When he spoke here last month, Sherman Alexie was asked if he had good relationships, was received well by people on the Rez (The Indian Reservation in Eastern Washington where he grew up).

He made a reference to Isiah/Luke, a prophet never being welcome in his hometown, and quickly moved on to say how much he had moved on, and, trying not to be pompous, mentioned honestly how great it would have been if there had been a successful, straight-shooting Indian writer/comedian/filmmaker like himself to look up to when he was growing up.

He then went into a long harangue, showing how amazed he was at how far he had come. It was meant to be cute and perhaps self-deprecating, but by the sheer length of the list of things he mentioned, seen the Eiffel Tower, been kissed by Sharon Stone, having a huge house, having Robert Redford’s number in the cell phone he pulled out of his pocket, on and on and on, it morphed into something else entirely.

Anyway, I’m at a curious stage in my career. I like to call myself a working writer, analogous to a “working actor.” Some people are impressed I support myself solely through writing. Some, like my wife, are probably a bit less impressed that a 33-year-old Yale graduate makes so little money and has no publishing prospects.

Either way, I haven’t exactly come up from poverty. I’ve spent the last ten years clawing my way back up to the level of comfort and security I enjoyed when I was thirteen.

(Digression: this probably has a lot to do with what I’ve begun to notice recently as a ridiculous change in the standard of living in this country in the last twenty years, due to leftover effects of the boom economy of the 90s and, most of all, people’s ability to borrow vast sums of money. When my dad was in medical school, he and my mom lived in a trailer, next to other med students. I’d be shocked to find a med student today who doesn’t live better than my parents did when my Dad was well through his residency.)

Anyway, like Sherman, I have a lot to brag about too.

I have a laser printer and a lawn mower. The printer has a bug – with MS Word it only prints two pages a minute, but if you plan ahead it’s not much of a hindrance.

Not only have I not had my water cut off since 1998, I’m now so confident in my ability to pay each month that I even sprinkle my lawn, just needlessly padding the bill.

I have high-deductible health insurance and recently stopped going to the dental hygienist school, got a real dentist to fill the cavities the dental hygiene students and faculty have been telling me about for eight years.

I don’t have a cell phone, but I know someone who has Stephen Colbert’s phone number.

I shop at the Banana Republic, and on at least four or five occasions have paid full price for items.

I have a house and a mortgage. Hell, what am I saying, I even have two mortgages!

In recent years I’ve traveled to Costa Rica, Lake Tahoe, and Orlando, Florida.

My wife and I regularly buy some of our groceries at Whole Foods, in Mount Pleasant.

Even though our house has three bedrooms, we only sleep in one. The others are essentially superfluous.

I personally own three bicycles, two of which run quite well.

I got rid of dial-up internet almost two years ago.

I’m not due for a boot on my car (which is foreign and is of a model year in the current decade.)

Said car also has air-conditioning and can be unlocked from thirty yards away.

I very often buy the name-brand salsa, and always get the low-fat cheese, even though it’s almost never on sale.

I have a complete set of golf clubs. (I think it’s complete, I don’t play golf.) 

I get my hair cut every four months at a real salon with gay people. When you go there they offer you something to drink, anything you want. Beer, soda, whatever.

Written on my typewriter on Feb. 13 of this year. Released this week to coincide with the debut of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Mermaid Chair, a Lifetime movie event starring Kim Basinger

Sumter, our petulant Boykin Spaniel, sat in the bow of the johnboat, the spartina grass tickling his nose. Drayton, his skin tanned by the warm October sun, popped open a Palmetto Ale.

“You want to throw the cast net?” he said.

As I threw the cast net into the brackish waters of Edistawmalaw Creek, time and again, pulling in a haul of squirming shrimp, spottail, and Carolina croker, I was reminded of the rhythms of my life, my grandmother, who was the only white woman in the ’20s to weave sweetgrass baskets along Highway 17, my great-grandmother, who fired a cannon off the piazza of her tabby-stuccoed house, trying to drive the Union out of the harbor, not because she hated black people, but because she loved the South.

