Jon Wilson:  

Life August's humidity draped St. Petersburg, Florida like a soggy blanket. Inside a Central Avenue honky-tonk, the air conditioner thumped and burped and sputtered dead for the umpteenth time. The drinkers sat in their sweat: immobile, dazed, beaten, staring at dying beer in dirty glasses. Someone shouted: "McIntyre!" The barkeep threw open the door. Outside, heat lightning glimmered over the Gulf of Mexico and a whiff of jasmine crept in, perfuming the joint's steaming innards. On the jukebox, Willie Nelson sang about cowboys and against the machine leaned a big guy with a belly like a keg. A red scar ran down the left side of his face and in his hand -- he only had the one -- something sharp and silver glittered. "It's a raht nahss naht fer a knahf faht,'' he said. "No," I said, "I'm just here to write a biography." "Well, then, you go raht ahead," Keg Belly said. "And make it quick." Okay, then. My family moved to St. Pete when I was 11 and I went to Clearview Elementary, Lealman Junior High and Dixie Hollins High, and I surely did like everybody, and then I went to to work for the local newspaper, where I met Becky, and proposed to her when she said she was looking for someone a little seedy and packin' heat and now we are married almost 30 years, and I kept on workin for the newspaper and we never moved away, forever and ever amen, the end. "That quick enough for you?" I asked. "Yer kahnd of a sm...Expand for more