Potter's Ashes (2)

I want a drunken hippie funeral.
I want the women to get drunk
and show their ass, the men
to get in fistfights, over ancient slights.
I want whoever eulogizes me
to excoriate organized religion.
Not lay a guilt-trip on them,
but subject them to the ridicule,
the scorn of upright, thoughtful citizens.
I want pot smoked. Beer and wine consumed.
Ardent spirits. People pissing behind bushes.
Overeating. Passing out. Lots of music
should be played. Paint a watercolor,
write a poem, give a homeless man
a handout. Come back a year later
and shit on my grave.

I remember when the winos went to liberate Ralph Waite's ashes,
from the county, in On the Nickel, and turned over the metal shelves
with all the containers full of paupers' ashes in them, or when John Goodman
and Jeff Bridges threw Steve Buscemi's ashes into the wind, and he blew back
in their faces, in The Big Lebowski, and I expect such a fiasco for myself,
if not for Potter, with Brenda stumbling into the open grave, Balder cross-threading
the lid on the coffee can, or Owen rolling a cigarette in a howling gale, like the
Miami Hurricane marching band playing the grand march from Aïda, people laughing,
people crying, people saying, "Florida Gators suck!" or either "Fuck the Semi-Holes
from Half-Assed U!" Brew's alma mater, Outstanding Senior, 1968. The only one
not pictured in the annual. Past glory. Once, when I told Owen he should make
good grades, to get ahead in life, Potter said, "Like you." He will be missed.
They threw away the mold when they made Potter Brown. To coin a phrase.
Hardly a day passes I don't think of him.

I added a poem I had written in a previous book, out of sequence, and then wrote one
that should go at the end, not here, and put them where they are to illustrate
the capriciousness of chance, its aleatory, or random nature, the fickleness of fate,
the spinning single-digit finger-puppet of destiny, sometimes I'm a prince, sometimes
I am so hateful I can't stand myself, a little wino philosophy, it's better to be shit on
than to shit on someone weaker than yourself, noblesse oblige, Potter was God's own
democrat, and dogs and children loved him, and so did I, and everyone I know.

I went by the Goodwill store,
for old time's sake (and to eat
the noon buffet at the Spiced Right barbecue),
and they had a Schwinn le tour luxe bicycle
with a 25" frame on sale for twenty-five dollars
and twenty-five cents. I paid for it, took the front wheel off,
and put it in the back seat of my rental car.
The tires were flat, but it seemed to have everything,
including toe-clips and a book rack. Taped handlebars.
I'll get a tune-up at the shop I trade with, Tucker Bikeways,
and ride it into the new millennium, like the wind.
I'll be the wind. It's a classic. I'm a throwback.
A match made in heaven. Uncle Potter's smiling on me.

I called books things like The Volcanoes of Wakulla County,
in which a defrocked archeologist throws a trowel into a musette bag
and goes off surface-collecting in a beat-up pickup truck,
like Clint Eastwood photographing covered bridges,
and if a lonely farmer's wife who looks like Meryl Streep
tries to seduce him, he says, "I am a happily married man."
Frank McCourt ended Angela's Ashes with the sentence 'Tis--
the name of his next book. I call the pamphlet after this one Taint.
Taint a pussy and it ain't an asshole, it's a perineum:
just right for Iceland.

Owen tells about the garbo who reeled up
a moray eel, and swung him at the deck.
The hook tore out of the moray's lip,
the weight ricocheted off a column, and hit the garbo
in the knee. He collapsed in agony, on the deck,
whereupon the moray slithered over and bit him on the leg.
A garbo is someone who comes down from Alabama
and fishes for a week, buys a plastic garbage can at K Mart,
fills it full of motel ice, and keeps the mingo (for vermilion)
snapper he should throw back. Driving home, he throws the can
in a side ditch, bloody ice, rotten, undersized fish, and all.
I'm glad Owen got to fish with Potter, tell stories in the Winn-Dixie,
the yuppies from Sandestin wrinkling their noses at the fish-slime odor
of Owen's tennis shoes, then fleeing when they figured out
where the smell was coming from, like the time Brew was on unemployment
in Fort Walton Beach, America's Most Patriotic City, 99% turnout for Gerald Ford's
swine flu vaccination program, and Larry said, "Oh, good, we get to pay
for the standing rib roast and king crab legs with food stamps," and Brew could say,
"Yes, that way I save my cash for beer and cigarettes."

