Book Review (With Value-Adding Update!): Tales of Tucson

Title: Tales of Tucson

Author: Anthony Randall

Date: 2021

Publisher: Koala T Publishing

Length: So far it’s an e-book; my copy prints to 125 pages in Word

Quote: “Fifteen hundred dollars was a cheap price to pay for a vindictive little poke at your enemy and besides it wasn’t Saul’s money he was paying with—it was never Saul’s money that he squandered.”

Well drat, blast, and bother...This is, as advertised, a laugh-out-loud comic novel that sold well in the UK and might do well in the US.

But it contains adult content. Definitely R-rated content, if not X. The characters can hardly open their mouths without uttering a formerly unprintable word and nothing is hidden from the young about what Bright Young Things such as we were used to get up to in the 1980s. 

Actually the incidence of “parties” featuring sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll sounds exaggerated and the consequences of such revels underplayed, but then again the main characters are rockers trying to launch a hopeless-sounding band, so who knows. The incidence of “jobs” where about all we did was hang out and socialize is not exaggerated. The economy was booming, we had little but youthful charm to offer anyway, and a lot of freshman-class baby-boomers really were paid to hang around workplaces looking cute.

Aunts are not always averse to that kind of thing. Most aunts did some of it at some point. Many aunts are happily married to the men with whom we did it; this is how sisterless men become uncles and some of our nieces and nephews acquire cousins.

But aunts are not supposed to recommend books with explicit sex, and this book has a good half-dozen explicit scenes in which procreative acts take place in the absence of committed monogamous relationships. And, additional trigger warnings: lots of drinking, lots of drugs, no hangovers or addictions.

Sort of a male equivalent to Eat Pray Love, this is the story of a nice, quiet, clean-living young Englishman whose girlfriend, obviously an extrovert, decided he was too quiet and clean. So, having a married sister in Tucson, he headed for warmer, drier fields and a life his ex would envy. Throughout the book he muddles through the life of a rock star, bemused but not too bewildered to make a decent show in a crisis. He even appreciates the scenery. 

(At one point he admits doing something "like Arthur." I thought "Dent, who else?" but have been reminded...just before my movie-watching-and-snogging years began, there was also a movie called Arthur. Randall recommends the movie.)

In the eighties some of us could use the office as the place to do personal chores, errands, reading, knitting, shopping, phone-calling, letter-writing, long lunches and/or snack-grazing, and also work on novels or songs or software packages or other creative outlets, and generally prepare for evenings out (or evenings at home with the family), and still get and keep a job . Anyone could spare a few hours of office time to crank out enough actual work to satisfy, even impress, a normal 1980s employer. Well, in the US, anyway. In the UK the job situation was reported to be very different so it’s hard to blame Brits like Tom, the protagonist of Tales of Tucson, for rubbing it in and exaggerating his memories of “work” in the US for his ex’s benefit. Most employers did expect most employees to stay sober and keep our clothes, at least the button-down shirts and unnecessarily warming hosiery, in place during business hours. Padded-shoulder jackets and stiff 1980s shoes could, however, be left on and under the swivel chair most of the time, even in most of “conservatively dressed” Washington. I could believe that, further south, property maintenance staff might have gone to work in shorts.

Another running, perhaps overrunning, exaggerated joke is inland Americans’ abject fascination with any foreigner (“Golly, I’ve never seen anyone like you before”). The use of rude words does vary from place to place (in Tales of Tucson the Brits use the F-word to refer to everything but what it literally means, which usually gets half a page of detailed description) and an unexpected vulgarity can raise a laugh but, in real life, the audible “tone” of exotic swearing does convey that it’s meant to express hostility. If US listeners can be deceived by a UK intonation, so perhaps can UK visitors be deceived by US hosts’ willingness to smooth over offenses and soothe bad tempers—not without judging the bad-tempered person, of course. On the East Coast most of us may have understood “bollix” to mean “make a mess” rather than, y’know, that, but the familiar word for that was close enough that we could guess what the British meant.

Are American women really undone by any male voice with a British accent? Not the ones I’ve observed. Personally I think some men have more appealing voices and accents than others and the “’Ave a good night?”—“Corr, mate” accents of Tom and his roommate aren’t on my Top Ten list, but it’s more about what they say, and what they do while saying it...what’s a misplaced H when people love each other? We do notice an unusual accent, usually ask where it came from. Some of us may be so distracted by the resulting conversation that we forget to add the price of a tank of gas to the price of a snack, though probably not the ones who keep jobs in convenience stores very long. But I’ve not personally seen any woman, even in a small town, act so overwhelmed by an appealing voice while sober as the drinkers and druggies in Tales of Tucson seem to be. That has got to be the substance abuse.

