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photographs. Please show them to me.” Then, grumbling, he would get out a stack of prints and begin to tell me how they were created. Created they were. Planned and executed with the care an architect takes with a building. Only Clarence was the planner and the builder and the carpenter and the plumber and the one that cut the trees down to get the lumber.
    It wasn’t easy being his friend. You had to be able to move fast. Clarence was full of ideas and he feared nothing except having his knee give out or his books cut up by greedy dealers. He was haunted by the idea that someone would get hold of his treasured art books and cut them up and sell the pages.
    At the height of my friendship with Clarence he had me in a car one spring day driving down to Terrebone Parish with four surrealists from Chicago in the back seat. We were going to see the cemeteries. I was driving my small blue Datsun. The surrealists were huddled together in the back seat. Clarence was riding shotgun, telling me how to drive and reading the map and lecturing about Cajun cults of death and black silk funeral flowers and enamel photographs of the dead and carvings on tombstones and surrealism in general and the bad state of the arts.
    He turned to me suddenly, as if he had just remembered something important. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that whenever you have time we can start our diction lessons,” he said.
    â€œWhat?” I answered, for this was new to me.
    â€œI’ve decided to teach you to speak properly,” he said. “So that people will take you seriously.” The surrealists looked down at their hands, embarrassed for me.
    â€œThat’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just stay like I am.”
    â€œOf course not,” he said, and went back to the map. “It took me a long time to learn to speak correctly but I learned. You will learn too.” Alas, we never had time for our lessons.
    I learned of his death by reading of it in Time magazine. It was a cold wet winter evening. I was at a newsstand on the corner of Third Avenue and 73rd Street in New York City. I bought the magazine and stuck it in my pocket and walked outside and stood on the street thinking about the last time I had seen him, the night he showed me his new darkroom in the library he built onto the back of his wife Elizabeth’s house in Gentilly. Then I thought about the last month he spent in the Pontalba, about how bad his knee had become and how he cursed it. About the hundreds of boxes of books he had packed and the pulley system and cardboard chute he invented to lower the boxes down the three flights of narrow rickety Pontalba stairs. I thought about the expression on our faces as Clarence outlined his plan to sail the boxes down from floor to floor.
    That night I had a dream. In the morning I began to develop it into one of my Journal Entries for National Public Radio. The dream appeared to be about Picasso but as I developed it I saw it was really about Clarence. In such a way the mind gives up its secrets. I call it magic. Clarence called it art. Here then is the dream and its unfolding.
    Journal entry, January 18, 1985,
New York City, New York
    I dreamed last night of Picasso. We were driving through the Delta looking for a house for him to use as a studio. We were in my little blue Toyota. I was driving. Picasso was in the jump seat. “They gave me everything I wanted,” Picasso said. “Money and fame and beautiful lovers.”
    â€œThey let you paint your chairs,” I said. “That was the good part.”
    â€œI painted what they wanted,” he said. “The more ridiculous it was the more they liked it.”
    â€œYou were a genius at fourteen,” I said. “What else could you do? You had to find ways to make it more amusing.”
    â€œI needed blue,” he said. “I wanted a blue made of ground-up sapphires. If I had had the right blue. It really made me mad not