The Decadent Worker

Excerpted from Quent Wimpel Notes by Kerry Wendell Thornley, this portion of which first appeared in Inside Joke:

In literature, as in everything else, too often the answer to one question simply brings up another mystery. In this instance, for example, Quent held what seemed like a two-way conversation with a radio D.J. who must have been some miles away. How was such a thing possible? Unfortunately, in this particular literary endeavor — unlike most — precise answers to all questions are not found.

To tell the truth, Quent could never explain this phenomenon to his satisfaction. That advanced techniques in electronic surveillance were involved was obvious. That it happened all the time, whenever he was near any radio or t.v. set, was something he was long used to…

In his notebook was a list of all the song titles on the back of the Zuma album. “Surf Turf” and “Seal Beach Waves” and “Sandy Beaches” were all references to the traumatic interval in his bewildering existence when he had, as he phrased it, “discovered radio.” Another song was called “Program Notes” and that was even more clearly about that night in Tujunga, California, just over two years ago, when his first conversation with a disc jockey occurred.

Already, by then, he knew that his little house on the hill must be bugged — or at least that was the hypothesis that explained the facts with the fewest assumptions. For every conversation he held there with anyone was soon the business of the whole community.

Eduardo Scott would come up some evening for a visit, during which they would share a joint and rap about the Fitzpatrick assassination or about Cosa Nostra… Later that night Quent would go to one of the restaurants along Foothill Boulevard for a cup of coffee and, inevitably, a waitress or another customer would be involved in a conversation about whatever it was Eduardo Scott had mentioned to him — adding information, giving Quent knowing sidelong glances. There was no mistaking it for coincidence, for the examples just described were only his first sips from the chalice of conspiratorial communications… Soon his whole public social environment consisted of nothing but reviews — on his conversations, his notes, his most intimate acts of ever-more-infrequent lovemaking and ever-more-frequent masturbation.

…So naturally Wimpel began talking to himself. More exactly he began speaking to the walls in his hacienda-like little refurbished chicken coop on the hill on Mrs. Walsh’s two-acre estate where he was groundskeeper in exchange for living quarters. Couching these presentations in radio-program format, he addressed them to his intelligence community captors, assuming them an FBI team with a terrible security leak. Much to his own surprise, Quent found himself talented in this direction. “You know,” he interrupted himself to say — in the midst of a lecture about civil liberties and the rights of witnesses to Presidential murder plots — “with a little background music I’d sound like a pro!”

Now it happened that his landlady, Josephine Walah, was what Quent tended to characterize as an accumulator. That is, she never threw away anything — to which a gargage, two sheds and a barn on her property packed to the raftes with household items of every description attested eloquently. And it was in the barn on top of a nail keg under a sewing machine behind a davenport that he located a clock radio. (cont.)

“The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to one and hope to the other.” — Walt Whitman

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