The Watch - Exploring ‘The Deuce’ and Double Down Book Club Selection ‘Sweet Forever’ With Joe House (Ep. 196)

Episode Date: October 20, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss the works of writer George Pelecanos, leading off with his acclaimed new HBO show, ‘The Deuce,’ (1:00) before transitioning to the latest Double Down Book Club selection, ‘Sweet Forever’ (20:00). Later, D.C. native Joe House joins the show to further discuss ‘Sweet Forever’ and it’s time-capsule depiction of Washington (30:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at The Rigger.com and joining me in the studio, he just got off his shift from the high hat. It's Andy Greenwald! How you doing?

For a second, I left my body. Did you really? Yeah. I was like, what's the hi-hat? It's the bar. The deuce. The show we're going to talk about. Which is the show we're talking about today.

Today is also Book Club Day. It's Pelicanos day is what it is. It's Pelicanos season. So today, Andy and I are going to talk a little bit about The Deuce, the show that's been running for the last six weeks on HBO. We did an interview with the show's co-creator, George Pelicanos, a few weeks ago. So you guys should definitely check that out if you want to get a deep dive on the creation, the behind the scenes of the show. Today we're going to talk about a few of the episodes and just how we think it's going. But because George Pelicanos is the co-creator of the Deuce, and he's also the author of our book club book, this era or this age.

this month. The Sweet Forever. Yeah. We're going to kind of combine the two topics together to kind of just talk about crime fiction, crime television shows. His particular set of skills. Yes, his particular set of skills. We are going to be joined for the book club portion of this by a DC legend.

Another DC legend. Joe House. I thought you were going to say Otto Porter. Calling in. So we'll talk to Joe about the book. I don't know if Joe's seen the deuce, but we'll be talking, Sweet Forever set in D. It's set in the 80s in D.C. It's about as much as anything.

anything, it's about that city. It's about the dawn of the crack era in D.C. It's about Len Baez, local star. It bookended by his time in the tournament that year in 1986, and then his death right after the draft. And it's obviously very informed by the music that was going on around at that time. 86 is a very good year. Here's my goal. I'm going to set out a goal. It's always risky to set out a goal at the beginning of a podcast, an unplanned a podcast. But we are going to talk about the deuce. If you have not yet read the suite forever, I still think you'll find things worth listening to in the second half of the show. because we are not specifically going to spoil the book per se.

It's not really spoilable in a lot of ways. And what I hope we get out of our conversation with House is really context for the book, for... What it was like in DC in the 80s. For the city and then how the city has changed. And also, through that conversation, it's another way into why we love books like this and why we really hope people love exploring these books with us. And I have to say, that same love, it was a really interesting week to catch up on the deuce and then read The Sweet Forever for the third time

and made me, first of all, it was very pleasurable, both experiences, but also really exciting to be able to just in the moment track and visualize the connections between Pelicanos's work and see that the things that made me fall in love with him as a writer are still present in his work on the small screen. Well, one of the things that's fascinating is how Pelicanos and he talked about this in his interview with us,

like a lot of authors, was largely a French figure, was just kind of plugging away at crime novels and hoping for something to pop. And I think with a lot of crime novelists, what happens is, you know, if they don't get a claim immediately, they kind of just build their audience book after book. And these guys, like, are prolific. They usually pump out a book like once every 18 to 24 months. Yeah. And, you know, he was somebody who really believed in what he was doing early on.

And that was this idea that the crime is ancillary to the life of the people who are affected by the crime. And the crime story can take in everything from politics to music to friendship, to drug abuse, to all these different things that you want to talk about. You can do it through the lens of having a crime. In the years since George wrote Sweet Forever, that became a popular television trope. Yes. And I'm glad you said that and made that turn because what I really took away from this week catching up on the dues and reading this book is that one of the things that George brings to his work, that is so essential and so missing from a lot of the television that we sift through is a real sense of light amidst the dark. And what I mean is the deuce is not by any stretch a feel-good TV show.

It traffics in, maybe that's a poor choice of words, a lot of the darker elements of humanity. You know, it is about the sex trade. There is enormous misogyny and there's violence and there's fear and there's a dark side of race at play in a lot of this. And of course, because it's Pelicanos and his co-creator David Simon, the show doesn't shy away from any of it. But there's also the high hat, which is the bar that you mentioned, that James Franco's character, one of his characters, his better character, I would say, Vincent is opening and managing. And it is a port in the storm. Yeah. And my biggest surprise from watching these last few episodes of The The Deuce, which I completely adored, I think this is outstanding tell.

television. Every time an episode ended, I missed it. I missed the world. I don't necessarily want to live on Times Square in 1972. I don't really know what my hustle would be. I don't think I would be good at having a hustle then or now. But there is something about the life of this bar, and there's something that is just good about what, about this virtue, it's virtuous almost, this idea that, and it said verbatim by one of the characters, everyone needs a place to drink at the end of the day. Yeah, man. Yeah. And in every Pelicanos book, there's always a bar. In his earlier books, um, starring Nick Stefano's who is a character in the Sweet Forever, a supporting character.

Um, Nick picks up shifts at a bar called The Spot. And the way that he, the Pelicanos evokes this place, there's raging violence and uncertainty and, of course, the inner turmoil of our first person narrator. But in this place, you know, where there's, you can always pour a couple fingers of old granddad and you can crack a beer and different walks of life come in there. And in that one place you are together, that is sort of the linchpin of the, the show, of the deuce. And TV needs that. I'm a broken record about this, but you kind of want to spend time with people. That's what TV is. And so the fact that they have found a way to articulate that so well, and that was in the wire, and that was in Tramay. But it's the heart of the show, at least

through six episodes, in a way that surprised me and has really sustained my love for it. It's interesting to go through this coming out of the summer and into the fall where we've talked about Westworld and we talked about Game of Thrones and those two shows while they're very different in terms of their mythology and quality both had a feeling of as we were watching it we were trying to solve it you know that there was a degree to which you were almost getting ahead of your skis because you were trying to get to the I understand how this is you know and a lot of the time it wouldn't necessarily be that you were trying to get to the end because you were trying to spoil it for yourself as much as you were trying to borrow a David Simonism

make all the pieces matter. You know, you wanted everything that you were seeing to be going towards an ultimate answer. Or else, why is this journey worth it? Sure. Watching The Deuce has been a nice reminder that there is a multiplicity of television experiences. One's not necessarily better than the other,

but the idea of a hangout show, even a hangout show that is about topics and subject matter that you wouldn't necessarily want to hang out in. Like you're saying, like after watching this, it's not like you are pining for the days of 1970s. A peep shows. Times Square, yeah. Rousts.

But the idea that, you know, this is a, to say that this is a tapestry is to like kind of, it's underselling the size of the cast here. It's the shit on tapestries. Yeah, it's, and I think sometimes it works against the show in terms of its, in terms of the drama, in terms of the heightened sensory experience you might want to get from a television show when you're watching is simply so much stuff to pay attention to that you can kind of just immerse yourself in it. but to watch them put together this ensemble and to just slowly kind of unravel this story and even though there are so many huge sociocultural moments that are getting touched on in this show, they're just kind of like, they're kind of surfing it, man. They're just kind of like just letting it happen. And God bless them like for being allowed to do this still, like that there are still shows that can be this.

Well, here's the thing. Like this is what separates a Simon show or Simon and Pelicano show from a lot of other things that were foisted upon us as prestige TV over the last six, seven, eight years. My go-to punching bag for this, and I apologize, it's not fair. I need more punching bags, but there was a show on stars

called Magic City that Mitch Glazer created, and it wasn't very good. Jeffrey D. Morgan was in that, right? That's right. It looked good, but it was not very good. And it was a period crime show about Miami.

And that's all it was about. It looked beautiful. It was about these characters, I guess. They weren't memorable, but it was in Miami, and it was sort of there. And all the stories would come from just being there.

By the time you get to episode six of the do, season one, and there are eight episodes, we realize this isn't about the sex trade in Times Square in the 70s. This is about the radical changing of the sex trade in America within a certain era. All of the pieces, you said it, all the pieces of the show do matter. And so for those of you who are caught up on the show, we now know that this whole season, all the little bits and pieces and dribs and drabs we've been getting are about the mass. Collusion from the mob and the cops and the government basically to profit off of sex work. Yeah.

To move it from the streets into buildings, to clean up Times Square, but more importantly, to continue to, to, it's not legalize things quite, but it's to normalize them in order to make profit off of them. And it's about, I mean, this is what Simon and Pelicanos in his books and certainly in his TV work do well. It's about the end of things. Things used to be one way. Now they are. And it almost goes back to season three of The Wire, which was largely about, quote, unquote, progress and the impossibility of progress. Well, we're seeing progress, and it's ugly. It doesn't feel good, but this was about, you know, there had been some loosening, I don't know if it was loosening, but there had been a shifting way we looked at morality and sexuality in the end of the 60s, and this is sort of the commodification of that to some extent.

But yeah, it's fascinating to watch them basically take all these archetypes, take these people that in scripts and in descriptions of shows would be defined by what they do. So prostitute, pimp, cop, bartender, whatever. And slowly but surely get to the person underneath the job description in every single case. You know, whether it's Chris Bauer's construction worker or, you know, James Franco's bartender. It's just the way that they sort of chip away and start showing the humanity. in these people is, we may not appreciate it while it's on. I know that we probably didn't with Tramay. I know that show me a hero, it's myers, but maybe not enough viewers.

The same thing for Generation Kill. Simon is very, very good at taking it a profession or a series of professions and showing how the people who do those jobs are more than they're just their professions. I love the performances on this show. I love the characters on this show. I've fallen completely in love with them in six episodes. And I have to tell you, maybe this is a new experience. Maybe it's one that we should have more of in contemporary TV,

which is I'm being greedy. I want much, much, much more. I can't believe there are only two episodes of this left because I want to keep sinking into this world with these people as they navigate these changing terrain. Now, there's going to be a second season. But that's already been confirmed, and likely a third, although that has yet to be made official.

But from what George told us when he was here, they're going to do a pretty significant time jump. That this is a show about, telling a story about America, of course, about a city, of course, through the lens of Times Square and these inflection points for when Times Square shifted. And so if this season is what we've been talking about, of taking the sex trade from the streets into the buildings, the second season will be in the 80s and about pornography moving to California, basically.

Which makes me wonder, not everyone from the season is coming with us, I would imagine. I mean, if we're going to jump 10 years. No, I would imagine not. And I'm going to miss them. Yeah. You know, first of all, I can only guess that the ones who don't make it with us to the second season don't make it because they climbed multiple flights of stairs. Because that is the show's go-to. So far, two people, two people have been shown wheezing on the stairs only to suffer massive cardiac events.

Yeah. That's my only criticism of the show, honestly. It's like, you know, these people... There's a lot of death during oral sex, you know, just like a lot of horrific oral sex going on. These people... You mean, the rat also? these people smoke so much. Like, it makes me want to smoke because it just, I feel weird having never done it.

