Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

“You shouldn’t take care of someone unless you love them. Not because they can give you something.”

“Everyone eventually takes care of someone because of what someone gives them, even if it’s love, or just a few good stories.”

John said, “You better be sure that he has what you want.”

“He’s got this book called Yoga for Bolsheviks. This local Communist met a Mazatec shaman and learned the secret of dream control. You know the Mazatecs?”

John smiled, “Not personally, but they introduced the West to psilocybe mushrooms, morning glory seeds and salvia divinorum. Do I win the Oaxacan trivia contest?”

Jeff smiled. “You win. What no one knows is that they developed a practice similar to Tibetan dream yoga.”

This should be a good deal for Frank, hell maybe he could cure Jeff of dreaming. Poe and ghost should work, but John couldn’t stop himself. He poured himself a cup of coffee and asked Jeff, “Well here is your trivia, do you know Professor Joe Gould?”

“Is he an ethnologist?”

“He was a hobo panhandler, a Harvard graduate, a real character in the ’40s.”

Jeff made an attempt to look interested while putting a white and orange trade paperback of The Complete Book of Wills, Estates and Trusts by Alexander A. Bove Jr. Esq. on the worn wooden counter.

“The New Yorker ran a piece on him during World War II. ‘Professor Seagull’ He carried Big Chief tablets with him all the time—claimed to be writing The Oral History of Our Time—it was going to be a million word history of the people, the shirt sleeves multitude. He became enough of a legend that a New Yorker big shot followed him around. Turned out Professor Joe had both hypergraphia and writer’s block. He just kept rewriting some trivial incidents of his life.”

“Fascinating. What a deep parallel to my situation. I want to help an old man, and there have been other old men who are con artists. Why ‘Seagull’ anyway?”

“One of the ways Joe Gold earned money was making weird noises and dancing. He claimed to speak the language of the seagulls. He said he translated over ninety percent of Longfellow into sea gull. He said the poems sounded better in gull:

“All the wild-fowl sang them to him,

In the moorlands and the fen-lands,

In the melancholy marshes.

Chetowaik, the plover, sang them—my great aunt won a prize at the Texas State Fair for declaiming the Song of Hiawatha. I imagine it would sound pretty great in gull. Look you like Frank, he has told me that you have given him dozens of paperbacks over the years.”

“When the big shot wrote the article on Joe Gould, Joe became a caricature of himself. The big shot caught Joe’s writer’s block and then didn’t write for thirty years.”

Jeff said, “Just sell me the books. I’ve been a good customer. I won’t need you any more.”

John rang up the books.

“They’re $18.85.”

Jeff handed him a twenty and told him to keep the change.

Jeff did his best imitation of storming off.

When John told Haidee that night, she suggested that he was jealous,. Not many people adore Frank like you do. Maybe you want to be the only to do the good deeds for the old man. Maybe you think you are the only worthy of the stories.

After a week John decided to call on Frank. He went to the market and bought a selection of gourmet teas, five pounds of sugar and a fancy mug. He went up to Frank’s apartment and knocked.

There was no answer.

He came back a few times in the afternoon. About five he was worried. He asked the young Korean man, who sold the cell phones shop if he had seen Frank. The man said that he had not seen Frank in a couple of days, but that was nothing unusual. Frank often spent three or four days alone in his room. John said he was going in, and the man said OK.

The door was unlocked.

Frank lay on the floor near the bed. It looked like he might have fallen. There was some blood, sticking his few white hairs to the greasy yellow linoleum. His eyes were open. The police spent two hours talking to John and the shopkeeper.

Jeff had left town.

He apparently left the night after he spoke to John.

It wasn’t clear if violence was involved, and the police weren’t very interested. A small article graced the Austin American Statesman focusing on Frank’s involvement with the alternative press. John was surprised to find out that he had also ran a club in the seventies, which seemed to have been the high tide in his economic life. Club Zothique had burned to the ground in mysterious circumstances. Hints about organized crime were dropped in the article.

A week later the Korean man came to the New Atlantis shop.

“No one has come for his things. I asked the landlord and he said that you could have his things. I saw you cry when you found him, so I thought you were good enough.”

John borrowed the key. He went with Haidee that night. Downtown is fairly quiet at night. They parked their van in front of the cell phone store. John unlocked the door and they went upstairs. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned or organized in any way. No one had even washed away the small bloodstain, which seemed really sad. Haidee hugged him a moment and then they began putting books into a giant garbage bags. They would drop them off at the self-storage unit that John rented, on Sunday he would sort them out, and price the ones he thought he could sell. He’d give the rest to Goodwill.

Even though the little apartment had seemed full of books, certainly as crowded as the New Atlantis, it only filled two garbage sacks full. They were mainly old paperbacks—mysteries and SF. There was some hardback poetry and histories.

They were quiet during the sacking up of the books.

Haidee asked. “Would you like to be alone here for a while? I could go down the street to the Decline and have a cup.”

“Yeah. I would.”