DEKE’S FAVORITE MIX-TAPE

Deke worked the dark third-floor at The Odyssey disco in West Hollywood, mining the bad-Daddy chickenhawk trade for tens and Tuinals, a thirteen-year-old midnight cowboy in clothes to match, not counting his Teenage Jesus & the Jerks tee-shirt. A boyish shag blond, his face became even more angelic from the free plastic surgery he'd endured, rumor had it, after his father broke his jaw one night in the grip of passion.

Above all things, Deke cherished the sound and image of David Bowie. The music, especially songs such as “We Are the Dead” (from Diamond Dogs), “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” (Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars), and “All the Madmen” (The Man Who Sold the World) validated his emotional geography, while Bowie’s shifting exotic looks affirmed Deke’s desire for a mutable exterior of easy-access beauty that, in his mind at least, might for an evening negate the squalor he knew.

Until his stay with Good Uncle Vic, Deke had found lodgings in the filthy basement below Frederick’s of Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard, a veritable underground railroad for punks, runaways, kid hookers and other distressed youth. There were other places that charged negligible overnight fees in even worse areas, places like the Canterbury Arms, a 20’s German film industry émigré hotel gone to seed. Even more desperate lodgings were offered by borderline cases like Andrew Collar.

Collar worked at a computer video transfer place he claimed was aligned in some technological manner with George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic facility, and with whom Deke found lodgings for a spell during the bad spring of ’82, two years ago. He owned a co-op in Universal City, the place was always packed with tow-headed early teen multiples of TV’s James at 15 star Lance Kerwin. (In 1999, Kerwin was arrested for crack after two failed marriages he currently lives on an all-Christian rehab ranch.)

All Collar wanted was company and the right to the occasional candid Polaroid. Then there were outright monsters like Good Uncle Vic, Deke’s ultimate destination before fate beat sheer velocity.

Good Uncle Vic, whose handle people always pronounced in full, was a prescient post modernist who could have told you what that meant. Looking like a screenwriter’s idea of a child molester—half bald, bug-eyed, and perpetually sweaty—he did everything he could to make his appearance even more loathsome, which he correctly guessed would gain him the admiration of kids who thought they looked worse and did everything they could to emphasize it. Good Uncle Vic—a displaced native of Germantown, MD—owned a six-bedroom house in Van Nuys, CA, and a storefront in Flushing, New York. Being an interested party, Good Uncle Vic kept up with the latest trends in youth culture.

This was 1981, and so the kids were excited about the New Romantic movement, which featured made-up androgynes fronting bands with colorful names such as The Teardrop Explodes, Visage, and Ultravox. Because of scattershot US release patterns, the dour urban trance rock of Joy Division, whose lead singer Ian Curtis had recently hanged himself at the age of 23, was also in favor. (The band had gotten its name from the World War II novel The House of Dolls by Karol Cetinsky; in the book, 'joy division' was a term applied to young concentration-camp inmates forced to prostitute themselves for Nazi soldiers.) With further research, Good Uncle Vic discovered that all these groups enjoyed a primary influence in the works of David Bowie.

And so, to create the veneer of being in the know with kids who respected little else, he played New Romantic sounds, along with every David Bowie record available. He had permanent guests running both residences, and who kept a Super 8mm projector wound with Swedish Erotica loops intercut with bottom feeder boy porn (shot on-premise) showing at all times, some of them staring Deke. In two years, Deke’s partially decapitated body would be discovered in an apartment on Franklin Street by West Hollywood Sheriff Department Vice, a one-room completely lacking in personal effects except for a small tape player and smashed cassette tape in pieces and unraveled in a wild perimeter of the room. Their report would list the cause of death as "shot-gun wounds to mouth, self-inflicted."

[extracted from my novel, GONE. ]

TORCHWOOD saves

The 2006 first season of BBC America's Torchwood was the most singularly vexing tease of a televisual sci-fi experience a geek could imagine. For every strange delight--the show's instantly identifiable gritty/glossy digital noir look, queered Hawksian banter, sudden-death romance, and fevered willingness to insert sex into everything, typified by an episode about an alien who feeds off orgasms--there was an equal negative. The worst offenders: a reliance on 11th-hour high-tech deux ex machinas and an increasingly Lost-like sense that the show's creators were just making shit up as they went along.

But with the second season, Torchwood's bi-sci-fi geek promise of being a randy mix of Queer as Folk and Doctor Who--creator Russell T. Davies respectively created/reanimated both shows--was seriously fulfilled, thanks to the appropriation of one actor from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and a generous infusion of tropes from Joss Whedon's classic. For example. he got really good at killing off characters...

With the good chance that you've neither seen nor heard of Torchwood, some exposition.

