Novel

Thursday, February 24

After Andersonville, Brew got a job digging at the Old Capitol, in town.

He spent the last few months of his writer-in-residence period wondering, Why can't I stay?, then his 180-day appointment ran out and he was unemployed.

This will happen with his LDA grant, but he hoped to get a couple of books written before he started worrying about how he'd find another job at his age, with his employment history.

One reader told him it took balls, to cash in his retirement to give himself a year to write, but Brew said he'd been inspired by President Bush's lectures about the Ownership Society. He was the Captain of his Fate.

If we miss the tide, it might not flow for us again.

Don't want the tide to go out on us. To miss the tide out of caution, conceptual timidity, lack of nerve.

The crew were a bunch of OPS workers, who slept in vans, smoked pot and drank fortified wine, house-sat for permanent archeologists, out of town on digs, and worked job-to-job, spending what they made, living hand-to-mouth.

OPS stood for Other Personal Services. A temporary position, that paid no benefits, and a low wage.

The Old Capitol was being renovated. Restored to an earlier historical configuration. Demolished, the two legislative wings torn down. It made the New Capitol, immediately behind it, look like a high-rise parking garage, or insurance company headquarters building.

Some legislators had wanted the thing torn down completely, but the historic preservationists had managed to keep the central structure, even if the other two-thirds were torn down.

Brew called this "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Demolition is Preservation."

Whenever federal money is used for construction--or demolition--a portion is set aside for archeological research. Brew called such scientific research a boondoggle. Called it salvage archeology. He called himself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.

The Mall Builder culture doesn't just build shopping malls. It builds new, super-big-box stores, in new shopping centers, and leaves the old big-box stores abandoned, bombed-out, with broken glass in the parking lot of the old déclassé shopping centers.

If you wanted to get on permanent, you didn't say this, out loud.

You might mutter it among yourselves, at lunch, with the other OPS workers, but if you openly criticized the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties for being the point man of the whole operation, like the guy driving stakes for the surveyor, you would be found unqualified to serve. You would not measure up. They would not like the cut of your jib.

One time two of Brew's co-workers snuck off in the basement to smoke a joint, and they heard somebody coming, and said, "Who dat," and it was a couple of construction workers, sneaking off to smoke a joint.

The construction workers thought that, because they wore white "bossman" hardhats, like an architect, or an engineer, the archeological field workers would be snobs, who looked down on construction workers, but come to find out, the archeological field workers smoked pot and looked down on bossmen, like architects and engineers. Some paper asshole with a necktie on.

This was a revelation to the construction workers, who did not realize that the archeologists, although college-educated, experienced, and many of them with several years of graduate work, made less money than a green helper throwing scrap into a front end loader, a demolition laborer, sweeping up scrap: the demolition laborer made a higher hourly wage and had benefits.

Why did the archeologists work for so little money, and such a lack of job security, or possibility for advancement?

They had a call. The work was interesting. They discovered shit.

Not on a make-work salvage job.

But sometimes, out in a swamp.

Brew had dug up a greenstone celt, or battleaxe, buried with the mandible of a warrior, who dated back to an era before the birth of Christ, when Indians lived on shell heaps. Brew was a heap big heap writer. Sometimes Brew called his stack a heap.

A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf.

Brew had reverse pride.

The more New York knocked his dick in the dirt, the prouder he felt.

That is, Brew saw a connection between the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties and the Division of Cultural Affairs. If you would call the navel lint they gave a grant to art, you'd get a grant, but if you called it a porkbarrel project, that went to defanged asskissers, the multicultural, and the sexually ambiguous, you were found unqualified, lacking in talent, not quite up to par, excellence-wise.

You had to have a call to be a writer, too.

You had to submit to the test, the ordeal, to be thrown into the water, tied-up, to see if you would float.

You had to write with one hand tied behind you, for years, to test your resolve, your spirit, your purity of heart.

The crew made a big deal out of lunches, eating them on the green, in nice weather. A regular déjeuner sur l'herbe. They'd heat water for tea on a Sterno stove. They'd have breads and cheeses, meats and smoked fish, a Mason jar of red or white wine sometimes, pickles, olives, maybe a potato salad, a sausage. In bad weather they might eat on the top floor of the New Capitol, and Brew would see if he'd been named to the Florida Artist Wall of Fame yet, with Tennessee Williams, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Ernest Hemingway. A queer, a mannish woman, and a suicide.

No Florida cracker need apply.

A cracker is prima facie a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe. Didn't Brew know?

Sometimes they went into the cafeteria of the New Capitol for breakfast, or brunch, and ate with the state workers, on morning break.

One time the crew went on break into the cafeteria of the New Capitol.

The state workers, in their polyester clothes, drank decaf, with powdered, non-dairy creamer in it, and artificial sweetener, and ate a pastry, just this once, a glazed donut perhaps, jelly-filled, with their pinkie raised. They talked about fat grams or calories, later carbs. What they watched on television last night. Watery beer.

The archeologists wore Army surplus field jackets, sweaters and flannel shirts, blue jeans, a scarf and a boogie cap, muddy boots. They were working outside, in the winter. They wore long-johns. The men and the women. They perspired into their work clothes, and smelled a little ripe. You could smell the hops of the beer they drank, the fusel oil.

They ate hotcakes, eggs and bacon, or sausage, biscuits and gravy, sweet rolls, with whole milk, real coffee.

The crew finished and went back to work. Brew lagged behind to eat a strawberry shortcake with whipped cream on it. It was Kool Whip. The shortcake was a van Gogh yellow, the strawberries an industrial, fire engine red. The thing looked like a Portuguese man-of-war, waiting to sting you.

Bob Graham entered the room, introducing himself to state workers, who rose, and shook his hand, and told him their home town. He was governor, and his office was upstairs. He worked the room.

He might have noticed a table full of archeologists, but Brew was sitting quietly by himself, one forearm guarding his dessert, like Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues, the other hand shoveling it in, like a fiddler crab eating with his little claw while brandishing the big one. Uca rapax. Forearm shiver. Once you get them spooked, the rest is easy.

Governor Graham turned to face Brew and stuck out his hand. Brew looked at him like he was a salesman.

Attention must be paid. But not by Brew.

Fuck Arthur Miller. Nobody told him to be a playwright.

Governor Graham stood there with his hand outstretched, transfixed, like a bird dog hypnotized by a rattlesnake.

Finally a man with yellow shooting glasses and a wire in his ear nudged Governor Graham, he wobbled off, retrieving his hand, several members of the security detail glared at Brew, and the room returned to normal.

Elvis is out of the building.

When Brew told the crew what they had missed, no one believed him.