He cut his own hair. In warm weather, he’d bathe in the creek behind his house. He hunted ginseng in the woods when the season was right. He tended a vegetable garden that grew tomatoes, squash, okra, carrots, and onions. He smoked Marlboros. He sometimes wrote in a tree house on his property. Women loved him. They wanted to take care of him, to fatten him up. He never drove. He wrote. He wrote in yellow legal tablets, one stacked on another. His favorite restaurant was Waffle House. In the ’60s, he heard Janis Joplin play in Greenwich Village, and when he requested a Bob Dylan song, she snapped, “We don’t do covers, sir.” He loved him some Bob Dylan. He loved David Letterman, too, and the Cubs. He loved Seinfeld, Deadwood, William Faulkner, Bill Clinton, AC/DC. He loved movies, though he never went to a theater…

Tom Franklin remembers William Gay