Novel

Monday, March 7

It could have been the drinking, at Tulane.

Brew had always been able to hold his liquor. He could drink most men under the table.

But at Tulane, especially after he started being asked to take his exams again and show improvement, the drinking got out of hand. Especially at parties.

He thought the parties were an ordeal, to see who could drink the most. A contest.

The young bucks challenged the silver-back males.

Brew challenged his professors.

When he was just hitting his stride, everybody would go home, and leave Brew high and dry. Brew had won.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory, because the professors didn't play fair. They welshed on their end of the bargain. Behind closed doors they gave Brew a bad performance appraisal. They faulted him for excessive drinking.

Huh? What about your drinking? Was I supposed to let you win? Win the coed, shamelessly flirting with you? Don't you see she is a brownnose?

Brew started drinking before he arrived at the party, to level the playing field, as it were. He arrived drunk, and got completely shitfaced. Incoherent. Then would be the bike ride home, where he would end up among the azalea bushes in Audubon Park.

Once, he crashed into a row of trash cans at the curb, in front of the host's house, ending up with coffee grinds and grapefruit rinds on him, fish skeletons, little X's for eyes.

Would you want to put the Tulane imprimatur on someone like that?

Once he turned his Styrofoam cup full of Copenhagen snuff spit over on the white carpet of a professor's new condominium apartment, where he was stretched out on the floor, drinking, spitting snuff into his cup, and muttering foul imprecations in his beard.

I'm not the phony, you're the phony.

Owen went out to Texas, in search of work, but didn't find any.

He came back home.

Nashville called. A man wanted Owen to do some studio work. On a country music record.

He sent him a plane ticket.

Brew drove Owen to the airport in Fort Walton Beach, from Point and Shoot. He got on the plane with his fiddle case, a change of clothes, in a grocery sack, and a feather pillow.

When he got up there, the man said another fiddle player, an old pro who turned the job down, wanting more money, took the job, when the man hired Owen, so he gave Owen a plane ticket home, and Owen came back home.

Brew went to pick him up.

Owen left his feather pillow in Nashville.

James King asked Owen to play fiddle with him.

Brew offered to drive Owen to South of the Border, a motel on the North Carolina - South Carolina state line, halfway between James King's house and Owen's house.

They went up in Brew's red Ford Ranger pickup truck.

Owen and Balder had collected a cooler full or Skunk Bayou oysters in Brew's secondhand yellow fiberglass canoe, and Owen brought them with him.

Every time they stopped for gas, Owen would let the tail gate down, and shuck a few oysters, and have them with Saltine crackers and a green jalapeño sauce Tabasco had started marketing again, after not selling it for many years. Brew had picked a case up at the factory store in New Iberia, or Avery Island, where he had been to visit Larry and Hazel, and see the Passionate Visions show, at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He went by the Tabasco factory on the way home.

Brew turned Owen over to James King.

He had his fiddle case, the cooler full of oysters, a Carhartt wool-lined work jacket he had inherited from Brew, his Red Wing boots, and some flannel shirts and blue jeans in a grocery bag.

"I travel light," Owen said.

Brew drove back on US 319, all the way to the bridge at Apalachicola, where it originated, where he took US 98 on in to Panama City.

He remembered stopping to eat at a buffet restaurant in Fitzgerald, Georgia, with several state police cars out front.

The peach cobbler was delicious.

After a month with King, King let Owen go.

He said he couldn't afford a fiddle player, and was going to have to go back to a four-piece band.

The last gig Owen played with him was at Hahira, Georgia.

As if to show King what he was losing, Owen played his ass off that night.

Lowell, who was there, said he'd never heard anything like it. He said it sent shivers up his spine. It gave him goose bumps.

Later, when Doyle Lawson hired him, he mentioned that several people had told him about hearing Owen play at Hahira.

It was a memorable performance.

King let Owen go and he came back home.

Down on himself. At sixes and sevens. Discouraged.

Brew knew the feeling.

When the Gillis Brothers were Folk Masters, at Wolf Trap, they used a publicity still of the band with Owen in the picture.

Brew knew because Darrell McCall was on the same bill, and he sent David "Jug" Brown, his songwriter, a program, and Jug showed everybody.

Jug is Owen's uncle.

The Gillis Brothers put Owen out on the side of the road with his fiddle case and the loose change in his pocket.

Apropos of traveling light.

He's lucky he didn't have to whip John or Larry's ass, or John and Larry's ass, to get away from them pulpwooders.

Lord, I'm glad I don't have to work for pulpwooders anymore.

Pine-straw gatherers.

Their instruments in hock.