The muddy hands of an oyster roast in November, the smell of the oleander branches burning and wet burlap steaming. The sweet banjo picking of the woodsmen at our ancestral mountain cabin in Cashiers. The well-crafted cornices of the Four Corners of Law.

Great-grandma was so lucky, she died after an oyster roast, from oleander-smoke poisoning, and I wished, throwing that net, that I could die while shrimping.

It was a perfect January morning. Drayton pulled out his harmonica from an old handkerchief he got at Luden’s and played a tune from Porgy and Bess. A grey heron sat like a lawn jockey, listening and watching us, and we watched him.

And later that night, as we rode over the new Cooper River bridge, and looked down on the old bridges, being torn apart, I realized that my connection to my ancestors was being torn apart, like the bridges were being torn apart, like me and Drayton were being torn apart, and I took his hand in mine and told him I was leaving him for my web designer, a metrosexual from Portland, Oregon who wore Prada turtlenecks and made the most beautiful air quotes in the jasmine-scented Carolina air.

Drayton was mostly trying to concentrate on driving, he was very drunk from the White Lightning from his great-grandfather’s ancestral still out on Goldbug Island, but in the morning, he would take a walk with me in the surf of Breach Inlet, the sandpipers scooting along with each wave sliding in like a bed sheet changed by a Gullah housekeeper at the Mills House Hotel.

His khakis from Grady Ervin, well-worn and handed down from his older brother Chalmers, a harbor pilot who died in Hurricane Pinckney back in ’73, were rolled up to his ankles, and he took my hand in his.

But no words came. We walked to our favorite sand dune. You aren’t supposed to walk on the dunes, but our ancestors helped build those dunes, I’m sure, and those laws were meant for tacky tourists who bought T-shirts down on the Market, where my great-uncle Middleton used to sell lemons. Those people didn’t know a sea oat from a royal palm, and anyway, nothing could prevent us from heeding the call of that dune, which cried out like a beautiful mythological creature with a sweet song, and we went and sat, we sat there all night, watched the sea turtles come and lay their eggs, watched them hatch, watched the ghost crabs swoop in and scarf up the wee turtles like a fat man eating crawfish.

And as a dolphin leaped above the surf, the moonlight shimmering off its wet back, I knew that this night was every night, that just having this one night was like having an eternity, because the turtles would come back and lay more eggs, and in a hundred years we’d tear down the new bridge and put up a new one, and my great-granddaughter would throw the same cast net and smoke pot from the same plant and date a boy who drank whiskey from the Draytons’ ancestral still, and I could never escape this land of the salt marsh and pluff mud, of tea olives and camellias, it was as dissolved in me and I in it as simple syrup in sweet tea, and as Sumter barked and we laughed we realized we lived in Charleston once and no one, not even Dennis Kucinich could take that away.

At the Piggly Wiggly I was behind a shabby old rich couple, in their early eighties. He was tall and wearing a blue blazer with a tear in the back seam, duck pants with frayed cuffs and white canvas boat shoes purchased sometime back when Carly Simon held roughly the same position in the celebrity realm as Ashlee Simpson.

She had a white bouffant, I guess we could say reminiscent of the judge’s wife from Caddyshack. They bought 90 dollars worth of stuff, mostly ice cream, Little Debbie snack cakes, cranberry juice and Nilla wafers. The cashier took their credit card and just reached over and swiped it for them, without bothering to ask if they needed help. Then Walter brought their cart out to their 90s-era Camry.

The hood was slightly crumpled from gently rear-ending someone (by the looks of it not recently); the back was covered with B-zone parking stickers. B is somewhere far downtown, South of Broad I think. It was also covered in crape myrtle berries, dirty like Lauren’s car used to get when she didn’t drive it for a month. They’d put notices on the windshield, telling her to move it or face towing for dereliction. (Cars are for drivin’ not parkin’.)

Now that I live uptown, having not been into Burbage’s in many years, it’s rare that I see people like this, other than perhaps in Maine in the summer. I suppose I’d strike the mother lode if I went to the Yale-Harvard game like a good grad. To see them at the Meeting Street Pig was, while actually not so surprising, still a nice juxtaposition. (An instance of more typical Pig life: I once saw a young expectant mother get asked by an acquaintance “Who you pregnant for?”)

