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"They took everything. I always thought Captain had left some-thing for me, you know. But I didn't care. The books were hisgreatest gift and all those luncheons at the Monteleone Hotel when wehad had gumbo together, and he let me break up all my saltinecrackers in the gumbo till it was porridge. I just loved it.
"What was I saying? I bought the ticket to California and saved asmall balance for pie and coffee at each stop. A funny thinghappened. We carne to a point of no return. That is, when we passedthrough some town in Texas I realized I didn't have enough moneyto go back home, even if I wanted to. It was the middle of the night. Ithink it was El Paso! Anyway, then I knew there was no going back.
"But I was headed for San Francisco and the Haight Asbury, and Iwas going to found a cult based on the teachings of Wynken in praiseof love and union and claiming that sexual union was godlike unionand I would show his books to my followers. It was my dream, thoughto tell you the truth, I had no personal feeling about God at all.
"Within three months, I had discovered that my credo was by nomeans unique. The entire city was full of hippies who believed in freelove, and panhandling, and though I gave regular lectures to largeloose circles of friends on Wynken, holding up the books andreciting the psalms梩hese are very tame, of course?
"I can imagine.""梞y principle job was that of business manager and boss ofthree rock musicians who wanted to become famous and were toostoned to remember their bookings, or collect the proceeds at thedoor. One of them, Blue, we called him, could really sing well. Hehad a high tenor, and quite a range. The band had a sound. Or at leastwe thought it did.
"Father Kevin's letter found me when I was living up in the atticof the Spreckles Mansion on Buena Vista Park, do you know thathouse?""I do know it. It's a hotel.""Exactly, and it was a private home in those days, and the topfloor had a ballroom with bath and kitchenette. This was well beforeany restoration. Nobody had invented 'bed and breakfast,' and I justrented the ballroom and the musicians played there and we all usedthe filthy bath and kitchen, and in the day, when they were asleep allover the floor, I'd dream about Wynken and think about Wynkenand wonder how I would ever find out more about this man and whatthese love poems were. I had all sorts of fantasies about him.
"That attic, I wonder about it now. It had windows at three pointsof the compass, and deep window seats with tattered old velvetcushions. You could see San Francisco in every direction but east asI remember, but I don't have a good sense of direction. We loved to sit inthose window alcoves and talk and talk. My friends loved to hearabout Wynken. We were going to write some songs based onWynken's poems. Well, that never happened.""Obsessed.""Completely. Lestat, you must go back for those books, no matterwhat you believe of me when we're finished here. All of them are inthe flat. Every single one that Wynken ever did. It was my life's workto get those books, I got into dope for those books. Even back in theHaight.
"I was telling you about Father Kevin. He wrote me a letter, saidthat he had looked up Wynken de Wilde in some manuscripts andfound that Wynken had been the executed leader of a heretical cult.
Wynken de Wilde had a religion of strictly female followers, and hisworks were officially condemned by the church. Father Kevin said allthat was 'history,' and I ought to sell the books. He'd write morelater. He never did. And two months later I committed multi-murdercompletely on the spur of the moment, and it changed the course ofthings.""The dope you were dealing?""Sort of, only I wasn't the one who made the slipup. Blue dealtmore than me. Blue carried around grass in suitcases. I was into littlesacks of it, you know, it made just about as much as the band made forme. But Blue bought by the kilo and lost two kilos. Nobody knewwhat happened to them. He actually lost them in a taxi, we figured,but we never knew.
"There were a lot of stupid kids walking around then. They wouldget into fdealing' never realizing that the supply was originating withsome vicious individual who thought nothing of shooting people inthe head. Blue thought he could talk his way out of it, he'd makesome explanation, he'd been ripped off by friends, that sort of thing.
His connections trusted him, he said, they'd even given him a gun.
"The gun was in the kitchen drawer, and they'd told him theymight need him to use it sometime, but of course he would never dothat. I guess when you are that stoned, you think everybody else isstoned. These men, he said, they were just heads like us, nothing toworry about, that had been just talk. We would all be as famous as BigBrother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin very soon.
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