and gray, and unforgiving. There is not a drop of beauty at your home today. 

Covid-19, a modern plague for a modern populace, keeps your husband from coming home on leave. It doesn’t pay to spend two weeks quarantining, not when he’ll only have to turn it around and make a month of it when he leaves. He can’t afford the risk of catching it. If he catches it, it will spread to you. Once it’s spread to you, it will spread to your parents or his father. It’s too great a risk.

Your phone rings, your shiny new Samsung. You think about the girl you were in 2003, who did not ever imagine owning a computer, let alone carrying around one in your pocket. It’s an unknown number, and you know that on the other end is your husband, breaking in a fresh burner, somewhere out in the great, wide world you no longer travel. 

Pressing the phone to your ear, you greet him automatically, “Hello, darling. How very dare you call when my husband is away.”

It was an effort to make the sting of separation lesser. John chuckles at it, trying to play into the bit as well. “Hey, love. What can I say? I couldn’t resist.”

There is small talk, pleasant and aching. If you close your eyes, you can imagine a place you’ve been a million years before—catching each other mid-leave, calling from some far flung airport, alerting the other to an impending homecoming. 

But, oh, isn’t that a pain that does not quiet. A daydream that only deepens the hurt, instead of soothing it. 

Minutes drip by and by, filled with empty talk, dancing around topics that neither of you could open to one another ever again. He cannot tell you where in the world his boots have fallen, and you cannot ask him what foul thing is crawling from the dark this time. 

A panic begins to fill your chest, crushing you, as your conversation begins to run out. What’s next? What comes next in this horrible, cruel life? What can you provide any longer that he can’t find in a one night stand? 

He would never think of you as a warm, wet hole. He would never think of you as a bed warmer. God forbid even entertaining the idea of him considering you a housekeeper, a maid, a cook, an accountant for his home. He would never—but you do. What could you possibly be for him, now that you cannot be his equal?

Everything breaks after a minute of dead silence. You break. 

“You have to ask me for one, John,” you say, your voice so much more shockingly steady than you were prepared for. “You need to do that for us, because I cannot take ruining another thing between us.”

His response is immediate, almost fearful, “Don’t. Prem, don’t make me do that. For fuck’s sake, and don’t ask me to do it over the phone either.”

“It’s dead, John. Jesus fucking Christ,” your panic spirals and deepens, tearing you into ribbons beneath your sternum, “it died in Beirut—”

“Nothing died in Beirut!” he argues, a harsh cut edging into his voice, his fear manifesting in the blade-cusp tone.

“I died in Beirut. Your wife died in Beirut.”

“I’m hanging up. I’m not fucking doing this. You’re not listening to sense. We’ve been married twenty years, Prem. My wife did not fucking die in Beirut, I am on the goddamned phone with her!”

“Stop bassing out your fucking voice to me,” you warn him, a snarl. “You’re not going to growl me down from this. It’s dead, John. We have to cut it off before it kills us, too.”

“What? Our marriage?” he spits, as if throwing out the name of it will put a harsh light of reality into the conversation.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“No, not ‘yeah’. Name it. Name the fucking thing you want to put down so badly.”

“I want you to end our fucking marriage, John.”

Silence, screaming down the line. “Why? Prem, there’s—we…”

“Because I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want you to hate me. I…I love you. But. Good Christ, John. It’s turning into poison. I don’t want us to hate each other.”

More silence. 

He says your real name, beseeches you with it, and tries to find you through the ether with a simple, pleading, “Love, no.”

“Please, John. This. This is the only way we can keep each other. I know you’ve felt it, too.”

Another eternity of silence sits like a fresh corpse between you. And why shouldn’t it. The corpse is seventeen years old, the corpse is what is left of a love story.

“I—okay. Okay, Prem. It’s.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“No, don’t—just. Don’t. I have to go. There’s…I’ve got to handle something. I—I love you.”

“…I love you, too.”

+++

tag list: @smoggyfogbottom @parttimepr0phet @dotcie @kastlequill @pssytrux <3

[fanhackers]

The End of Reading (?)

There have been a lot of academic books and high-journalism opinions about the end of English Literature as a discipline or, even more alarming, the end of Reading itself.  As both an English professor and a fan studies person, I take these claims with a grain of salt.  Regarding literature as a field - well, there might be fewer English literature majors, but most students still want to take literature courses as part of their undergraduate degree, and I think many people still want to be guided in their reading towards stuff that is good.  And capital R-Reading, from what I can see, isn’t in as much jeopardy as people think. 

In his recent article, The Reading Crisis, A.O. Scott agrees,explaining that people have always worried about the state of reading, particularly where the kids are concerned:

Nowadays parents and other concerned adults worry that young people don’t read or love reading enough. Their counterparts in the 18th and 19th centuries were apt to fret that the young loved reading too much. 

And as someone who’s spent much of my life in fanfiction reading and writing communities, I’ve never been worried that young people aren’t reading. They may be reading different things than people expect, but let’s face it: most people aren’t reading Paradise Lost (or at least not every day) and most stuff on the NY Times Best Sellers List isn’t anything particularly thought provoking or improving (the NYT Book Review of the same week as Scott’s essay is topped by the likes of James Patterson and John Grisham etc. I personally find fanfiction–or at least, the fanfiction stories I finish reading, which isn’t all of them–infinitely more thought provoking and improving!) 

