A Ghost Story
In this newsletter: Imaginary reader mail, and some words of advice.
Part I: A Mysterious Letter
The other week, I speculated about which ghosts might haunt my old apartment, among other places, and asked readers to write in with their own theories regarding ghosts in the city. Just before New Year’s, I received an unusual response. It came in the mail, in one of those cardboard packing tubes, with a smudged return address and too much postage. Inside was a letter printed on a long scroll of rolled-up dot matrix printer paper, the perforated strips on either side still attached. The text was intriguing, and I thought it worth sharing here. I’ve retyped it, and it follows below.1
JN-K,
You asked the other week for thoughts on New York City ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve seen a few.
You can call me Rapaport. This all happened around a decade ago, soon after I came to the city from somewhere dark and northerly. I had found a room on Craigslist and worked for a while, until one week in early spring I won a lot of money playing poker online. I quit my job, got my own place in Windsor Terrace, and undertook a regime of long walks, intending to keep myself too busy to play poker during the day, and too tired to play poker at night, so that the money lasted and I could extend my sabbatical through that summer.
My routine in those days was to wake around 9 and shower and then, as I boiled water for coffee, to throw a red casino die across the kitchen counter. The result of the roll dictated the general direction of my day’s walk. A one sent me south down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island, where I skated at the public rink just off Surf Avenue in the blue plastic skates they rented there, the blades as dull as baguettes. A two sent me west into the Green-Wood Cemetery, where I wandered all day among the graves, and read “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” in the lee of the crypts. A three, and I would walk northwest towards Gowanus and then Red Hook, to eat a sickeningly large meatball sub and watch the barges from Valentino Pier.
And so on, through six, my only Manhattan itinerary: Take the F train over the Culver Viaduct to Jay Street-Borough Hall, and then the A down through the Cranberry Tube to Broadway-Nassau. The idea was to walk up from Fulton Street to the Central Park Zoo to watch the chinstrap penguins rocket around in their pool, but on the way I made stops: For a donut at a coffee cart down near Maiden Lane, at the central library to look up at the ceiling, and, if it had been long enough since I had last rolled a six, for a haircut at a place on Fulton.
My barber was Baum, who was deep into his dealings with the ghosts by then, and weeks from real trouble. This story is about him, and what happened after he disappeared.
Like all the barber shops and shoe repair stalls and little corner kosher luncheonettes down in the Financial District in those days, the shop where Baum worked was run by Bukharians from Forest Hills who pasted pictures of the rebbe in the corners of their mirrors, and switched from English to Bukhari depending on whether they were talking to their customers or about them. Baum was unlike the other barbers at the shop in that he was not Bukharian, and also that he was not good at cutting hair. That meant that all of the regulars would wait for another guy rather than let Baum touch their heads, so most of the time when I walked in Baum was sitting in his chair, reading the Daily Racing Form. He would pop the #3 guard on his Wahl, run it over my head a couple of times, charge me $18, and sit back down with the Form.
Baum ran a small-time betting syndicate out of that chair. Guys would give him a few dollars to bet at Aqueduct over the weekend, and he would hand out the returns early the following week. It was just for laughs. Baum wouldn’t take more than $5 per person, and he tried to talk you out of it even as you handed him the money. If you insisted, he’d take it, make a note in the back of a composition book with the word HORSES handwritten in block letters on the cover, and put the cash in a black leather pouch he kept on the counter.
I watched these transactions for a few weeks before I asked to buy in. Baum said no, but then said yes, and what was strange was that every time I played, I won. It was never much: I might give him $5 and get $7 back when my red die brought me to the barber shop again, or $10 at the most. The consistency, however, was impossible. No horseplayer, no gambler, was so steady. Baum wouldn’t talk about his bets or his strategy, and I wondered if he was running some kind of obscure scam, but the amounts involved were trivial and so I kept playing.
