Old Folks flashed on Glamourcon '99,
the last trade show he covered in Atlanta.
At the time, he thought he could
make side trips, and write about them, and the book he wrote would be published,
as an ink-and-paper book, like a collection of Ernie Pyle columns
SWIMMING IN THE AT-RISK POOL: FOUR SIDE TRIPS WITH ART BREW, REPORT WRITER. September. In "Family Reunion," Brew and Brenda and Balder fly to Seattle for Brew's mother's 80th birthday, and family reunion. Brew watches Autumn Sonata, in preparation. In preparation for "I Only Read It for the Ads," he watches Crumb and Naked Lunch. Straight, No Chaser. Then attends Glamourcon '99, a titty-picture memorabilia show. Roger Jackson will publish a chapbook of this free-lance writing assignment. Brenda goes along as his still cameraperson, with a disposable 35mm camera, and takes three souvenir glamour shots of Brew with Glori-Anne Gilbert. In "Take Back Your Day Job," Brew rides his mountain bike to work and back, at his job writing operation and maintenance manuals at a fiber-optic cable factory in Atlanta. HONK if you love Suent. He watches Tales of Ordinary Madness. Brenda gives Jeannie her 15-speed bike, and Owen comes by to get it. They eat salmon strips, dredged in water-ground corn meal and deep-fried in peanut oil. Brew and Brenda put Duke up for adoption, at Animal Control. In "Powwow," Brew and Brenda drive to Macon, Georgia, where Owen is playing fiddle with the James King Band at a bluegrass festival. Jeannie is on the Double-Eagle band bus. Brew and Brenda meet relatives and former hippie friends. Parking-lot pickers. The idealists in "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" who were driven out of academia, and the arts, by the mentors of the cynical careerists who run things now, the apparatchiks who expelled Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Writers Union, or informed on each other to the secret police in East Germany to keep their dachas and their chit books at the nomenklatura store. Brenda gets a job, temp-to-perm. A job she had interviewed for, and hoped to get. She's making more money than Brew. She drives to Wewa and moves the last few boxes from the back bedroom of the trailer to a rental storage shed. Alpha Male, report writer for the Annuit Coeptis Detective Agency is sent under cover, to Suent Scientific, to check up on Brew, see if he is misusing company resources. PI novel thus stands not only for post-inaccrochable, but for private investigator. The PI novel lives! Brew reads Pulp. Brew reads If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Brew sees that the trip to Macon comes in "Take Back Your Day Job," not in "Powwow." Brew sees that Outsider, or Botched Book: Six Months in the Life of an Underground Writer and Gross: A Book a Month for 144 Months combine to form The Bicycle Cycle--The Second 150 Volumes of Art Brew's Stack. Phew--white folks! Brew sees that the trip to Macon comes in the next book, NEW PHYSICAL YEAR, and ends SWIMMING IN THE AT-RISK POOL, which begins with the last few pages of the last book and ends with the first few pages of the next book. John Bennett sends Ragged Lion, a tribute to Jack Micheline, in which he calls Brew, "Probably the most overlooked writer in America today."
The book wasn't published, but Old Folks got a membership in the Glori-Anne
Gilbert fan club out of it, and Brenda took a picture of Glori-Anne sitting on his
lap.