The Strange and Savage Tale of John Hood

A few weeks back the announcement came in a letter:

This just in: I'm getting sprung. I don't yet know when (they say 2-3 weeks), I don't know where (they've requested Scranton) but at last it shall be done. I'm getting sprung.

John Hood was finally being set free.

It immediately brought me back to a phone call I had with him back in the Spring of 2001:

“Hey Hood what’s happening.”

“Hey…um…I’m going away for a bit.”

“Oh yeah. Going on vacation? Where you headed?”

A long pause then he mumbles…

“Bank job.”

“What?!!!”

A little louder “Bank job.”

“Oh you fucking moron.”

“Look I can’t really talk about it. But I’ve talked to my lawyer and I’m gonna turn myself in tomorrow.”

How I came to be friends with Hood, or why our paths wound up crisscrossing I'll never really figure out. It just is. No explanation needed. Hood is one of those characters that pops into your life and adds endless amounts of color.

And a character he is...

Like an extra from a Fante tale of LA, Hood is a caricature. A tall lanky bastard with a hell of a swagger, he stuck out like a sore thumb wherever he went. He always wore a film noir style fedora, chain-smoked, drank hard, and never let you get a word in edge wise. But you didn’t care. The stories he spewed forth in an endless stream — only cut off by the occasional drag on the cigarette — always had you locked in with the mix of humor and thug misfortune.

I heard mention of a mom who is of some stature down in Florida — but he never quite said how and never spoke to her that much. There was his brief stint at Yale and his decision that it wasn't for him so he took his tuition and fled to New York City, holing up in the Chelsea hotel and making himself a regular at lounges. Over beers he told me tales of playing in bands with members of the Swans and other such ilk.

The first great chapter begins with his return to Florida. Hood, ever the self-promoting wanna-be Humphrey Bogart, was one of the drug-addled heads who helped make South Beach in Miami what it is. He promoted parties and bars, even making a name for the now infamous Crobar. But true to his personality, no matter how good the game, he always found a way to self-destruct. He consumed to excess — drugs, drink, friends, — you name it. Ask anyone who has met him; he was hard on a friendship. He was now well jacked on heroin, forcing friends to drive him around to his next fix. Sometimes he would steal cash from the people he had forced himself upon or shacked up with. At some point he was shipped off to Chicago to run some clubs and work his networking and promotional magic. Once his trip there burnt out like one of his many cigarettes, he returned to the land that made him.

In Hood’s life with all the misery, there was always a punch line. It was like a 40s movie — give the kids a good mix of violence, drama, and some comedy relief. My all time favorite tale of Hood is the time he found out a lady friend was shacking up with a pair of Canadians. What does Hood do? Does he say “well she’s dead to me now, time to move on”? No. Instead he goes to the hotel where they are cavorting and pulls a fire alarm. He then positions himself outside their room and when the panicked Canadians come running, he kicks the crap out of them. There’s your comedy, here’s your drama: the incident landed Hood in Dade County Stockade, one of the toughest jails in the land. The piece he wrote for the Miami New Times about the incident is still one of the funniest and intriguing things I’ve ever read.

But that was Hood. The one thing that was always hard to reconcile about the man was his lounge scumbag mentality mixed with the longing to be a serious writer. And write he did…sometimes for the Miami New Times, sometimes for Paper, even Rolling Stone. Or so he said…you had to sift through the tales to find fact from the fiction. The scary part was that too much of it was true. I think that was his draw. No matter how much common sense told you to keep away from someone who had such a knack for getting to trouble, you had to like the guy. He had too much life in him.

Somehow he wound up back in New York City. At this time I had resettled into Brooklyn and was running Bully Magazine. Hood found it online, dug our style, and started writing the occasional piece for me. Bukowski and Burroughs directly influenced his writing at the time: street tales of addicts destroying themselves told with pinpoint literary precision. It was punchy and gripping. Whatever his excesses or eccentricities, the guy could write. He was an intellectual — he never lost his Yale roots — but he was channeling it through the eyes of a fiend who has seen far too many late nights in dark and grimy places.

And so we became semi-friends. Like I said. It just happened. No explanation needed. I would publish his writing and he was grateful. We even grabbed the occasional beer.