You can do an avant-garde art piece that's just people from the Deuce and Mad Men smoking. Do you think that Franco being kind of methady was just like, no, no, I'll just really smoke Marlboro's, and now he has major health issues? Because there is not a scene where he is not smoking a cigarette. And sometimes he's playing two characters smoking in the same scene. He's literally hotboxing himself. Do you imagine how the continuity guy who has to first? figure out like what length of cigarette he's smoking in each shot? I just, just to say, like, we will come back to the show.

I really, really, obviously we are pro Pelicanos. He's the thread running through this podcast, but there is so much of him in this show, and I think it is, it helps. It helps the subject matter. It does keep, I've heard people say that, you know, even despite the subject matter and a lot of the positive things we're saying, that this show still isn't, quote, quote, fun enough. And to that, I say, like, are you watching the margins?

The performances, like, the guys who are playing the pimps. Gary Carr, Method Man. Gary Carr is incredible British actor. Our man, Chris Partlow from the Wire. And then Method Man and Black Thought especially, these guys are delightful, even as they do horrific things in the show. But this is the genius of Simon and Pelicanos. They are everything all at once.

They can be monstrous. they can be tender, they can be just outright hilarious. And one can feel, as the season builds to its finale, one can feel an enormous amount of sympathy for them because they're the ones getting, in many ways, the rug pulled out from under them, because they are not necessary once the next steps are taken. Yeah, and, you know, I think that sometimes when you talk about David Simon shows,

it sounds like you're talking about jazz. You know, it's like... It's the worst talking about jazz. It's really good for you, man. And you just don't understand the artistry underneath all of this. This is the scene when what's his name, Larry Gilliard, who plays the cop, Chris Olson, takes the reporter to the Jazz Club, and he does that, he does the watching jazz face where he leans his head back and he goes, because the bass is hitting him. Do you think it's because we're so, like, self-aware about the wire after the fact and about the sort of pleasures of the wire that we almost, it almost feels weird talking about another show in that way, in that sort of reverence? I think the wire had a certain propulsiveness that has been probably intentionally taken out of what Simon's done since then.

There wasn't the same kind of, at the end of the day, they were still chasing someone. I mean, that's sort of how three ends with just like, who have I been chasing this whole time, you know, with Stringer. But I do think that there is almost like you make a great album and then all of a sudden you just like, you know, we're not going to use electric guitar. anymore. Right. To challenge yourself. You've done that already. Yeah. Maybe I'm just particularly sweet on the show, but I think that he has done enough projects since the Wire that he feels

he's like comfortable playing the hits again a little bit. A little bit, yeah. The sense of humor that's in this show and I think a lot of it has to do with the casting. But the sense of humor that's in the show is pretty, it's pretty funny. And that's hard to say because of what happens to people in the show. You feel weird being like, I laugh like multiple times during every episode That's the best kind of TV show.

And I think it's the cast, but I also think it's Richard Price continuing to write for the show was a very particular biting kind of world-weary humor that is shot through this. And I mean, probably also the writers who were added to the mix, Megan Abbott, Lisa Lutz, who written that standing episode. I think Lisa Lutz wrote the Chinese food scene, right? She has the scene where the cops buy the prostitutes Chinese food? I think, yeah, I think George told us that. I think that was a Price episode, but that she may have written contributed that scene.

Well, in any case, that's like one of those scenes where you're watching it and you're just like, is priceless, like, to not to put too final point on it. You're like, this is just amazing stuff, but almost in retrospect, you're like, oh yeah, and this is kind of how I felt about certain scenes in the wire. Yeah, look, the thing that that is my... Which is like I almost sound like I'm not thankful for it. No, the biggest problem with, quote unquote, prestige TV with the hour-long drama was this, I'm not a bad man problem, right? Where it was this idea that, you know, I'm not one thing, I'm not the other thing, I'm both. Well, if you have to say it, you're neither, you're nothing. You're not good at making the story,

quite frankly. Or in articulating this anymore. Because you look at what these guys do effortlessly, which is present something that isn't reality, but is shot through with enough experience and lived in experience and care and empathy that when you see the pimps and Chris Alston, the cop, played by Larry Gilliard, at the barbershop, or at Leon's, at the cafe, these neutral places and they are talking like people have known each other for years because they have. You're not thinking about powerful or impassioned bathroom mirror monologues. You're just thinking about how life works. And that's the brilliance of this show.

Andy, I want to get to sweet forever, but first let's just take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by LinkedIn. Greenwald, have you tried to hire someone lately? Yeah, I have an active listing at the moment. What's that for? Podcast co-host. Oh, you're the best one in the business. It's a hard thing to do, listing jobs.

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credit towards your first job post. That's LinkedIn slash the watch. LinkedIn.com slash the watch for a $50 credit. Today, terms and conditions apply. If I had used LinkedIn, I wouldn't have lost Katie Nolan to ESPN. Today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by Stitch Fix Men. You can tell a guy who's got style. He always looks great and seems confident like he's ready for anything.

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That's Stitchfix.com slash watch to get started today. Stitchfix.com slash watch. All right, Andy, we're back. And it's book club time. Double down book club. We're back. The Streets Book Club. this time we did George Pelicanus is the sweet forever.

Chris, it's funny that we've had this book club for a couple iterations now, and we had yet to do one of the founding sacred texts of the idea for a book club, and in fact, for a large chunk of our friendship, which is this author and this book. So, if I may, just by way into this, this book was published in 1998. It is Pelicanos's probably fifth or sixth book at this point. And the second in the D.C. Quartet? The second in a series of books that came to be known as the D.C. Quartet, three of which follow Marcus

Clay and Dmitri Caras through three decades of life. 70s, King Sucker Man, the 80s, Sweet Forever, and the 90s, shame the devil. And there's also the big blowdown, which tells sort of an origin story for Caras, his father's story in the 40s and 50s. Right. And King Suckerman has, I'm a big fan of that book. Yeah. King Sucker Man is basically a crime novel version of a 70s, like, crime, like, almost like a

black exploitation movie or a like trashy French connection movie. It has like a real like 70s in flashing lights thing happening in the way that the Sweet Forever doesn't quite have. The 80s in Sweet Forever is more deeply ingrained into the characters and the story. One of the interesting things about being a fan of George Pelicanus for a long time in reading all of his books is you see, and this is actually the case with all great writers, especially prolific writers. You see them change as people. Their interests change, not just their talent level or their comfort, but who they are and what they value. And his first three books are enormously important to us.

