I remember the diving platform at Wakulla Springs as being much higher.
It figured in Old Folk's first book-length novel, Screed. Old Folks and the
Ed Ball figure ended up on the diving tower like Robert Wagner and Frederic March
in the movie The Condemned of Altona, based on the play by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Perhaps it was Wagner and Maximilian Schell, who played the crazy brother. Sophia
Loren was the girl.
This was before Wagner got a bad face lift.
This
was before Sophia Loren got a bad face lift.
Shostakovich's 11th Symphony
in the background, where the czar's cavalry ride into the crowd of peasants with
their swords, and then that terrible silence.
* * *
Old Folks used to stop in Perry, where there were many cheap motels, when
they drove to Panama City, to visit Granny Brown, and get up early and go to the
St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, Wakulla Springs, and the fort at St. Marks.
They
usually took the jungle cruise and rode in the glass bottom boat, if the bottom wasn't
murky.
Usually, it was crystal clear.
But once, when there was a
big earthquake in Alaska, the spring belched out white chalk a day before.
It's all connected, if you know what to look for, and insects do, and forest animals,
and Indians probably did, because they studied the animals they lived with, and hunted
for food. Depended on.
It wasn't Tarzan of the Apes, filmed on the
Wakulla River.
The Creature From the Black Lagoon was filmed there, too.
One time they took the boys to see it in Tallahassee, in the auditorium of the R.
A. Gray Building, on a Friday night. It was free.
Balder was little.
Julia Adams was sub-bathing on the deck.
The creature put his webbed, clawed
hand on the gunwale of the boat she was stretched out on the deck of, and Balder
hollered, "Black McGoon!"
Old Folks named a character Black McGoon.
Black McGoon was Old Folks.
Old Folks had many pseudonyms.
Blaster
Al writes,
At the time I started doing mail art I had already tried a lot of other things, with zero-to-little success. As a kid I'd early on become addicted to the old pulp magazines Weird Tales, Trilling Wonder, Planet, Doc Savage, Dime Detective and so forth -- and my earliest aspirations had to do with becoming part of this world, which seemed to me to be a nicely hermetic three-ring-circus & pocket universe thing where marvels were still allowed to happen.
I'd developed this pulp-ghetto ideal where, by turning out reams of pulp under various pseudonyms for very low pay, you could live a precarious but romantic existence. That was the idea. But by the time I was actually old enough to begin my hand at it, 1953-54, most of the pulp mags had folded, the whole pulp market collapsed, leaving me and my dream bereft. Along with this I had been having some correspondence with Fredric Brown, the late-great sifi and mystery writer. And one of the things he told me, by way of helpful advice, was, "Always try to be lucky enough to work in a despised medium." I wasn't quite sure I knew what he meant but I filed it away, at least subconsciously, for future reference.
So -- time passed and I drifted into quite a lot of writing for the confession magazines and then did some TV work, had a nightclub & TV act, did some theatre, wrote plays, etc. None of it very satisfactory from my pulp-dream standpoint. Finally, in 1972, I happened to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone, the issue with the Thos. Albright article "Correspondence Art." I read that and all the names and addresses of these people mailing things, I thought that sounded like it might be right up my alley. I had like this very positive 100% yes-response. To me, the whole mail art thing seemed like an ideal way to realize my long-cherished pulp dream, that is, to do a lot of fundamentally rapid work and use a lot of different pseudonyms and not make a dime.
Old Folks had been following Blaster Al's lead ever since. He called himself
Black McGoon, Buck Sergeant, Alpha Male (pronounced mah-lay), Art "Home"
Brew, compare art brut, and Old Folks. Sometimes J. P. Old Folks. For Just
Plain.
* * *
When he drove over to Wakulla Springs for Creaturefest 2003 he just went
over for the day and came home before dark.
His night vision wasn't very
good and he couldn't afford to stay at the lodge and take the VIP package, which
included a moonlight boat tour and a screening of the movie with the original cast
and male and female stunt doubles.
He was a stealth journalist.
In
and out, like The Shadow.
Incognito.
Who was that masked man?
Beats the shit out of me, Camerado. Look for him under your bootstep.
The
treasure isn't over yonder mountain. You're standing on it.
Oh yea, sometimes
Old Folks called himself Followed by Buzzards.
He had a cult following.
David Zack's dog, Bleeto, short for Diablito, didn't have no tail, he had a very
short tail.