Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
when interest rates soared, eventually to 20% and higher—fairly imbuing us with character-
istics similar to Robin fucking Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
How did we manage to pull off 8½%?
Easy. It was South Carolina!
We made a bank president our other one-third partner!
We wouldn't need any financing to buy the property, because we'd never own it, because
concurrent escrow closing on the property and the individual units would happen in the same
moment, squeezing scads of profit from the thin air!
Was it a cop out? Or had we broken on through to the other side? I suspected all new in-
sight to the benefits of a regional concept called asshole bubbas? In favorable light the process
rendered a young man ready for a lifetime of magnanimous giving.
Billy did the legal part. The banker's role was silent, what with the better part of valor and
all that. And I handled sales—thirty units in sixty days. Oh, they were a good deal, and I was,
in a cultural, revolutionary context once again, a natural. I had no money and couldn't believe
these guys would just take me on, so I repeated my pledge to Billy to get a second mortgage
on my house or better yet dummy up a loan application and—
“Stop.”
Billy waved that one off, mumbling about cost benefit and enough risk where it was war-
ranted without sticking our asses over the parapet for chump change. Then he covered my
end. Few people in anyone's life are as generous and true as Billy. I used to wonder why he
did that and years later realized that some people actually go through life without needing to
screw anybody.
The canned cream o'chicken and cat food remaining in March went to eighty grand by
December, and that was some dough in those days, mobilization dough, let's-get-this-life-
started dough—dinner out with drinks
and
dessert.
Then came the tough question: would a free spirit with values intact and apparent narrat-
ive talent want to be a southern writer? Or would he best consider the rest of the world? A few
southern writers shone with wit and insight though the truly greats seemed mostly dead, and
those remaining sounded tediously similar to each other, leaning hard on idiom as a substitute
for substance—like the accent in Charleston; it got thicker if the speaker wanted to emphasize
inclusion or exclusion to those addressed. How else could the south be portrayed in narrative
fiction without such caricature? Well, it could be portrayed as anywhere else could be por-
trayed, without the accent, the idiom and tedious repetition. What was wrong with that?
You'd still have the natural beauty, the country people and the wildlife teeming like few
places in the world. Then again, most characters suffered from public education, and though
a few rare intellects surfaced in the southland, nearly all yarns were burdened with idiom and
accent. A narrative could consciously avoid bubba and cornpone, but why be in a place if only
to avoid its character? Better to avoid the place if it still felt repetitious, tedious and predict-
