King Love was a bum. He was dirty. He smelled bad. He clearly had a serious mental disability. King Love was a homeless vagrant, but he was much more than a bum. He was also a king.

Standing on street corners and waving to passers-by, he wore a series of ridiculously cartoonish outfits that made him look like the bastard child of Jerry Garcia and the King of Hearts. His shaggy off-white beard dutifully framed a worn Egyptian face -- a face which remained in the memories of all who saw him -- bore into the unconscious of the city like an unfulfilled obsession. People talked about him around water coolers, in boardroom meetings, on the radio, waiting in long lines at corporate fast food establishments.

King Love was an icon -- a common cultural currency in a world bereft of saints and filled with sinners. He was a lonely, troubled man who re-invented himself to cope with a world he didn't create and could not control.

King Love became something everyone recognized, but no one understood. As his satirical celebrity grew, his notoriety began gripping him like an awful existential vice. His reality retained by a crippling perception of paranoia, he created the light-hearted character in a make-believe masquerade.

The show came to an end when his outlandish Schick and insulting manner threatened the virtues of its own existence. No business owner wanted him in a five-block radius of their establishment. No air-conditioned public building in the city hadn't been graced with his presence and no air-conditioned public building owner had second thoughts about throwing his lazy bum ass out on the street.

King Love was the effect of dementia -- a desperate attempt to cause a new reality and force an acceptable perception. But the royal walls of postmodernity came crushing down around our fair subject.

After King Love decided to stop playing the part, he fell into a deep, deep depression that he never recovered from. He had been kicked out of almost every public place in town and the act had became impossible to maintain. But in the process of abandoning his kingdom of love, a simple man of confusion was cast into an empire of darkness -- his own troubled world of paranoia and fear. A world equally as vivid, but unequally maddening.

Not long ago, King Love died. Alone. In a subsidized public housing facility on the South side of town. In our collective memories, he is cherished as proprietor of undisciplined optimism in a world of pointed disappointment and despised as an unwanted public nuisance and a potent reminder of our own failures.

In a city where cheap sentiment is as valued as genuine sensibility, the passing of King Love went over like a bad punch line. To his estranged family who came into town shortly afterward, the King Love phenomenon was a surreal ending to an unfinished tale. To me, the passing of King Love mixed sentimental recollections of my favorite bum with my own fears and insecurities. It cast me into a world where perception became reality and then receded back to perception again and then finally collapsed upon itself.

I never really knew King Love while he was alive. But his passing taught me the power of belief, the misery of defeat and the resurrection of the damned.

I was assigned the King Love story on a fluke. When I walked into the newsroom that Wednesday afternoon, I was hopping mad over my boss's decision to make me drive across town every day and pick up the crime report. Part of our staffing problem comes from the fact that when people leave, they aren't replaced because we can't afford to hire good replacements so each of us is always picking up new duties that used to be done by someone else who is no longer in our employ.

It's a shitty situation that has caused a great deal of misery and on this particular afternoon, it was causing me so much misery that I wasn't even speaking in complete sentences. Grunting to my editor, I filed the crime report.

"Have I got a story for you," I hear from behind.

I turn around to find Mark Hohmeister, a strangely optimistic wiry man who assigns stories to reporters.

"Really," I said. "What?"

"King Love's family is going to be in town."

Instantly, I could see his angle. Mystery solved as King Love's estranged family tells all.

"Do the TV people have this?" asked the managing editor.

"I don’t know," said Mark. "Here's the number for Detective McCurdy. He's the one who contacted them."

While McCurdy was searching the King Love's house, he found an identification card with the name Kamal Youssef and business card with the name James Cook. James Cook was an attorney. Kamal Youssef was a physician.

"Being bipolar, Kamal was susceptible to great moments of elation as well as terribly deep periods of depression," James Cook told me over the phone. "He created King Love to keep himself high. But after he quit being King Love, he fell into a deep, deep depression."

Cook went on and on about how brilliant he was. About his extraordinary periods of elation and devastating moments of depression. About how, in the past few months, he had changed. About his friend.

King Love had friends. Friends who, weirdly, called him Kamal and remembered a man of knowledge and depth. They had befriended a man wholly different from the radical street character the city had come to know. They had befriended a real person.

