Rebar for Tootsie Rolls

by Jamie Bollenbach @2005-2023

A Tableau of Contents

This whole pulp story whizbang I wrote for fun in the mid 2000s is a wickerbasket full of schticks, and one of these is that you didn't find this on the internet. Nope! You found these stories digging through musty boxes of 80 year old magazines in the basement of a vast and decrepit bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Everything more or less takes places in wartime San Francisco, roughly in 1942, as Dectective Mack Brain chases Nazi spies around Pacific Heights and relaxes in affordable housing, but chapters are missing, stories end abruptly, and whole months are lost and gone.

This freed me to play and write them inside out, from one ridiculously overwrought sentence that popped up to figuring out how things got there or where they must go, rather than get tied up in knots with plots.

It was never edited properly, and the first few stories, freed by any need to be good writing, demonstrate that all too well. But they settles down into a better groove around #7, and it might be worth starting there. It was written for fun and I hope you get a little kick out of it too.- Jamie Bollenbach, Seattle, WA, August 2023

1 Chapter .22 Rimfire
2 Chapter 9mm Hollowpoint
3 Chapter .38 Special

15 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Snitch Pudding
16 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Red Nose Honking
17 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: A Snack Box of Buttered Lap Dogs
18 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Total Decor

19 Rebar For Tootsie Rolls: Kill Three, And It's One, Two, Four
20 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Shoot Me With a Kiss, Sugar Baby
21 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Party of Two For Murder and Drinks Available In the Bar if You Care to Wait
22 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Stop- You're Killing Me.

23 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: I Wandered Lonely As a Corpse
24 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Get Stingy Wheels
25 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Backscrub at the Bloodbath
26 Rebar For Tootsie Rolls: Double Cross in Triplicate!

Q: What is Rebar for Tootsie Rolls? A: Put a Sock in That Pie Hole, Buddy!

On a chilly gray November morning, in an old motor oil box unearthed in the moldy, half-lit basement backroom of a decrepit booksellers in Portland, Oregon, was recently found a moth-eaten pile of torn, disconsolate WWII pulp detective magazines stacked like a pile of action pancakes, covered in forsaken syrup.

The stories in these crumbling newsprint pages, covered in expiring bookstore ennui and both usual and unusual stains, were torn in half, incomplete, and bespoke- yes I said bespoke -of another era, where a man could do good when he got up in the morning just by finding the right Nazi joker to sucker-punch in the kidney. And in the day, he could make a little cabbage slapping around a two-timing claims adjuster or maybe an amateur grammarian with a stick up his keister over conjunctions. And by the evening, he could be charming a smoking hot blond tomato who just stepped out of a Vargas poster into distracting him from the existential wounds of modernity simply by drinking too much and showing her his really neat gun.

These are those stories that were those there.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls

Thursday, August 24, 2023