The first time I started reading A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD by Matt Phillips, I had to stop. Thanks to the heavens, the fates, a few better decisions, and a middle-class upbringing that cloaked me in some forms of protection, I haven't lived on the street or sold drugs. But Oh Dear God, I've known plenty of others who have (if you haven't known any, you've cut yourself off from the sad side of America), and more than once, I've experienced a dangerous locale and wondered how I'd deal with being sexually violated, should it happen. Probably the worst season for that last issue was in my late 30s, living in a rough cabin and often alone at night, creating fear out of the darkness.
I finally reached a quirky and only marginally rational conclusion, but it was enough to let me get some sleep: I had heard that nerve cells, the slowest in the body to regenerate, are made anew every seven years. So, I reasoned, if rape took place and I became estranged from my own body, I would just need to survive seven more years until every cell would be clean and new.
The mind, unlike the cell, doesn't regenerate. We'd be lost if it did, having to start all over again with how to balance on two feet, how to move food to our mouths. The drawback to this continuity is, most of the time, the hardest scariest parts of life are not fully forgotten, are they? We just make a sort of peace that lets us move forward.
So the young woman named Creeley Nash, driving a valuable load of potent drugs to Portland, Oregon, scared the you-know-what out of me. Not only was she balancing her life on "ordinary" drugs like booze and weed, but in order to earn a decent living, she'd agreed to run the transport for a man named Animal.
What Creeley was: Thirty-nine years old, unwed, poor as sh**, and somewhat proud to be a second-shift waitress at Walburn's in downtown Portland. But no, she was not Animal's girl.
The constant danger she's in when driving illegal drugs reflects the nastiness, cruelty, and crudeness of most people in that business. But to Creeley, who thinks a lot about what's going on, the treatment she gets from the people she delivers to is a predictable part of life as she understands it:
She expected it because being a woman meant being seen as a possession—men thought they deserved her. Or wished they deserved her. At her age, Creeley found this dynamic amusing. She'd stopped being afraid of men a few boyfriends ago, and now she steered clear of them. She'd given up on love. Didn't exist. Not for her.
A tip of the hat to Matt Phillips: The author's gender is almost irrelevant to this 300-page crime novel.
Creeley's inner commentary on drug running is revelatory: Rich people commit as much crime as poor ones, but hide it better. All cops are bent in some fashion, from her point of view. In a way, that reassures her, because it lets her finally ask for help from one, when she realizes she's got to know for sure whether her imprisoned mother really did murder someone, or was framed.
OK, I had to stop reading early, in my first dive into this book. I wrote to one voice of the publisher, Vern Smith, about the way the book trampled on old traumas of mine. I wasn't sure I'd do the review.
Vern replied, in part:
I think we always considered that this might be read as a heavy book, and accepted it as such, seeing literary and social value in that, too. I do believe that eliciting such a response is more of a blessing than a curse in that a book like this should spark conversations, and the best thing, I think, we can do in response is talk, which is sort of what we’re doing here.
So you can guess what I did. With the lights on brightly and the locks on the doors double-checked, I stepped back into the story.
Turns out, within the violence and peril, A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD is a classic crime novel after all. A murder took place. Blame got distributed. Someone—Creeley in this case—is searching for both truth and justice and willing to make sacrifices for that.
So it turned out to be a powerful book worth reading. The investigation makes sense, the voices are real, and yes, Vern and Matt, there will be more conversations about it, when I find some other folks who've read this (that's a hint, folks).
And if I didn't especially like some of the resolution, and would have made different choices in Creeley's shoes, well, thank goodness those shoes aren't mine. Because despite all the strange and scary parts of my earlier life, I found a really great set of decades eventually. Sometimes life really is stranger than fiction. Safer, at least. And happy.
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