I've recently discovered that John Travolta played a friend of mine in a movie that was released last December! Yeah, I know it's a bit after the fact, but I'm not a movie goer nor a television watcher and would never have known anything about it but for serendipitously hearing the movie's title song on the radio about a week ago. In fact, when I first became aware of the movie I didn't think it had yet been released because the website through which I became aware of its existence still had an old banner ad saying "Coming to Theaters December 29". Call me a dope for thinking that means December 29, 2005 if you want to.

Anyway, our university radio station, WUWF, does a locally produced four-hour acoustic music program on Sunday afternoons, and while I was listening to last Sunday's program a song about someone named Bobby Long came on. Now, I had known a fellow named Bobby Long seventeen or eighteen years ago, but I just assumed that the songwriter's use of that name was coincidental. After all, it's a common name with there probably being a few thousand Bobby Longs in the US. But, as I listened to the song I started to get intrigued, wondering if it could be that Bobby Long. Then, when the singer mentioned something about Bobby's fondness for Flannery O'Connor, I knew it had to be the same guy.

Bobby Long was a poet, a drunk, a defrocked professor of literature, a philosopher, a retired US Marine Corps officer, and one of the craziest people I've ever known. We knew each other back when I was helping run a Friday night open mic in Pensacola. Bobby was a regular who would sometimes take the stage and recite his poetry, or the poetry of others, or sing Neil Young's "Losing End" unaccompanied, or deliver a mini-lecture about Flannery O'Connor or T.S. Eliot, or tell us why the girl in the front row that everybody knew as Susan was really named Lilith because she reminded him of J.R. Salamanca's Lilith*. Then, he'd go out into the parking lot, fix himself a fresh drink, and pontificate, philosophize and soliloquize to anyone who'd listen. He loved the power of words and would sometimes introduce his girlfriend as, "This is my friend, Barbara, and she has the prettiest little pink pussy you've ever seen." just to see how people would react.

Well, it turned out that the song I had heard on the radio was written and performed by a fellow Floribamian named Grayson Capps. I recognized his name from having heard some of his other material on the same radio station and knew that he was originally from Brewton, Alabama, which is only about fifteen files from my house. The song mentioned that Bobby was a friend of Grayson's dad, and I knew that Bobby also had lived in the Brewton/Atmore area.

So, being a curious fellow, I got on the Internet, found Grayson Capps' website and discovered that a movie was released last year, based on a book written by Grayson's father, Everett. The film is called "A Love Song for Bobby Long", which is also the title of the song I had heard, and John Travolta played my old friend Bobby. It seems that Grayson had done some music on one of the film producer's earlier projects and gave the producer a copy of his father's then-unpublished manuscript to consider as a story idea. The producer apparently thought the manuscript was good enough to base a screenplay on and the rest, as they say, is history.

Though I haven't had a chance to see the film yet, I have had the opportunity to read some reviews of the movie and they tend toward the unfavorable by a pretty wide margin. I was particularly appalled by one reviewer's noting that Travolta more or less brushed off the faux Bill Clinton southern voice he had used in "Primary Colors" for use as Bobby's voice. The real Bobby sounded much more like Roy Blount Jr. Still, I'd like to rent the DVD sometime just to see if there's much of the Bobby Long I knew in it after having been fictionalized and interpreted in turns by a novelist, a screenwriter, and an actor.

I'm curious to see if there's any chance the Bobby Long in it will resonate with my memories of the crazy son of a bitch who used to recite his** poem about the time he found a wee fairy frolicking in a flower bed. When he asked the little pixie what he did all day, the fairy rattled off a laundry list of the types of cutesy activities one would expect a fairy to be involved in, ending up with "Well, whattaya think of that?", to which Bobby replied:

"'Well... I don't.
In fact, it makes my sick to hear such viscous drool.'
So I lifted up the heel of my boot,
And I crushed the Goddamned little fool."

* By the way, when I went to Amazon.com to make sure I had the right author for "Lilith", I was told that the last person who bought Salamanca's "Lilith" also bought Everett Capps' "Off Magazine Street" which is the novel upon which the film "Love Song for Bobby Long" is based. I'm not makin' this shit up.

** I assume Bobby wrote the poem though I can't say I ever actually heard him claim authorship. If it wasn't his, it was still funny as hell.