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Watching
Watching is an ode to life-as-lived; bleak, funny, and devastation built around a descriptive account of the sleaze palaces around Times Square.
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First published June 1, 1997
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About the author
John Fergus Ryan
9 books7 followersJohn Fergus Ryan is the author of three novels, The Redneck Bride, The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer, and Watching. Billy Bob Thorton (Slingblade) recently finished production of a film version of his book The Redneck Bride, starring Antonio Banderas. Ryan has lived in Memphis, Tennessee for over 40 years.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 8, 2015
Dark and seamy this one. Sad and searing. Also funny. Here's the opening:
This ranks right up there with "Call me Ishmael" if you ask me.
Meet Billy "The Gimp" a retired pickle jar lid maker who frequents the coin-op porn palaces of pre-Giuliani New York. His story spills out in stark, declarative sentences. Billy loses his pension after a mobster makes off with the funds, and worries about ending up as one of the mad homeless ones that he sees frozen solid in the alleyways. His Hell's Kitchen apartment building is filled with freaks and deviants: a sado-masochistic gay couple, a transvestite who prefers dressing in frumpy housefrocks, and a seemingly normal man who keeps a naked male slave chained to the wall. Billy doesn't judge these people; they're just being who they are. He's one of them too, after all.
Billy loves his coin-operated porn. He's watched each movie so often he names the characters, makes up stories for them. When he's sad or lonely or frustrated, he'll enter one of the booths and talk to the screen, confessing his worries and fears to the characters. He knows they can't hear him, its just that there's nobody else to talk to.
He's a tough guy, Billy "The Gimp." An older guy too. He avoided serving in WWII because one leg was shorter than the other, thus his moniker. When he tried to play sports as a youngster his friends slapped the name on him after the way he ran. The name stuck. Once in awhile he runs into trouble in this rough-and-tumble city, but Billy knows how to handle himself.
This is Billy's story. He's telling it because he wants people to know that he was here, that even though his life is small and perverse and sad, he wants future people to know there was a man named Billy "The Gimp" and he lived in New York City.
This book captures all the grit and the grime (and the crime) of the NYC some people remember as charming. It's set smack dab in the middle of the porn palaces, cheap flop houses, crumbling buildings of the un-moneyed city. When Billy leaves the house, he carries a fake wallet, so often has he been mugged. He buys them at the Salvation Army, adding fake photos and fake credit cards to make them seem like the real thing. He's got survival skills. This book shows just how hard it is to survive, to pull through the poverty and perversion and sadness. It's prose tense and perfect, each sentence snapping easily into the next, even when describing unimaginable things.
The New York in this book is long gone, but it is captured here. And this makes New York feel like a city on the edge of oblivion, a shattered metropolis with dead souls milling about in it, seeking happiness wherever they can, and sometimes finding a kind of happiness that is inexplicable to those of us on the outside.
I am a voyeur and a bi-sexual foot fetishist. I am also a member of the American Association of Retired Persons.
This ranks right up there with "Call me Ishmael" if you ask me.
Meet Billy "The Gimp" a retired pickle jar lid maker who frequents the coin-op porn palaces of pre-Giuliani New York. His story spills out in stark, declarative sentences. Billy loses his pension after a mobster makes off with the funds, and worries about ending up as one of the mad homeless ones that he sees frozen solid in the alleyways. His Hell's Kitchen apartment building is filled with freaks and deviants: a sado-masochistic gay couple, a transvestite who prefers dressing in frumpy housefrocks, and a seemingly normal man who keeps a naked male slave chained to the wall. Billy doesn't judge these people; they're just being who they are. He's one of them too, after all.
Billy loves his coin-operated porn. He's watched each movie so often he names the characters, makes up stories for them. When he's sad or lonely or frustrated, he'll enter one of the booths and talk to the screen, confessing his worries and fears to the characters. He knows they can't hear him, its just that there's nobody else to talk to.
He's a tough guy, Billy "The Gimp." An older guy too. He avoided serving in WWII because one leg was shorter than the other, thus his moniker. When he tried to play sports as a youngster his friends slapped the name on him after the way he ran. The name stuck. Once in awhile he runs into trouble in this rough-and-tumble city, but Billy knows how to handle himself.
This is Billy's story. He's telling it because he wants people to know that he was here, that even though his life is small and perverse and sad, he wants future people to know there was a man named Billy "The Gimp" and he lived in New York City.
This book captures all the grit and the grime (and the crime) of the NYC some people remember as charming. It's set smack dab in the middle of the porn palaces, cheap flop houses, crumbling buildings of the un-moneyed city. When Billy leaves the house, he carries a fake wallet, so often has he been mugged. He buys them at the Salvation Army, adding fake photos and fake credit cards to make them seem like the real thing. He's got survival skills. This book shows just how hard it is to survive, to pull through the poverty and perversion and sadness. It's prose tense and perfect, each sentence snapping easily into the next, even when describing unimaginable things.
The New York in this book is long gone, but it is captured here. And this makes New York feel like a city on the edge of oblivion, a shattered metropolis with dead souls milling about in it, seeking happiness wherever they can, and sometimes finding a kind of happiness that is inexplicable to those of us on the outside.
July 17, 2024
Very gross and very ernest. Sort of hedonism removed from its implications. Both the gritty exploitation image of a pre gentrification manhattan and a human reflection of life in that specific gutter
June 15, 2011
Odd, offbeat, strange, sad, and brilliant short novel, set in and around New York's notorious 42nd Street area before the clean-up, when it was dominated by x-rated movies, peep shows, adult book stores, and a constantly changing cast of whores, johns, weirdos, creeps, criminals, cripples, monsters, addicts and the lost, the lonely, and the depraved.
Watching is told in the form of a first-person report from a lonely man in the last years of his life, who seeks solace in the peep shows and dirty book stores and in the company of a handful of acquaintances.
Although the 42nd Street surroundings are colorful and sensationalistic, this is no romp like the excellent Josh Alan Friedman books on this area and time. Rather, it is a meditation on love, loneliness, and aging.
The chapters are short, somewhat like prose poems. It is very readable, clear, concise.
It lacks the wild and dangerous humor of Ryan's other two masterpieces -- The Redneck Bride and The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer -- but it is a very fine book.
Watching is told in the form of a first-person report from a lonely man in the last years of his life, who seeks solace in the peep shows and dirty book stores and in the company of a handful of acquaintances.
Although the 42nd Street surroundings are colorful and sensationalistic, this is no romp like the excellent Josh Alan Friedman books on this area and time. Rather, it is a meditation on love, loneliness, and aging.
The chapters are short, somewhat like prose poems. It is very readable, clear, concise.
It lacks the wild and dangerous humor of Ryan's other two masterpieces -- The Redneck Bride and The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer -- but it is a very fine book.
April 17, 2024
record of a violent civilization++crushing loneliness indeed…maybe one of the most beautiful and also disgusting books i’ve read in awhile (i read the last chapter like 3xx)!
June 15, 2014
A man deeply in thrall to his own obsessions, John Fergus Ryan, who has a star cameo in *The People Vs. Larry Flynt* outshone only by Courtney Love's supporting role as Althea, was the author of many under known books, and this is one. To continue the metaphor, *Watching* contains some true heart-stopping lines, as I think any reader will agree.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews