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Vachss
rhymes
with "ax."
National
mystery and crime writing associations in Germany, France
and Japan have awarded Vachss their most prestigious prizes.
Everybody
Pays, a collection of Vachss' short stories, appeared
in September. At press time, the books stands at 35th on
Amazon.com's
mystery and thrillers paperback bestseller list. His most
recent novel is Choice of Evils.
Vachss
believes adult child molesters cannot be rehabilitated and
should be jailed for life. He's skeptical of some of the
treatment often prescribed for sex offenders. "You tell
me why someone who fucks babies should have self-esteem,"
he says.
Vachss
and some partners are launching a new publishing company,
Red 71. The imprint takes its name from a short story by
shadowy '30s pulp master Paul Cain; its first title, The
Beggars' Shore by Zak Mucha, appeared this fall.
Vachss'
Web site, www.vachss.com,
began as an unofficial fan site before Vachss gave it his
blessing; it is maintained by volunteers.
Vachss'
father played pro football in the 1930s. "Then he went and
killed Nazis," Vachss says.
The
Nigerian civil war lasted from 1967 to 1970. By the time
Vachss arrived at the end
of the war, Biafra's leader had already fled. Burke also
went to Biafra--as
a mercenary.
Vachss'
wife, Alice, worked for the Queens District Attorney's Special
Victims Unit. Parade once named her one of "America's
toughest prosecutors." The couple has no children.
Vachss
says he and Burke share the same taste in women, music,
dogs and racehorses.
Vachss
graduated magna cum laude from the New England School
of Law in 1975.
Some
myths about the eye-patch: that Vachss lost his eye in a
gang fight; that he lost it in a drive-by shooting; that
the eye is fine and the patch is just for show.
Vachss,
who has no children, says his two pitbulls, Honey and Pokey,
are thriving in Oregon. "The thing about pitbulls is, they
play bigger than their size," he says. "I've always liked
that."
Vachss
cites the work of the late children's-rights activist Leslie
Haines, who died
of ovarian cancer
in February, as one of the reasons he's always admired Oregon.
He also mentions the Portland metro area's approach to dealing
with juveniles.
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Raising
the Stakes: Vachss' current legislative campaign.
Andrew Vachss is exactly the same every single day.
Enraged.
"I've learned to ice the rage," he says. "So I don't act
out, like I did plenty of times when I was younger."
Better to stay calm, to steer the vitriol with laser precision.
"It burns just the same," he says. "Especially since it's
constantly refueled."
Vachss
is at war, fighting on many fronts. He's a best-selling
crime writer, with 13 novels and millions of sales to his
credit. He's also a lawyer, a hellcat barrister described
as nearly invincible in court. He's an activist, trying
to sway national policy (see "Raising
the Stakes"). First and foremost, though, he's a preacher,
evangelizing in vinegar tones that mark his New York City
upbringing.
His enemy in this jihad? Child
abuse in all its forms, sexual
molestation in particular. It's a cause that feeds a
limitless fury. "Not a day goes by when I don't get some
new reason to be enraged," he says.
Is he obsessed? People who know him say that doesn't begin
to cover it.
"Obsessed? That's an understatement," says David Gendelman,
a rat-a-tat-talking New York lawyer who's been Vachss' ally
for years. "I've said to this guy many times, hey, take
a few days off and relax. Come out to the beach for a barbecue.
He won't do it."
It may seem odd, then, that less than a year ago, Vachss
traded his native megalopolis for new digs near Portland,
bringing his full-throttle work ethic and attack-dog yen
for battle to the land of balanced living and fuzzy New
Age harmony. In copacetic Oregon, fiction is more apt to
feature Zen-addled fly
fishermen than the self-avowed sociopaths who people
Vachss' novels. Which, of course, poses a question: If Andrew
Vachss is the hardest of the hardboiled, what the hell is
he doing here?
If motherfuckers would let me be, I swear I would be
a polite, respectful person.
--Burke, Footsteps of the Hawk
Vachss' fiction slaps the face of a genre grown fat and
happy on silky Bogart fantasies and tea-time whodunits.
Uninitiated mystery fans often come away knock-kneed and
caramelized from Vachss' tales of illegal organ harvesting,
incest, Internet kiddie porn, the serial murder of teenage
prostitutes and suburban S&M rings.
The icy eye of Vachss' storm is Burke, the main character
("hero" would not be entirely accurate) of most of his writing.
