An Unloosed Seuss?
February 21, 2014 – La Jolla, California, USA
All it took to move Brittany Sparks from her old apartment into her new house was a couple of trips with a borrowed pickup truck. Ever since landing her first job with Qualcomm’s San Diego office, she had saved most of her paychecks and avoided indulging in clothes or furniture. Her little, white-washed house did not have many square feet, but with only Brittany’s bed, couch and desk inside, it looked practically empty.
“You sure this is all you’ve got, Britt?” asked Peter, the friend from work who owned the truck. “No secret stashes of stuff in a storage locker?”
“No, that’s everything,” Brittany assured both Peter and Denise, another friend who had helped carry furniture and boxes.
“I can’t believe you own your own house. You’re so grown up,” said Denise.
“The bank still owns most of it,” said Brittany, running a hand over one of the interior walls. “I mostly own the mortgage.”
“Still, it’s a great investment,” said Denise. “At least you get to keep the house once it’s paid off. All I’m paying is rent.”
“I know. It’s old and it’s little, but it’s still pretty cute,” replied Brittany.
“And you’re right in between the beach and the freeway,” added Peter. “Pretty good spot.”
“Yeah, but sometimes I worry that the neighborhood looks sketchy. These houses have been here for so long, they’ve got all kind of people living in them. You wanna hear something wild? It’s what my realtor told me about this house that convinced me to buy it.”
“Really? What did she say?” asked Denise.
“That Dr. Seuss lived here for a while when he first moved to La Jolla.”
“No way. He lived in a big house up on a hill,” replied Peter.
“Yeah, eventually. But there’s a rumor that he lived here for a few weeks while the big house was getting built,” said Brittany, trying to plead her case.
Peter and Denise looked at the wood floors and paneled ceilings with new appreciation.
“Pretty cool, it it’s true,” said Peter. “But I’ll bet every real estate agent in La Jolla uses the ‘Dr. Seuss live here’ line when they’re trying to sell a house.”
“You should look around and try to find any lost manuscripts,” said Denise with a little chuckle. “I’m always reading about people finding forgotten stuff in the walls of old houses. What if you found a whole new Dr. Seuss book?”
“Why would he write something and stick it in a wall?” replied Brittany with a laugh.
After her friends left, Brittany re-inspected her little house and finally felt like it belonged to her. She loved the tiny patch of scrub grass and the succulent plants in the backyard. She noticed a discoloration in the ceiling that was probably a crack. She imagined the drips that would likely emerge from the crack when it rained. Then she worried if the water heater and gas stove that came with the house were safe. They were all her problems now. She had no landlord or apartment manager to call.
In between worries about cracks and what to hang on the walls, Brittany kept returning to the idea of Dr. Seuss living there. What if one of his famous stories had been inspired by the house? She especially liked his book, The Places You’ll Go, and she thought maybe the house could have shown up in one of the drawings. She bought a copy of the book and compared the shape of the houses inside to that of her own house when viewed from the street.
Then she caught something of a Dr. Seuss bug. She visited a spot where she could see the large house on top of Mount Soledad where he definitely lived and wrote many of his well-known books. She stopped by the Geisel Library on the University of California, San Diego campus and admired the collection of 3D models of the fantastical animals he dreamed up. Then Brittany discovered Scripps Park and the lone Monterey Cypress tree which was the inspiration for truffula trees in the book The Lorax. She sat in the park for hours, watching the wind blow the tree and make waves across the Pacific Ocean.
Brittany’s thoughts returned to her own house and Denise’s idea of finding a lost book in the walls. How amazing would that be? The entire world loved Dr. Seuss. Everything he did was so imaginative, yet so relatable, no matter your age. People would go crazy for a lost Dr. Seuss story. It would be like finding a chest full of pirate treasure.
When Brittany began her search for a lost manuscript, she tried not to take it too seriously. She chuckled to herself when she stood on the kitchen counter to check the top of the wooden shelves, which appeared to have been attached to the wall at the same time the house was built. As she might have expected, all she found on top of the shelves was dust and spider webs.
