The Glitter and the Grit

via.

I used to be the bodyguard for Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t like to brag about it, but it’s true. Amongst the twists and turns my life took over the years, I could always say to myself that I was half a step removed from Camelot. The glitter and the grit. Robert and I, we would talk Aeschylus all the time. We would talk about our favorite horses and all the times we’d saved people from drowning. But I never found myself falling down the subsequent path of pessimism outlined by writers like Norman Mailer or any of the other New York crew. ‘Our resolve was not to seem, but to be the best.’ That’s what Aeschylus once said, and it was true. It didn’t matter what happened. It didn’t matter who or what was in our way. The mission was clear.

Now I was a private investigator in Boston in the year of our glorious future, 1985. Or ’86. It had been a minute since I’d last looked at a calendar — in no small part because of all the crime I had to deal with on a daily basis, to the point where it just felt existential, you know? There was Crime out there, capital C and all, and I was there to meet it. Not to shake its hand in greeting, of course, but to rather to shake its hand and say, “Guess what, Pal? You’re under arrest.”

That was me, Spenser Edmund, private eye. I didn’t normally like to think about myself in relation to the politics of it all, but I was driving by Hank’s Auto Body…