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The day before we were to do lunch with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, and his assistant Stephen, we reserved a car to rent. We were bringing Kay, the Ph.D. who had hated the Doctor for over twenty years for making her wash the dishes. We were to meet the good Doctor at the hospital. Brent’s tiny convertible just didn’t work. When we went to pick up the car at the airport, they wouldn’t rent to us. Brent had Brenda’s credit card and they wouldn’t take it without her being there. We offered them a company check, which they said was fine, but they still needed the credit card and the person who owned the card present. I knew I couldn’t charge a jelly donut.
We didn’t panic, but we drove along the street just knowing that things would work out. Sure enough, a giant billboard appeared before us, “TRIANGLE,” advertising car rentals. It wasn’t a name that either of us recognized as a national corporate monster, so I figured we had a chance. From my past experience in business, I knew that if the rental house was privately owned, they might take a signed company check in lieu of a credit card. A few blocks later we pulled into their lot. Upon entering the office the first thing I noticed were pictures of movie and TV stars, framed and signed and covering the walls. I was relieved when I got to speak with the owner of the business. I explained our film, gave him our card, he took the check and gave us Wilmington film rates, which were slightly below those posted on the wall. That truly was a momentous occasion. I knew, with my big old truck in the driveway, that there would be the need for many car rentals, money permitting. The fact that that man took a check opened the door to the entire film. Right at that moment, I saw the film being made.
Rupert says, “Transportation.
Gotta Go, Gotta go, Gotta Go.
Trucks are good for Truckin’.
Without hesitation.
Cars are good for uh-huh,
to get you where you need to go.
Uh-huh.”
We picked up Kay in a late model, four door, silver Intrepid. I hadn’t driven a late model car since getting lucky on one or two occasions at the cab company I had driven for in Florida while attending the film school. This was definitely different. The Intrepid didn’t have a meter and there were no sado-masochistic dispatchers to deal with. I was behind the wheel as the producer of a documentary film on the way to a meeting with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, with my star, Brent, and that thread of a connection that gave us credibility with the Doctor—Kay, a woman who shuddered at the memory of the Doctor.
“When I went into labor he gave me reading material for the hospital because he said I wouldn’t have anything better to do,” she vented on the three- hour drive across the state.
I felt that when she saw him, perhaps all of her anger would disappear, because he was so old and fragile, and he had accomplished so much for a community of people with his commitment to his work. Strangely enough, the stories she had told me did nothing but reinforce my admiration for the man and his commitment. Without people like him a lot of work would never get done. She was right to have escaped from there. She wasn’t cut out for that level of commitment. Kay was a “mild,” and hated him for it, of course.
We arrived in Chapel Hill early for the appointed rendezvous time at the hospital, so we explored a second hand book store. We each found something of value for our personal tastes. Brent searched for his family tree, Kay bought into Martin Luther and I found a Joseph Campbell book I didn’t yet have, “The Masks of God, Primitive Mythology.”
When the time drew near to meet with the Doctor, we drove to the front of the hospital and parked. I climbed out and announced to a security guard, “We’re here to pick up the King, Dr. Brinkhaus.”
“Move it over there,” he said.
We parked in a patient drop-off spot while I went inside to the front information desk of the busy hospital and was directed to a house phone. I called upstairs to the King at the precise moment I had been instructed to call. Stephen, the assistant answered the phone and informed me that he would be right down, and that the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, would meet us at the pre-arranged restaurant, the same place where we had met with Fabio. I hadn’t met Stephen, so he described himself as an academic carrying a folder. I told him we were in a four door, silver Intrepid with Kay in the back. Even though we were in front of the very busy medical school hospital, we connected with the pale, vampire Stephen very easily.
“The King, Dr. Brinkhaus likes to drive himself, and he drives like a maniac,” he stammered, “I’m afraid to drive with him.”
I wheeled quickly into traffic, pushing everyone back into their seats.
Brent smiled, “Uyh-huh, hang on to your oatmeal.”
“How old is he?” I asked.
“He’s in his eighties,” Stephen said.
I drove a little bit faster, reasoning that if this guy was still working in his eighties, and he was open to doing a film, and his assistant said he drove like a maniac, and after the stories Kay had told us about working on Christmas and while she was in labor, I wasn’t going to keep him waiting. We arrived at the parking lot of the restaurant quickly. After circling through the crowded parking lot once, we found a parking space. The King, Dr. Brinkhaus pulled into the lot and made a new space.