As I dug through old newspaper clippings and photographs in the library of our newsroom, I came across a 1995 interview which quoted him at length. His message seemed to be a tenuous mixture of fellowship and apprehension.

Sometimes he sounded like a 1960s radical: "Love is the best crazy glue," he told the reporter. "It is the only glue which makes people stick together."

Sometimes he sounded like a hunted animal: "I realize that people have been cheated of real paradise on Earth," he is quoted. "They have been cheated of their innocence, falsely convicted as sinners, and their wages of sin is Hell and everlasting fire and wailing and gnashing of teeth. For some people, Hell is here and now."

Searching through endless complaints and many lighthearted references, I came across one of his "Love Declarations." These were hastily self-produced pamphlets on the order of Thomas Paine or Publius, but in the voice of Dr. Seuss or Benjamin Franklin.

"Dare to be free from religion," screamed the headline. "I want to live for the day when there will be no more Jews, no more Christians, no more Moslems, no more Hindus, no more Blacks, nor Whites, nor Yellows, no more Blues nor Purples nor Greens, only Free "H" Bees -- Free Human Beings."

The signs he would wave at traffic intersections promoted love and denounced God. They approximated a sort of relative atheistic affection for mankind that smacked of secular humanism and postmodern relativism.

Piecing the bits and pieces of his past together, a tragic story emerged of a man who was once a successful physician in upstate New York. A pathologist who had a wife and son. And friends who called him Kamal. Somehow, he ended up here and became King Love.

"Can you come down to the station at 7:30?" Detective McCurdy asked me. "The family requests that you meet them here."

As I was driving to the city's police department, I began to speculate about his breaking point. Obviously, this was a man who once led a normal life. How did he come to achieve this unfortunate fame and befall this unending pain?

I was standing on the second floor of the police department -- just between the conference room and the elevator -- when they all came rushing out. As a small band of Kamal Yousseff's survivors filed out of the smallish elevator, they seemed confused and excited and exhausted all at once.

As we sat down around the large oak conference table and they each spelled their names and explained their relationship. Not only were his ex-wife and son there, but also his brother and sister-in-law.

After a few questions, it became apparent to me that these people did not understand King Love's fame and influence. I showed them a magazine which featured their dearly estranged departed on its cover -- a large portrait of a shaggy man in a cheap crown and a red velvet cape.

"It's got hearts in it," the sister-in-law observed, examining the picture.

The son seemed most puzzled by the story.

"He used to be a normal, loving person," he told me. "But then he just kinda snapped. I think it was the Gulf War."

The Gulf War? That’s what caused Kamal Youssef to abandon his medical practice and become a vagrant profit of hedonism?

"It really had an effect on him," the son proclaimed. "He started hanging out with this group of radical peace activists."

"I was frightened of him," his ex-wife interrupted. "He would come over to the house wearing these Egyptian robes. I wouldn't let him in the house. And there would always be these people waiting in the car. Sketchy people. Real sketchy."

At that point, the Youssefs had been divorced for about ten years. Connie had retained custody of Anwar and Kamal had gone on to continue his pathology practice in West Palm Beach. The father had taken his son on weekly escapades -- the kind of scheduled domestic moments of divorced fatherhood seen in zoos and in shopping malls -- a divorced attachment clinging to a weekly appointment -- a last clutching grasp for a loving relation amid a sea of cognitive nightmare of relativity.

Eventually, the waves of Kamal Youssef's internal madness flooded the shores of his tenuous familial bonds. His ex-wife became so concerned about Kamal's increasingly erratic and unexplainable behavior that she and her son moved to Jacksonville to escape. Even hundreds of miles away, Kamal's visits began to scare Connie so she moved again. This time, she didn't leave a forwarding address.

As Kamal Youssef's family became estranged, his association with radical peace activists grew. His brother explained his Gulf War trauma as an extension of Egyptian heritage. Explaining his troubled childhood and lengthy medical education in Cairo, his brother seemed just about as crazy as King Love. He spoke in excited tones of anticipation and immediacy with a heavy rolling Egyptian undercurrent.

"He was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant," he told me staring into my eyes -- desperately trying to get me to believe him. "He was a man ahead of his times."

