Heir apparent to a knight errant

In the beginning, there was John D. MacDonald. And lo, it was good.

Then John D’s protagonist — handsome, hairy-chested hero Travis McGee — begat other knights errant, including a loveable serial killer, an amateur-sleuth photographer, a renegade roadkill-eating former governor and a crime-fighting marine biologist.

And lo, it was really good.

John D. MacDonald nearly created the whole Florida crime genre with his McGee novels, which he sprinkled over the couple decades before his death in 1986.

But he lives on in the influence he brought to the works of Carl Hiaasen, Tom Corcoran, Tim Dorsey, Randy Wayne White and a score of others.

All of those writers created laconic, self-sacrificial heroes. Hiaasen’s novels don’t really have continuing characters other than Skink, the governor who went off the grid a few decades back and became an eco-terrorist. (John D would approve.)

Dorsey’s hero is Serge Storms, a loveable serial killer (he kills only bad guys). Corcoran’s Alex Rutledge is a Key West photographer who gets pulled into solving murders in the Southernmost City.

For my money, it’s Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford who remains the most McGee-like of protagonists. He lives a McGee-like life on the water, though across the peninsula from McGee’s slip at Bahia Mar. McGee was a “salvage expert,” who never seemed to want for money. Doc Ford sells marine specimens to colleges, museums and public schools, and earns just enough to afford his boat and beach house on Dinkin’s Bay, down on the Sanibel coast.

Like McGee, who has Meyer, the hirsute economist and fellow sleuth, Doc Ford has Tomlinson as an erudite foil, ying to his yang. And both of them have whispered pasts, which may or may not involve histories with the CIA and black ops. Night Moves (Putnam, $25.95) is the latest — and 20th — Doc Ford novel and hits stores this week. It is as rich and immensely satisfying as anything that White has written.

This time, Doc and Tomlinson are chasing the wreckage of a squadron that disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. Along the way, Tomlinson is having an affair with a married woman. Doc doesn’t approve, of course — he’s a moral titan, much like Travis McGee — but he isn’t sure what to make of things when the married woman keeps sleeping over at his apartment. Of course, assassins are on the trail of Doc and Tomlinson, and we have a lot of Florida folklore, adventure and Haitian drug dealers.

What more could you want for a good time?

Doc Ford is definitely his own man and White couldn’t imitate another writer if he tried. Though we mourn the loss of John D and Travis McGee, we can rejoice that we have Randy Wayne White and Doc Ford.

White has a great online presence at docford.com and has two restaurants named after his creation — one on Sanibel and one across the bridge on the mainland. You’ll find directions on the site, where you can learn more about White’s earlier career as a fishing guide and his other missions — to share the love of all things maritime, and to take baseball equipment to Cuban kids.

(Here’s my Creative Loafing profile of White from 2009.)

Remembering a walk on the moon

NEIL ARMSTRONG

“For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”
From the Armstrong family, in a statement issued today, 25 August 2012, on the day Neil Armstrong died, aged 82.

Here is what I wrote on the occasion of the publication of Magnificent Desolation, by Armstrong’s fellow moonwalker, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin. It was published July 19, 2009, the day before the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

Tom Wolfe started with a simple question: What do you do after you walk on the moon?

How do you top that?

After romping around on the lunar surface, you can imagine the empty feeling that comes upon you even when you do something exciting. Going to Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning loses its thrill. After all, you’ve been on the moon.

Wolfe called it “post-orbital remorse,” the condition that affected the astronauts who walked on the moon.

How many of us know for certain that our lives have peaked?

The look at the astronauts started as a Rolling Stone series Wolfe wrote in 1973. When he began digging deeper into the story for the book-length version, he got so involved that he had to cut off his manuscript before it became unwieldy. When it came out in 1979, The Right Stuff (Picador, $16) told the story of the space program from the test-pilot days of the pioneers in the late 1940s, up through the end of the Mercury program, in 1963. The story of the third generation of astronauts, those who were part of the Apollo program, remains tucked away in his archive of magazine articles.

