When Dale Bridges was working as the arts and culture editor for Boulder Weekly in the early 2000s, he couldn’t have predicted he’d publish a novel loosely based on some of what he experienced here.
With The Mean Reds, out now from Stephen F. Austin State University Press, he’s done exactly that, finding inspiration in some of the people and places he knew during the job, and setting it all in the Boulder-esque fictional town of Mountainview.
The story follows hapless alt-weekly movie reviewer Sam Drift, who skates through life getting high and watching old movies. Sam’s world is thrown into chaos when the editor of the paper assigns him an investigative piece to uncover the story of an exotic dancer who died outside a lounge not unlike Boulder’s real-life Nitro Club. The result is part The Big Lebowski, and part hard-boiled detective story, in the vein of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
Bridges says writing the novel was a lesson in letting go of his real-life experiences and allowing the story to develop independent of his memories.
“Sam was definitely supposed to be me,” he says. “When I started writing the novel it was based on my experiences and my own internal struggles and issues. But … at some point, I had to let it go.”
The novel began to coalesce once Bridges delved deeper into his characters’ backstories and let them become different people. Same with the city. Once he changed the name, he felt the possibilities for the story open up.
“This city needed to become its own thing,” he says. “Then the imagination takes over and you make things up.”
But creative license aside, there’s plenty here Boulder readers will recognize. For instance, this passage in which the narrator waxes on the fictional Mountainview of yesteryear:
“Once upon a flashback, Mountainview had been a sleepy little college town nestled at the base of the Flatirons like a baby tucked into a mother’s bosom … In those days, the university focused primarily on agricultural studies, and the tourists who trickled through were mostly bearded men with checkered hats and rubber boots pulled up to their testicles as they prepared to fish the Colorado River. It was just a town. A nice town, a pretty town, but just a town.”
As the above excerpt highlights, Bridges’ novel is driven by a distinct voice, with Sam often making Chandler-esque quips as part of his internal monologue. Bridges says that’s a matter of taste.
“If you give me an interesting voice, something with dark humor and a quirky style, it doesn’t really matter to me what the book is about, I’ll keep reading it,” he says.
Black-and-white childhood
One of Sam’s quirks is his obsession with old movies. He processes his life by making comparisons to Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant alongside many other classic films and their actors. That all comes from Bridges’ childhood growing up in the ’80s in Yuma, Colorado, the son of a fundamentalist preacher.
As a kid, Bridges wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music or go to the movie theater. He wasn’t even allowed to go to dances, a la Footloose.
“The internet didn’t really exist at that time,” he says. “So it felt like the rest of the world was so far away out on that prairie where it’s just that nothingness as far as the eye can see.”
They had a television with a rabbit-ear antenna and four channels at his house. On Saturday, after the morning cartoons, he was allowed to watch old black-and-white movies. No cursing, nudity or sex. So when Bridges went off to college at the University of Northern Colorado, he watched everything he could — from John Hughes films to The Simpsons — but those classic movies stayed with him.
“When people have nostalgia for their childhood, it’s usually of their era,” he says. “But mine was for an era that I never had borne witness to.”
Bridges used that childhood nostalgia to flesh out Sam’s character in The Mean Reds. The title of the novel comes from a line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when Audrey Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, asks, “Do you ever get the mean reds? Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of.”
Letting go
To bring Sam to life and let the story take on its own trajectory, Bridges says he had to learn to stop forcing the novel to follow his direction.
For example, when he was trying to write the character for the owner of the dance joint, Bridges was relying on his memory of the proprietor of the Nitro Club from many years ago, whom he remembered as a small, bald man with very soft hands.
Bridges knew the club well, because people threw a fit when it opened on Pearl Street in 2007 — a story he wrote about at the time for Boulder Weekly. Then he started hanging out at the club because it was one of the only places in town that stayed open late.
Bridges says he kept trying to write the owner as the small, soft-handed man from his memories, but it wouldn’t work. So after months of struggling, he made the fictionalized owner into a woman, and things began to fall into place.
“What really happens is you let that subconscious brain of yours, where a lot of the creativity happens, let the story take on a life of its own,” he says. “You have an idea of where it needs to go and what needs to happen. But if you try to force it down that path, it often just doesn’t work.”
ON THE SHELF: The Mean Reds reading with Dale Bridges. 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder. $5
Further reading: Five books that inspired Dale Bridges as he wrote The Mean Reds
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. “Chabon is one of those writers whose every sentence seems to have been perfectly crafted by the writing gods. I love him and hate him for that. Wonder Boys is a funny, quirky, sad, wonderful novel about writers and the strange characters that orbit the literary world. I reread it several times while working on my novel, and the fact that a decent movie came from it is a bonus.”
The Writing Class by Jincy Willett. “It’s a shame more people don’t know about her because I think Willett might be the best living American writer. The Writing Class is a weird, funny, unconventional mystery taken (I believe) partially from Willett’s own experience as a writing teacher. I was so excited while I was reading this book because it proved that you could write something personal and literary within the mystery genre.”
The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames. “Ames mostly writes for movies and television now, which is sad because he’s an excellent novelist. His writing is so personal and funny and utterly unique. The Extra Man is about a guy who moves to NYC to make it in the big city and meets an older man of ambiguous sexual orientation who makes a living by escorting wealthy old ladies to social events. From Ames, I learned how to write fearlessly and hilariously about my own life. Another good movie was made from this novel.”
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley. “If you want to write a modern mystery novel, I can’t think of a better place to start your reading than Mosley. He’s just so good at it. He’s got all the verve, style, and love of language that Chandler and Hammett utilized to define the noir genre, but there’s an extra kick with Mosley. Let’s call it self-awareness. And yet another good movie to boot.”
We Have Always Lived in The Castle by Shirley Jackson. “Even though Jackson is well known, I still think she’s tragically underrated. You can have King, Poe, and Lovecraft — for horror, I’ll take Shirley any day of the week and twice on Sundays. This novel taught me how entertaining an unreliable narrator can be, and I have never forgotten that lesson.”
