Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Thoreau said the curse of trade corrupts everything it touches, "though you trade in messages from heaven."

Melville said the same thing in "Bartleby the Scrivener," where Bartleby's errands of life ended up in the Dead Letter Office.
Lord, we can't put this at the beginning of a story, where Brenda and Heap set off on a new adventure, eager, trusting, and naive. Full of hope and dreams and innocence.

What is Heap--cynical? Jaded? Hard? A hard man, an hombre duro.

Il faut, d'abord, durer, Hemingway said. First, you must last. You must survive. You must harden yourself. Without losing your vulnerability.

You must have what Nelson Algren called an acquired innocence, an innocence tested in the annealing flame of experience.

Trade is good. Trade is a test.

The marketplace is good. The marketplace is fair.

Not to give the story away, but the cultural operator's job was to set up and resolve oppositions in his life, and then write about them, in myth.

Learn from them.

That's why Heap used the Bryan Hand painting of himself rescuing Miss Weekiwachee from the Creature from the Black Lagoon on the cover of SQUIBS.

It was the forces of darkness versus the forces of light.

That's what graduate school was and that's what Heap's long struggle to cross over from the underground to the mainstream as a writer was.

An account of the hero's journey, the antihero's journey, the hero with scant resources, the immobilized hero. The broke-dick dog, the tin-penny whistle, the swinette-picker. And in Heap's case, it wasn't just him, it was him and Brenda, Team WUPPIE, for willfully underemployed professional, cleaning out the Augean Stables together, one of the Twelve Labors of Hercules.

In Tallulah, they wouldn't eat shit. That came later, at Tulane.

They would shovel shit. They were good with a No. 2 shovel.

They knew how to shovel. They were working-persons in their prime.