One of my friends in the band was Ed Stehney. When they broke up the band and shipped everybody out, he went to Phoenix, Arizona. He played tenor saxophone.

He used to pick Bobby Bradford's brain. In addition to playing with Ornette, in L. A., Bobby had played with Wardell Gray and Eric Dolphy out there.

From Wardell Gray to Eric Dolphy.

Bobby once pitched the idea of a jazz combo, a quintet, to the bandleader, a warrant officer named Nicholas J. Azzolina. We called him Mr. Jazzolina.

Mr. Jazzolina said there was no one qualified to lead such a combo.

Bobby played in such a combo with James Clay.

He plays in such a combo now. He calls it the Motet.

That's one mo' than a quartet.

Ed Stehney was the first person I knew to own a blind saxophonist Roland Kirk record.

Kirk played tenor, manzello, and stritch on one side and straight tenor on the other, to show he could do it.

One weekend around Christmas I hitch-hiked out to Phoenix to see Ed. I was inspired by Kerouac's hitch-hiking jaunts.

We smoked some marijuana. I guess that was the drugs part of SEX, DRUGS, AND FLATT AND SCRUGGS: I smoked some marijuana with Ed Stehney.

Oh, yea, I ate Benzedrine-soaked cotton out of inhalers, drank codeine cough syrup, and took what was supposed to be a Miltown once.

I wasn't a dope man. I was a booze man.

I wasn't much of a sex man, either.

I was saving myself for marriage.

I don't know what kind of a man I was, or am.

I was a bookworm. A reader.

Not very exciting.

Now I am a writer.

Last week I got three rejection slips for BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK and a review of Bukowski Never Did This that I didn't think got what the book was about, or I am about.

It's no wonder they don't get it if I don't get it.

My life was boring and confusing and now I write books about how boring and confusing my life was.

That's about it.

What do I expect.

Praise? A genius grant? A major award.

A major award is a lamp in the shape of a woman's leg that blows the fuse when you plug it in.

I thought I was writing A Christmas Story.

I thought it was funny.

One Sunday, Ed and I went out to the colored Elks Club, to a jam session.

There was a door prize. A fifth of Old Crow.

When they had the drawing, I looked at my ticket stub. I had won.

I tried to hide my ticket but Stehney saw it and shouted, "Over here. Over here."

I had to go up on the stage.

The emcee said, "Ain't this a bitch. One of them in the house and he wins the door prize. A fifth of Jim Crow."

People laughed.

"Are you sure you have a member-ship card?"

People laughed.

One thing black people call themselves is members.

Sex is J. D. Salinger having an affair with Joyce Maynard.

Who'd want to do that?

"I read for escape," John Prine said, in Daddy and Them.

Maybe I read for escape.

Maybe I write for escape.

I just want to escape. Writing is a drug. I have a writing jones. A jones is a habit, or addiction. I get up, I write. If I don't write, I feel bad. I get grouchy.

That's about it. I am preoccupied, irascible, beset by demons, voices I cannot still, except by writing, who'd want to have sex with someone like that?

I am unworthy.

I am a creep.

I'm jealous of normal people. And I hate them.

I have white guilt. From having white privilege.

I am ashamed.

I am ashamed of what I think about black people. How I feel about black people.

I wish they'd go away.

What do they want? I tried. It wasn't enough.

What can I do?

Jack Saunders is a straight white male, over 65, from the south.

Do you care what a man like that thinks?

What he has seen, and been through, that shaped his thoughts?