Molly the midget is what you call almost too beautiful. Sort of a cross between the most gorgeous woman you’ve ever seen and the most desirous vision your imagination can conjure up. They say she can take on any appearance, they say no man can resist her charms. I never wanted to find out…..Tommy Two-head wasn’t so cautious.
A car-jacking in L.A. forces a guy barely able to cope with his own problems and who just wants to be left alone, into a whirlwind of conflict and hazard. A bizarre cast of characters, including an enigmatic midget girl with an over-power presence, a desperate Mexican gang-banger on a mission to save his sister, a gypsy fortune-teller, a hired killer with no remorse and even less scruples, and a former beauty queen dancing in a strip bar in Vegas, become Bill’s unwanted burden while opening the door to possible salvation – if he can survive the journey.
From the marbled halls of L.A. high rises to the bleached-out desert sands of Vulture Flats, Icicle Bill and Tommy Two-Head dodge bullets, the authorities and their own tortured pasts in an effort to witness just one more sunrise. Intrigue and danger beckon at every turn while memories and remorse lurk threateningly in the subconscious, stalking as quietly and ominous as blood drops on sand.
Kansas farm girl, Fallon Dawn Hunter, lands in Hollywood and quickly learns that not everyone who’s nice to you is your friend. After being raked-over in her attempts at an acting/modeling career, she winds up answering phones in a ram-shackle 2-man law/P.I. office overlooking Hollywood Blvd. It doesn’t take long before she meets a Tinsel town film legend, and is introduced to the seedy underworld of Asian prostitution, where she’s exposed to the raw sexuality of an alluring Chinese bargirl, desperate for her help.
As she wrestles with her own confused emotions, she must also evade a blackmailing killer, a murderous thug, and the unwanted attention of police detectives while trying to hold onto her honor, integrity, sanity, and skin. She’s treaded in snow boots for stilettos, and her little dog, Bunny, for a Colt .25 … only to discover you can’t run from killers in hells, and you can’t always stop what’s chasing you with bullets.
Goodbye Natalie is a fast-paced, twisting thrill ride that weaves through the glamorous Hollywood movie industry, onto the yachts and into the bedrooms for the rich and powerful and behind the red doors of forbidden Oriental massage parlors. A tribute to the noir detective classics where danger, romance and intrigue lurked behind every torn curtain and around every jagged corner.
FROM 1982 TO 1998, California embarked on the most massive prison building spree in the history of the world by building 24 prisons from Tehachapi and Folsom along highway 99 in a stretch known as Prison Alley, ushering in the era of Mass Incarceration. In order to fill prison beds and create jobs for California Correctional Peace Officers Association members, laws changed to expand lengths of prison sentences and ensure an increase in the prison population. California was aggressively moving away from an economy previously built on government defense contracts and agriculture to a new kind of economic model… the Prison Industrial Complex. In 1977 the prison population in California was around 19,000, but by 2009 it topped 160,000 prisoners and required the intervention of a federal receivership in order to deal with Constitutional violation lawsuits involving overcrowding and substandard medical care.
Prison is a twilight world existing in the shadows, largely unknown to outsiders. What goes on within the walls and electric fences of this nation’s penitentiaries would shock the senses of most people. To those of us confined, controlled and caged we adapt, endure, and negotiate our way through the labyrinth of violence, deprivation and dispossession from genteel society. We attend rehabilitative groups and learn the causes and effects of our criminality (those of us rightfully convicted) or earn college degrees to expand our knowledge, becoming critical thinkers as we grow toward prosocial adaptation.
In becoming critical thinkers, some of us are compelled to challenge conditions we recognize as inhumane and go beyond what any individual, incarcerated or otherwise, should endure. To bring light to these dark places of concrete and steel incarcerated writers and journalists and those who support them stand up to censorship and power to report truth, illuminating the forgotten, dispossessed and disenfranchised Voices from the Shadows.