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More About This Book

Overview

Riveting, demented, and reading like a cross between James Ellroy, Carl Hiaasen, and Terry Southern, Plainclothes Naked stars a self-loathing ex-junkie detective, a sexy nurse who offs her infomercial-guru husband with a bowl of Drano-laced Lucky Charms, and two of the most outrageous villains—think Mutt and Jeff on crack—ever to grace American letters, as they chase an elusive (and rather incriminating) photograph of President George W. Bush.

Editorial Reviews

Entertainment Weekly
“[Stahl’s] brilliantly demented riffs beg to be read—or screamed—aloud.”
MAXIM magazine
“Plainclothes Naked is a page-turner.”
More Reviews (6) Fewer Reviews
Mirabella
“Gripping and powerful.”
Paper Magazine
“Bare-ass hilarious....A wonderfully sick comic masterpiece of the hard-boiled genre.”
Phoenix New Times
“[Stahl] goes for the reader’s funny bone via the jugular vein....fast-paced and truly comical.”
The New York Post
“...the new king of black humor....Plainclothes Naked [is] a hallucinogenic potboiler.”
Vanity Fair
“Raw and devilishly raunchy.”
Publishers Weekly
Wanton violence. Crushing drug addiction. Sexual abuse. It's the world according to Stahl, back with a third tale of whacked-out people in a whacked-out world (after Perv A Love Story and a memoir, Permanent Midnight). The story plays out around the search for a photograph of George W. Bush having kinky sex with the mayor of a small town outside Pittsburgh. The photo was once in the possession of Tony Zank, a local crackhead who is desperately trying to get it back. Along with his partner, a wanted shovel-murderer named McCardle, Zank leaves a path of freakish, carnal destruction, eventually attracting the attention of Manny Rubert, a police detective with a serious codeine addiction. Rubert has his own reason for wanting the photo. He's the mayor's ex-husband and is curious how and why she did for President Bush what she'd never do for him. Several other misfits including a comically inept police chief and an alluring young woman who once force-fed her husband Drano and crushed glass inhabit the outer edges of the careening, overdeveloped plot. Stahl's talent for supplying a cast of mean yet oddly moving characters is evident, as is his talent for creating tactile, unsettling images. Knife wounds open up "like a wet pair of lips." Bedridden yet still-amorous old ladies whip back the sheets, "revealing seven decades of thigh." It comes all at once the comedy, the tragedy and, always, the vulgarity. The challenge is keeping the object of the mayhem in focus. Stahl's formula can be brutally compelling, but he uses it here to less striking effect. Agent, Sterling Lord. (Nov. 6) Forecast: Stahl an actor as well as a writer has a devoted cult following, including a host of high-profileblurbers, from James Ellroy to Benicio del Toro to Anthony Bourdain. His latest should handily pull in the regulars. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780060933531
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 11/12/2002
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 336
  • Sales rank: 1,198,624
  • Series: Harper Perennial
  • Product dimensions: 5.31 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.76 (d)

Meet the Author

Jerry Stahl is the author of Permanent Midnight; I, Fatty; Perv—a Love Story; and Plainclothes Naked. He has written extensively for film and television, and his work has appeared in Esquire, Details, Playboy, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

Plainclothes Naked

Chapter One

Tina couldn't decide between ground glass and Drano.

She'd already sprinkled a pinch of smashed-up lightbulb — an easy-reading 40-watter — in Marvin's Lucky Charms, when she started thinking maybe drain cleaner was the way to go.

One of the old Jews at the home, Mister Cornfeld, came down with the blood-squirts for a week and finally died after somebody put Liquid-Plumr in his prune juice. Old Jews were always drinking prune juice, always talking about what was going on in their pants. Either their constipation or their prostates or something skanky like that. At least her granddaddy, whatever his other faults, had not spent a whole lot of time boring her with what was happening downstairs. Till he bought the mall at ninety, Pop Lee snored like an idling diesel and still liked to grab ass and talk nasty. When she found the trunk full of Moppets and Barely Legals after the funeral, she wasn't exactly surprised. But at least the old skeek didn't discuss his plumbing.

Tina could hear Marvin doing his prosperity chants from the bedroom and knew she had to make up her mind. Since he'd re-directed his energy from day trading — which had cost them their condo — to developing and selling his new "Millionaire Mantra," Marv had been experimenting with the perfect brand of satsang to put up on the Web. He was convinced there was an untapped pool of desperate New Agers who wanted to be rich and cosmic at the same time. His goal was to create the perfect quarter hour chant — ten minutes for Personal Prosperity, five for World Peace and Feeding the Children — then get himselfup and streaming so folks could vocalize along with him, and send away for his line of videos, audiocassettes, and the ever-popular BUDDHA WANTS YOU TO HAVE IT ALL! T-shirts.

