It is a common piece of trivia that J. Edgar Hoover was known to fire near any Bureau employee with a handshake too limp or too sweaty. It is also a common focus of historical speculation as to whether the man’s homosexuality was latent or blatant. Lesser known historical fact re: the COINTELPRO founder’s formative years: adolescent J. was a neighborhood semi-celebrity within the Eastern Market for his polished rock collection. Tumbled. Smooth. Made homogeneous by friction and a Protestant patience. His gemstones sat in an anal rank-and-file atop his dresser, awkward and psoriatic John charging admission to area children for a hands-free look. A nickel per head. Cold. Hard. Conspiratorial. The Christian-named anonymity and calm before a career of initials and intrigue.
A young Vladimir Nabokov was delighted when he discovered that the Latin letters of his first and last names came out to Vivian Darkbloom when suitably anagrammed. A notebook full of failures in the attempt to show for it. His classmates were markedly less enthused when he refused to answer to any name but that of his gender-negative alter ego. Likewise for the teacher at roll call. Clever. Precocious. In all probability, overly so. Other children misconstrued his use of a script other than the nationally modified Cyrillic as unpatriotic and proceeded to ostracize, tease, and beat—though not necessarily in that order. St. Petersburg has always proved to be unkind to the privileged.
Wassily Kandinsky was reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations at fourteen, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid at forty.
Simone de Beauvoir suffered from body-image issues until twenty-one, the age at which she met Sartre, periodically binging and purging herself away to sickness and distraction, &c.. It was once she found solace in the polyamorous arms of the famous Frenchman that she gathered the strength to write her now-seminal feminist texts. But then, even the word seminal presupposes a patriarchal worldview. Conception is not when seed meets egg, but when theory meets praxis. Liberated, though bookish and solipsistic. Any philosophy is, in its own invariable way, as limited and limiting a doctrine as that which it would see replaced.
Barry Goldwater lived under the dictatorial rule of a department-store-owning father. Goldwater’s Department Store could always be counted on to turn a profit while under the elder Goldwater’s direction, Baron “The Baron” Goldwater answering to his feudal nickname thinking that it came from a place of his employee’s endearment. He managed and monitored the store’s shiny planar surfaces with heavy footfalls, beard and pattern baldness making him look like a Nast rendition Boss Tweed. Barry could always be found hiding cross-legged in the center of one of those circular clothing racks, finding consumerism cathartic even in those days. A child raised and reared by the free market.
Pre-pubescent Pablo Picasso ate paint and shit a spectrum, each action having its reaction equal and opposite.
Woody Guthrie was born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, though his U.S. President namesake would not be inaugurated until a full year after the folk singer’s birth. W.W. was reelected on the platform of his keeping the United States out of the First World War. W.W.“W.”G. went on to pen This Land is Your Land. The last verses of the American standard were eventually deemed semi-subversive by those in a position to deem and stricken from the final version sung in schoolrooms. W.W. soon led us—the capital lettered U.S.—into WWI. W.W.“W.”G. grew up with a world war on the wireless and a dustbowl in the backyard. As they stood there hungry/ I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?
Lenny Bruce kept his pot in the smallest and innermost nested doll of his grandmother’s antique babushka set.
Samuel Beckett was born a Church of Ireland member of French Huguenot descent, with all the classical Christian guilt associated with such a lineage. He was devout as a child, attending service in the dilapidated Foxrock chapel and playing chess against the presbyter in the belfry’s hollow every other afternoon. The set was handmade, rough hewn. Pastor and parishioner enjoyed a sort of marriage of mind, early evening tête-à-têtes that would each leave the other reeling in turn. That is, until the two had a falling out over some spiritual issue or other, an inconsistency in the scripture, the absurdity inherent in faith. From that time on, the boy-to-become man was forever in crisis and motion.
December 22nd, 1989 found one Samuel Barclay Beckett face-up and blue-faced on the floor of a Parisian nursing home. The carpet’s fibers pock-marked his face, itself heavy and slack jawed against the flat surface. Emphysema. His bronchiole had expanded exponentially, puffing upwards and upwards like a synthetic flying machine, and collapsed, taking the majority of his lung’s tissue with it. His gravestone was carved, as per his orders, “any color, so long as it’s gray.” The senseless end of to a fluke, an inevitability of probability.
Southern California. Lenny Bruce overdosed on what would later be determined to be morphine and was found in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home on the hottest day of the summer of 1966. Year of the horse. Horse, H, Junk, Smack, Shit. He was naked on the tile, sprawling and supine, a spoon and syringe within each arm’s reach. It was his final punchline and it fell just flat. Overdose on the opiate is known to cause asphyxia—Bruce’s lungs collapsed, too heavy for their own strength to bear. He was eulogized and memorialized, sporting the first posthumous pardon in New York state history for his 1964 obscenity trial. One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That’s obscene.
