Brew's theme, stated in ten words or less,
was, "Is you is or is you ain't
an existentialist?" He'd been living
a double life, short-changing his employer.
Now, his conscience was clear.
He'd come out in the open, erect,
and fully exposed. Rather than going,
or staying, underground.
Big as you please.
What you see
is what you get.

Jack Neff and I used to Sunday-paint
at Butts Farms bean platform, where
Town Center Mall and Destroying Angel
Patio Homes now stand. My grandfather
hunted quail at Boca Raton Field, after it closed,
but before there was a Bible Conference, or
Florida Atlantic University. Man, they did not want
the collected papers of Theodore Pratt, local author,
who wrote The Barefoot Mailman and several paperback originals
featuring a character named Handsome. Just like FSU didn't want
a School of Chiropractic Medicine. What do they think of
an English Department that teaches genre studies? Where
the head of the department won a contest to write
a sequel to The Potboiler? A. k. a. The Godfather.
As Christopher Walken said when Dennis Hopper told him
his grandmother in Sicily slept with an Ethiopian, and he had
a little eggplant in him, "Come again?" "I beg your pardon?"

Brenda says Ollie must have thought
I was just some fat guy who sat
on the sofa listening to Dread Clampitt
with earplugs in his ears. A stage father,
proud of his kids, but talentless.
Et voilà, I'm in show business too.
The Madcap Titan of the Dustbin.

Bryan was breaking in
a trainee at The Red Bar.
There are two good days
in a job: the first day
and the last. And New Year's Eve
if you're a musician or a table-waiter.

I wake up, without shame.
It's Friday. All I have to do today
is write about my trip to Grayton Beach,
Blue Mountain Beach, Santa Rosa Beach,
and Point Washington yesterday, to see Bryan Hand,
Billie Gaffrey, Woodie Long and Dot, and Eileen West
and Darcy Jones, give them a copy of 32 Short Reviews
of BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS and the flier A Tray
of Portugaises, where they will recognize the Acme Oyster Bar
at Baytowne Wharf, in Sandestin, where Dread Clampitt play.

If I hadn't been a writer
I could have become a telephone solicitor
for the state troopers, describing levels of
support to potential donors. Gold, Silver, Bronze.
"Do you have Lead?" I asked. Do you know what?
They were willing to accept $15, given my current circumstances.
I promised that this time I would really send the amount I pledged
(last year I had philanthropy fatigue, and did not fulfill my obligation).
The professional solicitor thanked me, and I said, "It's all for the troopers,
right?" Getting my sarcastic dig in. Making myself feel superior. One time
a bill collector, to whom I remarked, "You've got a sweet job, fellow,"
screamed at me, "AT LEAST I PAY MY BILLS." I said I did too,
eventually, but when someone spoke to me disrespectfully, I took their name
out of the hat for a month or two. I said, "I have debtor's leverage, you see."
Kiss my ass, kimo sabe, I bought a boat, I'm going out to sea. Heigh-ho, Silver.

One reviewer said that, before Miami Blues came out,
Charles Willeford was "...destined for oblivion, lacking even
cult status." Do not pass Go, go not collect $200.
I have a cult, though. The Buzzard Cult. Named after
the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement
that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after
European contact. A mortuary complex, involved with
interment of the dead. Let raptorial birds pick the skeletons clean.
Dermestid beetles. My books are like an explosion in a charnel house.
From stale-fart gasses. Putrefaction. The Madcap Titan of the Dustbin.
Debris, filth, the cast-off, the useless. A bricoleur, or knacker in an abattoir,
gets by on grits and grunts, like the conchs in the keys during the Depression.
Key West is from Cayo Hueso. Ossuary. Isle of Bones.