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Jan. 18 '73 Dear Jack,

   I certainly thought Bonny Bill and I would have returned down Highway #24 out of the fog into the garden of Moberly long before now to see you Savonarola, but so the world bends.
   Penrod and I are in the midst of one of our snits.   He is holed up in the Hammond basement 5909 Columbia Ave, Hammond.  He sold a piece you will like to see in the February underlined:  Gallery - supposedly it will be out then, and completing his novel.  He rarely rises from the bsmt, so he must be completing the novel.
   Perrill quit driving a taxi in Chicago and is doing a 2-page piece for underlined: OUI for $500 on cigars.
   After 15 Tribune pieces and nothing else I escaped to a shed beside the Pacific.  I hear the sea like a Moberly coal train.  Trying to do a novel on the sex life of Mennonites.  Kaggan was to finance me with book reviews but haven't heard a word from him.  He must have gone to his reward.
   Very exciting, the New Letters.  When I get a couple bucks I'll write them for a copy, I'd like to see it very much.  Is the autobiog about ready for book form?  I'd like to do a Trib Mag piece on you some day - maybe I can stop in Moberly if I ever head East.   I'm doing a piece from notes gathered before on Nick Lindsay, a mad carpenter-poet, son of Vachel Lindsay for the Trib.  Why don't you write up the old festive days of ?  and Algren and you for Playboy or Esquire, or me interview you on it.  Or could we rob a train?  Or the Moberly 1st National?  I didn't know how desperate writers got but I'm finding out.  Or slip a chapter lively and full of names to Mark Zussman