Novel

Tuesday, March 8

When Brew was growing up he fished under the bridge across the intracoastal waterway at Atlantic Avenue, where there was a City Park. He used live mullet for bait and caught snook, a gamefish with a lateral stripe from gills to tail.

In Gulf Coast Cooking there is a recipe for snook in adobo sauce, from the Yucatan, or either it's in Frederick Turner's book, A Border of Blue.

Brew used to wish that he would make enough money writing so that he could go on trips like Frederick Turner took, from Key West to the Yucatan, but when you cock your snook at New York, and literary presses associated with university writing programs, it isn't likely to happen.

On the other hand, Raw Energy, one of Brew's first self-published pamphlets, had a recipe in it for Escabeche de Poissons Divers. Subtitled A Cookbook for Action Painters.

So you didn't have to go anywhere to write a book about it.

Where do science fiction writers go?

Maybe progress is not an unmixed disaster. When Brew fished for snook in the intracoastal waterway, the city sewer emptied into the canal, and you could see the untreated turds, used Kotex, and rubbers floating up, on Saturday morning, from Friday night's wild screaming nudity, sex, and excretion.

I'm not lying. They made a movie about it. The Kinsey Report.

Brew was a report writer. Report on the Suppression of Art Brew's Work by Unknown Forces. Laura Linney was Jim Carrey's wife in The Truman Show.

They wrote Truman's father out of the script because he didn't fit the town profile.

Filmed at Seaside.

Potter used to hunt ducks in Santa Rosa Beach. The dune lakes.

You can't do that anymore, either.

Dread Clampitt might play a gig at Old School Square, in Delray Beach, across from the house Brew and Brenda and Owen and Balder used to live in, on Swinton Avenue. If they did, Brew would ride down with them and help them man the record table. Help drive the van.

He would sell Dread Clampitt CDs and copies of Root Doctor to Americana music fans.

You can't hold the Swinette-Picker of American Letters down.

Brew was like Truman's father.

Written out of Delray Beach.

They didn't want to be reminded of the turds.

In The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens said a hard thing to do is to sit under the statue of a famous general in the garden of your native town and imagine other possibilities.

Brew's father had a bridge named after him, in Delray Beach. The Jack L. Saunders Bridge. Across the intracoastal waterway at Linton Boulevard.

Brew narrowly escaped sleeping under it, with the other dirtballs. With Truman's father.

Brew had turned into his father. Into Truman's father.

He imagined his way out. Then he followed his dream.

Ha ha, all the way to Point and Shoot. Where you could still catch mullet with a cast net, and The Red Bar in Grayton Beach served fresh fish, never been frozen, and not pond-raised tilapia, either.

Bryan Hand worked there as a waiter, and painted the cover of DRAGGING UP on the side.

In DRAGGING UP, Brew rescued himself from his job as a grant writer for a community behavioral health care center in DeFuniak Springs.

Was there really a Creature From the Black Lagoon hovering over him, preparing to strike, or was that paranoia? Was Brew paranoid?

Doyle Lawson called and offered Owen a try-out, on a swing out west the band was taking. Brew drove him to Bristol, Tennessee, to join the band.

Brew was still out of work.

Doyle said if he didn't take him on, he'd pay his bus fare home. If he hired him, Owen was on his own.

Brew said that was fair.

Doyle told Owen, "No drinking and no dope." Owen said he understood.

That meant all the time, even when Owen was off-duty. If Owen drank, or did dope, and Doyle heard about it, he was gone.

Owen said he understood.

At the end of the swing out west, Doyle hired Owen.

He worked for Doyle for almost four years. The same length of time Balder was in the Marine Corps.

Doyle is a perfectionist, and not easy to work for. But Owen learned a lot, about music, presentation, studio work. He must have learned how to hide his drinking, because Doyle never called him on it.

Disclosure: As a member of the Jazz Journalists Association, I requested, and got, a copy of Doyle Lawson's new CD to review. You Gotta Dig a Little Deeper. I'm listening to it.

After Brew dropped Owen off, he was talking to Doyle's wife, Suzanne, and Suzanne's sister, Mary Jane, and they asked him what he did. He said he was a writer.

They asked him what kind of books he wrote, and he gave them a copy of Forty.

Forty starts out with Brew and Owen driving to a street fair in Key West, listening to a Doyle Lawson tape, in the family station wagon, with folding lawn chairs on the roof rack.

So Owen comes from a show business family and his family digs Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. Digs gospel music. Tight harmonies.

No Sheriff of Mayberry infomercials for Owen's family.

Forty was Brew's 40th book.

Clamor, clamor, clamor.

It's hard to fly with an albatross around your neck.

But you can't piss and moan about it.

Who wants to read that?

Brew and Brenda were proud to tell people Owen played for Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver.

He was on three or four CDs.

They were on Crook & Chase, the Grand Ole Opry, and toured Europe, besides being nominated for a Grammy.