Beauty is Imperfection

From The Periodical, Really True Crime Magazine

By Blaine Dubrowski

As you may or may not know, I am a fan of hard-boiled crime fiction, and for the longest time I’ve been trying to ensnare reclusive crime fiction writer Mason R. Hibbert into a sit-down interview where I can plumb the depths of his dark soul. Hibbert, as you may know, has written 98 dime store pulp novels, as well as his share of penny dreadfuls. His work has been informed not only by the world of thieves, grifters, whores, lowlifes and cops on the take, but also by a sense of deep-seated cynical outlook best encapsulated by the heroine in 40 of his novels, the gum-smacking, crack-smoking private detective Jayne Druthers: “Nature hates us,” Jayne says. “That’s why I live in a city.”

Over 20 years, we’ve seen the seamy underbelly of Jayne’s world, whether it’s her delivering a mulatto baby in Hawaii with a Nazi war criminal on the lam or strangling a chicken in Utah to save its soul. And don’t ever call Jayne “Miz.” “I’m Mrs. Druthers, after my husband Ed, who was killed in the war,” she says. “Don’t ever disrespect Eddie with that feminist shit or I’ll shoot you in the carotid artery and the day you stop bleeding will be the day you die.”

Jayne is the type who prefers leather trench coats, bright red lipstick, a pack of Camels, bright white fish net stockings. Also, she hates pretense. One of my favorite scenes is when Jayne is enjoying her favorite show, “My Mother The Car,” when a man staggers to her doorstep and asks her to kill him so his family will get the insurance. Jayne says she’s up for it until he offhandedly uses a polysyllabic word.

“I ain’t got no use for a big vocabulary,” Jayne says. “So I ain’t killing you. I hope you live longer and suffer a bit more. Get out of my office.”

Of course, Mason R. Hibbert’s own history is a bit shadowy. The legend, well cultivated by him, is that either his entire family was wiped out by a gang of thieves in the 1930s or they are all still alive and quite comfortably sitting on the board of Boeing Aircraft. Because of my need to get to the bottom of his mystery, I tracked him from the diners of Vermont to the rathskellers of Boston to a Wal-Mart in Topeka, Kansas. When I asked the locals about him, every answer was the same: “Who in the hell is Mason R. Hibbert? Are you going to buy something or do I gotta call security?”

I got a line from his fourth wife Esther, a short-haired gamine in a stevedore shirt and cigarette pants who lived in Hoboken, N.J.

“You want to talk to Mason?” she said. “That’s a tickle. If you want his number I want some folding lettuce. A couple of G’s should do it.”

So I finally tracked him down at the dog races in Miami, Florida. This is our interview:

RTC Magazine: Mr. Hibbert, it’s really an honor to meet you.

MH: I don’t know who in the hell you are, but you’ve got a lot of nerve coming here. You have five seconds to get away from me or I’m going to tear your lungs out.

RTC: I’ve always wanted to know how you came up with the idea for Jayne Druthers. Was she based in part on someone you knew? Perhaps one of your four ex-wives. Some have suggested she’s based on your mother.

MH: Get the hell out of here before I pop out your eyeballs and stomp on them.

RTC: There are many apocryphal stories about you. One says you hitchhiked to Belize and wrote your 16th novel, “My Iron Lung Breathes Mustard Gas,” while sitting holed up in a tiny bathroom for three days with nothing to eat after your third divorce. Is that true?

MH: I take your calumny and I hand it back to you, you cack-handed potato eater. I spit in your navel.

RTC: Another story about you, of course, is that your first writing partner died of either a suicide or autoerotic asphyxiation or brain cancer. Of course, what I love about your poem, “Autumn Leaves Don’t Know My Pain,” is your assertion in it that all three things could conceivably be true. Such is the absurdity of life, right?

MH: You have as much chin as my dachshund, you chinless wonder. I oughta dump you in Biscayne Bay after putting you in a dress.

RTC: It’s 1974. Your second wife Nora’s first husband, a mafia guy, arrives at your door with five mooks, all of them carrying Nagant pistols. You’re in your underwear. What did you do?

MH: That never happened. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, you’re a real wet smack, Jackson.