I didn’t know what I was expecting at the reunion of Kay and Kenneth, whether it be a hug or a handshake, a curtsy or a bow. Time heals, I thought. The King, Dr. Kenneth Brinkhaus actually moved toward Kay for what looked to be an incoming hug, but she trembled in fear and backed away, not even offering her hand, and feebly muttered, “Hello, Dr. Brinkhaus.”
He covered her rebuff well and walked with her into the restaurant followed by the rest of the group. He was above it all. He showed no anger or hostility, just charm and grace and the vigor of a warrior still high from combat on the highway. We played musical chairs in the restaurant. He asked me about the seating, catching me totally off guard. I placed him between Brent the hemophiliac, the community he had helped, and Kay, because maybe the ice would break.
We ordered veggie burgers and iced teas all around. Stephen passed me the Doctor’s Curriculum Vitae. I told him about our contact with Susan Resnik, who had written the book on the social history of hemophilia. It turned out that Dr. Resnik had interviewed the King, Dr. Brinkhaus for her book. Since she made up names for everyone in the book, this was news to me. It was a very pleasant lunch. When it was time for dessert and coffee, the King, Dr. Brinkhaus rearranged the seating; he and I switched seats, which put his assistant, Stephen, between him and Loretta. I mentioned Susan Resnick, and he said that Stephen would send us an edited transcript of his interview with her. I felt really lucky. We picked up the lunch check, using money from the original contributors’ fund.
After lunch, the King, Dr. Brinkhaus spun wheels out of the parking lot. We hauled Stephen back to the hospital. I gave him a couple of video copies of Tai-Chi-One, and we drove back to Wilmington.
“He’s so old,” Kay said, “but don’t be fooled by all that charm. There have been at least three people that committed suicide while working for him.”
And so had she, in a way, ended that life. She joined the ministry instead.

Tinkerbell and Cleopatra invited me out for dinner with the girls, and I felt somewhat honored to be taken into this inner sanctum of feminine mystique. But they were all my own age, and I wanted to meet the 22 year old daughters if there were any around. Having been an observer, while working in the service industry, of women haggling over who got the watercress on the check in a restaurant, I was amazed at how their system actually worked when put into operation. The efficiency of the human memory, even the memory of the alcoholic blackout-prone Cleopatra, when it came to seventy-five cents for extra blue cheese, could not be matched by any computer. I knew I didn’t want to be one of the girls. I played along for the evening and watched Tinkerbell pretend she was a kid. I was an observant fly watching the spider. I had to be careful—no attachments, no games. I felt there were plans being devised for me that would take my mind from my work.
The old wolfhound howls at the moon. He’s a loner. He gnaws on old dead bones. He doesn’t need to chase cars. He’s creatively active while the church bells ring in the sheep and the old women talk about what really matters, the person who isn’t there, the most important person of all, the one who isn’t there.
The day after the trip to Chapel Hill, we composed a letter to the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, and invited him to lunch the very next week. We also invited Kay, who hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, and mentioned this in our invitation.
He responded immediately, asking permission to bring along an assistant, Steven Pemberton, a young historian who was helping Dr. Brinkhaus with his archives. The Doctor actually asked us permission to bring someone along. Certainly.
Cleo began inviting me over her house nights, for beers and bongos. She played the bongos when she was drunk. The corporate moll was a wild woman from the jungle in her own hut, blasting rock and roll over the stereo and pounding her skins. The jungle, the jungle, I was in the jungle. I drank very little and retreated as early as possible to the solitude of my cave.
Tinkerbell became a regular on afternoons for bicycle rides and beers. She had all of these wild ideas about alternative treatments and remedies for everything from cancer to cold sores. I soon found myself brewing teas and drying and grinding shark cartilage. Eventually I told her she was too old for me and she stopped coming around. I was left with a lot of old shark cartilage to gnaw on while I howled at the moon. I also found a recipe for shark fin soup and felt really blessed.
We attended a business luncheon for networking that Cleo had set up, as a pillar of the business community. It cost more than I could really afford to pay for a small salad, a stale roll and a cup of bad coffee to listen to people promote their business cards for an hour. I sat next to a woman who said her daughter wanted to break into the movie business. I gave the woman our card to give to her daughter. The amount of materials we were accumulating had to be put in some kind of order, and it seemed like we were getting ready for a break-through on the gathering of experts: Susan Resnick and her thesis, Dr. Brinkhaus and his assistant, and Fabio from the North Carolina film Foundation. We continued to send out proposals for funds, but nothing happened. Money trickled in from up North from the water man, and I sold plasma twice a week so I could continue to buy pork-neck bones and cook for the dog. The dog.
Cleo became a little more assertive about my ownership of Argo.
“Keep him over there,” she said, “he’s your dog. I’m filling in the hole in front of my house and I don’t want to see another one.”
