Part I, Clip 2: The Vampyres Of New York

The Vampyres Of New York

Part I, Clip 2

The story continues…

As I say some sort of subconscious stirring had drawn me to New York.  When I first walked into James Carter I felt stirring in my brain but now there was a deeper agitation foreboding a brain change.  At my age, of course, there was always something happening, your body diminishes a bit while mental adjustments are constant but this felt more like a sea change, a premonition of a brain crunch, going in one door and coming out another.

Over the past decade or so I had had three major crises.  The first was the strongest, a tremendous electrical discharge at the top of the frontal lobe.  My whole power train from brain to genitals lit up, transparent as it were, I had no means to evaluate it nor was I aware of any changes in my behavior.

The second occurred a few year later, the electrical discharge was not so strong only flashing from my heart.  Something had changed but I couldn’t tell what.  The third that happened was only a couple years ago just before my wife died but only disalienating however I did then notice some personality changes as bits and pieces of personality fell into place.  I had greater self-confidence and a bit more forceful personality, I lost my usual diffidence that had been diminishing I now noticed from the first two events.

They say that coming events cast a shadow before them.  In my case that has to be true because I began to ruminate on the notion of dual personalities. I do not mean split personality but dual personality, twins of a sort, both aware of each other, nothing hidden from each.  Biologically speaking the physical structure is made up of two halves, from two separate identities.  That is the sperm and ovum come together to form one organism, two different and unrelated strands of DNA and the two strands retain separate identities as the brain retains two separate halves joined by another organ, the corpus collosum, that allows communication between the two halves. 

At some time in the distant past a predecessor organism contained all four sex chromosomes, XXXy, but when sex evolved dividing chromosome in two the male received one X and the y while the female received the other two Xs, but the three Xs are not identical.  So, the male has an X passive right side and the active sperm left side of the brain, hence the celebrated feminine side to the male personality.

The female has an active X from the sperm and passive X from the ovum.

The psychoanalysts Freud and Jung at the beginning of the twentieth century then named the ovum side of the brain the Anima and the left the Animus.  So really the individual whether male or female has the elements of a dual personality.

This fact has always been recognized being frequently portrayed in literature although usually unconsciously. The first representation, although the exponents weren’t aware of the source was the opposition of God and Satan, Good vs. Evil impulses.  There was a conflict between the wish to be good and the reality of being evil.  This was a psychological problem that had to be explained; thus the serpent in the Garden of Eden story and also that of Lucifer being kicked out of heaven.  Thus early civilized man explored the nature of psychology.

Certainly in my early life the whole notion of God and Satan was relegated to the realm of fable.  By the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Western world and the Western world only biology became a source of explanation thus the story of ETA Hoffmann, The Princess Brambilla that is a discussion of the Anima and Animus.

Perhaps the most famous dual personality story of the nineteenth century was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.  A story that concerns two aspects of the Animus.  In Stevenson’s story Dr. Jekyll has suppressed a wild aspect of his Animus by emphasizing a respectable persona that he needed to succeed in the world as a physician.  However Jekyll longed for the rough and rowdy days of his youth represented by the other person of Mr. Hyde.  Hyde, to say the least, was uncivilized.

The repression of Hyde was so strong that Jekyll couldn’t indulge him.  This being the golden age of science, while Jekyll was the experimental sort, he discovered a potion or drug that temporarily released the Hyde persona of his Animus or Ego.  This was fine except for with each repeated dosage Hyde become more obstreperous finally indulging his passions in murder.  He was on his way to becoming a serial killer.

Now with police hot on his trail Hyde took the antidote to turn himself back into Jekyll but alas he found the little abyss back too wide to jump over.  He had become his opposite.

Stevenson’s little novelette became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.  Without fully understanding it the cat was out of the bag although it came in many different colors.

Perhaps one of the most interesting investigations was that proposed by the American writer, the great Edgar Rice Burroughs.  He created one of the fundamental characters of the twentieth century, the great man beast, Tarzan Of The Apes.