Walter (“How ya’ doin!”) is the only face at the new Meeting Street Pig  I recognize from the old one, back when it was a bus stop and social center for African-American Charlestonians. A big guy with a beer-belly and bubble-butt, he has a baritone voice, but likes to greet women in a crazy falsetto. I’m surprised the Newtons’ haven’t used him in a commercial yet. He’s got to be one of the great all-time baggers in Pig history.

One time I got on the Beltline, a bus route that stopped at the Pig and essentially circled the downtown business district. (The Meeting Street Pig sits at the dodgiest, northernmost end. The route went up to Rutledge, down Broad to East Bay, and then took Coming and Cannon back west.) Walter got on and spent his fifteen-minute break riding the loop, once around.

I have no idea how I confirmed that, i.e. what I was doing riding it with him, but it really happened, I swear.

what my wife might prefer even less than “newspaper hands” on the white trim, curtains and miscellaneous linens

idle hands

illiterate hands

uranium hands

scissorhands

still-sticky-with-the-last-bit-of-soynut-butter hands

chicken thigh hands

stripper thigh hands

fox news hands

Joe Sanchez’s rebuttal. This was actually written by my brother, unlike the Christmas letter, which was not written by my wife

Ichiro: in another lifetime, undoubtedly, the worlds greatest, yet still would-be-undersized, women’s fastpitch softball hitter.

Pujols: wound back further then all the available copies of Stepmom at Blockbuster. he’ll make some of us weep in pain too.

Jeter: instant (in stance?) frustration. there’s only so far you can tilt your head back to sneer at the world before your eyes lose sight of the pitcher. the rest is more comparable to a Menudo dance move then a real swing.

Papi: moves his stick with the most effortless of shifts. luckily not automatic. clutch. the pure clutch.

Junior: More grace then a southern baptist church. Prettier then half the girls I’ve dated. ok. all.

Piazza: Like he’s swinging a 4 x 4, or maybe a redwood trunk, slow, lumbering power.

Manny: Effortless, flawless, shoot-from-the-hip, in those baggy pants and jerseys, somewhere between a cowboy in chaps and a rodeo clown. Sometimes he’ll shoot one over the right field fence and I’ll think he swung and missed it, so late and quick.

Ichiro: a double-fisted, backhand approach shot, charging ahead.

Jeter: I call it the quick bat, but it’s more just a quick swing, one moment he’s in his stance, the next he’s holding his arms across his body, like a cheap, two-frame flipbook.

Pujols: a freight train coming through the wheelhouse, the barrell, full coverage, full power, a menace.

Ortiz: beefcake, sugar rush, the king, long live the king, that upper cut slash, riding the razor’s edge, cool and sweet like ice cream, as meltable.

This was for a 9/11 commemorative event back in 2002. I wasn’t thrilled about doing a 9/11 commemorative event, but this went over pretty well. I’ve considered using it as a preface to North Charleston, the novel I’ve been working on.

The comparison between Charleston and New York has been made before. I don’t know if every town likes to call itself a little New York or if it’s just a coincidence that the last two places in which I’ve lived have been known to do so. Although New Haven, Connecticut, where the homeless are unionized, certainly makes the claim more often.

The place I lived before that, Charlotte, North Carolina – one, doesn’t like to call itself little in any way, and two, tries to avoid comparisons. It would rather not be known as a big Columbia, a Southern Indianapolis, a less smoggy Jakarta, or, of course, a little Atlanta. For it’s not that Charlotte is competing with Atlanta, more that it is joining it — in some sort of amoebic, sprawling version of the famous Sistine Chapel image — reaching out to its maker, two fingers reaching along the I-85 corridor to form one city. So then maybe Charlotte is thus a moister San Diego.

Charleston, South Carolina, has its upper King Street, which has been called ‘our SoHo.’ And the argument has been presented to me that the peninsular set-up of our downtown is like the narrow Manhattan island, complete with a largish park designed by the Olmsted firm, and the ash heap lands of the Neck and the East Side separating it from the more pastoral, Levittownian worlds of North Charleston and Hanahan and Mount Pleasant. …and from the East Cooper sea islands, one of which was at one time called Long Island – oh, but now this is getting a little silly. And besides, the malls and movie theatres of North Charleston make it a better sister to that island Babylon east of Manhattan, land of Amy Fisher and Steely Dan, hairgel and prosciutto.

