Keith Kumasen Abbott so loved his comic novel Mordecai of Monterey that in 1987 he wrote to Michael Sowl (the inspiration for Mordecai) about the sequel in 1987, while complaining about recent dental work costs that had emptied his pockets:

“I may need to haul trash for a living until my sunset years. You remember those years. I was living on 5th street in Pacific Grove, looking out over the bay every morning. Big bank of windows. Then sunset. Almost a year went by. Seemed like years. So I got my retirement out of the way early.

And thanks for the animal parts clip. Maybe I can work that into volume two of the Monterey saga, Buck and Mordecai Go to Pebble Beach.”

In fact, in May of 1990, a scene of the sequel appeared in The New Censorship magazine. The story takes up the tale of Whatever Happened to Eric The Artist?

Buck and Mordecai Go to Pebble Beach

Inside the lobby of a self-storage company, Eric waited for a rent-a-cop to locate the right keys. Eric wore a ripped leathr shirt, rust suede pants, and a green eelskin boots. Hanging off his matching green eelskin belt was a squirrel tail. Eric’s skin was grey and his face looked haggard enough for a cowboy singer on the way to his last gig on a tour.

Outside the building Mordecai waited with Eric’s assistant, Tobin Ares. Tobin was looking over San Francisco’s South of Market ambience of electro-plating shops and car repair garages.

“When I first met Eric in 1973,” Mordecai said, “he used to look exactly like Andy Devine, you know him, the fat actor who played Jingles on the Wild Bill Hickok Show on tv in the fifties. Hey Wild Bill, wait for me. Remember that?”

“Before my time.”

“Back when he was all plump and jolly.”

“Really?” Tobin yawned and looked through the plate flass doors inside the lobby as Eric received a ring of keys from the guard. “Well, after the Betty Ford Clinic, Eric really gained weight.”

Mordecai noticed that Eric was so thin he hardly cast a shadow under the banks of bright fluorecent lights.

“Eric wore janitor clothes, khaki pants and shirts then, too.”

“He still does. Eric just got dressed up for our trip to see the Texas moneybags.”

Eric came out and they followed him around the building into the parking lot. At the side entrance to an attached warehouse, he unlocked the metal-plated door and walked into a large, bare, white room with high ceilings. There was nothing inside except a windowless office in the corner, painted the same shade, like a white box inside a white box.

A single overhead light illuminted the office door. Three different brass locks punctuated the space above the doorknob. While Eric inspected the keyring for the right three keys, he talked to Tobin.

“Let me tell you about my good buddy here. See Mordecai’s the secret reason for my first big score with the Abrezzi Gallery in New York. Sold a dozen paintings first time out, just a week after I met him. Mordecai’s got a rare mental disease. It’s called melanoia. It’s the opposite of paranoia. Mordecai had a melanoia attack at my old house out at the beach. Melanoia starts with him hearing this ping sound. It’s a mental alarm clock alerting him to wake up to a streak of good luck. Then he starts following people, or he thinks he’s following someone. He also thinks that someone is about to give him something or that something good’s going to happen.”

Tobin remained quiet for a moment. Finally he cleared his throat and glanced once at Mordecai.

“That’s very West Coast.”

“I knew Tobin wouldn’t believe in melanoia.” Eric grinned at Mordecai. “He hasn’t read about it yet in Interview.”

Tobin’s face flushed but he caught himself and tried to sound laconic.

“You don’t have to be cruel, Eric. Have you had it long?”

“I gave it away years ago. My girlfriend up in Seattle took it for a while. She was addicted to paranoia. But recently I think she gave it back to me because I’ve had a few attacks. So I decided to hop on a plane and take my melanoia for a stroll in California.”

Eric examined his key chain for a second time. Mordecai noticed that his hands were shaking.

“So when you have this….” Tobin’s lack of interest so fatigued him, he seemed to have trouble remembering Eric’s exact words, “attack, what do you do?”

“Melanoia doesn’t exactly work like an attack. Actually melanoia works more like a magnet, everyone notices more of what’s going on around them and they find things to do. So melanoia’s sort of like a magnet and rearranged things, so they stand out in patterns and then people see different things than they’re used to seeing. The truth is I don’t do anything at all.”

