The Revolt of Jack Crevalle
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Jack crevalle means horse
jack. Compare caballo.
But caballo is related to cavalier. In French, cheval and chevalier.
Knight. Jack Crevalle was a knight errant.
Well,
he had a pisspot for a helmet. The
knight of the woeful countenance.
An
unlikely hero. A comic hero,
almost. You have to see the humor of it.
Jack
Crevalle is a nom de plume. I am using a pseudonym for a short story I am
writing as a tune-up for a novel I hope to write, after the book I am working
on now, a memoir.
Charles
Willeford once wrote a book as a novel, Something
About a Soldier, went back and changed the names to the names of real
people, and published it as autobiography.
But
he conceived of it as a novel. That's
why it read like a novel.
I
once caught a 40 lb jack on light tackle, a spinning rod with 3 lb test
line. I fought him for several hours
before I landed him. My brother Bill had
a gaff hook. That's how we got him up
over the seawall.
You
can't eat one that big. They have
ciguatera poisoning. The flesh is bloody
anyhow, and not everybody eats jack.
Niggers mostly.
But
they are an esteemed game fish, and I was proud of him. I wanted to show him off.
Would
this opening make you want to read further?
Does
it pique your curiosity?
Or is
it too postmodern, self-referential, and fancy.
Like Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan
Stew, with all its references to Dashiell Hammett, James Joyce, and Flann
O'Brien.
Does
the word nigger turn you off?
That's
how Crevalle used to talk.
Now,
he's more sensitive about using words that offend people. He doesn't use cunt either.
Well,
he'll use it to refer to a cunt, but not to a woman.
Unless
she acts like a cunt.
Hard-boiled
fiction is plainspoken. That's its
appeal.
Toni
Morrison criticized Hemingway for devaluing a character in the beginning of To Have and Have Not by calling him the nigger, but that's how Hemingway
would have thought of him.
He
was just a guy a gunfight happened around.
The gunfight, the action, was the thing, not members of the crowd,
bystanders, extras.
The extra.
A
documentary about Ben Johnson is called Third
Cowboy on the Right.
Hemingway
and Toni Morrison both won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I
think I have read everything Hemingway wrote.
I
have never completed a book by Toni Morrison.
Oprah
Winfrey either.
This
is how GIs talk. GIs, professional
athletes, cops. Construction
workers. Grunts.
Crevalle
had spent two hitches in the Air Force.
That made him eight years older than his classmates at college.
It
also made him a Vietnam-era veteran.
There
were some other Vietnam-era veterans on campus, but many of the college
students, most of the graduate students, and some of the younger professors
were in college to avoid the draft. A
deferment to go to college would keep you out of the military. Out of