Brittany was still chuckling a few days later when she took a closer look at her floorboards. She had seen movies where secret documents were hidden under a loose piece of floor, so she surveyed the wood strips, looking for discolored pieces. When she pressed on suspect sections, nothing jiggled. If Dr. Seuss had a hiding place, it was not in the floor. Brittany laughed out loud at herself. Was she actually expecting Dr. Seuss to have a hiding place in a floor? Why would he need any kind of hiding place? He was more interested in publishing his work than burying it.
As illogical as her search was, Brittany could only push it from her head for a few days before it returned. After the floorboards, she checked for hidden seams in her walls. It would be easy for someone to create a replaceable panel which opened up to a space which held thousands of pages. Brittany tapped on her walls, searching for clues. All she discovered was how many layers of wallpaper covered every interior surface.
Then she realized her house must have some kind of attic. The roof was slanted, but the inside ceiling was flat, so there had to be a gap in between. Brittany uncovered a rectangular hole in the top of one of her closets, covered by a piece of plywood. She bought a ladder, climbed up and pushed the plywood aside. Using a flashlight, she scanned the gap between roof and ceiling. More dust and spider webs. No lost pages.
“This is dumb,” Brittany said to herself, but she had the nagging feeling that if she checked the attic, she might as well check under the house.
Brittany knew enough about structural engineering to realize that her house had a cement foundation around the perimeter and space between the floor and the ground. But there were no obvious access points on the sides or front of the house. A wooden porch extended away from the back door and Brittany decided that any opening to the space beneath the floor must be under that porch. She put on grubby clothes and removed a metal screen attached to one of the porch’s sides.
When Brittany shined her flashlight under the porch, she found piles of accumulated leaves and dead insects. She crinkled her nose and slowly crawled into the tight space, hoping to get a better look at an opening in the foundation. Her right hand touched something hard. She looked over to find a Coke bottle. Next to it, under more leaves, she found two more. Each was sealed with a cork and held a paper message inside.
Brittany scrambled out from below the porch and hurried to rinse the dirt from the bottles in her kitchen sink. Upon closer inspection, she found that each cork was sealed over with wax to make sure the contents remained intact.
“What should I do?” she asked herself excitedly. “Should I tell someone? Who would I tell?”
After staring at the bottles and debating with herself for fifteen minutes, she peeled the wax off of one of them. Then she used pliers to first pull out the cork and then the papers stuffed inside.
Brittany unfolded six page’s worth of yellowed paper. She was no expert, but the paper definitely looked old. Words and drawing, make with blue ink, covered each of the six pages. Brittany’s heart raced. She could tell the words were part of a long poem. The drawings were crude, but they reminded her of the style used by Dr. Seuss. Could it be?
Brittany knew the poem was an early draft because lines were crossed out and alternate words were added in the margin. She was expecting the subject to be an interesting group of animals or people. Instead, the poem told the story of a family of tires. Brittany crinkled her nose the same way she had before crawling under the porch and said, “Tires?”
Brittany read aloud some of the lines and tried to decide whether they sounded Seussian or not.
“This red truck needs tires
To help it fight fires”
And
“The tires on the hippie van
Roll from Berkeley to Spokane”
Tire drawings included faces on the treads and little arms which looked like oversized valve stems. Baby tires were attached to things like shopping carts. Large adult tires sat below dump trucks.
After studying the six pages, Brittany’s initial excitement turned into complete confusion. She decided not to open the other two bottles. She went to her computer and searched for the English Department at the University of California, San Diego. She found a Professor Deamer, who specialized in children’s literature, including Dr. Seuss. She sent him an email explaining her find and requested that he take a look for himself.
Brittany assumed that a potential Dr. Seuss manuscript would generate great excitement and she would get an instant response. She waited three days before receiving a reply message from Professor Deamer’s generic email account, which was not affiliated with the university. The email was short and read, “Got your message. Meet me on Saturday at 9 am in Balboa Park. Sit near the Botanical Pond. Bring the pages.”
