Sleazy Street AFOOT IN A FIELD OF MEN

By John Skow

With a haircut, a couple of breath mints, and wearing its job-hunting clothes, this bluesy ramble about being down but not quite out in Texas might pass as the loosest-jointed novel in years. As things are, call it a collection of related stories, some short, some tall, and some too lackadaisical to stand up and be measured. Good stuff, anyway, whose major virtue is that it is extraordinarily lifelike. Which is to say, messy, disorganized, contrary, repetitious, tacky, funny, if you are in the mood for that sort of thing -- and in need of laundering.

The narrator and central figure, who has the same name as the author, is weak on men and money, strong on children and survival. She is 40 or so and a fierce lover of her layabout poet Leo, a cashiered college professor. She wants to write and also likes to smoke a little dope. In the meantime, she keeps the necessary $50 ahead of perdition (banked under the rug of the one- room roach farm she shares with Leo and her grown son Morgani) by soldiering for an office-temporaries outfit.

She is a curious watcher of her own slightly out-of-focus life, preserved from the swamps of resentment and depression by mild fatalism and the occasional joint. Episodes are sifted and examined, but not retailed as anecdotes. Some really are conventional stories, or nearly so, with shape and some sort of resolution. Two or three are wholly shapeless, like twelve months out of twelve in the real world. The narrator meets a renowned Indian healer named Rolling Thunder, and nothing happens; then a crazed and menacing religious cultist, and nothing happens again. Even when the narrator's brain- dazed brother, an outlaw biker, kills a man in a brawl -- something happens here, certainly -- the fact comes out only as an aside, as part of a moody, troubling description of his skirmish with a bored psychiatrist at a VA hospital. The author's sound instinct is to play against the dramatic. There is no resolution of the brother's predicament. You are missing the point if you try to watch one chunk of carrot in the roil of this Sleazy Street stew (the phrase is from a country-funk song lyric in praise of downward mobility: "It's coffee in the pot and a dirty sugar spoon/ it's towels on the floor of a dirty bathroom/ and a smell like me and a smell like you/ all mixed together in a Sleazy Street stew."

Leo the poet gets disgusted and leaves, comes back, then leaves again. You can't blame him. Pat, as she admits, is overplaying her role of Mother Courage as Kelly Girl. Not only does she now have her own three children living with her, she has also taken in Pauline, who has five kids and a pregnant German shepherd. Chaos, at least. And lurking about Pauline are a violent estranged husband and a homicidal ex-husband. This, furthermore, is not the book's Act II, in which the plot is supposed to get complicated; it is Act III, when everything is supposed to settle down and make sense.

Will it all end serenely? Of course not. Will Leo resurface, maybe to have another birthday party with Pat and Morgani, all bivouacking in their tiny van parked at a curb in Austin, living happily ever after or until arrested for loitering, whichever comes first? Hope so.