One Mukluk

(continued)

By Barry G. Gale

Several weeks after Adams's disappearance, on a Sunday morning TV discussion show, reporters interviewed the exceedingly pigeon-toed Reverend Oughtnot Dreadnot about Adams's disappearance. Dreadnot was well known around Washington circles as a strong believer in reincarnation, safety pins and homogenized milk. The reporters took Dreadnot to be Adams's minister, because that's how Dreadnot described himself, though Adams had never mentioned anything like that to me.

"No, no, it's not Dreadnot Oughtnot, it's Oughtnot Dreadnot," Dreadnot said. "Though you can call me Harold, which is my wife's middle name."

"OK, Harold, what can you tell us about Adams?"

Dreadnot didn't say much, except to indicate that Adams saw him several times and that they had spent a lot of time talking about Adams's experiences in Vietnam.

"Thanks, Harold," the host said at the end of the show, "thanks very much for joining us here today."

I later called Dreadnot and told him that I had seen him on TV. I tried to explain that Adams had never been in Vietnam, that, like me, he had gone to graduate school with the explicit goal of avoiding the draft and not going to Vietnam. But he didn't seem to want to listen to me. Instead, he persisted in asking me over and over again the same rather odd and irritating question: "Mr. Heigh, if Adams was Jesus Christ, what does that make you?"

I didn't know quite how to respond and, in truth, I didn't really know exactly what he meant, but his question seemed to insinuate something about my relationship with Adams which I did not particularly like. I didn't know exactly what it insinuated, but the fact that it insinuated anything at all about our relationship is what bothered me. Finally, I said to Dreadnot that I didn't think, if Adams was Jesus Christ, it made me anything, because Adams was not Jesus Christ. Period.

On the eleven o'clock news about four weeks after Adams's disappearance another professed witness was interviewed.

"And you were just...," the reporter asked.

"Yeah, I was just taking a leak along the banks of the Potomac, and I see this guy come up from under the river," said the unidentified man, who was a tall, light-complexioned person who wore a red carnation around his bulbous right ear and large, pink-framed, reflective sunglasses. "Goddamnist sight I ever saw. Guy must have been nuts. 'MeisterHEISTER fondles frogs!' That's what he said. Really, that's what I heard the guy say. Who the hell is MeisterHEISTER?"

"And you are sure this was in Washington?" the reporter followed up.

"Yeah, I'm sure. Or maybe Baltimore. But I know it was somewhere in this area."

Demmo Klunkk, a close friend of Adams's who went crazy one day about a year before and had become the notorious Monster of the Marmalade, hiding out in the numerous basements, sub-basements and sub-sub-basements of the Marmalade and perpetrating all sorts of devious tricks on DOST employees, including blowing up urinals at unexpected times, sent out an e-mail message to all DOST staff, indicating that all mayhem at the Marmalade would cease for one full week in honor of Adams's passing. And all mayhem did cease.

However, the Monster resumed his illicit ways with a bang exactly one week from the time the e-mail message was sent. When Security arrived at the DOST Walk of Fame on the seventh floor Secretarial suite of the Marmalade the next morning, they found all the portraits of previous DOST secretaries mischievously disfigured. All the male secretaries had moustaches, of one kind or another, added to their faces, and Mabel Wretch, DOST's first female Secretary, had a goatee, in the form of a pubic triangle (with little curly, dark wiry hair), painted on hers.

Clarissa said she and Jocelyn broke up soon after hearing the news of Adams's disappearance. She said that Adams, although they did not realize it at the time, was the glue that kept them all together, that really made the three of them one. She said it was like a cheese sandwich, and Adams was the cheese. Without the cheese, she and her girlfriend were merely two pieces of dry, tasteless bread.

I got a call one day about four months after Adams disappeared. It was from a person named Rodney Numbnuts. He said he was Adams's supervisor, who Adams was unable to locate during his more than 20 years at DOST. Ironically enough, Numbnuts said he'd been trying to find Adams for many, many years, but without any success. Apparently, he thought Adams's office was in corridor "I" and not "J," and he thought Adams spelled his name with two "d's" like Jane Addams of Hull House fame, and not just one. Why he would think that, I have no idea. It didn't make much difference, for two weeks later the numbnut Numbuts retired.

"I always told Adams," my philosophical friend and colleague Halls Benedict said when I talked to him about Adams's disappearance, "that asking questions that people can't answer is what makes people mad. Why do you want to make people mad?"

I didn't have a clue as to what Benedict meant.

I might make mention of the fact that, just before his disappearance, Adams had finally compiled two so-called "survival" lists which he had worked on for quite some time. One was for things he needed to do in order to get "in" at DOST — find out who he worked for, what he was supposed to do, how he could feel that he was making a substantive contribution. He also made another list for things he needed to do in order to get "out" — to leave government, find a responsible, meaningful job in the private sector in the Washington area (or at least "something approaching" a responsible, meaningful job), set up a new line of work.

It took Adams about a year, at least a year, as I recall, to compile the lists. He was quite proud when he had finally completed them, and he promptly shared them with me. But I noticed right away, and then he did, too, a peculiar characteristic of the lists. Each of the lists for the "in" and the "out" was exactly the same — the same number of things to do, described in the same way, and in the exact same order. How peculiar that was, I thought at the time. And I still think so today.

The lists can be found paper-clipped to the last page in Adams's Diary, which he kept at the time and which I now have in hand, thanks to Clarissa and Jocelyn. I mention this for those who might be interested, for those who might not, and for those who simply don't care; especially, I guess, for those that simply don't care.

A major problem arose, not unlike the problem with Adams's office space, when the Department tried to transfer Adams's responsibilities (he was a GS-15, the highest level one could achieve on the federal government career ladder) to someone else at DOST. According to DOST ABSURDLY RIDICULOUS AND RIDICULOUSLY ABSURD TRANSFER OF GS-15 WORK RESPONSIBILITY FROM ONE GS-15 TO ANOTHER POLICY (DOST Order 62121-B) "the responsibility for the work of any GS-15 employee, or anyone who wants to be a GS-15 employee, or anyone who was a GS-15 employee and who wants to be a GS-15 employee again and anyone who was not a GS-15 and doesn't ever want to be a GS-15 employee again and by definition can't be a GS-15 employee again because he or she was never one in the first place, and any other people either working at DOST or not working there, and their friends and their relatives and their friends's relatives and their relatives's friends, and anybody else who, by some accident, coincidence, or sheer bad luck, can no longer shoulder his, her or their responsibility, or any responsibility for that matter, may, upon second thought, be transferred to any other DOST employee or personage so described above, or even those not described above, upon certification that the transferee and the transferor have the same Aunt Eloise in common; and there shall be no exceptions to this rule except those exceptions that are deemed truly ridiculous."