Unfortunately, with each minute of spiritual honking, Tina's determination to kill Marvin, sell his computers, and quit her job at Seventh Heaven was given renewed impetus. Mostly she just wanted to shut him up.

"Hungh-uh, hungh-uh, HUNGH-UH," came the turbulent sounds from their bedroom. "Hungh-uh, hungh-uh, hungh hungh HUNGH!"

No doubt he was taping himself, too. Marv had the vid-cam on a tripod in front of the bed. Which was another thing....

Marvin wasn't a petite man. In fact he was husky. Husky and soft, with a shaved head, no chest hair, and a little red moustache. Just the thought of him in there, cross-legged on a throw pillow, wearing the Gunga Din loincloth he thought made him look guruesque, was enough to set Tina crunching another pinch of glass and dipping into her bag for the industrial-strength Drano she'd pilfered from the rest home janitor's closet.

"Oh God, shut up!" Tina yelled to no one but herself. No way Marvin could hear over the din of his chants. By now he'd shifted to nose-hums, which really drove her off a cliff. It was hard to describe the sound he produced. The odd Om alternated with guttural blasts of ersatz Sanskrit and quick, bleated syllables like sneep or snerm, the kind of noise a goat might make if it tried to speak English and suffered from a cleft palate.

Marvin was always a big planner. After his Chant for Prosperity site was up and running, he told her, it was on to the next big plum: Eternal Life. If he could just cook up the right pitch, maybe mock up some phony interviews with people who looked 120 but healthy, he could charge aspiring eternal lifers fifty bucks a pop for tapes, books, and videocassettes explaining his discovery that certain sound vibrations could keep you young, possibly even ensure immortality.

"You can't prove they don't," he explained to Tina one morning, sitting at the kitchen table slathered in Indoor Sun, his artificial tan lotion, wearing the turban he'd fashioned from a floral dish towel. "As long as I'm still up on my hind legs, who's to say I'm not the one guy on earth who's gonna be here for the Trilennium, or whatever comes next?"

It was Marvin's belief that Indian heritage, India Indian — curry, turban, memsahib — made for an effective sales tool. But lately, for Tina's money, he'd gone too far. These days he went straight from flossing his teeth in the morning to lounging around in turban and loincloth, inventing new and different chants and mantras. A necessary lifestyle, he'd tell her, if you wanted to turn yourself into the first big On-line Money Swami. Every day the cosmos blessed him with another sanctified cash concept.

Recalling all this made Tina wince. The idea of eternity spent listening to Marvin hum through his nose was so awful that she pulled out the Drano and poured a shot in his cereal before she remembered the envelope. Plenty of residents slid valuables of one kind or another under their mattresses, and the one perk of sheet-and-blanket duty was getting first crack at whatever treasures Seventh Heaven-ites saw fit to hide. Her first week on the job, she'd retrieved a sandwich bag stuffed with clipped-out cake recipes, an autographed photo of Frank Sinatra junior, and sixteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills wedged in a tattered paperback of Conrad Hilton's autobiography, Be My Guest.

What with Alzheimer's, general forgetfulness, and the simple fact that people who moved into rest homes rarely moved out alive, mattress stashes made for a steady and occasionally fascinating second income.

Not wanting to miss a chance to poison her husband, but anxious to check out her booty, Tina hollered that breakfast was ready. She pulled the envelope out of her purse and ripped it open. Then she tapped the contents onto the kitchen table, stared at it...

Plainclothes Naked. Copyright (c) by Jerry Stahl . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

First Chapter

Chapter One



Tina couldn't decide between ground glass and Drano.

She'd already sprinkled a pinch of smashed-up lightbulb -- an easy-reading 40-watter -- in Marvin's Lucky Charms, when she started thinking maybe drain cleaner was the way to go.

One of the old Jews at the home, Mister Cornfeld, came down with the blood-squirts for a week and finally died after somebody put Liquid-Plumr in his prune juice. Old Jews were always drinking prune juice, always talking about what was going on in their pants. Either their constipation or their prostates or something skanky like that. At least her granddaddy, whatever his other faults, had not spent a whole lot of time boring her with what was happening downstairs. Till he bought the mall at ninety, Pop Lee snored like an idling diesel and still liked to grab ass and talk nasty. When she found the trunk full of Moppets and Barely Legals after the funeral, she wasn't exactly surprised. But at least the old skeek didn't discuss his plumbing.