Scott concludes his essay by wandering into fannish territory, using D&D to describe some different ideas of reading and readers:

If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic. Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you. Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive. Those terms, shadowed by connotations of pathology and vice, answer a vocabulary of belittlement — bookworm, bookish, book-smart — with assertions of danger. Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.

I am both a lawful and chaotic reader–though chaotic reading is the most fun, isn’t it? :D

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[verdantachillean]

If you get this, answer w/ three random facts about yourself and send it the last five blogs in your notifs. Anon or not, doesn’t matter, let’s get to know the person behind the blog <3

Just saw this lmao

-I LOVE to study anthropology, I’ve been interested in it for at least a year, and got interested in it because I started studying the mythology that inspired Yo Kai Watch, I believe that everyone just needs to find a study field that interests them, because there’s just so many that at least one will inspire them

-I like to study and read law related things, I just got into Ace Attorney, love to read John Grisham books, and want to learn more about how the law affects culture

-I like to drink tea, my favorite flavors are hibiscus and lemon

[urrone]

if you get this, answer with three random facts about yourself and send it to the last seven blogs in your notifs! anon or not, doesn’t matter, let’s get to know the person behind the blog <3

Oh this is fun!

I have worked from home since the panoramic and I fuckin love it, I work so well from home. My problem is that the forced outing to work every day was my only enrichment in my enclosure, and living alone has gotten really fucking lonely. So I'm planning on moving to Michigan to live with one of my best friends.

I recently counted when someone on twitter asked about duplicate copies of favorite books and I currently own 11 copies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in its entirety. My favorite copy (probably) is the 8th printing of the second American edition I have, still in the slipcover with original dust jackets and fold out maps. I've never read them. I barely like touching them. But if my condo catches on fire I'm grabbing them on my way out the door.

When people ask about famous person encounters I tell the story about my freshman year of college when I was waiting tables in Charlottesville, VA and John Grisham came into my shitty little restaurant and ordered the red beans and rice, only we didn't have rice made that day so the bartender had to abandon ship and run across the street to the Piggly Wiggly for minute rice while we slowly brought out his starter salad. Only it's a lie, I didn't wait on his table, but no one wants to hear about me walking slowly back and forth to my section past his table, so it's just a little pretend. I can tell you he's a good tipper though. The minute rice part is real.

[truecrimecrystals]

Domonique Holley-Grisham has been missing since February 12th, 2009. 

That day began as a typical day for the then-16-year-old. Domonique played in a hockey game, where he reportedly won MVP of the game. He then returned to his family's home in Rochester, New York. Domonique vanished a short time later. He still remains missing today.

Domonique is the second oldest amongst six siblings. Just hours before he vanished, Domonique brought some of his younger siblings home from his hockey game while their mother went to the store. At some point after arriving home, Domonique received a phone call that prompted him to walk outside of the residence. He told his siblings he would be back, but he never returned. Domonique has never been seen or heard from again.

Domonique's mother later reported him missing. Police classified Domonique's disappearance as a runaway, despite the fact that he had never done so before, nor had he indicated that he planned to leave. There were a few reported sightings of him in the Rochester area, but none of the sightings were ever confirmed. 

Over the years, there have been a few rumors about what might have happened to Domonique. In 2016, Domonique's mother told reporters that several people have reached out to her, "saying her son was killed by a group of teens over an unknown disagreement. Others have told her his death was an accident and was hidden because the kids he was with were scared."

Neither of these theories have been confirmed, but it appears that they also have not been ruled out. Domonique's case remains opened, but several years have passed without any updates in the case. There has been very little reporting about his disappearance. 

Domonique's family has since moved to North Carolina. They are still hoping to once day receive answers about what happened to him. If you have any information that could lead to Domonique's whereabouts, please contact the Rochester Police Department at 585-428-6595.

[ayyy-imma-ninja]

Err

Honestly out of questions for the SK Au

So just wanted to know...

Will what Howard Grisham's actions be revealed to us in future stories?

Also, how's your day? Hope it was decent at least-!

Perhaps someday it will be plainly explained, but the clues and implications are there. I don't like simply saying what a character's done. I prefer "show, don't tell".

[mattnben-bennmatt]

Matt Damon's interview w/ Vanity Fair (December 1997)

Meet Matt Damon

Three of Hollywood’s top directors have decided that 27-year-old Harvard dropout Matt Damon is a star: Francis Ford Coppola gave him the lead in the latest Grisham adaptation, The Rainmaker, Steven Spielberg cast him in the title role in Saving Private Ryan, and Gus Van Sant directed him in Good Will Hunting, which the actor co-wrote. But, David Kamp discovers. Matt Damon himself is not so sure.

By David Kamp

-

This is how it works: a script is first sent to Chris O’Donnell and Leonardo DiCaprio. They pass. Then the secondtier actors reconvene, exchange familiar nods, and audition for the role that they hope will elevate them from their current station. Usually this role isn’t even any good, merely a preen-and-shout exercise in an expensively produced Hollywood infliction. But the actor who secures the part is assured offers and choices, while the also-rans are forced to scratch around for other work: made-for-cable movies, TV pilots, independent films about small-town white ethnics who wear their shirts untucked and say things like “Cut the shit, Frankie!”