I mentioned to Baum, at some point, that I played poker, or at least that I had played poker before I stopped to preserve my nest-egg, and so sometimes after he cut my hair he would walk with me to get a slice at a pizza place a few doors down, and then chatter about gambling as he followed me north as far as City Hall. He said he liked to keep an eye on his bike, so he would unchain it from the scaffolding by the store and wheel it along as we strolled. We all had distinctive bikes in those days; Japanese-made steel frames from the 1970s with forgotten brand names that we bought refurbished from a place in Dumbo, or a guy on a corner in Prospect Heights. Baum’s was a gold Univega with bright blue handlebar tape and a canvas saddlebag. Baum said he had wrapped the handlebars himself, and he kept the bike in good shape; the chain oiled, the tires aligned.
It was on those walks that Baum, eating a slice with one hand and guiding his bike with the other, explained to me how he had wound up the only inept, non-Bukharian barber at the barber shop. He had come back to the city after college for an office job and been happy enough, until one afternoon around 3 p.m. a laptop battery exploded on a table a few feet away from his desk. It hadn’t actually burst; there was no fire or anything, but he had heard this noise and gone to look and there was this big battery that had puffed up to the size of a small balloon. He looked around the bullpen where all the desks were, and he saw that everyone else was still looking at their screens. Some of them were reading Gawker, some of them were scrolling Twitter, some of them were typing into little chat windows on Gmail. It made him feel entombed, so he walked out and never went back. Instead, he bought fifteen composition books and a pack of black Pilot V5 pens at a Staples nearby, biked to a café on Union Street where they didn’t mind if you sat all day with a single cup of coffee and a scone, and started to write down everything he knew.
He wrote all day, and came back the next day to keep writing. As he wrote, the scale of the project revealed himself to him: Not only would he have to write everything he could remember; every birthday party, every walk in the park, every day at the beach; but he would have to write down everything he knew; every fact ever memorized; and everything that happened while he was writing. He wrote down the plot, so far, of “Bleeding Edge,” which he had begun reading the night before, and what he had paid for the composition books and pens, and that he had hummed the “Chariots of Fire” theme in the shower that morning. He wrote down the lyrics of “American Pie,” which he had memorized at 12 and been unable to shake, and the lyrics of all the songs on “American Beauty,” and then the chorus of the Green Day song “American Idiot.” He described the American flag, and what he recalled of the battles of the American Revolution. Then he turned to his earliest memories: Grown-ups glimpsed through the bars of a crib, a Matchbox car found in the sandbox at the playground, a stuffed rabbit lost on an airplane. And then the plots of movies: “Diner.” “Duck Soup.” “Die Hard with a Vengeance.” It felt insane and scattershot, so the next day he opened three notebooks at once on the café table: One to write down memories from early childhood, another to write down memories that those early memories reminded him of, and a third to record new experiences as they happened. To avoid a recursive nightmare, he decided he wouldn’t record memories of recording memories. Beyond that, everything he could think of, every thought or feeling or fact or experience, belonged in the notebooks.
He wrote for a week. Too much of his day, he found, was spent writing about what he did in the time he didn’t spend writing, so he tried to eliminate new experiences; to routinize his life so the hours would flow forgettably into each other, and he would live purely on the pages of the composition books: Wake, bike to Union Street, eat a slice, write, eat a slice, bike home, eat a slice, sleep. All the slices were plain, all the bike rides followed the same route. He dropped “Bleeding Edge” and at night read “Lizard Music,” which he had already summarized in the notebooks, and then once he finished he read it again, and then again.
His plan was to live this life for a year and then stop, type up all he had written, and cash it in for money and fame. He could hardly wait, and he struggled to brush aside fantasies about what his life would be like when this opus was published, so that recorded thoughts about his impending glory didn’t take up too much of the text. Baum was filling composition books at the rate of three or four a day, and he was storing them in cardboard Bankers Boxes he kept under his bed. Soon the space under his bed was full, so he rented a small storage unit at a place down in Gowanus, carried the fifteen Bankers Boxes downstairs two by two, and hailed a taxi. The boxes filled the trunk and half of the backseat, and the cab hit the potholes hard on the way down Carroll Street. On the bridge across the canal, a Suburban rear-ended the cab, and Baum and the driver got out to scream at the guy. As they stood there, the cab burst into flames like a Pinto.