Red Holland took his teevee show--Good Morning, Tri-States!--
drift-fishing on the New Florida Girl, and stalked Suzette,
who walked around the cabin, to opposite sides of the deck,
avoiding him, until he and his cameraman cornered her,
Red stuck his mike up, between her tits, leered at the camera, and said,
"Who says Red don't get the big ones." Suzette let out a whoop.
I thought of like Shirley Stoler chopping Alec Baldwin's fingers off in Miami Blues.
Playing the German prison commandant in Seven Beauties. Red don't know
how close he came to drawing back a stump.

We used to drive over to Santa Rosa Beach,
to visit Potter and Suzette, taking Highway 30A at Inlet Beach,
through Seagrove and Grayton Beach (this was before Seaside),
and every time we made the trip there were more high-rise condominiums,
more strip stores, more upscale tin-roofed Cracker houses with pastel sides,
gingerbread and widow's walks, shades of Key West, gentrified.
I sounded like the hitchhiker Jack Nicholson picked up
in Five Easy Pieces, dry-washing her hands and saying, "Filth."

I fixed up one of the outbuildings
at the house on Martin Lake
for a writing studio, with my typewriter,
my FM radio, the manuscripts of
my stack, self-published books and pamphlets,
little magazines from friends and fellow writer/editors,
mail art, a plastic eagle from Kinney Shoes,
a woolen pennant from a summer camp
my father went to, French Broad,
after the river, a plaster-of-Paris ashtray
my uncle made. Potter took one look at it
and dubbed it The Slave Quarters.

Dear Larry and Hazel:

I started writing poems about Potter. I'm going to make up a pamphlet, Potter's Ashes, that covers through his death, and memorial service, and a second pamphlet, Taint, about the scattering of his ashes on the Friendship. A trip that hasn't taken place yet.

I like how they're going.

I bought a Schwinn le tour luxe at the Goodwill for $25, spent $75 on a tune-up, and new cork tape, for the handlebars. So for $100 I have a restored classic.

A big (25") frame and small, hard tires. It rolls much smoother than my mountain bike.

I haven't ridden it yet. It's dark, and I wanted to take the toe-clips off. Also, the seat is up high. Higher than I could get the seat on my mountain bike without bending the seat post.

Too high for a trial run in the dark.

We went and got it in Brenda's truck. She was pleased that I am happy with it.

We watched a video last night called The Buena Vista Social Club, produced by Ry Cooder and directed by Wim Wenders. The story behind the making of the CD.

Pretty good. I love that music.

When we moved back to Delray Beach I used to listen to it, eat mangos off my own tree, cook chicken marinated in mojo criollo sauce on the charcoal grill, with black beans and yellow rice, Cuban bread, and imagine I was Papa Hemingway, the sweat rolling off me as I drank Vichy water to replenish fluids.

I love my bike. Potter is looking after me from Heaven. Or Cuba. Wherever he is. Trying to make a used-up car run a little longer. With spit and baling wire. Shit, grit, and Mother Wit.

Did I tell you Owen inherited Potter's guitar and Balder inherited his car? There were three garbage bags full of beer cans, smashed flat, in the trunk. Balder asked Suzette if he was recycling the cans, and she said no, if you had ten pounds of aluminum cans you could get around the Florida open container law.

Of course there was the smell of beer. That many empties.

One time I visited him, and he was out on the deck, staring at his car, and I asked him what he was doing, and he said, "Looking at my snapper reef."

He could imagine it on the bottom, attracting fish, no one know the LORAN coordinates but him.

