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  • Hog Country
  • Michael Gills (bio)

The Razorback—which can be traced to de Soto’s escaped hogs—united us in Fayetteville, a Mecca for a whole bunch of us in the 1980s, a damned lucky thing for Arkansas. There, below the hillside of the neon cross, William Harrison, James Whitehead, Miller Williams, John Clellon Holmes, Ellen Gilchrist arm-in-arm with Otto Salassi, Barry Hannah, Lee K. Abbott’s face lit up at a bonfire in Holmes backyard, Heather Ross Miller, Carolyn Forché, Jim Harrison playing five card stud with his brother the librarian, Nemerov drinking martinis in the basement, Maxine Kumin, Tobias Wolff singing on a piano stool, Diane Ackerman, Michael Heffernon, Donald Hays, David Sanders, Frank Stanford, Buddy Nordan, Scott Ely, Floyd Collins, Gail Regier, Al Maginnes, Mark Burgh, Dixon Boyles, and Dale Ray Phillips singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” behind Brenda’s Bigger Burger all the live long day.

Goddamn. How about this? Get out of bed one fine spring morning and drive there. Find the Pig Trail, it’ll get your mind right. Cruise on in and make a left on Dickson Street; coast downhill to Roger’s Rec. Ask for Swifty, or whoever owns it now. Tell ‘em you’re a writer and that you heard Roger’d let you write a hot check for beer—file it under “F” for fiction like he always did for us. Order Budweiser in a bottle. Watch the old men play dominoes. Go read the writing on the bathroom wall. Hear those snooker balls clack-thud. Payphone’s by the door. Call up Skip Hays. Say why you’ve come, that you’re willing to go a beer or two. If he comes, and he just might, look him in the face, in the eye. He’s hard-looking, an athlete—sweet as right rain inside. Quote your best first move. Say why you’ve come, that you’re a hog fan, too. See what happens.

Once in Skipper’s workshop, this guy’s story was up about helping his daddy castrate a hog. The boy’s job was to hold snorky’s head between his legs while daddy did the dirty work with a blade. Only the hog, who did not like being castrated, yanked his head from between the boys legs and chomped down hard, bit the son’s dick off.

Daddy said, “Did he nip you son?”

Skipper looked at us, we looked at him, then all of us fell out of our chairs laughing–the kind of laugh that’s infectious, so we couldn’t stop, we kicked our feet in the air. We wept. And when we looked at the writer, the author of that wonderful piece of dialogue, he was crying for real. It was him. He’d been that boy. We understood, and tried, really tried, to make ourselves quit laughing. Then tears would come raining out of Skip’s eyes and [End Page 7] we’d all fall out of our chairs again. When you’re at Rogers, get him to sign The Dixie Association (1984). This text, a knockout first-person narrative about a fellow who gets out of prison to play for a minor league ball club in Arkansas, was finalist for the 1984 P.E.N./Faulkner Award. Hays’s characters are no less vividly realized than those of Stone or Kerouac or Melville. Twice, I’ve had to track down my signed copy in different states, only to find it passed onto to someone somewhere else.


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John Clellon Holmes once talked me into quitting school to follow a woman I’d fallen in love with (and later married) to Washington D.C.; to “Go!” (1952) without fear of repercussions. I didn’t know so much about the Beats then, what they stood for or were about artistically, but I did know what it felt like to be young in springtime, to want to hit the road and make speed toward oceans. He had the cancer already and in six months they’d cut out his whole lower jaw so he’d have to wear a metal mask over half...

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