Matt Damon was one of these also-rans, a scrubbed young kid with an Andover face who played schoolboys and soldiers in movies that were O.K. but never quite took. He was in School Ties, in which Brendan Fraser played a Jewish football recruit at an elite New England prep school, and Courage Under Fire, the Denzel Washington drama about the Gulf War.

By now, given the circumstances that bring us all together here, you’ve surmised that Damon is no longer an also-ran, and that something wonderful has happened to him. What happened was that he became the beneficiary of Francis Ford Coppola’s whim to cast an unknown as the lead in The Rainmaker, the latest film adaptation of a John Grisham book. On top of this, Damon stars as a character named Will Hunting in a movie entitled Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant’s first picture since To Die For, and plays Private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming World War II epic. So Matt Damon is suddenly big news, a star in the making, Hollywood’s face of tomorrow, etc., etc. There is “buzz” about him, and it’s my duty to observe that his career has “caught fire,” that he is “hot.” People who work in entertainment are already slurring his name nonchalantly, “M’daymun,” as if they’ve said it a million times and are exhausted by the sheer burden of advance-word knowingness. Matt Damon. M’daymun. Matthew McConaughDamon. He’s probably a wanker. Let’s find out.

‘Oh, hey, man, how you doin’? . . . Naw, I’m just here watching the game with the guy from Vanity [belch] Fair. . . . Yeah, look, I promise I’ll reread it, but if you want an answer now, I’m telling you probably not, because I read this script on the plane that blew me away, and it’s supposed to go at the same time as yours. It’s about a compulsive gambler. It’s written by a guy who is a compulsive gambler, I think. . . . No, so I think probably not, but look, this is for just this film, O.K.? Let’s keep talking for the future, O.K., man? ’Cause I’d like to work with you.”

He hangs up, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe I’m in a position where I have to turn down work. This has never happened,” he says. He’s of compact physique, with broad shoulders, sharp features, and short, mussed hair—he looks like an early Heisman winner.

“When did it start happening?” I ask.

“Just this past weekend,” Damon says. He is only recently back from England, where Saving Private Ryan is being filmed. We are drinking beer and watching football, and, appropriately, there is an air of beer-commercial wish fulfillment afoot, the kind of deal where two knuckleheads in a dorm room slam down their brewskis on top of the console and are magically transported poolside, where butlers and multiple facsimiles of Jayne Mansfield attend to them. Only it’s not nearly that decadent—we are simply luxuriating in a fancy hotel room in New York City on the dime of Miramax, which is releasing Good Will Hunting. Knucklehead Damon is not blasé about his four-star accommodations, self-consciously ordering “overpriced room-service food that I would never pay for myself” and reveling in the junkiest stuff in the mini-bar—the whole jar of cashews, the entire box of Lindt chocolate squares.

Knucklehead No. 2 is Ben Affleck, Damon’s best friend since their high-school days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the star of the recent, well-received independent films Chasing Amy and Going All the Way. Affleck is also in Good Will Hunting, playing, in fact, Will Hunting’s best friend. He joins us in Damon’s room, settles in with a beer, and trades stories with his buddy about the day’s big experience: getting fitted for their first-ever complimentary Movie Actor suits. They are attending a function the following evening. “The Gotham Awards? The Gotham . . . Independent Film . . . something?” says Damon. “I don’t know what it is, but they’re giving Harvey and Bob Weinstein some kind of award and we’re being brought along as sort of, you know, Miramax mascots.” The free suits are part of the deal.

Affleck has been to the V.I.P. showroom of Emporio Armani, where he was surprised to encounter a locked glass door with a receptionist behind it who at first wouldn’t let him in. “She motioned for me to pick up this phone on the wall to tell her who I was,” he says. “They’re afraid of Cunanan copycats—that’s my theory.”

“I went to Calvin Klein,” says Damon. “They tried all these things on me and said I looked very ‘fash.’ They promised me that I’ll look ‘fash.’”

The conversants are wearing jeans and dorky shoes—not so much bad style as pre-style: Hollywood taste hasn’t imposed itself on them yet, and their clothes still look mother-bought. They’re new at this, and it’s endearing. You come in prepared for the worst, a Stephen Dorff situation, wherein the hyped kid in the hotel room is sulky and has an off-duty goatee and smells of Gauloises and sits with such an extreme slump that his head is at armrest level and his groin points out at you. It’s nothing like that. These boys are nice knuckleheads.

Good Will Hunting is proof that Damon and Affleck are also intelligent knuckleheads—not an oxymoron, but an apt way to describe a 27-year-old and a 25-year-old who are by all appearances regular guys (neither emits imaginary Keith Haring rays of star quality, as Matthew McConaughey does), and who happen to have written the screenplay for the film in which they star. Yes, they are writer-actors, an uncommon skill combo among filmdom polymaths, and Good Will Hunting—the first thing they have ever written—is now a Gus Van Sant movie.

Will Hunting, Damon’s character, is a troublemaking Irish-American kid from South Boston who is discovered to be a math prodigy. An awed M.I.T. professor (Stellan Skarsgård) wants to take Will under his wing. He gets his chance when Will, on the brink of being jailed for his latest criminal offense, is sprung by the judge on the condition that the professor supervise him and enlist a psychotherapist to set the boy straight. Will resists the touchy-feelyisms of various therapists, until he meets his match in Dr. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), himself a product of South Boston. This kid, you see, he’s . . . goodwill hunting.

