Correspondances comme un roman me the nearest international airport. They wanted to show Gainesville. I think about the essay he wrote, “Why I Live me just how cosmopolitan the city was, which was definitely Where I Live.” There’s not a word about the university, only the case, although this was only due to the university, and its about his Gainesville, this city that gave him the distance to professors and students from all over the world. I find it really write about Bacon County, and I tell myself that if Gainesville reassuring to walk around the campus and hear about eight did the trick for Harry, if he wrote everything here that made different languages in the space of just 500 meters. Yet I think me love him, then Gainesville will do the trick for me too. of Harry, who was part of the “real” Gainesville, who spoke He concludes his essay by saying that if all goes well, he will only English, who never wanted to leave “his hole,” as he called die in Gainesville. Everything went well. He died there it. I’m not even sure he ever left the country. He joined the in 2012—long before entering my life, well before becoming Marine Corps and was supposed to go to Korea, but the war my guide in this city that I must now learn to master. ended while he was still training in Florida. Harry said people who tried to find some kind of meaning to life were nuts. It’s been two months, but I still haven’t gone to a museum, Harry, an ex-boxer who got in bar-room brawls, was addicted a concert, the farmers market or a lecture. I hang out at to opiates, partly because of excruciating leg pain caused by small bars, at Lillian’s, where Harry was a regular, and Mojo, a long-unexplained illness (simiar to poo),wchad paa-which just opened, and I wonder what Harry would think of lyzed him for many months when he was a boy. Harry started the whiskey selection (pretty impressive to my eyes, but I can’t making up stories while leafing through the Sears Roebuck really picture him wanting to taste Japanese whiskey). Big Lou’s catalogue, fascinated by the models who “looked so goodhas the best pizza I’ve ever eaten, in the US or elsewhere. On and clean and perfect.” Where he was from, a farm in Bacon Sundays, I play pool in one of the city’s many pool halls to help County, Georgia, everyone had some kind of deformity, a miss- stave off the blues at the weekend being over. I’m lousy, of ing finger or scar, or was cross-eyed. “Everybody was maimed.” course, but there’s always a local pro to give me a few pointers. Harry experienced this bodily damage at age five, whenThe rest of the time, I work, just like Harry, either on my novel he woke up one morning and could no longer walk. Fromor on steering my students through the maze of their own that time on, he had always felt great empathy for freaks fiction. I meet with them in my office to talk. All notice of nature, the type they’d put on display in circus sideshows. the bronze-colored armchair, of course. To all, I say it was He felt like a freak himself during the period in whichHarry Crews’s chair. They can either sit there or in a more curious locals would come to gawk at him in bed and touch traditional wooden chair. I love when they choose Harry’s. Even his stiff legs cramped up beneath him. Harry and his love for though they often don’t have a clue who I’m talking about. Station-service dans la périphérie de Gainesville. A gas station on the outskirts of Gainesville.