I remember the moment I learned to read, when the squiggles became a code I code break, and I could suddenly see Spot run. That was it, man, I was hooked, and I have been ever since. I was the kid reading under the covers with a flashlight, the one who sat in the back row of class so he could devour a fantasy novel instead of pay attention.

Now I consider it one of the real blessings of my life that I get email from readers, people I don’t know, who tell me that one of my books caused them to miss their train stop, or that I owe them a night’s sleep.

And since the show first aired, a number of you have been kind enough to say you’d like to read one of my books, and have asked which to start with.

First off, thank you.

The quick response is that you can read any of them. All the books stand on their own, so whichever fires your pilot light is the way to go. You can find a brief description of each of them here.

However, because I was curious, I recently posted on Facebook and Twitter and asked my readers which they thought you should start with.

All five of the books got votes, but two clear winners emerged.

The first is THE BLADE ITSELF, which was my debut. It’s the story of two friends who undertake a robbery that goes desperately wrong. One of them escapes, and builds a new life for himself. The other goes to maximum security prison. But seven years later, he’s out, and he’s looking for a little payback…

The second is GOOD PEOPLE. In this one, two regular people find a large amount of cash in their tenant’s apartment. It seems like a fairytale ending; they’re in tough financial straits, and the money could solve everything for them. But as Tom and Anna Reed are about to learn, fairytale endings never come cheap…

Obviously, I hope you like the show on it’s own merits. But if you do decide to try one of the books, drop me a line and let me know what you thought. I’d love to hear from you.

Meanwhile, enjoy this week’s episode, in the Florida Keys. We had a blast making it, and it’s turned out to be a real favorite of everyone involved.

By the way, I’ll be live Tweeting during the episode. Got questions, comments, thoughts on the nature of life? Join the conversation. Follow me on Twitter, or just search the #HiddenCity tag.

Cheers!
-Marcus

I don’t believe in ghosts. Or spirits, demons, or angels. Understand, I’ve got no problem with the idea that there is life and consciousness greater than our own. If you want to label that consciousness God, hey, knock yourself out.

But me, I can sum up my spiritual philosophy by cribbing Shakespeare—there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. I just don’t believe those things are particularly concerned with us.

All of which is preamble to the moment in a voodoo temple in New Orleans. Dolls and gifts and beads and booze and statues, piled and layered atop one another, bills rolled and tucked in every crack, messages written on every surface, the whole cluster draped in Christmas lights and hazed by incense smoke.

And the priestess across the table from me just blew my goddamn mind.

Voodoo is a lovely religion, a mashup of beliefs seasoned with a sense of play. The Loa to whom voodoo practitioners “pray”—it’s not really the right word, because it’s more conversation and barter than humble contrition—are messengers, go-betweens that connect people and the Divine. They have power, but also flaws and foibles. The result is a very human faith, rich in story, warm and living and colorful.

So when I sat down for a blessing and a reading with Priestess Miriam Chamani, it was with honest respect and an open heart.

But not, really, an open mind. I didn’t expect anything to happen that I couldn’t explain.

Priestess Miriam lit candles and incense, and collected a handful of dice and bones. She told me to close my eyes, and to think about my problem. Blessings are specific in voodoo; they’re like a prescription.

I closed my eyes. But it wasn’t a problem I thought about. It was a hope. A good wish for someone I don’t know yet but already love.

And Miriam said, “So are you hoping for a girl baby, then?”

Now, here’s the thing. I’ve spent hours thinking about this, and I’m a reasonably smart guy who knows more than the average about scams and cons.

And there is just no goddamn way she could have known my wife is pregnant.

Sure, I wear a wedding ring, but that would only tell Miriam that I’m married. My wife wasn’t there, so it couldn’t have been pheromones or some subtle physical cue. And at this point we hadn’t told anyone but our immediate family. Our friends didn’t know. The crew didn’t know. There was nothing, nothing, online about it, nothing she could have Googled or seen on a Facebook page. No hints, no clues, nada.

And yet that was the question Miriam went straight to. And smiled knowingly as my eyes flew open. How did she do it?

I have no idea.

I suspect that she is essentially deeply, deeply, intuitive, so much so that there was something in my bearing or my language that gave her a feeling. Some subtle cue that whispered in her inner ear.

And yet—and this is what New Orleans does to you, with its sweat and magic and blurred lines—I found myself asking how very different that was from getting the answer from a Loa. If a voice you can’t control whispers secret truths inside your head, does it really matter if the source is intuition or the supernatural? And what’s the difference?

After we were done, I went next door and had a drink and stared out the window. I tried to find an explanation. Thing is, there simply isn’t one.

You just have to chalk it up to New Orleans.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that the baby in my baby’s belly is healthy and strong and seems damned eager to come out and play.

And yes, she’s a girl.

- Marcus

It’s a point of some pride that one of our stories from San Francisco is the murder of Harvey Milk. Don’t get me wrong, I dig serial killers and bank robbers, and just like Paris, we’ll always have them.

But this murder—this assassination—is different.

