Frey's account of prison has not a hint of that sort of unsentimental talk. Moreover, he would never use a taboo word like "white boy." This is the most striking pattern of excision in his theft from Little: Little focuses on racial hatred as the central fact of prison life; Frey invents a happy bonding lie with a black prisoner. Little insists on the truth: "[In prison] you stay with your own. Color lines are as solid as the penitentiary steel that surrounds us. You eat with, get loaded with, exercise, gamble, live and die with your own. Cross those lines and you're out of the car, roadkill."
Little comes close to an apostrophe to his fantasy-addicted liberal readers in insisting on the fact of racial hatred in prison: "This is the way it is. If you crave martyrdom, sit at the wrong table, you'll get your cross, crown of thorns thrown in for free."
Now guess what Frey does with Little's honest treatment of race. And remember, the key to understanding Frey is that he realized you can't lay it on too thick for an audience addicted to silly fantasies.
Well, no matter what you guessed, you probably underestimated the sheer schmaltz, the stinking cheese, of Frey's narrative. On his first day in prison, he's clobbered by a 300-pound black inmate. Yet by page 2, Frey and the hulking thug are best buds.
Every single detail of their courtship is wrong, in a very adaptive way. First, that name, "Porterhouse." The guy tells Frey he calls himself that because "he's big and juicy like a fine-ass steak." That's such utter, patronizing, Jeffersons-style blaxploitation crap that the fact not one reviewer objected to it tells you Frey was right: to be a bestseller, play it for total morons.
Porterhouse's backstory displays the old-school S&M romance Frey's female fans just love: he threw his wife out of a seventh-floor window for fucking another man, then took the man to a vacant lot and blew his arms and legs off with a shotgun and then "waited thirty minutes to let the man feel the pain of the shots, pain he said was equivalent to the pain he felt when he saw the man fucking his wife."
I guess that's love, for you normal people.
Once again I want to smack myself for thinking that I, with my pitiful Sadean fantasies, was the sick one. You decent people go way, way past my kind, and still think you're the salt of the earth. Reminds me of one of Eddie Little's excellent Chandler-style similes, when he describes a sky "as clear as a moron's conscience."
Frey swaggers further into patronizing fantasy when he learns that Porterhouse is illiterate. Frey spends the rest of his time in stir reading to his "big and juicy" friend, introducing the poor black man to what he considers great literature. I can't resist quoting Frey's account of the process in full: [Brace yourselves! - Ed.]
"I read slowly and clearly, taking an occasional break to drink a glass of water or smoke a cigarette. In the past twelve weeks we have worked our way through Don Quixote, Leaves of Grass, and East of Eden. We are currently reading War and Peace, which is Porterhouse's favorite. He smiled at the engagement of Andrei and Natasha. He cried when Anatole betrayed her. He cheered at the battle of Borodino, and though he admired the Russian tactics, he cursed while Moscow burned. When we're not reading, he carries War and Peace around with him. He cradles it as if it were his child. He says that if he could, he would read it again and again."
Amazing, isn't it? Just try to list the lies, treacle, and condescending bullshit in that paragraph-Porterhouse comes across as Frey's own Koko the talking gorilla.
