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Al agreed to read my novel and screenplays as did his wife, and then he introduced me to the Pendleton Papers upon which he based a novel.    Whether fact or fiction I could never tell nor was I told whether it be true or not was not mine to judge, for no premise is too outrageous, no conspiracy theory implausible and we are in history where absurdity rules.  What I read in the Papers was a brief outline how in the late sixties a bill was passed to fund a program to find a virus that attacks the immune system.   The CIA and WHO introduced the virus into a small control group in the Congo by way of the smallpox eradication program. IT GOT LOST. At this time there was a Russian defector who worked for the New York City Blood Center who was working on hepatitis B vaccine.  Voliska had free reign to collect blood from all over the free world.  He collected blood from central Africa.  Voliska conducted the hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York, Miami, San Francisco, Saint Louis and Dubuke advertising for gay men between the ages of 25 and 35.  In the meantime Haitian health care workers were working in Central Africa and they went back to Haiti.  Al asked that I write the screenplay based on his novel:  Norman Iland and Alberta Charles called the screenplay IMMUNE.

I soon bought my first computer. A whole new world opened up—Tetris and solitaire—that’s about it. A third screenplay VAGRANT and a couple of short stories popped out along with the refined script for TAKE A BITE OF THE APPLE. Barbara Bush was the first lady of literacy, the mayor of Baltimore claimed to have a city that reads and Tom Clancy turned out best sellers the way girls on Baltimore’s block gave hand jobs for splits of champagne. I gathered letters of support and carried heavy bottles of water and tended bar whenever I could pick up a shift at the convention hall in Ocean City.
I tried to convince myself that playing solitaire on the computer would help me become familiar with the computer but it was just another addiction that took time away from life that could never be retrieved. Always being in financial trouble—always looking for ways to make money—never achieving any sense of balance—only escaping from one moment to the next, this is all that had been achieved. Fortunately I had no television so I read many books and Joseph Campbell became a mentor and the I Ching a guide. Still I gathered more accounts in the slow painful process of one at a time through word of mouth or someone seeing the sign of IRIS and a phone number on the side of the truck.
I picked up several accounts in Rehoboth, Delaware, including a health food store and several restaurants. The health food store was owned by an ex navy seal and his wife a nurse and their son. The store was called Alice’s Wonderland. Al the navy seal claimed to have cured himself of a brain tumor—the reason he became a nutritionist with a health food store. He had spent quite a bit of time on nuclear submarines and felt that was the cause of his brain tumor though the navy never agreed with him.