unpopular, alienated interlopers with a penchant for cheap liquor

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The crowd at Big Joe’s confirmed that bit about madness: Clauberg had courted a perfect outcast harem. A Greek dishwasher and janitor named Popeye helped keep the place clean, rubbing oil into the floorboards as necessary. According to the former employee Henry Rinard, Popeye was a short, well-muscled man with no teeth, hair, or eyebrows, prone to mumbling to himself for hours “in gibberish not even another Greek could understand.” Clauberg let Popeye crash on the floor at night, and in exchange, Popeye performed additional odd jobs, like bringing Clauberg food from the joint where he washed dishes, cutting his hair, and helping him yank a rotten tooth from his gums using a pair of pliers. Another regular, Abbie the Agent, wore “thick-lensed eyeglasses, smoked continuously, and was seldom sober.” An outcast from a wealthy Connecticut family, Abbie fetched cigarettes and wine for Clauberg, and periodically became so inebriated himself that he passed out on the Popeye-oiled floor. (His other nickname was Horizontal Abe.) Rinard also wrote about a guy known mostly as the Sea Captain, who wore a wool hat, raincoat, and heavy, too-big, laceless boots, even in June. The Captain was something of an enigma, even to Rinard: “He was either Swedish or Norwegian; he understood English, but never spoke,” he wrote. The clientele was no less unique. “Saturday afternoons they met at Indian Joe’s, where they thumbed through the bins in between swigs from the bottles of muscatel that Pete Kaufman brought along from his store, suspending their searches briefly at three, when a man called Bob turned up with a suitcase of pornographic books.”