RVANews

Ray Gun, Slouch, Porch Cat, and off-track betting in Richmond

Tom Batten — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:00:47 +0000

Ray Gun won't tell me which horse to bet on or how he's going to bet. He won't tell me his real name either, just that he's called Ray Gun because he's missing all but the pointer and thumb on his right hand. Across from him, his friend Slouch¹ tells me to "pick a horse that speaks to you, find a name that resonates."

A friend of mine once won big money betting on a horse named after a geographical anomaly near the town where he grew up, and everyone knows the Simpsons got their dog, Santa's Little Helper, by betting on him late one Christmas Eve, so I take Slouch's advice as sound. If you've never seen a racing form at an off-track betting center, imagine John Doe's notebook from Seven if the movie took place in the year 2099 and John Doe was a robot. Streams of numbers and letters curve across the page in unlikely combinations, the names of the horses are in a column to the far left.

Ray Gun and Slouch place their bets, too. Ray Gun won't let me see his betting slip, and Slouch lets me look at his but it's too complicated to follow. At the table next to ours a man clutches his head and moans, "I forgot to back up the three with a seven-three-six." Ray Gun laughs and mumbles--everyone at the OTB mumbles everything, like enunciating would give away a great secret--"You got to back up the three, baby." I get the same feeling I used to get when I was in sixth grade and I'd hang out with my cousin and his friends who were juniors in high school. Not only did I not understand anything they said, I couldn't fathom how they came to know any of the things they knew in the first place.

Ray Gun keeps loose French fries in the pocket of his shirt, he pinches some out and passes them to Slouch. They eat, and when Slouch is done he wipes his face with a napkin and drops it on the ground. The OTB is the last place in America where you can litter with impunity. I ask them why they don't order something from the lunch counter in the corner and Slouch says, "You order over there, they look at you like they never even heard of food before. You're lucky if you don't get food poisoning."

"This is what I'm talking about," Ray Gun says. "You know the food is nasty so you decided not to try it. That's called having a system."

"This one always has a system," Slouch says. "A system, you need that. But you need a little luck, too, to back it up. That's why I carry these." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of loose bolts. "Head bolts from my first car," he says. "I got lucky for the first time in that car, and they haven't let me down since."

Slouch scowls and checks the clock; it's almost post time. "Let's go," he says. "Got to smoke while the race is running."

I follow them. The OTB is divided down the middle into smoking and non-smoking areas. The non-smoking section features cute old couples who cuddle at reserved tables while frittering away their savings and intense dudes wearing sunglasses with laptops who labor over tip sheets and perform hardcore mathematics between each race. In the smoking section, the chairs are knocked over. Men and women dump sweat and pick at their knuckles. Ray Gun and Slouch smoke and flick ash on the floor, there's an ashtray about a foot to their left but neither of them can see anything that isn't directly between them and the television over the bar. Everyone in the smoking section acts like their life is on the line, not just because of the thick clouds of poison in the air, but because they're waiting to find out if this is either the last stop on a downward spiral or the jumping off point for a meteoric rise. I feel like an intruder, like I've snuck into an AA meeting just to gawk at people.

I catch a glimpse of Porch Cat as they lead him to the starting gate. "Looks like a strong one," I say.

Ray Gun shrugs and says, "That's horses for you."

Slouch offers me one of his bolts. "Here," he says, "see if this helps."

Ray Gun laughs and says, "You wanted to help the boy, you'd have told him not to pick a horse with 40-1 odds."

"You wanted to help him you would have given him a glimpse of your system," Slouch says.

"Look," Ray Gun says, perching an elbow on my shoulder. "When things go bad we say 'luck' so we don't have to kick ourselves for messing up. When things go good we say 'luck' so it feels like God's got our back. That's all. You just need to rely on yourself, because there's never anyone else to blame."

"By that logic," Slouch says, "it was your own damn fault you lost your damn fingers. Which means you owe me the seventy-five bucks I spent putting Elmer to sleep."