Burroughs himself was entranced by Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.  The idea of a dual personality had a great appeal to him.  Of course the novelette was new at the time presenting a startling idea.  Psychology, specifically psycho-analysis, presented startling findings to the public that had to be absorbed but couldn’t or wouldn’t be absorbed for fifty years or more and then by the chosen few.  Burroughs also had a great interest in psychology.

Concurrent with these developments was the newly risen conflict between civilization and the primitive with their conflicting demands on the perplexed mind of humanity.  The notion was, especially propounded by the anthropologist James G. Frazer in his multi-volume The Golden Bough was his vision that the primitive mind was overlain only by ‘a thin veneer of civilization.’  Scratch a civilized man and the primitive beast beneath would emerge, not too unlike Jekyll and Hyde.

Influencing Burroughs alongside these was Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Mixed and shaken well what came out of Burrough’s mind was Tarzan of the Apes.

As a ‘true’ story of course the novel is preposterous.  Generally speaking the literati rejected the novel for its obvious impossibility refusing to see the allegory of the times which it was.  The story is beautiful in a mythological way.

Tarzan was a thoroughly divided man just as was his model Stephenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.  No less preposterous I might add.  If you set a matrix over the two stories they are the same.  Burroughs himself had two personalities and he believed that all people did to a greater or lesser degree, correctly as it would seem.

Thus Tarzan or John Clayton, Lord Greystoke to give him his real name and title was born an English aristocrat on a voyage to Africa.  Pirates seized their ship depositing them on the coast of Gabon just below the falls of the Congo.  A tribe of great apes, more resembling the Missing Link than any known species assaulted the homestead of the man, wife and child castaways killing the mother and father.  The son would have been killed by the great bull ape except that a female named Kala who had just lost an infant snatched the babe from the cradle running away with it and defying anyone to harm it.

Thus the human Tarzan became a feral child raised as a beast among the Great Apes without acquiring the thin veneer of civilization.  However an Englishman to the bone, a member of the greatest race of the human species, was always an Englishman no matter what the circumstances.  His parents humble but well constructed cabin weathers the elements for a decade or so until Tarzan discovers it and enters to find it well supplied with children’s books thoughtfully brought by his expectant real mother.  He thus discovers that he is not a funny looking ape but something else altogether.  As the picture showed a boy and conveniently put the letters B-O-Y beneath it cleverly putting picture to type or two and two make four as we say he learned that the was a boy.

Teaching himself to read using the convenient dictionary his pop brought along he acquires the thinnest veneer of civilization.  Probably learned chemical formulae from dad’s convenient chemistry text book although that is mere speculation on my part.  At that point he acquired a dual personality.  He was both a beast and a semi-civilized man.  However he prefers the skimpiest loin cloth with tails hanging down front and back to the most luxurious tuxedo.

That’s the way Edgar Rice Burroughs rewrote Stephenson’s Jekyll and Hyde while integrating the latest and most advanced ideas of his times.  Altogether an excellent intellectual achievement.

Stephenson’s idea wasn’t exhausted by Burroughs’ treatment.  Indeed, the idea became a staple of at least pulp literature.  I’m not going to trouble you with an exhaustive study but here’s a few highlights that are very interesting.  The idea of the hero with a day job and an after dark avocation had taken root.

We have The Shadow of Maxwell Grant. Not just a couple dozen novels as with Burroughs’ Tarzan but well over three hundred of them.  Grant was a magician.  No, really.  He was a practicing magician, as such he undoubtedly had an interest in hypnotism.  Grant said that The Shadow had the power to cloud men’s minds so that he was invisible.  That’s hypnotism and there are many more evidences in the novels.

As with Burroughs’ Tarzan some fans come from print others through other media.  By 1930 when The Shadow appears the other media includes, movies, radio and comics that had come into existence.  However the characters created by the movies and other media were much different than what issued from the minds of Burroughs or Grant. (Real name Walter Gibson.)