Of course, as Andrea Dworkin so pungently put it, we don’t necessarily want to be overwhelmed. Of course in the 1980s, and apparently still today, men managed to miss the point: if we took off anything beyond overcoats or shoes on the first date, it was because we’d planned to, which meant that whatever erotic acts took place were all about our hormones and indicated no special attraction and probably no respect for the man involved. There were women who fantasized about going to a party and amusing themselves, in senses beyond conversation or dancing, with half a dozen different guys and leaving with a different one than they came in with; such fantasies were mostly fuelled by vindictive thoughts but everyone had heard of someone who claimed she’d actually done it. (I had one very “liberated” housemate of whom I could have believed it, but that was not among the things she said she’d done.) But that, like the male “playboy” routines, always had that “It’s all about me and my hormones and my pleasures” vibe. Tom and friends don’t seem to notice when they’re being used with a certain degree of contempt. If those guys had actually called the gals they said they were going to call, it would likely have been, “Have we met? Oh right, I remember you, James wasn’t it, or Todd? Oh right, of course, you were Tom and the good-looking one was Seamus. Oh well, whatever. But listen, Tom, Friday night was nothing, y’know what I did with a couple dudes I met Saturday night?”

Nice quiet people who fall in love easily should stay sober on dates. A happily-ever-after relationship that begins with premarital baby-making is the sort of male fantasy in which I can suspend disbelief only in science fiction, where one can postulate sex robots. Tom might learn something from the way his longest-running relationship in Tucson involves Holly, who more or less forces him to begin as “just friends,” but the lesson seems to be lost in the hormones.

As a story, Tales of Tucson may disappoint readers who expect it to form a conventional novel with a plot. Randall gives it some suspense: will Tom’s primary employer get into major trouble, as foreshadowed in the opening scene quoted above? Will that trouble have anything to do with his employment of improperly documented foreigners, e.g. Tom and Seamus? Will he continue to employ Tom and Seamus? If not, will Tom be forced to have some sort of sex with a fat old woman who, his bandmates think, lusts after his body? If he does, will this motivate her to give the band their big financial break (and, if so, are they good enough to benefit from it?), or to have Tom deported? None of these questions is answered by the end of the book. This is a book with a lot more pot than plot, and the witticisms (and marijuana joints) keep rolling up to the final “To Be Continued.” Expect to want the next volume at the end.

It’s possible, though, that you enjoyed the 1980s (soberly) enough to appreciate a slightly rose-tinted nostalgia trip to the fine long summer days of your twenties, or thirties or forties. The frustrations that now seem funny; the difficulty of keeping a band together long enough to attract a fan base to a distinctive sound, of continuing to offer your reggae-inspired songs after your authentic Jamaican influence quits the group, of fulfilling a contract to perform for a group when your Christian influence refuses to endorse the group’s activities and, after praying about it, decides he can’t endorse your activities either, of playing any kind of rock when your drummer gets into or out of college...and that sneaking suspicion that, at its very best, your band may not be all that great and the person who called you “the next Beatles” has lost per credibility by saying that. The jobs people offer the young, and the fact that you did them. The hormone surges, and the inevitable discovery that, whatever you did, they would eventually satisfy themselves, and the discovery that hormones also make a landscape look more lovely, and make food taste better, and make it easy and satisfactory to jam with any half-competent musician anywhere. The way Tom and Seamus are always eating the best dish of something or other they’ve ever had and enjoying something more than they’ve ever enjoyed it before, because when we’re young and eupeptic all the good experiences in life do just keep getting better and better. If that’s what you’d like to be reminded of, while laughing at the way memories tend to exaggerate themselves, then Tales of Tucson is for you.

There’s a salutary hint of self-parody in the exaggerations, too. Tom and Seamus tell themselves all the women they flop into bed with, except “Call me Sunshine,” are pretty and nice. Are they really? Did we tell ourselves everyone we were dating was desirable? Were they really? What about those employers whose expectations were so low that they were planning to continue to employ us, while being pleasantly surprised if we painted over the rude words we painted on the walls? How well did we really do the painting job? What sort of influence would it have been on the music industry if our bands had stayed together and been “the next Beatles”? In the 1980s it was obligatory to describe our job experience with a certain amount of “marketing” spin—but how much spin did our experience need? It can be useful to meditate on the effects both the hormones of youth and the nostalgia of age have had on our memories.

As for the smut: When I read it I was a little old lady in quarantine for Delta COVID, 100% lustproof, and instead of being tempted to the Deadly Sin I just laughed out loud. This was not the way real Eighties dates went, at least on the East Coast. This was the way older people told us real dates had gone in the Sixties. We were exploring all the alternatives to the pleasures that could transmit HIV. But I could imagine someone who was single then, who is married now, who wants to share memories of The Way We Weren’t, having a lot of fun with this book.

So I think this X-rated story has redeeming social value for most readers who remember the 1980s. The self-obsessed young are probably protected from it by their self-obsession; they’d rather read some piece of p.c. angst inspired by The Hunger Games. Tales of Tucson should be enjoyed, on multiple levels, by people who were young in the Eighties. For us it’s a good read.