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Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers' Favorite
Underground in Tinseltown: Narrator’s Edition by John F. Wilkie chronicles the story of two of life’s strugglers living as part of the marginalized society in the most glamorous city in the world, the entertainment capital, Hollywood, Los Angeles. It is in the 1980s when homeless drifter Jay arrives in the city of dreams to seek his fortune in the music business. Knowing nobody in L.A. and without money, Jay is prime material for some of the more questionable characters that lurk in the dark recesses of Hollywood’s back streets. When he meets an older Puerto Rican man, Monty, who makes his living by shoplifting and then returning the shoplifted goods for refunds as well as dreaming up elaborate scams against his enemy, corporate America, Jay finds, if nothing else, a way to survive in this alien environment. Monty clearly has homosexual designs on Jay but the young drifter is simply not interested in men, and so begins a constant battle of sexual tension between the pair. Despite their daily disagreements, fights, and different visions of life, Jay and Monty will become partners in crime as well as the relentless and constant struggle for survival in a city and a lifestyle that threatens constantly to grind them into the pavement.
Underground in Tinseltown is a stark and deeply troubling portrayal of the depths to which the human character can sink given the wrong circumstances and a desire to find the quickest, easiest, and often the most perilous solutions to life’s problems. Author John F. Wilkie has created an ensemble cast of the weirdest and wackiest of characters that all are beset by the travails of alcoholism, drug abuse, and stultifying helplessness in a world that has seemed to have left them behind. Without a doubt, the strange and deeply co-dependent relationship between Monty and Jay is the clear highlight of the story. In Monty, Wilkie has created a character that, despite being deeply selfish and viciously unfair and backstabbing to even the best of his friends, we can still identify with him and his deep-seated desire to “get even with the man” through his many insurance frauds and scams. We can even see the human being beneath the façade in his written communications with his best friend, Pete. What struck me the most was the sheer pointlessness of the pair’s lifestyle, the depravity and poverty that their drug addiction brought them down to, and the risks they would take, especially Monty, in his criminal activities to support their drug and alcohol habits to the exclusion of everything else. This is a stark and at times harrowing read but if you want to know the minutiae of a drug-addicted and meaningless downward spiral, this is the book for you. It was a challenging read but one I appreciated and can definitely recommend.