Thus Grant’s Shadow is composed of interesting dualities.  On the macro level The Shadow represents the Godly mind while the evil criminals he destroys are in the Satanic mold.  The Shadow might even be construed as Godliness’ last stand.  The Satanic model would increase in dominance until in 1966 Time Magazine blazoned its cover in black and white with the question Is God Dead?  That was quite shocking tearing the fabric of society.

In that same year the Jew Ira Levin published his novel Rosemary’s Baby telling of the birth of Satan’s child, Little Andy.  The novel was followed by the Jew Roman Polanski’s horrific film of the same name in 1968 as the Satanic side of the human mind replaced the Godly.  From Rosemary’s Baby flowed the Charles Manson murders.  It’s been hell since.

On the micro level The Shadow himself was the alter ego of a man named Kent Allard who in vampire fashion assumed the identity of Lamont Cranston. We at the time knew only of the radio Shadow and Cranston.  In the novel Allard faked his death in South America removing all traces of his existence.  Returning to New York he terrorized his lookalike Lamont Cranston into allowing Allard to operate in his identity while sending Cranston overseas.  Thus by day Cranston was a playboy around town and at night he was The Shadow, a vigilante fighting evil.  It seems that it would be difficult to be a playboy without a nightlife but Allard/Cranston managed it.  The Shadow is an integral part of my own mentality, perhaps in opposition to the evil William C. Gaines.

By the late thirties Burroughs and Grant were spawning all kinds of imitators.  While comic strips in newspapers had existed since the turn of the century comic books came into existence in the mid-thirties giving whole new dimensions to the dual personality.  Comic books as we know them were created by the character Superman in 1938 first in Action Comics and then in his own name.

The comic book was wholly a creation of Jewish talents pushing a Jewish agenda.  As such, whether we knew it or not the comics reflected the Jewish view of life or Weltanschauung.  The Jews have been described as a peculiar people and indeed their history confirms the evaluation.  The Kent Allard/Lamont Cranston/Shadow triumvirate more or less sums up the Jewish experience.

Twentieth Century US experience in which I lived most of my life was one of discovery for me.  In my childhood that followed the death camps of WWII I never actually knew a Jew as a Jew.  Like Kent Allard they had merged into a new disguise that for a novice or even experienced person was extremely difficult to penetrate.  I knew they existed because I read about them and there was a synagogue in one of the most conspicuous places in town while the only Jew that identified as a Jew was called Sheeny Sheyer and he was a haberdasher.  Beyond that I scarcely knew Jews existed until the really big 1958 Holocaust fest show.  That was my introduction.  Since then, of course, Judaism has been one of the central thread of my studies.

Jews have developed the dual identity into an art form.  As the saying goes:  Sometimes they don’t know who they are.

As they are living in other people’s countries, since 1800 they have tried to adapt by adopting local haberdashery while adopting personal names in the local manner.  Of course in mid-nineteenth century European population pressures compelled the State to order their peoples to assume last names, just as in our day population pressures have forced the adoption of a unique number to identify the specific individual.  Thus there might be umpteen John Smiths in the US but you have to have the right number to identify your John Smith.

In the Jewish case a man might have gone by the name of Isaac Ben Abraham, that is Isaac, the son of Abraham.  Under the new system he had to choose a last name.  The Jews usually named themselves after articles of value or distinction. Hence all the variants of Gold, Silver and precious stones.  Isaac Ben Abraham might become Isaac Goldbladder or Isaac Silvermaster or, Perhaps Heinrich Heine.  Going into the twentieth century then all Westerners had a first and last name and any number of intervening names their parents might choose.

As most of these names were either German or Russian upon coming to the US many chose to translate the name into English; thus Sumner Rothstein became Sumner Redstone.  Sumner itself being considered an assimilative name.  David and Michael are the most popular Jewish first names.  Some, like Edward G. Robinson the actor, anglicized their name more completely, his European name being Emmanuel Goldenberg (Gold Mountain.)  Behind that not unlike Lamont Cranston who might have been Kent Allard was a Hebrew name and that was his real identity.  So a Jew automatically had a dual identity, his public name by which he was known at large and the name with which he was registered as a Jew.