The Right Stuff remains the great work of literature to arise from the space program. There are other fine books, including Gerard DeGroot’s Dark Side of the Moon (New York University Press, $35), which took a comic look of the space race. Next month,Wayne Biddle’s book about the engineers behind rocketry – also called Dark Side of the Moon (W.W. Norton, $25.95) may add to the serious  works about the space program.

There have been a number of astronaut memoirs and picture books along the way. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, wrote before of his post-orbital remorse in Return to Earth (Random House, 1973). For the 40th anniversary of his moonwalk, he’s written Magnificent Desolation(Harmony Books, $27).

When Return to Earth came out, Aldrin was not long back from the moon and deep into his post-orbital problem. In short, he was very much a work in progress.

In his new book, Aldrin is closer to the end of the story and – I’m pleased to report – he’s in the Zip Code of his happy ending. He stared down the demon of depression (which he dealt with in Return to Earth) and now he’s also battled alcoholism.

(To learn more about Aldrin’s battle with alcoholism, see www.cleanan   dsobernotdead.com.)

Aldrin not only knows the moment 40 years ago when his life peaked. He also knows when he hit bottom – trucked out on public relations tours, selling used cars – and wrecked two marriages on his way.

This memoir starts with the peak – the moon landing, told in gripping detail – and then his battle to recover his life, nearly losing it to drink.

It’s a compelling story, all the more fascinating for what it followed, that historic trip to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins. As Armstrong and Aldrin stood on the lunar surface and looked around, they searched for words to describe what they saw. “Magnificent . . . desolation,” Aldrin said.

Of all the words that have been devalued in the modern world, it’s probably “incredible” that has lost all its meaning. What we did to put men on the moon was incredible. Most everything else is less.

Tom of all trades

Marshall McLuhan once likened the Sunday New York Times to a warm bath – something to slip into for comfort and pleasure.

Tom Corcoran and songwriting partner John Frinzi

We’re borrowing that line to tell you that Tom Corcoran has just run a nice, toasty tub for you. It’s his latest novel, The Quick Adios (Times Six). Prepare yourself to slip into the relaxing and refreshing waters of a great story.

Corcoran is one of those writers you impatiently wait for, much like Florida’s other great writers of mysteries, Michael Connelly, Randy Wayne White and Carl Hiaasen (well, his books are sort-of  mysteries).

Corcoran’s stories feature an accidental detective named Alex Rutledge. Nominally a photographer in Key West, Rutledge carries the DNA of the late great knight errant, Travis McGee, the hero of those marvelous John D. MacDonald novels that never get old. (I’ve been on a MacDonald tear this summer and even named one of my sons Travis after that great hero.)

Corcoran’s Alex Rutledge is smart, charming, handy, resourceful, and successful with women. In short, he’s everything a man wishes he could be and everything many women wish they could find.

But he’s not perfect, which is one of the reasons we like him so much and why we miss him when he’s gone.

Tom Corcoran is a busy man, considering all of his ventures. So this is only the seventh Rutledge mystery in the 14 years of the series. Each book adds to the wonderful Key West mosaic Corcoran has created with these terrific novels. There’s never a word out of place, never a description that isn’t perfect, never a story that doesn’t absorb you to the point where you walk to work reading the book, tripping over the sidewalk like a dork.

Or wait – maybe that’s just me.

Nevertheless, Rutledge fans slip into the bath as Corcoran describes his knight errant and his latest mission.

The saga began with The Mango Opera back in 1998 and has included Gumbo Limbo (1999), Bone Island Mambo (2001), Octopus Alibi  (2003), Air Dance Iguana (2005) and Hawk Channel Chase (2010).

Corcoran built a strong audience with his first five novels, published with St. Martin’s Press of New York.  He also knew how to work the promotions circuit, from his earlier life in the music industry as part of the Jimmy Buffett orbit. So he decided, starting with Hawk Channel Chase, to cut out the middle man.