I was thrilled with the chance to dig into it, and overwhelmed by the people I spoke to. These are people on the front lines of history; brilliant, compassionate, political, fervent, funny. And I’m very proud of the story we told. I’m proud that we didn’t simplify things, that we didn’t make it as simple as gay-straight, good-evil.

However, one consistent bit of piss in my punch is that the constraints of television mean that there are always things we can’t cover in a story. There just isn’t time. Inevitably, things have to be left out, some of them quite wonderful.

And so I’d like to take a moment to talk a little about my understanding of Harvey the man, rather than Harvey the victim.

When someone is killed, there’s a tendency to elevate them beyond the human. They become a symbol, a role in a story, rather than a real person who lived and loved, who did things both wonderful and shitty, who had moments of grace but also crippling hangovers and walks of shame.

And one thing I learned in talking to the people who knew Harvey is that he was a man. A human being, not a symbol.

He had a wicked temper. He was disorganized, scattered. He was a flirt—and, to hear Tom Ammiano tell it, more than just a flirt. In other words, he had emotions. He had weaknesses. He had passions.

All silenced in an instant.

That’s a true and often forgotten horror of murder. There is rarely any warning. You don’t have time to put your affairs in order, to tell your mother that you love her. You also aren’t around to correct the perception painted of you in the aftermath. Once you’re gone, you’re at the mercy of the remaining world.

And while I never had the chance to know him, here’s one thing I bet Harvey would hate about his legacy: he would hate being a saint.

A leader? Most definitely. A ray of hope for a gay kid in a small town? He’d dig that. But a saint? Not a chance.

Who wants to be a saint? Saints can’t love unless they love purely and chastely. They can’t drink and dance shirtless. They can’t kiss the wrong person and laugh about it later. They certainly can’t screw.

All things that were part of the real Harvey Milk. The man.

So call this an appendix to the show. A reminder, for Harvey’s sake, that he wouldn’t want to be canonized. He wouldn’t want quiet respect and soft voices.

You want to celebrate Harvey? Go have a drink and a laugh.

That I think he’d like.

- Marcus

But here are some brief thoughts on the Los Angeles episode and LA in general.

• The most difficult part of interviewing a porn star is deciding what you’re going to wear. Go ahead, try it. After that, if you’re interviewing someone as articulate and thoughtful as Kayden Kross, the rest is easy.
• Los Angeles is unfairly gifted with beauty. I’m a Midwestern boy, and proud of it, but there’s no denying how gorgeous the place can be.
• Especially Malibu.
• My favorite Thai restaurant in America is Jitlada, on Sunset west of Normandie. The food is stunning, inventive, and nuclear spicy.
• It’s amazing to sit down with a man who honestly believes—and makes a good case for—the idea that his father was a serial killer. It changes something in a man’s eyes to know that about your father.
• Soot Bull Jeep. Korean BBQ. Go there. Trust me.
• If I spent all my waking hours for the next twenty years studying dance and gymnastics, I wouldn’t be able to pull off the moves the kids in tonight’s episode make look easy.
• Watching the sun set over the basin from the Griffith Park Observatory is absolutely cliché. It’s also absolutely worth doing.

I’ll be live-tweeting tonight’s episode, by the way. Got any questions? Thoughts? Insults? Fire away: @MarcusSakey, or tag #HiddenCity.

- Marcus

When it’s done, I look like this.

Apart from the fact that I look awesome—go ahead, admit it, that shit’s hot—the reason I’m doing this is to understand what it feels like to hide in plain sight. The gig is that I’ll now go wander around while three people search for me. They’ll have photos of my pre-transformation self, and they’re betting they can catch me within fifteen minutes.

See, Whitey Bulger, the man alleged to be one of the worst gangsters in American history, was on the run for more than fifteen years. And for most of that time, he was in America, hiding in plain sight.

Which sounds fine and good. But my expectations for this scene are pretty low. Looking in the mirror is hilarious, but I still see myself clearly. To me I look like me, only wearing makeup.

But as I hit the streets of Boston, I started to notice some changes. It was a subtle shift in energy. A disturbance in the force. For awhile I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I realized that people were passing me differently.

I don’t mean that they were turning cartwheels. It was the way they walked, the eye contact or lack thereof, the turned shoulder or ashed cigarette. There are hundreds of cues that our subconscious mind is constantly both sending and receiving, cues that communicate who we are and how much space we take up.

And now people looking at me see their creepy but ineffectual uncle, and they’re adjusting accordingly.

Girls won’t meet my eye. At all. Which is silly because, hello, do you see this sweet ‘stache?

Guys my age ignore me completely; I’m just a moving obstacle. Guys of the age I’ve been made up to look do see me, and we react to each other, radiating clues to our position. But wrinkled and gray and wearing a really ugly shirt I borrowed from the DP—thanks, Damon!—my place in the pecking order is clear: I’m at the low end of it.

It’s not that I’m used to strolling a carpet of rose petals scattered by coy redheads whose downcast eyes belie naughty intentions, laughing to myself as men scurry out of my way.

It’s just that right now I’m completely invisible. Seriously. You’d walk right by me and never notice.