On might say then that he was always in disguise in the broad world, a secret foreign agent reporting, as it were, to the synagogue. His people came first before his ‘adopted’ country.  This is a source of much confusion to non-Jews while Jews lie when they say their ‘adopted’ country is their first loyalty.  Interesting that they adopt a country but the country doesn’t adopt them.

When comic books were developed in the mid-thirties they were almost exclusively Jewish hence expressing the Jewish Weltanschauung.  All the characters had dual identities.

Thus Superman migrated from the planet Krypton and ‘adopted’ Earth as his chosen planet.  His Krypton identity was Superman while his earthly identity was the wimpish Clark Kent.  Capt. America was the Jewish identity while Steve Rogers was his goyish identity.  And this continued with the comic book characters Batman and Robin identities.

Now, the Jew has always felt inferior to the other; Cain was the big strong other while Abel was the lesser younger brother.  Clark Kent was a weak human while the Jewish Superman was a powerful extra-terrestrial.  Steve Rogers was a 98 lb. weakling while Capt. America while lacking true super powers certainly outperformed human beings.

The creators of these characters mostly anglicized their names, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, but not all.  So these people had multiple real identities.  When you think about it, it is fairly incredible.

When the super characters began playing out in the post-war years the publishers had to search for new themes and they tried everything settling finally into crime but then as Crime Does Not Pay William C. Gaines finally hit the main vein with sado-masochistic horror comics, thus Weird Tales and Tales From The Crypt et al..

That’s where I came in and leave off.  I was surprised to find myself ruminating on this subject like this especially as I am beginning to find movement in my brain that signifies some sort of development.  When I hit seventy-five I began to notice subtle brain changes followed by electrical discharges the significance of which I am just now understanding.  So, I felt some changing was coming but I couldn’t tell when.  I found out; it was imminent.

-II-

What prompted me to ruminate on dual personalities, the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, was unknown to me but from the rumblings in my brain I knew something was brewing.  Whatever abominable motives I had for coming to New York City were about to out themselves; I sensed that.

I still needed a wardrobe. I had come to the realization that I needed different garb for different situations, that is, essentially, multiple identities.  Ragnar was much more familiar with the city and as his time was at my disposal I asked him to show me around some thrift shops; I needed second hand clothing.

I met him at the building’s entrance where we stopped and chatted with Ottmar the doorman for a few minutes.  Ragnar gave Ottmar an opportunity to look me over and evaluate me.  I put on my maximum gravitas for Ottmar, which I also assumed for the outing with Ragnar.  I was sure I passed Ottmar’s test and while I couldn’t be sure I saw that he was tentatively satisfied.

Ragnar was gifted with an almost perfect knowledge of the city’s streets so I let him lead our two man parade.  While walking along we passed a wig shop, I guided Ragnar in.  The shine was showing through the sparsening  hairs on my own head while I had always been fascinated by Andy Warhol’s use of wigs.  They were good disguises.

There was a wonderful array of wigs.  I picked out a grey one for dignity, a blond one to look vainglorious and a dark one, I suppose for variety but maybe in imitation of Elvis.  I was interested in disguising my own paucity of follicles (God, that’s labored, isn’t it?)  I can’t bring myself to say bald, but like with Warhol, for effect.  An obvious wig draws people’s attention away from your actual appearance making an identification less possible.  So, I was three wigs closer to my objective.

Ragnar brought us up to a block or so of thrift shops.  I began selecting street clothes.  There were any number of styles to choose from, very nearly any time period.  Especially since the Great Migration under Obama’s third term, permanent dictatorship actually, one could buy almost any style in the world, naqibs, dashikis, everything.

The ’16 election ended the ‘democracy’ as you well know.  God, that was a mess.  I was irate when they refused to inaugurate Trump after he had taken a full sixty-five percent of the popular vote and all the electoral votes save New Mexico.  We, of what was dubbed the Outsider Party, were irate but the Insider Party small as it was had the fire power and already controlled the apparatus so there was little that could be done in that surprise move.

