The Regular, by Dave Buckhout

This is a work of fiction plying the thoroughfares of alcoholism, writing, and being southern, and one man’s attempt to forcefully bend all three to support his unique spin on Victory! It could be read as a documentary, but that it peddles both fact—and—fiction in digging a deeper strata of truth. For the central figure, one Marvin Goodspeed, rapidly emerges as a moving target. A home-grown prodigy of the urban South, this Goodspeed pursues a dogged defense of ideals and liberty and hearth via his dutiful use of the pen and the bottle—the former sustaining the man, the latter the myth. We come to see all of this through the eyes of one Cyrus Cleburne. A local alternative-press journalist, it is his steadfast observation, world class eavesdropping, and even an ill-advised attempt to walk a mile in another’s duct-taped shoes that spotlight the dislocating effects that history and environment and obsessing over history and environment can have on an individual, a culture, a region. With the aid of a timely verbal ass kicking, Cleburne zeroes in and tracks Goodspeed, this author of sudden (and unwanted) renown, as he saunters and stumbles his way through the porous DMZ separating who we are and who we think we are. In the process, our central figure is revealed as the New Newer South mash-up he is, instinctually clinging to things “old” in the face of a “new” sprinting towards the next millennium. It is a strange piece of genius, or madness, or something else entire that Cleburne finds residing in a once forsaken set of urban villages away down South: an alcoholic wordsmith busy stem-winding all three into a tight braid and doing so without a glance at the mess of contradictions he racks up. Relentless in the cause of righting wrongs—perceived and, or real—we watch on in head shaking disgust (and, somehow, admiration?) as Marvin Goodspeed drags his hungover carcass out into the trenches each and every bloody day, waging his losing battle yet declaring Victory! nonetheless.