Em McElderry stopped by to see us. We were living in
Pop Cason’s house. He was on the way to the Miccosukee
Indian Reservation to see an alligator wrestler he knew,
from the folk music circuit. His neighbor in Panacea, Jack Rudloe,
had had a story accepted by a national magazine, but when he submitted it,
they refused it, and gave him a kill fee. They said the story was too violent.
It was about him jogging around
an Airedale, and making off with him. He took him out in the middle of the lake,
went down, and tried to drown him. Jack chased them and wrestled with the gator,
under water, and got his dog back. The magazine editor said a gator didn’t stand
upright, to fight, a detail Rudloe had included in his story. What the fuck—it happened.
It turns out the Indian had a cigar box full of photographs of him practicing his craft,
and in one of them, a gator is up on his hind legs bitch-slapping the Indian like
Alex Karras bitch-slapping an offensive interior lineman.
This cut no ice with the editor. A photograph,
in black and white. Now, they demand
an all-rights contract, and if you take money
from them, they own your work forever, and can edit it
any way they please. Hunter S. Thompson wrote a story called
“The Ultimate Free-Lancer.” He eked out a living, and then he didn’t.
In a tribute to Jack Lemmon on the DVD of Glengarry Glen Ross,
a director told him, in
an Oscar for Save the Tiger, and was full of himself, “You see that guy,
you see that guy, they’re all just as good as you, they just didn’t have the luck
you did to get the part you did to get the work done, and seen.
It made Jack Lemmon humble.