I had friends in the band, and kept going over to the band barracks dayroom after work, after I was reclassified. My own dayroom was full of category fours.

Category four is the lowest quartile on the IQ test the military will accept.

The Army has to take them, so they make the other branches of the service take some too.

In the Air Force, they make them Personal Equipment specialists.

Personal Equipment specialists issue parachutes, helmets, nylon flight jackets, and aviator sunglasses to pilots and enlisted crewmen on flying status.

If you see some bugger-eating moron (BEM) with a nylon flight jacket and aviator sunglasses on, he's probably a category four.

I was the age of a freshman in college. Hanging out with musicians, who read books and played music, listened to jazz, watched foreign films, and were hip enough to understand Lord Buckley or Lenny Bruce, was a treat. We had an income. We didn't have to do homework. We didn't have to write a book report about what we read and we didn't have to read the books in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, which contained none of the writers we were reading.

You wouldn't find "You're Too Hip, Baby," or "Red Dirt Marijuana," by Terry Southern, in the Norton Anthology. You'd find it in Evergreen Review, published by Grove Press.

You wouldn't find Amiri Baraka.

When he was still LeRoi Jones, Baraka wrote Blues People, in which he quoted Bobby Bradford as saying, "If a guy walked in here carrying a Coke bottle, I wouldn't laugh until I hear him play it."

I remember seeing the first two films Stanley Kubrick made on the black-and-white television set in the band barracks dayroom, and thinking, Wow. This is a guy to watch.

Killer's Kiss and The Killing.

I was sorry when the Air Force had a downsizing of bands, shut down the one in Waco, and shipped all my friends out to larger, consolidated bands, bands that flew to other bases, and worked five days a week, playing parades in the middle of the week, all week long.

I remember going with my friends to hear Stan Kenton, Bill Doggett, Woody Herman, in Waco, and Les Brown, Count Basie, and Phineas Newborn, Jr., in Dallas.

Not to mention trips with Bobby to Woodman Hall, in Dallas, to hear James Clay and the Red Tops.

The Red Tops were the house band at the jam session on Sunday at Woodman Hall in Dallas. James Clay and a rhythm section, plus sometimes Leroy Cooper on baritone sax.

I was welcome, even though I was white. There was a long tradition of white kids who loved black music being welcome in black clubs.

When the Ray Charles band was in the vicinity, David "Fathead" Newman would come by and have a tenor battle with James Clay.

These were as legendary as the tenor battles between Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon, or Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, although not recorded.

I guess now they are passing from memory, as the people who heard them die off.

Once the police stopped us.

The white policeman wanted to know what a colored couple (Bobby and his fiancee, Melba Joyce Moore, called Joyce) were doing with a white kid in their car.

The policeman said the only reason a white kid went into niggertown was to score pussy or dope.

I thought to myself that if I wanted to score pussy or dope I could do it at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, without going into niggertown, but kept my mouth shut.

I told you the service was a maturing influence.

Once I went to a gig in Fort Worth with Bobby and James Clay and the bar had canceled the gig and not bothered to tell the band.

They came prepared to play and were turned away.

Sorry. We didn't know how to get in touch with you.

That's a disrespectful way to treat someone.

Why did Bobby take me along?

He said for the gas money I paid.

I don't think he was kidding. I think he was being honest.

I was not embarrassed to pay gas money to be taken along. What did I contribute?

My enthusiasm? My innocence?

My good looks? My boyish charm?

At Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, I heard a comedian tell a joke, between strippers.

Did you hear the one about the trapeze artist who told his deaf-mute catch-man to catch him by the balls of his feet, the balls of his feet?

Needless to say, the pain was excruciating.

You can't copyright a joke. Or a T-shirt.

READFEST 2006: SEX, DRUGS, AND FLATT AND SCRUGGS.

No. Whoever sells the T-shirt probably does have it registered.