Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--New Orleans was a good town to be poor in.

There was food, music, art films and concerts out at the college, open-air drinking, at Mardi Gras and in the French Quarter, all year long.

There were bookstores, libraries, alternative newspapers, a little magazine/small press kind of feel.

Heap first read Post Office in New Orleans. Perhaps the most successful small press book he could think of. NOLA Express published poems and short stories.

Brenda had dropped out of school and taken a job at the university library, mending books.

Between her salary, his stipend, and his student loans, they made enough to eat well, drink all they wanted to drink, and buy books and records, new.

They were rich.

Heap thought their income would go up and up, as he started to sell books. Gradually, but surely.

It turned out that was the high point of his career.

His material fortunes went downhill, from there.

He was to make more money, but he was to make it at a necktie job that ground his guts to glass.

And he was to have time to write again, but it was time he stole from Brenda and the boys, it ran out, and he had to go back to work, and by then he had lost his innocence, it was time he felt guilty about having, because he knew what he did with it would not pay off, it would be money down the drain, like all the rest. Money pissed away on a self-indulgent lark.

Heap had a puritanical streak.

The Heap Streak, he called it.

He felt he didn't deserve to be successful, as a writer. That success would be empty, and shallow. A betrayal. And if he ever was successful, he would be suspicious of his success, he would expect it to abandon him, as capriciously as it came.

But that first year was glorious.

He saw himself making progress in the work.

He was teaching himself to write. He saw he could do it. In fact, he was relatively good at it.

He had found his work, his vocation, his call.

Blessed is the man who's found his work.

And writing was open-ended, because he could always do it better. He could always improve.

No matter how good he got, he could always get better.

There was always room for improvement.

And writing, he was the judge of how good he was doing. Not some committee.

Nobody else could judge it because they didn't know what Heap was shooting at.

Heap knew. That is, he didn't know. He couldn't quantify it.

But he recognized it when he saw it.

He knew it when he saw it.