And they're a firing offense, Nick's Trip and down by the river where the dead men go, the Nick Stefano's trilogy. Nick Stefano shows up in Sweet Forever as a secondary character sort of in between those books or just before those books start. The best way to describe those books. He's in King Suckerman, too. And the best way to describe those early books is like basically punk rock Raymond Chandler. Yeah. His first person detective novels that involve a guy whose life is coming apart while he listens to the replacements and does pushups. It sweats out.

It solves crimes. Sweats out the whiskey. By the time he got to the Sweet Forever and Sweet Forever was the first Pelicano's book I read. And so I'm psyched for anyone out there. This was the first book. I've read. This was, to my mind, where he turned the corner from being the punk rock Chandler to being a much more, and I mean this without any shade, I mean this quite complementarily, to be much more socially responsible in a way to broaden the palate. It's no longer a first-person book. We go in the heads of multiple characters on multiple levels of society, not unlike the wire. David Simon would then hire Pelicanos to work on the wire five or six years after this book was published, largely off of this book. This is the book that Simon's wife, the crime writer Laura Lipman, it to David Simon and said you should hire this guy for your show. Yeah, and there's actually a great tradition of crime novels as social histories.

Just off the top of my head, you've got the James Elroy, L.A. novels that jump out immediately. And then there's also, if you haven't checked these out, the David Peace Red Riding books, which are about a series of murders that took place in Northern England in the late 70s and early 80s. And each of the books are called 1977, 1980. And they are phenomenal. they made them into a series of, I think it was like two, two movies maybe.

I can't remember how they did the movies, but Andrew Garfield was in it. I believe Rebecca Hall was in it. They did a good job with the movie, but the books are extraordinary. This idea, basically, that a crime story can tell the story of a community or a region or a city or a time

is not something that, you know, that's not something the Dashiell Hammett was doing. You can extrapolate ideas from Chandler and Hammett about the time those books were written in, but they weren't explicitly trying to tell the story of an era the way some of these other writers eventually took that upon themselves. I think this is Pelicanos at the height of his powers because he is synthesizing the two strains of writer that he is.

I love the you said punk rock Chandler that's in it, but then also the sort of social scientist that he became, or social observer anyway, later in his career. What this book has is it's probably his most intricately and impressively plotted because it's set around the NCAA tournament weekend, opening weekend in 1986, the shadow of land bias and the impact he had on the community, both in life and death, bookends the book. But what this book also does with just, especially noticing this on the third read, just relentless pace and structure, you know,

over three days. But what he does in this, and this has fallen away in his later books, and I don't know if this is because he's getting leaner, you know, in his prose, which is very possible, or he's pulled in a hundred directions, which is also possible because he's making television shows like The Deuce. But this book has just an overflowing amount of tiny, beautiful, specific detail and grace notes given to even the smallest characters. In Life and Death, he writes Death, and this is also why David Simon ended up giving, I think, every penultimate episode of The Wire to Pelicanos. Dr. Death, yeah. His first episode was Where's Wallace? Because of the way characters are dispatched in this book with, with dignity, but also with real agony.

I mean, both of the reader and for the character. They're shattering. And there are these little moments in this book. Obviously, I'm going to mention, and we're going to talk to House about this, like the hot dogs from Ben's Chili Bowl. But, you know, the action figure in the little kid's hand who gets gunned down by Shortman, the the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way Marcus Clay describes the smell of his sleeping three-year-old son's head. It's really breathtaking. Yeah. Pelkanos has always been an incredibly visceral read for me, I think for you, for a lot of people, because of himecher says, he loved anything that had a ritual attached to it. And it's, we're not, but he makes driving American cars sound awesome. Um, this book, obviously has a lot of ritual because there's a lot of drug ritual, and there's even a line when Demetri Karas says, he loved anything that had a ritual attached to it. And it's, and it's, and it's, whether it's setting up lines of cocaine or pouring a very specific amount of alcohol. A brandy into a glass.

And he was a bartender himself and his characters have been too. But, you know, the language of shaking a Newport from the deck, you know, of five dead soldiers lined up front of them. It's so tactile. Like this entire book, there are things like you said, like the smell of the child's head. There's something about, I think there's a night where Dimitri, like, just basically rocks out and Marcus's record. store to Husker Doe records all night and like it's in his apartment yeah it's trauma arms yeah that's right yeah that's right and then like you know like the plaster that's getting shaken loose because of his dancing and stuff like that and then we turn the camera to Marcus on the street seeing him listening to the pogs yeah and you know

it's it's a classic classic buddy buddy moment but the rhythm that you're talking about is um something that just jumps out on a reread you can't believe um and he i think he takes this from elmore leonard who's also doesn't matter how long an elmore leonard book is it's it's a one-s sitter. You know, you could just like sit down and be done with rum punch or whatever in one sitting because there is a certain understanding of just the right moment to maybe throw a little bit more in there, but knows how to get out of the way of the story and the characters and just let them go about their lives. And people talk about writers in this sort of like magical like, ah, the characters are just speaking through me. I don't know. But you read these books and you kind of feel like these

are guys that Pelicanos quote unquote knows. And he knows where. what they do with every waking and sleeping hour of their day. And what they value. And what they value. And so that as they go through their life, the story is told in conversation and action, not in narration. Yes. And one last note, we're going to bring in Joe House in a minute to talk about this and about the world. But what I was really struck by was my changing relationship to the book. And when we had George Pelicanus on the podcast recently, I think we finally fessed up about the time we went to a book signing, and we basically tried to training day him out of the sign, out of the Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, or whatever it was.

