Novel

Friday, March 11

One Saturday morning, Brew was reading the Atlanta paper, and he saw that it was Howard Finster Day, in Summerville, Georgia, up by Rome.

He drove up to see the show.

It was a crafts show in the parking lot of the high school. Howard was signing prints with a Sharpie pen.

There was a long line at his booth.

Brew walked around and talked to some of the other vendors.

He didn't buy anything.

Paradise Garden was just outside of town.

Brew went there and toured the site.

He bought a coffeetable book, about Howard and his art. And his art-site, Paradise Garden. After he read it, he sent it to Larry and Hazel.

Brew would make several more trips to Paradise Garden, two by himself and one with Jeff Potter and Martha. And Henry.
The last trip he made, alone, after Howard had died, the place was closed.

Coming home from work one Friday afternoon, as Brew passed the North Atlanta Trade Center, there was a sign out front that said Folk Fest. Friday night was Meet the Artist night, and a ticket bought on Friday was good all weekend.

Brew saw Woodie Long and Dot. Woodie was busy greeting fans, but Brew talked to Dot, about how Owen was doing in his musical career. And Balder, in New Orleans.

She and Woodie had watched Owen and Balder grow up, at bluegrass festivals, and Woodie had picked banjo with Owen and Balder, around the old campfire.

I think Dot said Woodie had been painting eight years and had painted 8,000 paintings.

Then, three years later he had been painting 11 years, and had painted 11,000 paintings.

Brew wrote a dozen books a year. At least.

In the year covered by Bukowski Never Did This he wrote 18 books, and the previous year, when he was on sabbatical, he wrote 24 books.

All Brew wanted was to make a living at it, like Woodie. To go to things like Folk Fest, rather than write technical manuals in a factory for a living.

At Folk Fest, Brew noticed that many galleries carried Woodie's work. They fetched respectable prices.

Brew felt kind of left out that you couldn't buy his books in bookstores.

One Friday, Brew left work early and drove to Ellijay, to pick up Owen.

The band was playing in Dahlonega, at a bluegrass festival, Saturday. Doyle and Dale Perry were playing golf. The bus was in a K Mart parking lot. It would spend the night there and amble over to Dahlonega Saturday morning.

Owen fixed Brew a sandwich, with sliced jalapeño peppers on it--Potter called the jap-a-línos--and then the two of them drove to Dahlonega, Friday evening, at dusk, through the foothills of some mountains. This is where Barry and them hunted, in a national Wildlife Management Area. Trout streams, campsites, bike trails, hiking. Balder would go up there with Matt to ride his mountain bike, after he moved to Atlanta.

Brew slept in the back of his truck. Owen picked all night, with friends.

The next morning, Brew walked around the park, talking to people, at their campsites, drinking coffee. People he knew, people who knew Owen, and had seen Brew with him. Strangers. Usually they could find someone they knew in common.
Several people said they were glad Owen was on with Doyle Lawson, now, and a couple of people said, "instead of with them pulpwooders," but of course "them pulpwooders" is where Owen got a taste for how pulpwooders live: off-the-land and hand-to-mouth, with a yard full of barefoot young-uns and women looking like sharecropper's wives out of the Depression. Men looking like that too, come to think of it.

The band played a matinee show, Saturday. Brew sat in a folding lawn chair in a field to one side of the covered seating area. Next to him were a bunch of lesbians from the college, some college, some college English Department, drinking champagne and eating food out of a picnic basket and rubbing each other with sun-tan oil.

They looked at Brew like he was a hick.

He looked like a hick, with his B & B Feed & Seed gimme cap with the anatomically correct boar hog on it.

Little did they know he was Owen's father. That he was America's greatest writer. Bubba Po-Mo.

Brew later wrote a screenplay about the weekend, but it was not produced.

Did he say to the lesbians, "Excuse me, but I'm Marshall McLuhan, and you're full of shit"?

Brew was America's greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever, but sometimes he just shortened that to America's greatest writer. Like calling a he or she reader it.

Brenda bought a trailer in Wewa.

She named it The Empty Nest.

Brew would drive down to see her on holiday weekends. He sent her money to help with the payments.

On one trip, he built her a chicken pen. A chicken lady just don't feel right without chickens on the property.

On one trip, he put up an oak porch swing and an A-frame to hang it from.

On one trip he helped her get a truckload of goat-shit mixed with straw from a petting zoo for her garden. She had a little Japanese pickup truck.

He wrote screenplays about a couple of these visits, too.

Unproduced screenplays.

Unpublished books.

The biggest thing to hit Wewa since the last rodeo, and the stock car races at the Dead Lakes Speedway, was Victor Nunez filming Ulee's Gold in Wewa.

But how many more movies did anyone need to set in Wewa?