Awash in Portis, in Situ in T-town, AL

[FILL YOUR HAND, YOU SON OF A BITCH]

a great gallery of Portisan talkers: brilliant and garrulous con artists, deliriously gifted fabricators, delusional mountebanks, disbarred lawyers, defrocked doctors, disgruntled inventors, dispossessed cranks, and disgraced dreamers who crawl out of the cracks and crevices of Trailways America with confident claims that they have the philosopher’s stone, the key to all mysteries. Or, more often, that they had it and lost it, or had it stolen from them but are close to getting it back.

And if the man had been not merely honest but also forthright, he would have offered that he had discovered the very elixir for which his disjointed and long-suffering search had first commenced, that it was in fact what he had conceived it in dreams to be, and that it had been here, the whole time, hidden beneath all the combustible lampooning and self-helpery by which he had tried to make sense of the need to traipse across the map in the first instance. It was and is America’s bequest to the seekers and the strivers and the holy confounded mess of leaders who are to be doing the bidding of the People who are also the Rabble, “it” being scripture, American scripture, from prophets as diversely voiced as any nation might plausibly hope for, and it impels and implores and inveigled against, attaining a kind of comic poetry that stands shoulder to shoulder with the blazing irascible sun itself.