The inferno that devoured the taxi spewed burning composition book pages across the wooden deck of the bridge. The pages floated up over the bridge’s blue steel girders and landed in the Gowanus, smoking as they hit the waters and then sinking into the depths. After that, Baum stayed in his room for three months, rereading “Lizard Music” and eating Cup Noodles, until his mom pulled him out of bed and told him she had set up a job for him as an apprentice at the barber shop on Fulton, where the landlord was some kind of a distant cousin.
Baum had started riding his Univega out to Aqueduct on the weekends after a few months at the barber shop, on a whim. This was before they had opened the casino out there, when the old racetrack echoed like the hull of a torpedoed aircraft carrier dragged up on the beach. Grandstands built for tens of thousands of gamblers held a few dozen, and the place smelled of marijuana and horse manure. There was a bar on the second floor in the back where the trainers and the degenerates hung out, and Baum would sit there and study the form. He bought “Picking Winners,” and he started making bets.
At least that’s the story he told me. This was still early in the spring. Sixes seemed to be coming up rather often, and some days when my hair was too short to justify another cut I would stop by the barbershop anyhow, and Baum would step away from the Daily Racing Form and we would walk with his bike and his slice for a bit, talking about horses and money. He still wouldn’t tell me how he kept winning. He hinted that it had to do with a strategy that Beyer mentions in “Picking Winners” involving horses that change up their running style in the previous race, but that didn’t explain the streak, which at that point had been going for fifteen weeks.
Sometime in the middle of April, he started talking about taking a big swing. The Bukharians and some of the regulars were pushing him to take some real money. He was still only taking $5 per guy. I figured he had to be betting around $100 per week on behalf of his little syndicate, and winning maybe $200 back at the windows each week. He took 10% of that, which meant $4 profit for each guy who bought in and $20 for himself, which barely paid for his lunch and the Daily Racing Form. His streak was wasted if he was just going to piss it away on tiny dollar bets, the Bukharians said, and maybe they were right.
He talked about this big swing for a couple of weeks before he set a date. He’d do it the last weekend of the brief spring meet they held at Aqueduct, before the racing moved to Belmont for the spring and early summer. For that one weekend, he’d take as much from each of the regular contributors to his syndicate as they cared to contribute, up to a point. He asked if I wanted to buy in. I had sworn off gambling, sort of, but this wasn’t poker, and the prospect of a few hundred extra dollars to stretch my leave was appealing. I decided to let the red die decide. One morning at City Hall Park, as Baum got ready to ride the Univega back down to Fulton, I rolled the die against the base of the pool around the big bronze fountain. One, two, or three, and I’d keep my money; four, five, or six, and I’d buy in. The die landed on five, and I handed Baum six hundred-dollar bills. He made a note in his HORSES notebook, put the cash in his leather pouch, and rode away downtown.
And then he disappeared.
I found out on the following Tuesday, when I broke my rule and went to the barbershop even though the die had tried to direct me to Green-Wood. The die had landed on the five on Monday, which had sent me north towards Greenpoint and then over the bridge into Queens. It rained hard all that night. On Tuesday I rolled a two, but the idea of mooning around a wet cemetery all day with untold hundreds of dollars waiting for me on Fulton Street seemed unappealing, so I rode the F train and then the A, and walked to the barbershop.
I opened the door to four silent Bukharian barbers glaring at me. The black aluminum baseball bat that usually leaned against the shop doorway was in the hands of the biggest barber, a guy named Aron who had been in the Soviet army and whose forearms were smudged with old tattoos. He’s not here, they told me. He hadn’t been in on Monday, either. We don’t have your money. Then Aron kind of cocked his head, and the brush-off turned into an interrogation as he recognized which of the regulars I was: You’re his friend. Where is he?
