Book Jacket Copy: “Heathen Slut”

“Welcome to my country, heathen slut.”

Casey Quinlan has spent her life breaking barriers – she takes after her dad, a US Navy fighter pilot who was among the first to break the sound barrier.

She spent grade school as the perennial “new kid” as her family moved from coast to coast following the fleet.

That experience came in handy when she was part of the first wave of women broadcasting engineers hired by US networks to prevent being sued by the gender police.

Getting arrested in passport control in Riyadh as she arrived to cover the Gulf War in 1991 gave her the title for her memoirs – the book you hold in your hands, “Welcome to My Country, Heathen Slut,” is the hilarious story of how she won over classmates, nuns, co-workers, rioters, and even the Saudi national police.

Beating the odds when facing armed dudes, nuns armed with rulers, cranky old-skool TV guys, and even breast cancer, Casey’s story of life on the front lines of change and gender politics will make you laugh, make you think, and make you glad you bought this book!

Introduction to Fiction, Part 1

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the drain in the floor.

The sound of running water was the first thing I heard.

Which made me realize that I was under attack. By a fierce amount of cold water, which was hitting my back, and really annoying the fuck out of me.

“Wake up, princess. Don’t want you to drown while I wash the bourbon stink off you.”

Gee, thanks, dad. What would I do without you?

Maybe sleep off the my-head-is-in-a-vise hangover you woke me up to?

“Gaaahh” was all that came out of my mouth, though.

That, and a more than sneaking suspicion that what would follow that syllable would be whatever was left of the aforementioned bourbon if I didn’t close my mouth.

Why the hell had I gotten so far into the bottle last night?

Oh, right. The new client. Who was also my old lover. Who had tracked me all the way to Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Florida (it exists, and it’s hard to find) to beg me to help him stay alive.

“C’mon, princess. Kyle’s gonna be here in an hour, and you have to be a sentient being when he does,” said Mike, my father and now my partner in business – and sometimes crime. Fishing Expedition Investigations, LLC.

After 20 hard years in the NYPD, winning my gold shield and losing at every attempt at a personal life, I’d retired to MOFN, FL to team up with my dad, a retired Navy intelligence officer.

Dad had originally planned his retirement around a marina and fishing-guide business – that was before the market crashed, taking a good chunk of his retirement fund with it. Now he had his Navy pension, the marina, and a fishing business that had drowned in the BP rig disaster.

And me.

I climbed up the wall of the marina shower room – crap, I was naked. Double crap, I was in the men’s shower, too. How the hell had that happened?

Last night was a black hole, with flashes floating up to the top in what seemed like random order.

Kyle and me, in the marina bar, the band playing the usual buffet of Buffett and Marley.

Walking on the docks after I’d had way more bourbon than is recommended before walking on things you could fall off of.

Oh. My. GOD. Kyle and me…making out? Or is that bourbon-induced psychosis? Because I would have to be psychotic to even consider revisiting the disaster that was Kyle-and-me ten years ago.

“I need a drink,” I said to Mike.

“A double.”

Plumber-like, She Approaches the Blockage…

I’m not on one of those insufferable bast…lucky people who, when confronted with a blank page, can just fill that sucker up with an endless stream of words.

Are you listening, Nora Roberts?

My coping strategy for blockage is very plumber-like. If you’ve got a blockage, it’s as important to get the flow going again as it is to determine the blockage. Anyone who’s had to troubleshoot a sewer line knows this at the cellular level.

When I’m working on a writing project, and the pipes lock up, I write some kind of non-project-related bullshit (a comedy bit, an email to a friend, a comment on an online piece, pick one, pick several) until the blockage dissolves and that crack whore I call my muse comes back from her little binge.

That said, some binges last longer than others. In those cases, I stack up useless comedy bits and online comments like cord-wood. And all my friends get plenty of updates…

Losing My Religion…at the Vatican Museum

I’m a cradle Catholic: born to a long line of Irish Catholics in New York and Pennsylvania. I didn’t have any other frame of reference through my grade-school years, since those were the days before Vatican II – attending a church that wasn’t Catholic was a mortal sin.

There are mortal sins, venial sins, and “your mother’s gonna beat your ass”  sins. Mortal is a mortal lock for the maternal beat-fest.

I spent my childhood doing two things: following the fleet (my dad was in the first generation of Navy jet fighter pilots) and pasting nickles, dimes, and quarters to little holy-card boards for The Pagan Babies.

Say the phrase “pagan babies” to anyone my age who went to Catholic school in the US, and you’ll hear some version of “OMG – I musta given them $500 by the time I graduated from 8th grade!”

Fast forward to the Easter of 1968. I was attending Central High School in Bushy Heath outside of London (the American School of London wasn’t accredited state-side yet) and, for spring break, there was a school trip to Italy. Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples  – with Easter Sunday in Rome.

I went. It was terrific, in spite of the fact that it was a ****ing bus tour from Milan on.

Rome. The Vatican. St. Peter’s Square. Absolutely unbelievable to stand there and think of all the Catholic – and Christian – history that’s taken place there.

Easter Sunday mass, I attended in the rain. It was so crowded that the standing-room I found was clear across St. Peter’s Square from the balcony where Pope Paul VI said mass into a mic fed to speakers throughout the square.

The next day, still gobsmacked by history and splendor, I went on a tour of the Vatican Museum. The young priest who guided my group (random, all Americans, I was the only high-school age kid) led us ’round what seemed like an endless series of rooms, each with more incredible art than the last.

Lest you think I was art naif, I spent my childhood in the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Met. If I was impressed, it’s ’cause it was bloody impressive.

At the end of about the 20th room, the young prelate puffed up and said, “what you see here is less than 10% of what the Vatican holds. Most of the collection is in storerooms around Vatican City. We simply don’t have the wall space to display it all.”

I heard a skidding sound in my head.

I asked him why, given the church’s constant keening cries for money for the poor and starving of the world, they didn’t sell some of it to feed said poor and starving.

He glared at me, puffed himself up even further, and spat, “but this was given to the CHURCH for the greater glory of GOD!”

Forty-two years later, almost to the day, I count that as moment that I turned my back on religion.

Religion always comes down to passing the collection plate, and buying real estate.

Faith is most powerful in homeless shelters, in the laughter of a child, in comforting the sick, in staying at someone’s side as they die.

Fuck the Church.