Road to 1980

Five months and not quite three weeks into the year 1980, Mount St. Helen let the world know what a big bang really is.

Yet for all its fury, the volcano’s eruption wasn’t the loudest or the fieriest event that the year would see.

Among other things, 1980 gave us the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the Abscam scandal’s snaring of a U.S. senator and six Congressmen, interest rates on home mortgages rising as high as 15 percent and John Lennon getting gunned down by a crazed fan.

And in November of that year, Ronald Reagan would usher in the era of the “me generation” by defeating Jimmy Carter and becoming the 40th U.S. president.

“It struck me as a fascinating time to be voting for the first time,” says Spokane novelist Jess Walter.

Which, he says, is one of the main reasons why he picked 1980 as the year in which to set his latest novel, “Citizen Vince” (Regan Books, 304 pages, $24.95).

Already attracting positive attention from critics across the country, “Citizen Vince” tells the story of an ordinary guy, a Spokane doughnut maker, who is excited about the upcoming election. Turns out he has never voted before.

And the why of that is what makes “Citizen Vince” go: Vince is actually Marty Hagen, a former low-level New York hood and career criminal who has been sequestered in Spokane as part of the federal witness-protection program. A doughnut maker by day, Vince hasn’t left his bad habits behind. He makes money on the side by selling a bit of pot and working a credit-card scam.

When a shark-eyed, gun-toting stranger from back East shows up, looking to horn in on Vince’s off-the-book businesses, things get progressively interesting – and dangerous.

Throughout it all, though, Vince never loses interest in the election. New to the process that most of us take for granted, and someone who is able to vote only because he has been given a new identity, he never stops asking the appropriate questions.

“See, what I’m trying to figure out,” Vince asks his shepherd in the U.S. Marshall’s office. “David, how do you know who to vote for?”

Walter, who was a freshman at East Valley High School in 1980, first hatched the idea for “Citizen Vince” several years ago as a screenplay. The author of two previous novels, as well as a number of nonfiction works (including the critically acclaimed 1995 book “Every Knee Shall Bow”), Walter typically writes what he knows best.

And what he knows as well as anyone is Spokane.

“Since I wanted to write it as a screenplay, I honestly thought of all the places that were shuttered that I could use to shoot,” Walter says. “I figured we could shoot exteriors of the Doughnut Parade (the store on North Hamilton, which is still open). We’ve got Sam’s Pit (on East Second, long closed), and then we’ve got the motels on Sunset Boulevard, right there at the bottom of the hill. Those places just cry out, ‘L.A. noir.’ “

Those are just the main locations. Walter also puts the reader, among other places, on Sprague Avenue in front of the former newsstand P.M. Jacoy’s, in Vince’s apartment “on the flats below the South Hill,” outside Casey’s Restaurant (on North Monroe) and in the bar of the Ridpath Hotel.

Walter took readers on a tour of the Lilac City in both his previous novels, 2001’s “Over Tumbled Graves” and 2003’s “Land of the Blind.” But this time he is more concerned with the city as it existed in 1980.

Or, more correctly stated, as it exists in his own personal version of 1980.

“I’m already waiting for people to come up to me and say, ‘That’s not what Sam’s Pit was like!’ ” Walter says. “But it’s kind of the place that I remember.”

His memories of the former barbecue eatery, which attracted the occasional attention from the police, dates from the days when he covered the cops beat for The Spokesman-Review. It was during those same days that Walter got to know some of the witness-protection guys whose real-life stories he borrowed as models for Vince’s fictional experiences.

“It turned out that Spokane was a really good city for them,” Walter says. “They ended up sending a half a dozen guys here. It was big enough that they could sort of blend in, and it was so isolated they didn’t think these guys would get in trouble.”

Some did, others didn’t. None, as far as Walter knows, obsessed over voting. Not even in the election of 1980, which paired incumbent Democrat Carter against the Republican challenger Reagan and which marked the end of one thing (the ‘60s) and yet not quite the beginning of something else.

“If I was setting a novel in the early ‘60s, I would just get this magical impression, almost like a filmmaker,” he says. “You’d have these great props.” Cars with big fins, for example.

“In 1980, it was K cars,” Walter says. “Technology is on its way, but it hasn’t really gotten there yet, so everything is smaller and more cheaply made. It’s this period of American austerity because inflation is so awful, and it’s the pivot in which we turned to selfishness and cynicism and open corruption instead of hidden corruption.”

If that in itself sounds cynical, then Walter is quick to correct the perception.

“To me, it’s really kind of earnest, wholesome novel because it’s sort of about our social contract, if anything,” he says. “And 1980 just seemed like the perfect election to portray that.”