Writing the books is the easy part.
Old Folks, looking back
1. TO LIVE POOR AND WRITE. DIY fellow in New Orleans, when
I stole the last year of my NDEA fellowship in anthropology at Tulane, stayed at
home, and taught myself to write, by writing 2½ books. Digging the slave quarters
at Shadows-on-the-Teche, in New Iberia, where Henry Miller visited Weeks Hall in
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Move to the mountains to live poor and write.
Live communally with Jack and Karol Neff at Penland School of Handicrafts, near
Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Laurel Cottage Cottage Industries. Work as a potter's
helper, laborer in a feldspar mine. Write nights and weekends.
2.
LABORER, CLERK. Move to Winston-Salem to work in an herbs and spices, coffees
and teas, home winemaking, beermaking, and cheesemaking shop John Ehle and Rosemary
Harris have an interest in. Owen is born. Move to Courtney, across the Yadkin River.
Work as an electrician's helper, industrial construction. Work as a carpenter's
helper. Work as a press brake operator trainee in a factory that builds industrial
air-conditioners, the only white guy on an all-black crew. Work as a janitor in
a department store. Fired for stealing six rolls of toilet paper.
3.
PARAPROFESSIONAL. Move back to Florida and live with Brenda's mother. Find
a technical writing job in Fort Walton Beach. Rent a house in Ocean City, an older
subdivision. Visit Potter and Suzette in their A-frame on Choctawhatchee Bay on
weekends. Larry publishes Playing Hurt, a chapbook that asks what colored
town will be like in Utopia. Balder is born. I get laid off, but find a job in
Tallahassee, our old college town, as an information specialist. A permanent, Career
Service job. Brenda goes back to work, in the state archeology lab. I am laid off,
then blacklisted as a troublemaker when I file a grievance, cutting off my nose to
spite my face. In one week, I was fired, evicted, arrested for drunk driving, and
a manuscript a publisher had had for nine months came back rejected, by winged messenger,
unread, after I inquired about its status. Quit drinking November 11, 1977.
4.
NOVELIST. Move to Delray Beach and work in the bank my father had been on the
board of directors of. My grandfather sells me the house behind his house, The Cottage,
a hovel on the edge of historic colored town. The boys attend nursery school and
elementary school in the school I went to, and both my parents went to, which is
now integrated, with teachers from the old separate-but-equal colored school system.
I write and publish the pamphlets that make up Screed. I talk my mother
into loaning me the money to publish Screed cooperatively with John Bennett,
Vagabond Press. When Screed comes out I quit the bank and learn the ropes
of free-lancing, writing a bylined column for the hometown newspaper. I go on a
bicoastal book tour. Winter Park, Florida, and Ellensburg and Seattle, Washington,
Portland and Eugene, Oregon. I thought Screed would put me over as a writer, but
it didn't. Brenda works as a technical instructor for a manufacturer of PABXs, or
telephone switchboards.
5. BLUE-CHIPPER. I work for IBM for
3½ years. Show them what I am writing and ask them to let me write books for my job.
Pitch a new product line to them, underware, which seeks to get at the infrastructure,
or underlying form of what the small, desktop computer is going to mean in everybody's
life. By analogy with the hardware and the software. Unfortunately, I say that
PC doesn't stand for personal computer, it stands for pubococcygeus,
the muscle women contract when they squeeze their pussies shut, and call the computer
we make Big Red, the Snapping Pussy of Doom. Vagina Dentata. Did you hear the one
about the woman who went drift-fishing with 27 guys the other night? All she got
was a red snapper. I resign by mutual consent, assured that quitting will not be
held against me, after a Speak Up I wrote, and went Open Door with, is turned down
by the Vice President, Personnel, at Corporate. I wrote and published Common
Sense, Full Plate, Blue Darter, and Lost Writings. Not just pamphlets. Books.
6.
AT THE HOUSE. My grandparents die and I inherit their house. That's one
reason I was so brave at IBM. I had a paid-for house. I ask the state to buy the
house and turn it into a museum, naming me the curator of my own collections, but
they decline. I take out a home equity loan, stay at home, and write Evil Genius
and Open Book, which I publish myself, then go around the state, barnstorming
for them. I write Forty about doing that, at Fantasy Fest '86 in Key West
and Miami Book Fair International, where I have a booth. My 40th book. I get a
temporary job at IBM which is canceled and find out my manager at IBM ticked Do Not
Rehire on my exit interview and has been damning me with faint praise to prospective
employers. I move to Panama City and live in a trailer behind Granny Brown and Uncle
Wayne and look for work in Northwest Florida.
