Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
What if the 60s Never Happened?
he South Fork
TIM LITTLETON WAS
forty-one already and a real businessman, homey as Burl Ives with the folksy
goatee, and he was fat, warm and humorous as a Burl Ives song. He tipped me off one day
that the Savannah paper wanted coverage on our little island corner of South Carolina—not a
stringer but a staffer. “Every New York news hound'll be on it, once they find out. Cold, miser-
able bastards.” I got the job.
Savannah journalism was who, what, when, where and the facts with no style, no flourish
and no irony.
Who the fuck you think you are, bubba? We don't need that shit.
Making slightly
less money than rent and groceries, two years felt like a long time. Seeing prime time fade away,
it was time to take a stand, time for a novel—time for a labor of love with no check on Friday.
Time for the saving grace—and poverty, just add water.
Nobody quits art. Art is set aside for practical reasons. Then art fades away, sometimes. I
stayed friends with Tim Littleton because he understood artistic aspirations, and because he
gave me work, writing a monthly article for the Chamber of Commerce magazine he'd edited.
My special coed had put up with an attic apartment in mid-Missouri, with subsistence living
in Miami on stolen fruit and menial jobs—with artistic delusions and a low budget oyster roast
billed as a wedding in our South Carolina back yard. We'd moved up the coast a hundred miles
to Charleston, where a fellow stood far better prospects for revenue than on a resort island.
Hot mud was still laughable, even as a fossil remnant of a long gone age. Still, how tough
could real business be? Businessmen didn't do shit—anybody could see that. They hired out the
work.
This conclusion followed the data; on learning that the city magazine in Charleston would
not be a source of income, because there weren't no city magazine. But a city with no magazine
would want one. So it was settled by virtue of logic, free will and flight of fancy in a package
deal that felt like a legacy.
City magazines were new and Charleston, South Carolina was picture perfect, a still-life of
lovely bones marinated in scotch whiskey, bound to history, inured to innovation and obsessed
