Novel

Saturday, February 19

No, wait. Brew wasn't a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic. That was when he was on sabbatical.

When he was a grant writer, he became a senior fellow at the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).

He hadn't been busted, he had been reverted to his permanent rank. Yardbird.

He was still a PSI fellow. Now that he was free to stroll and ponder, he was more of a PSI fellow than ever.

Here are the first three columns he wrote, when he was still employed as a grant writer. For YU News Service, the parody news and disinformation syndicate for which he was Miami Bureau Chief.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Art Brew was a senior fellow at the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI), a left-wing think-tank which studied global issues from a local perspective.

Think globally, write locally.

It didn't pay very much but he got a lot of glory from it. PSI was a prestigious shop in left-wing think-tank circles, and senior fellow was a coveted position.

Indeed, Brew was something of a public intellectual, although his lecture fees were pretty low.

One of them $22.50 gigs, as Owen said.

Two 50¢ hotdogs and $20 cash.

He was no ordinary dude, he didn't have to work.

He had his name written on his shirt.

Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut. Senior fellow.

He had a gimme cap with the PSI logo on it. ¥.

Actually, Brew studied laissez-faire capitalism from the perspective of a working stiff.

He did have a job.

Grant writer at a behavioral health care center.

Senior fellow at PSI was an additional duty. Like Officer of the Day, or NCO of the Day.

Buck Sergeant of the Day.

Ha ha, there was no Buck Sergeant of the Day. A buck sergeant was the Charge of Quarters (CQ).

Brew was the CQ of his own barracks, and dayroom, a house he and Brenda were buying from her brothers and sister in Point and Shoot, Florida. The Old Home Place.

He sat in this house, in his studio, Lazaretto, or The Penalty Box, after work, and surfed the Internet, thought about issues, and wrote a daily column.

"Issues," Kerouac said, "I'm talking about sin."

To Brew, what the government, and the corporations, were doing, to the working stiff, and in his name, overseas, was sinful.

Just because he was a secular humanist didn't mean he didn't believe in sin.

Was Brew a secular humanist or a bourgeois formalist? He couldn't remember.

When Shostakovich was accused of being a bourgeois formalist, he wrote his 5th Symphony. That shut Stalin up.

Could Brew write a Shostakovich's 5th Symphony?

That was the question.

Sometimes Stalin called Shostakovich a decadent formalist

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Sometimes New York called Brew a decadent formalist. There was no such thing as a bylined column "novel," with poetry, interviews, essays, letters, book and movie reviews, including X-rated movies, redneck zines, and cookbooks like White Trash Cooking, and if there were, the audience for it would be so small as not to be commercially viable.

Brew called the genre he was writing in Guy Lit, by analogy with Chick Lit. Guy Lit conflated genres. Brew had created a new genre for himself he called daily typewriting. Also known as enema vérité, the paranoia-critical method, and stark-nakedism.

Enema vérité was what you saw on the end of the fork when you really looked.

Sometimes, to see what's on the fork you have to eat with chopsticks. Or with your fingers, like our Third World cousins. Lotta mud puddles, man.

Brew posted his columns on the worldwide web, daily, as he wrote them. In a book he called Brew's News.

Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself, Rahsaan Roland Kirk said.

Brew thought being his own publisher gave him cachet. And independence.

New York thought a book published on the worldwide web reeked of hopeless amateurism. Amateurishness. Hopelessness.

Brew had published 61 books on the worldwide web, although only 21 of them were available, now. He had taken down the other 40 when he took a job in the defense industry, with which he had security clearance and loyalty oath issues.

HUAC. Help Underserved Arts Communities. Or I'll kill you.

No, that was Support Mental Health--or I'll kill you.

Brew was now a grant writer for a community mental health center, or community behavioral health care center, as it called itself, now.

While you're up, get me a grant.

Brew was competing with faith-based organizations for the shrinking social services dollar in today's competitive budgetary arena.

It was science-based, proven models, and verifiable outcomes versus, "Know ye that our prayers are answered, for whatever happens, that's the answer." Lord Love a Duck.

Sort of like evolution versus creationism, or abstinence-only sex education versus sex education.

It was a living.

A PSI senior fellow would make do.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--In addition to Point and Shoot Institute (PSI), PSI stood for pounds per square inch.

When Brew was a boy, Pop Lanier had a Pure Oil station in the center of Delray Beach, where Jerry Seinfeld's parents now own a condominium.

Back when you used to could catch snook in downtown Delray Beach.

There was a seat out of a buckboard old men sat in, telling lies, at Pop Lanier's. A sort of a Dead-Pecker Bench.

Pop Lanier also had an air hose for customers, or for public use.

Did you hear the one about the tourists who asked the hard-of-hearing gas station attendant if he had any restrooms? The attendant thought the man said whisk brooms, and said, "No, but if you'll pull over there I'll blow it out for you."

Feel that air? That 'ere what?

Brew had an old English bicycle, with the skinny tires.

He fixed a flat on the inner tube at home and carried the wheel to Pop Lanier's to pump it up.

He started filling the tire with air.

The men on the bench, who were watching, nudged each other.

By and by the tire exploded, and Brew jumped as if shot.

The men all laughed.

They nearly fell out of the buckboard, laughing.

That was the reaction Brew got to the query letters he sent off to New York about his books.

"You can't be serious." "Surely you jest." "It is to laugh."

Brew was serious.

He didn't see what was so weird about what he proposed. Didn't they read the Internet?

A publisher who ignored the Internet was like a buggy-whip manufacturer who ignored the car.

It was like Faulkner saying the water tower in "Centaur in Brass" was "a footprint."

If you didn't see that, before you knew it there would be a footprint on your backside. You would have been walked over. While you stood there, guarding the buggy-whips.

The gatekeeper at the door.

There weren't no more doors, man. Didn't you know?