Confessions of a Crap Artist

20

With the money I received from my sister as cash payment for my equity in the house I opened a checking account at the Bank of America at Point Reyes Station. As soon as possible—after all, there wasn’t much time left—I set out to buy the things I needed.

First, I paid two hundred dollars for a horse and had it brought to the house by truck and let loose in the back pasture. It was almost the same color as Charley’s horse, possibly a little darker, but the same size, as far as I could tell, and in as good physical shape. It ran around for a day or so and then it calmed down and began to crop grass. After that it seemed perfectly at home.

I then set out to buy sheep, the black-faced kind. With this I had more trouble. In the end I had to go all the way to Petaluma for them. I paid about fifty dollars apiece for them, three ewes. As far as lambs went, I was undecided at first. Finally I came to the conclusion that he hadn’t considered the lambs his, so I did not get any.

Getting a collie like Bing was really hard. I had to take the bus down to San Francisco and go shopping at various kennels before I found one that was the same variety. There are all sorts of collies, costing different prices. The one resembling Bing cost almost two hundred dollars, virtually as much as the horse.

The ducks cost me only a dollar and a half apiece. I got them locally.

My reasoning was that I wanted everything set up the way it was supposed to be. It seemed to me that there was a very good chance that on April twenty-third Charley Hume would come back to life. Of course, this was not a certainty. The future never is. Anyhow, I felt that this increased the chances. According to the Bible, when the world ends the dead arise from their graves at the sound of the last trumpet. In fact, that’s one of the ways that the end of the world is known to be coming, when the dead arise. It’s a piece of strong verification of the theory. During the month that I lived there in the house I felt his presence grow more and more real, as he neared closer and closer to the moment of his return to life.

I felt it especially at night. Beyond any doubt he was close to resuming his existence in this world. His ashes—he had been cremated, according to the terms of his will—had been sent by error to the Mayfair Market, and there Doctor Sebastian had picked them up (the clerks at the Mayfair had telephoned him and explained the situation) and had driven them out to Fay. She had taken the package up to the McClure’s ranch and scattered them into the ocean. So when he returned, he would do so in the Point Reyes area, and with his house exactly like it had been, with the horse and dog and sheep and ducks, all of which had belonged to him, he was sure to arise there.

In the afternoons, when the wind from the Point was strongest, I could go outdoors onto the patio and actually see the bits of ash in the air. In fact, several people in the neighborhood remarked on the unusual concentration of ash in the air near sunset. This gave the setting sun a deep reddish color. Beyond any doubt, something of vast importance was about to happen; you could feel it, even if you hadn’t been warned.

Every day that passed put me into a greater state of excitement. Toward the end of the month I was hardly sleeping at all.

When April twenty-third arrived I woke up while it was still dark. I lay in bed awhile, so keyed-up that I could barely stand it. Then at five-thirty a.m. I got out of bed and got dressed and ate breakfast. All I could get down was a bowl of Wheat Chex, incidently. And a dish of apple sauce. I lit a fire in the fireplace in the living room and then I began walking around the house. I didn’t know exactly where Charley would first be seen, so I tried to cover every part of the house, be in each room at least once every fifteen minutes.

By noon I was so conscious of him that I kept turning my head and catching a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye. But at two o’clock I had a distinct feeling of let-down. I had a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk and that made me feel better, but the sense of his presence did not become any stronger.

When six o’clock came, and he still hadn’t come back to life, I began to become uneasy. So I telephoned Mrs. Hambro.

“Hello,” she said, in that hoarse voice.

I said, “This is Jack Seville.” (What I meant, of course, was Jack Isidore.) “I wondered if you’d noticed anything definitive.”

“We’re meditating,” she said. “I thought you would be with us. Didn’t you catch our telepathic message?”

“When was it sent out?” I asked.

“Two days ago,” she said. “At midnight, when the lines are Strongest.”

“I didn’t get it,” I said in agitation. “Anyhow, I have to be over here at the house. I’m waiting for Charley Hume to come back to life.”

“Well, I think you should be here,” she said, and I noticed a real hint of crossness in her voice. “There may be a good reason why we aren’t getting the expected results.”

“You mean, it’s my fault?” I demanded. “Because I’m not there?”

“There has to be some reason,” she said. “I don’t see why you have to stay there and wait for that particular person to come back to life.”

We argued awhile, and then hung up with less than the most amiable feelings. Again I began pacing around the house, looking this time into every closet, in case he returned and found himself shut in where he couldn’t get out.

At eleven-thirty that evening I was really getting worried. I again telephoned Mrs. Hambro, but this time got no answer.

