EVERYBODY SMOKES IN HELL

Ridley’s either one bad motha of a writer or simply one bad writer. But his stories in any case remain always at a boil and show a rich mastery of black English. Someone gotsta pay because he stolt Daymond’s pure package of H and kilt his clocker. That someone is young Paris Scott, who has been working in a Hollywood convenience store. Like Ridley’s degenerate gambler, John Stewart, in Stray Dogs (1997) and scriptwriter Jeffty Kittridge in Love Is a Racket (1998), Paris is a born loser unlikely to realize his million-dollar dream even when it drops into his lap. Paris’s roommate is Buddy, teenage wheelman for Alfonso, who kills a roomful of mothas while copping Daymond’s H, though Alfonso himself takes much lead and dies. Buddy hides the H in a duffel bag under Paris’s bed, little knowing that the bag also holds the last works of Ian Jermaine, lead singer and composer for zillion-dollar rock group Will of Instinct. The night before, Paris had saved Filthy White Guy from being rousted and driven him home to his Xanadulike palace in Bel Air. Filthy White Guy turns out to be suicide-hungry Jermaine, eager to fill the legendary footprints of Marilyn, Jimmy Dean, and Jim Morrison. He’s just taped his farewell in his home studio, playing all the instruments himself, and actually does go out in a blaze of glory—or, rather, fertilizer. With the tape and the H in his duffel, Paris has four different killers chasing him from Hollywood to Las Vegas. One is Brice, a female assassin whose specialty is deep pain before long-delayed oblivion. “She had great tits. Real and large. Not mutant-large, just large enough to fit with precision comfort into a man’s wide and groping hand. Her two beautiful boobs swelled in an upward curve ending in full nipples that always looked erect. Her tits were the least of her. She was a hell of a woman.” If you like that, there’s plenty more—or even if you don—t.