Deadeye Dick Page 0,1
Haitian dollar is worth, and actual American dollars are in general circulation. There seems to be no scheme in Haiti, however, for retiring worn-out dollar bills, and replacing them with new ones. So it is ordinary there to treat with utmost seriousness a dollar which is as insubstantial as a cigarette paper, and which has shrunk to the size of an airmail stamp.
I found one such bill in my wallet when I got home from Haiti a couple of years ago, and I mailed it back to Al and Sue Seitz, the owners and host and hostess of the Oloffson, asking them to release it into its natural environment. It could never have survived a day in New York City.
• • •
James Jones (1921-1977), the American novelist, was actually married to his wife Gloria in the James Jones Cottage, before it was called that. So it is a literary honor to stay there.
There is supposedly a ghost—not of James Jones, but of somebody else. We never saw it. Those who have seen it describe a young white man in a white jacket, possibly a medical orderly of some kind. There are only two doors, a back door opening into the main hotel, and the front door opening onto a porch. This ghost is said to follow the same route every time it appears. It comes in through the back door, searches for something in a piece of furniture which isn’t there anymore, and then goes out the front door. It vanishes when it passes through the front door. It has never been seen in the main hotel or on the porch.
It may have an uneasy conscience about something it did or saw done when the cottage was an operating room.
• • •
There are four real painters in this book, one living and three dead. The living one is my friend in Athens, Ohio, Cliff McCarthy. The dead ones are John Rettig, Frank Duveneck, and Adolf Hitler.
Cliff McCarthy is about my age and from my part of America, more or less. When he went to art school, it was drummed into him that the worst sort of painter was eclectic, borrowing from here and there. But now he has had a show of thirty years of his work, at Ohio University, and he says, “I notice that I have been eclectic.” It’s strong and lovely stuff he does. My own favorite is “The Artist’s Mother as a Bride in 1917.” His mother is all dressed up, and it’s a warm time of year, and somebody has persuaded her to pose in the bow of a rowboat. The rowboat is in a perfectly still, narrow patch of water, a little river, probably, with the opposite bank, all leafy, only fifty yards away. She is laughing.
There really was a John Rettig, and his painting in the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Crucifixion in Rome,” is as I have described it.
There really was a Frank Duveneck, and I in fact own a painting by him, “Head of a Young Boy.” It is a treasure left to me by my father. I used to think it was a portrait of my brother Bernard, it looks so much like him.
And there really was an Adolf Hitler, who studied art in Vienna before the First World War, and whose finest picture may in fact have been “The Minorite Church of Vienna.”
• • •
I will explain the main symbols in this book.
There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me.
There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone.
Haiti is New York City, where I live now.
The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.
• • •
This is fiction, not history, so it should not be used as a reference book. I say, for example, that the United States Ambassador to Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War was Henry Clowes, of Ohio. The actual ambassador at that time was Frederic Courtland Penfield of Connecticut.
I also say that a neutron bomb is a sort of magic wand, which kills people instantly, but which leaves their property unharmed. This is a fantasy borrowed from enthusiasts for a Third