The floating book shop had a long visit from an old friend today, the elder Hughes brother, Bobby, whom I dubbed Flynn in my novel Exchanges, which is set in part on the commodity trading floor. He and his brothers Joey and Huey treated me very well, taking me and other staff out to eat several times through the years, and forking over cash during the holiday season. Huey was one of the first to buy Close to the Edge. He made a ton of money and now owns a lot of real estate. Joey bought the first four of my books before we lost contact after electronic trading started making our jobs obsolete. He has relocated to North Carolina and loves it. Another brother, Cement Head, whose Christian name was, I believe, Jimmy, is now struggling. I'd always thought his nickname came about because of his difficulty in grasping the requirements of the so-called write-up room, where trades were allocated. Turns out he'd once put his head through a ceramic wall while standing at a urinal. A fourth brother, Peter, passed away. Barbara, the lone sister, also worked at the Exchange, processing trades. Bobby caught a lot of abuse from his peers, and dished out quite a bit himself. He and Joey will reappear as the Flynn brothers in January of 2020 when I put my take on James Joyce's Ulysses into print. That day's odyssey takes place in great part on the floor of the Exchange. Bobby is currently house sitting at one of Huey's properties on Long Island and working as a greeter at a YMCA. He's also working on a children's book set in Central Park and hopes to make it a series. Here's a pic I took this afternoon:
My thanks to the young gentleman who purchased a massive pictorial on automobiles, from their beginning to 1994, and to the older one who bought The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert, a novel with which I was unfamiliar until its recent appearance among a large donation. Of course, almost everyone knows at least the title of his masterpiece, Madame Bovary. Here's how a blurb at Amazon describes the other: "A book that deeply influenced the young Freud and was the inspiration for many artists, The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flaubert’s lifelong work, thirty years in the making. Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt." Sounds like every night during most of my adult life.
My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE
Read Vic's Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza
No comments:
Post a Comment