It’s strangely gentle territory for a serial subversive like Van Sant, whose previous films are rife with casual criminality and sexual deviance. “I haven’t really had anyone I’ve shown it to not like the film, which is really unusual for me,” the director says. “I guess that before, I felt that portraying something out of the mainstream was a powerful way of telling a story. But this time the story itself was enough.”

Good Will Hunting is an engaging, comfortably inhabited small movie. That anyone has even bothered to make a film about two of Boston’s prominent milieus— its academic community and its most famously insular neighborhood—is gratifying enough, but Damon and Affleck have transcended the homeboy-homage genre of indie film that has given us Trees Lounge and Palookaville. The screenplay’s realistic handling of townie-student resentments is buttressed by the time Damon spent at Harvard; originally a member of the class of ’92, he remains two semesters short of graduating. As actors, Damon and Affleck avoid vanity shtick, and the cast responds in kind—particularly Williams, soothing and bearded as he was in Awakenings, and Minnie Driver, who plays Damon’s love interest and has since become his real-life girlfriend.

“To me it was just an extraordinary script,” says Williams. “It was quite shocking when I met Matt and Ben and saw how young they were—I was like ‘May I see some ID?’”

The Rainmaker I can’t tell you about with any authority, because it wasn’t finished at the time of this writing. But I can tell you what Mickey Rourke has told me. Mickey’s in The Rainmaker—mark my words, Mickey’s back—and he says, “Matt worked his ass off. Matt walked the walk. And Francis showed a lot of love on the set. Francis is good with young kids.”

It’s not all leather trousers and kissing Bridget Hall, being a boy actor. The road to The Rainmaker was paved with near misses and self-worth crises. “I’d have taken Robin,” Damon says, alluding to Batman Forever. “Hell, I auditioned for it. When they first offered it to Chris O’Donnell he wanted more money, so they had auditions and I did a screen test for Joel Schumacher. Primal Fear—you know the Edward Norton role? It more or less came down to him and me, and he pretty much put a smokin’ on me. To Die For I lost nearly 20 pounds to audition for, but Wock got it.” (“Wock” is his friend Joaquin Phoenix.)

Damon’s first role of consequence was in School Ties, in 1992. A poor but not altogether worthless cousin of Dead Poets Society, the movie had a young cast that also included Brendan Fraser, Chris O’Donnell, Randall Batinkoff, Cole Hauser, and Affleck. Damon was effectively first among the featured performers, playing a moneyed “legacy” student whose anti-Semitism and resentment of Fraser’s character bring about the film’s climax. But he was not to be the first of the gang called up from the minors.

“Scent of a Woman happened right during School Ties. The whole cast went down to audition for it,” says Damon. “Chris O’Donnell was a business major at Boston College, and he’s a very savvy businessman. So the way I found out about the part is, I’m checking in with my agent, to see if anything good has come in, and my agent says, ‘Here’s one with a young role, and . . . Oh my God, it’s got Al Pacino in it!’ So I go up to Chris and say, ‘Have you heard about this movie?’ and he says [curtly] ‘Yeah.’ So I say, ‘Do you have the script?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Can I see it?’ ‘No—I kinda need it.’ Chris wouldn’t give it to anybody. Later, Ben, me, Randall, Brendan, Anthony Rapp—we’re all commiserating about our auditions, talking about how they didn’t go well. Except for Chris. Chris used to play things close to the vest. We asked him how his audition went, and he just said [highpitched, Hibernian singsong], ‘Ohhh, it was all right.’ And we were like ‘Dude! Just tell us how it went!’ And he would say [singsong again], ‘Ohhh, I don’t know.’”

While O’Donnell went on to become Hollywood’s literal and figurative Boy Wonder, Damon and Affleck found themselves in a wilderness of spotty work and tenuous finances, sharing a two-bedroom apartment on Curson Avenue in L.A. with a third friend from Cambridge. Affleck and two other School Ties veterans, Hauser and Rapp, found jobs playing oily adolescents in Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s winning evocation of the mid-70s. As a result there developed an overlapping School Ties—Dazed and Confused coterie of underemployed young actors: Damon, Affleck, Hauser, Rory Cochrane (the latter film’s lovable stoner), and Matthew McConaughey, dead-on as Dazed and Confused’s over-age, breezily malevolent parasite on the town’s high-school scene.

“When Matthew got A Time to Kill, we all went nuts,” says Damon. “It was such a feeling of vindication—that one of our peer group, someone not on the A-list, got the part.”

Damon’s ticket out of obscurity was last year’s Courage Under Fire, in which he delivered an attention-grabbing performance as a soldier who witnesses something horrible in Kuwait and, thus traumatized, becomes a heroin addict. Damon lost 40 pounds for that role and became, literally, anorectic. “I was under 2 percent body fat,” he says. “I remember seeing Lou Diamond Phillips”—whose boxing-ring scenes in the movie reveal a perfectly sculpted torso—“and thinking, God, if I looked like that I wouldn’t take my shirt off. I thought he looked fat!” He produces an unsettling snapshot of himself from this era, smoking a cigarette and holding up a packet of ExLax. He looks like Chet Baker about to die.

