When Old Folks got fired for stealing
from the department store in North Carolina, and moved into the back bedroom of Brenda's
mother's house, in Parker, he found a job as a technical writer in Fort Walton Beach.
Potter, who was living with Suzette in a rented A-frame house on Choctawhatchee Bay,
helped him move his refrigerator, and what little furniture they had, into a house
Old Folks found to rent in the oldest subdivision of Fort Walton, Ocean City.
The neighborhood was enlisted military dependents and old retired couples raising
their divorced daughter's kid, while she worked as a waitress or a beauty operator.
Brenda hated the place, but it was the best that Old Folks could do.
Brenda
was at home, taking care of Owen, then at home, nursing Balder and taking care of
Owen.
Old Folks was at work, or at home, drinking, after work. He wrote
at work, so this gave him more time to drink, after work.
Then, when he lost
his job, through the Gerald Ford stagflation, he stayed at home and drank all day,
too.
* * *
Potter was taking a CETA Program bricklaying course at Okaloosa-Walton Community
College, drawing the GI Bill, drawing unemployment, laying bricks, off the books,
and playing music with the Crooked Smilin' String Band on weekends.
Sometimes
on the way home from school he would stop by the house and pick with Brenda, play
with Owen. This was before Balder was born, when Old Folks was still working.
Most weekends Old Folks, Brenda, and Owen would go out to Potter and Suzette's, to
cook and eat, tell stories and play or listen to music. Drink.
* * *
Brenda kept chickens, and on Sunday mornings, Old Folks and Brenda and Owen
would go out and get bags of grass clippings, to put in her chicken pen.
The chickens loved to scratch through the grass clippings for bugs.
The retired
military NCOs and officers kept their lawns neatly trimmed, like a parade ground.
They weeded the fire lanes. Every week was Area Beautification Week.
Fort
Walton Beach called itself America's Most Patriotic City. They had a 99% participation
in the swine flu immunization program. Even after it got out that the vaccine was
defective, and was killing old people.
Living in Fort Walton Beach was like
living at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.
Oppressive, if you weren't
a theoretical physicist.
Oppressive if you were.
* * *
One time Larry and Hazel and Charly visited, when Old Folks was out of work,
and on food stamps.
In the A&P, Old Folks said to Larry, "Yes, I
like to spend my food stamps on king crab legs and standing rib roasts. That leaves
my unemployment free for cigarettes and whiskey."
The man behind them
in the checkout line, a retired military person who'd been feeding at the public
trough for 40 or 50 years, became apoplectic.
Not often, but sometimes being
poor white trash was almost as good as being black. He could see why younger white
people wore their baseball caps on sideways and baggy shorts and called each other
"my nigger," like Vince Vaughn in the hip-hop La Dolce Vita, Be Cool.
Bling bling.
* * *
Larry and Hazel later told Old Folks they thought he was dying, on that visit.
He was dying.
But he quit drinking and got better.
He got another
30 years of writing in.
Be 30 years in 2007. November 11.
* * *
One night Old Folks was walking back from the A&P, where he went to get
two tall six-packs of beer, and out of every house a blue light was emanating, and
everyone was watching television, and they were all watching the same thing, a movie-of-the-week.
The Stepford Wives.
Old Folks got a good laugh out of that.
* * *
Old Folks had bootlegged a cable over from the neighbor's house and they
got cable now, and Brenda could watch movies at home, cleaning house. Back then,
they would play the same movie, over and over.
One Brenda watched was The
Homecoming, based on Harold Pinter's play.
Old Folks just ordered it
from Netflix, to screen again, remind him of the good old days.
The Goodle
Days, as John Hartford says.
* * *
When Old Folks found out IBM was damning him with faint praise, in Delray
Beach, and moved back to Northwest Florida, to look for work, one of the places he
looked was Fort Walton Beach, but the city had such bad vibes for him, when a chance
to live in the trailer behind Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne came up, rent-free if
he would furnish it, he jumped at the chance, and that limited his job search area
to Panama City, Tyndall AFB, and Panama City Beach.
* * *
When one of the co-publishers of Coastal Homes & Lifestyles: Celebrating
Life on the Emerald Coast, Kris Wheeler, met Old Folks--the magazine did a spread
on Dread Clampitt--he knew who he was.
He had looked up Hunter S. Thompson
writing for the Playground Daily News and got a hit on Old Folks's discussion
of the topic at The Daily Bulletin, where Old Folks told about Thompson writing
wrestling promotion when he was stationed at Eglin AFB, working as a sportswriter
on the base newspaper, the Eglin Eagle.
Old Folks guessed that OLD
FOLKS AT HOME was a celebration of an alternative coastal lifestyle, that of the
good old boy, or member of the mullet culture, watching his paradise disappear, unable
to do anything about it but piss and moan, as it slowly disappeared, out from under
him.
Well, he could write books about it, like William Faulkner calling the
water tower in The Town "a footprint."
Old Folks called
the water tower at Sandestin in 1975 a footprint.
He knew what it portended,
then.
Goodbye, mullet culture. An elegy for a disappearing way of life.