Diary

Friday, March 4 (cont'd)

Q: Are you a bitter literary also-ran (BLAR)?

A: Are you kidding? The Florida Literary Arts Coalition (FLAC) all have day jobs, while I am footloose.

Teaching, winning grants, giving each other writer-in-residence positions. They don't help anyone who can't help them.

Whereas, I'm not looking for any help, from anyone. I'm independent.

To keep their jobs, win their grants, they must be circumspect. They can't be outspoken.

Whereas, I can. I am.

I did it. My way.

The hard way. The right way. Not cutting corners, taking shortcuts, trading favors.

Assuming reciprocal obligations. Forming entangling alliances.

A coalition is an entangling alliance.

I cock a snook at the apparatus. They're apparatchiks.

Think of the members of the Soviet Writers Union who voted to expel Solzhenitsyn. Or the East German writers who informed on each other to the secret police.

To keep their dachas and their chit books at the nomenklatura store.

The only chit book I ever got was a booklet of food stamps when I was unemployed, with Brenda at home, nursing Balder and minding Owen, no work in sight for me.

They get a grant, I get food stamps.

Granny Brown got the swine flu shot and nearly died. Potter came in and she was laying on the couch, sweating. And freezing.

"I got the swine hog," she said.

One time I was driving back to Fort Walton Beach
from Tallahassee, where I'd been to turn a job application in.
I stopped in Bristol to buy a loaf of white bread, a can of Vienna sausage,
and a small jar of yellow mustard, which I intended to eat at the boat ramp
on the Chipola River at Clarksville, at a concrete picnic table. "Le Déjeuner
sur L'herbes" meets "The Frugal Repast." DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period.
I had on my job-applying outfit: a short-sleeve shirt and brightly colored tie.
The clerk at Strickland's IGA asked me for my food stamp ID and a driver's license,
to embarrass me, when I went to pay with food stamps. I said, "I work, you Republican
son of a bitch, when I have a job, instead of this Gerald Ford swine flu vaccination program,
old people dropping like flies." "Let this man through," she said, hustling me
to the head of the line. They're either at your throat or at your feet.

I guess I did have a mentor at FSU.
Chief nominated me for Outstanding Senior
for organizing a beer party Friday afternoon
at the Pastime Tavern after Dr. Dailey's seminar
on French Structuralism and The Savage Mind,
attended by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate
anthropology majors, plus a sociologist or two. A political scientist.
I won. The only winner, of ten, not pictured in the [1968] annual.
When Dr. Phelps retrenched us, after the mutiny, Chief took me and Brenda
under his wing and got us in to Tulane, me with a three-year NDEA fellowship
and a tuition waiver and Brenda with a tuition waiver and a chance for
an assistantship later on. We dug with him at Port St. Joe, and on the Navy base
in Panama City. The Sowell Mound. 8BY3. Not everyone has dug
in C. B. Moore's backfill. Not that it impressed anyone as a boxing title,
but it meant a lot to me.

A picaresque, there's a sense of constant movement.
Fuck you, kimo sabe, I bought a boat, I'm going out to sea.
Huck Finn, lighting out for the territory ahead of the pack.
Exploring. Restless. Gotta go. If a shark stops moving
he will die. The hummingbird stands still. In one place.
He's not immobilized. He's writing in his ruby-throated head.

You want to get out and get
experience. Material to write about.
But when you do, you're not at
your writing desk. Everything's
a tradeoff and a crapshoot.

There was X. O. Jones, executive officer
to the commanding officer, C. O. Jones.
Cojones. Then there was a B. O.
For box office. What--and get out of
show business? I can't quit now.

One time Jay Johnson and I
dug at the Fire Tower site
until late, sifting that rich, organic midden,
and got back to the campus without time
to clean up thoroughly before the dining hall closed.
We were both on the prepaid food plan. We washed
our faces and hands, in the lab, but our arms and necks
and white T-shirts were black as soot. As we went in,
Dave Cowens, who was sitting with some other jockstraps,
asked, "Jesus Christ--what have you guys been doing?"
"Digging up dead people," I replied. Was his career
with the Boston Celtics any more adventurous than mine
as a legend of the underground, or immobilized writer?

It's BLAR vs. FLAC,
fighting it out for the earthly vehicle
of the artist. If you're white, you're right.
If you're brown, stick around. But if you're black,
get back, get back, get back. Please don't throw me
in that briar patch, Br'er Fox.