Last Night: ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE by Eddie Little, 1987, 9780670872176.
Recommended by an instagrammer account I follow, olnoirtown. I forced myself to finish this. The writing did not speak to me. Little's life story is juvenile crook, drug addict, adult crook, con and ex-con, drug recovery, crime recovery, drug relapse, crime relapse, new indictments. The story is presumably based off real-life experiences.
14-year-old Bobbie lives in an unnamed Midwest city in the 1970s. He left his abusive home and family a couple years ago and gets by on small time crime. His girlfriend is a couple years older and was sexually abused by everyone in her family. Bobbie squats in a drug house and has a few crook and drug friends.
Bobbie's idea of a big score is hitting a college laundromat and robbing all the cash changers and machines. He's caught by a security guard, has an epic fight, almost kills the guard, and stumbles home with serious injuries. A pal calls his uncle, a former med school student and Army commando, to patch Bobbie up. The Uncle, Mel, takes Bobbie under his wing. Mainly because Mel needs a small guy to work a pharmacy burglary with him.
Things happen. Bobbie brings along girlfriend Rosie and they follow Mel and Mel's girlfriend Syd across the Midwest and to Denver. Mel has crook connections and ex-Army-crook connections. They burglarize the pharmacy. Set up a to sell the drugs. Get into gunfights. Meet crook-friends of crook-friends. Plan scores. Get tipped on scores for a percentage to the planner. And shoot more and more and more heroin.
Hey, this is a novel. It's fiction. It's written by an ex-con bullshitter who was later indicted for financial fraud. The plot has a 14-year-old on the road, committing murder, and getting his 17-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Sure, it's possible. But, it goes a bit far for me with Bobbie joining this loose association of crooks and druggies dodging the cops/prison, fighting ripoffs from other crooks, and moving city to city.
Anyhoo. Like I wrote earlier, the writing did not grab me.