RTC: It’s 1975. You’re hitchhiking to Alaska to write your weirdest Jayne book, “Strung Out in Nome.” Here, Jayne goes through a strange experience after a couple of hippies give her a tab of acid. She loses herself. She starts to question who she ever was or if anything is real.

MH: I’m shaving points on my dog, “Luck be a Doggie,” and you’re ruining it Roscoe. Why don’t you make like an egg and scramble.

RTC: She meets Eddie in heaven and he says, “What are you doing here? We saw each other enough in life. Geddout of here?” She takes in a young black kid and becomes his mother and says, “This is it. This is life. It’s to give of yourself only in the moment and not be bitter.” Then the drugs wear off, and she goes back to Newark, and it’s like the whole thing never happened, and she’s the same tough talking bitch dame she was before. Nothing was learned. There was no redemption. The end.

MH: Shit! My dog lost.

RTC: I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Hibbert. After 20 years of following Jayne, your readers and I want to know: What was that about? Why did you give Jayne all the knowledge of the Gods, only to have her go back home and forget it all and pretend like none of it happened? Why’d you betray your readers’ trust like that? Why, Mr. Hibbert, why?

MH: Look, you, you come here and ask me to explain things and make things all nice and tidy. I don’t have to explain myself to you. I wrote a few books a while back and here you are and you want your life explained. Nothing I could say about art or books or life would ever mean anything, which is why I have no listed address or license plate. You want a savior? Get your queer ass to church.

That was pretty much the end of our interview, except that I didn’t really let the whole Alaska book go, and, well, I followed him to a bar and we continued to argue and then, well, dear reader, I’m ashamed to say that I ended up killing Mr. Hibbert with a crow bar. It’s not really how I planned the interview to end, but I’ve got to say, it provided a thrilling end to his life and to this article, and if I’m off to jail for the sake of art, so be it.

I hope to be writing my next article for this periodical from a Dade County jail cell, where I’m already starting an epistolary exchange with Tom Wolfe. But I leave you with this last quote from Mason R. Hibbert’s book, “The Diadem of Despair,” in a scene where Jayne Druthers is squaring off against a corrupt judge.

“Don’t be mistaken, judge,” says Jayne, “I’m about to put a couple of dum-dums in your belly. But before I do, I want a kiss.”

“Why?” the judge asks.

“Just to remind me how we’re both corrupt.”

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What are we really doing that we don’t put on Twitter?

–*Henry just ate peanut butter. I was too lazy to make an egg.

–*Marcia got up late. Was dreaming of doing the dishes.

–*Joel’s got a bit of a chub. Don’t know why. It’s 9:30 in the morning.

–*William went to work but mostly goofed around watching Internet porn.

–*Harry just got roped into doing one of those things to see who’s searching for me on the Internet. Didn’t work. Feel stupid now.

–*Dean grabbed wife’s boob. She kept reading newspaper.

–*Faye heard a friend start to talk about the stimulus package. I walked away before he and this other guy realized I didn’t know anything about it.

–*Kathy signed a birthday card for somebody I don’t know. Said, “Congratulations.” Feel like a big phony.

–*john killed a bug.

–*Janet just took the most amazing dump.

–*Peter yelled at the Verizon woman until she took a charge off. Feel like a winner.

–*Somebody at work corrected my pronunciation of the word “Montpelier.” I’d like to reach up into his asshole and pull his tongue out backwards.

–*Trying to smile my way through a conversation about the weather with my neighbor. Pinhead.

–*Beatrix got stoned in the park with my friends listening to the symphony. Crushed glasses.

–*Jake is just repeating the same left-wing stuff my dad says. Feel kind of lost without it.

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What apocryphal stories about the current health care reform bills in Congress are being floated by opponents in the insurance industry?

–*The current bill will cause nine months of waiting to see your GP

–*It will make all private health insurance illegal.

–*Doctors will be paid from a single payer plan with a fixed fee that will discourage financial incentives for physicians–when in fact, a capitalist system that commoditizes their services and pushes their fees down naturally through market mechanisms is a much more American way for them to go down the toilet.

–*The bill will force seniors to eat each other in a horrible Malthusian game of survival of the fittest.

–*The regional quality of care will shift so that meth labs, which once only exploded in Oklahoma, will now explode everywhere.

