Novel

Saturday, February 26 (cont'd)

When Brew went to Fantasy Fest '86, in Key West, he took Owen along with him to help him man his booth, across from Captain Tony's Saloon, the site of the original Sloppy Joe's Bar. They toured the Hemingway House.

Brew had been to the Hemingway House before, on an earlier visit. When he was writing Open Book he drove down and spent the weekend in a motel just to feel like he was a writer.

He got a pamphlet out of it. HAWK: Black McGoon in Key West. By analogy with Jim McLendon's PAPA: Hemingway in Key West.

Brew had read everything there was to read about Hemingway in Key West, at that time. He felt competitive with Hemingway.

Just as Hemingway had felt competitive with Turgenev.

When Owen saw the mounted game fish, the mounted heads of big game, pictures of Hemingway, barefoot, needing a shave, his knuckles skinned from belaying a billfish, or getting in a fistfight at the dock, a lightbulb went on over his head, and he realized there was more to being a writer than worrying about money and shouting at your wife and kids. There were fried grouper sandwiches at the Half Shell Raw Bar down by the turtle kraals, a booth in the shade of a royal poinciana tree with a bougainvillea vine growing up in it, the smell of lamb, roasting on a spit, the pennants snapping in the breeze.

Fiesta!

Liberty's a glorious feast. A fig for those by law protected.

Brenda ordered a fig cookbook, in the mail. the girl & the fig cookbook.

There was a poolhouse out back where Hemingway wrote. A studio.

He wrote standing up, drinking Vichy water for his hangover.

Brew wrote sitting down, drinking Vichy water. Artesia-brand mineral water from the Edwards Aquifer, in Austin, Texas. Au revior, Perrier.

Brew no longer had hangovers because he no longer drank. He was in training.

Brew wrote in his eyrie, the second upstairs bedroom of Tarrymore, the paid-for house he inherited from his grandparents in Delray Beach. The house he mortgaged to write and publish Evil Genius and Open Book and write Forty, published by Popular Reality.

In Visceral Bukowski, Ben Pleasants reports that Sherri Martinelli, a woman who fucked Ezra Pound, at St. Elizabeths, decided she'd fuck Jeffers, at Tor House, in the tower he build out of stone, with his own hands. She'd fuck him up in the tower.

She knocked on the door.

Jeffers looked at her, said, "I built my house, you build yours," and closed the door.

Maybe she just took Pound cookies.

She says before he could eat them he would drop them and before you could help him pick them up he would step on them.

That's what Brew would have been like. If a groupie offered him a cookie he would drop it and step on it before he could eat it.

Brew got a lot of good writing done in his eyrie. But not as much as he got done now in Lazaretto, his studio in Point and Shoot. Where he had cashed in his retirement to give himself a year to write.

Got more balls than a big brass monkey. As Iris Dement sings to John Prine, in "In Spite of Ourselves," the theme song to Daddy and Them.

Once on one of his road trips Brew stopped by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' cracker house in Cross Creek.

He would have loved to live there, back in the day. With Idella, the perfect maid, and Dora, the prize milk cow. Making scotch marmalade out of wild Seville oranges and gopher stew, before the gopher was an endangered species.

Fried mullet, hushpuppies, with guava jelly.

No, maybe that was over closer to the coast.

A visit from Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville.

Once, when Brew read at Konglomerati Foundation, in Gulfport, he went by to see the house Kerouac died in, a tract house in St. Pete. Kerouac had once owned the house next to it.

He married Stella to take care of Memere. And to take care of him.

Stella deserves everything she got. She earned it.

By the time Kerouac died, he was a mean drunk. And a sloppy drunk. A messy drunk.

Mind you, he wasn't always that way.

Who knows what waking up to find yourself famous, overnight, will do to you
.
Brew wrote about what 30 years of failure did.

It made you crabby and hung-up about rejection.

The worst thing you could do was put that in your writing.

If Kerouac had never gotten famous would he have kept writing, written more, completed the Duluoz saga, without bowdlerizing it, to get it published?

And who was better off? Kerouac? Or Brew, who just wrote away, every morning, in his room, following his vision where it led?

Completing the saga.

Brew wrote the state and asked them to buy his house and turn it into a museum, naming him the curator of his own collections, and letting him and Brenda live in it, rent-free, until they died.

The state did not reply.

At the time, a grant for an individual artist was $2,500. And if you won one, you couldn't apply again for a year.

You wouldn't win one if you were not a minority, a woman, or a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or undecided person with a Thalidomide flipper growing out your ass associated with a university writing program.

This meant Brew had to (1) move, (2) find a job, (3) work full-time, (4) self-publish pamphlets, later (5) set up a web site for himself, and (6) worry about being fired for blogging.

The world didn't owe Brew a living.

It didn't hurt him to move, work, self-publish, or publish on the worldwide web.

In fact, he was a pioneer. He did something not too many other people had done, or were doing, but that other writers would surely do, too, as literature became increasingly corporatized. That is, if they wanted to (1) create a body of work and (2) invent a form to present it in.

They would use what was available. Like a bricoleur. A knacker in an abattoir.

It was the artist versus the businessman, the independent scholar versus the educationist. Us versus them. Dem. It.

Brew not only had a love-hate relationship with publishers, he had a love-hate relationship with readers.