When I was a kid, after my father was murdered, we drifted.
Roaming the seedier parts of San Diego, crashing with my mom’s biker friends or in pay-by-the-week motels overlooking the freeway. We fled California under mysterious circumstances, moved into an old rusty trailer in the middle of nowhere Arizona. No electricity, dirt-floor outhouse. Thirty years later and I still shake out my shoes for scorpions every morning.
When I was 13, we landed in Las Vegas. Most envision Vegas as some kind of Bud Light-drenched, lotus-eater paradise. For some drawn to its siren song, the place holds the small-dream promise of a slightly better life—like the anecdote Dave Hickey tells in his book Air Guitar about his Vegas IHOP waitress hoping to move up from “food” to “cocktail.”
But the city I encountered—the Vegas I know to this day—is a different sort of beast. As I write in Bondage, my debut crime thriller novel out now from Close to the Bone:
“The city unfolded out the window like a zombie movie. Abandoned vehicles and burned-out car frames. Vacant storefronts and empty strip malls. Row upon row of foreclosed homes. Pawnshops and payday loans. The blinking light pollution of casinos in the predawn.
“Cash your check here.
Loosest slots in town.
“Along the roadside, refugee tarps and sleeping bags and sprawling encampments. Total collapse. And looming above it all, a fever dream in the smog and failing light, the high-rise casino towers of the Strip.”
The hero of Bondage is Che Guevara Horowitz. She’s a young loner who was raised by revolutionaries out in the Nevada desert to train for the violent overthrow of the United States government. When we meet her, she’s escaped from prison—convicted of double murder, only one of which she actually committed—to find her sister, Emma, who has mysteriously vanished. As she evades the law, Che’s search for Emma takes her to a dreaded place from her painful past. Las Vegas.
In most ways, Che and I couldn’t be less alike. I didn’t grow up learning how to make bombs in the desert. I’m no whatever-it-takes badass. But I can’t deny that there’s a lot of Che lifted straight from my life, my worldview, my Grimm fairytale of an upbringing.
In the literary world, people talk of autofiction, the idea of narrative storytelling as a kind of self-revealing confessional. You might expect that to be a million miles from a work of page-turning genre fiction like Bondage, which I think of as a feminist, neon-noir crime thriller. Yet, at some point while writing the book, I had the realization that whenever I sat down in front of the blank page, I brought my whole life with me. Every relationship and experience, all the detritus and junk from my days.
The Las Vegas of Bondage is a nightmarish one entirely of my own creation, filled with gunfights and double-dealing private eyes and dark conspiracies. Yet amid all that, it’s also a world I recognize as my own. A place where Che, failed by everyone in her life and entirely on her own, finds solace in the very things that saved my life growing up—pop culture and trash TV.
“Growing up, they filled the emptiness the best they could. Stephen King novels, waterlogged comic books, trash television when the winds were conducive for picking up a signal. When Dave and their mother disappeared on their reconnaissance missions, the girls spent entire days watching whatever had been brought by the tumbleweeds who passed through the compound. Mainly VHS tapes of B-movies and episode collections of sitcoms. Home Improvement. Family Matters. Bud’s House. A continuous cycle of their shallow tape library. The glittering stars and nuclear sitcom families, windows onto worlds that seemed so strange and alien it was hard to believe they existed at all.”
In that list of 90s sitcoms—the brainless dialogue and vapid moral lessons which were the soundtrack to much of my early life—I snuck in a fictional one: Bud’s House. The star of that in-universe show is Buddy Flowers, described at one point in the book by a NPR-type news announcer as: “America’s Uncle, who endeared himself to an entire generation with his love for football and corndogs, as well as his self-deprecating humor and homespun wisdom.”
Despite his public face, Che’s search for her sister takes her into Buddy Flowers’s Vegas mansion, where, down in a locked basement, she discovers an unspeakable horror. It all leads her deeper into the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, drawing her into a shadowy world of organized crime, occult serial killers, and countless abducted women.
Before Bondage, I never thought of myself as a crime writer. Yet partway through the writing of the book, I freed myself to mix my literary sensibilities with the kinds of plot-driven stories I liked to read and watch. I came to realize that it was only natural to weave my own biography (which itself reads like some kind of crime-horror tale) with the propulsive story I wanted to tell of high-stakes survival, as well as other ideas that were occupying my brain space, like the aftermath of revolutionary movements and the nature of male violence towards women. This, ultimately, is what propelled me through the long years of writing, what gave me the stamina and faith to finish the book.
Nothing is off limits. Lean into the pain. It’s all fair game.
I haven’t lived in Las Vegas for a long time—the city lies in my past now, six cities and two countries ago—but I’ve tried my damnedest to conjure the place to life in my novel. Or at least a version of it. Not the supposed glitz and glamor of the Strip, but another, darker Las Vegas. The grimy, blood-streaked underbelly. The sleazy and seedy streets. The empty and ominous roads, headlights following in your rearview, that lead you out of town—all the way out into the surrounding desert, where the bodies are buried.
Shane Joaquin Jimenez is the author of the novel Bondage. He holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School. Recent writing has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Roi Fainéant Press, Punk Noir Magazine, and elsewhere. A longtime Las Vegan, he now lives in Canada. You can find him at www.shanejoaquinjimenez.com
