Verwandte Artikel zu Mortal Lock

Mortal Lock - Softcover

Vachss, Andrew

 
9780307950833: Mortal Lock
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307950832 ISBN 13: 9780307950833
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL

A hit man stalks his mark at a race track. A sociopath crosses every moral boundary to become a published author. An ex-mercenary obsessively defends his “perimeter” from a dangerous interloper. A man for hire grudgingly accepts help from a teenage girl to track an online predator. In a dystopian future, young people struggle for survival underground, forming themselves into vicious gangs with only the graffiti of the “last journalists” accepted as truth. Andrew Vachss collects twenty tight, powerful stories—all from the past decade of his career, including some now published for the first time—along with an original screenplay. Together, they form Mortal Lock, a searing portrait of the criminal underworld, with both its depravity and humanity on display.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Vachss’s many books include the Burke novels and two previous collections of short stories. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications. He died in 2021.

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Excerpted from Ghostwriter


1.

I was born a gifted child. By the time I started school, everyone was telling me I could be anything I wanted, do anything I wanted to do. At home, too—I had very supportive, encouraging parents. But there was only one thing I ever wanted to be: a writer. Just a writer.

That’s the wrong word, “just.” It trivializes something sacred. Writing is my connection to the universe. My only connection. If some magical surgery could scalpel it out of my soul, there would be nothing left. Without my writing, that’s what I’d be: Nothing.

I knew this years before teachers started telling my parents about my “talent.” I felt it inside me, growing. It suffused every cell in my body, surging with such power that I couldn’t have suppressed it even if I had wanted to.

That force crushed everything in its path. By the time I was in grade school, it was so potent that it took over my world. It wasn’t just that writing was the only thing I cared about; writing owned me. Every sense was always tuned to that same signal. If I wrote something great, that’s how I’d feel. And if I wrote something lousy, that’s how I’d feel, too.

I don’t know the exact time it happened, but, after a while, writing was the only thing that could make me feel anything at all.

The topic didn’t matter. Even if it was supposed to be writing about writing—like when you do a book report—it was always about my writing. It didn’t make any difference if I liked the book or I hated it, the only thing that counted was how I said whatever I thought—that was the power-source.

I knew the grade didn’t matter. Of course I’d get an A, but so would other kids. There was no grade that could measure my writing. I was the only judge.

But I was never smug, never satisfied. I’d spend hours deciding on just the right phrase, always trying to get it . . . perfect. I didn’t care about being the best writer in class. What did that mean? I always knew there was more than that. Much more. Some place where I rightfully belonged. Don’t mistake me for some petty narcissist—I was always my harshest critic, even when I was my only critic.



2.

It wasn’t until tenth grade that I saw my name in print. I could actually feel my synapses flame with this confirmation of my destiny.

The editor told me it was very unusual for a sophomore to get a bylined story. Even though I knew I could have written the whole school paper by myself, every single word, I told her how grateful I was to have gotten the chance.

I wasn’t even lying. Not then.

The staff of the school paper always picked the editor. Every member got to vote, but it wasn’t like the other elections at school. It wasn’t the most popular kid who won—it was the one who was willing to do the most work. Some of the kids just wanted to do their own thing: take photos, or write poems, or do a gossip column, silly garbage like that. But putting the whole thing together, that wasn’t a job most people wanted.

They always said the editor should be someone who had earned the job. Worked their way up from the bottom, paid their dues. So, naturally, they always picked a senior for the position.

High school has all kinds of rules—the kind they put on posters, and the kind you learn by watching how things work. It doesn’t take long before you realize that the rules don’t apply to everyone. Certain kids get to do certain things; other kids don’t. Nobody had to spell that out. It was just the way things were—and so blatantly obvious that even the dullest kids picked it up quickly.

I saw this as an operational system, a weird blend of objectivity and favoritism. Like with the jocks: the best players got to be first string, no matter what year they were in. So the stars actually earned their positions. But once they got to be stars, they got their own set of rules as well.

I thought writing would work the same way. So whatever the editor told me to cover, I jumped on it. I was never late with an assignment. And I always nailed it, too: If they wanted three hundred words; they got three hundred words. Who, What, Where, When, and Why, just like the faculty advisor said had to be in every story.

The faculty advisor was Mr. David. The school hired him because he had a master’s from the Columbia School of Journalism, and he had a lot of pieces published, in magazines with big names. He won some prizes for writing, too.

Mr. David had been what they called an “investigative journalist” before he retired. I guess they had to pay him a lot of money to get him to teach at a high school. But that wouldn’t be a problem. In the town I lived in, the parents always demanded the best teachers. They paid a lot of taxes to keep their public school as good as any private one. Better, even. That was very important if you wanted to get into the best colleges.

I remember hearing my father tell my mother that was why we moved there from the city. It made the commute worthwhile, he said.

Besides the school paper and the journalism class, Mr. David taught creative writing. He even worked with the Debate Club. Maybe he was one of those men you read about—the ones who can’t stand being retired. He was busy all the time. I don’t think he needed the money, so I guess that teaching was what he really wanted to do.

I thought a lot about Mr. David because I was trying to come up with a solution for my problem, and I thought he might have the experience to help me.

My problem was the editor of the paper. She was a fat, pasty-faced toad, with frizzy hair and thick ankles. Outside of the paper, she was so marginalized that you wouldn’t believe she could squeeze her disgusting presence into that tiny bit of space. But when it came to the paper, everybody always gave in to her, because she did just about all the work.

That made her really valuable. If someone turned in a pile of slop, Amanda would fix it up for them—even if she had to rewrite every word. That meant a lot, especially to the crowd who needed every extracurricular activity they could grab. They were obsessed with getting into the best colleges, and they knew grades and SATs just weren’t enough. Their competition always had more than that to offer, so they needed more, too.

They were always saying Amanda was a real lifesaver. Saying it to her—I don’t what they said about her at the cafeteria tables where she knew she’d never be allowed to sit. Or even if they ever mentioned her at all.

But to me, Amanda was no savior, she was a roadblock. She changed everything I turned in. I would get it back, all marked up. The first time, I told her I wasn’t going to rewrite it. She hadn’t made what I wrote better, she’d just changed it to be what she wanted it to be—she was in control, and she wasn’t letting anyone else join that one-member club.

She didn’t like me saying that, I could tell. But she didn’t lose her temper or anything. She just said everyone on the paper had to be edited, and if I didn’t “go through the process,” my article would have to be spiked.

I knew what that meant—Mr. David taught what he called “newspaper vocabulary” to all of us. He was the first person I ever heard use words like “byline” or “jump” and expressions like “above the fold” or “column inches.”

I couldn’t stand the thought of anything I wrote being spiked—it would be like the spike going into my own body. So I...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307950832
ISBN 13 
9780307950833
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
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