Woody Guthrie died in 1967—leaving a son, Arlo. Huntington’s Disease, complications due to the uncontrolled mutation and replication of countless cells ultimately doing him in.
Picasso died one of the very few who have entered the cultural lexicon colloquially recognized by a single name. At age 91, in direct defiance of any sane doctor’s orders, the iconoclastic Spaniard drank his health and subsequently fell to the kitchen floor, face contorted like a Mannerist Christ. All present claim that the man’s final drink was a pale rosé, the color compliment his Mediterranean olive skin’s sickly jaundiced hue. Collectors and curators have subsequently tried to find the bottle, operating under the assumption that the man’s wife and guests wouldn’t be so bad-mannered as to drink the rest before attending to the body—also knowing that Picasso never ate or drank the last portion of anything as a matter of superstitious and self-consciously eccentric principle. As any and all attempts to produce the keepsake bottle have failed, it is safe to presume that Picasso’s then-recently-widowed spouse and the assembled houseguests drank the artist’s memory before going about the business of calling a coroner.
Barry Goldwater silently passed while watching a public-access television production of Our Town.
Simone de Beauvoir collapsed on the rain-slick streets of Paris in April, 1986, the wettest month of that year by all reasonable accounts. Pneumonia finally caught up with the proto-second-wave, post-first wave, wave-onto-her-own feminist—her alveoli filling with fluid until she too was ultimately done in. The body was bloated and blue with water weight on the autopsy table, having soaked up and retained rainfall and puddle water before being removed from the cobblestoned street. It had had to be drained to make room for embalming fluid by the time the embalmer got to his job, the cause of death not at all difficult to determine. Beauvoir was buried next to John Paul, though the soil from which her grave was dug was so saturated with rainwater that the final hole occupied two plots, its walls continuously caving in and having to be re-dug wider and deeper. She was wonderfully eulogized by sincere contemporary and dilettante convert alike in a ceremony miserable for its humidity, the muggy aftermath of a month-long storm. All present agreed it was as appropriate a farewell as any.
Kandinsky passed in a building of his own design, the simple Bauhaus geometry suggesting a child’s simple sensibility. Its designer could not, however, have predicted that the structure would serve as the place of his own final demise. And so, Kandinsky’s final turn was a lightly ironic and entirely unintentional subversion of the Bauhaus maxim “form follows function”, function serving in this case as a reaction to form.
Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux in 1976, nine years before Gorbachev and his glasnost policies allowed the man’s work to be read in his native land and tongue, ultimate absolution—Nabokov’s treasons were not in his politics or privileged birth, but in his betrayal of the Mother Language. The Cold War was, after all, not a war of Command System vs. Free Market. It was a war of the Slavic versus the Germanic and Romantic, an ageless conflict stemming from some ancient linguistic faux pas or other. Nabokov’s trilingual disloyalty to his country-of-birth began with an innate curiosity of life too far west of the taiga and ended with his death in a country foreign to him in that it was other than his nation-of-origin, familiar in that it was more welcoming than any other could ever be.
J. Edgar Hoover died in a hospital bed in 1972, finally, having survived six presidential administrations, three attempted firings, and untold tries on his life. High blood pressure would prove to be more effective than any of these. His body was borne off of sweat-soaked bed sheets and secretly done away with by any number of the anonymous whose job it is to do such things—the Director never did see Watergate or the ensuing end of his era. The few personal belongings Hoover was allowed by the hospital staff sat in an organized row atop his room’s bedside table, obsessively mulled over by the horizontally-oriented public and oh-so-private figure. Entirely without speck or spot. All visitors, his doctor included, were made to take off their shoes before entering, as per J. Edgar’s orders and in direct violation of Hospital policy. At once sanitary and desensitized. Cold and hard, but fading and tired, Hoover’s eyes closed at half-past midnight on the second day of May, already halfway off and on to metempsychosis.
***
Drew Dickerson
Drew Dickerson is a young writer out of Cumming, Georgia. His work within the short story discipline was recognized by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. He was a 2010 Presidential Scholar in the Arts Semi-Finalist and traveled to Italy in May, 2010 to study under John Guare, a trip that was filmed as an episode of the HBO series Masterclass. His previous work can either be found or will be appearing on The Blue Pencil Online and Defenestration Magazine. He will be attending the University of Georgia in the Fall.