No, that does not mean we asked him if he gets wet. No, but we were close. And he, you know, and he was like, I'm going to have one Heineken and go to sleep. Yeah, right. When I first read these books, when we were younger in different phases of our life, I was devouring, dare I say, hoovering up the Dimitri stuff, and like the going to concerts and just getting messed up. and everything about, like, the high life, literally as he presents here,

and that's all shot through the Stefano's books, too. Reading it this time, I was totally slayed, and I'm sorry, this is pure dadcore here, but I was totally slayed by the Marcus Stuff being estranged from his son, about Clarence Tate worried about his daughter. Yeah. You know, there is something in here, quite frankly, for people of different ages in life, and it's fascinating now to read this. Obviously, this book was always...

I think Pelacados, I would be really curious. to know what he thinks. I feel bad that we didn't ask him about this because even the hangovers in this book are magical. And super specific. And when you actually are hung over and drinking terrible coffee and it feels like your brain is going to fall out of your ear and you're going to throw up at the same time. That's not a great feeling. But when this happens in this book, you're sitting among piles of records with your best friend, busting each other's balls. You're kind of like, yes, this is the best. Yeah, there's a moment when he makes,

when Dimitri makes soup for Marcus with an old ham bone he has in the freezer. I'm like, this is something that someone has done. This is, this is lived in. Yeah, it's interesting. The times that we've talked to him, you know, he's very proud of this book, obviously, and the series and the other books that he wrote in the 90s and early part of the 2000s, but he very quickly says he could not write those books now. And there is some serious distance, both in who he is,

where he is in his life. But also, and he told us this recently, and this is a good as segue as any into our conversation with House. Well, I guess we could ask House this, but I did have one more question for you. Well, I was just going to say that Pelicanus feels like the city is different.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Well, that's actually a great way. I'll bring this up with House. So let's go to Joe, and let's talk to him about Sweet Forever. Joe, we wanted to have you on to talk about Sweet Forever because we just thought reading is fundamental. It's time to get you back in the literary game. But also, obviously, you're like,

You're one of the great voices of Washington, D.C. culture. You're almost something of a social historian yourself. Whenever I talk to you, I just feel like I'm getting such a lesson in the ways of D.C. As far as I'm concerned, there's Jim Vance and then there's Joe House, and that's it. But Joe, what were some of the feelings you had reading this book? Well, the very first feeling I had is I don't know how anyone that's not from Washington can make any sense out of this book. because it is so hyper-specific in all of the places and the restaurants and the music venues and the porn theaters and the neighborhoods. They're so sort of hyper-specific.

I have in my mind's eye I was able to experience this book in a way that it feels like a shame that other consumers of it who didn't grow up in the Washington, D.C. area at that time, could enjoy it. It just, it was kind of mind-blowing because it walked me right through. I mean, that was my teenage year. Well, paint us that picture then, because I think that, you know, one of the things that is compelling about the book, separate and apart from the story and the plot, is just, it is a, it was kind of a document of an era of 1980s, D.C. when it was written in 1998, but it is even more of a time capsule now because the book is set, I think, and the sort of risky new branch of real right records that is being opened on you, right? And the U Street corridor is now, or has been for 10 years, right? Sort of the ground zero of the gentrification or

hipsterization of downtown D.C. So can you talk us through the geography of what, where is this book set? What was that like for you in your life at the time versus this world today? Yeah, so U Street is an important part of the D.C. fabric, the D.C. history. It was historically a focal point for the African American arts community. The Lincoln Theater is there. It's proximate to Howard University. The Howard University Theater is in the general vicinity there. From basically like New York Avenue to Florida Avenue to 7th Street all the way up to 18th Street

and U Street kind of bisects all of those neighborhoods, La Jroit, Bloomington, Georgia Avenue is in there as well. that quadrant, and I'll call it like, I don't know, 15 square blocks or so, was in the 60s, and even before that, a real focal point, like I said, for the African-American arts community, and specifically the jazz community in Washington, D.C., in connection with the Martin Luther King assassination, that part of the city burned. and it took 30-some-odd years for that portion of the city to be restored. One of the big engines behind restoring that portion of the city and its reference in the book was the arrival of the subway in Washington, D.C. it's called the Metro. And so they put a metro station in the vicinity of like 10th and you, maybe a little closer to 11th in you. In fact, there are a couple stops now I'm thinking about it, but Green Line stops along you

street and the construction in the mid-80s there had the effect of, you know, enticing business back into that area because it never really did recover after the riots in the late 60s. So for 20 years up until that mid-80s period, it was kind of blighted. But the arrival of the metro did have a positive effect in luring people back into that area. still slow going though it's like picturing it in your mind's eye it's low row houses

it's block after block of low row houses three story four story row houses but they don't go up very high and it's it's got a little bit of a feel I guess like Brooklyn but it's a lot denser than Brooklyn and so for this

time period the way when this book was set I the way it looked then because of the construction, it was very much like, I don't know, I don't want to call it a war zone, but you're constantly navigating equipment. You're constantly navigating, you know, it's dirty down there. There isn't a lot of commerce down there. And at that time, none of the gentrification, Andy, that you mentioned of the last like dozen years or so, you know, was way off in the future. The main stay down there, as always, is the famous Ben's Chili Bowl, which has been there for

