I Miss Larry Brown

I wonder what it would have been like to have a beer with Larry Brown. You know good and Goddamn well that Joe-writin’ sonofabitch was more real than you or I either one could hope to be. You know he was.

I wonder. Driving around in that pickup. Fishing cold beers from the floor cooler. Or sitting on barstools at the Paradise Inn or wherever. Him looking like any other wiry Southern boy you ever saw. Only he could bring a man to crocodile tears with a couple sentences about an old man rocking a baby on a porch.

I met him once. I did. He was kind and elusive and uncomfortable in his coat and tie. Didn’t make much eye contact when he signed my copy of his book. And hell, I wanted to cry right there on the spot just knowing the words he had bottled up in him.

That’s about the highest compliment I can pay a man.