Excerpt from “Book Two Jacob Dobson” from Tropical Detective Story by Ray Mungo (Jake Dobson is Steve’s alias in this book)

Jake Dobson is a writer and a pilgrim, he chose (as he had no choice) to use words as bricks to line the Path. Building on words a road to utter silence.

And Jake’s a cowboy, wood-chopper, and makeshift auto mechanic in jeans and boots, maybe a bandanna or charm, certainly a battered grey felt hat. He usually wears a wide brown leather belt with a large simple brass buckle; that circle strikes the fulcrum between his upper and lower halves.

He’s an angel and stays up all night seeing brilliant inner senses in what most people wouldn’t bother to notice. He’s possessed by a demon, loses his temper, might be unkind for a minute (I’ll always forgive), cajoles with a routine from his Act, instead of pure Truth, and loses the Way.

He’s god and devil both, and no better or worse than we. He really knows true from false, and right from wrong, and all together as One, and that’s the greatest praise I could spout.

Jake and I worked together in a dank basement in New York printing out mimeographed protest literature and multicolored fantasy magazines. We rapped passionately at each other over four AM sandwiches at neon dives on upper Broadway.

We also grew up together – later still – when we lived at farms only twenty miles apart in an area of lonely back roads through hills and fields. Ah, many’s the joints we smoked, many’s the crazy rides in near-dead old cars to New York or Boston to make some trouble while trying to make some money.

And many times in farmhouse kitchens and hotel rooms in New York he “blew my mind” (we used that phrase then) with stunning understandings, keys to all the locked doors of our struggling minds, ways to see how great we really are, ways to live without tears.

And many times I dreamed in my sleep that we were locked together, Jake and I, in our barefoot summer, leaning on the hood of his 1960 Chevrolet station wagon – we’d be forever in our twenties, idealistic and resourceful, healthy and good-looking, mostly real-looking, staring at the camera, grinning silly stoned: brothers, friends, lovers, partners, young gods. BANG, a frozen Polaroid dream.

Because I never met a better man than Jacob Arturo Dobson, nor loved and respected any man more.