No Chinaman must figure in.

That was the only rule Brew remembered for writing a mystery.

Nowadays, you couldn't say Chinaman. Or Asiatic.

Someone couldn't just "go Asiatic." There had to be a reason, a plausible cause. Like degenerative disease, side-effects of psychoactive drugs, head injury. Blunt trauma. Probably he should not have hit her.

He was only defending himself. When she went loopy there was no way to predict what came next.

Jane. Fun with Dick and Jane. Dick.

Gay Gobble, Dick Dork, and Dirk Dick. What was that from? Boogie Nights? He and Brenda watched A Map of the World last night. Julianne Moore and Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney's life was in the toilet. A kid that was fucked-up, a loser husband, a job that sucked. Then her friend's daughter drowned and she was accused of sexually abusing a child in her capacity as school nurse. Other children came forward to accuse, as small-town hysteria spread. A regular Oprah show.

Oprah in the background at the prison. Vide Pirandello, et al. Stories within stories. Malcolm Lowry's "Through the Panama."

In Elmore Leonard's latest, Pagan Babies, a woman says the worst thing about prison, worse than the food and the lines, the bulldagger in the shower with HIV, was the television in the dayroom, all the inmates watching Urkel. I remember that was the worst thing about the mental hospital.

Am I hallucinating? Anyhow Brenda--Jane, rather--was at the halfway house, if she hadn't wandered off, and Brew--Art "Home" Brew, vernacular writer--was at home, in the house with the staircase, so someone could be hidden upstairs, menacingly, strike menacingly, an adverb.

Writer's a good occupation for a character in a book because he has time alone, with no one keeping track of his whereabouts, whether his socks match, Céline used to say, "Is it six pages yet, can I stop yet," if you have to ask, the answer is no.

Vernacular writer. If a folk artist painted 1,000 paintings a year--as Woodie Long did, Brew knew--he was not considered a hack, he was prolific. As fecund as the shad, as Henry Miller said. If he was self-taught, an outsider artist, he was not considered a sore loser, a whiner, or a bitter Bierce. He was a maverick, a loner, principled and courageous. A man with the courage of his convictions. But a vernacular writer....

Minor chord.

That was it. The nagging, subliminal thread, the loose thread that Brew's mind had been tugging on.

Vitalis. Jane's scent. She was in the house.

Brew drew up, like reading Blaster Al's story, "Possums in the Drain." Their little toenails clicking in the pipe as Dick strained at stool, or pushed, in the sink, where he liked to take a hot, steaming crap, à la the letter carrier, when he was home alone.

Jane was going to find him. Squatting in the sink.

Scared, he could have bit the head off a nail with his asshole.

Think of Forest Whitaker's laser beam coming out of the sink hole in Ghost Dog.

Tense-tendoned. Violet-flavored nuisance. Odor, o-no.

Comes out like a ribbon, lies flat on the brush.

Brew let fly. The shame, the shame.

New York, New York.

Farts in Space, NASCAR racing,
the 25th anniversary of Star Trek,
Zombies Ate My Co-Workers, we are
the original surfers, get to say
what people can wear, on the beach,
the only way I will get a woody
is to buy a T-shirt, one time at Waikiki
I had auditory hallucinations of
"I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and "Little Deuce Coupe,"
dreading going back to the world, as we called
the states, in Japan, The Land of the Big BX,
have you had it in an olive, the oral polio vaccine,
Friends of Hookworm, a liberal charity in Playing Hurt,
Save the Pickaninnies, why?, for what?, for whom?
the bell tolls, louder, faster, techno, CAPS LOCK,
Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot, given the existence of
an anthropomorphic god, as set forth in the works of,
don't ever end a sentence with a preposition, strike them adverbs,
man, them redundant pleonasms, if that's not, if it is, if it
will be, Frank McCourt called a book 'Tis, I called one Taint,
the perineum, halfway between the butthole and the, you know,
do you want to share something with the rest of us, Mr. Saunders?
No, not much. Aldous Huxley. Ape and Essence.
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, the prurient ape's
defiling touch. And do you like the human race?
Greatest Hits of Yesteryear. References no one but
an encyclopedic reader will catch. Babbling in
his heathen tongue. Jack the Raver. Take that boy's
temperature. Rectally. With a lollipop. More coffee!
More forehead fissures! I've known rivers. I've known
souls grown deep. The Congo, the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates.
Egypt and flax. Test question. Trace the influence of,
the connection between, the similarity, the difference.
Compare and contrast. Shit and get. Up the xylem, down the phloem.
Cantharides, when applied externally, are epispastic and rubifacient.
Pardon me, boss--but ain't you pissin' in my pocket?
Tales of Beatnik Glory. What I really want to do
is write pamphlets. Mexican eight-page bibles.
Hadacol bottle caps.

The duffer's tour, Geezers On Parade,
a sort of a Buena Vista Social Club
of unpublished, or underpublished writers,
the neglected, the abused, the victimized,
the martyred, the self-important, the confused,
the day late and the dollar short, the last-ditch attempt,
the final solution, the loose end, the subliminal thread,
the significant other's scent, Vitalis, the clicking of
the marsupial toenails, you don't know where they've been,
the laser sight, coming up through the gooseneck joint,
implausible, but what an image, make you draw up, then,
look out below! A horror story.