Exposure: A Love Story

by James Lockhart Perry

Sam Spaulding is a tough, violent former war photographer with a Pulitzer Prize and a dead brother Henry who at one time ran one of the ugliest gangs in Los Angeles. Sam finds out he has Stage III intestinal cancer and decides to go out spitting in the face of death. But he reckons without his wife Lydia, who takes on her husband's fatalism with every ruthless weapon at her disposal. The skeletons in Sam's closet hardly help, when they come back to haunt him in the foul-mouthed ex-junkie Rudy Spavik and his angry girlfriend Sheri Ballin. From Los Angeles to the Mexican Baja, this unlikely foursome careens between hell and redemption, never entirely sure which is which. Until a nasty spat with Abe Smullen, the most beautiful drug lord in history, welds them together into a reluctantly indestructible clan.

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2011

About the author

James Lockhart Perry was a Texan born on Valentine's Day in 1892 into the wilds and woolies of East Texas. Daddy Jim, as he came to be known, never worked the oilfields that erupted all around and became so potent a symbol of the crude, brash, lawless state the rest of us recognize. Instead, he patiently farmed the rice fields, married the fine-looking Missouri-bred schoolteacher Dora Mae, and built a beautiful yellow house in the tiny hamlet of Markham for his three lovely daughters Adrienne Lavonne, Audrey Louvelle, and Anita Lorraine. He also built a legend in his lifetime for tireless inner strength and placid outer humility.

So the author's use of Daddy Jim's name for a pseudonym serves as homage as much as anything to the towering gentle spirit of that pioneer and his brave people. The only historical connection Daddy Jim and the author share is that Daddy Jim died on the author's twelfth birthday, thirty-three days before John Fitzgerald Kennedy set off with Jackie of the pink pillbox hat for Dallas. And the fact that both author and rice farmer have loved Daddy Jim's granddaughter to distraction.

The smartest thing the author ever did, apart from forcing the granddaughter to marry him, was to buy her a camera. Since then the couple has stretched the meandering, shutterbugging progression of their lives around the globe, until twenty years ago when they finally settled down on the beach south of Los Angeles, California. Where the surf rolls in with the same steady, timeless rhythm of the rice waving in the breeze of Daddy Jim's long vanished fields.

Reviews

[Carol Kean · Rating 5 out of 5]

At his age, all rental companies won't even loan him a car. In his favorite photo of him with his buddies, he's the last guy still alive. What's left? Sam intends to let cancer send him the way of all his buddies, but his wife has other plans.

Her plans include adopting a loser of a would-be photographer and his girlfriend, then launching a rescue mission when (no surprise) they get in trouble.

What good is a 70-yr-old man wearing a colonoscopy bag? You'd be surprised...