All for now,

Jack

We went over to Owen and Jeannie's Christmas Day.
Owen cooked duck. Brenda stuffed them with
apples, oranges, and onion. You throw the stuffing away
(it soaks up grease), but they give the birds an interesting flavor.
A bouquet? We thought of the family in A Christmas Story
eating in the Chinese restaurant after the Bumpus's dogs
got their holiday turkey. After supper, Owen and Balder picked,
on guitar and mandolin, trading instruments. Owen's big,
and has that beard, and Potter's nose, and him playing his guitar,
which Potter wasn't able to tie to his side and take with him,
and Potter's runs--when a fiddle player steals
another fiddle player's licks, someone is sure to say,
"There ain't no shit like dogshit"--the resemblance
was painful to observe, in a way. In another way,
it is encouraging. Comforting. We live on
in the people we have influenced,
whose lives we've touched.

At Christmas, Owen would buy a sack of oysters,
and we'd shuck them and eat them on the deck, Christmas Eve.
Owen is making notes for a cookbook, and it has a section
on baked oysters. Oysters Brown is Oysters Rockefeller
with star anise instead of Pernod. Or Penrod, as Wayne called it.
He also cooks them with lemon juice and garlic, Parmesan cheese,
with jalapeño pepper and Monterey Jack, and they're run under a broiler,
rather than baked, per se. Potter and Suzette would come over,
and Potter and the boys would play music. We'd sit in folding lawn chairs,
and drink, and listen, maybe telling a story, here and there. A lot of laughter.
Gifts were exchanged. Food was cooked and eaten. Turkey, ham, a leg of lamb.
I can taste the leftovers. Once I made a cassoulet. The dogs would run in the yard,
chasing squirrels. Dylan and Daybreak. We had a bantam rooster named Sadam Hussein,
who roosted in a tree. At dusk, you'd watch him climbing up to the top
of the highest oak. The dogs knew better than to mess with him.
Potter and Suzette never spent the night. They'd drive to Lynn Haven,
and stay with Suzette's family. Often we'd see them there on Christmas Day.

Between the Gillis Brothers and James King,
or between James King and Doyle Lawson--no gig
lasts forever--Owen moved into the second outbuilding
at the house on Martin Lake and fished with Captain Cooter.
Bachelor Hall, I called it. His friends would come over and they'd
drink whiskey and shuck oysters, outside, around a fire,
throw empty beer cans in the ashes. One Christmas Day,
in Lynn Haven, Potter said the snatches of a song went through
his head. He had the tag line and the title. "Vagabonds in the Yard."
You'd hear them moving through, like Gypsies. Tinkers.
Itinerant musicians. Troubadours. Ezra Pound studying Provençal.
Skalds. Is that the Elder or the Younger Eddas?
General Sherman's irregulars, who lived off a musette bag
full of rice and chickens they could liberate. Make a purlieu
in a cast iron wash pot. We aren't bums, Ma, we're part
of a tradition. Look at Dad, with his jakeleg pamphlets.
I haven't been busted, just reverted to my permanent rank. Yardbird.

One time when I was unemployed, I drove around Florida's Forgotten Coast,
formerly Florida's Last Frontier, writing poems and stories about places I had lived,
and dug, and camped, and fished, and cooked, and eaten, and drunk, or walked
on the beach, a green crab net and red Vidalia onion sack full of speckled speeder crabs,
surf clams, cockle shells, left-handed whelk, make my famous scungilli marinara
over angel hair pasta, and sometimes I'd drive to Fort Walton Beach, then up to Niceville,
across the top of Choctawhatchee Bay, through Basin Bayou, Rocky Bayou, pottery types
named after local sites, along Highway 20 through Ebro, where the Jack Saunders School
of Fiction Writing was located, smoke jumpers, C-46s with four-bladed props,
Young Men and Fire, Old Men and Smoke, you wouldn't blow smoke
up an old trooper's ass, would you, son? And I'd stop by Suzette's house
in Santa Rosa Beach, and Potter would be outside, on the deck, staring at
his snapper reef, or taking a nap, or watching a Braves game, on teevee,
or cooking, or eating, and he'd make a pot of coffee, and we'd chat, like a couple of
househusbands.