At least the battle lines were drawn although little in the way of revolt has appeared yet.  Some very minor skirmishing in places like Chicago and some Southern cities but nothing unmanageable yet.  Remarkably quiet but with a feeling of real tension.  Trump had no choice but to go back to New York City.  Winning by that margin and being denied his office, of course, exposed the Insiders to the world and the mask did come down, both here and in Europe.  Embarrassed the Insiders stripped Trump of his fortune leaving him with a relative pittance, he definitely had to sell his 757.

Even as Trump was returning to New York the Insiders threw down the walls and immigration exploded.  They give us five million as the official number but it is probably ten to twenty million judging from the streets of New York which is where millions landed.  Speaking as the ghost of John Rocker one doesn’t hear so much dozens of foreign languages but that English seems to be missing.

In an odd turn of events on our journey I noticed ‘scribes’ with tables set up for customers who wanted to send a letter back home but were illiterate.  Talk of medieval times; there was no longer an appropriate name for it. I found myself buying strange things.  I got a very nice Lubavitcher outfit, also a perfect disguise, weird hat and all for not too much.  I picked up a naqib or burka that I thought would be a terrific disguise.  You could carry weapons and nearly anything under the voluminous folds without fear of detection.  Plus as an apparent woman you were generally ignored, invisible.

I also asked Ragnar to get me a couple handguns.  He agreed before he realized what he had admitted but we both let that slide.  I have no idea why I thought he could do it nor did I realize why I wanted them.  We were fully loaded on the walk back to the condo.  Perhaps spurred on by Ragnar’s ability to get guns I asked if he knew martial arts.

‘Oh sure.  That was one of the Carmichael’s requirements.  I also serve as a bodyguard.  I’m Black Belt.  Why?’

I wasn’t sure why.  ‘You look like you can really handle yourself Ragnar.  Good shape, athletic build, just wondered?  Work out?

‘Absolutely.  I don’t bulk up like a body builder but I’ve put on enough muscle to deal with things, get the right weight you know.  May I ask you a few questions?’

‘Sure, go ahead.  If they’re discreet.’

‘A friend of mine recognized you from your picture on your web site.  He says you’re the writer Partly Wright.  True?’

‘Partly Wright Delivers The Truth?  Yes, that’s my stuff.  Your friend reads me?’

‘He’s on the conservative side and says you lay it out as it is.’

‘That’s my goal Ragnar, that’s my goal.  Good to learn somebody else thinks so too.  Is your friend political?’

I was trying to find out if Ragnar was part of some secret political organization but I couldn’t come out and ask without seeming nosy.

‘Is your friend in a political set?’  I asked hoping that sounded like a generality.

‘No, we just talk at the gym about things.’

Talk at the gym?  OK.  There was a possibility.  I let the subject drop for the time being as we were approaching the condo.  We threw the bundles into the grocery cart as I reminded him to be ready for my first fitting at James Carter.

-III-

I woke up next morning and realized that I was due at James Carter for my initial fitting.  I looked forward eagerly to the thought of realizing my desire for a bespoke suit, still, other thoughts crowded my mind.  I wondered what my real reason was for being in New York.  Yes, I was aware of the good reasons but I sensed subliminal  reasons I wasn’t able to articulate.  And then there were the brain stirrings that usually preceded some sort of mental adjustment.  So far each had been more liberating after the trauma while I believed I had cleared out all of the fixations that had influenced my behavior.  At the same time I sensed, or I knew of from study, that there was a level of conditioning that lurked below the subconscious in a sort of basement or foundation of the mind.  Perhaps that was stirring.  I would soon find out.

Alighting from the limo I was greeted on the sidewalk by the manager, a little too effusively I thought; there was no reason to leave the store.  As he escorted me up the stairs to the second floor it hit.  The seventh step up I felt, even heard, the brain crunch as I slightly staggered against the rail.  Fortunately the manager was ahead of me and didn’t see me lurch or whatever grimace was on my face.  I was slightly dazed and mentally unsteady as he brought the lead tailor out to introduce me to him. 

I could feel the cold professional appraisal, I knew I was being evaluated for what status I would be assigned.

