My mother died—I think of terminal sexual climax—on November 5, 1971, while watching goo-goo eyed King Kong finger Fay Wray in his king-sized palm, and I inherited $200,000. King Kong was rolling his watery eyes around, trying to focus on that little white fetus in his left hand, lowering his submarine-sized, black, greasy right index finger toward screaming Fay, Mom was squirming in her seat, the people behind me were yelling “Down in front” because I’m so tall and always had to sit down front with Mom, who was eating hot, buttered popcorn and drinking Diet Pepsi.

I owe all this to Gabriel Ratchet. It was he who arranged for the round-trip ticket, two seats side by side, on Scandinavian Airlines, got me my reservation in the King Gustaf Holiday Inn, deodorized my

Where darkness is on the rocks of the Morula Mountains, the stars twinkle in the frosty night like stars. Cold winds come from the east and thin snow skitters along over the frozen surface of the old snow. Some pines stand and whir in the gusts. 

The red and cream Santa Fe Trailways bus pitched and rocked along the cracking, heat-racked asphalt. Around the square, jagged Rupp comers, along the dust-haloed fields, across the Twin Bridges, past windbreaks and leaning, paint-less barns, past sagging, rusted barbed wire, and turned left at the cemetery, turned by the yellow, condemned (no fire es-capes) mausoleum.

Sky stood in the gray, sepulchral hallway of the University of Michigan library. He was early to return his Snorri Sturluson and Le Ménagier de Paris, both due at 8:00 A.M. And he regretted, he mourned, he pined indifferently, that those great structures of the heart must go back to the shelves in librarian time while he, Skyblue, waited in his skyblue levis, his Botticelli hair, his Billy Budd eyes, himself a gnomon of six feet and 150 pounds of undeveloped imagination, his nose aquiline, his ears quincunxes and his throat a pillar of cleanshaven agility.

The cell was not a literary cell. It was neither Nabokovian nor Kafkaesque. It was just a cell six feet wide, eight feet long and ten feet high. It contained (1) a steel cot, (2) a ventilating window five inches square, (3) no light, (4) a porcelain urinal and (5) Geoffrey Wolgamot, murderer of college students, whose execution was nigh.