7. CONTRACT WRITER.
Popular Reality publishes Forty. With an afterword by Blaster Al, "Jack
Saunders Revisited." I get a job as a tech writer doing work for the Navy base,
the mine defense lab, job-to-job. When the book, or the military training course
is finished, your job is over. Owen and Balder move up and live with me in the trailer,
enter high school and middle school. Brenda sells the house in Delray Beach and
we buy a house on Martin Lake. With two acres of waterfront land, a deck and a pier,
and 119 live oak, pine, magnolia, and dogwood trees. Also two tin outbuildings,
or sheds, The Slave Quarters and Bachelor Hall. I use one as a writing studio, Owen
lives in the other one between bands. He has dropped out of high school and gone
on the road with the Gillis Brothers. Brenda works for a defense contractor, as
a tech writer, writing a mil spec tech manual on the commo link between a tethered
submersible and the mother ship. After visiting the Walter Anderson Museum of Art,
in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I ask the Division of Cultural Affairs to help me
find a publisher for my stack and a library to sell or donate the original manuscripts
to. I offer to throw in The Slave Quarters, which they can put in the Museum of
Florida history, in the basement of the R. A. Gray Building, with the mastodon skeleton
out of the Aucilla River and the Indian River orange crates, but they do not reply.
8.
THE OLD ROLLBACK. I am laid off by three contractors, the third time in the
middle of the Reagan-Bush recession. Brenda is also out of work. She changes jobs
and takes a pay cut each time. In three years she is out of work for 18 months and
I am out of work for 24 months. We are soldiers in the transition to a post-Cold
War economy. We lose the house to the bank, move back into the trailer behind Granny
Brown and Uncle Wayne, and declare bankruptcy. Owen is on the road with James King,
then with Doyle Lawson, then with James King again. Balder enlists in the Marines
to be a bandsman and is stationed in New Orleans.
9. A SECOND CHANCE,
LATE IN LIFE. I get a temporary technical writing job out of town, in Atlanta,
with a fiber-optic cable company. I am hired permanent. With benefits. At age
57. We rebuild our credit. Brenda buys a trailer near the prison in Wewahitchka,
where she works installing and maintaining the computers and the telephone system.
Then she sells the trailer, quits her job, and moves to Atlanta. Finds a job in
Atlanta. We buy a house. Balder gets out of the Marines, comes home from Okinawa,
and enrolls at Georgia Tech. Owen and Jeannie move to Athens after Jeannie graduates
from college. Then they get married. Then they have Ella Blue. Then they move
to Tennessee. Then Potter dies, and Balder drops out of school and moves in with
Suzette, in Santa Rosa Beach, and helps her renovate her house, plays music around
Seaside with Potter's old bandmates, Duke Bardwell and Franko Washboard Jackson.
He lives the life of Riley now that Riley's gone. Owen changes bands, to David
Davis and the Warrior River Boys. Balder forms Dread Clampitt. I begin posting
books online at The Daily Bugle. I am a headliner at the Underground Literary
Alliance's Legends of the Underground reading, off-off-Broadway.
10.
ON SABBATICAL. Bush is elected, 9-11 happens, Enron happens, the jobs go
south, Brenda and I are both laid off. We sell the house in Atlanta and move back
to Panama City and live in her old home place, in Parker, which we are fixing up,
and buying from her siblings. Between early, reduced-benefit social security, separation
pay, and unemployment, I have a 49-week sabbatical. Brenda also draws 39 weeks of
unemployment. Then she goes back to work and I start looking for a job. We're living
in the house rent-free until Uncle Wayne's estate is cleared. We plant a garden,
raise chickens, eat mullet, and go to hear Dread Clampitt play at The Red Bar every
Sunday. I make new fans over there, readers Balder's age, to whom I am, not a fuck-up,
but a rock star. Not just Balder's dad but a legend of the underground in my own
right.
11. BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN. I get a contract tech-writing
job and we start paying off the house. After five months, I am fired for blogging.
I get another job, as a grant writer, out of town. A long commute. I make it to
my six-month appraisal. I have applied for a dozen grants. I write my 250th book,
SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL. A small press, LitVision Press, asks to see the manuscript.
While he is considering it, I write Bukowski Never Did This, and post it
at The Daily Bulletin. He asks to publish Bukowski Never Did This
instead of SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL. Whichever.
12. NETWORK OF STOPPAGES.
I quit my job and cash in an annuity I rolled my pension distribution over into
when the fiber-optic cable manufacturer laid me off, to promote and sell Bukowski
Never Did This, write books about doing that, but before I get any product to
sell, my publisher loses his day job, and I am in limbo, unsure of what is going
to happen to my book. I visit Larry and Hazel in New Orleans, where I see a book
called Vanishing Florida, which inspires me to write OLD FOLKS AT HOME. Then,
nearing the end of OLD FOLKS AT HOME, I envision a year-long series of books, about
combining family, writing, and work, which I have done as well as any writer I know
about, called The Empty Nest, and begin pitching The Empty Nest to
agents and publishers. Maybe Guy Lit will catch hold, and liberate male readers
from the Big Dick Syndrome. I'm going to do this if it hare-lips everybody on Bear
Creek. I give The Empty Nest the subtitle My First 35 Years as a Writer.