II
    Fred Stone had money; he'd sold his business sometime in the sixties, and thereafter received large checks in the mail every month.  He used his fortune to buy junk.  Before he'd winnowed his collection, I'm told that he had a warehouse, somewhere in Cambridge.  According an old friend,
    "Fred had a table, twenty feet long, covered with bolts, end up, sorted by size.  You know, it was a tough neighborhood (Central Square), but it was good to be able to go over to Fred's place.  There were always photographs to look at (Fred had been a photographer for Le Courbusier, and had collected filing cabinets full of old glass negatives, besides.)  or you'd go sit in the old denist's chair, or whatever.  It was a real good place to grow up.  Kept me out of trouble."
    When I stepped into the basement of Fred's small house, I could barely walk three steps from the stairs.  His reduced collection filled the entire place.  Only his wife's cats could sqeeze though.  The mold and fur were so thick, I couldn't breathe, let alone sort through the vast and dark world of junk.
    A dozen old friends were called in, to sift a treasure trove that rivaled Charles Foster Kane's.  There was a pile of rusty toy trucks, and rolls of lead flashing.  My brother and I found a pair of old film cans, and when we pried them open, out spilled a delicate collection of shrimp-sized driftwoood.  There was the reclining dental chair, from before the turn of the century, made from wrought iron and complete with twining vines and red velvet cusions.  There was a thick packet of postcards and gilt-edged letters, the collected love letters of Fred's own grandparents, written in their elegant antebellum manner.  We found a fragment of a book titled "The Complete Hiƒtory of the World", dated 1740.  We found dozens of blueprints, some of them from Le Corbusier, and a film script written by Lance Hendrikson, the grizzled actor who'd been his friend.  We found old movie posters, Fred's junk cameras (one from every decade of his life), the old Hawk missle nosecones, his favorite pieces of rust.
    We gave away as much as we could; the photos and correspondance were taken in by friends.  I ended up with all the movie film.  A local contractor, who happened to be driving by, took the dental chair.
    But after all that, came two twenty yard dumpsters.  We overloaded them.  A lot of the stuff was useless; old business correspondance, filing cabinets.  But most of it was the carefully collected junk of a master.  Nothing should have been thrown out.  It was much better to dig him a grave forty yards deep and fill it, like a pharoh, with him and his posessions.  Instead, the intense zone of junk he'd created was washed back into chaos, the sea of refuse.  It was the worst thing I ever saw.