Health be damned, Damon believes that the extreme measures for Courage Under Fire were well worth it. “It was a business decision,” he says. “I thought, Nobody will take this role, because it’s too small. If I go out of my way to make something of this role . . .” At this point he cites the punchdrunk performance of Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects. “He’s killed early into the movie and he probably has, like, nine lines. But I found it the most memorable performance of 1995. The guy just goes out and thinks, No one’s gonna understand what I’m doing except for me, but I’m a fuckin’ genius. For me, I was sick of reading scripts that Chris O’Donnell had passed on, and I was looking for something to set me apart: ‘Look what I’ll do, I’ll kill myself!’ Directors took note of it.”

Indeed, Damon’s performance impressed Coppola enough that he cast him in The Rainmaker. The out-of-nowhere notoriety this accorded Damon prodded Miramax to push Good Will Hunting into production. And when Good Will Hunting was shooting on location in Boston last spring, Williams invited Damon along to visit Spielberg, who was in town to film scenes for his slave-ship-revolt movie, Amistad. “I’d auditioned by tape for Saving Private Ryan, but Steven thought I still looked like I did in Courage Under Fire,” Damon says. “So when he actually saw me, he saw that I didn’t look that way anymore, and that’s what made the difference.”

Inevitably the topic of nascent stardom arises and, equally inevitably, Damon demurs. It’s a “lofty assumption,” he says, that the Coppola—Van Sant—Spielberg trifecta will make him a star; it could all blow over in a year’s time. “I won’t be Matthew McConaughey,” he says. “I’m not as good-looking as him. I’m certainly never going to be anyone’s sex symbol.”

Here the conversation takes a turn for the meta-, becoming all about the impact of this article and the photos that will accompany it, and how celebrity is lovely if it helps you get better work, but is also a tricky bugaboo larded with unseemly implications. Ed Harris, Damon concludes. That’s the kind of life he’d like, being a good actor like Ed Harris, well regarded but not overpaid or stalked by anyone. Damon makes no attempt to veil his disdain for Hollywood, proclaiming himself “an East Coast person” who will one day settle down in his native Boston area; for now, he has no fixed address and lives in Cole Hauser’s apartment near L.A.’s Griffith Park.

You could argue that Damon is being pre-emptive, just in case things don’t work out these next few months. But his conviction strikes me as genuine. He can’t fathom, for example, the notion of eightfigure salaries. “Chris O’Donnell made $10 million last year. [Again, more deliberately] Chris . . . O’Donnell . . . made 10 . . . million . . . dollars last year. Now, if I made $10 million last year, I would not be sitting here with you. No offense. Unless you and I were friends and you wanted to hang out with me and help me spend my $10 million. Shit, man, give me five million bucks once—that’s $500,000 a year for the rest of your life if you invest it. I can’t spend that much money. Not the way I live.” (For the record, Damon says that his average take-home pay for The Rainmaker, Good Will Hunting, and Saving Private Ryan was “significantly under half a million per picture.”)

Damon’s upbringing was progressiveliberal even by Cambridge standards. As a child, he was taken on tours of South Boston by his mother’s longtime boyfriend, who had driven one of the hated buses that delivered black kids to white schools in Southie in the mid-70s. When Damon was 10, he, his mother, and his older brother, Kyle, moved into an experimental cooperative house. “About six families bought a broken-down house in Central Square and rebuilt it,” he says. “It was governed by a shared philosophy that housing is a basic human right. Every week there was the three-hour community meeting, and Sundays were workdays. My mom put little masks on me and my brother, gave us goggles and crowbars, and we demo’d the walls.”

Damon positively beams when he speaks of his mother. When I ask if I can give her a call, he agrees and advises me that she is “nice, you’ll like her, she’s really touchyfeely”—which I later surmise to be his way of saying I love her dearly, but her value system skews somewhat to the left of mine.

Damon’s mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, is a professor of early-childhood education at Lesley College in Cambridge, and she forthrightly discusses her discomfort with her son’s impending celebrity. “I’m not happy about it, particularly,” she says. “What happens in a consumer society is that people become objects of attention in a way that doesn’t seem healthy to society. I’m happy that Matt is happy in his work, but I’m not convinced he has to be on the cover of a magazine about it. It’s a little hard for me to accept. It’s all so out of the ordinary that I worry he might not grow as I want him to.” For an unreconstructed leftist whose son has pledged allegiance to the Entertainment State, these difficult quandaries arise frequently. “It was hard for me to go to the set of Courage Under Fire,” she continues. “I was deeply against the Gulf War, and I didn’t know how the film was going to pan out politically.”

So it’s settled then. We have come here to celebrate the launch of Matt Damon, actor, not Matt Damon, celebrity. We shall not torment him with shallow appraisals of his love life. We shall not murmur that he looks kinda fat or suspiciously thin in that photo we saw in People magazine’s “Star Tracks” section. We shall leave him alone to develop his craft and indulge him in his use of that word, craft. We shall take into account that he is still learning.