One of those other hats Corcoran wears is that of book publisher. Years ago, he started a small press that specialized in books about Florida. He republished the 19^th Century classic, The Young Wrecker on the Florida Reef  by Richard Bache. He published the story of the  Key West doctor who kept the mummified body of his true love at his bedside (Undying Love by Ben Harrison). And he kept in print other classics of Florida history.

So why not just bring his Alex Rutledge books onto his Dredgers Lane imprint?

And so he has. The novels are beautifully produced – much better than some of the mass-produced books from those New York publishers – and he gets the books into the hands of his readers with a minimum of fuss.

Corcoran with Hunter S. Thompson “back in the day” (circa 1980)

Corcoran’s always working on something. Years ago, he co-wrote songs with Buffett (“Fins,” “Cuban Crime of Passion”) and was part of the loose network of friends who made Buffett feel at home in the Southernmost City in 1971, when he arrived unknown and unwanted by the music industry. Corcoran was one of the people who kept him fed and taught him the lore of their adopted home town of Key West.

These days, Corcoran’s been composing songs with John Frinzi, a Florida singer-songwriter who sings with rare grace and candor. Frinzi’s latest album, Shoreline, is primarily co-written with Corcoran, as is the upcoming as-yet-untitled collection.

Corcoran’s worked with the best. He not only wrote with Buffett; he also drafted two screen treatments with Hunter S. Thompson. You know his photography from album covers and book jackets. You might’ve marked time by one of his calendars or cribbed one of the books he printed in a class on Florida history.

But Alex Rutledge fans are an impatient lot.

Confidential note to Corcoran: we want more of these great stories. Now, please.

The Quick Adios (Times Six) spends a good deal of its plot on mainland Florida, as Rutledge takes a quick-and-easy job to do some commercial photography in Sarasota. There’s some intrigue to the job and a couple of sexy characters that make you go all a-tingle, and things seem well in hand until the first body is found.And then another, and another, until we reach the body count of the title.

By then, Rutledge is back on the Rock, trying to help his friends on the Key West police solve the crimes. And, of course, someone is trying awfully hard to kill Rutledge.

Part of the appeal of Alex Rutledge is that he leads the life that we all want to lead. A generation ago, Travis McGee was our role model. Now it’s Rutledge. We’re a little older, a little wiser, and maybe he’s a little more realistic.

But he’s also not really in it for himself. Rutledge is a moral crusader, someone who regards honesty and decency as his personal property. Injustice irritates him immensely, and he’s out to better the world, one day at a time.

Corcoran started at a high level with The Mango Opera 14 years ago. He achieved the sort of literary altitude few attain. No less a master than Michael Connelly referred to one of his books (Air Dance Iguana) as “the reading highlight of the year.” Randy Wayne White said Corcoran’s books are “impossible to put down.” Jim Harrison – that’s right . . .  Legends of the Fall Jim Harrison … called another one of Corcoran’s books (Octopus Alibi) “a true marvel of a mystery.”

When your fan base includes some of the best writers in the country, you know you’re doing something right.

Corcoran has always been busy doing something – songwriting, publishing, photography. It’s too much to wish for that he’d just do one thing, like writing novels. Besides, then we’d miss the music.

The Quick Adios is written with such elegance and assurance that we can’t help but be greedy. We want more. We want to luxuriate in this great, warm bath.

……………………………
Your to-do list:
Visit Tom Corcoran at his website: www.tomcorcoran.net
Order The Quick Adios here: http://amzn.to/NsH0AG
Check out John Frinzi’s website, stream some of his music, check his performance schedule, then go ahead and get his Shoreline album: www.johnfrinzi.com

Passing it on (how a teacher affects eternity)

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams

I never took a class from Buddy Davis, but he taught me a lot.

BUDDY DAVIS

Years ago, when I was beginning my teaching career in Kentucky, I’d panic over what to do in class. I had most of these frantic talks with my colleague and friend, Harry Allen.

