K Gets a Last Name (in Czech?!)

I've been writing about a particular character, on and off, for about 15 years.  His name is K and he's based on a guy I knew in St. Augustine who only went by the name "K".  He was a middle-aged black man with a huge gut and built like a certain type of fireman--meaning he was thick, and probably strong though he liked to eat & drink too much beer--and he even had the mustache to go with it.  

But that's where his similarity to a firefighter ended, because K spent far too much time, everyday from noon to dark, in the corner parking lot of "Your Neighborhood Grocery Store"--read the ghetto mini-market where I worked during college-- drinking beer and bullshitting with all the other old-timers who hung around sipping 16 oz cans of Schlitz.  K couldn't have possibly had a reputable job considering all the time he spent bullshitting on that corner.  

But he had a great voice, and he told great stories.  He called his penis his "Love Piece".  He didn't say "go to jail"; he called it, "going on vacation".  He was the oral historian of Lincolnville--the black neighborhood of St. Augustine, FL--and he'd tell you all sorts of stories going all the way back to the early 60's.  But his favorite type of story involved inventing some impossibly complex situation that would require him to go to jail in a day or two, each story always more and more believable as he continually perfected his craft, and none of it was ever true.  It just felt true, and I learned a helluva lot about fiction by talking to old K.  His name for me was Smooth.  

--Alright Smooth. So this is my last day. You know I gotta go on a long vacation tomorrow.  I gotta do the right thing and turn myself in.  Yeah, so this is my last day.  Something happen that shouldna happen, but you know I gotta do the right thing, so I'm goin to the station in the mornin. 

(That's the direct opening quote from what turned out to be his most memorable relation of an impossibly convoluted tangle of events that would lead to his eventual imprisonment, and of course it was all bullshit--the best kind of bullshit.  He told that particular story to me & my boss, to charm us, and when my boss's wife told K to be quiet, K had to laugh cause the narrative tension was lost.  The story over, he asked my boss for a can of beer on credit.  "You know I'm good for it," he said.  And he was.)

The first story I wrote about K was a short sketch for an assignment in a college short story class.  I'd never intended to return to him, but every few years, he jumps back at me.  He even managed to find his way up to Staten Island in my novel.  K can bullshit his way into or out of just about anything, I guess.

So, last night's dream:

I'm in a school bus, painted white for some institution, which I represent somehow.  We're in a flat, barren landscape: red dirt to the horizon.  We pull up to a primitive guard tower where there's a gate to a chainlink fence.  The guards don't want to grant us entrance.  Someone in my party says we're here to see K--that's the magic word that gets us in.

I'm in a control room.  Five or six middle-aged women are watching about twenty computer & surveillance monitors.  They're all dressed normally, like any woman you'd run across in suburban America. There's a pleasant, small office vibe of camaraderie, but I'm the outsider.  One of the women asks why I'm here, and the others watch for my answer.  I say I know K.  Another woman asks, "K Bychom?" I agree without hesitation or doubt, which is strange because in real life I've always resisted giving the character of K a last name.  It's also strange because bychom is a Czech word.  

They all know and like K, and the mention of his name brightens the atmosphere.  They start laughing, telling stories and jokes about K. The fact that I know K makes them like me too.  It's clear they love K and his antics, so much that whether or not he's a prisoner in this facility becomes impossible to distinguish.  

He's charmed them all.