Red Harvest vs. My Life Story

I took a slice of my life and mashed it with Dashiell Hammett’s most chilling nightmare. —How do you like these tomatoes?

One of my favorite novels is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest — I’ve read and listened to it, multiple times. Dash wrote it in in 1929, and no one has gone quite this hard since.

It features one of the damnedest dream sequences in American noir — wherein the laudanum-juiced Continental Op visits everywhere in the world he’s ever set a tired foot. When he wakes up, there’s a surprise.

I’ve moved a lot in my life too. I decided to take the timeline of my own chronology and MASH it with the structure of Hammett’s dream in Chapter 21, “The 17th Murder.”

Below is what I came up with . . .

Joelle and I at Cal Jam 1, 1974. We had just taken our first tab. © Bill Montijo