“I’ll tell you what Buddy would do,” he’d say, then launch into some tale about his days as a student with Horance “Buddy” Davis at the University of Florida.

Both Harry and I copped a lot of ideas from Buddy. Harry had kept every one of Buddy’s assignments. Though we couldn’t pull off Buddy’s classroom mannerisms — he was such a strong authority figure in class, something we couldn’t do effectively — I took Harry at his word that the man was a brilliant teacher of writing.

And so much of teaching is “borrowing” from your teachers and the teachers you hear about, as you pass down the ancient craft and wisdom. I appreciated everything Harry told me about Old Buddy, but I never figured I’d meet the guy.

And then I did. After a long and circuitous path through other universities, I ended up teaching at the University of Florida, replacing — the word is used loosely here — Buddy Davis, who had just retired. Nobody replaced Buddy Davis.

But I was proud to finally get to know him and to thank him for the help he unwittingly gave me, and to be friends with him the last 20 years of his life. Anyone who took a class with him was touched forever. (And not always in a Mr. Chips kind of way. He was known for locking tardy students out of classrooms and making others wear a makeshift crown of thorns.)

HARRY CREWS

I bring up all of this because Jay Atkinson has just written a new book about his Florida education. The title is misleading. Memoirs of a Rugby Playing Man (St. Martin, $26.95) isn’t just about blood sport. It’s about how Atkinson, a New England transplant, came to the University of Florida for graduate school, and learned about writing from Harry Crews and learned about rugby from P.J. Van Blokland.

Both professors played a huge part in Atkinson’s education, and though he was already extremely conversant with both rugby and writing before setting foot in the Sunshine State, he details all that he learned from Crews and Van Blokland, and the role that a teacher can play in a student’s life.

The memoir also does a wonderful job of portraying the changes occurring in Florida in the 1980s, and amounts to a trip into the Wayback Machine. Get out the polyester, the double tank tops, the big hair and the porn-star moustaches. We’re heading back to the Reagan Years.

Van Blokland recently retired from the university after years of teaching food and resource economics. But it’s what he taught on Norman Field that most concerned Atkinson — the rugby skills and strategy that Van Blokland brought across the pond from Great Britain.

We’ll get back to the rugby.

P.J. VAN BLOKLAND

The heart of the book is about Harry Crews. He died earlier this year after many years of ill health. Perhaps his whole life was spent in ill health, from the time as a child in South Georgia when he fell into a boiling vat on a hog farm and burned off most of his skin.

Crews’s life was the quintessence of hard scrabble, and he wrote about it eloquently in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. His bare-knuckles approach to writing infused his novels, including The Gospel Singer, The Knockout Artist and Car.

Crews taught creative writing at the university for a generation, and when freshly minted grad student Jay Atkinson showed up in a Crews class at the dawn of the 1980s, things didn’t get off to a good start. At first, Atkinson thought the scruffy drifter hanging around outside the classroom was a janitor. Inside the seminar room, he learned the drifter was the professor. After Crews delivered a meandering preamble to the class, Atkinson told him he hadn’t understood a word because of his swamp-and-turpentine accent. Would he mind repeating the rant, in normal English this time? Crews said he didn’t much like Atkinson’s New England honk, and suggested they step outside to settle their differences like real men.

Thus began a beautiful friendship, of course.

Today, deep into his 50s, Atkinson is respected for both nonfiction and fiction. As a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, he felt duty-bound to retrace the journey of that town’s most famous son, Jack Kerouac. Paradise Road follows the road taken by Sal Paradise, the protagonist and Kerouac’s On the Road stand-in. He’s also written about Boston’s organized crime in Legends of Winter Hill. He’s also done collections of fiction.

But finally, Atkinson has written a love story. It’s about teachers, it’s about rugby, it’s about the intensity of meaningful and lasting friendships.

I’m about as athletic as a doorknob, but even second-hand, these stories of brotherhood on and off the field get the adrenalin flowing. Even those ignorant of rugby knows that this sport goes hand-in-hand with the consumption of high-octane beer, the stuff with the color and consistency of crank-case oil. Play ’til you’re bloody, with a black eye and a loose tooth, then hoist a pint with your mates.

