Novel

Friday, March 4

Brew dropped out of high school to enlist in the Air Force. The Air Force was his whaling ship.

When he got out the first time, he went home, lived in his old room, and drove his Brother Bill's 1949 Mercury convertible to Palm Beach Junior College, in Lake Worth.

He and Charles Willeford were in the same junior college honor society, Phi Theta Kappa, at PBJC, but they did not meet.
Brew used to drive home on Range Line Road past the house where the artist Debierue lived in The Burnt Orange Heresy, an immobilized hero novel. Brew never met Debierue either, although he once sent $15 to Les Amis de Debierue, to help the old émigré out.

Who knows, some day there might be a Friends of Art Brew, and he would need some help himself.

Like the Friends of Walter Anderson building a museum in Ocean Springs. 30 years after Anderson died.

Living at home with his parents did not work out.

Brew reenlisted, to get the GI Bill. They didn't have it the first time he got out.

When he got out the second time he enrolled at Florida State University, in Tallahassee.

The Big University, he called it. He got that from Brenda Brown, whom he met at FSU.

When Brenda was at Gulf Coat Community College, her instructors used to tell her, "When you get to the Big University, you'll have to pretend to believe in evolution."

The second half of that, unstated, was, "Or the liberal professors will call you a conservative, and make fun of you."

Conservatives never have liked being made fun of.

You could see them reading Ayn Rand and watching William F. Buckley.

Their mothers dressed them funny.

Brew and Brenda had anthropology classes together, they went into the field as archeologists together, they fell in love, got married, raised a family, and lived happily ever after together. Or they lived poor and Brew wrote.

Tallahassee was a great town to go to college in. There were bookstores, libraries, art films and concerts, on campus, interesting people. The coast was a short drive, with wild rivers, a beach to walk on. Woods to hunt in. Bluegrass music festivals, here and there, in the Panhandle.

St. Joe Company prefers to call the Panhandle Florida's Great Northwest, Inc.

Panhandle connotes vagrants. Down-and-outers. Truman's father, in The Truman Show, filmed in Seaside. There was no Seaside, then. There was no Beaches of South Walton County. It was just Walton County, then.

Hogtown Bayou. Poor as Job's turkey.

Ha ha, the turkey is a New World form. Job didn't have a turkey.

Brew and Brenda wanted to teach college and live in a town like Tallahassee. They went to graduate school, at Tulane.

College didn't need them. Many are called but few are chosen. The supply of people who wanted to be college teachers exceeded the demand, so there was an adjustment, a retrenchment, Brew and Brenda were retrenched.

Continuous workforce rebalancing, Force Management Program (FMP), Reduction in Force (RIF) would be a constant leitmotif in Brew and Brenda's life, as they got caught in the old rollback at Tulane, in the Gerald Ford stagflation, in the Reagan-Bush recession, and George Bush's trifecta of 9-11, the War on Totemism, and the budget surplus turning into a budget deficit, with a little help from corporate governance issues. The combination of layoffs and a jobless recovery, everybody except business executives, lobbyists, and politicians out of work or underemployed, making half what they made when they had good jobs.

Once, between the Gerald Ford stagflation and the Reagan-Bush recession, Brew and Brenda lived in Tallahassee, and after they moved back to Panama City, they went over there on a visit, to hear Owen and Balder play at The Pearl, an oyster bar on the truck route, or Balder play at The Warehouse, or Hurricane Evac, from Hurricane Ivan, when they visited a nursery that sold native plants and Brenda bought an ashe magnolia and a book about what plants to raise to attract butterflies.

Now Brew was driving over for a book conference, a small press/little magazine conference, perhaps a literary website conference.

Brew was a small press (Garage Band Books), Brew put out a literary magazine (Beat Poet 1), Brew hosted a literary website (The Daily Bulletin).

He'd be right at home.

He even had a book coming out from LitVision Press, a member of the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA), a ULA logo on the book, like an anti-Oprah logo.

The Florida Literary Arts Coalition, who were hosting the conference, would probably welcome him with open arms.

Whichever, he would write about it, in DRAGGING UP.

Brew could have gotten a booth at the book fair portion of the conference but he didn't have any product to sell.

Besides, it didn't make sense to write "I hope you like Dragging Up" in the front of Bukowski Never Did This.

DRAGGING UP was a sequel to Bukowski Never Did This, a continuation, the rest of the story, and it came between Bukowski Never Did This and POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT: AN IMMOBILIZED HERO NOVEL.

He would go to the book conference, write about it, end his book, with a book fair on either end, and start another book, a related book, about having the house to himself, springing to the easel of a morning, not going anywhere, not doing anything, going anywhere he took a notion to, doing anything that piqued his fancy, unbought and unbossed, unedited, inédit, America has a passion for the inédit.

Raw, fresh, new.

Purple, twitching, hideous.

Papa kill that awful dreadful snake.