45 years or so serving half smokes. It plays an integral role in this book because people keep taking this kid there. And it's a wonder he agrees to go down to visit his family in South Carolina or wherever he's sent off to save him because he's eating so well. He forfeited Benz. That tradeoff was probably saved his life down in Georgia going fishing, but he had to give up Benz for it. One side note for people who enjoyed reading this book, another Pelicanus book, Hard Revolution,

is specifically about the riots and about that neighborhood burning, basically. He takes a character that was from the next series of books he did Derek Strange and wrote about him in his youth. So if anything, How's is saying, that's Sparks Interest, that's a book to read. Joe, you paint like a pretty vivid picture there of this idea that, you know, and I think probably anybody who grew up in a big East Coast city went through some extended period of construction on a major part of the city where you're like, you're not really going to dig this up, are you? And then they do, and you're like, you know nobody can get around this city now, right? Or the Philadelphia version.

You're not really going to drop a bomb on your. own city. Yeah, right. Seriously. But another thing that plays a huge role in, it's in the background and in the foreground of Sweet Forever, is the rise of cocaine in the city. And I was wondering, you know, I'm a little young to remember that period clearly, but I was wondering if you remember just how big of an impact it had on the city then. So it had an enormous impact on the city. And it was the headlines of the Washington Post. and the Washington Star at that time, nearly daily because the gangs that rose concurrent with the rise of crack cocaine especially led to, you know, D.C. becoming the so-called homicide capital

of the world, and that was that time period. Now, at that point, the city was very segregated, still very segregated. So I was a teenager, and while it was chilling to read the tales of these drug wars, and the gang wars that were going on. It wasn't proximate to my life. And I, you guys know, I enjoyed, I grew up in the independent music scene in the Washington, D.C. area. I was lucky to have that there.

And that had the effect of bringing me downtown to portions of town that were probably, in retrospect, like not the safest places to be going at kind of random times. But even in those expeditions, you never really came up that close to, you know, the sort of turf war that was going on in the city. Yeah, even the vocabulary words that you're using while describing it, I mean, it brings me back to just the vernacular of the war on drugs and the militarized aspect of that and the idea that, you know, and like a lot of wars were happening and it felt like off away from you. But it, but, you know, it was a constant presence in local media and in national media back then in terms of the, just the idea of how much it was influencing city politics, voting patterns, all this stuff,

and obviously destroying millions of people's lives in the process. For sure. Go ahead, Andy. One of the things that Pelicanos does so well is he evokes the potential for cities to bring people from disparate backgrounds together. And there's a very broad array of races and classes and ethnicity. brought together in this book. And one thing that I'm struck by that is relevant to the conversation you were just having about growing up with this vibrant music culture is that there were, it's not just there was one vibrant independent music scene that I'm thinking of.

It's not like just an indie rock scene. There was a vibrant black music scene, underground black music scene there that is incredibly specific to D.C. Go-Go music. You know, EU and Troublefunk is happening concurrently with... Discord. With Discord records, with Scream, and then even Tommy Keen gets to show up on stage here, the great underappreciated Tommy Keen. Unbelievable. Yeah, you had all these overlapping, interlocking music scenes. And, you know, I hate to put Roastin' glasses on, but because there was not a social media infrastructure to allow you to access this stuff whenever you wanted, there was a degree, the impetus is on you to go seek it out.

And once you got the bug, it wasn't really a choice. You know, once you got that first seven-inch record and you got that first seven-inch record and you got it. indoctrinated into a subculture you were kind of like this is my life now and this is what I do can you talk to us about specifically like your your journeys downtown and what what that was like for you as a music fan and just as a young person living in such a specific city in such a specific era yeah and I it's funny that you guys mention I'm glad that you connected gogo and that sort of all by itself its own independent music scene because there was a real overlap between the punk scene and the funk scene I mean there were shows that were punk and funk and funk where Trouble Funk played with, you know, somebody out of the hardcore scene. I think there was a Trouble Funk minor threat show. There might be a poster for. But, you know, the interesting thing that the thing that ties them together,

and I think that Brother George really captured, D.C. in that era, was really a working-class town. And with working-class folks, you know, out in the suburbs, maybe coming into the city for government jobs. But, you know, at that point in D.C.'s life history, the money that's there now was not present. So the thing that sort of tied those two music scenes together was just kids looking for, you know, an outlet to kind of enjoy their own thing. And it is highly unique now that I'm in my 40s to have these two scenes arising at, you know, simultaneously. serving the two communities that were present there in the D.C. area, on the one hand,

African-American community and then the white kind of suburban community as well. But they were both kind of open to each other, is the way I would say it. And the venues that you would go see like Rare Essence or Trouble Funk or EU, same venues hosting the punk rock shows. As you were talking, I pulled up a flyer from a show at DC funk punk spectacular at Landsberg's Cultural Center. It says in the heart of the downtown district, Friday, September 23rd. I'm curious if you could put the year on it, but it's Trouble Funk headlining with minor threat. And then from Austin, Texas, the big boys. Oh my God.

The special scratch rap team, New York and the Static Disruptor with all night disco by sound tech productions. Beer and Wine All Night, five bucks. Joe, was all this stuff, like, was there any oversight to any of these shows? or was it pretty much like self-starters? Self-starters and self-police. It is, you know, I don't know that it's necessarily incredible that there wasn't trouble amongst the kids, but there wasn't really trouble amongst the kids that I recall from my experience.

Now, I did experience it. Andy, to answer your question, my guess is that was an 1982 or 83 show. I'm going to go with 83. What year was it? No, it doesn't say it. We're literally as guys. Oh. I thought I was going to guess the answer.