–*You will no longer be able to afford stirrups but will have to put your ankles on the OB-GYN’s shoulders.

–*It will give everybody AIDS.

–*Poor people have scabs.

–*The bill has already killed 50,000 people without even being enrolled.

–*The Hindenburg has just crashed! Oh the humanity!

–*The health care bill will make hillbillies play banjo and fuck each other up the ass.

–*It means the French have finally won.

–*Universal health care is only something Japs would do.

–*If this bill passes, I, the executive of a big insurance company, will no longer be made love to by my wife or my favorite whore.

–*If the word “bailout,” “socialism” “jihad” and “cow rape” scare you, well then you should realize that all of those words appear in the health care bill.

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New York, NY (API) Sheldon Wainwright III, 80-year-old wealthy scion of a large industrial-logistics fortune and vehement opponent of the so-called “death tax,” said Friday that he’s leaving his entire net worth, valued at $130 million, to multiple charities, the Episcopal Church, a stripper and his dog, and not to his “worthless” children his attorneys reported.

“The estate tax is an abomination,” Wainwright is reported to have said in a statement made through his attorneys. “It’s taxing a person’s dollar of earnings twice as it tries to circulate. It’s just wrong.

“But don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving those little bastards, my children Reginald, Littleton, Brooks, Mercedes and Reese, one cent of my money because they are all ingrates and s***-for-brains who have squandered their trusts and my good name in various displays of profligate dissolution.”

“They’re disinherited,” he said. “Screw ’em.”

Littleton said his father had been a staunch estate tax opponent all his life.

“Dad said that a person’s wealth should be a legacy for his children … or, if you don’t like your children, for the bimbo at the strip club outside Houston.”

Wainwright said that the most basic tenet of wealth preservation was that people save and invest so they can pass money on. “The estate tax penalizes such good people and robs them of those incentives for small business investment and other things that are their legacy to the world,” he said.

“But let’s be clear. Most of the money you give to your ingrate children they squander because they never developed the god damned discipline of a may fly,” Wainwright spat as he started to foam at the mouth. “Everybody knows that your personal business barely survives a first-generation transfer much less a second-generation transfer. Children who just get their money for free stay children forever, which is why my stupid kids have all turned into drug addicts, perverts and members of the Ringling Brothers circus. Every time you give your money to your children, it mostly just ends up going to one of their crack-addict ex-wives. I’m looking your way, Littleton.”

“Dad’s got very profound, deeply held convictions,” said Mercedes, who, now that she’s disinherited, lives in a “Gray Gardens” type mansion overgrown with weeds and teeming with jaundiced cats. “He never liked my first, second, third or fourth husbands, all of whom are now living in houses he indirectly paid for. So I guess he thinks he’s done enough for me. But let’s be clear. He doesn’t want the government to get any of his money either. I think if he could he’d rather just have it all buried with him in a big vault of gold bars like Tutankhamun.”

“I’m quite sick from morphine addiction,” she added.

Psychologist Dana Hiller with the University of Rochester, said that it’s often the case that old money families try to get their children involved in philanthropy and not give them too much money early in their lives without letting them know what it’s like to work.

“But that idea seems to have completely slipped by this family,” said Hiller. “Sounds like the old guy is just a bit pennywise and pound foolish. Frankly, I’d just give the money to the feds and not get an ulcer over it. He’s going to make himself sick.”

Reese Secord, often considered the most level-headed of the Wainwright children for her relatively minimal number of ex-husbands, asked her father repeatedly if she could leave something in the codicil of the will for her daughter Rebecca.

“No way,” said Wainwright in a letter faxed to his attorney. “I’m giving it to Bunny at the Bare Elegance cabaret lounge. I love my 12-year-old granddaughter Rebecca, but I’d rather see her rot in hell then Reese get one red cent of my money.”

“Damn Obama trying to take my money,” Wainwright said through an oxygen mask. “That money’s mine. And Bunny’s. Damn socialists.”

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Philosopher Karl Popper said that for an assertion to be scientific, it must be “falsifiable.” In other words, some evidence could appear at some point to prove the assertion untrue. When someone says that Diet Coke erases your memory, it might be stupid gossip, but it’s at least falsifiable, which is why those kinds of arguments tend to die quickly.