“I think Marlon Brando has done more to destroy this generation of actors,” he says, referring to his own generation, “because, with the whole marble-mouth thing— the I-don’t-give-a-fuck mentality—what people overlook is that when the dude was my age he was the hardest-working man in show business. He was onstage, he was busting his ass with Stella Adler, he was obsessed with acting. When people say, ‘I just want to be fat and live in Fiji and have everyone tell me I’m a genius,’ they’re not looking at what it actually takes to get there.”

[the-voltage-diaries]

okay so this conversation has inspired me to ask a few questions to you. Yes you, reading this. Feel free to answer (or don't - whatever is comfortable), because I would love to hear your thoughts. This is basically about the kind of content the MC would read and/or you would like the MC to read.

What do YOU find problematic about voltage's stories?

What genres do you see the MCs reading? (And feel free to shoot recs if you have!)

What books would you recommend to the MCs? Why? (books YOU consider good content & want them to read, not based on what you think they would like)

What are some issues YOU want the Voltage characters to address and be more vocal about?

I'll start:

Check out the link! I've got a list and this would get too long haha.

HMM. I think it depends on the MC, but I have a feeling they would like Rom-Coms, Fantasy, and Mystery largely. Some of them might even be into Sci-Fi and non-fiction (biographies and memoirs). So... it's all over the place haha. Idk why but I can see 'Six of Crows', 'The Devotion of Suspect X', 'Book Lovers' and maybe 'Becoming' coming my way as recs. Maybe some spicier stuff too?

I would want the MCs to read the following, so that we could talk about it later HAHA: - The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd) - for the women supporting women, the intersectionality of racism and gender, apart from the soft and comforting style. - A Man Called Ove/Anxious People (Fredrik Backman) - no real reason, but it was so good. Bittersweet and heartwarming. - Heartstopper Series (Alice Oseman) - for how it addresses various physical and mental issues, its diverse representation, its sensitive narrative and just wholesomeness. - Animal Farm (George Orwell) - because of how disturbingly timeless it is, especially in today's time. - The Confession (John Grisham) - because of how it deals with racism and the very real failure of judicial machinery. - Circe (Madeline Miller) - To me, this was a story of a woman becoming her own institution, becoming her own empowered machinery

The issues I want the voltage characters to be more vocal about are those bare minimums that happen in our daily lives or affect the lives of the people around us. - The patriarchy that exists everywhere (including the ways in which it represses non-heterosexual, male identities such as women, LGBTQ+, etc) - How the state/govt machinery is functioning - Environmental debates - Discrimination and discriminatory practices around them (religious, sexual, gender-based, region-based, class-based, casteist, racist, etc) ^off the top of my head. What about you? 👀

[taterturnspages]

THE CLIENT BY JOHN GRISHAM - BOOK REVIEW

Genre(s): Fiction, Legal Thriller, Mystery, & Suspense

No Spoilers

TW: mention of suicide, PTSD/child trauma

SYNOPSIS:

‘The Client’ by John Grisham follows eleven-year-old Mark Sway after he and his little brother, Ricky, witness a suicide of a well-known lawyer, Jerome Clifford, who was defending a high-profile case involving the murder of Senator Boyd Boyette. Mark and Ricky attempt to put a stop to the suicide attempt, but Mr. Clifford had other plans. Mr. Clifford captures Mark and locks him inside of the vehicle. Mr. Clifford spills a major secret to Mark involving the Boyette case. Mark escapes the locked vehicle with the explosive secret and a hefty choice to make. After the media acknowledges Mark as a witness to the suicide and the police investigate the crime scene, the FBI is on Mark’s tail to reveal what he knows about the case.

Mark retains an amateur lawyer, Reggie Love, to guide him through the high-stakes pressure of the FBI hounding him for information, and the possibility of the Mafia tracking him for potentially holding information that could harm their case. Should Mark spill what he knows to the FBI and chance the Mafia finding him? Or, should Mark keep quiet and play the risky legal system game that could result in serious federal charges? Neither Mark or his lawyer knows the answer to this question. Reggie is willing to go to great lengths to protect Mark from the pressures surrounding him, even if that means both of their lives are in danger.

Mark needs to make a decision, but which will he choose?

READ THIS IF YOU:

Are a fan of ‘Law & Order’

Enjoy thriller books with a little more than just ‘true crime’

Need a page-turning suspense novel that you can’t put down, and when you HAVE to put it down to eat or go to work, you think about it 24/7

CHARACTERS:

This novel has an endless stream of characters with a ton of different FBI agents, Mafia men, Mark’s immediate family, court staff, and hospital staff. For that reason, I will only cover the two main characters, Mark and Reggie.

Mark Sway:

Despite Mark being only eleven years old, his wit and intelligence are far beyond his years. He has lucid moments of not being afraid of anyone or anything, but deep down he is just a kid and it’s comforting to see that he lets his childlike coping mechanisms take over at times. The book takes place over six days…SIX DAYS. The amount of things this child has went through in such a short period of time was tough to read, but he handled it like a champ and ALWAYS focused more on the feelings of those he cared about. His character made this book go the extra mile for me, because I was always thinking ‘What is Mark scheming next?’. He singlehandedly kept me on the edge of my seat.

