JEROME ALOYSIUS WILLIAMS knew from the first onset of puberty that he would be a poet. His first poem gained him a girlfriend and confirmed his commitment to poetry.

When adults asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he quickly answered, "I'm going to be a poet." When a proper response would have been the question-"Why not a philosopher?"-they stared at him as if he had come from outer space.

At a keg party in college, Jerome introduced himself to a group of drunk young men as "a poet." One of the drunks popped off with a rude comment about Jerome's manhood, and the poet responded with a fist to the drunk's nose, which crunched and began spewing blood.

From that day on, Jerome Aloysius Williams became known far and wide as Wild Bill, the punch-drunk poet.

With an MFA in poetry writing, he held a string of teaching jobs for about forty years, never staying anywhere for very long. He changed women more frequently than jobs. He was dedicated to drinking and fist fighting, but he lived like a hermit in a series of rented rooms, where he slept on the floor. His only furniture was a table and chair, where he sat every day to write poetry with pencil on paper. He thought before writing. He never revised.

Well into his sixties, however, he had grown bored with women in their twenties and dissolute living. He had also become very uncomfortable as his contemporaries began to die. He wanted to see some them before they were gone.

So Wild Bill looked up his old pal Harry Mature, and they set off for New Mexico on their motorcycles to find their even older pal, Johnny Mack. Despite some dementia, Johnny Mack still has a good bit of spit and fire left in him, and he joins his two friends on a trip to Hollywood, where he hopes to spread the ashes of his wife.

In the course of this trip, there is a fight in a "gentlemen's club"; a hazy visit to an industrialized hippy commune in Colorado; a red-haired hitchhiker on a certain corner in Winslow, Arizona; and adventures in Las Vegas, where they meet a monk.

When the Hollywood hill proves to be too daunting, the oldsters go down to Mexico. Wild Bill survives a bullfight in Tijuana. In Cabo San Lucas, the ashes go out to sea, and the men have life-changing epiphanies.

Come along for the ride. Come along for the laughs. Come along for the tears.

Carpe diem-and don't let this one get away.

This hilarious novel continues the adventures of Harry Mature, the hero of TROUT AND OTHER MYTHICAL BEINGS.