On the other hand, when someone makes the kind of argument that can’t be proved or disproved, they’re not simply being dishonest but their assertion tends to spread like cancer among those who can’t employ simple insight to stop it.

The main thing is to avoid the arguments by calling bullshit on whoever uses them. So steer clear of anybody who ever says stuff like this:

–*The current economic crisis was caused by homosexuality and abortion

–*Human wickedness, particularly sex and violence on television, caused 9/11

–*The ice caps are melting because we offended God by not honoring Him daily*

–*Our whole synagogue is being punished because somebody dropped the Torah*

–*Nazism was caused by all of us being less Christian

–*The Rodney King riots were caused by the legalization of abortion

–*The Kennedys are cursed because their family patriarch made his money dishonestly

–*The United States is a fascist theocracy

–*9/11 was a conspiracy

–*JFK’s murder was a conspiracy involving lots of people who are now dead and who can’t confirm it, so we just have to assume it’s true

–*Strawberry Shortcake is a demon from hell*

–*Tinky Winky is gay

*With the exception of those things in asterisks (which I got from literature or from flight of fancy) all of these things I have plucked right out of the media by various dunderheads, blockheads and mouth-breathers. Most, but not all, are right wingers, natch.

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It’s a small accomplishment, but Stephanie and I have been trying to get “The Retributioners” onto the Internet Movie Database for some time, and now we’ve finally done it. You can see our page here.

Of course, we need to flesh it out a bit, but mostly we’re happy just to have it up. The IMDb has very high standards and they make you jump through a few hoops before they’ll allow you to put your film work up. Yet again, we feel validated by the God-like Web powers that be.

In other news, I’m also fleshing out the WordPress version of my blog Beauty Is Imperfection with some snazzier layouts, and lately, I’ve been routing people here rather than linking them to the MySpace version of my blog. Eventually, faithful reader, I’m going to ask if you’ll take this journey with me and move to WordPress. I haven’t decided whether to continue cross-posting my blogs on MySpace, now that I’m using the site less and less. I still have a fondness for MySpace, because I found a lot of friends on it and it got me into social networking in the first place. Also, it’s still the only place where you can find my rarefied and solipsistic musical work with all its cultish appeal. But having said that, MySpace has been very difficult to use for a long time. The security there is ass, and its junk apps seem to somehow slow down my very powerful computer to Commodore 64 speed. Furthermore, I’m thinking of using this blog as a way to keep fresh daily content on “The Retributioners” main site, and I don’t know if it is necessary to keep my ramblings in three places.

Let me know what you think. Fran? Mel? Gene? Jen? Lori? Nat? Gummo? Squeaky? If I go to WordPress, will you follow?

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2 CBS

48 Hours Mystery: Michael Jackson is autopsied for the ninth time and 48 Hours makes a startling discovery: He had a heart attack. Jermaine Jackson sings to Katie Couric.

4 NBC

Dateline: We interrupt the Fourth of July to ask where Debbie Rowe is and why she isn’t demanding custody of her children from Diana Ross. Jermaine Jackson sings to Matt Lauer.

5 ABC

20/20: A time-lapse photograph examination of Michael Jackson’s collapsing nasal septum. Jermaine Jackson sings “Ben” to two of Diane Sawyer’s interns.

10 CNN

Larry King Live: Was Michael Jackson’s death caused by a powerful drug? We ask a waiter at T.G.I. Friday’s.

11 WGN

Jermaine Jackson reads the Michael Jackson inquest at a press conference by singing it in a 2/4 bossa nova number.

13 PBS

The News Hour: As nation mourns Michael Jackson, North Korea annihilates Hawaii

14 History

History is written by the winners, and the biggest winner was the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

15 ABC Family

How your sexually active pre-teen killed Farrah Fawcett

15 ABC Family

How demons will anally rape you in hell and other Bible stories on “The 700 Club.”

16 Animal Planet

“I Killed Master Jackson For My Freedom”: Bubbles’ shocking confession

16 Animal Planet

The joyless and horrifying act of cat sex

17 Logo

A new show for part-time Lesbians: “Half Saph”

18 BET

“You Ain’t Shit,” Kanye West’s new talent show

19 CNBC

A round-table discussion among today’s business leaders about how, if ever, we can fool people into the shell game of capitalism again.