Tobin was trying to gauge when to step in on Eric’s struggle with the keys. After many tries, Eric managed to match the right key with the top lock and Tobin turned his attention back to Mordecai.

“How did you get hooked up with Eric?” Mordecai asked.

“Oh, I was doing my graduate work at Yale and he was teaching there after his comeback, you know…and his agent said he needed an assistant so…”

“I read about his comeback in People Magazine on my flight down from Seattle.” Mordecai remembered how upbeat and cheery the piece was. He’d been shocked at how wretched Eric looked in the photos.

Tobin shrugged. “At least, they tried to be kind. Others never made the effort.”

Eric finally located the right keys for the next two locks. He paused for a moment as if remembering the correct sequence, and then unlocked the middle lock first, the top lock second and then the bottom oone, using a different key for each.

“Is that some key code?” Mordecai asked.

“Yeah,” Eric said, stepping inside. “Big industrial secrets like mine are protected by coded locks.”

Mordecai and Tobin followed him into the room after he flipped a wall switch on. A low hum started as a bank of five console television sets lit up. The tvs were on different channels, but the sound was off. On three sides behind the tvs were banks of French doors, bolted to the floor and spray painted white. The windows had been painted, too. But most of the glass was broken and missing. Handwriting circled around each jagged pane. The walls behind the french doors were painted white, too. But pockmarked with bullet holes.

By the left hand corner of the french doors was the largest pile of Rainier Ale cans Mordecai had ever seen. The aluminum cans were a gleaming landslide of green and gold empties glued together in an upward triangle that covered most of the floor space, almost touching the corner of the french doors.

Mordecai checked the five tvs again. The three largest tvs were on the bottom with two smaller tvs on top. Two had no pictures at all, just fully blank screens. The sets appeared to be programmed to be changed to different channels at set intervals. One moved from a rerun of a sitcom to some woman in a kitchen giving a cooking lesson. The two others changed channels constantly. Mordecai watched for a while and for those two of the tvs the changes seemed random.

The tops of the television sets displayed various burns. Some were long and narrow and looked as if cigarettes had been laid on them and allowed to smolder. Others were round, as if singed with a single blast of flame. A small butane blowtorch was lying on its side next to a round scorchmark, along with a small glass waterpipe. As Mordecai moved closer he saw that both the blowtorch and the waterpipe were glued down to the surface. The inside of the waterpipe’s glass appeared to be veined with tiny writing.

Eric opened a small refrigerator in the back corner of the room. Inside the two top shelves were packed with 16 oz Rainier Ale cans. Only an automatic pistol was on the bottom shelf. Eric toook out two cans, opened them, and walked over to Mordecai and Tobin.

“Have a Green Death and add to the art work pile.”

Eric walked past the tv sets and stared down at the Rainier Ale cans.

“Eric must really trust you to let you see this before the show,” Tobin whispered to Mordecai. “Nobody except the shooters have seen it, and they were pledged to silence. Even the stars haven’t breathed a word. I’ve been so proud of them.”

“Tobin lines up the celebrity shooters.” Eric paced around the room, looking at the installation from different angles. “Tobin knows everybody.” From the far corner he regarded the Rainier Ale landslide.

“A computer programs two tvs to change channels on the drum beats of a Navajo dance.” Tobin pointed at the five televisions, blinking from channel to channel. “It’s just stunnng, isn’t it?”

Mordecai took a drink of his Rainier Ale. “Why Navajo, if you can’t hear the music?”

Tobin didn’t answer.

Mordecai turned to Eric. “So, what’s it called?”

“Freed Base.”

Tobin regarded Mordecai with new-found admiration that Eric had so casually revealed this confidential fact to Mordecai. “Even the celebrity shooters haven’t been told the title. The name’s a secret until the opening in Dallas.”

Walking over to one of the french doors, Eric pointed at the writing scribbled over the remains of one shattered window.

“Bianca Jagger shot the glass out of this one and signed it. And that’s the one Tab Hunter shot.”