Philadelphia

Q: What did you think of Ernest Hemingway?

A: He was a serious writer and a famous person. Perhaps the most famous serious person in America. Most serious people aren't famous, so he was exploring new ground. Most famous people are superficial. They're at the mercy of press agents and gossip columnists. Hemingway was his own press agent and gossip columnist.

Q: Did he write for the working stiff?

A: He wrote for yuppies. People who could go to Pamplona, go on safari, go deep sea fishing in their own yacht.

Follow a whole season of bullfighting, driving from corrida to corrida.

As a war correspondent, he identified with officers, not enlisted men.

He once declined to do something because "there is the career."

He never made a false move, career-wise.

Q: Except for Across the River and Into the Trees.

What did you think of all the wives he had?

A: He was unfaithful to each of his wives while he was married to them. I don't respect that. I take the marriage vows serious. It's like breaking your word.

Q: How did he treat his children?

A: Ask them.

Or look at them.

They're messed up.

Q: Hemingway said that after he was dead, no one would care what kind of father he had been. All they'd care about was the books he had written.

A: I ask, of any writer, (1) where he got the money to live on, while he wrote, and (2) how he combined learning, then practicing his craft with being a responsible husband, a father, and a son, and being a reliable friend.

I ask that of myself.

I show the reader how I answer those questions, as my circumstances change.

Q: You combined being a writer and a parent, etc., fairly well.

You also combined writing and earning a living without compromising yourself too bad.

A: Thank you.

I'm on the feeder plane to Atlanta.

I think of riding the Greyhound bus to New Orleans to see Larry and Hazel.

How one bus driver was suspicious of my writing in a journal.

She thought I was a company spy. A Cheka spy at an Anna Akhmatova reading.

There was always a Cheka spy at an Anna Akhmatova reading.

I think of flying to Atlanta to attend a grant writing class for the community behavioral health care I worked for.

I have a sexier title this time, being the ULA Read-Off headliner.

Bukowski wrote a story called "This Is What Killed Dylan Thomas," which contained the line "riding with the enemy." Or a story called "Riding With the Enemy," which contained the line, "This is what killed Dylan Thomas."

The passenger sitting next to me is reading In Touch magazine. She is in touch with the sexual lives of celebrities.

Pictures of glamorous people I don't recognize.

This isn't going to kill me, and the young woman reading about people I'm not interested in is not the enemy.

One time a reporter asked Thelonious Monk if the hat he wore affected the music he was playing. He scoffed, as if to say, "Of course not," thought about it, and said, "Maybe it do."

Maybe they are the enemy. The celebrities and the people who write and read about them, buy what they are seen wearing, driving, etc., in a vain hope of being like them.

Out of the blue, Sue called.

My mother is bothered by the pneumonia, which comes and goes.

She's in and out of hospice care.

She refused antibiotics and came home to die.

She requested that I fly out to see her next weekend, to say goodbye. Also Virginia and Bill. Instead of a cruise at her 86th birthday.

I guess I can squeeze it in, between Philly Zine Fest and Zine-A-Polooza.

It's considerate of Mom to pencil herself in between engagements.

Classy.

When Bukowski went to Catalina Island with a recording studio executive he sat in the hotel in his shorts and drank beer all day.

She shopped, and went sightseeing. Saw sights?

By evening, he was too drunk to go out.

When Faulkner got so drunk he burned his back on a radiator, on a trip to New York to meet with his publisher, and had to be hospitalized, a friend asked him why he drank like that.

"It's my vacation," Faulkner said.

Bukowski was on vacation.

When Bukowski was working, he stayed sober enough to write poems in the evening.

I'm working.

I don't take vacations.

I'm a poet, I'm a beat writer, I'm a monk, I'm an old bitch, gone in the teeth, who did Hemingway box --Ezra Pound?

Somebody writes for In Touch magazine.

And they make more money than Ezra Pound.

Madonna wants to be a rabbi.

I bought a new pair of Rustler blue jeans
and a T-shirt with a pocket on it
for my trip. I wore my old watchband,
which is faded, from the sun. It was once
blaze orange but is now a dirty gray,
plastic-looking pink. I saddle-soaped by brogans.
I wear white socks. I have a chamois
long-sleeve shirt I wear in airports and on the plane.
I have a ULA Literary All-Stars trading card
on a lanyard around my neck. My hair
and beard are white, my teeth are stained,
my eyes are a faded blue. I write in a red linen
journal. I have a gym bag full of clothes,
and pamphlets, and a backpack with my
YSL Chinese-knockoff fanny-pack containing
my Nikon Coolpix 3100 camera in it and
my clip-on shades. My antacid tablets.
I look like a rock star. An old one.
Seedy and stove-up. A backstage pass
to my own book release party.