Get Shorty

by Elmore Leonard

[jamiereadthis]

Week before last I took a trip by myself. It’s one of my favorite things to do, to disappear off the grid, to land up someplace in a [slightly sketchy; always slightly sketchy] motel. It’s not so much a vacation from anything as it is just a change of scenery.

One of the rules, and it hasn’t failed yet, is to make as many new friends as possible. I can do this on trips, because there’s so much wide open space of solitude that it’s hardly an intrusion. I’ll talk to anyone. I’ll talk to a lamppost.

This time, it was the beach. I made friends with the staff at this cheap old motel to the point where they were letting me have late breakfasts and a free ‘suite’ (I paid for a double and they gave me a king) and the run of the pool after closing, where I could swim all night if I wanted. I knew their kids’ names and grandkids’ names. I knew everyone in housekeeping. I was ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’ in the inviolable rule of southern hospitality.

So yes, this book was covered in sand from the hot salt ocean, it was read in the pool at 1 a.m. (One night it rained. A night swim alone near the ocean in the rain: how could you want that to end?) But more to the point I’m making, I pick the books I read on these trips with a purpose. They have to fit the mood but they have to be friends too, they have to sit by my plate at meals— to show it’s okay I’m eating alone— but never read through the meals because they’ve started too many conversations.

And the whole trip, I didn’t eat a meal alone. My favorite spot is this bar on the dock, the best burgers and shrimp on the beach, the local joint for all the retirees and fishermen. They’d tie up their boats right there on the dock and four out of every five meals, there I’d be. “Whatch-you reading?” is like “whatch-you fishing?” The best starter-kit for conversation there is.

I say all this not to say how many people went “Elmore Leonard!” or “Get Shawty?” or “That’s the one with Danny Devito?” I say it because I’m not convinced yet there’s a soul on the earth, asshole or saint, that can’t be won over with a good joke or a good story or someone just being an interesting, real human person. Where that isn’t enough to break all the rules and get away with anything and make family out of strangers. I’m sure those people exist. I’m saying I haven’t met one yet. And since that seems to be the basic law of Elmore’s universe too, well. It makes me feel like I’m not naive. It makes me feel like maybe that’s the basic law everywhere. And maybe, the more who believe that: it just might be.

Plus, my room number was 325. Chili Palmer’s with the guns and the money and newfound friends was 325. How’s that for kicks?

“What you don’t understand,” Catlett said, “is what the movie is saying. You live clean, the shit gets taken care of somehow or other. That’s what the movie’s about.”
“You believe that?”
“In movies, yeah. Movies haven’t got nothing to do with real life.”