Who Is Brian Quinn?

Jumpsuits - Phideous Dexter - Oregano

"Let me tell you Karl, this book I've been working on is turning into a real bear. It just feels all mixed up, even for me. The plot's gotten so complex and bizarre, it's getting out of hand, really. It's like trying to drive a car backward, you know, using the rearview mirror."

I had begun to feel confused and frustrated and Karl's funky playboy lair wasn't helping. The apartment had begun to feel oppressive, claustrophobic. I kicked at a stray bottle, sending it scooting over the carpet. "And I don't even know who Brian Quinn is," I said. "Bernie knows. I've got to talk to him. Honestly, even if he can't help us rescue Genevieve I'd just be happy to know who I'm writing about. Who's Brian Quinn? I can't even tell where the story's going at this point."

"Tell me about it," muttered Karl. He hadn't been listening. For the last ten minutes he'd been trying to squeeze into a bright blue jumpsuit with a red stripe that was obviously too small for his expansive physique. "You think you could give me a hand here, Mannie?"

The hunt for Stan Bernie had begun. The plan, according to Karl, was for him to disguise himself as a plumber or some such thing and get into Stan Bernie's apartment complex.

We had located the writer's domicile through one of Edna's old English profs at the university. Evidently, a few years prior Bernie had been taking a variety of classes at the university, auditing the courses, going under several false names, attending classes and keeping a low profile, passing himself off as a modest elderly student taking advantage of retirement to enlarge his intellectual acumen. Unfortunately, he'd blown his cover when a particularly inflammatory writing professor had begun a lecture, to which Bernie was in attendance, with a reading of a section of one of Bernie's novels, The Great White Snail declaring it to be an example of the kind of rubbish produced by a hopelessly degenerate mind made hostile by an over indulgence in controlled narcotic substances. This followed by a tirade on the weak and pathetic use of adverbial cliche in Bernie's prose.

Bernie had attacked the professor, a rickety near-sighted octogenarian, knocking him to the floor and pummeling him with the dogeared copy of his own book from which the now prostrate pedagogue had been reading. Bernie himself had become somewhat rickety and near-sighted, now deep in his twilight years, and so had collapsed shortly after this violent outburst, wheezing and groaning like a dog with a busted hip. Stan's photo on the back of the dust jacket quickly confirmed his authorial presence and soon after he found himself escorted from the school grounds, the school board having gleefully suspended him for life.

Edna had told us the gruesome tale a few nights earlier. "When Gordon and Dr. Pollock found out," these being two professors she'd had semi-academic, semi-personal relationships with in her undergraduate days. "They tracked Stan down through the school records. I guess they admired him in a way. I mean, he's written like eighty books or something I think. Highly prolific. Gordon adores pulp novels, cause they're so sexually charged and ethically neutral at best. Dr. Pollock is in psychology and he just likes any kind of smut. But Bernie was taking all kinds of classes, mostly sociology and some chemistry, and some botany or forestry or something. Doing poorly I might add. Of course, he was auditing. Good thing. Using a false name, Brian Quinn I think."

"What? Really?" I said.

"Mm hmm. He also used the name Phideous Dexter, one of his characters. Gordon says he lives in a run down apartment on fifth and Flanders, section eight type deal. They never actually got to see him, only heard him muttering and swearing behind his door. Evidently wasn't too pleased at being ejected from the school."

"Sociology and Chemistry," I remarked.

"And maybe etymology," said Edna. "I don't know,"

The story sounded insane but plausible and so Karl and myself, well mostly Karl, had formulated a plan to get to Bernie.