This opens the bartender to a flurry of trouble. When his questionable neighbor, Russ Miner, leaves town for a few days to visit his sick father, he asks 'patsy' Hank to watch his pet cat, Bud. Following his release from the hospital, he sidles up to a stranger and says, 'Did you know, between you and me we only have three kidneys?' A sardonic viewpoint and grim acceptance of fate are part of his natural makeup.īut even Hank eventually has his breaking point. For example, after being beaten one night by two goons at the bar for having made a 'bad drink,' Hank loses a kidney to the injuries.

Hank tends bar six nights a week, which feeds his binge-drinking habit and gives him bad feet, and engages in an affair with Yvonne, a fellow bartender.ĭespite this seemingly mediocre existence, author Huston establishes an intoxicating first-person voice for Hank Thompson - a voice that bears both an urban neurotic charm and a keen edge of dry humor. Being a passive man with no firm goals in an aggressive and ambitious city can make for difficult circumstances. Hank was the vehicle's driver, and the psychological scars left by that accident have kept him from climbing behind the wheel ever since. Hank now finds himself paralyzed by past misfortunes and haunted by nightmares of a car crash that ended a friend's life back in California ('I remember the last time I saw Rich and I remember his face as we flipped through the air and he looked into my eyes.

You feel useful, you have friends and your parents love you. It's not the life you expected, but it's nice enough for you. You're a good guy, you're tough and you have a reputation in your neighborhood for helping people out. She left fairly quickly, though, and Hank stayed, eventually settling into an unassuming life that swallowed him whole.

He started hanging out with a different crowd and got into 'some trouble.' After six years of trying college with no degree to show for it, Hank went to New York City with a girlfriend.

He's a former high-school baseball prodigy, whose all-but-given major-league career ended with a hard slide into third base and a resulting broken leg. In Charlie Huston 's fast-paced debut novel, Caught Stealing, Henry 'Hank' Thompson is a displaced Californian living on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the year 2000.

Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston