Novel

Tuesday, March 1

Did Charles Willeford publish a story called "Strange Pussy"? Was it reused as the first part of The Shark-Infested Custard? I don't remember. But I know he published a book called Poontang.

There's a picture of him in Writing & Other Blood Sports standing two persons to the left of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas while a friend, one person over from him, holds his book open to the title page. Poontang.

If he signed it for you, he usually wrote, "I hope you like Poontang."

He was 65 when Miami Blues came out. Before that, or until then, he was, as one reviewer wrote, "...destined for oblivion, lacking even cult status."

He wrote one book as a novel, went back and changed the names of the characters to the names of real people, and published it as autobiography. The memoir Something About a Soldier.

He wrote criticism (New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction), he wrote the screenplay to Cockfighter.

For years he reviewed mysteries for the Miami Herald.

The advice he gave Brew was,

In 1957, Theodore Pratt told me that Delray Beach was a better town than N. Y. for a writer. "If you stay in Florida," he told me, "you'll never run out of things to write about." He was right, of course; I never have, and you won't either. My most productive years were from age 50 to 55, and I'm sure that yours will be too.

Stay where you are. Keep writing.

Would Bukowski Never Did This open things up for Brew like Miami Blues did for Charles Willleford?

Probably not.

Brew would stay where he was and write about Point and Shoot.

He moved from Delray Beach to Point and Shoot when Forty came out.

He moved to Atlanta, to take a job. He moved back to Point and Shoot, when OFÉ, whom Suent Scientific sold APRF to, laid him off. From little oafs, big ofays grow.

bRIGHT mOMENTS turned into dARK cABLE, for OFÉ.

The years from 60 to 65 were Brew's most productive.

Willeford read at the Miami Book Fair where Brew had a booth. At night. Brew didn't go to hear him, so they never met. He figured he would see him down the road, as they were both attending events like the Miami Book Fair, but several months later Willeford was dead, of a heart attack.

Still, Brew felt like he knew him.

The three men who influenced Brew the most, four counting Jack Kerouac, were now all dead: Charles Willeford, Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson.

All four heavy drinkers.

Brew in training.

Brew a reformed drunk.

Brew had a booth at the Miami Book Fair.

His booth was next to Radical Jack Lieberman, a leftist who was pro-Castro.

In Miami, in 1986, that was a good way to get your car vandalized, by anti-Castro Cubans.

Anyhow, there was always a commotion around his booth, a melee fixing to break out, and people gave Brew's booth a wide berth.

His booth usually parts the crowds like Moses parting the Red Sea by smiting it with a 2 x 4 anyway, so he couldn't blame his lack of book sales on Radical Jack Lieberman.

This is Fall Arts & Crafts Festival at Downtown Carillon Beach 20 years later.

Ten Speed Press had recently bought White Trash Cooking from Jargon, and was putting some promotional muscle behind it, at the book fair.

Brew looked the book up in Google, and the book has a picture of a white trash cook on the cover; he thought it had a picture of the inside of her refrigerator, with an open can of Astor-brand grapefruit juice, a large can, with triangular "church key" holes on opposite sides of the top, maybe a little rust around the lid.

I guess that picture is a frontispiece.

One problem with the book is you can't buy possum, squirrel, or gopher at the Winn-Dixie, although when Brew lived in Tucker, Georgia, a supermarket that served the poor-neighborhood niche he lived in sold goat meat. Wayfield supermarket. Serving black, Latino, and Asian neighborhoods. An enormous variety of hot peppers. But that ain't white trash.

The WPA Guide to Florida said that white trash and black sharecroppers, mill-workers, and commercial fishermen in Northwest Florida, plus the naval stores industry of pulp-wooding and turpentine stills, had a lot in common with each other. More in common with each other than with the white merchants, landowners, and professionals one rung higher on the ladder than they.

Brew always thought that that was true, and that there was a connection between white trash cooking and black soul food.
Just as there was a connection between bluegrass, or old-time country music and the juke-joint blues played by black musicians. Or gospel music. It was hard to tell the difference between a white and a black gospel group.

The WPA Guide to Florida had trips you could take, in an automobile, and listed features for you to look for.

Maybe Brew's next book, POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT, would read like an old WPA Guide.

Roadside attractions. Tourist courts. State parks.

Monkey jungles and snake farms.

The pork chop legislature.

PC didn't stand for politically correct, it stood for pork chop legislature. The Charley Johns Committee, rooting homosexuals out of the public school system by entrapping them at tearooms, as homosexuals call public restrooms where they go to have sex with strangers.