1: In Which Meet

Me again. Nuts again. Trying to make sense of even one single thing again.

So, something had me thinking about the Andres, and how I still fondly think of them as good and stout friends even though I only spent a few brief days with them almost 30 years ago. An odd thought? No more than any other of the bats careening through my head. I started to call this "Two Andres, The Purse, The Meaning," but it didn't sound quite pompous enough to ring true with my arrogant voice.

I met old Andre first, before I met his son, when he opened the door to a friends' house when I knocked. The old bastard had made a half-hearted attempt at something -- surely not modesty -- with a towel after he'd stepped out of the shower at my friend's house.

Andre had a broad and winning smile, but he said "And who the fuck are you?" He was somewhat shorter than me but (back then) far more burly. This was so long ago I was very lean and very quick.

I looked back for a while and then said, "The cop who's just about to kick your ass back to New Orleans."

He glared at me for a time and then turned loose of a flat-out barnyard bray of a laugh, saying "Welcome, friend," with a sweep of his arm as though the house was his own. And that sweep of his arm revealed more (or: perhaps more than the intended amount) of Andre Dubus that Andre Dubus wished to display.

Disdaining, as always, the customs of either journalism or fiction, I'll answer the unasked question: yeah, a pretty considerable root. You don't want one too big, you know? And shrimpy just won't do.

And so I met Andre Dubus.


2: Jubous and Weeshus

At the time, I was working for Pharoah. Being nineteen times uneducated and without any sort of pedigree, I made out the best I could -- and that, for me, was being an electrician working 364 days a year.

But I wangled an utterly forbidden day off, trading on the fact that no one else at the quite large company I worked for could do the work I did. But I had an invitation to do this literary gig with the man many considered the finest -- ever -- practitioner of that enormously difficult form, the short story. My friend Bob Shar (whose house Andre had just showered in) founded a truly fine and unusual literary magazine called The Crescent Review, and Bob had somehow secured a grant to pay Andre's fee and also that of his son, Andre III, whose work the magazine had recently published.

And, God alone knows why, I was to introduce them at a reading in the private study within the mansion of the most tasteful of this country's robber barons. R.J.Reynolds was a rogue and a pistol-toting redneck, but the house he built -- and the art within its walls -- is perhaps unmatched in this country. Oh, the Barnes family from Philadelphia amassed a greater collection of art and that dipshit Commodore Vanderbilt built a shrine to himself in Asheville (not far from here) that's about the size of Dubai yet has the taste of a Chia commercial on UHF television. Reynolda House is the real deal.

And so was Andre Dubus. I was charmed by the way he spoke, after the fashion of my kinsmen -- a strange, alternately guttural and lilting riptide of words. It had probably never occured to me before that the Creole culture my father's side of the family was so steeped in extended further along American shores than the tail end of Georgia.

Old Andre sounded like my Aunt Catherine, who dazzled me as a boy describing a secret fishing spot on one of the Altamaha River's backwaters and oxbow lakes. It was between Weeshus and Jubous, she said, this mystical place full of fish large enough to swim from eddy to cloud and then back. Only grown -- grown something -- did I buy a marine map to guess at where the point might be.

It took me a long time. But then, remembering my aunt's voice, my eye caught on Oasis, and there it stuck. It didn't make sense, so I had to walk around with it lodged in my head an uncomfortable length of time before I slapped my forehead, thinking of course, she pronounced Oasis as Weeshus.

Then, spreading a slight circle on the nautical chart, I found an inlet called Dubious. Had to have been Jubous in her Creole speech. And there, on the map, was the location of fish heaven: between Oasis and Dubious.

Friends, that description suited Andre Dubus to a fare-the-well. Somewhere between Weeshus and Jubous.

3. We Go a'Sporting

Andre III arrived, a fearsome ally for a night's debauch. He was tall, absurdly fit, wry and sardonic when his father and I launched into new orbits of varletry. And a lady-slayer if one ever walked this earth. Aristocratic bearing (perfectly complemented by a subtle splash of menace), finely chiseled features, dressed perfectly -- he'd be a hit this very day: shirt untucked over just-rightly faded bluejeans and beneath a nice and understated sports jacket. Hair long enough to say... something. A mystery.

The old coot's boy looked like rock-and-roll walking.

Perhaps some background (and for the good of mankind, please don't ever use that vile spawn of a term backstory: it offends, or at least it should offend, any writer anywhere) here would be in order:

At this time, the summer of 1986 approaching, there were many American scholars and critics who considered Andre Dubus the best living writer, as I've said, of short fiction. He'd grabbed the short story and throttled the life's blood out of it, run roughshod over the peculiar form of the novella -- and he'd accomplished these miracles with tales populated with ordinary trying-to-be-decent people, surrounded by the familiar details of a life lived without the then-trendyreference to brand names and gyppo joint chain stores owned by tacky Arkansans.

Andre's work breathed real life, really lived, and the man himself gave scent of enormous appetite. A retired Marine officer, he was tough as nails and silly as rubber snakes. He had stopped carrying pistols by then -- long story there -- but he wasn't one little smidgen afraid of protecting himself or his family. Me, the Quaker/poet/activist? I've always had a mighty soft spot for Marines and for fistfighting. We were doomed to meet.

Andre III was just as funny and just as wild as his old man, but in a more removed fashion; he was paying, clearly, more intense attention than I'd ever before witnessed. We were drinking far beyond abandon. I was considerably the least of the three in body weight. The younger Dubus was quite the tallest, his father built like the love child of a fireplug and a bulldog. But the Dubus' were gym fellows. Then and now I dislike the scent and the sights of a gym, with the exception of a boxing gym -- which I expect to be dingy and reeking of skank and early death.

Anyway, we were drinking and loudly challenging any comer to drink one-for-one with us. The old man and I were already blowing blue lights when we arrived. Perhaps oddly,