Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Art Brew combined a trip to Panacea, Florida, to interview Jack Rudloe with a visit to his friend, Slim McElderry, who had just sent him a copy of a CD, The Black Hole, Max Roach called "brilliant."

"Now I can die at peace and go on to my Blues Heaven," Slim wrote. Up there with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie and Bessie Smith, playing their songs, them playing his. Laughing, getting high, making love. All one needs is a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.

The Homeland über alles Security Czar wanted to put people like that out of business. Public safety had become snooping in the guise of anti-terrorism, hassling, stamping out victimless crimes, filling the prisons, blacklisting people, Star Chamber justice.

Brew saw that the gate of Slim's chain-link fence was open, and his 1979 Ford station wagon was in, so he went up to the Camp Gordon Johnston barracks and knocked on the front door, big as you please. Slim cracked the door, saw who it was, and let Brew in.

Brew took a seat. The two men were old, gray, Slim slim, Brew with a beer gut. Brew called himself Florida Slim, but he meant it ironically, like calling a tall man Shorty, or Tiny. Or a short man Dynamite.

One time Miss Kitty, the bartender at the Pastime Tavern, got a call for a short man who called himself Dynamite. The caller asked for him by his real name. Not being able to remember his nickname, Miss Kitty called out, "Potash!" and everybody in the Pastime knew who she meant.

Slim said he'd played a coffee house, in Tallahassee, called The Black Dog, the night before, and it was a nice venue, but in a building owned by the American Legion, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars--Slim called them the Foreign Legion--who were going to close the place down, because of the content of songs sung by people like himself.

When Brew told Balder that, Balder said, "They've already got Clear Channel radio, and now they want the live music venues, too."

Mac nodded.

Slim went by the names Slim, Mac, and Em.

"Balder dug your CD," Brew said.

Mac said he talked to a musician from Pensacola who had heard about Dread Clampitt, tearing up the Seaside, Grayton Beach, Santa Rosa Beach SMSA. Plus Hogtown Bayou.

Brew was the Eco-Tourism Czar of The Beaches of South Walton County.

Ha ha, not. Brew was persona non grata (PNG) in South Walton County.

Brew had published a poem in Kurt Nimmo's PNG, when he was still in Detroit. Good Bukowski poem in PNG Poetry Online called "Hemingway, Drunk Before Noon."

Hemingway called his depression Black Dog.

Mac talked about people who were not spiritually grounded getting problems, like alcoholism, drugs, acquisitiveness, compulsive gambling. Multiple marriages. The whole culture was mad, delusional, in a dream.

They don't have time to sit and meditate, he said.

He said he had been in Halifax, Nova Scotia, recently, and liked it. He felt safer, there. Not in danger of getting arrested.

You could get arrested for being against tourism, or development. They'd find something. Your car license, your pet license, your fishing license.

This monkey must have a license, as Peter Sellers says, as Inspector Clouseau.

Your monkey has broken the law.

Rudloe talked about the regulators making the net he dragged to collect specimens with illegal, and how he had to fight to get a permit, deviations, had to get the scientists who needed the specimens he collected to vouch for him, it was endless, endless, they wore you down.

Mac had dropped out. His neighbors considered him a harmless recluse, crazy and poor, he wasn't a threat to anyone. He went to the beach.

He had finished writing, and was almost finished performing, he said. Brew of course would not complete the great long continuous book of his life, 40-Year Run, until August 31, 2011, so he had a few more years to fight the good fight. To rage like a heathern. Somewhere up ahead was a book called JACK THE RAVER: A WRITING LIFE.

JACK THE RAVER would be Brew's 226th book.

Without selling one to New York or Hollywood.

Speaking of crazy and poor.

Jeff Potter, Out Your Backdoor Press, had offered to publish Mac's Panacea Fantasia, and Mac was going to talk to him about it, on the way to Nova Scotia. He had bought a rail pass that let him go anywhere he wanted to, in the United States and Canada, for a month, so long as he went somewhere in both countries. A cooperative arrangement between Amtrack and the national railroad in Canada.

Brew told him that when he had visited Potter in Michigan he'd put him up in a camper trailer behind the house with a sign on it saying Art Brew School of Fiction Writing - Northeast Outpost, and Mac allowed as how he might be put up there, too.

If Potter published Mac, he'd have a corner on writers from Florida's Co-Opted Coasts. He had already published Brew and Mac's neighbor, Jack Rudloe. Also, Mac said, Potter was interested in doing something with his songbook, and tape, The Blue Sun.

Brew had gotten a copy of The Blue Sun somewhere and written Mac a fan letter, or Mac had gotten a copy of something Brew had written and sent him a copy of The Blue Sun. This was before the tape, when there was just a songbook.

Jack Rudloe had pitched a story to Sports Illustrated about his Airedale dog being eaten by an alligator when he was jogging around Otter Lake. He said the gator got up on his hind legs and bitch-slapped the dog.

The editor rejected the story, saying an alligator didn't get up on his hind legs. They paid Rudloe a kill fee.

But Rudloe wanted to publish in Sports Illustrated, he didn't want a kill fee.

Mac volunteered to go to the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, where he knew a man named Jumper who wrestled alligators, whom he'd met at the White Springs Folk Festival--I'm making these details up, for verisimilitude, Mac--who might have a photograph of an alligator on his hind legs.

Sure enough, Jumper had a Hav-a-Tampa cigar box full. Alligators up on their hind legs, slapping, like Alex Karras, defensive tackle for the Detroit Lions slapping an offensive interior lineman.

Mac stopped by Brew's house in Delray Beach on the way back to Panacea, introduced himself, stayed a few days, recharged his batteries, blessed the house, and left, telling Brew he had it made, to quit worrying about money and write.

It was several years--20-- before Brew could do that, with kids in junior high school and elementary school, but he had done it, now, and Mac was right.

He had it made.

He should relax, and enjoy it. While it lasted.

He'd be deader than Wild Horse, whose viewing he went to Sunday, soon enough.

Dead like Potter Brown.

Potter and Wild Horse are up there playing in that Angel Band. Brew and Mac were still alive and kicking.

Kicking asses and pulling passes. Two old reprobates.