Lots of friends came by to see me. One of them was Raoul. Raoul had been in the crop-duster business and had made a fortune by flying in a load of marijuana to Jackson, Tennessee, one night. He had cousins in Caracas. He had plenty of money, and now he was trying to write. He wrote poetry mostly, and wanted me to read it. The night he came over he had three or four poems. He also had a lot of beer with him. I was glad to see him. I wasn’t so glad to see his poems.

“Hey, Barlow, I’ve got some new poems,” he said.

He’d caught me at the typewriter, in the act itself, which, of course, was almost sacred to me.

“I’m kind of busy, Raoul. I’m trying to write.”

“Oh, come on, man, I brought you some beer. Sit down and read these poems.”

I hated to have to mess with him, but I was almost out of beer.

“The only way I’ll read them is if you leave me some beer, Raoul. I’m trying to write.”

“Hey, man, take all the beer you want. You understand this shit, Barlow. Read these poems. Tell me what you think about them.”

Raoul sat on the couch and I started looking at his poems.

“I’ve got some women we can pick up later, Barlow.”

“Great, Raoul.”

The first poem was about a bullfighter. There was a lot of blood and sand in it. There was a lot of death in the afternoon. The bullfighter was a candyass, though; he couldn’t face the bulls. Finally he ran from one and got a horn rammed up his ass and had to have a colectomy. And then he just stayed on a cot in a cantina for the rest of his life, sucking on a tequila bottle.

“This poem sucks, Raoul.” I laid it aside and picked up the next one. “I think it’d be a lot better if you tried to make a short story out of it.”

“I know, man, I know. I don’t know the prose, though, man, I don’t know the prose.”

The next poem was about a garbageman who tried to smell the roses in life every day. And as bad as it was, Raoul had his finger on something. He was touching the hurt in people, trying to. For that I gave him an A.

“Listen, Raoul, you’re a good guy. You’ve got some humanity in you even if you did put a lot of dope on the streets of Jackson, Tennessee.”

“It was just a one-time thing, man.”

“Listen, Raoul, none of that shit matters. If you want to write, you’ve got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”

‘‘I’ve been thinking about doing that, man.”