This astonishing good fortune had a profound effect on Heff. He confided to friends that for the first time in his life, he did not feel doomed, and to those enemies who knew him as Alope, he confided the same thing. A cloud had lifted from him. A dark storm had at last passed through and moved on. A slough of despond had drained. His sinuses were clearer, too, and he credited the wisdom of The Book of Counted Sorrows for all these improvements in his life. He purchased a fine house in the flats of Beverly Hills, made plans to marry a pretty and good-hearted former high-school sweetheart named Tess, purchased a cute little kitten with no intention of feeding it to a mutant, acquired a brighter and more cheerful wardrobe than the black robes that had been his usual attire, and in September, 1939, he began work on Ode to My Wrestler Wife: Good Riddance and Goodbye, which sold to films for $806,045 on the basis of the first eight rhyming lines and a two-word synopsis.
In early October, 1939, his head exploded. This was as great a disappointment to his friends as it was good news to his enemies, but the most profound effect was on the tender members of the children’s choir in front of whom it occurred. Because Heff always had as great an interest in music as in doom, and because his newfound optimism motivated him to give something back to his community, he had become the unpaid and highly enthusiastic director of the choir at Our Ladv of the Timid Waifs Orphanage. The orphans were indeed waifs, and timid; consequently, the horrid spectacle of Heff’s exploding head traumatized them so thoroughly that most never sang again, and one of them was unable to pee for a week, though all the others peed a split second subsequent to poor Heff’s violent self-decapitation. And peed copiously, I might add.
In Heff’s defense, if he’d known that his head was going to explode, he would doubtlessly have arranged to be elsewhere: maybe home alone or on the beach, perhaps in a rose garden or at a dime-a-dance hall in the arms of a lovely and coquettish stranger. He would never have intentionally detonated in front of children. After all, no one can reasonably be expected to anticipate such a thing as a head explosion, and the Los Angeles Times, as usual, was judgmental and sensationalistic when it headlined the story IRRESPONSIBLE POET TRAUMATIZES ORPHAN WAIFS WITH EXPLOSIVE DENOGGINIZATION, recalling their equally shabby treatment of Langford Crispin.
Upon his death, Heff’s considerable fortune – enhanced by wise investments in Human Stupidity Bonds, the value of which soar with the rise of stupi ditv in the species, but fall with any indication of increasing human wisdom – was inherited by his only child, Hisser Heffalope, ward of the state. At the age of eighteen, having survived into more enlightened times, Hisser was released into society. It became a wildly successful criminal defense attorney, specializing in clients who were wealthy serial killers; Hisser won not-guilty-by-reason-of-entertaining-legal-defense verdicts for the most savage, unremorseful, bloody-minded, and ill-dressed murderers of its time, winning kudos, plaudits, accolades, and prize Cadi1lacs from the wards committee of the hoity-toity American Bar Association. Hisser also pioneered the profitable practice of suing the grieving families of a killer’s Victims for damages, sucking them drier than an empty coconut husk. A secondary career as a cat rancher was far less successful, because Hisser routinely ate the profits.
Fortunately for the fate of mankind, The Book of Counted Sorrows did not fall into Hisser’s several hands upon Addison Heffalope’s choir-traumatizing death, but was reacquired by Ed Thomas, the Orange County rare-book dealer. By this time, Thomas was no longer operating out of a converted burlesque theater. He had moved his business into a former whorehouse that for decades had specialized in providing midget prostitutes for sailors of equally diminutive stature.
(A parenthetical aside: The term “midget prostitute,” much in use in the 1930s, is not one we would use these days. Now we would say “height-challenged hooker.” or perhaps “pocket Venus, if we were of a poetic bent, or possibly even “very small, not to say unusually small, not to say remarkably small, lady of the night.”)