The Half-Assed Novelist

The year was 1973.  I was an artist, living in New Orleans...I drew caricatures for tourists along the boardwalk on the East bank of the Mississippi River.   The times were indeed high.  My artist friends and I we shared love, we shared passion, we shared whatever intoxicants we might possess at our midnight gatherings in Jackson Square.  It was such a fine and natural sight, everybody dancin' in the moonlight just like the King Harvest song of a similar name.

It was at one of these nocturnal festivities that I saw something wondrous and truly affirming.  I was lying on my back, letting the cool of the grass support my carriage as to give my tired legs a moment of respite. In that moment my eyes happened upon a kite, swaying against the moonlight. The kite was as patriotic as Old Hickory himself, streaked with brilliant reds and blues against a backdrop of white.  I was mesmerized by the hypnotic dance of this flying wonder and could not help myself but to follow the string all the way down to the earth where I saw that the string stopped inside a little hand, a hand attached to an arm which made a skinny journey to the torso of....

a little boy.

This lad was a firecracker. He was decked out in bell bottom jeans with patches on the knees, a "Super Friends" t-shirt with likenesses of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.  He wore a baseball cap bearing the logo of what must have been his favorite team, the Baltimore Orioles. He wore horn-rimmed glasses which perched ever so carefully atop a slightly runny nose.

I rose to my feet. I walked over to the boy, fascinated by the way he mastered the kite flying high above our heads. I said "Son, what's your name?"

The boy barely gave a sideways glance as he mumbled somewhat under his breath "Jimmy."

My stare penetrated his blank exterior and I asked with fervor "Jimmy what?"

And with that the boy made a massive pull on the string, sending the kite into a nosedive, he jerked the string with such a violent motion that the kite leveled out, three feet above the ground, the pointy tip flying straight into my posterior.  I fell to my knees, my eyes watering, my backside on fire. The boy glared down with sinister, repellent eyes and said to me "My name sir....

is Jim......






FREGOSI!!!!"