At age 63, Art Brew, underground writer,
gets laid off from his day job, technical writer. Not long after that his wife Brenda
gets laid off, too. She worked in an IT Help Center.
They both draw all the
unemployment they have coming, then try to live on Brew's reduced-benefit social
security income of $1,000 a month until they find jobs.
They live in Brenda's
old home place, which they are fixing up, and intend to buy from her brothers and
sister as soon as they are employed again.
The job outlook in Parker, Florida,
is not good. It's not good back in Atlanta, where they were laid off. Most of their
former co-workers are still looking for work, no pension, the 401k spent on mortgage
payments, although most of them were younger than Brew and Brenda. He got a late
start at a good job.
He had several good jobs, over the years, but didn't
seem to hold them. He spent 10 years out of 30 at the house, cooking cheap, nutritious
meals, from scratch, raising two boys who turned out to be professional bluegrass
and jam-band musicians, and writing up a storm.
In 32 years he produced a
body of work and invented a form to present it in. The body of work is his stack.
231 volumes. The form is daily typewriting. Also known as crank-lettres, enema
vérité, and the paranoia-critical method.
Brenda stuck by him through thin
and thin.
The above-ground height of his career was being a headliner at
the Underground Literary Alliance's Legends of the Underground reading,
off-off-Broadway, just months before the September 11 attack.
His book ranges
back over those years, trying to make sense of it.
The book is a success
story, and has a happy ending, if Brew sells the book, or finds a menial, dead-end
job before he and Brenda go tango uniform (tits-up).
Brew has an attitude.
He doesn't suffer fools gladly.
It has caused him trouble, up to now.
Maybe that will change. Probably it won't.
BOOK ONE--WHY AREN'T YOU AT WORK,
DADDY? contains the sections "Getting Ready," "Apprentice," and
"Journeyman." BOOK TWO--DAILY TYPEWRITING FOREVER: SOMETHING NEW UNDER
THE SUN contains the sections "Master," "The Post-Masterpiece Novel,"
a play on post-modern, "A Sabbatical Year," and "Swiss Family Two-Discouraged-Worker
Family."
Brew, a straight white male, from the south, of a certain age,
is not a racist, he is sous rature, or under erasure.
They're
trying to wash him away.
But it ain't working.
Think of the Randy
Newman song "Louisiana 1927" on the album Good Old Boys.
Brew is a good old boy. That's what Guy Lit is about. How to be a good old boy in
a society that wants strainers, company men, and fake artists. It's important to
be one for your sons, for your marriage, and for yourself.