The dog refused to stay in the yard, though I did convince him to stay out of Cleo’s hole. The fence was four feet high, and the cow was able to get over without any problem whatsoever. He did it when nobody was looking. Every morning he was inside the fence, and by the end of the day he’d greet me in the front yard, covered with mud from his dip in the lake. Cleo granted me the privilege of hauling scrap lumber from one of her warehouses so I could build on top of the fence. We didn’t expect the landlady, Saint to return for some time, and I was walking on broken glass with Cleo already. I had agreed to keep the dog, I even liked him a little. It certainly wasn’t the same as with Toots the cat. I couldn’t seem to make the same deal with the dog, about going on adventures, as I had with Toots. Cats don’t infringe upon the personal territory of others the way dogs do. Cats are good writers; they steal their prey without anyone being any the wiser. Dogs are bad actors; they need attention and don’t care how they get it. And Argo was a bad actor. He grabbed the attention of every passerby he could, with his bright smile and wagging tail and big wet nose. He was a butt sniffer. I added another foot to the top of the fence by screwing in long floorboards across the tops of the fence posts. I actually deformed Saint’s estate so I could keep a dog that I didn’t really want to cook for anymore, and that I wasn’t even supposed to have, for the sake of trying to keep the peace with a crazed and somewhat powerful woman, who evicted people by day for doing just what she wanted me to do, and played the bongos by night. Everybody LIMBO! I didn’t want to be a BUTT SNIFFER! Butt, butt, everybody GUMBO!

After lunch with the devil, Brent and I drove over to the hospital. We had no idea where to begin looking for the King, Dr. Brinkhaus.
Brad told me the story of how, when he lived in Chapel Hill, he was in dire need of clotting factor and went to the treatment center at the hospital. They said that they couldn’t treat him. He limped to the parking garage and couldn’t find his car. He cowered in a corner of the garage until he could gather strength to continue looking, eventually finding his car and driving home to treat himself.
We pulled into the side lot of the hospital and approached a man in a white lab coat. I puffed on my cigarette as we approached the man. I told Brent to stop. I got the man’s attention as I stifled a cough.
“Hey, Doc, we’re looking for the King, Dr. Brinkhaus.”
“I’m his doctor,” he said. “You can find him on the eighth floor of his building,” he said.
“Of course, thanks,” I answered.
We may not have deserved this treasure, but something had led us further along the path to hope or hell. Whether it be the devil or the deep blue sea, the work was what mattered.
Brad parked the car in the garage and pointed out the corner where he had once cringed in pain, and I didn’t feel his pain. There was no way that I could comprehend what he had gone through. I’ve had my own moments, but they were exclusive to me, as his were exclusive to him. I listened, but I didn’t fully comprehend—and maybe it didn’t really matter. Above all, I couldn’t lose my objectivity. We caught the shuttle train to the hospital main entrance and eventually found our way to the eighth floor of the Brinkhaus Building and ran into The King, Dr. Brinkhaus in the hallway. He was tall and white-haired. He wore a tie on a white shirt under his lab coat. He was The Doctor. He was The King. We spoke for fifteen minutes. I told him we were making a movie about hemophilia and asked him if he would be interested in participating. He was old. He doddled and sputtered and spoke a lot in a very enthusiastic manner. “Sure,” he said.
We passed him our card and left. To most people it wouldn’t mean anything. I wasn’t sure what it meant to me. To Brent it was meeting a legend in hemophilia research, a man whose work had helped to make his life tolerable. As we approached the elevator on the eighth floor I showed him Kay’s list and asked who was next.
“That was the King,” he said, “nobody can follow that.”
We got on the elevator and Brent’s normal sarcasm broke through as he winced with pain in his knee from the day’s strenuous activities.
“He’s a doddering old fool,” he said, smiling.
“Brent, at least wait until you leave his building.”
“I know,” he said, “we met him in his building, and he’s a doddering old fool.”
“He said he’d consider being in our film.” I said.
“He did,” Brent said, “he’s God. Where are the dogs? I wanta see the dogs.”
Brent dragged his leg out to the front of the hospital and waited for the train. I hopped across the pedestrian bridge to the parking garage, so as not to take up any unnecessary space on the crowded train, and met him at the car. We smoked cigars and drove with the top down back to Wilmington.

