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cannibalism, which was not very much. When not in the library, he was usually down on the beach, where he watched the people, but talked to virtually no one, and sipped carefully, even sparingly, from his daily bottle of cheap red wine. He talked to virtually no one because his disease was still in remission. It had gone into remission shortly after he was jailed and he often suspected that he was cured of it forever. The disease that Citron no longer suffered from was curiosity.
    Citron's one meal a day was taken in the evening and usually consisted of a large bowl of what he still insisted on thinking of as pot au feu , which simmered sporadically on the hot plate and whose ingredients were suspect vegetables, meat and chicken bought on sale with blackmarket food stamps at Boys Market in the Marina del Rey. Sometimes Citron also bought day-old bread. He once estimated that he was living slightly more than $1,000 a year beneath the federal government's official poverty line, which that year was $4,680.
    After the diamond money finally ran out and he was down to his last $32.64, Citron packed what little he owned into the trunk and backseat of his one luxury, a 1969 Toyota Corona sedan, and headed north to a spot on the Pacific Coast Highway about halfway between Malibu and Oxnard. It was there that the Cadillac People lived.
    The Cadillac People into whose midst Citron settled were called that because that's what some of them lived in—old Cadillac sedans with savaged fenders and rust spots and backseats jammed with whatever their owners couldn’t bear to part with. Other Cadillac People lived in equally old Lincolns and Chrysler Imperials and huge Ford station wagons and converted school buses and homemade campers that perched haphazardly on the beds of senile pickup trucks. It was a community of sorts, an anarchists’ community perhaps, parked defiantly and illegally at the edge of the continent on land owned by the state. Occasionally, the highway patrol stopped by and halfheartedly shooed the Cadillac People away. But they almost always drifted back.
    Some of the Cadillac People drank. Some didn’t. Nearly all of them slept in their cars and used the ocean as their combination bathroom and TV set. They sat there in the mild sunshine, day after day, on the western edge of the American dream, listening mostly to country-western radio music because of the stories it told, drumming bored fingers on worn doorsills, and staring out through tinted windshields at the Pacific as they waited for something inevitable to happen—death perhaps; certainly not taxes.
    For three weeks Citron had waited with them and listened to theirstories, which, like the country-western lyrics they favored, usually involved cheating lovers, faithless friends, venal employers, and feckless offspring.
    “You know what this is kinda like?” the Cadillac People's resident philosopher had once asked Citron. “This is kinda like a real bad double feature. You sit here waitin’ for this one to end and the other to begin, except you know damn well the second one ain’t gonna be no better’n the first. But you wait anyhow.”
    During what he sometimes later came to think of as Life's Intermission, Citron gambled four gallons of gasoline to drive into Venice and back to check out his post-office box. Another six months’ rent would be due on the box in two weeks. Citron had no plans to pay it.
    The post-office box in Venice was Citron's last outpost, his final link with civilization. It was where dunning letters could be sent; where strangers could implore him to buy their costly goods and services; where his oldest and dearest friends could send him money orders and entreaties to come and stay with them forever; where warmhearted foundations could offer him grants-in-aid; and where somebody, somewhere, could write to tell him that she loved him.
    What Citron found in the post-office box were four letters from the Internal Revenue Service, which he