Novel

Friday, February 18

Brew filled out his time sheet, made two copies of his letter of resignation, gave the original and two copies and the time sheet to his bossman after lunch, and left.

In his letter of resignation he said he wanted to spend more time with his family and pursue other career opportunities.

He thought he'd go by the Eileen West Gallery, in Point Washington, on the way home and see the current show. He was not able to go to the opening, Saturday, because he was at the book fair.

But he'd been there several times, back when it was the Toulouse Women Gallery.

The two loose women were Darcy and Dawn. Darcy now had her cottage framing operation out back. Brew owed Darcy $20 for a family portrait she had framed for them. "Musicmakers." Their neighbor, Jody, painted it, from a photograph.

The first show Brew remembered attending there was "Margo Hammond: Recent Works on Paper." Watercolors.

Brew wrote a book about going to the show he called ART BREW: RECENT WORKS ON THE WORLDWIDE WEB. He posted the book at The Daily Bugle, the web site he gave himself in Atlanta when he bought a house in Norcross and signed a 30-year mortgage. At age 59.

He went to Franko Jackson's one-man show, of memory paintings, and CD Release Party, of Washboard Jackson's Greatest Hits. Balder and Owen both play on it.

One time he called a book GREATEST HITS BOXED SET: A PRETTY FAIR COUNTRY WRITER IN A SUBGENRE FILLED WITH SECOND-RATERS. Now, he didn't feel the need to knock second-raters.

Maybe he would go by Woodie Long's Gallery of Folk Art after he left Eileen's.

One Christmas, at Pretty Michelle's, Woodie brought a pot of beet tops, and Brew realized he wasn't a beat poet, he was a beet poet: all he wanted to do was live where he could eat mullet he caught with a cast net and grow beets, Kohlrabi, and Swiss chard in his garden.

And now he did. Also hear Dread Clampitt on the weekends at The Red Bar.

How many bluegrass bands would let a conga player sit in with them?

Them white boys swing.

That Christmas, James King heard Owen was looking for a job playing fiddle with another band and fired him.

Woodie told him, "I always liked to get fired."

Brew hadn't been fired, he had been hassled into quitting. So he couldn't draw unemployment.

It had happened to him before.

Hell, when the defense contractor got rid of him they laid him off for lack of work, so he could draw unemployment, and gave him two weeks' pay in lieu of notice.

Owen and Balder used to play with Margo Hammond's kids, Bronwyn, Savage, and Josh Bell, and Mike Jones's daughter, Darcy, at bluegrass festivals, when they were all little. They grew up seeing each other at festivals.

Bronwyn said they called themselves Children of the Dirt.

She has two kids, Darcy is pregnant, Owen and Jean have Ella Blue.

My chronicle thus has a longitudinal dimension, like Trollope's. Born, died, in-the-service.

President Bush talks about the Ownership Society.

If you don't own anything, you own your own poverty, illness, inadequate education for your kids, and so forth. Low old-age pension, if you paid enough in. Many poor people didn't.

Uncle Potter worked as a deckhand, for example, on the New Florida Girl, out of East Pass Marina, in Destin.

He had no old age pension.

He had no health insurance.

He owned no house.

He had never had a telephone in his name, or a life insurance policy, after he got out of the Navy. His brothers and sisters chipped in to have him cremated.

He "owned" a Martin guitar and a 1987 Chevy Caprice Classic with a plastic bag of empty beer cans in the trunk to get around the Florida open-container law, calling himself a scrap-metal recycler.

Potter belonged to the Reciprocity, or Exchange Society. He gave you fish, you gave him deer meat, or goose sausage. Life was a Kula ring for Uncle Potter.

Brew studied exchange, like the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Economic anthropology is about the exchange of goods and services, linguistics is about the exchange of messages, kinship is about the exchange of women.

Women are chattel property?

What do you think you are, friend?

You are expendable. Cannon fodder. Grist for George Bush's Ownership Society mill.

Brew liquefied his assets. While he still could.

He needed a year's income now more than he needed $750 a month for 60 months two-and-a-half years from now. What could you do with that?

Besides, he could be dead in two-and-a-half years. Dead from stress.