One Mukluk

(continued)

By Barry G. Gale

Clarissa and Jocelyn asked me to look at Adams's Diary, which they found under some old dirty underwear in a beat-up downstairs bedroom bureau. They also asked if I could somehow use the information that it contained to memorialize Adams's life and especially "his struggle," as they called it, and as I call it to this day. I assumed that what they meant by this was Adams's struggle to survive in the un-survivable world of the Washington bureaucracy.

I told them that I was not a professional writer or anything like that, but that I would try to do what I could, given the obvious limitations on my part. But first I'd have to look at the Diary. You know, to see what it contained. And they said fine.

One of Adam's arch enemies at DOST, with whom he always argued, and usually bitterly, a fellow by the name of McDeetin, said to me soon after learning of Adams's disappearance that he supposed at times like this you're obliged to say that, "Yes, we had our disagreements, but I'll miss the old SOB, for who can I argue with now?"

"But actually, I'm glad he's dead," McDeetin said, "the dirty rotten motherfucker."

Scumsquat, McDeetin's moronic special assistant, added that he was glad, too: "the dirty rotten motherfucker."

Adams was posthumously awarded the Anton K. Diddleyshit Memorial Foundation Disappearance into the Potomac River Award, which is given every 26 months, 12 days and 42 and one-half hours to any woman or man or other person, their relatives and friends or friends of their relatives or relatives of their friends, or any combination of the above or any other people who are eligible for any other Anton K. Diddleyshit Memorial Foundation Award, who disappear into the Potomac River between the White House and Chain Bridge when Nick The Shepherd is herding sheep on the nearby rocks.

Billy Adams, Metro's son, attended the award ceremony to receive the plaque in honor of his father. As the Anton K. Diddleyshit Memorial Foundation official handed him the award at a special ceremony, held at Washington's St. Regis Hotel off of K Street, near Georgetown, the Tattler reported that Billy was overheard saying: "Jesus, and I thought D.C. schools were complete bullshit!"

Crimpton Crawford Crispy III of the Craven, Greedy law firm was chosen by Clarissa and Jocelyn to handle Adams's will, at the strong recommendation of Snort Fremrose of the Retirement Office and all of his friends at DOST, which numbered in at least the thousands, and Cindy Willowy Crispy, Crimpton's wife, and all her friends at the Local Country Club, which numbered in at least the millions.

I thought the choice was a poor one, given the fact that Craven, Greedy was under contract to DOST and that this might constitute a conflict of interest, but, hell, who was I to say?

Hockenhokey felt that there might be a lesson in Adams's struggle and in his apparent untimely death (by the way, he asked, does someone actually time these things?). Why Hockenhokey felt there might be a lesson in all this was never really clear to me, but nothing that Hockenhokey did was ever really clear to me, so I guess I should not have been surprised.

Hockenhokey told me that he asked some of Adams's closest friends and people he considered some of his more intimate acquaintances, both friends and enemies, about the question of lessons, and that he had collected several hundred thousand responses. He wanted to know if I wanted to hear what they were.

I said no, I didn't really want to, but I also added that I appreciated his generous offer. I did ask him what he himself thought the principle lesson or lessons might have been.

He thought for a moment and then said that he saw basically two lessons. The first was that, if you take on the Washington bureaucracy, they will scrunch you like a bad Portuguese zipper (whatever that was, and Hockenhokey did not explain) and the second was that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

(The second of these sounded to me awfully like a statement attributed to Harry Truman, but perhaps I'm wrong.)

Finally, I thought that you might be interested in knowing what Adams's last Diary entry was. Although it appears on page 57 of a 388-page document, he wrote the following words in large red letters in the margin next to it: "Last entry. Yes, I know this sounds crazy, but it actually is the goddamn last entry. MA."

The Diary notation reads: "If someone should be unlucky enough to find this Diary after I am gone, tell Demmo Klunkk I'll meet him some dark and terrible night in the farthest reaches of sub-sub-basement Z of the Marmalade, near Allentown, Pennsylvania, and won't we have a devilishly good laugh together."