Reggie Love:

Reggie has lived a troubled life, and that surely did not stop when Mark Sway entered her office. Reggie is a new lawyer and has only practiced for four years, but don’t let that fool you. She is a strong female character and an amazing lawyer. She makes sure to let everyone know that she will not tolerate anyone messing with her or Mark. Much like Mark, Reggie is stuck between a rock and a hard place. She is having trouble advising Mark on his decision, but she supports Mark nonetheless with every decision he makes. Again, Reggie also took this book to the extra mile for me. For Mark, he was now walking in a world with no trust and no allies. Reggie did her absolute best to assure Mark that she was by his side no matter what and I know that is exactly what Mark needed during all of this. I strongly believe that Reggie’s character was flawlessly written.

PRAISES, CRITIQUES, AND MY THOUGHTS:

I like to start my reviews with bad news first, and good news second to end on a happy note. So, first and foremost, my only issue with this book is that the ending was not nearly as exhilarating as I would have hoped. I keep all of my reviews free of spoilers, so I really can’t go into more detail there. I was hoping for an ending with more drama and more suspense. Don’t get me wrong, the ending was not predictable (in my opinion); it was just not as extreme as what I was hoping for out of a suspense novel.

Now with that out of the way, I’m going to explain why I loved this book so much. For starters, this book didn’t NEED a child as the main character. The story could have been written with an adult MC, but the fact that Mark paved the way in ‘The Client’ makes it that much more interesting, albeit upsetting because reading about these events happening to such a young child is devastating. But from a strict “fiction novel reviewer” perspective, I think the difference between child and adult MC was everything.

Second, Reggie Love is an ICON. She is unfettered, which after learning her backstory, was inspiring given all that she has been through. If I ever have legal troubles, I will do my best to find a real-life Reggie Love.  

I highly recommend this book, as well as any of John Grisham’s novels, because they always knock it out of the park for me. I’m typically a strict romance reader, but every now and then I need to take romance breaks. During those times, I know that John Grisham will not disappoint. He has yet to prove me wrong there. All of his novels are legal thrillers and follow some sort of legal problem, so if you find interest in the legal system, then John Grisham may be the author you’re missing.

[hell-much]

Hi! I love your fanfics for a long while now (also commented on them on ao3, so I’m not a complete lurker).. but wow the amount of words you put out there is astonishing. Can you talk a little about your writing process/what motivates you etc.? I’d love to hear about it (if you like, obviously) if not, thanks for creating such lovely works and putting them out there for us to read! 💕

Thanks for all the love ❤️

I have to say I really don’t have much of a firm process for writing. Writing by hand occasionally works well for me. I’ll try again and again doing a mind map, but in the end, never stick to them.  (The first mindmap for RFTA is wild, lol)

At the moment I’m trying what I read in an interview with John Grisham and get up every morning at 5am to write before work. Usually, I would write after work and I'd be so tired and frustrated because all my "productive" hours of the day would go to work and not doing what I loved. So now I've spun that around. Now no matter how tired I am coming home at night, I already put my writing time in for that day. So far that’s working well for me, but those processes change regularly. Anyway, that’s what I mostly do just for getting a first or second draft done.

For editing (which I hate with a flaming passion) I will usually just lock down at home for a weekend or so and do nothing else all day. I'll use One Stop for Writers, to help me flesh out the chapters and work with ProWriting Aid and Grammarly to work on the words and grammar. What helped me lately is to use the immersive reader in Word for my final review of a chapter or story. That has really been great to get a feeling for if everything works.

Motivation in general is difficult, tbh. I mean I enjoy writing, and I enjoy re-reading my own stories (I'm willing to bet money that no one re-reads my own stories as much as I do), but of course I write for comments too. And writing for an almost extinct fandom can make that feel unrewarding at times. But then you know there is that one comment occasionally. The one that's really heartfelt and enthusiastic and quotes bits out of the story. Or the one that is on a chapter from three years ago. Or a reader will leave short comments to every chapter/story they read as they go along. Or a comment analyzing what I did (what I didn't even realize I did!) with the characters. Or friends screaming at me in DMs and text messages as they read.

And then what happens is that I go back, re-read my own writing and end up thinking: Huh, it’s really kind of good isn’t it?

That’s the most rewarding thing ever and that keeps me drawing in again and again.

Hope that answers your question? Thanks for giving me a chance to ramble a little about my process!

[thelonebookman]

My dad never did...until he did. His passion while I was growing up was sports and he'd entertain himself watching them on TV in the stereotypical fashion. He was a high school science teacher and I guess I just assumed he felt like reading was too much like work.

Then, one day, when I was in my thirties, he just up and bought one of those massive "Years Best SciFi 20XX" anthologies out of the blue (or maybe just stumbled across a spare copy, I can't be sure at this remove). And he started reading other things. Thrillers, spy novels, typical airport fare like Ludlum and Grisham but it was still a radical sea change that I never truly understood. I (an _extreme_ bookworm) loaned him a few titles too, though I regret not doing it more or talking more to him about what he read.

Once, he went directly from mildly success run at a local casino (he was good at cards and odds) to a used bookstore and spent his modest winnings on an entire grocery bag of potboilers. When I learned of it I wanted to go "who are you and what have you done with my heretofore illiterate father?"

But then he got sick and then he passed on and I never did get to really talk books with him or figure out what had changed (he was not a self reflective man, so he may not even have known). I regret not taking more time and effort but life keeps happening and you always figure you have time, until you don't.

