Novel

Sunday, February 20

One weekend after Brew got on permanent with IBM, he and Brenda threw the secondhand yellow fiberglass canoe Brew bought out of the paper for $75 on the roof rack on the top of the family car, a Ford Ranger pickup truck with a camper cap on the back, invited Johnny and Sara Casebolt along, to play with Owen and Balder, and took off to go camping. It was a holiday weekend, circa 1984.

Johnny Casebolt couldn't come, so it was just Owen and Sara, who were the same age, and Balder, who was three years younger.

Brew and Brenda were nigger-rich.

After working as students, then Brenda being at home with Owen and Balder, nursing them, then Brenda working at a minimum wage job as an archeologist for the state, OPS (temporary, no benefits), and Brew working as a laborer, when he wasn't out of work, then Brew working as a clerk in a bank, then Brew being the houseperson in the home, after Screed came out, Brenda got on as a technical instructor with Mitel, Brew was hired as an associate information developer for IBM, Brew's grandparents died and left him enough money to buy their house from the estate, and they had a paid-for house and an income from a mortgage on The Cottage, a hovel behind Brew's grandparents' house his grandfather had sold them for $15,000 on an agreement for deed, which Brew sold to a friend and took back a mortgage on when they moved into the main house, Tarrymore.

Brew had gone from living in a hovel to being a slumlord in one fell swoop. A reversal in fortune. Like writing a bestseller.

Or quitting your job as a grant writer and giving yourself an LDA grant.

They didn't have reservations anywhere, they just headed out, thinking they would stop at a campground along the way.

They headed north, towards Lake Okeechobee, then west at Belle Glade, towards Clewiston, rather than east, towards Pahokee, around the lake.

"Let Me Show You My Pahokee." "Clewiston Is for Lovers."

Those were the names of two columns Brew wrote when he was at the house, between the bank and IBM, and his income was $25 a week from writing a column and a book review every week for his hometown paper, the Delray Beach News-Journal, $10 for the column and $15 for the book review.

I wonder what Jeff Klinkenberg gets? I wonder what Al Burt gets?

Brew pulled into the Lykes Brothers campground on Fisheating Creek, near Palmdale.

All the campsites had been reserved in advance for months, but the campground had just had a cancellation, and Brew and party got a campsite on the water, where they could pull the canoe up on a sand beach in front of their tent.

When you're rich, things go for you. Luck breaks your way.

Brew and Brenda set up the tents, the propane stove, the camp table, and sat in two folding lawn chairs watching the kids paddle the canoe, swim, and swing out over the creek on a rope, then drop into the water. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting.

By and by Brew walked up the road to a country store and bought two sirloin steaks the size of motorcycle seats and cooked them on the grill. The kids were hungry, from swimming.

They had folding lawn chairs for the kids, too.

They ate their steaks and looked out at a buzzard rookery across the creek from their campsite, the cypress trees stained white from buzzard droppings.

It was like the buzzard rookery in the Errol Morris movie Vernon, Florida. Nub City. Guy in there caught a possum and was going to sell him at the Possum Festival in Wausau.

Maybe someone will make a movie of DRAGGING UP.

I don't know the termology but I have lived it.

The next day, Brew and Brenda walked down Highway 27 to the Cypress Knee Museum.

He had seen signs for the place, of course. It was an institution, like Silver Springs or Cypress Gardens. On a low-rent scale.

But Brew tended to avoid monkey jungles and snake farms, alligator farms and parrot jungles. They were depressing. Unless he had a newspaper column to write, and wanted to be arch. Snooty.

Since they were there.... They couldn't spend the whole weekend looking at buzzards evacuating their bowels down a tree.
When they paid to get into the museum, admission to the catwalk through the cypress swamp across the street came with it.
They looked at cypress knees that had been given comical names, like "Lady Hippo Wearing a Carmen Miranda Hat."

Then they went across the street, to see where the bark was stripped off the cypress knees and they were boiled and polished.

A man was sitting in a chair under a television set on a stanchion overhead. He had on a suit coat but was barefoot. He took their tickets and said, motioning to the TV set, "If you watch that there, it will tell you everything you need to know."

He turned the TV set on and left.

The TV set played a videotape of the man who took their tickets, explaining the operation.

It was Tom Gaskin, museum owner.

I guess he left because he didn't want to answer any questions. And he made the tape because he was tired of giving the spiel.

Brew and Brenda watched the tape, then walked through the swamp on the catwalk.

The walk through the swamp was more interesting than the museum.

I don't think the museum survived construction of the Florida Turnpike and I-95, which diverted traffic from US 27 from Wildwood down.

But it gave Brew a dream.

I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.

The old swinette-picker dream.

When Brew gave himself a booth at the counterfair he held in his front yard, when the Delray Affair denied him a booth, after he left IBM, he played an audio tape of himself telling a story about visiting Tom Gaskin's Cypress Knee Museum, in Palmdale, on a battery-powered ghetto-blaster, to draw a crowd, then tried to sell them a pamphlet containing the story.

The Dreyfus Affair - Banned Books.

Is that story in this book, or the previous book, GUY LIT?