I think you may have, but I don't know for sure. That preceded me by a little bit. My era was like 85. It's 83. You nailed it. Yeah. I mean, that had to be it. Minor threat is the tell for that.

You could get advanced tickets at the Joe's Record Paradise in Rockville. Oh, my God. Or the R-TX Arlington, Kent Mill Georgetown. It was a blush dog bite production. Which, by the way, unbelievable. Joe, if you and I have a Holy Trinity, it's music, food, and sports, and the sports play a huge role in this book as well. And I just feel like I just kind of want to clear out and let you play ISO ball here and talk a

little bit. Because I think you can read about Len Byest in Sweet Forever, but you don't really understand just what a huge figure he was in D.C. back then. So what's curious about this is, and I wonder. if George is revealing a slight bias, not to use bias, two different ways. But Georgetown at this point in time was a big effing thing. Georgetown was humongous in Washington and humongous in the communities where this book takes place, especially down there in that sort of, you know, Shaw, Howard University kind of area.

So the bias towards bias, I think, really speaks to, and I'd love to, you know, have the opportunity to hear George talk about this a little bit. His center of gravity is Silver Spring, and that's my center of gravity as well. And then bias was incredibly important to me as a kid, but I wasn't in a position to have an idea as to how broad his appeal was, across the DC area, I just know from my time as a teenager and then going beyond it the impact that his death had on the entire community and the stories that I've been able to sort of tell with people that I've met beyond that time. He was incredibly important to the community because of, and there's a line in this book, from Northwestern High School in Prince George's County, Maryland, which is, you know, not that far away from the University of Maryland campus to the

Boston Celtics, that was a real, you know, kind of magic trajectory for our area, right? I mean, Patrick Ewing was an outsider. He came from, you know, Massachusetts down to D.C. And then went on to start him. He didn't, he wasn't born and raised in the DMV. Len was our guy. And I know that to be true for me personally. I mean, I know that morning, you know, the book ends with the bias overdose. I know exactly where I was that morning. I know exactly the condition that I was in, which was hungover. I had snuck out that night.

Sorry, Mom and Dad. And I just couldn't, I was speechless. How did you hear about it? Speak. My mom told me. Oh, man. Yeah. At like 10.30 in the morning when I finally got out of bed that day.

Yeah, I mean, in the same way that the music had a certain, like, mythology. It was like a local product enjoyed by local people and it was very regional and in some way very close start off. Basketball players had that too. It's a slightly later version of this but I remember when Rashid Wallace was at Simon Gratz on their 30 and O team

and they played in the city finals and it was like, this kid's going to UNC this is going to be amazing. You know like Rashid Wallace is going to go out and rep Philly High School basketball in the ACC. This is great. And you know of course he went on to have the career he had. There were other

guys. I mean, like... And he brought Philly to the world with his positive attitude on the court every night. But that state, the same idea that you would go see minor threat or you would go see trouble funk or you would go see these local legends in basketball, there was something that was very shared because, you know, you didn't have a lot. You know, there wasn't that influx of culture coming from every other part of the world that you wanted it from then. So you had to make the most with what you had. And if you had somebody like Lambeius, you had a lot. It was at a moment where still when we could have that earnestness and that sort of now it looks quaint, that sincerity. Like local product really meant something in that era.

A point of pride. Obviously Pelacanos is, you know, he doesn't need to prove his DC bona fides to us or to you, but I'm curious reading it, aside from Ben's Chili Bowl and the references to Tacoma and the district line and all the stuff that is just, and by the way, to go back to what you said at the beginning, one of the reasons why I love reading his books is because, his DC is like Narnia to me. You know, I've learned more about DC and I've visited since, and now I can make more sense of it geographically. But when these areas begin to come up over and over again, they create their own sort of

mythology in the novice reader, you know? So when you mention Prince George County, I'm like, okay, well, I have a sense of it from the role that it plays in his books, and that's kind of fun, although I agree that it would be better to actually have that deep-set knowledge. But to go back to my question, other than the food and the references to Georgetown and et cetera, did you find to be the most DC aspect of the book? What was it that was pure DC to you? Oh my gosh. That's a hard question. It is. It's a broad question. I guess what I'm fishing for is something about the tone. Yeah, the book is so rife. Honestly, and I don't know what it says about me that

it resonated the way it did. The reference to the porn theaters was such a throwback. It was such a specific time, like, they were there and then they were gone. Like, you know, the idea of a theater where men would go and where those theaters existed, the theater in Georgetown that continuously showed Caligula, perpetually Caligula. Perpetually Caligula is the name of my first album, actually. It's out of print. It's so weird upon reflection. And that was the reaction I had really like, oh, my, the gaiety thing. theater, casino royale, the Caligula place in Georgetown. What? This brother is going deep. I mean, those are places that existed in that era, but they might as well have disappeared in 1987,

you know, for all of the impact they had in the community. But that's kind of the amazing thing about this book and about the genre in general, which is something we're always trying to connect the dots from like getting people to read this one book to appreciating crime fiction in general. It is a presumed. reserved an amber snapshot of an era that is completely gone, as you said. You know, there are, there are, there are, there are, there are, there are, there are, there are people like this. And there were people like this in Pelicanus's life and probably people that maybe you intersected with at different stages of your life, living a certain way at a certain time that would otherwise just be forgotten or bulldozed by history or bulldozed like whatever buildings were bulldozed to build the metro that led to there being in American apparel in the U Street corridor in 2006 or whatever it was, right? I mean, it, it, it still exists and reaches a new audience and a new level of significance because of it. What I especially appreciate on that note is the socioeconomic sort of feel of this, because that more than anything is my recollection of that era in D.C.

