Friday, January 21 (cont'd)

I feel like an astronaut,
writing on a pad on the thigh
of my flying suit, driving along,
listening to NPR, or a nigger airplane pilot
celebrating Black History Month. Who dat
say who dat? Who am I, and why am I here?
I want to be your vice president. Too much union control
of California prison population, governor alleges.
Need more anger management classes in San Quentin.

One time Barfield was fishing
in a mullet skiff at Crooked Island Sound.
He had a seine net out. Suddenly,
over the horizon appeared a landing craft,
air cushion (LCAC), which drove,
or herded a school of mullet
into his net. Full box! Good job,
boys. I'll be here tomorrow.

In Sleeping with Soldiers,
Rosemary Daniell worked on
an oil platform, as a janitor,
or housekeeper. Later, she lived
with a drug dealer, on a boat.
He was lucky not to be in prison.
She married a paratrooper,
an enlisted man. Did he ride
a motorcycle? She said she thought
one of her early husbands suffered from
an untreated mental illness. All he wanted to do
was make whiskey, grow pot, fish, hunt, raise dogs,
and trade pocket knives. Watch NASCAR races on
his satellite TV. That's who I believed my readers were.
Gulf coast boys. And women like Rosemary Daniell.

The Old Home Place. My car, under a magnolia tree. Brenda looks at me from the front porch. She has an apron on. I either shrug It won't start or fix a flat.

A manager stands behind a desk, giving me a tongue-lashing. I grovel at her feet, like Giancarlo Giannini and Shirley Stoler in Seven Beauties.

Bukowski and I clinch, in the center of the ring. He is exhausted. I wink at Hemingway, in the audience. "You're next, Champ."

Art Brew stands on stage at the Amato Opera Theater, in the Bronx. The stage is decorated for Gounod's Faust. He reads "Possums in the Drain" from Notes From Underground. He stands like Jack Warden playing Benjy in the buckboard in The Sound and the Fury. Schoolyard bullies don't faze him. That's the Paris Review contingent. Schoolyard bullies. "Your shoes are garbage."

Buy a picture, get a book. Buy a book, get a picture. Suitable for framing. Brew used to sell Cloverine salve, hoping to win a Red Ryder BB gun. Happy landings to you, Little Beaver. There's Sharon Stone. There's Lamb Chop. If you had a race card, wouldn't you play it?

Sonny Rollins in a pair of chaps, his saxophone slung across his chest like Pancho Villa's bandoliers, playing, "I'm an Old Cowhand," from the album Way Out West. Gene Autry singing "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine." Owen playing it on fiddle at Clem's Shoal Creek Park, Lavonia, Georgia.

William S. Burroughs told Jesse Bernstein,
"Keep it in the family. Stick with your friends."
I feel at home with LitVision Press, Brian Hand,
the ULA, John Bennett, my coterie of steadfast readers,
the Buzzard Cult, with me from the beginning. Like Brenda:
through thin and thin.

Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
Not that it impressed Ernest Hemingway very much as a boxing title,
but it meant a lot to Cohn. Brew called himself the Madcap Titan
of the Dustbin. After Kurt Schwitters. Also sometimes a bricoleur,
or knacker in an abattoir. Put together out of scrap. How many Americans
know what a knacker is? It's Karaoke versus Trivial Pursuit, to them.
Dueling TV sitcoms. Let's stay in tonight. I'm not up for the bar scene.
I mean, that's the choice. The bar scene or television. Board games.

Q: Do you write every day?

A: Yes.

Q: Why? To keep your chops up?

A: It's like reading, or breathing.

Why would I not do it?

It gives meaning to my life.

Q: If you could read someone like yourself, every day, as a reader, would you do it?

A: People do. Read me every day.

I read some bloggers every day.

If I could read Charles Bukowski, or Charles Willeford, every day, I would.

If you like them you might like me.

Would you listen to Thelonious Monk play every day? Listen to him practice, compose, rehearse, play a gig, play a jam session, afterwards, record, go on tour?

Q: That's different.

A: No it isn't.

Q: Would you write if nobody read you?

A: I did, for years.

I don't have all that many readers now.

But I always imagined someone reading it, and laughing.

Q: So it's funny?

A: Yes. I'm a comic writer. A satirist.

Q: Satire is from satura, or full plate. Compare saturate.

A: Run it into the ground and break its nose off.

Q: Do you hang out in bars? Watch television? Play board games?

A: I read and write. Help Brenda in the garden.

Q: That's elitist.

A: Why would anybody not be an elitist?

Just, some of us have better taste than others.

I'm sure people in bars look down on me as a bookworm.

Within reading, my tastes are democratic. I try to read as many voices as possible.

One of my complaints with the New York literary establishment is it excludes my voice.

Because it doesn't like what I have to say.

About it.

Q: People may agree with you.

A: That's my theory.