Timothy Leary's Copy of GR

[Timothy C. May]

LOT64 at aol.com wrote:

> On a lighter note, Heikki writes of discovering V while working as a
> longshoreman in Helsinki.  I lost my first copy of Gravity's Rainbow while
> working as a lonshoreman in the port of San Francisco.  I was  unloading
> coffee sacks and it fell in between four large pallets.  They were so heavy,
> it was impossible to retrieve. Maybe you found it while unloading a freighter
> in Finland?  Let me know, it was a first edition.  I don't know where the
> ship was bound for, but I hope whoever found it when they unloaded
> appreciated it.

This fell off the pallet as it was being loaded onto the container
ship--the pattern of falling copies of GR apparently remains
unstudied.

Anyway, the copy was found by Frank "The Pro" Fain, on his way to meet
his parole officer for lunch. Fain thought it might be a crime novel,
but could tell by the first page it was not his cup of joe. So his
parole officer, Sy Powers, took it off his hands and read it
between interviews with his clients.

However, on his next trip to the Men's Facility in Vacaville, a cow
town north of the Bay Area, he left it in a restroom stall, where
Ishmael Schwartz found it teetering precarious on the toilet paper
dispenser, seemingly ready to tumble into the bowl to be swept on to
other readers, even jazz club musicians.

But Ishmael rescued it, and read what he could of it in the break
room, even as the other guards sneered at the hoity-toity
title. Ishmael got the last laugh, seeing his how name eventually
appear.

Now more tattered than ever, he tossed the finished copy into the cell
of Timothy Leary, new resident of the Vacaville facility.

And that's how this copy of GR made it from the docks of the Bay into
the mind of Tim Leary.

--Tim May (who talked to this other Tim at a Cypherpunks party
recently and got part of the story first hand, and who apologizes to
anyone offended that this story was so prosaically written, lacking
the Koopmanesque pseudo-Joycean obscurantism)

-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
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