A career criminal, part-time unlicensed private eye and
full-time dangerous man, Burke hunkers deep in subterranean
New York, crashing in a squat guarded by his Neapolitan
mastiff Pansy, working for the highest bidder. He runs his
life from a booth in a Chinatown restaurant that, in his
words, "has lots of businesses...selling food isn't one
of them."
Burke generally won't hurt people unless they do one of
two things: mess with his tight family of street allies--which
includes a mute Mongolian headcracker and a radical Zionist
mad scientist--or abuse kids. More often than not, child
molesters he runs across end up dead.
Vachss has obviously hit a fresh nerve. Burke's pummeling
adventures have been translated into about two dozen languages.
In Portland, his appearances at Borders and Powell's draw
some of the biggest crowds the stores see.
"I consider him the preacher of crime fiction," says David
Firks, editor of the Portland online crime magazine Blue
Murder. "He cuts right to the bone. I read probably
200 stories a week in this job, and his have such rhythm.
It's like jazz."
"He writes true, everyday shit," says Gary Lovisi, the
editor of Hardboiled
magazine. Lovisi lives in Brooklyn, pronounces the word
"genre" john-ra and regards the hardboiled style
as a blood calling. He praises Vachss as one of the most
powerful crime writers around.
"What I've found with Andrew is that, whereas other people
ratchet up the violence in their stories in an effort to
make them 'more realistic,' Andrew tones down a lot of the
true things he's seen," Lovisi says.
Some critics have branded Vachss' relentless books cartoonish
and unrealistic. If you want to get Vachss talking, bring
this up.
"They don't have a fucking clue," he says. "You know why?
Because their frame of reference is crime fiction, not life.
You get hit in the head with a tire iron, five minutes later
you're up and looking for clues. You get shot all the time.
You do things for the right reasons, all the time. I write
about crime. I write about violence. I write about abuse
to children. I think if you look around this country, why
are these not mainstream novels? That's not happening here?
The Bridges of Madison County, that's like--what?
I make stuff up?
"I wrote a book called Strega. It talked about modem
trafficking of kiddie porn. 1987, the book was published.
The reviewing community shrieked about how inauthentic it
was, about what a fevered, crazy imagination I had, how
it was worse than science fiction. Try telling anyone today
that modem trafficking of kiddie porn does not happen.
"What happens is, I'm at ground zero, so if I see something
happening, I write about it."
Ground zero. Looking back on Vachss' life, it seems impossible
that he could have ended up anywhere else.
Down where we live, every day is a rainy day. --Burke,
Blue Belle
Born in 1942, Vachss grew up in a neighborhood wedged between
Chinatown, Little Italy and the Village, near the waterfront
on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It wasn't exactly a breeding
ground for sensitive types.
"Everybody fought," he says. "I mean, what you call these
stupid fight clubs now? We didn't have fight clubs, but
every day after school somebody was fightin' somebody. Looking
back now, I don't think that was such a great and wonderful
thing, but that's how it was."
Vachss wandered through Cleveland's Case-Western Reserve
University. His real education, it turned out, began immediately
after graduation. In 1965, he landed a gig as an investigator
for the U.S. Public Health Service's syphilis task force.
"Let's say you had syphilis," Vachss recounts. "I'd have
to persuade you to tell me everyone you've had sex with
in the last 90 days, six months, a year. And if what you
tell me is, well, she was blonde, I think her name was Mary
and I met her in such and such a bar, I'd have to find that
bar, I'd have to hang out there until I saw someone of that
description, and if I saw someone, I'd have to find out
if she was Mary. And if she was, I'd have to persuade her
to tell me the same story, and so on down the line until
I broke the chain.
"I became the guy they sent out when somebody wouldn't
talk. And I was the guy who got the prisons, the migrant
labor camps and whorehouses. I thought it was a great job."
In the course of one investigation, Vachss ran across a
man with a lacerated penis. He'd injured himself while molesting
his own infant child. You could say that this discovery
was an epiphany for Vachss, but that word doesn't seem quite
strong enough.
"I went into a rage that I'm still in," he says. "Child
molestation was always presented to us as something strangers
did. The idea that someone would penetrate their own infant,
tear the kid in half--I would have said, ah, it's not possible.
"I thought I'd met Satan. Who else could do this? But then,
when I saw that there were people who were not only like
him, but that they were friends of his, and when I found
there was money to be made, that you could traffic in it--yeah,
it fried my nerves."