20 Public Access

An Hour With The Dark Lord Satan (taped in Betamax)

21 MTV

An old interview with Michael Jackson, the one in which he claims repeatedly that sometimes when black people grow older they turn into white people.

22 Vh-1

“Daisy of Love,” brought to you by Trojan condoms and Ocean Spray cranberry juice

23 Fox News

In a special Fourth of July tribute, Fox News says goodbye to America as it slides irretrievably into European socialism.

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The following is a rough transcript of Sarah Palin’s speech in Wasilla, Alaska on Friday, July 3, in which she announced that she would be resigning as governor.

I appreciate you all being here on the shores of Lake Lucille, which has served as a source of inspiration for my family for years, and not just because it’s a dead lake running over with oil, antifreeze, de-icing solvents and leaching sewage. Some people call Lake Lucille a “dead lake,” but I like to think a lake is more than just a place where fish have enough oxygen to live.

I wanted to thank my husband Todd for coming in from the commercial fishing grounds in Bristol Bay where he was called away from his ling cod and kelp perch so that he and I could speak to you on the eve of our Independence Day. It’s a day to remember how our forefathers gave up so much—gave everything—so that we could live in peace, something we should remember as we wage war in Central Asia.

Now, I love Alaska. As you remember, Alaska was one of the last states admitted to the union. It was purchased when Secretary of State Seward bought it from Russia in 1867 only because the short-sighted Russian tsar saw it as a remote ice box that was difficult to defend and would be easier to sell than to lose in two seconds to some aggressor. And while it was long-known as Seward’s Folly by tut-tutting critics, we resilient Alaskans have proved them all wrong by creating a glorious Republican welfare state where sewer pipes run five feet above ground over the permafrost.

Alaska has been blessed by God with clean air and natural resources and fresh water. God gave us power. By God, he gave it us. Drill baby drill.

Four years ago, I promised to be a different kind of governor four years ago. Now you may be asking, didn’t I only become governor two and a half years ago? Maybe. But I don’t stick to rules; I told you I would be anything but conventional.

Together, you and I, we pushed through the largest private sector energy project ever: the AGIA gas line. We became energy independent by making sure energy was in the hands of the energy companies that make the profits that go to America’s companies. We built a prison to be filled up with prisoners. We protected states’ rights in the Supreme Court, even though I am not on that illustrious bench.

We did everything we needed to do and then I reached the national spotlight. I am not a quitter. Thus, I am passing the torch.

As you know, life is short. One can’t waste time and resources by compromising and staying in one’s job until it is finished.

I hate apathy. And by that I mean, just going on day in and day out working in a job I was hired for after actively lobbying for it with millions of dollars of campaign contributions. Just going along and doing what you are told because it’s your job—that’s not what we Alaskans are about. If you doubt me, look at the oil company rebate checks we have to prove it. We can’t be apathetic when we quit our jobs. No, when we quit, we must do it with the full force of our convictions.

When Alaskans began drilling, we showed our mettle and took whatever money was given to us and kept our heads down. And now we have more freedom and more prosperity. It’s a good day for America.

I’ve always said no more politics as usual, and that I am a fisherman. The national press won’t tell you what is a fisherman, but we here in Wasilla can tell you: a fisherman does not float downstream dead. Nor will I.

There’s nothing worse than a quitter. I hate quitting and that’s why I’m leaving office. The national press might tell you that I’m a quitter only because they’re going by the dictionary definition: “Someone who quits a job.” How true that is. But in Alaska, quitting has another meaning. Staying in your job.

Being a public figure is about self-sacrifice and being a point guard and not not keeping your eye on the basket. Did you see what I did there? That was a double negative there to make you realize I was talking about the opposite thing. And by that I mean you do want to keep your eye on the basket.

I have always said that I’m about small government and protecting the land and drilling for resources and exploiting the minerals as we protect the environment. And now we have shown that we are as good as we walk the walk.

I don’t want to waste Alaska’s money and time by being a lame duck. If I were here as governor, I promise you I would have in just a few months wasted all of your money in scurrilous and monumentally dishonest ways. So I had no choice but to do the right thing and remove myself from politics so that we would not have politics as usual. I play a different way. Some people might have said: “Finish the term you ran for, Sarah.” But I won’t play their game.

