Untitled Document
THE$5 MAN
Chapter 1, page 1. The Spinster Goode Hatbrow raised pigs instead of
children. She . . .
Page 102. The man with
all his parts replaced is tethered to Harry Wonder III by feeding tubes.
They’ve just escaped Bob Walnut Hospital No. 6, and they’re
heading south down Route 55 in a 1992 Dodge Dakota pickup truck that Harry
Wonder III had purchased the previous day — from a green fire hydrant
he mistook for a leprechaun priest. The escapees are heading to the
Orphanage of the Ozarks, run by Books Milan, a defrocked bookie who sells
marginal dope and marginal people. The FBI is always not far behind because orphanage
bookkeeper Maude Kummer, years ago, confused by the new indoor plumbing,
flushed the last of her stamps down the toilet, and so she drew a poor
likeness of Abe Lincoln on rough paper, stuck it to the envelope containing
Harry’s birth certificate, hoped that it would pass for a stamp, and
sent the papers to the county clerk. The postal authorities intercepted the envelope with
a picture of something that looked like a frog wearing a stovepipe hat and
sent it to the FBI, where J. Edgar Hoover put it in his Communist Frog
Conspiracy File. Back at the orphanage, Frankie
“Hardscrabble” Ipplemate, the maintenance man, is sharing a
joint with his trained chicken. And in the background, always in the background, is
the swayback man on the swayback horse.
The $5 Man, the book I’m writing, again
is caught in its middle with nowhere to go. I cannot control the
characters. I do not know the swayback man. The story will never break free
from its middle — unless I swallow some pride and buy editing
support. I have enough money in my small bucket of stocks and
my savings account and in pension buckets to buy an editor — but that
won’t do. I suffer a self-inflicted canon that restricts me to
“extra money buckets” for this type of adventure. I have three
extra buckets: the gambling-money bucket, the writing-money bucket, and the
computer-consulting money bucket. The gambling bucket is at $2,016 — good but not
enough. The consulting bucket is dead forever: I am a DOS man in a Vista
world. I am trailing-edge man, outdone by 12-year-old nerds with keyboard
hands. My own PC endures five minutes of flashing black screens spitting
out ominous warnings before starting on its ever-slow way — I suspect
it’s because I went around back to “ipconfig” and injected rogue numbers in
“alternate IP address.”
The writing-money bucket stands at $2.16, last
year’s total royalties, thanks to some befuddled soul who bought one
of my incoherent books that mistakenly made it to the Internet. The Five Dollar Man was
doomed — but then Google gave me hope. Whatever Google’s secret
algorithm is, it seems kind to Illinois Times and to me. We both, sometimes, are included in search
results.
It’s a Wednesday, and I’m in a St. Louis
restaurant with a man willing to pay for words. One of us is dressed
inappropriately: He is a well-coiffed fellow in suit and tie and probably
wearing socks. My wardrobe has refined itself into two seasonal piles. The
warm-season pile is T-shirts and baggy shorts to the knee; the cold-season
pile is sweatshirts and baggy jeans to the floor. It’s still winter,
and I am “bagged” to the floor. He is about my age, he owns a company, and he has
company rules: He wants me on-site for the work; there’s a dress code
on-site; there are specific work hours that will not be violated;
there’s a storyboard — it will be followed. The
words I give him will be funny but not as strange as this stuff I wrote and
that his son found on the Internet and gave to him. “And another thing . . . ” he started,
and then he hesitated and said, “There’s really no reason for another thing is
there?”
“Not really,” I answered. “I know people,” he said, “I
didn’t get rich not knowing people.”
“You do know people,” I said. And then we
talked about baseball, and I left with no new writing-bucket money. I drove
back to Springfield, on the same I-55, traveled the other way by the man
with all his parts replaced and Harry Wonder III. The swayback man on the
swayback horse was is in my rearview mirror — he’s always
there, always in the mirror. It is not easy on this Thursday to kill 102 pages it
took me an hour here, an hour there over two years to write. But I know
that I must delete it all — completely, no backups, no paper, no
pieces — lest it leak into my next book and again leave me stranded
in the middle and . . . and . . . it’s done! Gone! All deleted! Time to start anew, fresh, unmarked by old thoughts.
THE $10 MAN
Chapter 1. Page 1. The Widow Gertie Capbrow raised hogs instead of children. She .
. .
Contact Doug Bybee Sr. at dougbybee@sbcglobal.net.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2007.