Professor Deamer’s response was more mysterious than the bottles under the porch. Brittany worried about her personal safety, but she was too curious not to show up for the meeting. She figured that nothing too bad could happen in a public park that would be filled with people.
Brittany arrived at the Botanical Pond at 8:30 and sat on a bench. She thought she was doing a good job of surveillance, but she did not notice when a tall, white-haired man approached from behind.
“I’m Donald Deamer,” said the man, before Brittany could turn around. “We shouldn’t be seen together. Follow me. I know a more secluded place where we can talk.”
Professor Deamer walked toward a nearby two-story building with a red tile roof and a Spanish-style exterior. Brittany hesitated before following him at a distance. He climbed a stairway that led to a walkway surrounding the building’s inner courtyard. Then he disappeared into a room. Brittany shuffled cautiously to the room’s open door. Professor Deamer sat in a leather chair in front of a large glass window. He pointed to a second chair, which faced him.
“Please, have a seat. You can keep the door open if you like,” Professor Deamer said to Brittany.
She glided across the room and perched on the edge of the second chair.
“I assure you that I mean you no harm. I’m sorry for the secrecy. It’s for your own good. Did you bring it?”
Brittany held up the bottle into which she had reinserted the pages. “I found it like this,” she said, passing the bottle to the professor.
“And where exactly do you live?”
Brittany recited her address and the professor nodded as if he recognized the location.
Professor Deamer pulled the pages from the bottle and laid them out on his lap. He read quickly but intensely, flipping through one page after another.
“If it really is Dr. Seuss, it wasn’t what I was expecting,” said Brittany. “I wouldn’t think he was interested in tires.”
Professor Deamer looked up and appeared to relax for the first time. “Most people know him for his illustrated books, but he was interested in all sorts of things. He started out in advertising, selling bug spray. He did war stuff, propaganda stuff, some pretty risqué adult stuff.”
“Huh. So maybe he would like tires. But another thing surprised me. The writing, well, it doesn’t seem very good. Does it?”
“Not particularly.”
“But you still think it’s his?”
“I didn’t say that. But even if it were his, you have to remember that not everything a genius does is gold. They come up with some duds too.”
“So how can we find out for sure if it’s his? Do a handwriting analysis?”
Professor Deamer raised his head from the pages and looked seriously at Brittany. “My advice to you is to let it go. Put it back where you found it or on a shelf somewhere. Don’t go to the press. Don’t try to sell it.”
“What? Why?”
“Does Dr. Seuss need anything added to his legacy? Especially something like this, which might subtract from his legacy?”
“Won’t people want to see it? Don’t they deserve to see it?”
“Don’t forget there’s a good chance this is all a hoax. Someone probably planted those bottles there. Maybe they heard the same rumors about the house that you did and wanted to have a little fun. You don’t want to put yourself through all the danger for a hoax.”
“What danger?”
“There are powerful people in the publishing industry who would like to keep things the way they are. They have a big financial interest in it. Have you ever heard of Clive Brown and Spike Wilcox?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t think so. They thought they had discovered a whole shelf full of lost Seuss manuscripts. And then they disappeared.”
“The manuscripts?”
“No, Brown and Wilcox. No one has seen them since.”
Brittany slumped in her chair. “What? Disappeared? I definitely didn’t expect to hear any of this. I was thinking about The Places You’ll Go and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.”
“Maybe it’s best to keep it that way. I won’t tell you what to do. I’ve warned you, but I can’t be involved any further. If you talk to anyone else about this, I beg you not to use my name.”
With that, Professor Deamer shoved the papers back into the bottle and left it on the floor. He stood up, nodded once toward Brittany, and walked out of the room.
Brittany picked up the bottle. Raindrops began to fall on the window. Brittany thought of the probable leaks in her roof. After several quiet minutes of sitting in her chair, she decided to stop at IKEA on the way home. She would buy an easy-to-assemble bookcase. It did not have to be very big. It would mainly hold her three bottles. If visitors asked about them, maybe she would tell the whole story. It would be a measure of how well she trusted them. And maybe someday she would open bottles two and three.
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