‘Abe, this is Mr. Partly Wright for whom we will be making several suits’.  He said, adding a few suits I hadn’t mentioned as he saw that Abe was giving me a fishy eye bordering on disapproval or even hostility in an effort to forestall any affront by Abe to drive me off.

‘And Partly this is Abraham Goldbladder our tailor and one of the finest in New York’, Abe growled, ‘And anywhere else.’ ‘I’m sure you to will get along swimmingly, won’t you Abe?’

‘I’m sure.’  Abe said glowering at me, sawing the measuring tape across the back of neck a couple times.  ‘Partly is it?  Come this way and we’ll get started.’

I followed into the work area where Abe turned swiftly and stood glaring at me, uncertain of how to begin.

‘I know who you are Mr. Wright.’  He said sternly.  ‘Follow me.’

‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘This explains who some of the people are who Ragnar noticed following me.  It isn’t that I didn’t think The Tribe mightn’t be tagging my movements but this confirmed it, moved my suspicions from paranoia to fact, so to speak.

Abe led through a corridor or two, down backstairs to a door he flung open with an imperative gesture to pass through.  I found myself in an alley, a dank smelly alley, narrow and confining.  At first I thought that Abe had thrown me out, refusing to serve me but, no, he followed me out and stood confronting me.

‘We know who you are.’  He repeated sternly as though demanding a reply.

I paused a moment gathering my fractured wits about me while trying to assume a commanding but condescending humorously mocking posture.  This confrontation would determine the quality of my stay in New York.  Abe believed that confronting me in amongst the smelly dumpsters in the alley would be an insult to put me at a disadvantage.  Abe had no way of knowing that I had dealt with his tribesmen in a more than somewhat intimate basis in my working years and was quite familiar with Jewish tactics.

I smiled and chuckled at him trying to exude the air that Abe was in his proper habitat and that I was fully aware of it.  I did succeed to his obvious discomforture.

‘I’m sure you do, Abe.  I’m just surprised that you have finally come out into the open.  Am I in your habitat now?’

It was important for me to get the upper.  I knew that Abe would try to get me angry while not being able to imagine any other arguments than the Semitic canards that had come down through the ages forming the basis of his peoples’ minds.  I therefore imagined myself smoking the avuncular or grandfatherly pipe chuckling quietly at the young one’s impertinence.  If I could get Abe steamed so much the better.

Abe flushed a little, losing his edge, when he realized that I had said that he was in his element in the alley amongst those godawful dumpsters.

‘We want to know what you’re here for.  What’s up your sleeve?’

‘Oh Abe’, I chuckled, ‘you’re not going to lay that paranoid trip on me are you?  Do you fear the other that much?’

‘Fear what other?’  He said, jutting out his jaw a trifle.  ‘We aren’t afraid of anyone.’

‘Oh Abe, you know, the ever present fearsome anti-Semite.  Those you have to shut down and silence by any means necessary.’  I took an imaginary draw on my imaginary pipe to keep a steady low.

‘We know from your writings that you’re an anti-Semite Wright, the lowest form of scum on the planet.’

‘By ‘we’ I presume you’re including the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League, possibly the SPLC, Abe?’

He snorted non-committally refusing to answer.

‘Only in the Jewish mind, Abe.’ I replied to his question with a smile and a knowing laugh.  ‘Anti-Semitism is only Jewish fear of the other in action.  You just can’t face who you are; any criticism smarts so bad because it tells you the truth about yourselves.  The truth is that Jews always live in societies that are superior to you and that clashes so furiously with your fantasies of superiority that it drives you mad.

There is evidence.  Consider the Jews transported from a relatively primitive backwater town like Jerusalem to the stupendous magnificence of Babylon.  The Jewish imagination was dwarfed.  Thus you have madmen like Isaiah and Ezekiel proclaiming Jewish superiority and opening the gates to the Persians.

The same scenario has been repeated ad infinitum throughout history including your opening the doors of the United States to unlimited diverse immigration.  That’s the same thing as opening Babylon’s doors to the Persians or Spanish doors to the Moors not to mention then opening Moorish doors to the Spaniards.  It is incontestable Abe.

