Characters in Remember When, 4. Are we the bad guys?

One thing that emerged as I was pouring out the story that became Remember When was that the conflict that mattered in the telling was one of a personal nature and circumstances. There was no essential Us vs. Them to the story itself. That said, there certainly were bad guys as part of it all.

The two identifiable bad guys played very different roles, though. One was the Distant Foe (or Objective), one whose direct actions were rarely portrayed. That would be Guillermo Restrepo. He's first seen in a flashback two years previous to the time of the story, still rising inside the Medellin Cartel structure but also laying the groundwork for making a play to have an advantage over his fellows. In many ways, he's a mirror of the Main Character in the story. Guillermo doesn't create identities; he is simply so unknown as he is that he can be himself. Oh, and kill anyone who can recognize him that isn't loyal to him or unable to harm him. He's the embodiment of how hard it was to gain positive identification on any of the Drug Lords of the era who didn't let themselves become public figures, didn't brag, and stayed in places where outsiders didn't interact with them.

As such, he's described mostly by what effect his actions have upon others. There is some hint as to his looks at time, and one precise reference to his facial hair or lack thereof, but it is also one of the key elements to the story that he wasn't very memorable in appearance or manner. An attributable photograph would have identified him, but as the protagonists lacked that, it was only possible to know it was him if a trained observer knew to look for the very precise visual cues of his features. Those being things that an onlooker wouldn't notice.

The other identifiable bad guy in the tale was a guy who had made part of the climb into being a player at the local level on the Distribution side of things. A bit of a loser in some ways, or at least a slow achiever, he has made exactly one smart choice in recent times: to be one of the first of the L.A. distribution middle level to sign on with Guillermo's faction and his new way of doing business through Panamanian banks rather than trying to launder the profits inside the U.S.A. He has also become, by his own standards, rich by doing so. Not bad as an achievement, for a past-his-prime Surfer Joe-sort of fellow. Which is how he is referred to throughout the story. He buys clothes, and cars, that are way too fancy for the lifestyle he's capable of living, and he indulges his desire to be one of the "cool people" by ingratiating himself thoroughly into the Music (and likely Movies / Television) Scene in L.A. That much blow buys a -lot- of temporary friends.

Unfortunately for Joe, that much cocaine running through his fingers also proved impossible for him to keep his own nose out of. A moderately competent Santa Monica thug with the basic skills of being a gangster, and hiring others to be gangsters that worked for him, was pretty far off his best game by the time of the story. Unstated in all this was any precise description of his build, but there were a lot of mannerisms and some physical descriptions mentioned about him. By an act of random public humiliation at the hands of Sherri, and the paranoid fixation memory that so much cocaine induces in a person, he also became the Close Foe, the Active Antagonist of the story. This meant he got a lot of time in the later parts of the story. One amusing effect of this was revealed during the Critical Readings while the novella was being edited... Women readers had a very different, earlier, and far far more visceral reaction to Joe as a character than Men did. They may have thought he was an interesting character, or important to the story, or even tried to fill in some of the blanks about him... but in reacting -to- him, it was almost 100%... hate. In their reports, Joe was pure scum.

I'm kind of proud they felt that way about him.

How did these two characters work for you as reader? Did they "live"? Did you react to either or both of them? Do feel free to say so in the comments!