To carry this scheme to completion would leave us with West Ashley and James Island as New Jersey, and Folly would serve as the Jersey shore, a favorite of surfers and the ideal place for a full-scale Skee-ball revival.

So there is here an almost-island, a city, of limited space and urban delight, the rich on one end and the poor on the other end, the end where the kids and the artist-types have been moving and fixing up the Craftsmans unafraid, and there is for sure the bridge-and-connector posse who trek in and answer the phones, paralitigate, scrape the lead paint from the Federal-era  plasterwork, hawk the tchotchkes from the Market stalls, transplant the tea olives. The bridge-and-connector posse that at night slithers into tube tops and platforms and slaps the hairgel on and together puts on the collective swerve of arguably the most romantic and hedonistically popping place within several states.  And so one could argue, that how ever far we are from being a little New York, we do share this with them, that, like the Borough denizens, it seems that Charleston’s suburban and exurbanites, the I-26 crowd, are the realest of the local folk’lls, we could say that is they who make this the place that it is.

BRIDGE RUN SHOW ANNOUNCES SANCHEZ TO HEADLINE EIGHTH SEASON

One of the premier satellite events orbiting the Jupiter that is the Cooper River Bridge Run, the 8^th Annual Bridge Run Story reading returns in 2006 with a stellar line-up. Organizers are thrilled to announce that local writer Jonathan Sanchez will headline this year’s show, performing an original run-themed short story.

“It was getting a little nerve-wracking there, hammering out terms,” said a BRS organizer who insisted on anonymity. “We were able to agree on numbers pretty early on, but the worst obstacles were talent’s green room requests. I’m still not sure how we’re going to get our hands on a rehydrated sea cucumber. I guess we’ll figure it out.”

Sanchez will take the stage for the 8^th Annual Bridge Run Reading at 8 pm Thursday, March 30, at Millennium Music downtown, on the corner of King and Calhoun Streets. He’ll read for fifteen minutes, take a fifteen-minute meditation break, then return to finish his story before being helicoptered to his contractually-stipulated accommodations, Camelot-by-the-Sea in Myrtle Beach.

He will find time to sign copies of Bandit, the Bridge Run Story compilation, which has been re-released in a special MMVI edition, sure to make it the “emvy” of readers everywhere.

Jonathan Sanchez is the author of many stories depicting the life of Charleston’s young and piazza-less. He has given countless (47) public readings over the course of his career. Sanchez also conducts workshops for children, and is the director of the Write of Summer camp in Charleston and Florida. An avid runner in the months of February and March, he is a committed yoga practitioner and instructor, with clients including Jonathan Sanchez, the writer.

J.R. Littlefield ran a school uniform retail business for forty years. He never understood the whole Catholic schoolgirl fetish thing.

Alice Cassells likes petunias but not zinnias, fish sandwiches but not fish sticks, leaf blowers but not rakes.

Jordan Hughes climbed a Mayan pyramid on his honeymoon in 1977. He and his wife enjoy Christmas lights and apparitions of the Blessed Virgin.

Azalea Boyd of Billings, Montana has never seen the blossom of the plant she was named after. While in Georgia for the Olympics in 1996, she saw some shrubs but they were of course not in bloom in July.

January Biddleton likes old hammers. She has seven.

Toni Winterson has never had an e-mail address.

Joseph Halevi writes all of his letters on the backs of credit card junk mail. He soaks his feet in cold water for fifteen minutes each morning, and eats sugary cereal with no milk.

Billie Rae Douglas is addicted to tanning beds.

Her cousin, Alex Douglas, lost his left ear in a chicken processing accident. His disability check allows him to live off a modest used book business. He can’t wear sunglasses and rarely ventures out of his home in suburban Phoenix.

My 8th Annual Bridge Run Show is set for Thursday, March 30, 8 pm at Millennium Music. Now I just have to write the story.