Q: No retirement for the artist.
A: Ornette Coleman said, “You’re born, you learn something to do, you work, you die.”
Q: Danielle Ate the
A: If you do that you’ll work until you die.
The family is how they keep you working.
The Full Catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek said.
“So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe."
Q: Briefcase.
A: Commuter train.
Madison Avenue. Wall Street.
A hat like
Leonardo DiCaprio in
An affair.
A mistress.
Tacky.
Ben Johnson called it tacky behavior in The Last Picture Show.
Q: That’s funny.
You thinking Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegur, Jr. were tacky.
A: They were bad examples.
You might as well be George Costanza’s father in Del Boca Vista, warring with the other members of the condo association.
Q: I bet you think Richard Yates was tacky.
A: Fucking coeds.
Frederick Exley.
Wanting to put his tongue on the fillings in Gloria Stemem’s molars.
Q: Larry said, “I ONLY FUCK MY WIFE.”
A: Larry isn’t tacky. Larry is my hero. Do you know the overtime he worked?
Q: I like to think of you and Larry at Jazz Fest ’93 laughing about what they taught you in the Anthropology Department at Tulane in 1970.
A: I wore the wrong hat. To Jazz Fest.
I wore a jipijapa hat with a brightly-colored raw-silk band. I should have worn my gimme-cap from B & B Feed & Seed with the anatomically-correct boar hog on the front.
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Q: Why was it the wrong hat?
A: The feminists were integrating the men’s bathroom to protest the longer lines for the women’s bathroom.
I should have gone into the women’s bathroom with my boar-hog hat on and pissed a big pounding stream with the door of the stall open for all to hear.
Q: Your legs are fish-belly white.
I am blinded by your whiteness.
A: I can’t help being white.
It don’t make me a bad person.
Q: That’s what you and Larry were laughing about.
Being white made you a bad person.
A: Yes.
The PhD Mystique.
We can’t tell you why you failed because then we’d have to tell you.
Q: And then the minorities and women went along with it.
A: It was to their advantage to.
That’s what was so funny.
