Tallahassee (cont'd)

One time Albino Grizzly was sitting in the snack bar
of the New Capitol in his work clothes eating a strawberry shortcake
that looked like a Mardi Gras float, or a Portuguese man-of-war,
and Governor Graham came through, shaking the hands of state workers
and asking them their home town. He turned and saw old Griz, his hand
stuck out, and froze. He was hypnotized, like a pointer dog confronted by
a rattlesnake. Grandfather, Chief. A man with orange shooting glasses
and a wire in his ear nudged him and broke the suction and he bobbed off
like a glass bird with a weight it its ass, how do? how do? how do?
Like a four-barrel carburetor sucking wind.
Get me the fuck out of here.

Or I could just stand on the steps of the New Capitol,
behind the dancing dolphin fountain provided by
Anheuser-Busch, proud sponsor of teenaged drinking,
blocking out the sun, and shout, "Does this refresh
your memory?" But who would I sell my book to?
Judging from the Museum of Florida History gift shop,
and museum, the Black Experience Citizen and the Seminole Indian
invented Florida, and all my white-privilege ancestors did was exploit them.

Owen and I went to the opening of a mail art show
at the Governor's Square Mall co-curated by
Frannie Mae Rutkowsky. My entry was a stack
of books with a sign saying, "Free - Take one."
Not self-published pamphlets. Screed, in trade paperback.
Owen, 14, knew the work of many of the participants,
from having seen them on the walls of my eyrie. For example,
Blaster Al gave me a pear review. Her breast-shaped pears.
Woman look like Fran in Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. It went around to
various artists, who modified it, and sent it to me, last. By the bar
were art students and professors from the university, marketing themselves.
Unimpressed by Owen's knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the exhibition.
I thought of the mail art credo no jury, no fees, all work exhibited, as received.
Documentation to participants. A far cry from fine arts grants, one-man shows,
artist-in-residence positions. I had to leave, before I went berserk, and threw
the moneychangers out of the temple, like Jesus. Tantor the elephant, in rut.
Woe unto you hypocrites, lawyers.

Capitol Circle is US 319. The Pearl is gone. Nothing lasts forever
except cockroaches and gonorrhea. But Faulkner is staging a comeback,
thanks to Oprah Winfrey. When asked how he felt about the different media
his work was adapted in, a movie for a novel, teevee for short stories, he said,
"Television is for niggers."

One time I asked the Division of Cultural Affairs
to buy my house from me and turn it into a museum,
naming me the curator of my own collections.
They did not reply. Another time, after I had visited
the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, in Ocean Springs,
I asked them to help me find a publisher for my stack,
and help me sell or donate the original manuscripts to
a library, or Archives. I said I'd throw in my writing studio,
the Slave Quarters, and they could put it in the Museum of
Florida History, in the basement of the R. A. Gray Building,
with the skeleton of the mastodon taken out of the Aucilla River
and the Indian River orange crates.

I told them Melville left the manuscript of Billy Budd in a tin box.
I would leave my stack in cardboard boxes in a tin rental storage shed.
They didn't reply to that one, either. Did they think I wasn't serious?
Wasn't dying here, to paraphrase Dustin Hoffman, in Midnight Cowboy?
Wasn't deader than an ostracoderm, as William Styron said in Lie Down in Darkness?
Were they trying to kill me off to shut me up? Was I a threat? A nuisance?
A pimple on the ass of progress? Would the Budweiser people cut their dancing dolphin
fountain money off? Their wet T-shirt contests at Club La Vela on Panama City Beach?
Let's hear it for water slides and concrete Tiki gods and Goofy Golf.
Florida - State of the arts. And shuffleboard too!
The green park benches in St. Pete.