After a while, it occurred to me that King Love's brother was prone to exaggeration and was not, as we say in the world of journalism, a "reliable source." In his own colorful use of the English language (which was obviously his second tongue), he told me the story of a talented piano player -- a child prodigy who once played a Puccini opera for the King of Egypt in the prestigious Cairo opera house -- a gifted musician forced to abandon his love and instead seek a medical education.

"My father said to Kamal -- 'I am not going to be the father of an artist, you will be a doctor.' I think that really broke his heart."

As he handed me a family portrait taken sometime in the 1930s, little Kamal was sporting fez cap and dutifully posed in a position of deference next to his father, a large stern man holding an infant son. That son, who was now a grown man was now describing his brother's extensive education and how proud his family was.

After graduating from Cairo University in 1957, he came to New York to set up a private practice. Specializing in pathology, he went on to study medical technology at the Manhattan Medical and Dentistry School. Eventually, he opened his own laboratory called Mycogel -- a private business to sell bacteria cultures to local hospitals.

At Mycogel, he fell in love with a young employee named Connie. They married and had a son. Deciding that New York was not the best place to raise children, they moved to Florida where a thriving medical community might support the young family.

At that point, I decided that I had enough pieces to fit together a reasonable story of the man's life and ended the interview. My editors wanted me to file the story that evening and it was almost 9 o'clock.

As I was walking up the front steps of the newspaper, I ran into the managing editor who was just leaving for the evening.

"Was TV there?" he implored.

"No."

"Then I think we should hold the story. Go tell Lorraine that TV wasn’t there."

Upon learning that none of the local television stations were aware that King Love's estranged family was in town, Lorraine Branham decided to hold the story.

I stayed in the newsroom that night until 11 o'clock writing the first draft of the story. While sitting at my desk eating cheap snack food from the company's vending machines, I was inundated with curious questions from newsroom staffers. What did his brother look like? How long was he married? What caused him to go crazy?

The Gulf War? What? They had the same reaction I had.

The excitement was palpable and the intrigue was growing as the details emerged. Since we had decided to hold the story, I was given an opportunity to tweak my interpretation and verify every fact. Noticing the heightened interest among the management team, I decided to attend the morning budget meeting the next morning to talk about the story with the editors. I went home and slept.

I had never been to an editors meeting before. They are strange morning affairs where the section leaders get together and talk about that day's paper -- what they liked and didn't like -- and about tommorow's paper. Each editor has a three page document called a "budget" in which working stories are outlined. In the editors' meeting, stories are given a specific length: thus the name budget.

The budget line for the King Love story read thusly: "KINGLOVE: Developing story on the life of King Love as told by his brother and son. The king did apparetnly have a research practice in New York before becoming depressed during the Gulf War and a move to Florida, where life just fell apart. Developing. WITH ART OF KING LOVE AS A LITTLE BOY!! DID TV HAVE THIS?"

TV didn't have it. In fact, the Democrat was apparently the only news agency in town that knew about the story. I was working on an exclusive!

The editors came down on me hard that morning. How do we know he was really a physician? Do we have any hard copy proof? How do we know these people aren't lying? After all, we are talking about a bum.

At that point, I began to feel pressure. Pressure from my editors to check each the veracity of each individual fact. Pressure from the family not to turn the memory of their dearly departed not to create a caricature of their lost sheep.

I spent the afternoon calling medical directories in New York and Florida. Apparently, anyone who did anything before the advent of the computer database didn't really do it. Or at least we can't prove it. And getting anyone to actually get up from their little computer terminal and actually check something with their own eyes would require a five-page written form and two to three weeks of waiting.

Newspaper time is immediate. If we can't do it today, it can't be done and if I was going to prove to my editors that King Love was a medical doctor, I would need to find another way.

At that point, I decided to drive across town and visit the family at the Red Roof Inn.

"Sure, we've got proof," his ex-wife told me bluntly. "Here."

She handed me a small rectangular piece of paper. On the top, it read "American Medical Association: Physicians dedicated to the health of America." This could be good.

"Yes," the form read. "I want to renew my AMA membership and confirm my commitment to the Principle of Medical Ethics." The notice was dated January 1999. The $450 yearly renewal fee had not been paid.