The Film Foundation was fronted by a jovial, cynical guy called Fabio. My only early contact with him had been over the telephone. He had recommended a good lawyer and we tried to be receptive to his advice every step of the way, somewhat believing in the Fairy God Mother. I knew that we needed help. Basically, what they offered was a way to raise money for a project that probably wouldn’t make a lot of money, so the investor route was pretty much eliminated. The Foundation was to become our non-profit fiscal sponsor, a way for people to contribute money to the project and in turn, get a charitable tax deduction. I felt that we were on some sort of a Quest, and as we progressed, if we persevered the path would illuminate itself before our very eyes. When the initial contributors had sent money, I heard “Entry the Gladiators” in the background. I expected nothing less than a circus. Of course, I was the ringmaster, though at times I appeared to be nothing more than a clown.
In July we finally set up an appointment with Fabio in Chapel Hill—to do lunch, of course. To prepare for the meeting, I confirmed with Kay the list of doctors to look up at the University. The King, Dr. Brinkhaus, was at the top of the list. She said that he was quite old, retired for many years, but expected to “die over his microscope.” We drove to Chapel Hill in Brent’s little red convertible with the top down. We arrived a bit early at the restaurant parking lot and stopped in a small tobacco shop for Players cigarettes and cigars. A man looking much as I would imagine Mephistopheles to look was at the counter purchasing a carton of Dunhill Reds. Instinctively, I knew it was Fabio, but kept it to myself until we left the shop.
“Nah,” Brent said.
We entered the restaurant, and a few minutes later in walked Mephistopheles. We got the confirmation that we were looking for, that we were working on a worthwhile project, and the foundation would do whatever it was able to help us further our agenda of producing a 90 minute documentary about hemophilia.
“It’s a worthwhile project,” he assured us. We made a pact with the little devil.

After I had spent a couple of nights alone in Rooster’s house, Cleo came to the front door in her nightgown on a Saturday night, slightly intoxicated, carrying four cans of beer in plastic rings, and woke me up. I answered the door in a robe. We sat side by side, on my folks’ old couch, and drank beer and listened to jazz. She said she hated jazz. We got into an argument about jazz. The argument persisted until I walked Cleo back over to her house, me in my robe and she in her nightgown. It was that kind of street. No one else was around. Argo lumbered along side and plopped himself in the hole in front of Cleo’s house. He stayed there when I returned home. He didn’t come when I called. I went home and listened to jazz—Let’s hear it for jazz. The following Monday in the office she swore that I had knocked on her door in my robe in the middle of the night. She didn’t remember all that jazz. I knew I was in trouble. She made the mistake of telling the receptionist that I had accosted her in her house.
“Did you show up half naked on Cleo’s front porch in the middle of the night?” Miss Brooks questioned me in Cleo’s presence.
“Hold on!” I flashed, and told the real story. Cleo was shocked by the face to face confrontation, and she couldn’t refute my story. “You drink too much,” I added. She retreated to her office. I thought I was dead meat. I didn’t know that blackouts were a real problem for her. Her grief over Rooster and the fact that it may have been difficult to get someone else to move in there, kept her at bay.
Brad’s office was directly next to the shrink’s. Fred was middle aged and cheerful in a melancholy sort of way. His windows overlooked the school across the way. He seemed to spend most of his time looking out the window at the young people constantly coming and going. Every so often he would shut his door for an hour, when a client would come by, which wasn’t very often. There were a couple dozen different offices in the building, most dealing with a walk-in clientele of sorts. No one seemed to do very much business. I figured that Fred did a trade off for rent.
Tinkerbell had her office in the basement, a muscular therapist. She was short and a bit boyish in a cute sort of way. Her voice was another of those husky Southern horns that seemed to dissolve all feminine characteristics after the age of forty. She was attractive in her own way with a taut small-breasted body and a loose mind that wasn’t quite sure of itself. It didn’t take long for her to hear about my thwarting of Cleopatra. I was a bit uncertain if I was to be set up and dismembered again, the way it happened at school. She showed up at Cleopatra’s that afternoon. The ladies invited me for a bike ride around the lake, with the dog. I went for the ride, careful to follow any instructions that Cleo gave. Argo ran like a thoroughbred around the Lake. He stopped at selected trees and bathed in choice algae-covered puddles. We stopped and waited on Cleo’s cue, while he did his business. Then Argo would race ahead with Cleo, Tinkerbell and me in hot pursuit, until his next stop. It soon became evident that Tinkerbell was there as mediator. No great discussion went on, just a leisurely bike ride around the Lake. On the home stretch we stopped at a fountain. Argo smiled and romped in the pool while the fountain splashed down upon his big red back. Cleo took off her shoes and walked in the water. I had been given a reprieve.
When we arrived back at the ranch, Tinkerbell came over for a visit. She talked and I listened. We sat at the cafe table in the kitchen, looking out on the lush green lawn pock marked with holes. We drank some beers.