By a quarter of twelve I was virtually out of my mind with worry. I had the radio on and was listening to a program of dance music and news. Finally the announcer said that in one minute it would be twelve midnight. He gave a commercial for United Airlines. Then it was twelve. Charley hadn’t come back to life. And it was April twenty-fourth. The world hadn’t come to an end.

I was never so disconcerted in my entire life.

Looking back on it, the thing that really gets me is that I had sold my interest in the house for next to nothing. My sister had gotten it away from me, taking advantage of me the way she takes advantage of everyone. And I had restocked the place with a horse and dog and sheep and ducks. What did I get out of it? Very little.

I sat down in the big easy chair in the living room, feeling that I had reached the really low point in my life. I was so depressed that I could hardly think; my mind was in a state of complete chaos. All my data rattled around and made no sense.

Out of it all I realized that there was simply no doubt. The group had been wrong.

Not only had Charley Hume not returned to life but the world had not come to an end, and I realized that a long time ago Charley was right in what he said about me; namely, that I was a crap artist. All the facts that I had learned were just so much crap.

I realized, sitting there, that I was a nut.

What a thing to realize. All those years wasted. I saw it as clearly as hell; all that business about the Sargasso Sea, and Lost Atlantis, and flying saucers and people coming out of the inner part of the earth—it was just a lot of crap. So the supposedly ironic title of my work wasn’t ironic at all. Or possibly it was doubly ironic, that it was actually crap but I didn’t realize it, etc. In any case, I was really horrified. All those people over in Inverness Park were a bunch of cranks. Mrs. Hambro was a psycho or something. Possibly even worse than me.

No wonder Charley left me a thousand dollars for psychoanalysis. I was really on the verge of the pit.

Good god, there hadn’t even been an earthquake.

Now what was there left for me to do? I had a few more days left to me in the house, and a couple hundred dollars of the cash that Fay and Nathan had given me. Enough money to get back to the Bay Area and relocate myself in a decent apartment, and possibly be able to find ajob of some sort.! probably could go back and work for Mr. Poity at One-Day Dealers’ Tire Service, although he had gotten all he could stand of my crap.

So I wasn’t really so bad off.

Of course, it’s unwise to go overboard in blaming myself. I had had a theory, which couldn’t be verified until April twenty-third, and therefore until that time it couldn’t positively be said that I was out of my mind for believing it. After all, the world might have come to an end. Anyhow, it did not. All those people like Fay and Charley and Nat Anteil were right.

They were right, but thinking about them I came to the conclusion, after a long period of hard meditation, that they were not a hell of a lot better than me. I mean, there’s a lot of rubbish in what they have to say, too. They’re darn near a bunch of nuts in their own way, although possibly it isn’t quite so obvious as in my case.

For instance, anybody who kills himself is a nut. Let’s face it (as Fay says). And even at the time I was conscious that his killing all those helpless animals was an example of the lunatic brain at work. And then that nut Nathan Anteil who just got married to a very nice girl and then dumped her as soon as he got mixed up with my sister… that isn’t exactly a model of logic. To get rid of a sweet harmless woman for a shrew like Fay.

As far as I’m concerned, the nuttiest of us all is my sister, and she’s still the worst; take my word for it. She’s a psychopath. To her, everybody else is just an object to be moved around. She has the mind of a three-year-old. Is that sanity?

So it doesn’t seem to me that I should be the only person who has to bear the onus of believing an admittedly ridiculous notion. All I want is to see the blame spread around fairly. For a day or so I considered writing to the San Rafael newspapers and giving them the story in the form of a letter to the editor; after all, they have to print that. It’s their duty as a public service. But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. In fact, the whole world is full of nuts. It’s enough to get you down.

After thinking it all over, and weighing every consideration, I decided to avail myself of the clause in Charley Hume’s will and take the thousand dollars worth of psychoanalysis. So I collected all my things that I had around the house, packed them up, and got a neighbor to drive me down to the Greyhound. A couple of days before I had to I left the house that Charley and Fay had built—Fay’s house—and started back to the Bay Area.

As the bus drove along I considered how I would locate the best analyst. In the end I decided to get the names of every one of them practicing in the Bay Area, and visit each of them in turn. In my mind I began putting together a questionaire for them to fill out, telling the number of patients they had had, the number of cures, the number of total failures, length of time involved in cures, number of partial cures, etc. So on the basis of that I could draw up a chart and compute which analyst would be the most likely to give me help.

It seemed to me that the least I could do was try to use Charley’s money wisely and not squander it on some charlatan. And on the basis of past choices, it seems pretty evident that my judgment is not of the best.