JAY ATKINSON

The book takes us into the van as the rugby club travels from game to game and bar to bar, criss-crossing Florida, playing games and raising hell. The writing is so vivid, you feel every bump in the road as you hunker down with your go-cup of beer on the way home from the game.

Atkinson learned well. Even as a graduate student, he ended up developing a special friendship with Crews, escorting him to uncomfortable undergraduate parties, both on the same mission — to find women. After leaving Florida, Atkinson and Crews maintained the friendship, and Crews became long-distance friends with Atkinson’s son, and welcomed father and son when they visited Florida.

Atkinson still plays rugby today, and he coaches youth teams. He teaches writing to college freshmen. He also writes books that explore what it means to be a man in the modern world.

Harry Crews may be dead and P.J. van Blokland may have retired, but they’re still teaching, because Jay Atkinson is a teacher.

The golden age of rock’n'roll autobiographies

We may look back on this era someday and realize that this was the golden age of rock’n’roll autobiographies.

Or not.

But you have to agree that we are on a roll.

First we had Eric Clapton’s wonderful, soul-searching Autobiography. You could imagine Slowhand sitting at his laptop, twisting the chin hairs of his neatly trimmed beard as he struggled over telling the story of his son’s tragic death, his heart-ripping love for his best friend’s wife, and his imprisoning addictions. Few autobiographies of any kind have been as searingly honest.

Then came Life by Keith Richards, a work of masterful storytelling. We could say it was remarkably lucid, but one of the things we find out in Life is that a good part of the Keith-Richards-is-burned-out act is just that – an act. Offstage, he is a master of lucidity.   He is an extremely intelligent and literate man who plays bad-ass guitar and has substance-abuse issues.

And now we have the Gregg Allman autobiography, My Cross to Bear (William Morrow, $27.99). Allman has been such a strong presence in the fabric of American music for more than 40 years – so much so — that we’ve probably taken him for granted.
All I can tell you is that after a drought of non-Allman music, when he pops up on my office iTunes or on the radio, I never fail to turn up the volume. He may be the most under-rated singer in the history of rock.

Duane and Gregg Allman

All of these books – Clapton’s, Richards’ and Allman’s – were done with collaborators. With the Clapton and Richards volumes, the ghost writers had some sort of literary purpose. They wanted to elevate their subject’s stories, and in those cases they worked spectacularly well. Allman’s collaborator, a much-honored music journalist named Alan Light, has tried to present his book as an intimate monologue. Imagine you’re sitting in a room with Allman, you’ve got your glass of ginger ale (he’s booze-free now, of course), and perhaps a surgical mask in an effort to combat second-hand smoke. Gregg’s got some stories to tell.

It’s written in the honest, direct style of a conversation with a good old boy. Allman holds back nothing.

We learn mostly about his brother Duane and how that guitar genius and his early death haunted Gregg his whole life. Gregg Allman’s greatest regret appears to be that in this last conversation with his older brother, he lied – for the first and only time in his life, he lied to his beloved big brother. A few hours later, Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident.

We also learn that Allman’s father was murdered, that the overwhelmed mother sent her two sons to military school until she was able to properly care for them, and what struggles Allman had over his career with Dickey Betts, the guitarist in The Allman Brothers Band and composer-singer of its biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man.”

Along the way, you learn that he prefers to be called Gregory, not Gregg. I once found myself at a urinal next to him at the Welcome-to-Georgia rest stop on I-75. I would have turned to thank him for all of the great music over the years, but it didn’t seem like the right time.

And you learn all about his marriage to Cher — as well as all of the other failed relationships in his life. Though he admits failures as a husband, he seems like he’s worked hard to be a good father.

For music fans, this book is essential. Though there’s no mystery to it, it’s one of those books that you can’t put down. Like any good conversation, you don’t really want it to end.

