Novel

Tuesday, March 15

Brew and Brenda bought a house, in Norcross.

So they were homeowners again. No more renting. The rent payment would go towards equity in their house.

Or towards realtors, attorneys, insurers, and giving the bossman an indirect hold over you, depending on how you looked at it. Giving hostages to fortune.

You can't just up and walk away from a house.

Brew had sent Jeff Potter some pieces Jeff put up at his web site, Out Your Backdoor, around 1996, but he didn't have his own web site.

When he signed a 30-year mortgage, at age 59, he gave himself a web site. The Daily Bugle.

Bugle from buculus, the diminutive of Bos, the genus of cow. The trumpet shall sound!

Brew remembered vaguely that The Daily Bugle was the paper Spider-Man worked for, but who'd ever heard of Spider-Man?

Brew had used the name The Daily Bugle for a series of four-page sheets he published when he worked in Panama City, around 1990.

He'd called another series of four-page sheets Norman. By analogy with Marilyn.

That's the one where Norman Mailer told him,

I have a hunch your stuff is wild and terrific and keeps going off the rails. I have no better explanation for why you don't find publishers, since you certainly write well enough sentence for sentence and paragraph for paragraph.

Who wants to be on rails?

Brew read a book called Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz, in which Bley said he built a studio at home, so he could record himself whenever he felt like playing. Could record himself in real time.

Brew realized that the Internet--a recording studio at home--allowed him to write, and publish, books in real time. He had cut out the middle man. He was composing straight into the Linotype machine, without an editor, a rewrite man, Legal, Sales, Marketing, the Standards and Practices people, the Ideological Rectitude Officer.

Mind you, it might not be any good. A lot of what was on the Internet was tinfoil-hat nonsense. But Kurt Schwitters said the artist must be allowed to mold a picture out of sticking plaster. Provided he is capable of molding a picture.

If Norman Mailer could see it, other readers would see it. Eventually, someone in publishing would see it.

But all the people in publishing saw was a picture molded out of sticking plaster going off the rails.

He used sticking plaster because that's all he could find to mold a picture out of. And it went off the rails because it was molded in sticking plaster.

Duh.

The month after Brew and Brenda signed the mortgage on the house, Brenda was laid off. She was never to hold a high-paying job again. She took temp-to-perm jobs, with no benefits, and finally got on permanent, with health insurance, but low pay.

The high-tech boom was over. The dot-com boom. Everwhat you call it.

Brenda was employed at half of what she used to make.

They started laying people off at Brew's work, and expecting the employees who remained to do twice as much work for the same pay, which is like a pay cut.

The employees who remained expected to be laid off themselves, and didn't do shit. Brew would write a book, and give it to his engineer to review, and the engineer would not review it.

The plant was like a ficus tree surrounded by a strangler fig. It was slowly choking the life out of itself.

They could afford to make the house payment on Brew's salary, plus Brenda's reduced paycheck, when she got one again, but there were no more performance bonuses to pay the credit card balances down at the end of the year, and Brew's credit card balances began to rise, like mushrooms growing in shit, or on hay bales with cow shit in them.

Every few months they'd lay off a few more writers, engineers, quality assurance specialists, at Brew's work.

When Suent Scientific sold the factory, APRF, Atlanta Product Realization Facility, to Optical Fiber Enterprises, OFÉ, with an acute accent on the e, to raise cash, Brew figured he had six months until OFÉ laid him off. From little oafs big ofays grow.

He had eight months.