Arturo Collins? Who’s that? That’s me, that’s who. Paul Cinque, whom we’ve all read, in real life uses a chewed-up mini-golf-pencil nubbin and a pad of children’s colored paper when he comes to interview you. He asked me if I ever thought about what my legacy would be. I told him I don’t have a legacy, I have a reputation. In fact it’s all I have--that and the double-wide and my books and this credit card slip signed by Merle Oberon that I bought on Ebay. It’s from the Brown Derby, 1984.$67.51.
I have two dogs, too, but they aren’t so much mine as just two gray dogs that hang around the property and bark at the UPS guy. At dusk when the sodium lights come on and I step out back to set up the lawn chairs, they dive under the tarp of the old Continental like I was planning to kick them. Since I haven’t given them names and don’t feed them on any kind of fixed schedule, they aren’t really “mine,” just two dogs that hang around. They might belong to Billy Helms over on Chapparal. All the more reason to guard the old reputation, and getting shut out of the Bolger anthology, while personally humiliating and just generally awkward, has me second- and third-guessing this whole shmear. Because: it wasn’t edited by some numb-nuts, but by Lorraine Creel-Gaither, whom I respect. (Or used to.)
Meanwhile I’m sitting there watching Cinque take notes with his dull pencil on a sheet of kelly-green construction paper. “You going to be able to read that later?” I said. He assured me he would, and left in his yellow Saab before I could ask him to stay for a few cold ones.
No poems tonight. Time to dip solo but with abandon into this case of Bert Peel’s and throw the empty cans at the woodchucks, if there were woodchucks, which there aren’t.
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