Venice

Venice has a public beach, and an inlet, with jetties.

I remember driving through Venice once, from north to south, and going over a bridge. The water was beautiful. It made me wonder about growing up there.

If I were writing a book about driving along the Gulf Coast, I would come into Venice from the south, on Tamiami Trail.

I think I was there in 1986. 20 years ago. I imagine there have been some changes since then.

I knew a person from Venice. His father was a mullet fisherman.

What a life--to grow up a mullet fisherman's son, in Venice. And then become a mail-art and rubber-stamp artist.

I was at a reading at the Gallery Above in Panama City last night and Lisa Jankowski read a piece by Karen Elliot about Stewart Home.

It might have been Stewart Home writing as Karen Elliot about himself.

Karen Elliot is a mail art name several mail art artists have used, or written as.

The man I met who was from Venice was named T. B. McGee.

I met him at a mail art conference in Tarpon Springs hosted by John Pyros.

John Pyros hosted a small press conference in Tarpon Springs, then a mail art conference. Did he host a zine conference after the mail art conference I didn't hear about? Did he lose energy for the cause, after hosting the small press conference and the mail art conference?

I don't think there was anyone at the Gallery Above who knew who Stewart Home and Karen Elliot were, except Matty Jankowski, Lisa's husband, and possibly Chris Merriam, the gallery owner.

Why would anyone know?

Brenda and I drove to Tarpon Springs for the mail art conference and stayed at the same motel I had stayed at when I took the boys with me to the small press conference. Brenda was out of town on business on that trip.

This time, my mother watched the boys, to give me and Brenda a weekend by ourselves.

We ate at Pappas's, a restaurant down by the sponge docks.

Was this a rotation or a repetition?

I think of Binx Bolling tooling down to the coast in his MG with a secretary beside him. One he hasn't had an affair with yet. An Alabama girl.

Kerouac sold the tract house he was living in in St. Pete and moved back up north.

Then he changed his mind and moved back to Florida.

He bought the house next door to the house he had sold.

When we checked into the motel, we met McGee and the woman he was traveling with in the lobby. The woman knew more about mail art than he did, and had not heard of me. She was aloof, I thought, although he was open and friendly.

Maybe she was just shy.

I gave them one of my books, Saturday night, after the conference. Evil Genius, I think.

In it, I corresponded with some of the big names in the field, and they addressed me as an equal, a worthy person, a mensch. I looked bigger in her eyes Sunday morning.

McGee said she had stayed up half the night reading the book.

Later, McGee sent me a rubber stamp of a mullet.

I used to put a mullet impression on envelopes.

I also had a rubber stamp of myself that Frannie Mae Rutkovsky carved, and mailed me.

Later--much later--Brenda bought an ocean alphabet for Ella Blue, and asked me to add to it an entry on Mullet - The Fish that Leaps.

That's how you translate mullet in French. The fish that leaps.

I tilted my mullet stamp, as if it were jumping, stamped it, and wrote an entry.

This grew into Florida Cracker: A Bestiary.