The setting is the bright, well-appointed kitchen in John Ridley’s sprawling childhood home in Mequon, an upper-middle-class suburb on Milwaukee’s North Shore.
The subject is the sound that fingers make when they are broken–on purpose.
Ridley is dressed casually in a charcoal gray sweatshirt and blue jeans, and he’s lounging comfortably in a chair at a glass-top table. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, is done in shades of white, with an occasional accent of black or gray.
Ridley is here for a visit with his parents at the start of a national tour to promote his new novel, “Love Is a Racket” (Knopf), and he’s waiting for his wife, Gayle Yoshida, to arrive from their home in Los Angeles. His father, John Ridley III, an ophthalmologist, is at work, as is his mother, Terri, a special education teacher.
It’s a sun-flooded afternoon in suburbia. And John Ridley is talking about how, in the opening sentences of his book, he needed to describe the finger-breaking sound in a way that would look right and catch the reader’s attention.
Although Ridley had never broken one of his own fingers or heard someone else’s broken, he knew something of anatomy. And he knew that the breaking of a finger–say, through rough handling by a loan shark’s goon–would involve a complex set of actions occurring simultaneously: the crack of bone and cartilage, the tear of tendons and ligaments and something of a pop.
“I didn’t want to make it too complicated,” he says. “It should be a short sound, not a long sound.”
Here is what Ridley wrote–in the opening sentences of “Love Is a Racket”:
“Kraop was the sound that I heard. Heard it twice–kraop, kraop–one time each for my two fingers that got broke. I heard my bones pop before I felt anything, gunshot-loud they echoed in my ears. Maybe that was the tip-off what’d just happened was going to hurt like hell.”
– – –
At first glance, John Ridley seems to have little in common with the narrator and central character in his book, Jefferson “Jeffty” Kittridge.
Not only are his fingers intact but, at 32, Ridley is on top of the world–a success as a stand-up comedian (with appearances on the Leno and Letterman shows), as a television writer (for comedies such as “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and dramas such as “Trinity,” which premieres in October on NBC) and as a screenwriter (for Oliver Stone’s “U-Turn”). He wrote and directed his own feature film, starring David Caruso and Kelly Lynch, “Cold Around the Heart,” released last fall. (Although it didn’t last long in the theaters before landing on video, the film netted Ridley the best-director award from a New York film festival.) And he has published two novels with a third, already completed, due out next year.
Jeffty, by contrast, is, well, a loser.
He’s bitter, bigoted and sour. He’s a small-time con man on the streets of Los Angeles who preys on mom-and-pop store owners, milking them for an extra $5 or $10 through the old Do-you-have-change-for-a-twenty? scam. He drinks too much. He gambles too much. And, as the book opens, he owes $15,000 to a loan shark, Dumas, that he is unable to pay. Hence, the broken digits.
Here’s Jeffty’s take on the world:
“In the city, somewhere, a siren wailed. Somebody had been shot, or stabbed. Or maybe somebody’s house was burning down.
“Maybe not.
“Maybe it was a good siren. Maybe it was a woman being rushed to the hospital about to bring a new life into the world. I doubted it. And if it was, the kid would probably grow up to be an addict, or a pusher, or a killer anyway.”
One thing more: Jeffty is a failed screenwriter. He had written one script and sold it, only to have the producer and his minions slice, dice and rewrite it to the point that it was no longer recognizable. And then they gave up on it.
“They owned it . . . and they buried it,” Jeffty whines.
Ridley doesn’t whine. But he does know the frustration that comes with working in television and the movies where every word is examined and critiqued and revised by a host of executives, writers and assorted other chair-sitters. One major difference, though, from Jeffty’s experience: “I’m in the meetings,” Ridley says. And, of course, he’s had scripts actually produced.
Yet, Ridley says, for all their differences, he and Jeffty share much.
“Jeffty is really a big part of me,” Ridley says. “He’s everything I could have become.
“We started in the same place. We came out to Hollywood with the same goals. I was fortunate. I was the guy who was able to get ahead, and Jeffty was left behind.”
Jeffty, Ridley says, is “the shadow of me.”
– – –
“Love Is a Racket” is what’s called a noir novel. (Noir is French for black.) It’s dark and cynical and violent and hard and harsh. And also funny. Jeffty, for all his moral shortcomings, has a wry self-knowledge and a sprightly way with words.
“I don’t necessarily want you to like these characters,” Ridley says. “I want them to be interesting.”
The book is also, above all else, a love story.
It’s a warped sort of “My Fair Lady” with Jeffty in the Henry Higgins role and a young, homeless but beautiful junkie, named Mona, as Eliza Doolittle. The point of the transformation isn’t academic curiosity. It’s an elaborate scam with a huge potential payoff.
The characters in the book, Ridley says, “are trying to find a purpose in life. If they could find love, then they would be OK. Success is nothing if you have no one to share it with.”
But life has scarred Ridley’s characters, and by the time they find love–or an approximation of love–they don’t know what to do with it.
Here’s Jeffty’s take on love:
“Truth: The thing about love is no matter how twisted, or wrong, or evil, it never dies. Never. You can run, but you can’t hide. Love stays with you like a cancer, working on you double shift, day and night, until it does whatever it meant to do to you–shape or mold or bust up your life the way only love can, because nothing else is that powerful. Nothing else is that tenacious. Sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes you end up with a decent relationship: wife and kids. That’s livable. Sometimes you just end up dead.”
– – –
Back in the kitchen on Sierra Lane, Ridley is talking about growing up in the Ozzie-and-Harriet town of Mequon.
“It was boring as hell–in the best sense.”
The schools were good, the streets clean, the lawns well-mowed. But, even then, Ridley found himself fascinated by the secrets hidden behind the facade of a perfect life–the secrets that led the father of one friend to commit suicide after his embezzlement was discovered, and that sparked another friend’s father to murder his wife and then kill himself.
Ridley’s next book, “Everybody Smokes in Hell,” is even more noirish than his first two. “It’s really, really funny, and it’s really hard and really harsh,” Ridley says.
He also says this: “I don’t think I want to write nothing but noir.” He wants to branch out from the genre at some point. Still, whatever he writes, he says, will have an edge of cynicism–his own personal world view.
Ridley says he reads widely, with one exception: “Soft and cozy books, I don’t like to read.”
A few hours later, at a reception and book-signing at H.W. Schwartz Bookshop in Milwaukee, Ridley is surrounded by friends, family and acquaintances. Several are patients of his father’s, whose office is only a few blocks away.
It’s a well-dressed, well-to-do crowd, and no one’s more poised and distinguished-looking than Ridley’s parents.
This is a world that is a million miles away from Jeffty’s circle of existence, and, in conversations, Ridley’s mother and father give the sense that they would just as soon John wrote more episodes for shows like “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and forget about people like Jeffty.
Terri Ridley says that although it took her a while to get used to the rough, tough subject matter of her son’s books, she has come around.
“But,” she adds quickly, ever the teacher, “they’re not for the kids.”
A friend walks up to Ridley’s father to say hello. “So,” he asks, “what’s the story about?”
“There’re no nice people in it,” the elder Ridley responds.
– – –
Here’s Jeffty’s take on life:
“Truth: It’s a weird thing to think about, but we’re all the walking dead. Every single one of us. A car wreck, a bullet to the head, a slip in the bathroom–whatever the cause of our destruction is to be, it’s already out there waiting for us.”
Nothing soft and cozy about that.
