Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound’
They may share a name and a flair for facial hair, but the two Lee Raybons could not be more different.
At least that’s how Lee Jr. feels. In this episode, airing back-to-back with the season premiere, Lee spends some time with his old man. As little as possible, to be exact. He wants nothing to do with this guy, he has no plans to take care of him in his old age, and he gives him until the end of the day to make arrangements and clear out.
By the sound of it, it’s hard to blame him for resenting his father, who proves his grifter bona fides by revealing his senile dementia was just an act. Lee Jr. recounts several scams and side hustles Lee Sr. ran to supplement his income as a bogus preacher, from peddling pornographic books to having his own son help him sell fake baseball cards. Indeed, as soon as our disgusted truthstorian departs, Lee Sr. — who prefers to be called Frog, a nickname he says he earned in Vietnam — charms his son’s employees and neighbors into giving up the name of his granddaughter, which Lee Jr. pointedly refused to give him.
Before long, he shows up at Francis’ school after classes. But she tells this man who introduces himself as her granddad, “My granddad’s dead.” This tells him that his son really would prefer it if he were.
Lee Jr. spends his day trying to make things right for Ginger, the perfectly nice public defender whose life he jeopardized by falling for the rupidoop last episode. She forgives him for that — it wouldn’t be the rupidoop if it didn’t work on someone, she rationalizes — but the prospect of his continued “help” makes her even more jittery and paranoid than she already is.
Ginger winds up taking matters into her own hands, or rather feet. She hears from a colleague that Pookie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a recidivist robber with a foot fetish, is headed to Boontill Prison, where her client Mekko Dean was last seen. Managing to be both awkward and dominant simultaneously, which is no mean feat, Ginger teases Pookie with increasingly revealing glimpses of one high-heeled foot. She makes him promise to dig up any information he can on Mekko once he’s inside, then lets him have a full mouthful of toes to seal the deal. She staggers away, one-shoed but slightly less panicked.
As for Lee, he spends his day in the company of an even more colorful character. After first attempting to placate his pal Marty, who is now his managing editor at the Heartland Press, Lee makes his way to a strip club where Boontill guards are known to hang out. He finds the location by charming the proverbial pants off a gas station mart clerk (Colleen Elizabeth Miller) who handles his beef jerky in an unmistakably provocative fashion.
But that’s Lee for you, making friends wherever he goes. He almost instantaneously strikes up a rapport with a recently fired corrections officer with the improbable name of Chili Franks (a delightfully unhinged Paul Schneider). His hair is a thistle of frosted tips, his uniform is still on regardless of his actual employment status, he has a reputation for being a depressive sort … and he makes the best cheeseburgers you’ve ever had. Or so he insists, anyway, when he invites Lee back to his place to keep their conversation going.
By now, Lee has learned that the officer who menaced him and Ginger is named McMann — he saw a shirtless photo of him in a charity calendar. (The guy’s a slab of beef.) Over a long, drunken, cringe-inducing evening, Chili tells Lee that McMann is the unofficial boss of the guards and fired him for reasons he doesn’t specify.
At one point, Chili grabs a shotgun and appears ready to kill himself over it. But when Lee reveals he’s a reporter out to take powerful people like McMann down, Chili suggests they go out for more beers and instead drives Lee to McMann’s house. The ex-guard sees this as his chance to get back in the boss’s good graces.
In the episode’s funniest sight gag, Lee flees into the trees surrounding McMann’s house, dodging shotgun blasts … only to discover that every tree he hides behind has a motion-activated floodlight rigged to it, revealing his location over and over and over. It’s like something out of “Coyote vs. Acme.”
But Lee learns two valuable lessons before he makes his escape. First, when McMann screams “Where’s Mekko?” through the darkness, Lee realizes the guards don’t know where the guy is any more than he and Ginger do. Second, when McMann executes Chili for screwing up, Lee has proof, if he needed any more, that the corrections officers he has crossed are brutal killers.
Only two episodes down, Lee is already in deep. A powerful law enforcement officer whose name and face Lee knows has just tried and failed to murder him, then murdered someone else while he watched — that’s not the kind of thing you let slide if you’re in the murdering business. Suddenly, Lee Sr. doesn’t seem like the worst person who could show up at that bookstore’s front door, and we’ve got a real thriller on our hands.
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