Q: What genre is it?
A: Autobiography.
Q: Autobiography is fiction.
One selcts.
Edits.
Exaggerates. Forgets. Censors himself, so as not to bring calumny down on his head.
A: So you say.
What do you know about it?
Are you writing a book?
Q: I hope not. I am retired. Hors de combat.
I fought the good fight.
A: So am I.
I just watch rented movies, read library books, and gossip with Brenda about her co-workers. The ongoing conversations she has at work. The drama.
What I see on my rounds.
He went out to the library. On his bicycle.
Where’s Jack? He went out to the library. On his bicycle.
That’s what Jack Parker said when I moved back to Parker and was living alone in Brenda’s old home place, before she moved down. In Granny’s bedroom, the front bedroom, with a view of Parker Bayou, from the porch.
You can see the water from the porch, through the trees.
Q: I see a house trailer.
A: Out the kitchen window, too.
That don’t make me a bad person.
Q: Grace Metalious.
A:
I called
Harper Valley PTA.
In every town there is a creep who knows what’s going on. And he’s the only one who knows.
Q: Frank Zappa studied with Edgar Varèse.
A: Do the nasty on the White House lawn.
He said Nixon thought do the nasty meant take a shit.
Q: Nixon killed Phil Ochs. Nixon and Kissinger.
A: Gloria Steinem dated Kissinger.
They fascinated each other.
Q: Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer.
She said he needed a good swiving.
A: She was a piece of work. By her own account.
Q: Actually, you and Brenda are more like Carolyn
Chute and her husband than Grace Metalious.
The Beans of
A: Big-box stores and gentrification.
I don’t know how much of this progress we can stand.
Q: You can always move further up the country. The coast is always bad.
Highway 98 is
rerouted to make way for
A: And I’m writing about the Dixie Belle Motel.
|
|
|
For the Gulf
Q: You never should have given up that columnist job.
What outlet do you have for your writing now?
A: Why, The Daily Bulletin, of course.
Q: Oh, yea. Your cult following. The Buzzard Cult.
A: High-one-, low-two-figures.