Slouch and Ray Gun glare at each other like somehow they've come to the climax of a decade long conversation. The gate goes up, and the race begins.

— ∮∮∮ —

Footnotes

Slouch isn't his real name, he asked me to call him Slouch in this article, but also said I should make a point of mentioning that he actually has good posture. ↩

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Habibi: one of the year’s best graphic novels

Tom Batten — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:13:17 +0000

Habibi

by Craig Thompson
published by Pantheon Books
$35.00

— ∮∮∮ —

Craig Thompson’s new book Habibi is an incredibly moving and beautifully-told 600 page masterpiece about two escaped slaves struggling to survive in a Middle East fairytale world ripped more from Scheherazade than the headlines. It’s a love story. One of the great things here is that it’s every kind of love story, as the dynamic between the two main characters, Dodola and Zam, changes from mother/son to something vastly more complicated. But Habibi is one of those books where just telling you what it’s about doesn’t really tell you anything, because it’s also about language and storytelling and survival and, I don’t know, the horrible things that people with power do to the people without it. Oh, and there’s a lot of sex, too.

But let’s dip back for a quick second because I can’t tell you about Habibi without first telling you about Thompson’s last book, Blankets. When Blankets came out in 2003, everyone flipped for it. It sold a bazillion copies, scored mentions in cool music magazines, and everyone pretty much regarded it as a major work that was going to be instrumental in finally getting comics and graphic novels mainstream. Blankets had everything an indie comic was supposed to have: misunderstood teens with artistic temperaments, forbidden love, strict religious upbringings, unrequited love, love conquering all, love lost, and a scene at the end where it’s all okay because that’s what it takes to be an artist. It’s a Death Cab For Cutie song in book form. It’s also a lot like that scene towards the end of the first Transformers movie where Megan Fox says something to Shia LaBeouf like “My life has been difficult in ways that yours has not, so don’t judge me.” He looks at her like he’s seeing her in a new light--and I started crying in the theater.

This may be the point where some of you are tempted to no longer trust my judgment.

Upon further analysis, I realized that the reason I cried during Transformers wasn’t because I actually cared about the characters or about what was happening in the moviel: it was because Michael Bay is amazingly good at manipulating the emotions of his viewers. Watch that movie again (if you dare!) and you’ll see...the music is just right, the lighting is just right, the pacing is just right, and BLAMMO! Somehow you’ve forgotten that what you’re watching is stupid garbage, that Megan’s line is basically a non sequitur, and you respond as if real people are actually exhibiting real emotions in which you yourself are invested.

It’s a great trick, and there’s real pleasure to be derived from being on the receiving end of it. Craig Thompson is really good at it too. Look back up there at all that’s in Blankets and tell me I’m wrong. You get all those things together on the page, swirl that ink around so that the delicate teenage boy looks sad and the beautiful teenage girl looks like she needs someone to fix her and...well, it would be hard not to sell some books.

After Blankets you’d be forgiven for thinking that Thompson wasn’t any more than a master manipulator with some serious illustration chops and a maudlin streak. Habibi will change your mind.

Thompson makes a good third of the other illustrators out there look like total chumps. Each page is carefully designed with recurring motifs--that draw from sources like the Qur’an and other storytelling traditions--to add multiple layers of meaning to every moment. Scenes of city life and vast endless oceans of sand are drawn with such attention to detail that you’ll be staggered imagining a human being crafting the images with human hands and commonly available tools.

Dodola and Zam encounter what seems like hundreds of characters and endure dozens of plot twists, and while circumstance might sometimes bring them low, Thompson never loses sight of their humanity, never strips them of their dignity. Because of this you’ll find yourself gasping at their failures and cheering for them in their victories. It’s a story told with technical precision and real, honest-to-gosh passion, and if you cry at the end it won’t be because you’ve been successfully manipulated--it’ll be because this world and these characters have come to mean something to you, and you’ll miss them once you reach the final page.