They told me that Baum hadn’t turned up Monday morning, and that guys had been coming by all day to ask about their bets, and some of the conversations had gotten unpleasant. Aron had called Baum’s mom, who hadn’t heard from him, and he had gone by Baum’s apartment, where no one had opened the door. They guessed he’d taken about $20,000, between the barbers and the regulars, which was more than I had expected. I told them I hadn’t seen him since the week before, promised I’d call if I heard from them, and hurried away down the street.
I was angrier than I should have been. I had bet that Baum’s streak was for real, and I’d lost. The scam, at least, was no longer a mystery: Build up faith in the streak with small, steady, artificial payouts, then take a one-time monster buy-in and slip away. A braver man might have showed up on Monday, claim he’d lost it all on bad bets, and ask for another shot, but the aluminum bat in Aron’s hand suggested that that might have gone poorly.
Either way, I was out $600, which meant my sabbatical would be shorter by at least a week. Five fewer days of this happy new life of wandering; five more days of whatever drudgery would come when it ended. The sky was gray as I walked up Broadway, thinking about how I could never go back to the barber shop, and that I’d need to come up with a new Manhattan itinerary to replace the number six.
I was walking past the fountain at City Hall Park when I saw the gold Univega with the blue handlebar tape chained to a railing on the west side of the park. Baum’s bike. I looked around for him, scanning the park, but he wasn’t by the fountain, or sitting on a bench, or in the small crowds of tourists walking towards the Brooklyn Bridge. Stranger still, the bike was wet; its seat soaked, its handlebars damp. It had been there overnight. Baum never left his bike alone for a moment, never mind an entire evening. Something had to be wrong. I opened the saddlebag.
The leather pouch where Baum kept his cash wasn’t inside, but there was a plastic shopping bag wrapped around two composition books. One was the HORSES book. On the cover of the other, written in the same block print, was the word GHOSTS.
I took out my red die, blew on it twice, and threw it across the pavement. Five. I took the notebooks and hurried back to the subway, home to Windsor Terrace. In my apartment, at the little table in the kitchen, I read both while I worked through a pound of pistachios.
By sunset, I was convinced that either Baum was insane, or he had been getting betting tips from the dead. I walked out into the night to figure out which it was.
I’m out of time and paper. Watch for more.
Sincerely yours,
P.D. Rapaport
The text ended there. I’ve received no further correspondence from Mr. Rapaport, but will share more of this story if he chooses to send it.
Part II: Words of Advice
I am running short on advice. I can’t imagine you’re really looking for advice from me, two full years into the long 2020? Here’s something: This site will tell you which Covid-19 rapid tests are in stock where, though I’m not entirely sure it works for Walmart, which seems to have different availability based on where you are.
Speaking of horses, I wrote in this space a few years ago about the time I hit the Pick 6 at Aqueduct, and about a stallion named Mr. Prospector.
One thing I did not know is that in the 1980s, the ball they dropped at Times Square on New Year’s Eve was lit to look like a big red apple! My advice is that they should do that again.
That small part of me formed by hero worship of the counselors at the summer camp I went to in the 1990s sort of wishes I had gotten really into Phish at some point? Like not just carrying around “Farmhouse” and, I don’t know, “Rift” on my iPhone and in the various MP3 players and CD cases that preceded it for the past 25 years, but having an interest in their shows and having Opinions about the superiority of specific performances of their songs. It’s not a very large part of me, I should say. Anyhow, that part made me watch a bit of a concert that Phish streamed online on New Year’s Eve, and honestly most of it sounded like elevator music, but then every so often they would play an actual song and it was great. The one that really did it for me was this song, though this is them performing it in early September, not on New Year’s Eve. I don’t know.
That’s all I’ve got!
This is a goof. Do I need to explicitly say that this is a goof? Do I ruin the whole effect if I tell you right here that this is a goof? I thought it would be amusing to serialize a little paranormal mystery here; I hope you don’t mind. I’ve written made-up stuff in this newsletter before, but it’s always been presented in a speculative mood, rather than as a straightforward invention. Here I’m crossing that bridge. This is entirely fictional, which should be pretty obvious within a sentence or two, if it wasn’t already. But just to be clear.