"Torchwood" is a secret group operating "outside the government, beyond the police" so as to staunch the flow of aliens, ghosts, Romans, the black plague, and sundry other inter-temporal flotsam slipping into our world through the Rift--a space-time anomaly in Cardiff, Wales.

Working from an underground lair done up in retro tubeway chic, complete with mortuary and in-house pet pterodactyl, Torchwood is composed of plucky local cop Gwen (Eve Myles), laddish cynic physician Owen (Burn Gorman), IT girl Toshiko (Naoko Mori), and fashion-conscious teaboy (!) Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd). All are under the command of the ever-grinning, mysterious, possibly immortal American Capt. Jack Harkness (John Barrowman).

Unfortunately, the first season strained to define its themes and characters with sufficient velocity to prevent U.K. viewers from switching to Heroes' vanilla recombinant pulp, often devolving into an alien-of-the-week format dashed with tantalizing bits of identity politics. What kept fans tuning in was the promise of the Torchwood crew and Capt. Jack, who was kind of great from Day 1. A sexually omnivorous, fine-jawed scamp in a 1940s military long coat, Barrowman plays him like a camp Tom Cruise, alternately/simultaneously arrogant, pigheaded, flirty, world-weary, and idealistic. But in the first season's fantastic finale, Jack morphed from lovable rogue into an entirely new genre archetype.

Due to a time-machine gaffe by Owen, an inter-temporal, life-absorbing God--"The Great Destroyer," no less--threatens life on Earth. With the chips down, Jack's browbeating and flirtatiousness dissolve to reveal an absolute, almost fatherly love of his co-workers. He forgives Owen and sacrifices his own immortal self--seemingly for keeps this time--to slay the opposition. One acolyte--excuse us, Gwen--waits at his side for days until Jack rises briefly before disappearing, presumably to allow his followers to follow his example and continue his good works.

Needless to say, it's cheeky to blatantly reposition your horny gay-leaning hero as a Christ substitute, a deliriously fun conceit that prefaced the high learning curve seen in the second season's opener, an episode aptly titled "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang."

It opens with the chase for a coke-snorting alien blowfish--seriously--and the cheerfully unexplained return of Jack, before segueing to time traveler Capt. John (James Marsters, aka Spike from Buffy), who swaggers out of the Rift done up in Adam Ant pirate-punk gear, paralyzing lip gloss, and a horny leer to the accompaniment of Ennio Morricone-esque audio camp.

Captains John and Jack meet in a sleazy bar, make out, beat the crap out of each other, share a drink, and then bitch about each other's wrinkles. If you'd never seen the show, you could be forgiven for thinking your TV went completely insane. Turns out, John is Jack's dark doppelgänger/ex-lover gone gleefully bad and willing to fuck and/or kill every member of Torchwood in order to--well, no spoilage here.

Marsters' appearance is both a reminder of just how much Torchwood already owes Buffy--for obvious instance, the alien-spewing Rift is a sci-fi take on Buffy's demon-spewing Hellmouth-- and a preview of just how smartly it would appropriate from Whedon's world, which, in a weird/wonderful bit of intertextual alchemy, has allowed Davies' show to become more indelibly, well, Torchwood-like.

Like Buffy herself, Gwen struggles to keep her life as a normal person and world saver separate. Toshiko has expanded from a dangerously archetypical "Asian"--all cool competence and raised Spock brows--into Torchwood's Willow surrogate, the show's supercute, smart, intrinsically open-souled center.

But geeky citations aside, what Torchwood most effectively assimilates from Whedon is the use of supernatural events and creatures as metaphors for the characters' inner demons, along with a sort of soap opera humanism--the repurposing of deep weep melodrama as a means of addressing the group's existential pains.

In that way that renders the science fictional literary, Jack's horrifically traumatic youth is revealed; his response to it explains why he needs to help people. A parallel-universe episode offers the anxious, socially inept Owen hiding under his semi-douchebag skin. And Toshiko finally meets a man she can love--a WWI soldier suffering from PTSD--but her painful duty to the greater good trumps romances, and so much for that.

And so fused in a cauldron of its characters' essential loneliness, the Torchwood crew, as in most great TV, coheres into a alternative viable family. Davies would follow this with Torchwood: Children of Earth, a steep learning curve jump into near-Arthur C. Clarke-style grand SF and, as I write this, a Starz Network reboot about the end of death (!).

So looking back, what was Torchwood season two on about? Same as it ever was. That beneath its ambisexual snogs, quips, and action-plot tragedies, Torchwood was and will always be about difference, empathy, and striving to do the right thing in an indifferent-or-worse world while knowing you'll inevitably getting it wrong half the time and learning to forgive yourself for doing so. In the end, it's an atheist's idea of grace.