Wesley Dumont - His History

Welcome. In the coming months or years, I will be sharing some of the found writings of Wesley Dumont, a nearly homeless man that lived in the basement of my building in New York for a number of years.

Wesley Dumont died on November 2, 2002. He was 85 years old. Born on October 15, 1917 in Paris, France, Wesley was the son of a Frenchman and an American Red Cross worker. On the day he was born, Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, was executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris. Wesley would boast that this the omen for his luck with women.

I first came to know Wesley Dumont in the summer of 1994 in New York City. He was a regular at a bar in Hell's Kitchen that I would frequent as well. Although I was many years younger than Wesley, we struck up a casual drinking relationship almost immediately and he filled many an afternoon with the sort of stories that went perfect with my thirst for beer. As a young writer new to New York City, I loved listening to his stories. They were so rich in imagery I could almost taste them. Stories that spanned generations. Stories about the whole world. About love and loss. About war. About drink. About the power and the shortcomings of the American spirit. About women. And certainly a lot about writing and story telling in general.

I don't want to suggest that Wesley and I were the best of friends. We certainly spent a good many hours together, especially in those first several years. But the sixty years of age difference certainly kept us from hanging out on any sort of regular basis. I mostly saw him at the bars in Hell's Kitchen, or in the neighborhood. In fact, there were several years in the latter part of the 90s that I rarely saw Wesley at all, and when I did, he barely recognized me. By that time I had put the dreams of becoming a writer off to the side in exchange for a career in advertising. With that I set aside the nightmarish image of the lonely writer sitting in the dark in front of a blank page. I moved in with a girl and that was that. Marriage was on the horizon. But as fate would have it, all that changed and I hit a wall and decided it was fine time to tackle the midlife crisis before it set in. At only 30 years of age I found myself without a job, without the girl, and ultimately back in the bars of Hell's Kitchen rekindling my friendship with Wesley. I had also taken an apartment in the neighborhood that proved to be a pretty good dear rent-wise, and it came with a storage unit in the basement that some people would have paid up to $500 to live in. Wesley had fallen on some particularly hard times financially so I allowed him to sleep in the basement provided that he minded his own business and didn't let on to the landlord that he was sleeping down there. It didn't always go smoothly, but all in all, Wesley kept up his end of the bargain and came and went as he pleased. I was happy to have him around, and he was incredibly magnanimous, never over staying his welcome and always a gentleman. In his self deprecating way, he knew there was nothing sexy about having an elderly man in your single, New York lifestyle.

After nearly a year of living in my basement, Wesley left. He knocked on my door early on Saturday morning and announced that he had to go back to France to deal with some personal matters and that he might not be back. I remember I was incredibly hungover that day and wished I had had more of my mental capacities to inquire more about his trip and the reasons why he could not return. But just that quickly, he was gone. And true to his word, he didn't come back.

Several months had passed, and I went down into the basement to look into some things in had stored down there. It was the first time I had been down there since Wesley left. I was surprised to see that he had left a small suitcase of his belongings next to the small cot, neatly made, where he had slept for almost a year. I found what I was looking for (I forget what it was) and noticed that there was a small leak. Concerned about the well being of Wesley's suitcase and other personal effects, I took them upstairs for safe keeping, just in case Wesley did come back. I put them in a closet without another thought, and soon after, I forgot they were even there.

Thankfully things began to turn a corner for me personally and I was able to move on with my life. The hiccup of getting out of advertising and losing the girl was behind me and I took a job at a publishing house in Brooklyn. And I met a terrific girl, a beautiful librarian named Lilly and soon after we made plans to move in together in Park Slope. It was when I was moving out that I came across Wesley's things again. I suddenly found myself in a dilemma. What to do with Wesley's stuff? I was concerned that if he came back, he wouldn't know where to find me. I explained the situation to Lilly, and we agreed that the best plan of action would be to take his stuff with us and leave our forwarding address with the bartender at Wesley's favorite bar. Certainly Wesley would head back there immediately upon his return to New York City. So that's just what we did. Once we had finished packing the U-Haul truck full of my belongings, we stopped in to the bar for a pint, and I explained to Mike the Bartender my dilemma. I handed him my new address and phone number. Mike immediately tacked it to the wall behind him and off we went. Almost a year later I received a call from Mike. Wesley had passed away. That was all the information he had.

I had never opened any of Wesley's things. There were just some clothes in a trash bag, a cardboard box with some person effects, and a suitcase. But I decided to have a look. And what I found were thousands of pages of Wesley's stories, mostly short stories that have a beginning, but have no end. But in my view, that's exactly who Wesley was. And based on what I've read in Wesley's personal journals, I believe he would want me to share his words. Thus, The Found Writings Of Wesley Dumont.