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Take a small, stupid, and meaningless American town from the deepest countryside. Take a sweltering, humid, unbearable Texan afternoon.
Then take a blind bastard. No, I didn't say "visually impaired." Nor "disabled." I didn't say that "they" are so much more sensitive than us. I'm not the bastard. The blind guy is the bastard. And for the record, he's a blind bastard who replaced a crippled negro to do a stupid and underpaid job. No, he wasn't an differently-abled African American. He was just a crippled negro.
Take Mr. Harold, who opens his front door and sees this poor disabled man who needs help and he doesn't really feel like helping him, but you can't really make the figure of a discriminatory racist pig that doesn’t even help those who are less fortunate than us... So first, he helps him finish the job, mowing the lawn of his neighbor, also getting a nice punch in the face by the neighbor himself, and then he takes him home to watch dwarf wrestling on TV. Or rather, Mr. Harold watches, the blind man just listens, as is logical. And yes, I said dwarfs, I didn't say... What's the politically correct term for "dwarf"? "Differently tall"? Anyway, there are these little guys who are beating the living daylights out of each other, making lots of grimaces. You know, the audience goes wild watching this stuff.
Take Mr. Harold's wife, a thoroughbred Baptist all prayers, good deeds, and Sunday TV sermons. They go crazy for the blind. Even for the crippled. Just like Jesus. Although there is no evidence that Jesus was ever in a shitty situation as Mr. Harold's. Who knows, maybe in that situation, he would have loved them a little less.
Take that filthy blind man who slowly sneaks into Mr. Harold's life and family, charms his son by showing him wrestling moves, seduces his wife with quotes from the Gospel and hallelujahs. And even screws her. Take a family subdued, incapable of reacting, prone in front of the cliché that "we must help the neediest," and "they are unfortunate, therefore pure of heart."
Take Mr. Harold, who, in a fit of desperation, pretends to accompany the blind bastard to get ice cream and abandons him in the middle of the street. Take two burly thugs who catch up to him in a car shortly after and beat the hell out of him, so he learns not to abandon a poor blind guy.
Did you take all this? Good. You have achieved "A Fine and Private Place": the dirty, bawdy, wonderfully politically incorrect antithesis of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral."
Take Godzilla in rehab therapy. He must follow the twelve-step program to unlearn laying waste to cities, detox from dismembering and squashing humans. Take someone who buys an inflatable doll, talks to her, falls in love with her, but she gets a big head and turns him into... An inflatable doll. Take a couple who hate each other, the only two survivors of the nuclear holocaust, who communicate only through a tattoo that she makes on his back to remind him that he is solely responsible for the death of their daughter. Take a migration of phantom fish from another dimension. Take a desert haunted by Cadillacs and zombies, mad priests, and nuns in garters and lace panties. Take an arena in a lost place in the American countryside, where two strangers beat each other to a pulp just to satisfy the whims and urges of an audience of psychopathic rednecks.
Take all this, enjoy it, savor it, bring it under the umbrella in this sweltering and insipid summer. And you too will repeat with me: long live Lansdale's genius.
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