It was on one such jaunt that Hood’s life took its next turn. He was living somewhere in the hills of Pennsylvania, writing music reviews for some web site, and making the occasional trip into New York City. He called me up at work one day and suggested we go for a drink. Hood was like a bad boxer. He always telegraphed his punches. So when I got in the car, I could tell right away he was going to ask me for money at some point. It was in the air. We were heading down to Swift on 3rd Street and my new goal was to drink as much of my hard earned cash so I wouldn’t have to lend it to him. Cruel in a way, but I figured it was better used for my own liver disease then whatever bad scheme he had in his head. Sure enough at the end of the night: “Hey man, I need gas to get back to PA, can you lend me a twenty or so?” The look on his face when I told him I was out of cash said it all. It was one of those rare moments where the lounge lizard veneer would drop and you’d get to see the bastard who was struggling with the mess he had created for himself. I would get to know that a bit more several months down the road.

A few days later I’m sitting in the backyard reading and the girlfriend shouts down that Hood is on the phone. The aforementioned conversation took place. Once again, Hood was keeping the noir rolling.

It seems he was hard up for cash so he decided to drive the huge piece of shit Buick he was driving at the time (the most conspicuous car on the face of the planet) to a local bank. He walked in, told a teller he was going to put a few bullets in her brain if she didn’t fill a sack with cash, and then made a mad dash into the Pennsylvania hills. It was pure Hood. He ignored the most basic essentials of bank robbing. Forget the car that everyone and their brother would remember. He was a tall gawky bastard whose face was as distinctive as the Mona Lisa. The judge gave him 2-10 years.

I thought the tale was over, that I would never hear from him again.

A month or two later I receive a strange envelope in the mail. I open it up and there’s this chicken scratch all over yellow legal paper that would frighten even the most seasoned professor of hieroglyphics. It was Hood, chiming in from prison. (See the photo to the right.)

He was already feeling walled in and looking for a creative outlet, something, anything. He wanted to write for Bully. He suggested that he could do book reviews. I thought about it. The phrase “Convict Book Reviews” flashed in my brain. I laughed my ass off.

And so the next phase of our friendship began. I would send him occasional shipments of books, he would fire back 2-3 handwritten pages on each. They were great reviews, filled with his distinctive style, as if Humphrey Bogart’s character from the Maltese Falcon were dashing off 1,000 words on Walter Mosley, Elmore Leonard, or a rare French writer. He was a voracious reader who loved a wide range of styles and could spit back intelligently about each one. And considering he had all the time in the world, he could crank out more reviews than I could publish. I was literally backlogged with Hood reviews at times. Occasionally he would discuss life inside, talking about cellies and the rare amenities he could gather (for instance a typewriter). Once or twice he actually seemed in the grips of despair. At liberty to say what I wanted so there was no way in hell of him coming over to punch my lights out, I always reminded him that it was all his own fault. Tough shit convict, buck it up and deal. I think he appreciated the honesty. We had that type of friendship. It was funny that the first book he reviewed for me was Jimmy Lerner’s prison memoir You’ve Got Nothing Coming. It was an apt motto for Hood’s life.

But so it went…the books went out in the mail, the reviews came back in. The readers, authors, and publicists loved his reviews because he wrote with a passion that only a man desperate for some tie to the outside world could. He wasn’t a snotty critic, overcome with their own self-importance, hoisting up false idols and belittling any writer they considered beneath their aesthetic leanings. Hood loved books and writers and in the insane world of prison, this was his only tie to an actual life. So even the writers started writing back. Palahniuk, Hornby, and many others. The weirdest day was when Elmore Leonard’s publicist contacted me saying E.L. would love to interview Hood. Strange days indeed.

Once again, life took a twist. I decided that it was time to put the nail in the coffin on Bully. I had grown weary of being an editor and wanted to be a writer. I figured it was better to stop when the material was still good, rather than milk it for a few more years. So after the sixth anniversary issue I just stopped.

A few friends sent e-mails, an occasional fan would ask what happened. But for the most part it faded away like a surly drunk who makes a huge scene at a bar and then goes to pass out in the alley. On my life went, new and different things. And then I received this letter from Hood. I about wept. Of all the people who enjoyed the work I did on Bully over the years, Hood was the only one who took a spare moment to say thanks.

And so once again, I figured the chapter with Hood had ended. He was denied parole and appeared to be headed for the full term. I promised to keep sending the occasional books that still arrived from lazy publicists who couldn’t be bothered to update their databases. But like an ex you promise to stay friends with, you always lapse and forget, caught up in your new life.

Then the letter came. The State of Pennsylvania was setting Hood loose on the people of Scranton. In typical Hood fashion, he was already scheming to try and get himself placed in Philadelphia instead.

I sent him back a single piece of paper in the mail. On it was a photo of Steve McQueen from The Great Escape, riding the motorcycle. Underneath I wrote:

Congratulations! Now Don’t Fuck Up.