Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph; Mitchell

everything I had to do with Gould, and I found these in the file drawer with the rest of the Gould memorabilia—it was the morning of June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. I happened to be free to start on something new, so I went in and spoke to one of the editors about the idea. I remember telling the editor that I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his Oral History, and not his bohemianism; in my time, I had interviewed a number of Greenwich Village bohemians and they had seemed to me to be surprisingly tiresome. The editor said to go ahead and try it.
    I was afraid that I might have trouble persuading Gould to talk about himself—I really knew next to nothing about him, and had got the impression that he was austere and aloof—and I decided that I had better talk with some people who knew him, or were acquainted with him, at least, and see if I could find out the best way to approach him. I left the office around eleven and went down to the Village and began going into places along Sixth Avenue and bringing up Gould’s name and getting into conversations about him with bartenders and waiters and with old-time Villagers they pointed out for me among their customers. In the middle of the afternoon, I telephoned the switchboard operator at the office and asked if there were any messages for me, as I customarily did when I was out, and she immediately switched me to the receptionist, who said that a man had been sitting in the reception room for an hour or so waiting for me to return. “I’ll put him on the phone,” she said. “Hello, this is Joe Gould,” the man said. “I heard that you wanted to talk to me, so I dropped in, but the thing is, I’m supposed to go to the clinic at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and pick up a prescription for some eye trouble I’ve been having, and if it’s one kind of prescription it won’t cost anything but if it’s another kind it may cost around two dollars, and I’ve just discovered that I don’t have any money with me, and it’s getting late, and I wonder if you’d ask your receptionist to lend me two dollars and you can pay her back when you come in and we can meet any time you say and have a talk and I’ll pay you back then.” The receptionist broke in and said that she would lend him the money, and then Gould came back on the phone and we agreed to meet at nine-thirty the next morning in a diner on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, called the Jefferson. He suggested both the time and the place.
    When I got back to the office, I gave the receptionist her two dollars. “He was a terribly dirty little man, and terribly nosy,” she said, “and I was glad to get him out of here.” “What was he nosy about?” I asked. “Well, for one thing,” she said, “he wanted to know how much I make; Also,” she continued, handing me a folded slip of paper, “he gave me this note as he was leaving, and told me not to read it until he got on the elevator.” “You have beautiful shoulders, my dear,” the note said, “and I should like to kiss them.” “He also left a note for you,” she said, handing me another folded slip of paper. “On second thought,” this note said, “nine-thirty is a little early for me. Let us make it eleven.”
    The Jefferson—it is gone now—was one of those big, roomy, jukeboxy diners. It was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, at the conjunction of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, Village Square, and Eighth Street, which is the heart and hub of the Village. It stayed open all day and all night, and it was a popular meeting place. It had a long counter with a row of wobbly-seated stools, and it had a row of booths. When I