Yes! I screamed to myself in my head. This was it!

"Would you like to have dinner with us," Anwar asked me.

"I'd love to but I've got to get back and show my editor this," I said. "I can meet you in an hour."

We ate the super buffet at Westin' Sizzlin' I had been working on the story for almost 24 hours at that point and I was exhausted and starving. The conversation seemed to flow. As we ate and talked, they asked me a lot of questions about my job at the newspaper.

I asked a lot of questions about their lives. Anwar, it seemed, was a champion chess player. In fact, when he found out his father had passed away, he was in the process of winning a chess tournament in Nevada. He took the first available flight to Florida to attend to his fathers affairs.

He told me about what his Dad was like in happier days. About his wacky sense of humor. About his unpredictability.

He also told me about his own search to find his lost father. Plagued by the loss, he had spent the last year searching. Scouring the Internet databases, he drove to Fort Myers because he found a man by the name of Kamal Youssef. It turned out to be someone else and he actually had to drive through Tallahassee -- literally right past his father -- on the way home.

He hid it well, but I could tell he was fighting back tears. Especially when he told me about Kamal's neighbor, who told Anwar that his father had also been looking for his son. They were both looking for each other! I couldn't believe it. The details of this story were unfolding like bizarre combination of an MTV drama and a Greek tragedy.

They paid for my dinner. I promised them that I would bring the final copy of the story back to their hotel room after I left the newsroom.

I spent five hours sharpening each individual sentence with my editor. Byron Dobson is a large, imposing man with a silly fleeting laugh that shakes the rolls of his body. His computer screen had a large desktop photograph George Clinton and a small dish of candy. He was known as a difficult editor who frustrated the interns with his obnoxious attention to detail. This is why he was chosen as my editor on the story.

"Why is this long quote about mashing teeth in here. That was in 95," he said. Newspaper editors are obsessed with the immediate.

"I wanted to quote King Love so the readers could get an idea of who he was and what he thought," I told Byron.

He grunted and returned his pupils to the computer screen.

"Do you have proof that he was listed in the Who's Who in the World?"

"I have a Xeroxed copy of the page."

"The pastor of Celebration Baptist Church is going to speak at his funeral?"

"Jerry Gerrard?"

"The conservative church in Killearn?"

"That's the one?"

"Are you sure?"

"I confirmed it with the funeral home."

King Love's funeral was devastating. I wept. I was trying to take notes and I just could not stop crying. The story had run in the Friday edition that morning. Friday is the second best-selling day of the week and the story about King Love's mysterious past had run in that morning's papers.

I had been sent to cover Kamal Youssef's funeral. In the morning news meeting, the editors had praised my story at length I was told. I had spent the night with the family at their room in the Red Roof in. We drank orange juice and I gave them each a two-page copy of the story that would appear in the newsroom the next day. His son told me that he appreciated all the work I had put into the story. As a tear rolled down his face, he shook my hand and thanked me again.

He was sitting two pews ahead of me in this tacky funeral home chapel on the north side of town. I got there late and snuck in. I think I originally lost it when his brother started singing "Amazing Grace." One of King Love's crowns had been placed on his casket and three Egyptian priests were chanting and waving incense around.

I looked for the mayor, who had received some bad press for some insensitive comments he had made about King Love after his body had been found. He wasn't there.

The story I wrote about the funeral focused on Kamal Youssef's conversion to Christianity after he quit being King Love and his odd fellowship with the fine upstanding folks at Celebration Baptist Church. It wreaked of pathos and had a cleverly worded allusion to the walls of Jericho that few readers picked up on.

The King Love story had completely exhausted me. Shortly after leaving the funeral, I began drinking Jack and Coke and by mid-night was trying to explain this alien tale of masquerade.

King Love was an invention. A creation of necessity to protect Kamal Youssef from the growing darkness. In the last few months of his life, Kamal Youssef stopped using that invention, and searched for eternal salvation. His atheism had been supplanted by a interest in Christ. After all, the two shared so much. Jesus was all about love. But Jesus was the King of Kings. King Love was, after all, just a bum.

But what I learned about meeting King Love was, that there's more to life than who you are. Love is the answer. The king is dead. Long live the king.