Dear Marlowe: Expert Advice

I’ve been asked to write an advice column for advice columnists, which is sort of like giving swimming lessons to sharks. Still, a job’s a job. This city’s full of people who tell other people what to do for a living, and most of them could use a raincoat and a moral compass. They write from warm desks with clean cuffs, doling out wisdom like aspirin — two tablets for every ache, same dose whether you’ve got a headache or a broken heart.

This column isn’t for that. It’s for the pros who know that advice is a loaded gun and the safety’s always off. You want to help, sure — but you don’t want to lie, and you don’t want to sell soap. You want to tell the truth without breaking it, to say the hard thing without enjoying the sound of glass. I’ve spent a long time listening to people in trouble talk themselves in circles. The trick isn’t being clever. It’s being honest, patient and hard enough to stand in the weather. If you’re looking for tricks, take up cards. If you want to learn how to listen, pull up a chair.

I’ll be here, coffee going cold, telling you how to keep your spine straight while the mailbags get heavier.

— Philip Marlowe, Seamy Underworld P.I.

Dear Marlowe, I’m a male newspaper columnist who regularly provides advice to lonesome people, but the truth is that I’m the one in need of advice. You see, I’ve been so affected by their hopeless, desperate letters that I’ve spiralled into alcoholism, depression and some ill-considered affairs. All this, despite having a perfectly wonderful girlfriend named Betty, a recent alumna of Riverdale High.

To make matters worse, I’ve long been the target of sick pranks and cynical guidance from my boss, Shrike the features editor, who has no idea that I’m boffing his wife. Every time we have sex, I think of her as a tent, hair-covered and veined, and of myself as a skeleton in a water closet, the skull and cross-bones on a scholar’s bookplate. Whenever I make the skeleton enter the flesh tent, it flowers at every joint.

The worst part is that I beat the crap out of another lover recently when she tried to seduce me after inviting me to dinner with her poor, crippled sap of a husband. He has a face like one of those composite photographs used by screen magazines in guessing contests. She told him that I tried to rape her. Now he’s coming at me with a gun inside a rolled newspaper and I am running toward him to offer succour, to succour all my broken-hearted, sick-of-it-all, disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband correspondents with love. Thing is, I’ve just had a religious epiphany after three feverish days with my eyes fastened on an image of Christ on a background of blood velvet sprinkled with tiny nerve stars, my heart becoming the heart of God, God approving my every thought, my every word in every column, and there has been a loud explosion and I’m rolling down a flight of stairs with the shooter, so if you have any insights concerning the situation in which I find myself, now would be a good time. — Miss Lonelyhearts

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, Next time, take the escalator. — Marlowe

Dear Marlowe, I am renowned for being warm, cheerful, respectful and knowledgeable about all things sexual. I’ve written 45 books on the subject, hosted Playboy videos, co-starred in a movie with Gérard Depardieu, appeared on the cover of People, sung on a Tom Chapin album, had parts in dozens of commercials, am trained as a sniper, almost lost both feet when injured by an exploding shell in Jerusalem during the 1947-49 Palestine War … and my goodness, how I could go on! And do. Yet despite my being a major cultural figure with a radio call-in audience exceeding two million listeners a week, I remain best known as a cutesy 4-foot-7 talk show host who rhapsodizes about G-spots with an accent broadly deemed to be a cross somewhere between Minnie Mouse and Henry Kissinger. Is there anything I can do to spice up this chicken soup image? — Dr. Ruth Dear Dr. Ruth, Get some. — Marlowe

Dear Marlowe,

Like Julius Caesar and Wayne Gretzky, I prefer to speak of myself in the third person. Miss Manners believes she has earned that prerogative because she has distinguished herself as Emily Post’s esteemed successor in the promotion of what Miss Manners likes to characterize as “heavy etiquette theory,” her complex and advanced perspective regarding the ideas and intentions underpinning seemingly simple rules. (Unlike Mrs. Post, Miss Manners hastens to add, the reputation of Miss Manners has never been besmirched by a wayward husband’s concupiscent dabblings with chorus girls.)

Since initiating in 1978 her widely circulated column, now carried in more than 200 newspapers worldwide, Miss Manners has offered high-minded and beneficent guidance on such topics as rearing perfect children, the right thing to say on social occasions, graceful dining, domestic tranquility, properly dignified weddings, civility, and on and on. Miss Manners has consistently identified blatant greed as the most serious etiquette problem plaguing the United States. Indeed, the most frequently asked question she receives concerns how to politely ask for cash from potential gift-givers, and her most frequently given advice is that there is no polite way to do this. Full stop. Notwithstanding Miss Manners’s oft acclaimed and always timely advice, dispensed for nearly half a century for the paltry price of a daily newspaper, her country has devolved into a shameless kleptocracy with astonishing rapidity, run by a crime family whose greed for cash from potential gift-givers is constrained by not even the thinnest pretense of taste or basic human decency. In short, not to put too fine a point on it, Miss Manners would like to know why she has apparently been wasting her time.

Dear Miss Manners,

Embedded, Miss Manners, as I am in a world inhabited by conneroos and swindlers, I’m probably not the right mook to ask. What’s more, I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. I don’t like ’em myself. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. But how we wound up with a grifter president who likes to speak of himself in the third person like all self-absorbed, vain, pompous and insufferably buffoonish megalomaniacs, well, Miss Manners, you have the floor. — Marlowe

Dear Marlowe,

There’s a name for women like my twin sister Abby, but it isn’t used in high society … outside of a kennel. A few months after I started writing my syndicated newspaper advice column, Popo (which is what the family actually called her) just had to start one, too. Popo delighted in rubbing my face in the brouhaha over the time I called the Pope a Polack, or my giving credence to the urban legend about razor blades in Halloween candies, or offering mistaken legal advice (who knew that wedding gifts don’t automatically belong to the bride?), or warning readers not to throw rice at weddings lest birds eat it and explode (turns out they won’t). But Abby, that so-called “pioneering queen of salty advice,” is the one who considered women “faintly ridiculous” if they couldn’t make their marriages work. She’s the one whose recommended “code of conduct” for women was “husband and children first,” like we were all stuck in the 18th century. I beat her into this sorry vale of tears by 17 minutes, and she’s been an annoying B-word nipping at my heels ever since. — Ann Landers

Dear Ann Landers, I know you are, but what am I? — Abigail (Abby) Van Buren, the slickest little knockout broad in sixteen states and four Canadian provinces. (Marlowe sends his regards. He’s a little tied up at the moment.)

Send your questions, confessions and unsolved moral knots to:

Marlowe’s Desk c/o The Night City Gazette 1417 Alvarado Street, Suite 3B Los Angeles, CA 90026

No stamps for alibis. Save it for the jury. Replies when the truth shows up. (Oh, and in case you’re planning to incentivize your letter’s advancement to the top of the pile, the only G-spot recognized in this establishment is a one followed by three crisp zeroes.)