Jewish frustration erupts into mass murder.  The Jews attempted to compete with and subject the Roman Empire.  That ended in the complete destruction of Israel and the leveling of Jerusalem and the Temple.  Undismayed your people continued the war finally erupting at the beginning of the second century murdering half a million people in Alexandria and Cyprus under the most barbaric conditions.  A true crime against humanity.

The result of that episode was a manhunt to destroy any and all Jews.  Sixteen hundred years later after the resulting collapse of civilization your Jews again thought to kill all Europeans.  Sabbatai Zevi posing as a messiah thought to usher in the millennium in 1666.  Your Jews in Europe were selling their possessions for peanuts to have a last fling as money wouldn’t matter after the redemption.  The redemption failed and the Jewish revolt never happened.

I’m skipping over a great deal Abe, just the highlights now.  Then in 1914 you instigated the Great European Holocaust that after the terrible wars from ’14 to ’45 has continued to today when you have refused to seat the elected presidential candidate Donald Trump.’

Here Abe lost control a little, I was succeeding. ‘That was only social justice.  I’m sure you know that in 1920 five elected Jewish representatives to the New York legislature were refused their seats and sent back to New York City.’

‘Not because they were Jewish Abe, because they were Socialists.’

‘What’s the difference?’  Abe let slip.

‘In answer to your question, none.’  I laughed as merrily as I could without seeming forced.  I had admired a lesson Marshall McLuhan had given to Tim Leary in the Sixties of the old century that when confronted by hecklers the best reproof was to just open your mouth and laugh them off.  Drives them crazy and it seemed to effect Abe that way who should have known better with his age and experience.

‘But the situations are not comparable Abe.  Of course with the elected candidate refused we still needed a president.  Hillary, the defeated candidate was not possible and there were no alternates legally available so you people set aside all law, all precedent and said Obama would continue as president for life.  And then you had the gall to get your three Jewish representatives on the Supreme Court to declare it constitutional.  Fourteenth Amendment my ass.’

‘That was a problem that had nothing to do with we Jews.’

‘One thousand Rabbis said otherwise Abe.  Deny as you will.  Then out of sheer malice you destroyed Trump.  Stripped him of everything for having defied you.  Took everything, even renamed Trump Towers the Goldman Towers.  Don’t know why you left the other half of the name off.  Everyone knows who Obama’s boss is.

So, really Abe,  I’ve got your number, you don’t have mine.  I know you, you know me.  I’m just here to get some clothes because your company reminds me of Eric Ross.  It gives me some continuity.  You’re going to have to make my suits for me.’

So saying l slipped inside the door quickly throwing the dead bolt.  Abe hammered and shouted to no effect.  Accepting the inevitable he walked the length of the dark smelly alley emerging into the light to the amusement of those watching.  Abe’s planned humiliation of me turned back on him.

Abe had a short discussion with his manager but as there would be a fair amount of money involved he accepted his fate and began my first fitting.

I had won this one but the strain told on me.  My head was rattling as Ragnar drove me back to the condo.  I felt uneasy if not outright sick while the laughter in my head I had experienced in the alley came back.

Ottmar smiled me in and the elevator wait seemed interminable before I got the he thirty-first floor and all the door locks unlocked, rushing into the bedroom to leap into bed.  I had just pulled the covers to my chin when I heard that low chuckle and a voice say ‘Hello.’  There was no one there but the voice went on:  ‘Hello.  Yes it’s me.  It’s Gaines.’

‘Gaines?  Who the hell is Gaines?’  I found my mind answering.

‘You remember me.  Gaines?  The comic books?  Tales From The Crypt, Weird Tales?  Remember?  I’m why you came to New York.’

‘Gaines?’  Oh, I know what has happened.  My own personal Mr. Hyde has shown up.  I had acquired a dual identity.  ‘I just want to sleep Gaines.  Come back later.’  He did cease and I dropped into a fitful sleep.

Continued in Clip Three.