THE SIDE MAN: Bobby Keys never achieved the kind of musical fame of the Allman Brothers Band, but the chances are he’s played on some of your favorite recordings.

Like The Rolling Stones? That’s Bobby Keys blowing sax on “Brown Sugar.”

Remember those great George Harrison solo albums? Bobby Keys on sax.

Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Delaney & Bonnie, B.B. King, Nilsson, Joe Cocker, John Lennon, Warren Zevon . . . hell, even Barbra Streisand.
Keys played on them all.

In some ways, Bobby Keys has been sort of a rock’n’roll Forrest Gump, only much smarter.

He connects local-boy-made-good Buddy Holly to the modern era. Like Holly, Keys came from West Texas in the late 1950s, an incredibly fertile musical proving ground, and hit the road early with Buddy Knox (“Party Doll.”). He connected with Buddy Holly’s orphaned backing band, The Crickets, and brought them together with the young Englishmen who were such fans of the doomed young singer – Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton among them.

Someone like Keys, standing on the side, waiting to play his solo, can sometimes see things more clearly than the headliner. It’s great to have stories told by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Gregg Allman, but I look forward to books from the genius sidemen like Keys just as much. (Hal Blaine, who drummed on almost every record made in LA, published a memoir some years back on his days with the session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew.)

An interesting bit of trivia we learn from Keys: The Rolls Royce pictured on the cover of Delaney & Bonnie’s On Tour with Eric Clapton belongs to manager Albert Grossman. And the feet hanging out the window belong to Grossman’s most famous client, Bob Dylan.

Keys tells these tales and much more in Every Night’s a Saturday Night (Counterpoint, $25). Like all good, honest rock autobiographies, there are struggles with substance abuse and relationships and, eventually, a triumph through faith.

But there’s nothing clichéd about Keys’ story. Like Allman’s book, it’s like sitting down for an evening of good storytelling. For fans of Life, it again lifts the curtain on life inside the Rolling Stones. After all, Keys has been part of that stage band for nearly 45 of its 50 years and Keith Richards has often called Bobby Keys his “best mate.”

The life and times of the great hippie poet

I’ve written several biographies and I’m kind of proud of them. But then I got this new biography of Richard Brautigan.

It’s as if I’m standing at the urinal, looking down, congratulating myself. You know, that’s not bad . . . I’m pretty good, I guess.

Then William Hjortsberg walks up to the next urinal and unfurls a monster.

“Water’s cold,” he muses. “Deep, too.”

Hjortsberg’s book, Jubilee Hitchhiker (Counterpoint, $42.50) will inspire biography-envy in the heart of any writer who tries to tell the story of another human being’s life.

This book is huge and absorbing and . . . well, tumescent. It’s rich with life and despite its extra-small type over 852 pages, it never ceases to be absorbing.

Brautigan was a key figure in my adolescence. He was the Great Hippie Poet, the writer every wannabe artiste in my high school wanted to emulate. As the author of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Verses the Spring Hill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar, he was the quintessence of cool for my generation during those (1968-1972) years. We were the sons and daughters of liberal America in a bohemian university community, and Brautigan was our poet laureate.

He was the right writer at the right time. His poems were sometimes complex, but could also be mere snorts of whimsy and bemusement.

Witness “Xerox Candy Bar”:

Ah,
you’re just a copy
of all the candy bars
I’ve ever eaten

His novels broke the proscenium and made whole careers possible for generations of writers to follow. (Insert Tom Robbins, David Foster Wallace and others here.)
And he looked out at us, from his book jackets, with that stoned and inscrutable face, droopy moustache, slouch hat, eyes crinkling at the corners with some private giggle. Hell, we all even tried to dress like him.

And then, one day in 1984, when the train was long gone, he shot himself to death. He wasn’t found for more than a month.

Hjortsberg, an accomplished novelist, was a close friend – and a Montana neighbor. That crowd around Livingston included writers Thomas McGuane, Hjorstberg, Tim Cahill, Philip Caputo, Guy de la Valdene and (these days) Jim Harrison; painter Russell Chatham; actors Jeff Bridges and Peter Fonda. Not a bad bunch of running buddies. And they all loved Richard.

