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QuoteBecause this story has to start somewhere, let's begin on any given night in early 2009. It's probably drizzling, and a cluster of people is standing outside the wooden apartment building on the corner of 11th Avenue and Pike Street, the one with motel-style exterior hallways and severely chipped paint. A lightbulb above one door is glowing green, a signal that visitors are welcome. When the lightbulb glows yellow, visitors are supposed to come back later. When the lightbulb glows red, they are supposed to keep away.
Sometimes when visitors enter the apartment, they're asked to hand over any weapons they might be carrying—hardly anybody ever is—and sometimes there's a cursory pat-down. Inside the apartment are a lot of artists, plus a military guy or two on a night away from the base. Some are sitting around a card table playing poker. Others are sitting on couches and chairs, smoking and drinking.
They're all being watched, but only one of them knows it.
There's Mia Brown, in the corner, who is into scuba diving and spends her days working with the homeless. There's Jake, a musician. There's Jimmy the Dwarf, an actor and model who works with a local circus troupe. There's Brady McGarry, who has devoted his free time over the years to political and environmental causes. There's DK Pan, a Butoh dancer, performance artist, and curator. There's Jaybird, a skinny kid in leather quietly trying to peddle small bags of cocaine. There's Thoren Honeycutt, who has a few priors for theft, including theft of a firearm. And there's Rick Wilson—tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a suit. This is Rick's apartment, called Rick's Cafe (un)American during Rick's after-hours parties.
For a time, some members of this crowd threw these after-hours parties at a place called the Cthulhu Building, just three blocks uphill from Rick's. Later, some members of this crowd will throw after-hours parties at a place in Belltown called Cafe Corsair. Attendees often referred to them as speakeasies, although the people running them merely thought of them as private parties in private places. Court documents would later call them "underground illegal gambling enterprises (concurrent with illegal liquor sales)." A lot of people went to these parties—they were big events with bands and burlesque dancers. Guests were encouraged to dress up and usually did. Sometimes it seemed like half the city was there in suits and vintage dresses: artists, activists, politicians, cultural bigwigs, musicians, computer programmers, soldiers, criminals.
A lot of these parties happened because Rick's good friend Bryan T. Owens had money and connections. Not everyone liked Bryan, but because he was Rick's good friend he was often around—drinking Maker's and Coke after-hours, playing poker, telling stories. He had a bald head and a goatee and a blustery bro-dude personality—one of the party regulars described him as a "mini–Fred Durst"—but he was a trust-fund baby and he was generous with his cash.
QuoteThe best WW II memoir I know about The Sergeant in the Snow, by Mario Rigoni Stern.
Just proves my bad-war-equals-good-memoir theory, that the best WW II memoir would be by an Italian, because you can't get much more messed up than Italy's adventures in WW II, and this guy went through the worst of them, the encirclement of the Italian forces in Ukraine in the winter of 1942-43. Mussolini had sent a small Italian contingent along on Operation Barbarossa. So did almost every European country east of Germany; when the Wehrmacht has just conquered all of Western Europe while losing only 30,000 kia in the process, they sure look like a winner, and everybody wanted shares in the company. Nobody in Europe discovered that "Fascism is a bad thing" until Stalingrad fell, when they all sorta had the big born-again moment while pissing their pants in terror.
So in the Summer of 1942, the Italians doubled down on their Eastern Front contribution, sending almost a quarter of a million soldiers to man a section of the Wehrmacht's line along the Don River in Ukraine. Some of those units were good, especially the Alpini.
The Italian Army had developed very good mountain troops and tactics fighting the Austrians in the Alps in WW I, and the three divisions of Alpini Mussolini sent east could have made a real contribution if they'd been assigned to the Caucasus, where they were supposed to go. But the Germans were always too arrogant to use their allies effectively, and they did it again this time, sending these mountain troops to hold the line in flat farmland along the Don where all their training was wasted, and their small, portable weaponry was guaranteed to be outgunned by massed Soviet armor.
Mario Rigoni Stern, the man who wrote The Sergeant in the Snow, was a sergeant in the Tridentina Division of the Alpini, the best of all. His book describes the quiet time, almost happy, when he and his division held the line by the river, and then the collapse of the whole line in mid-winter. Only a few of the Italians on the Eastern Front made it out of "the Bag" the Soviets caught most of the Wehrmacht's allied armies in that winter. Rigoni Stern was one of the few to escape, and to his dying day (he lived until 2008), the thing that made him proudest is that he led a group of 70 Italian soldiers out of that bag without losing a single one.