Potter had a heart attack, and signed up for
a vocational rehab course at Gulf Coast
Community College to be an X-ray technician,
and for his English class, he had to use
the Open Computer Lab to prepare
his assignments. The proctor wasn't any use,
so he called me, and I drove out
and talked him through it. I signed up
as a special student, through the Lifelong
Learning Center, to use the laser printer,
in the computer lab, and went out every morning.
We'd have a cup of coffee in the Student Center.
Enough about me. How did you like my book?
They threw me out. The computers were for assigned
classwork only. Not personal business, by unauthorized
personnel. Interlopers. Frauds and counterfeits.
Poseurs. Bearded phonies. I suspected I was not
between jobs, I was structurally unemployed, a soldier
in the transition to a post-Cold War economy.
Cannon fodder. So was Potter. We were grist
for someone else's mill. Think of the meshing gears
in Modern Times, the Little Tramp, you have to have
a sense of humor, a sense of the absurd, Camus in his trenchcoat
looking like Kermit the Frog, or Jean-Paul Sartre, one eye
going off into space, like a lobster. You will be graded
for neatness. Attendance. No mouth-breather need apply.
Stupid people gotta eat too. I was the phony? What about
the bullfight poster and the Chianti bottle with the candle in it?
Black net stockings? Now, black fingernail polish. Poetry slams.
Multiculturalism. The same old hustle. You can't shit the shitter.
A couple of old broke-dick dogs, disillusioned with ambition,
striving, careerism, grades. Look good on your record.
What record? Potter carried in his DD-214, to the veteran counselor,
in an ammo can, and it was in tatters. Chewed, by field mice, Norway rats,
cockroaches, moths and rust corrupt, thieves break through and steal,
what was the use of paperwork? Red tape and CYA. Cover your own ass,
Camerado: I was looking for a job when I found this one. I'll be on my way.

Brenda bought a trailer in Wewa,
and Potter and Suzette would visit,
there, at Christmas. Potter's two big numbers
were "The Life of Riley" and "The Wewa Wiggle."
A vending machine at the Citgo station at the highway
selling earthworms. Dead Lakes Recreation Area.
Dead Lakes Speedway. Fastest dirt track in the South.
Larry McMurty wasn't afraid of cattle stampedes,
or rattlesnakes, he had a fear of poultry. Brenda had
a Buff Orpington rooster who turned mean. Aggressive.
He would lay in wait, and ambush her, when she came out
to feed the hens. She let them range free, rather than
keeping them penned up, although they had a chicken coop
to roost in. Protection from raccoons, possums, and the pack
of dogs belonging to the Goddamn Bumpuses. I shot him
with a pellet gun, and we had coq au vin. Chicken stew.
With rice. Pilaf, pilau, purlieu. Grits and grillades,
grits and grunts, hoecake and tomato gravy:
a Florida cracker will make do.

Brenda and Balder went to Henderson.
I stayed home to write. Brenda gave Potter a book
she and I had read, about the explosion on the Iowa,
and investigation, and cover-up. She kept saying,
"This is just like the dig," meaning the one where we
were locked out of the archeology lab, our membership
in the Order of the Blue Trowel revoked. I told her
anyone who had been in the military could identify.
The last time we talked to Potter, he and I discussed
the book. He said it was the big dick syndrome:
his ship had lain off Vietnam and leveled a mountain
with a 5" gun. Those 16-inchers were unnecessary.
Were overkill. We laughed about careerists, pricks,
asskissers. Strawbosses. Martinets. Puerile poltroons.
I never talked to him again. That's my last memory of Potter.
Laughing about the suckturds who run everything.

When I heard that Potter died,
I felt worse for my kids
than I did for myself.
He was like a second father to them.
Plus, someone they'd picked,
and fished with-and drunk,
as I no longer drank-told the same
old stories to, been told stories in return.
Shotguns, hunting dogs. A road-kill
deer meat chili, Braves games
in the lazy afternoons.
Hangovers, white liquor.
Homemade wine. He and I
once made some out of pea pods.
Lapsang Souchong tea. Tastes like bacon,
Potter said. A mead I made
from wildflower honey.
Cure what ails you.
Gout. Death and taxes.
Paperwork. He's in a better place,
I hope. Cuba. The lions playing
on the beach, the mango trees,
billfish tournaments, shooting pigeons
on the wing with the jai alai players,
drinking Papa Dobles at the Floridita.