And that’s when it hits—this is how Whitey got away with it for so long. For most of his life, he carried himself like the biggest alpha dog in town, and everyone knew that it was true of James Whitey Bulger. But when he was on the run, he was just an elderly Irish gent with white hair and the fading remnants of a devilish grin. Who would have imagined the two were the same?

After all, a haystack is a pretty good place to hide a needle. But you know what’s a better one?

A needlestack.

– Marcus

There’s no other word for it. I’d like to say that I’m asking for critical details, that I’m trying to paint a complete picture, that I’m hoping to dig into the man’s soul to understand his motivations. But really, I’m just stalling.

In my defense, the reason I’m stalling is that the man is a security consultant who, in about ten seconds, is going to hit me square in the eyes with tactical-strength pepper spray. I’ve asked him to do this, which does not say impressive things about my intelligence. But I want to know what it’s like.

Why, you ask? Can’t we all just presume that it sucks? That it hurts, a lot? That taking two million Scoville units in the retinas—two hundred times hotter than a jalapeno—is not the way sane people choose to spend a Thursday afternoon?

Well…yes. But also no.

One thing I’ve learned writing fiction is that it’s the little details that make a world real. The smell of a squad car, Pleather and fast food and a whiff of sweat and a tiny hint of vomit. The particular hopeless echo inside a solitary confinement cell. The electric thrill of holding a pistol, the way it seems to complete your hand, a rather horrifying but true fact.

Let’s make it personal. Think about your, say…your bedroom. Picture your bedroom.

Are you calculating the measurements and placing the furniture? Or are you remembering the view of the nightstand when your head is on the pillow, the way light spills amber across the sheets late at night, the warm sleepy smell of the person beside you as you hit the snooze button for the third time?

Those little details are what let you understand something. They’re how you get inside a moment. I believe that being pepper sprayed sucks. I believe that it hurts. But I don’t know how exactly.

Not for another five seconds.

The reason I want to understand this is to understand a larger story. In 1968, during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police and protesters went head-to-head—and frequently nightstick-to-head—in a bloody riot that symbolized the culture clash tearing the nation apart. The demonstrators say that they were peaceful, that all they wanted was to speak out against the war. The police say that many of the protestors were essentially domestic terrorists, similar to those that had burned down great whacks of the city the previous years. And so they defended their city, using the weapons they were trained in.

Like pepper spray. The security consultant is shaking the can up, and I’m desperately trying to think of another question. Every time I distract him, I buy myself a few more seconds.

Hey, just cause I want to do this doesn’t mean I, you know, want to do it. I know. I’ll ask—

With grace and precision he blasts me right across the face. Right across both open eyes.

So much for stalling. My thoughts, in order:

1. Oh shit.
2. Huh. That’s not too bad.
3. Man, I hope the cameras are rolling.
4. Wow, I’m really pretty tough. I can totally handle—
5. Oh shit!

The heat is a living thing, growing and coiling. It starts soft, not unlike a steaming washcloth laid across my eyes. But as the capsaicin—that’s the chemical that makes peppers peppers—sinks in, as it makes itself at home in the soft tissue, as it leaks into my tear ducts, the heat builds.

And builds.

My eyes were wide open when he hit me, but I’ve got them locked shut now. I have a sneaking suspicion that when I open them, the air is going to make it worse. The security consultant and his team are leading me inside. I can hear them talking, the scuff of shoes on concrete. But it’s all very far away.

In the darkness behind my closed eyes, I’m alone with my thoughts and the heat. And as the heat grows, it’s pushing the thoughts out.

Hotter and hotter and worse and worse and they’re telling me to open my eyes and I do and the outside world blooms like an explosion and I shut them again but not before I’ve let in a whole lot more heat and man oh man was this a stupid idea and the panic is rising but I can’t let it take control and I try to breathe and picture the snowbank outside and imagine burrowing into it face first and just laying there in the cold but that would make it worse too and they’re dabbing my face with dish soap on paper towels to break up the oil and telling me to open my eyes and I do and that just makes it worse…

And so on.

It’s about thirty minutes before I can open my eyes, before the world returns to normal. And then, almost suddenly, I can see. The effects have faded. I take a breath, and blow my nose, and I can see the crew around me, the expression on my wife’s face, and things are okay again.

When I look in the mirror, it looks like I have a wicked sunburn. My eyes are red and bright. I don’t dare touch my face, and I’m forbidden to shower that night, because it will reactivate the capsaicin.

Still, I learned a lot. The pain was bad, but worse was the sense of helplessness, the claustrophobia. I didn’t want to move or be touched. And in that dark space, panic’s ragged edge was so close. It sucked and pulled at me. It teased and tempted. I knew it would only make things worse, but that didn’t lessen panic’s gravitational pull.

And now that I’m okay, and that I know a beer is in my very near future, I have to admit that I’m glad I did this. Was it fun? Not so much. But I’m closer to the story than I could have gotten just by knowing pepper spray hurts.

I know the panic is worse than the pain. I also know that it fades, that if you ride it out, there’s no harm done. And so I understand why police would use it freely if they felt threatened.

They’re small things. Details. But it’s the details that make a story real.

– Marcus