I think often of a saying on a refrigerator magnet in my parents’ house: “It’s not my business what anybody thinks of me.” And I can’t. I have to do the right thing and I just can’t if I am given the job of overseeing your tax money and building roads and hiring policeman. Of course, I have a special needs child, and people are cruel.

Now, we still need people to fight the good fight and not believe the national media with their scurrilous questions about where Africa is and whether it is a sovereign country or not. That is me calling an audible and passing the ball in hopes that next time, someone else will be asked whether Africa is a continent or not. But for me personally, I don’t need a title like “governor of Alaska” to answer or not answer direct questions. I can work for you or not work for you in other ways.

At times like these, I like to take these words from General Douglas MacArthur: people who need people are the luckiest people. The luckiest people in the world. Please welcome our new governor Sean Parnell and I am seceding from the union.

Goodnight.

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Los Angeles (API) – Millions of shocked Michael Jackson fans today remembered him as an inspiration—namely as an inspiration not to become wealthy and famous.

“I remember when I was little I wanted to be just like Michael Jackson and I took dancing and singing lessons,” said Wes Miles of nearby Riverside. “Then as he got stranger and stranger I realized, ‘Wow, who would ever want things to go so horribly horribly wrong?’”

Jackson’s surprise death on June 25 shocked millions of people all over the globe, throwing the world into both mourning and a tut-tutting disavowal of Jackson’s life and the surreal, alienating effects of his all-consuming celebrity.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” said 12-year-old Sheila Stevens of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“I always remember Michael Jackson saying follow your dreams. But I got something completely different from that: ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ You just might get it and start talking to monkeys and dating 12 year old boys.’”

Daniel Lewis, a 42-year-old accountant from Omaha, Nebraska, said that when he was younger he wanted to be a comedian, and tried to get jobs in the entertainment business. After watching Jackson turn into a muttering elfin recluse, however, he realized he really ought to just go back to college.

“My mother always said, ‘You’re good with numbers. Don’t be a schmuck.’ I told her, ‘Mom, I want to be a star like Michael Jackson. A person’s got to follow his dreams.’ But boy was my mother right. You look at Michael Jackson three years after Thriller and you start to think, ‘Why am I being such a putz?’”

Paige Norman, a psychologist from Austin, Texas, said that the worldwide mourning over Jackson’s death shows how people not only celebrate pop musicians, but also how they slavishly ape them and identify with them, almost to the point of neurosis.

“People need heroes in these troubled times,” said Norman, “Especially people without good role models, who tend to need affirmation of their value and goodness from agents outside themselves. They very often turn to celebrities to provide that reflection of their worth.

“Probably Michael Jackson’s biggest contribution to human progress—more than his historic music—was that maybe he got people to stop doing that. Because he got pretty weird, you have to admit.”

Dorothy Totterman, a waitress from Glasgow, Scotland, said she once met Michael Jackson when she was an aspiring dancer. He told her after seeing a bit of her steps that she had real talent, and she said her heart was bursting with joy.

“But then I realized: This guy is wearing a mask and his nose is falling off into his dinner. What in the hell would I listen to this guy for? And that instinct helped me avoid a life of unrealistic expectations and emotional pain.”

“Thank you, Michael Jackson,” Totterman added. “Thank you so much for giving me that.”

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–*Busy mourning Farrah Fawcett.

–*Busy mourning Ed McMahon.

–*Going through Michael Jackson’s garbage.

–*Continuing your longstanding Courtney Love suicide vigil.

–*Visiting the petting zoo with your kids when you saw Abe Vigoda and stalked him around the yard until you thought he was going to run away.

–*Sending a death threat to one of the Jonas Brothers because you love them so much and can’t live without them.

–*Trying to get a look inside Michael Jackson’s house.

–*Trying to break into Michael Jackson’s house.

–*Trying to curl up in Michael Jackson’s house.

–*Giving Axl Rose special anal-tongue contact called the “Munich Police Force.”

–*Having a bowl of niacin and riboflavin enriched Wheaties.

–*Tracking blood through the snow to see dying Uncle Vanya in St. Petersburg

–*Trying to make some sense of my life and having it occur to me all of a sudden that Michael Jackson might have the answer.

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