The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan Read Free

authorized to perform rescues on the highway, so the engine was used as a storage shed for Homeland Security equipment.
When I first moved to Macon, into an unfinished apartment, my wife saw the landlord giving the plumbing inspector $600. Immediately, without any more work done on it, the apartment building passed inspection.
I’ll go, all right. I’ll leave behind students who believe that Nelson Mandela was the first African-American to be elected president of South Africa, and that Christianity is a Father-Son relationship.
I’ll gladly leave Georgia. But don’t tell me where to go. No law requires I go home—I’ll go where I please, thank you.
I’ll visit my friend Anselm, a photographer who used to teach in Illinois. He’ll sympathize with me now that I’ve stepped out of the system.
"There you go again, fool." He’s called me that ever since we were classmates in high school. "Don’t you know you can only effect change from within the system? That’s why I’ve never stepped out of it. If you hadn’t been afraid of the water in the first place..."
He was referring to the fact that I spent ten years out of school working in retail management before I decided to finish my degree and enter the professional world of academe.
I wondered then why I’d gone to visit him. He and his other friends, I suddenly remembered, had always had a habit of making themselves feel better in comparison by insulting anyone unlike themselves. Their derision of me— one idiot even suggested that for me writing wasn’t an end in itself but merely a means to an end (what end? poverty? isolation? depression? What a fucking idiot!)— was plainly little more than the by-product of their own insecurities and narcissism.
Anselm was the only one of that bunch I respected, for he actually did his work. His triptychs were masterful examples of abstract narrative photography.
The other clowns? One joined the navy—I think he liked being rear-admiraled. He was the idiot who derided me about ends. Interesting. The other’s a fat loudmouthed piano instructor teaching little kids their Brimhall and Guy Duckworth. I’m sure he steers clear of the Bartok Mikrokosmos . Fats Loudmouth put out an album of modern classical music featuring Steerhorn 25 years earlier. It was an excellent and innovative piece of work, but he apparently had nothing else to say beyond that.
The three of them—Fats, Butt Boy, and Anselm, Anselm the least of them—had rolled their eyes at each other over my writing. Their monologues at me invariably began, "You know what your problem is?" or "You know why no one’ll ever read your novels?" or "You wanna know what’s wrong with your writing?"
They were all about talk... If the allegation is true that only two types of artist exist—artists who are busy doing their work and artists who are too busy "being artists," Fats and Butt Boy were the latter. Anselm was the former, but an observer would be hard-pressed to think so if watching Anselm around Fats and Butt Boy. Anselm would adapt, like a chameleon, to his environment, and in a crowd of loud-mouthed blowhards, he could keep his own and do a convincing impersonation of an artist too busy "being an artist."
His advice wasn’t very helpful just then, but despite his pile-on tendencies in the company of thugs who were incapable of construction and who thus only committed destruction, I liked him. One-to-one Anselm could be a profoundly likeable observer of the world around him. Only this particular visit, though, he chose not to be.
So I made an excuse and left. Onwards to California! I barely made it to Chattanooga—the Georgia Mountains test my weariness—but with several emergency-caffeine rest stops, I made it. I just had to be out of Georgia before I could stop. The manhunters there couldn’t follow me across state lines. They could stand there drooling of stupidity until their faces needed shaving—just long enough for me to make my getaway.
No—I lost