Category Archives: Ink-Stained Tales

This is a true story. It must be. It was in the newspaper. I put it there. So. One evening in 1987, someone called my newsroom to tip us that the tiny town of Benton, Pa., had inherited something close to a million dollars. It was bequeathed by a man no one in Benton atContinue reading “Chapter 1: Red Room”

I’d like to say that Cy Ruthenburg’s rich tale of Joseph Derr’s rake’s progress, which hinged, in part, on the unexpected but not unwelcome debut of Oklahoma oilfield gambler Titanic Thomas in Evansville society, wafted on a fuzzy atmosphere of scotch above a spreading Ohio River sunset just over his shoulder, but since Cy’s clubContinue reading “Chapter 2: Titanic Rising”

By the early seventies, Joe Derr’s need for deception had ebbed. If he needed to pass at a reception at the governor’s mansion up in Indianapolis he had a willing cadre of faded debs to take his arm and help him find his keys. Otherwise, if you wanted Joe Derr, you got Donald Baggett, too.Continue reading “Chapter 3: Enter the Albino”

Unfreeze the frame and Donald Baggett and I are standing on a desolate Evansville street at 2 a.m. If he’s gone to all the trouble of killing his paramour, making his body vanish and confounding the Mexican Federales, the FBI, Interpol and Detective Clay Stinson of the Evansville P.D., I don’t really expect Don toContinue reading “Chapter 4: Hijinks at the Paradise and the Last Man to See Howard Hughes Alive”

So there we were, Jorge Camps and I, greeting gray daybreak with a couple of bottles of Negra Modelo after completing a strange and most unholy carnal via crucis along Acapulco’s notorious Condesa Beach. We’d chatted up transvestites, prostitutes, pederasts, boys on leashes, bondage buddies, sadists and masochists (like love and marriage, you can’t haveContinue reading “Chapter 5: The Final Footfalls of Joseph Derr”

The fire mine fire that would eventually consume Centralia, Pa., started in 1962 in a garbage dump, ignited a coal seam, and slowly but inexorably spread. Smoke began to pour from spreading fissures and occasionally a sinkhole opened up and swallowed a child.

In the late 1980s, my shooter buddy Keith and I traveled to D.C. for what would become the largest public demonstration in American history to that point, far bigger than Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. The occasion was a pro-choice rally. Hard to beat a gorgeous spring day in D.C. with a story that was gonna write itself.

Stuart looked behind him. But there was no one there. He looked at me but I quickly looked down. There was only one Stuart. And it was him. And he was fucked.