They remain heartbroken.

After Brautigan’s suicide, Hjortsberg announced that he intended to write a biography of his great friend. Twenty-five years in the works, it is here, after the author no doubt battled enormous odds – many of them emotional – to stitch together the life story of this gifted and difficult man.

Like all great biographies, it’s history. Hjorstberg puts his central character in the middle of a sweeping narrative that takes the country from the Great Depression into the Reagan Years.

Brautigan symbolized the hippie ethos that grew from San Francisco, where he was in the mid-1960s. Tied to that generation and philosophy as he was, eventually the world passed him by, and he could not cope.

I interviewed his friend, the great novelist Tom McGuane. He was talking about another friend, Hunter S. Thompson, but he could just as easily have been talking about Brautigan, another one of his generation’s more famous literary suicides: “He was a wonderful writer and he loved being a celebrity but, once again, that comes and goes. Literature is always there and writing is always there. They don’t come and go. If you get addicted to being popular, you’re hosed.”

Brautigan was a gentle soul and when the adulation passed him by, as it did so many icons of his generation, it was a difficult thing to grasp. He continued writing – it was always there for him – and he struggled with why, since he hadn’t changed, his audience had.

No wonder it took so long to write this book. Hjortsberg was writing an epic, not just a remembrance of a friend. He re-creates Brautigan’s childhood, his absent father, his painful adolescence, his emergence as the jester of hippie culture. The book is masterful and recreating time and place.

Everyone, it seems, has a Brautigan story. Most of them are funny. Hjortsberg was diligent in tracking down all of the stories, to give a full three-dimensional story better than anything Hollywood can throw at us.

(Young folks! If you ever wished you had been born early enough to experience the joy and intensity of the 1960s, this book is as close as you can get to being there.)

Hjortsberg, as a novelist, is a genius at writing about place – whether it’s San Francisco in the hedonistic and idealistic 1960s, or Montana in the depressed and trickle-down 1980s.

It is the fastest 852 pages you will ever read. It will open up to you the novels and verse of Richard Brautigan, which will give you a window on those long-lost times.

It is a monster of a book – both in physical weight, and in emotional weight.

Like its subject, Jubilee Hitchhiker is unforgettable.

Let us now praise famous Stooges

It’s a miracle I survived childhood. We didn’t have seatbelts in cars, all of the walls were coated in lead-based paint, and once a week a truck used to drive through my neighborhood spraying DDT.

And don’t forget The Three Stooges.

I grew up to be a father of seven and I’ve tried to be a good parent. When the Great Scorer comes to write against my name, I’m sure I will have spent 10 years just telling kids to fasten their seat belts. I do my best to keep my kids safe.

But I refuse to protect my children from the Three Stooges.

I was a kid around the time the PTA’s of America decided that the Three Stooges were bad for us. Too much violence and disrespect, they said.

Wise guys, huh?

(This is what YouTube calls the most violent of all Stooge scenes.) Even in single digits, I knew this was a joke and that we were not to try this shit at home.

Looking back at my distant past, I can’t tell you how much pleasure I got from watching the Stooges. I never poked anyone in the eyes because of the Stooges. I never hit anyone with an anvil because of the Stooges.

I did laugh a lot, though.

The three youngest of my children are — yes, indeed — boys. They are 9 and under, the perfect age for Stooging. They’re very curious about the new film about the Stooges and thank God the normally hilarious-but-raunchy Farrelly Brothers made their film family friendly.

But it makes me wish we could put more Stooges in our lives. They match up so well with my kids. My 9-year-old, Jack, is the Moe of this group. Travis, 8, is the easygoing Larry and Charley, 6, is the charming Curly.

Oh man, do I miss the Stooges. I miss the nyuk nyuk and the soitenly! that provided a soundtrack to my youth.

