Lucretia Borges

From Plastic Tub

"Few knew that there were two Lucretia's. Literally. Who would have supposed that the voraciously verbose jewel hound had a twin brother by the same name? So she didn't date--big deal... closet lesbian, everyone presumed. And when the child showed up? More charity work, right? A poor adopted orphan, perhaps. But Lucretia's twin brother Lucretia knew. Though he never left the house, never spoke to anyone but “darling Lucretia”, he knew where the child came from...."

So began John Wickle's disturbing tale of wealth and isolation, "Children of the Pope: The Borges from 1492 to 1982." The story, of course, was quite unpublishable at the time; it remained buried along with its author--blacklisted by the Borges family whose finacial interests were certainly more than substantial enough to bury such tawdry trash. That all changed with the internet--but who takes the internet seriously? Who indeed... Wickle died within weeks of the publication of his revisionist histories, which tackled numerous subjects (most notably the Mormo cult), many of whom, (were Wickle's claims to be taken seriously) would be more than willing and able to stamp out the teeny-tiny, little Wickle.

So what is actually ‘‘known’’ about Borges? Very little as it turns out. Extravagantly wealthy, Borges was certainly never without, and she spent a life time collecting more. Wickle was correct regarding her unmarried status and the odd appearance of the strange child suddenly found by her side, but most people assumed she was barren and unlovable, and that the oddly mute and albino child was but one of her many collections of the obscure. As founder of the independent and reviled AA fanclub, The 3rd A, her varied collection included Stimes Addisson's one-time Manhattan apartment as well as numerous original artworks and first prints from core AA'ers, including several original Reticent 27s. In addition to her AA fetish, Borges also owned one of the world's most impressive collections of forgeries and was fascinated with animals (a good deal of the San Diego Zoo's "collection" was purchased by Borges). Borges was not above dirty tricks to further her collections. Dewey Rose's after affects, for example, laid grounds for cause to believe that Borges had hired him to bully his way into several key AA holdings, including several properties.

When Wickle refrained from his more speculative ramblings, he seems to have nailed her:

When speaking with Lucretia, one gets the distinct impression that she has constructed this mythos about herself, imagining her voice as some honey-tongued monarch, charming, seductive. Meanwhile, she drones on and on about herself, in that grating squeak and that prickly titter. Like a terrier yapping, hungry for meat: Lucretia Borges, a greedy gleam in her beady black eyes, the very definition of a clamper -- like a Pac-man chomping, indiscriminately gobbling up everything in her path. In her zeal to capture the zeitgeist, she seems incapable of distinguishing between objects and the spirit -- and equally incapable of distinguishing between the “good” and the “bad”, pursuing the AA and the Gnomes with equal aplomb, but clearly failing to understand either as she snatched up Addisson's former Manhattan office and retrieved John P. Merriweather's robes from the grave with equal glee. Perhaps Lucretia said it best when speaking of herself as she often did in the third person, “When Lucretia sees wants she wants, she just has to have it.”

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