Vachss went to work for the New York City Department of
Social Services in the late '60s before plunging into one
of the era's most horrific calamities, the war between Nigeria's
military regime and the short-lived secessionist Republic
of Biafra.
As Biafrans starved under blockade and bombardment by Nigerian
federal forces, hundreds of millions of dollars poured into
programs hoping to save hordes of famine-stricken kids.
Aid organizations wanted someone to go into Biafra to make
sure the food and cash were getting through.
Vachss signed on.
"Once I got there, I wasn't on the ground for 30 seconds
before I realized it was too late," he says. Vachss escaped
as Biafra collapsed, but not before he had contracted debilitating
malaria and seen, as he says, "every kind of mass death
you could ever hope to see."
"My nerve endings were cauterized a long time ago," Vachss
says now. "The whole issue of what this stuff is doing to
me is not a factor. I left that in a jungle 30 years ago."
Back in the States, he worked first at a Boston halfway
house for a year, then took a job running the worst juvenile
prison in Massachusetts, where his jaw was broken during
a riot.
"I think this is where I finally came to understand," he
says. "I saw these kids with the worst kind of behavior
you can imagine, all with the same history. They'd all been
abused and neglected. That's when I decided to go to law
school."
Like Burke, Vachss the lawyer first set up shop in a booth
in a semi-legit Chinese restaurant in 1976. More or less
broke, he drove a cab and paid "rent" in trade. He defended
the restaurant's employees in their numerous squabbles with
the law; in exchange, they answered the pay phone as though
they were his secretaries.
As his practice took shape, this disreputable milieu and
his focus on child protection informed a new sideline. He
started writing raw, intense crime stories based closely
on his cases.
In 1985, after more than a decade of battering at the door
of the New York publishing establishment, Vachss landed
a deal for Flood, Burke's debut. Soon enough, money
from book sales allowed him to ditch straight criminal defense
and focus only on children. Most importantly, he says, the
modest celebrity accorded bestselling authors in this country
gave him what he was after all along: a bigger platform
from which to campaign.
It also turned him into a pop-culture icon of sorts, a
highly recognizable bare-knuckled avenger in a pirate's
patch, fearsome and hawkish. This image has its uses.
Baby, I've known you forever. All your feelings
are hard feelings.
--Michelle, a transsexual prostitute, to
Burke, in Blue Belle
Two questions must occur to everyone when they first meet
Andrew Vachss. One: What's the deal with the patch? Two:
Do I have the guts to ask him about it?
He saves me the dilemma, hitting me with the story right
out of the gate in our first meeting. When Vachss was 7,
an older kid smacked him in the face with a chain. The resulting
muscle injuries destroyed his control over his right eye.
When Vachss takes his patch off, he says, it's like a strobe
light is flashing in his face.
The patch has become integral to Vachss' persona, lending
the fierce expressions he adopts for posed photographs a
singular menace. Along with the tiny blue heart tattooed
on his right hand, the patch makes Vachss look as tough
as his writing and chasm-vowelled accent sound.
It's a mystique that attracts a lot of weirdness. Someone's
spamming email addresses with slander about the author.
There are enough people pretending to be him in Internet
chat rooms to form a good-sized social club. A porn star
has named herself in his honor. According to the volunteers
who run Vachss' Web site, some guy in Alaska goes around
telling people he's Andrew Vachss, that he's on the run
from pedophiles and that plastic surgeons fixed his eye.
"We have the common impostors, people who claim to be me,"
Vachss says. "That's really kind of common. And pretending
to be someone else on the Internet, that's like a new hobby."
He sounds bored by the whole thing.
As I was crossing Lafayette Street, a tall slender Chinese
girl shot by on Rollerblades.... She was a pro at it--had
a backpack strapped on, a whistle on a chain around her
neck, and black kneepads against a possible spill. A pair
of business-dressed guys saw her too. One told the other
the girl had another use for the kneepads. His pal laughed
in appreciation. I figured the guy who made the crack was
an expert--probably on his way to do the same thing to his
boss.
Anytime I forget how bad I hate this place, somebody's
always good enough to remind me.
--Burke, Footsteps of the Hawk
On a sopping night in November, Vachss hangs out outside
Borders in downtown Portland. Torrential rains fell earlier,
buzzing against the huge bookstore's skylight as Vachss
spoke to a clutch of Friday-night lit pilgrims.
