Novel

Sunday, February 27

When you've been leaning into a strong headwind, and the wind changes direction, if you don't adjust, adapt, you'll fall flat on your face.

Brew felt, or thought he felt, the wind begin to shift.

He still leaned into it, but he prepared himself to change positions, quickly, if the wind direction changed. To be quick on his feet.

Around 34 or 35 years into a 40-year run, the wind direction either changes, intensifies, or you find a way around it you hadn't seen before. You just have to stay on your toes and not be lulled into a false sense of wind permanence.

I mean, it's the wind.

Frannie Mae co-curated a mail art show in the Governor's Square Mall, in Tallahassee.

Brew decided to go. He was at the house writing Evil Genius.

This was before his trip to Key West, with Owen.

Owen called up the stairs, where Brew was writing, in his eyrie.

"Dad?" he said. "Can I go?"

Brew didn't see why not.

They stopped at the Ringling Museum, in Sarasota, to see the Rubenses, then at the Dali Museum, on Tampa Bay, to see the three large Dalis.

They spent the night with Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne in Panama City and left early enough to go by the preservation lab where Brenda used to work before they checked into a motel on Apalachee Parkway not far from the mall.

Brew saw people Brenda had worked with, and he had worked with.

The last time they saw Owen he was six. Now he was 14, and nearly as tall as Brew.

Brew is 6' 4" tall.

A woman Brew had dug with at Andersonville came through with a Field Techniques class she was teaching. She was now on permanent with the Park Service and had an adjunct faculty position with the Anthropology Department at FSU.

She did a double-take when she saw how big Owen was, but didn't come over and say hello to them.

The students she was showing around the lab looked at Brew and Owen as if they were farmers who had come into the lab to get their arrowheads identified.

Civilians.

They didn't know Brew was a better archeologist than their teacher.

They didn't know Owen was going to be a tournament-class musician.

Soon.

Brew and Owen went to the top floor of the New Capitol and looked out the window at the neighborhood they had lived in, when Owen was in kindergarten, and a latch-key child.

They checked into their motel, went for a swim in the motel pool, went to supper in the motel dining room, and drove to Governor's Square Mall, to see the mail art show.

Fran had spent all night hanging the show, the night before, and had gone home to take a shower. Brew signed the guest book for himself and Owen.

Owen knew many of the artists in the show from having seen their work in Brew's studio, at home. His studio was festooned with art from his mail art correspondents.

In the front of the room, near the guest book, and the finger food, were some professors and graduate students from the Art Department at FSU, drinking screw-top jug-wine out of plastic champagne flutes and talking shop: where to get a grant, a fellowship, a one-man show, an artist-in-residence job.

They looked at Brew and Owen like the archeology students in the lab had looked at them that afternoon: like they were a couple of hicks.

None of them was impressed that Owen knew some of the artists, or that Brew had entered a pile of copies of Screed with a sign on the top saying, "Free - Take One."

Brew said, "Come on, honey--let's go," and he and Owen left.

He wanted to throw the moneychangers out of the temple. He was afraid to stay. Afraid he might lose it.

At least turn the spit jar over on himself, like Miles in Sideways. Blow himself out of a cannon, like Hunter Thompson's ashes.

The guiding principles of mail art were, "No jury, no fees, all work exhibited, as received. Documentation to participants."

These arts careerists were antithetical to that ethos.

When they got back to the motel, Brenda called, and said that Fran had phoned her, to say she must have just missed seeing Brew and Owen. Brenda said she told her, "He's just weird. Somebody probably looked at him wrong."

Indeed, that's what had happened.

Somebody looked at him wrong.

In Henry and June, Osborn, played by Kevin Spacey, says, "Henry writes about fucking."

Brew writes about masturbation.

For safe sex and prostate health.

I mean, who would fuck someone who looks like C. Everett Koop? It would be like fucking your grandfather, or a dirty old man.

Every day, Brew goes to the door --I mean, he has the house to himself--and looks out, but no groupies have appeared on his doorstep, wanting to fuck him.

No one has even brought him cookies, although Kendall did give Brenda some soothing mermaid bath salts, good for skin and fin.

As for picking up women in a beer joint, he is in training, and no longer makes the wine tour of Point and Shoot.

Wine has lost its charm. Scintillating conversation. The TV over the bar with the NASCAR race on.

Fig dishes.