It was working class people. It was, you know, the rise of the, you know, I don't know what you call it, the K Street class, the lobbying class that exists now and how Washington has become this engine for folks to make a lot of money by consulting on matters that involved the federal government. None of that really existed in this way, shape, or form. The mega status of the law firms in Washington

that all came in an era after this time. And one of the things that also struck me as I was thinking about this. This was a time when there weren't a lot of people out on the streets. Yeah. Like there wasn't a lot of foot traffic back in this era, and there were a lot less people in general living in the city. And so, you know, the authenticity of, you know,

how you, the characters would recognize, oh, that's the kid that stands, you know, Anthony Taylor, that's the kid that stands on the corner in front of that liquor store. Like, that would be a known thing to those people from that neighborhood, the inhabitants of that neighborhood because of the commonality of their experience, well, the consistency of their experience, not commonality, because they're not seeing a lot of other people. And the funny thing about this record store every single day, the one on U Street, any sales? Nope.

Because there ain't nobody walking down the street there to go buy records. Yeah, man, but my favorite thing about this, and this is also kind of a very romantic vision of living in a city because there's plenty of things about living in cities that are tough. But for the most part, people have small apartments. They sometimes live with roommates or whatever, but they have these small places, got mice, got roaches, got whatever you've got. The heater doesn't work. But the thing about a city that's cool is that the city can be your apartment, and then you find a bar, and that bar is better than your living room. And you go to the same movie theater over and over again because that's better than the TV screen you have.

And you go to the record store that you go to all the time because that's got the best stereo that you could ever hope to have is just to wander around the stacks there. A lot of that stuff has kind of disappeared from life because I've gotten older or whatever, but that's the thing that resonates the most for me in this book outside of it being D.C. Is that idea that you can use a city as the extended canvas of your life? And, you know, it's something that he captures really, really well about how people build up as rich of a life as possible even when they're short on funds. Yeah, sure. I mean, that that's the, you know, essence of, again, that to me, that, that, um, strikes to the heart of what I'm trying to describe as this working class kind of thing, where you're a known entity at the bar that you frequent,

because you frequent it with some frequency. It is your living room outside of the living room and the place that you inhabit. And the same thing as kind of the restaurants that are mentioned, and the guy Bobby at Pied Al-Couchon, the bartender Bobby, who knows exactly what Dimitri's in for. and pours the perfect grand marnier. That's like an experience that feels like it belongs to a long gone era. I'm going to put you on the spot in a very unfair way before we let you go.

Nice. Obviously music plays a huge role in this book. A listener to the podcast made a massive playlist that we will tweet out again of either every song or band mentioned in this book and there are plenty. But you heard us right before we started recording. just going through like the NME list of best albums and tracks from 1986, which was just a wildly good year. I mean, albums alone, you have Paul Simon's Graceland, Run DMC, Raising Hell, REM, Lysrich Pagint, Smith's Queen is Dead, Beastie Boys, Huskerdu, on and on and on. Sonic Youth, yeah, Sonic Youth.

Metallica Slayer. Goodness gracious. And in this book, Pelicanos has his character, his character, in this case, it's probably really him. Dimitri Caras say, you know, this year will always be the pretenders, just like this previous year was always whatever he says. for you, 1986, who you got? If all those names we mentioned are something else, or even something that came out in 85 that you discovered, is there a sound of 86 for you?

So for me, the power of this band that I'm going to mention, there's two bands I'm going to mention. They're super, you know, D.C., although one of them, I think both of you guys know right to spring. Of course. So their seminal record came out in 1986. Like, that was, you know, their mind-blowing to this day yet still.

most important, a crucial, deliverable out of the DC indie scene. The inventors of emo, of course, even than inside. I reject that, but. I got a book for you. Yeah, the other band, and again, this is like the experience of it, was Dagnasty, which is just like a local, it's funny, they're touring again. But a local band with a prominent guitarist Brian Baker, who was part of minor threat, a quartet that was fronted by an African-American kid named Sean Brown,

and then was replaced by Dave Smalley in that very time period, that 85, 86 time period. And I experienced that band with both lead singers, always preferred Sean Brown, and I'm happy the iteration now is still fronted by Sean Brown. But those shows were, like, blows to the chest. I can kind of replicate the feeling. I can imagine the feeling of it now still, being sort of physically assaulted by attending those shows. Joe, thanks so much for joining us, man.

You really added an extra layer of character to this whole discussion about the suite forever. Really appreciate it. Fellas, we could do this for hours and hours and hours, but I'm glad we kept it to the 20 minutes that we did. Thanks, brother. Join us for Grand Barnier shot soon. You got it.

Okay, guys, we are so thankful to Joe House for joining us, to talk about Sweet Forever. Thank you to everyone for making our dreams come true by reading one of our favorite books with us. Sweet Forever by George Polikano. We'll tweet out that playlist. We'll announce our new book later coming up. And then on Monday, I just expect the more TV coverage, the kind of TV coverage you

rely on me and Andy for it. We are back. We got Kirby enthusiasm to catch up on. We've got the good place. We've got more Mine Hunter. So we're back, man. We're going to be on our couches all weekend doing the Good Lord's Work. Boy, that sounds weird.

Sorry, Brandskis. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by LinkedIn. The best place to find great talent for your hiring needs is LinkedIn. Businesses rate LinkedIn 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates. Go to LinkedIn.com slash The Watch for a $50 credit towards your first job post. LinkedIn.com slash The Watch, terms and conditions apply. Today's episode of The Watch was also brought to you by Stitch Fix Men. You can tell a guy who's got style.

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