Because the film will rekindle so many memories of the real thing, The Three Stooges Scrapbook (Chicago Review Press, $22.95) has been revised and updated. The title is misleading. Sure, there are a lot of pictures — priceless pictures that bring back memories of those long forgotten two-reelers the Stooges churned out in the 1940s.

But there’s a lot of text — full biographical chapters on each of the members as well as a group biography. It also includes a full annotated filmography of every moment the Stooges committed to film.

And, of course, there were six Stooges.

This great collection was assembled by twin fans, Jeff and Greg Lenburg, with the help of Joan Howard Maurer, the daughter of lead Stooge Moe Howard and wife of the Stooges manager and director, Norman Maurer.

Not knowing much about the Stooges — other than the fact that they made me laugh my ass off — I was a little worried as I began reading the story. Were they pricks off camera? Did they have some deep, dark secret? Were they cruel to puppies?

Insert an eye poke here, courtesy of Moe Howard. Of course not, Dummy.

They were all hard-working, born at the turn of the 20th Century, and they were genetic entertainers. They were, like Mickey Rooney and other comic artists and actors of that generation, incapable of not entertaining.

And they were brothers. Moe was the oldest, born in 1897. He was the bowl-haired leader, clueless and cruel (so saeth the Grand Dames of the PTA). When the camera was off, he was an intelligent, well-read, savvy businessman. His real name, we learn was Moses Horowitz. He was the second-youngest of the Horowitz brothers. Three out of five of them became Stooges.

Brother Curly (Jerome Howard) was large in stature, but moved as delicately as a ballerina, and drew the easy laughs with the nyuk nyuk and the soitenlys that all of us came to mimic.

Then there was Larry Fine, born Louis Feinberg. He was the pal, the benign and somewhat ineffectual middle man, with one with the wild hair that inspired Art Garfunkel‘s coiffure.

As a kid, watching the Stooges classic filmed shorts from the 1930s and 1940s, you were aware of a changing cast. There was Curly — everyone’s favorite, of course — but now and then there was a Shemp. When the Stooges came on the television, you were never sure who the third one would be. This could lead to a number of impassioned arguments about the relative worth of Shemp or Curly. (Curley usually won, but as I aged, I began to appreciate the nuance of Shemp.)

This was Samuel Horowitz, the oldest brother in the household. Shemp actually preceded brother Curly in the act, back when the Stooges were (lowercase) stooges in the act of Ted Healey. But Shemp chose to pursue a solo career in comedy. Larry, Moe and Curly built a career that was derailed in 1946, when Curly suffered a stroke.

Shemp stepped in, serving as Third Stooge for a decade until his sudden death. He was out night in 1955, clubbing with pals. He got into the back of a taxi with his friends, lit up a stogie, and immediately keeled over, burning the slacks of one of his friends. (The book is filled with small moments of such detail.)

Then came Joe Besser and Joe DeRita, who filled the third slot, until the act finally called it quits in the 1970s.

I remember my parents dragging me to a somewhat ponderous yukfest in 1964 at the big new theater down in Cutler Ridge. The film was It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and every American comedian who could still draw breath made an appearance. For me, the film was made by a five-second segment showing the Stooges, now old men. They were silent and for me, they stole the film. The Three Stooges! What a surprise! And — IN COLOR!

Here’s that scene.

But it was a shock. For me, raised on those 20- and 30-year old theater shorts repeated over and over on television, the Stooges were forever young. Here they were in 1964, looking their ages. As a little kid, it was sort of a revelation: even the Three Stooges get old.

They were entertainers to the end. They were gentlemen off camera. They made me laugh — a lot — and even if the new generation gets “the message” second hand, through this new movie, that’s something, I guess.

But let’s face it. Couldn’t we all use a little more Three Stooges in our lives?

I know I miss them. Even today, sitting at my desk in a fine sports jacket and necktie, when someone comes into my office in need of approval for one thing or another, I always respond, “Soitenly!” Unless my guest is of a certain age, they don’t get it.

But I make myself laugh, just thinking of the Stooges.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.