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The closer came summer the more activity happened. I picked up bartending shifts whenever I could and made weekly trips to Fort Meade where Mountain Valley was trucked in, near NSA, off route 32, between Baltimore and Washington DC. My involvement with the friends of the library also became more intense since I joined Friends of Maryland Libraries to research more of what a friend of the library should do to be a friend. Most of the Friends activity took place in Baltimore and I was invited to read at the inner harbor groin. Mister G’s lease was ending and neither of us had a place to live for the summer.
Out of all confusion an opportunity presented itself to occupy a vacant farm house in Whaleysville, 8 miles from Ocean City, in exchange for cleaning it up. The farmhouse had neither windows nor running water. I saw this as no problem since I sold bottled water for drinking though the bathing thing would have to be dealt with in a transitory manner. There was an outhouse. My sources for finding extra funding to help grow the business were nil since my appearance of insanity was obvious even in self-reflection though this didn’t stop anyone from taking any money I could earn to keep things moving and improving the cash flow or property or prospect of more visibility for the shit hole of a library in a very wealthy little town on a sandbar. Several truckloads of bags of garbage were removed from the farmhouse—we removed the ivy that was eating it–my younger brother replaced the windows—and I had a place to live for the summer. I had the electric turned on and phone service. Mister G took up space in one of the two bedrooms on the second floor. Corn was planted in fields surrounding the house at the end of the dirt road, far enough off the county road that the iris on the side of the truck appeared to be a weed. The house had been vacant for ten years.

Mister G sold Rolex Watches to timeshare salesmen, among other things. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. I knew him from Baltimore as an agent for rock bands, among other things. Always well dressed, he was short with silver hair and a sly smile. Mister G was driving the same Mercedes he had been driving the last time I saw him ten years earlier. It looked the same; he looked the same. The accidental meeting in the parking lot of Dumser’s Dairyland happened when my winter lease was ending. Mister G had a winter lease for two more months at an ocean front high rise so I had a place to stay. He liked Miso soup and claimed macrobiotics as his diet and Buddhism as his belief system. He also believed that Hitler would have done much better with a good publicist, and didn’t, however, believe in the holocaust. He gave me a break on the rent and I supplied the water cooler and spring water.
Mister G also paid me for making runs with the truck to Philadelphia where I loaded up on TVs for drop off to timeshare condos and he picked up his Rolex watches that he sold for $150 a piece. I had rented a small storage space across ASSAWOMAN BAY from Ocean City at a small industrial park complex down some not well traveled back roads where I kept my excess inventory and empty five gallon glass jugs in wooden crates stacked on wooden pallets.