When Old Folks got laid off by Suent Scientific,
in Atlanta, he got ten weeks separation pay, 26 weeks of unemployment, and one 13-week
extension.
He went on early, reduced-benefit social security.
He
moved into Brenda's old home place in Parker and started fixing it up. They would
buy it from her siblings after Wayne's estate had been settled.
Brenda stayed
behind to sell their house in Atlanta and work until she got laid off, so she could
draw 39-weeks of unemployment, too.
Old Folks was on sabbatical. Brenda was
on sabbatical. Brenda planted heritage-seed Seminole Indian pumpkins. Old Folks wrote.
Swiss Family Two-Discouraged-Worker Family, Old Folks called themselves, after their
benefits ran out, and they had to look for jobs.
Finding two good jobs in
Panama City with President Bush in office was like Hercules shoveling shit out of
the Augean stables.
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But, oh, when Old Folks was on sabbatical.
Old Folks called himself
a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic.
He wrote a book
called A Wine Tour of Parker, Florida.
It was like Zora Neale Hurston
going into the turpentine camps and jook joints around Great Depression Florida,
collecting folks tales, toasts, and myth. Back when she was a student of Franz Boas.
Old Folks was trained as an anthropologist himself.
He went into bars like
the Highway Bar, across from the wood truck gate, at the paper mill. A bar called
Toe Jam's, where Pitts Avenue meets Highway 98.
When Potter was seine-fishing on the Friendship, Suzette worked as a barmaid
in the Highway Bar.
Her father was the base commander at Tyndall AFB.
Acting out.
Potter said he went in the Highway Bar one time, high on LSD,
and everybody had an intense, "I cut you bad" aura around his head. Even
the women.
Working in a place like that must make you tired.
* * *
When Old Folks went into bars like that and started making notes in a composition
book, people wanted to know what he was doing.
Was he from the Health Department?
The Department of Juvenile Justice?
When Old Folks told them he was writing
a book called A Wine Tour of Parker, Florida, they wanted to know why.
Anybody who drank in the Highway Bar knew where it was, and what it was like, and
anybody who didn't, didn't want to.
"For my own personal satisfaction,"
Old Folks said.
That was like saying, "None of your goddamned business."
You could get in a fight saying, "For my own personal satisfaction."
Who did you think you were? Stephen King?
The Highway Bar had a screw-top
jug wine in a white, a red, and a rosé.
It was sold by the glass. For the
rosé, think of the spit jar in Sideways being emptied back into a bottle at
the end of the night.
* * *
The last place Old Folks worked was at a community behavioral health care
center in North Walton County, where Suzette was the Clinical Director.
He
would go in sober as a judge, and everyone would have an intense aura of fear and
loathing around their heads. Even the women.
It was because President Bush
and Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, and the worst governor since Claude Kirk,
had cut all their money off, and they were competing for grants funds where a nigger
preacher would get preferential treatment for being a faith-based organization. Or
a white fundamentalist preacher whose idea of a cure for alcoholism was handling
snakes.
It made Old Folks tired.
He wrote the grant applications.
At the same time as there was less money in the pot, the need was greater. There
was more spouse abuse, child abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and mental illness,
including, in North Walton County, an epidemic of meth labs, meth cooking in motel
rooms, meth production in houses with young children present.