The crowd of about 20--weekend nights aren't so good for
bookish events--included hardcore mystery fans, a scattering
of punkettes, a stripper, a porn writer, several graying
English prof types and a comic artist and writer with multiple
personalities, among others. Not bad, Vachss notes, but
not as interesting as some gatherings he's drawn.
"There wasn't the racial diversity I usually see," he reflects.
"No openly gay couples. No Vietnamese gangsters, which I've
had here in Portland."
Clearly, though, Vachss has amassed a posse of ardent fans
in his new home, proving that his heat-seeking prose finds
targets far beyond its Big Apple birthplace. Vachss cites
ample reasons for ditching New York: utter contempt for
the Giuliani regime, decaying social services, yawning ethnic
and class divisions. When it comes to his new domain, though,
he's less forthcoming.
Is it possible that this indefatigable crusader and echt
tough guy came to Oregon to get away from it all? For those
tempted to suspect that he's here in search of a retreat
or some find-the-cuddly-inner-me tranquility, Vachss offers
a quick brush-off.
"Tell 'em to go drink some more herbal tea, OK?" he says
sharply. "If I was going to retire somewhere, it sure wouldn't
be to fucking Portland. I mean, there's much nicer places
in terms of all that 'quality of life' crap than Portland.
Sure, people are nicer here than in New York, but people
are nicer anywhere than they are in New York."
After dispensing with the peace-love-and-harmony theory,
he offers praise for his adopted state that sounds like
it comes from a place much closer to his core.
"Oregon has always been a beacon for me," he says. "When
you compare the way Oregon treats children and seems to
feel about children, it's way ahead of the curve. Is it
where it needs to be? No, but nowhere is."
There are other things he likes about Oregon, things conducive
to certain aspects of the Vachss lifestyle. His pair of
pitbulls, Honey and Pokey,
for example.
"I kind of like living in a place where I can have my dogs
without the complications of having them in the city," Vachss
says. "And I kind of like living in a place where you can
go to the store, buy a handgun, put it in your pocket and
walk out."
That appreciation for Oregon's most libertarian traits
jibes with Vachss' well-developed love of privacy. He lives
somewhere outside the immediate metro area; he's registered
to vote in Lincoln County but says that's not where he lives.
"I would hate to have someone go to the vacant lot where
I'm registered," he says.
Vachss, acerbic, direct and, after the ice is broken, oddly
avuncular, can talk in volumes about topics he cares about.
Just ask him about Honey and Pokey.
"I saw Honey the other day, sitting, looking up into the
sky at a hawk, transfixed," he says, parent-proud. "She
just instinctively knew that this was something hunting.
I mean, she could spend her life doing that. There are hawks
in New York, but it would be so rare to see one. I mean,
that would just never happen.
"There was this one day, I left Pokey in the car for five
minutes--maybe seven minutes--while I went into a store.
And I come back out, and this old battleax is screaming
and whining about how I'm killing my dog, how the dog is
going to die in the sun. Meanwhile, the dog is demonstrating
her vitality by frantically trying to get out of the car
and tear this woman's head off, y'know?" He sounds delighted.
Vachss says Honey and Pokey thrive here--he thinks.
"You kind of can't tell with pitbulls, because they had
a great time in a junkyard," he says. "They're not yuppies,
y'know? They don't care if there's a mall."
Vachss' presence here may seem incongruous. Imagine, then,
Burke's arrival in the self-regarding City of Roses. When
Vachss split New York, he took his flint-eyed, gutter-dwelling
antihero with him.
Vachss says he's already planned his next novel, which
he needs to write in the next 90 days or so to make Knopf's
Autumn 2000 hardcover roster. He reports no shortage of
Portland-area margins frayed enough to provide Burke with
the raw material he needs to pursue his several chosen trades.
"Some of the action's going to be set in O'Bryant Park
downtown, I can tell you that," Vachss says, adding little
else about the book.
So, while his creator's decision to set down stakes in
this particular patch of dirt might remain something of
a mystery, Burke's migration to Portland may salt the trail
with a few clues.
"Everyone thinks I wanted to get out of New York because
I was never a fan of it, despite being born and raised there,"
Vachss says. "I didn't have any pressing need to get out
of town. People always think New York is a character in
the books. New York is a character in Burke's life, so you
may not ever get my reasons for leaving, but you'll get
his."
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Willamette Week | originally
published November 23,
1999
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