Tina could hear Marvin doing his prosperity chants from the bedroom and knew she had to make up her mind. Since he'd re-directed his energy from day trading -- which had cost them their condo -- to developing and selling his new "Millionaire Mantra," Marv had been experimenting with the perfect brand of satsang to put up on the Web. He was convinced there was an untapped pool of desperate New Agers who wanted to be rich and cosmic at the same time. His goal was to create the perfect quarter hour chant -- ten minutes for Personal Prosperity, five for World Peace and Feedingthe Children -- then get himself up and streaming so folks could vocalize along with him, and send away for his line of videos, audiocassettes, and the ever-popular BUDDHA WANTS YOU TO HAVE IT ALL! T-shirts.

Unfortunately, with each minute of spiritual honking, Tina's determination to kill Marvin, sell his computers, and quit her job at Seventh Heaven was given renewed impetus. Mostly she just wanted to shut him up.

"Hungh-uh, hungh-uh, HUNGH-UH," came the turbulent sounds from their bedroom. "Hungh-uh, hungh-uh, hungh hungh HUNGH!"

No doubt he was taping himself, too. Marv had the vid-cam on a tripod in front of the bed. Which was another thing....

Marvin wasn't a petite man. In fact he was husky. Husky and soft, with a shaved head, no chest hair, and a little red moustache. Just the thought of him in there, cross-legged on a throw pillow, wearing the Gunga Din loincloth he thought made him look guruesque, was enough to set Tina crunching another pinch of glass and dipping into her bag for the industrial-strength Drano she'd pilfered from the rest home janitor's closet.

"Oh God, shut up!" Tina yelled to no one but herself. No way Marvin could hear over the din of his chants. By now he'd shifted to nose-hums, which really drove her off a cliff. It was hard to describe the sound he produced. The odd Om alternated with guttural blasts of ersatz Sanskrit and quick, bleated syllables like sneep or snerm, the kind of noise a goat might make if it tried to speak English and suffered from a cleft palate.

Marvin was always a big planner. After his Chant for Prosperity site was up and running, he told her, it was on to the next big plum: Eternal Life. If he could just cook up the right pitch, maybe mock up some phony interviews with people who looked 120 but healthy, he could charge aspiring eternal lifers fifty bucks a pop for tapes, books, and videocassettes explaining his discovery that certain sound vibrations could keep you young, possibly even ensure immortality.

"You can't prove they don't," he explained to Tina one morning, sitting at the kitchen table slathered in Indoor Sun, his artificial tan lotion, wearing the turban he'd fashioned from a floral dish towel. "As long as I'm still up on my hind legs, who's to say I'm not the one guy on earth who's gonna be here for the Trilennium, or whatever comes next?"

It was Marvin's belief that Indian heritage, India Indian -- curry, turban, memsahib -- made for an effective sales tool. But lately, for Tina's money, he'd gone too far. These days he went straight from flossing his teeth in the morning to lounging around in turban and loincloth, inventing new and different chants and mantras. A necessary lifestyle, he'd tell her, if you wanted to turn yourself into the first big On-line Money Swami. Every day the cosmos blessed him with another sanctified cash concept.

Recalling all this made Tina wince. The idea of eternity spent listening to Marvin hum through his nose was so awful that she pulled out the Drano and poured a shot in his cereal before she remembered the envelope. Plenty of residents slid valuables of one kind or another under their mattresses, and the one perk of sheet-and-blanket duty was getting first crack at whatever treasures Seventh Heaven-ites saw fit to hide. Her first week on the job, she'd retrieved a sandwich bag stuffed with clipped-out cake recipes, an autographed photo of Frank Sinatra junior, and sixteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills wedged in a tattered paperback of Conrad Hilton's autobiography, Be My Guest.

What with Alzheimer's, general forgetfulness, and the simple fact that people who moved into rest homes rarely moved out alive, mattress stashes made for a steady and occasionally fascinating second income.

Not wanting to miss a chance to poison her husband, but anxious to check out her booty, Tina hollered that breakfast was ready. She pulled the envelope out of her purse and ripped it open. Then she tapped the contents onto the kitchen table, stared at it...

Plainclothes Naked. Copyright © by Jerry Stahl. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Posted October 8, 2011

    My Favorite Book of all time

    Dark & gritty in true Stahl-style. You connect to the characters in a very dark level.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 6, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

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