I guess this was all just to say: I really don't have a good answer to that poll.

*if you have a step-dad or similar who is a father figure but not a dad you can answer for, feel free to answer about him instead

This is only about books, for the purposes of this poll I do not care how many magazines, newspapers, etc. your dad reads. Also, for the purposes of this poll, any book that is not a novel is considered nonfiction. Referencing books like manuals, encyclopedias or phone books doesn't count unless your dad reads them cover to cover like some kind of lunatic. Thank you and good night.

[dankusner]

Tarrant County Texas Judge Tim O'hare Wants To Start A War

COMMISSIONER PRECINCT 2 Alisa Simmons

At this week’s Commissioners Court meeting, the county judge had a speaker forcibly removed by multiple sheriff’s deputies simply for saying the word “fucking” during the public comments section of the agenda.So, I said it for him.As elected officials, we may not always like the words people use to express their passion and frustration in Commissioners Court, but protecting free speech means allowing all voices to be heard—even when we don’t agree. I certainly have my critics (they’ll show up on this post in 3…2…1 ), but silencing people by throwing them out is not the answer. Words are not a physical disruption.In fact, the county judge instigated the ruckus, and our attorney only made it worse with his timid responses when I asked for clarification on profanity as constitutionally protected speech.Meanwhile, the rest of my colleagues sat silent as church mice. But if I never get anything else passed, I will always use my voice to advocate for all constituents.

Public speakers hurl expletives in challenge of Tarrant County’s new decorum policy

During general public comments, gun rights activist Christopher J. Grisham was removed from the court after using profanity during his comments. Grisham was also detained and put in handcuffs at the Jan. 14 session after arguing with bailiffs over his right to carry a firearm in the court. 

Precinct 2 Commissioner Alisa Simmons asked the court’s lawyer curse words were protected speech. 

The Tarrant County Commissioners Court approved a new policy regulating public comments and other issues of decorum on Tuesday, Jan. 28.

The policy passed along party lines, despite opposition from Democrats on the court and several Tarrant County residents who spoke out on the change.

The policy creates barriers to citizens’ ability to practice their First Amendment right and gives Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare too much power over their Constitutional right to free speech, opponents argued.

Several said they believed the move was meant as retaliation for criticism the court has received over many issues that have become contentious in recent years, from deaths in the county jail to the proposed elimination of early voting sites on college campuses.

The policy allows O’Hare to limit speaking time to two minutes in the case of 20 or more people signing up to speak on a single agenda item. It allows him to cut it down to one minute if 40 or more sign up.

The policy also changes the deadline to sign up to 5 p.m. the day before a scheduled meeting. 

The previous policy allowed people to sign up to speak all the way up to the beginning of a session at 10 a.m.

Before the vote, Precinct 2 Commissioner Alisa Simmons called the policy a “barrier” to free speech, as requiring people to sign up the day before creates a burden for working people who do not have internet access and would have to make two trips downtown in order to speak.

“We’re asking them to take two days out of their lives to come up here and participate in a process that should be very accessible,” she said.

O’Hare responded by saying that anyone who is unable to sign up either in person or online can call his office by the new deadline and sign up to speak that way. Anyone can sign up this way, independent of party affiliation, he said.

“No matter who you are, what party you’re from, whether you support me, don’t support me, we won’t check, we won’t know, we won’t care,” O’Hare said.

He also addressed Simmons’ statement that he has the ability to call speakers out of order by saying that he has done so twice: once for State Sen. Royce West, a Dallas Democrat, and once for Tarrant GOP Chair Bo French.

“I believe I run a fair meeting,” O’Hare said. 

“It’s strict when it comes to yelling out. I will continue to run a fair meeting. This is not designed to somehow give me the ability to pull some fast one. I’m a firm believer in free speech. Free speech is not the ability to disrupt a meeting.”

The policy also gives sheriff’s deputies the power to issue criminal trespass warnings to those who violate rules of decorum, which can come with a 180-day ban from the county administrative building.

Several removed from court for decorum violations

During discussion of the policy, O’Hare ordered the removal of a man for clapping and outbursts after issuing him a warning. 

Charlie Hermes, a senior lecturer in philosophy and humanities at UT Arlington, was also forcibly removed from the court and arrested at the Jan. 14 session after multiple instances of shouting.

Hermes was arrested by sheriff’s deputies on Tuesday, according to the Tarrant County inmate search tool. 

No charges were listed on the site as of publication.

Later during general public comments, gun rights activist Christopher J. Grisham was removed from the court after using profanity during his comments. 

Grisham was also detained and put in handcuffs at the Jan. 14 session after arguing with bailiffs over his right to carry a firearm in the court.

Grisham has demanded the county pay him and another man arrested that day be awarded damages. 

He has threatened to sue the county if his demands are not met by Feb. 14.

As he argued with deputies over his rights, Simmons asked the court’s lawyer Mark Kratovil if Grisham’s curse words were protected speech. He advised that while the First Amendment protects such speech, it does violate court policy.

24076098

When Simmons asked if court policy — at one point dropping an f-bomb of her own — superseded the First Amendment, Kratovil said he would look into it.

Speaking after Grisham, police watcher Carolina Rodriguez said a number of expletives and was also removed. 

She was arrested, per the county inmate search tool, but no charges were listed.